Bishop Hill A message to Will Hutton
Sep 21, 2013 Climate: sensitivity Greens Dear Will (if you'll forgive the familiarity)
Thanks for the link in your Guardian post - much appreciated. There's lots I could take issue with in your post, but let me focus on the bit quoted below (and not just because it mentions me).
Science has not helped its own cause. The open science movement, and even the Royal Society, has become concerned that the quest to win commercial funding has made a growing number of scientists too anxious to make their science unique. Too many scientific papers are published in which researchers make it hard for others to reproduce their lab experiments. Key data are omitted.
Compared with what is happening in some drug and cancer research, climate change science is remarkably honest, reproducible and subject to open criticism: the IPCC insists on the best methodology. But for climate change sceptics such as Andrew Montford, Bjørn Lomborg or Nigel Lawson's influential Global Warming Policy Foundation, this is an inconvenient truth. Climate change science must be greeted with the same sense that science in general is fallible.
Your suggestion that the IPCC insists on the best methodology made me laugh. I don't suppose the intracacies of Bayesian statistics are your cup of tea, but you really should try to get your head around l'affaire Forster and Gregory. If you are reading this, Will, it is an example of climate science using the worst methodology - a methodology without any support among reputable statisticians - and the IPCC rewriting the results of people who used the best methodology.
You need to to expand your reading I think.
But thanks again for the link.
Reader Comments (81)
Richard Betts
Would you like to back up your statement " anthropogenic climate change is real" with the evidence that we have all been asking for from you for a long time?
Just asking.
So eloquently put, Michel (Sep 22, 2013 at 8:27 AM). Who was it who said something along the lines of: “If God did not exist, we would have to invent him.”?
Well, many in the West have been persuaded to turn their backs on God, and are now adopting their own new religions, be they the church of Richard "There is no other god but me!" (Now, where have I heard that before?) Dorkins, Gaia or AGW. Being converts, they are more vociferous and adamant in their message, as well as less open to any reason.
Never forget that, no matter what happens to the climate, the AGWistas™ have it covered. We have already had “global warming causes more snow”, and “…causes colder winters”. How long before it creates more Arctic ice? A report in 2003 looked at the threat of “global warming” causing catastrophic global cooling. We all know ('cos we've been told, so it must be true) that it was AGW that caused the drought in the USA; the floods in the USA; the unusual cold Australian spring; the Australian heat wave; the Australian forest fires. It was AGW that caused the highest levels of snow in the Northern hemisphere for many, many decades. It was AGW that caused the killer tornadoes in the USA, and AGW was behind the “severe” storm Sandy; no doubt it is AGW that has caused the only two (to date) hurricanes to hit the Americas this year – ‘cos everyone knows that AGW is going to cause more severe storms. Whatever happens with regard to weather, in the church of AGW, it will be because of AGW.
"Compared with what is happening in some drug and cancer research"
You mean like my having to write in my lab book exactly what is being administered, have this counter signed, track all my data in the same manner, and then archive my lab book in the central depository when filled?
Anyone can follow what we do in a drug trail or in cancer research; that is the whole point.
Sep 22, 2013 at 1:46 PM | Roger Tolson
Of course. There's a little report coming out on this very topic on Friday - it will be available here.
:-)
Richard Betts
I'm not looking for a fight, at least not over how Forster and Gregory came to be "happy" with what appeared to be a misinterpretation of their actual figures but I will certainly take issue with you over your assertion that " anthropogenic climate change is real, and yes, it is a problem we are clearly going to have to address in some way", especially when you then go on to use the word 'scaremongering'.
I agree with you that the Observer's piece is bordering on the irresponsible but just where did it get its factoids from in the first place? No journalist that I know ever woke up one morning and said "let's scare the shit out of our readers by making up stories about the climate". What they write has come from within the "climate science community".
Wasn't it a guy called Hansen, supposedly a climate science guru, who first started talking about tipping points and prophesying that massive sea rise was on the cards?
I'm sure the Observer didn't make up the idea that Arctic ice cover has been at "record lows", without bothering to add that reliable measurements only started 34 years ago.
And whose idea was it to start panicking at a possible sea level rise of 3mm a year — as someone pointed out yesterday the thickness of 2 5cent pieces — as if it were actually possible accurately to measure anything less than about 10 times that figure?
And what about all that severe weather that has turned into one of the quietest hurricane seasons on record and the first for 11 years with no hurricanes in August and nothing but a single Cat 1 so far? And that is part of run of low hurricane activity dating back to the 70s.
The scaremongering, Richard, is coming one way or another from the climate science community or from their allies in the environmental NGOs with their own axes to grind. The media correspondents know even less about climate change than those of us who frequent blogs and have bothered to do some research. For sure they don't have the wit to make up the sort of stories that you are complaining about.
If (big if!) we need to do something about climate change then what we need to do is adapt, if and when we see some evidence that all these scary things are happening. At the moment they ain't — much as the scientists (and the politicians) would like us to believe they are.
When drivel of this remarkable, reality inverting character is written, it raises the question of "Why?"
Why do so many AGW fanatics trade in their integrity and thinking skills in support of the ideas of AGW?
Mr .Hutton is either writing out of ignorance or cynicism. Or both. He is certainly not writing based on facts or history.
But from Mr. Obama and his sad "flat earth" embarrassment, to the AGU rewarding Gleick after his confession, we see examples of AGW believers saying or doing things that in non-AGW areas would be considered completely laughable at best getting a free pass.
Richard Betts did you criticise Al Gore when he gave his Inconvenient Truth" video?
Did you ever call his alarmism "total poppycock"?
Funny how all those Climate "Scientists" were very quiet during that period and only recently have started to bemoaned some aspects of Alarmism!
I expect a Met Office news blog article is being written to explsin the irresponsible claimes made by the Observer.
If not, why not.
They write about Sunday Mail articles. But this Observer article is just total hype/alarmism
Michel (and others)
I have come to realise that religious zealots exhibit characteristics which are indistinguishable from mental illness.
I have also come to realise that religious fanatics exhibit characteristics which are indistinguishable from insanity.
I have further come to realise that CAGW true believers exhibit characteristics which are indistinguishable from religious zealotry and fanaticism.
Make of that what you will.
Richard Betts wrote: "But Forster and Gregory were IPCC lead authors in AR4 - in fact Piers Forster was a Coordinating Lead Author, so was deeply involved at the highest level, writing the SPM. Although they had come up with an observationally-based estimate of ECS, they recognised that it was still only an estimate which relied on assumptions, and that the IPCC "likely range" was based on a number of estimates from different sources."
Please don't suggest that the fact that Forster and Gregory approved how their work was modified makes things OK! This affair illustrates a major weakness with the IPCC consensus approach. These authors agreed to change the peer-reviewed analysis in their paper so that it was in closer agreement with what other authors had done and in better agreement with climate models. To do so, they changed the prior used in their Bayesian statistical analysis. When the choice of statistical methodology has a major impact on the final results, readers should be alerted to the fact that arbitrary choices such as this one change conclusions and they should show the results from both methods of analysis (if indeed they thought both methods were equally valid. Presumably they and their reviewers thought their first approach was appropriate. Otherwise they should have published a correction.)
Since these and other scientists KNEW that the choice of Bayesian prior did have a big impact on their calculated climate sensitivity, they should have been asking statisticians how they should correctly deal with such a situation. When such arbitrary choices have such a major impact on results, we have left the realm of science and entered the realm of opinion! If Nic Lewis is to be believed, statisticians would have told these scientists that such behavior is evidence that use of a "uniform" prior was inappropriate in this situation. Nic Lewis has show that the use of an objective prior can eliminate the fat tail of the pdf that made their 90% confidence interval so wide the results don't tell us much as we need to know to develop sensible policy. Nic obtained a usefully narrow range from 1.3-2.3 degC.
On the surface, it appears as if a major problem has existed FOR MORE THAN A DECADE in the IPCC's analysis of THE key issue in climate science - climate sensitivity. Climate scientists appear to have ignored this problem simply because the current flawed methodology using uniform priors gave results that were more useful in scaring policymakers about future warming.
Only outsiders like Nic Lewis and Steve McIntyre seem to have the guts to get their hands dirty repeating re-analyzing data and uncovering major methodological problems like these in climate science.
If Nic Lewis had been able to demonstrate that the 90% confidence interval for climate sensitivity was 4.0-5.0 degC, there would have been major articles everywhere touting his work. Assuming the work was confirmed, Hansen and Lewis might soon be candidates for the Nobel Prize for clearly exposing future danger to society! Hansen exposed, but couldn't accurately define, the threat. Lewis would have been the first to prove how dangerous the threat really was.
What’s at the base of AGW is power and greed
Power for the entryist Greens, modelling their tactics on the Trotskyists of yesteryear- some may be the same people. Classic "watermelons".
Greed by the various vested interests. NGOs, The Met Office, "Green" Energy companies whose existence relies on subsidies and the corrupt politicians who make amendments to Energy Bills, coach their paymaster before they go in front of All Part Committees.
It’s nothing to do with dangerous climate change.
Just follow the money. Pure and simple.
In what sense was the Mail's article 'irresponsible'?
Richard Betts
→ I'm saying that Forster and Gregory were happy with how their work was incorporated into the "likely range" estimate. This was done in Chapter 8 of the WG1 report, and their (sic) were contributing authors on that chapter.
Hi Richard, I don't think that's quite right. Chapter 8 was about climate models and their evaluation. I think you mean Chapter 9 of AR4.
While I would back you up on Piers Forster and Jonathan Gregory stating they were happy with how the Forster and Gregory 2006 results were treated, I don't think either of them - although very respected climate scientists - would claim to have been experts in Bayesian statistical inference at that time. And even if they had been, the fact that Forster and Gregory were happy with how their work was treated (in Figure 9.20 and Table 9.3) does not affect the fact that it was not statistically appropriate to restate their results in a way that contradicted the reasoned error assumptions made in their paper.
Another failed "prediction", projection", "forecast", or whatever weasel words the Met office is currectly using.
http://www.arcus.org/files/search/sea-ice-outlook/2013/07/images/summary/sio_july_fig1rev.png
Not only a fail, but the Met Office model is actually bottom of the class.
"Please can we have alot more Taxpayers' money to improve our "predictions", projections", "forecasts"?
or even estimates, assumptions and likely range.
I am still waiting for the punchline in the BIG INNOVATION story; my guess is that in the small print on the website you will find the statement: Number of employees 1.
Richard Betts
Hi Richard, I take it you and your Met office colleagues will be called upon to help our elected and their officers carry out their due diligence responsibilities on the "little report" :-)
Dung
They have a “leadership group” (chair Will Hutton, plus two directors) of three, a steering group of sixteen, at least half of whom are employees of their clients (or “partners”) including Alan Rusbridger, editor of the catastrophically uneconomic Guardian), twelve staff, and six visiting fellows, including one from BAE and one from GlaxoSmithKline. The latter two companies are among their clients, as are Google, the Guardian, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Barclays, Unilever and Nesta. Nesta (in case you didn’t know) is a government sponsored body doing exactly the same job as Big Innovation, so you have one body churning out taxpayer-financed blather financing another body churning out the same blather, but privately financed, both with their own zombie blogs that no-one reads.
One of the glorious unintended consequences of the Blairite insistence on responsiveness, transparency and stakeholder input is that we can see exactly how much onanist activity our taxes are supporting. It’s a tax-and-business-funded w*nkfest to which nobody came.
Sep 22, 2013 at 6:24 PM | Don Keiller
I find the most odd thing about the Met Office entry into the ARCUS Sea Ice Outlook projections is that the MO state in their document 'September 2013 Sea Ice Outlook June Report':
Now that it has gone horribly wrong they have a 'get out' clause but the MO has now had another 'barbecue summer' moment.
If your product is experimental, why not keep it to yourself until it works?
There is a voice on this thread, who speaks in mellifluous tones, his voice purring reasonableness and measured.
A voice, who dances light with truth, speaks in riddles and fixes a branch of knowledge, which at best is imprecise, at worst naming it supposition - would be a more accurate descriptor. There is no substance to his words, his art is in conjecture and about argument, the nebulosity of a stuff of nonsense and yet he persists and is persistent.
For his job, his entire raison d'etre is dependent on selling, flogging - this speculation. Time and again, all we hear is jesuitic nit picking over and over again - in minor fractions of degrees, percentages and all of it, is just a synthesis of computer generated prediction.
On and on and on, it's time to throw the switch and cut off the voice and end the drone.
Brilliant Athelstan.
His name is John Cook.
Sep 22, 2013 at 11:50 AM | eSmiff
...
To be fair, those organisations would, as a matter of course, maintain some involvement merely to ensure that they aren't blind sided in the future with 'arrangements' that did not suit (profit) them. But that doesn't excuse their embracing of the climatology creed.
I past years, I have served on a couple of committees of my professional institutes in developing professional practice policy and notes ... some of the big companies exercised their participation rights by sending along juniors to observe and report back so that their directors could 'intervene' if necessary to protect their interests.
Richard Betts: IMHO this kind of journalism is as irresponsible as the Mail's. Yes, anthropogenic climate change is real, and yes, it is a problem we are clearly going to have to address in some way, but scaremongering....
Richard, do you still stand behind your prediction of 4 degrees C warming as early as 2060? Would you consider that and the claim in the same BBC article of up to 10 degrees Arctic warming this century to be scaremongering? Just curious, thanks.
Oops - Met Office model said up to 15 degrees C warming by the end of the century. It's worse than we thought!
Hi TerryMN
That's a fair question - thanks for asking.
My paper "When could global warming reach 4°C?" looked at the earliest date we could reasonably expect to reach 4°C warming relative to pre-industrial - note that it was the earliest date, not the best estimate.
It was based on the information we had at the time, and was based on a number of approaches not just one model, so no I don't think it was scaremongering - it was addressing a reasonable question in a way which methodically worked through and explained.
Having said that, given the recent updates to estimates of Transient Climate Response, the range of strengths of carbon cycle feedbacks, and other new understanding of the climate system, it probably is time to revisit this projection and see whether it still holds. It does now seem that the very highest warming scenarios are less likely (see Peter Stott's paper "The upper end of climate model temperature projections is inconsistent with past warming" but we still need to look at how much difference this makes for the very long term projections I wrote about.
The forthcoming AR5 report will present new projections with ranges of uncertainty, so this may be useful here. It won't be directly comparable because the emissions scenarios are a bit different, but should give some idea.
Don Keiller
That's why the Met Office publishes the range of models, not just it's own. The best guidance is from the full set of models, not just one. The consensus forecast correctly predicted more Arctic sea ice cover this summer compared to last.
Billy Liar
Because it's important to do science out in the open rather than behind closed doors. Making clear that it's an experimental forecast is not a "get out clause", it's being open about uncertainties. When the Met Office presents everyone else's forecast alongside its own, it's giving people the full information so they can judge for themselves.
@Richard - thanks, I appreciate the reply.
I can see your point (although it strikes me as odd that one would want to know earliest versus best estimate - but maybe that's what the BBC was asking you). That said, given the model run/article was in 2009, the projection of 4 more degrees in as little as 51 years puts the theorized warming as much as just under 8 degrees per century - maybe not scaremongering in the context of spelling out so many imaginged nasty effects like many others have done, but it does seem way outside the bounds of what even the IPCC has
guessedreported.And the 15 degrees of Arctic warming by 2100 - I'm trying to think of a kind characterization of what that prediction might be called. :)
Hi TerryMN
It was 4 degrees C relative to pre-industrial, not relative to the date of the conference. It's basicallly in line with the IPCC upper end of 6.4 degrees C over the 21st Century.
The "exam question" was essentially "What's the worst case scenario?" hence the focus on earliest date in the title, although in the abstract of the paper we do give the best estimate too.
The 15 degrees in the Arctic happens because of strong feedbacks in that region, including sea ice and snow melt. We are seeing this happening already to some extent.
Clarification: I meant IPCC AR4 upper end of 6.4 degrees C.
Richard: "The consensus forecast correctly predicted more Arctic sea ice cover this summer compared to last."
What constitutes a "consensus forecast" in this case, or did you mean "median view"?
It strikes me there was no consensus at all.
matthu
Consensus doesn't have to mean 100% agreement. It just means the overall view.