Bishop Hill Cook's progress
Sep 21, 2013 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other I have an opinion piece in Canada's Financial Post, taking a look at the global warming consensus as revealed in a series of studies, including the Cook one.
Once the methodology used by Cook and his colleagues is understood, it becomes abundantly clear that the consensus it describes is a very shallow one; the results add up to little more than “carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas” and “mankind affects the climate.” These are propositions that almost everybody in the climate debate accepts; the argument continues to be over how much greenhouse gases have affected us in the past and how much they will affect us in the future, and whether any of this represents a problem.
By coincidence, John Cook has been given the right of reply to my piece last week in the Australian looking at the same question. There's a lot of huffing and puffing, but I don't think he nails it.
Reader Comments (59)
I love the unerring skill the SkS phonies show whenever they are threatened with actually debating something, to instead try and distract and zoom in on irrelevancies and the least significant aspects of the argument.
Cook is such a delightful phony – pretending his pathetic treehut forum discussions were on the same par as the climategate leaks/hack is such a narcissitic pose. Especially since we've all seen the lightweight SkS definition of hacking regarding their Nazi photos.
The rest, it seems, is Cook trying to emphasise the power of the survey by citing the self selected cohort of scientists who responded personally. If his paper becomes reduced to this justification then it is even less relevant.
Am I simply misreading Cook's response or does he not address any of the substantive criticisms and just repeats all of the disputed claims all over again?
Ol' John
Still trying to explain Mike's Nature trick.
Which is a standard term in science.
A 'trick' is a normal way of describing a statistical process which is used by scientists every day.
I'm with you John.
47 enquiries which didn't examine the data unanimously agree that the scientists did nothing wrong apart from express their own opoinions including that the hockeystick is crap.
Dickhead.
Also in the Financial Post is a complementary article:-
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/09/20/peter-foster-scary-climate-movies/
From the Cook 'article':
He can't help himself - in the very first sentence he claims they were hacked. No evidence has ever been produced to show this is what happened. It is just as likely that someone leaked them.
3rd sentence:
No surprising, as none were asked to look for it. No investigation was made of 'the science' at all.
The rest is just as poor, in my opinion. Even if a consensus was in any way relevant to whether the science was right, he still doesn't prove his case.
Ah yes, I was reading that article yesterday. One True Believer showed that he really knows his stuff:
'As CO2 rises the amount of CO2 escaping to space falls.'
Now I'm wondering why we don't have a pure Nitrogen atmosphere....
When asked, 97% said they followed each other. 3% are still looking for the truth and one day, 1 will find it.
The problem with the mainstream media is that by giving such rights of reply to climate doomsday cult members they create the perception that both sides of the argument have equal scientific validity. I blame the Murdoch press for creating this false equivalence.
''Everybody accepts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and drives climate''
I do not because the physics does not show any such property for CO2.
Firstly the atmosphere is nothing like a greenhouse. Air convects naturally to aid heat loss from the surface.
Greenhouses work by restricting convective heat loss. They do not store heat or increase temperature by capturing heat energy inside their structure.
CO2 reacts with SIR energy which acts to reduce energy reaching the surface. Increased molecular temperature, the result of the adsorption of the SIR, is transferred to other atmospheric molecules but with 400ppmv there is very little increased atmospheric temperature with most lost to space. This is not re-radiated or back radiation of the GHE but a result of the insolation.
Water vapour has the ability to store heat as latent heat which is released on condensating but again this is not a result of the GHE. Cloud formation at height will release latent heat and this will radiate to space, a good surface cooler since the gained latent heat was collected from the surface and the reason why rainforests are cooler than deserts.
It is not that the 97% consensus is 'wrong' but that the object of the consensus is so shallow that virtually everybody agrees with it, including the actual majority of so called 'sceptics'. So Cook's PR push sems to be backfiring, having drawn attention to the object of the consensus.
There is a video of Prof Lewandowsky, on the UWA website, anging on about the consensus, (Doran, Anderegg),etc) the day before Watts and Jo Nova appeared in the same UWA venue. John Cook is driving the slides, and Cook and Lewandowsky rushed together that meeting and a booklet the scientific guide to the Skeptics Handbook, to counter Jo Nova's very succesfull Skeptics Handbook. Students were handing out cook's little handbook, when watts and Nova were speaking the next day.
That was August 2010.
From this pamphlet, Cook and lewandowsky going onto to write the Debunking handbook, for Skeptical Science
Looks like Cook thought an even better paper onthe consensus was required to wave around. And It worked. Ed Davey was waving it, so was obama's twitter feed, creatively addng a consensus on 'dangerous' climate change.
This appeal to consensus/authority is unattractive from a Professor of Psychology research....
But 'What Lysenko Spawned' being an anagram of 'Stephan Lewandowsky' perhaps shows the universe has a sense of humour.
I take it Cook is still refusing to show us all his data , which hardly suggest they have themselves have much faith in their claims standing up to any decent review.
Bish, what you haven't said is that Dr (pending, in press) Cook's article is on page 2 of the Weekend Australian's Insight liftout. Page 1 has the centrepiece article by Professor Curry - "Consensus distorts the climate picture" There are any number of quotable excepts, but here is one -
Professor Curry's article, apart from being on the front page is two to three times longer than Dr (pending, in press) Cook's article. His is high on the consensus, 97.2% and "wah, wah someone stole our secret tree house scribblings". Unfortunately both are paywalled. As is a great cartoon from Bill Leak entitled "Shake up in the nonprophet sector" which has Professor Flannery getting his butt kicked out of his Climate Commission office. I don't know anything about copyright, but if you can get a copy of it Bish it's well worth giving a UK airing.
The world is made of problems.
The whole climate debate is a strawman argument: sure sure, "climate change" is a problem. So is the disposal of nappies, the indefinite entitlements of champagne leftists in institutes, fuckoshima, and the next comet smashin in , in NewYork city. The question is how big of a problem, and how much should we discard all other problems to mitigate this one.
Nobody quantifies this rank order, yet all the warmish want loads of quantums of dough for their obsession.
Truth be told, I am getting weary with the “arguments” meted out by the likes of Liam in the comments on your article, particularly the insistence that the sceptical are “deniers”. As so few of the sceptical deny much of the climate story: the earth is warming; the climates are changing; CO2 is rising; CO2 can absorb certain IR radiation; humans are producing a lot of CO2 – what are the sceptics denying? Ah – the scary part of the story: all that is happening is a Bad Thing™, and it Must Be Stopped™©. Even then, few sceptics deny it – they are just sceptical that it is a Bad Thing™ (and no evidence has yet arisen to even suggest that), or that anything can be done to arrest the change, let alone reverse it; there is also the implication that there is an “ideal” climate that we should be aspiring to. Exactly what this ideal is, of course, never explored; while the AGWistas™ continue to attack the man and not the message, perhaps the sceptics should be challenging them more along these lines – what is the ideal global temperature? What is the ideal climate?
Even though the good Dr states that the consensus agrees that at least 50% of the warming
is attributable to humanity; this does not entitle him to state that Human beings "CAUSE"
global warming, which he does in his article.
Dr Cook has (in my opinion) been seduced by his own advertising.
In no serious field of research would it be considered valid for the authors to interview themselves as part of the data collection exercise.
Organisations conducting political polls and companies selling cat food would face censure and advertising-code complaints.
Pharmaceutical company executives probably wouldn't go to prison because the regulator would be too busy laughing to get angry.
But on Planet Cook, it is OK. Apparently.
"These are propositions that almost everybody in the climate debate accepts"
These propositions are generalizations.
They aren't science.
Andrew
In most places, if you type "consensus distorts the climate picture the australian" into google, Dr Curry's excellent article comes up (after a subscription ad, which you need to wait for and then close).
It is measured, calm and solidly based. Well worth a read, and a sharp contrast to Cook's blatherings.
Sep 21, 2013 at 12:23 PM | John Marshall
CO2 absorbs IR but what happens next in the atmosphere is the heart of the problem.
(Is the S in SIR Solar?)
Can you point to a more detailed and pedagogic treatment of your comment?
Any connection between John Marshall at BH and John Marshall at MIT?
http://oceans.mit.edu/JohnMarshall/research/climate-modeling/
Bishop,
I read your article in the physical paper over a cup of coffee, which is much more pleasurable than reading it on-line. Well written and well received judging by the copious on-line comments which I checked at a later time.
In regards to Cook's anemic rejoiner, I had not realised that scanning abstracts for an impression of an opinion was considered to be scientific research.
Cook is outed as a shallow kook by his own words. He is a neverwuzzer.
heh, hunter, do you mean a "neverwozzer", a hopeless racehorse that absorbs money, as cited in Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy"?
Works for me.
Am I simply misreading Cook's response or does he not address any of the substantive criticisms and just repeats all of the disputed claims all over again?
Sep 21, 2013 at 10:47 AM | Danny
==============================================================================================
Indeed, he does. Not the title of the article
"Hardly any experts doubt human-caused climate change"
which is simply an appeal to consensus. He'e not very bright, is he?
Where's the option to Edit gone? For "not" read "note"
hmm. I want to ask these guys this:
"travesty, last decade and all that quote". Please give me one of those "easy" contexts that would make the quote mean anything other that what we understand it to be now.
.. fun thing is they can't. No one can, because it's a statement, not only a sentence
:)
He is thrashing around, isn't he?
Point of order, please - John Cook has no doctorate and has no right to be referred to as Dr Cook. At some point he will need to defend an as yet unwritten thesis, demonstrate that he has contributed to the sum of human knowledge, and show that he has dedicated an appropriate amount of time and effort to this work*. Until then, it's Mr Cook.
*having said that, if UWA tolerate Lew's toxic dross, then Cook's photoshopping himself into Nazi uniform will be more than sufficient for the internal examiners.
The Judith Curry article in the Australian can be accessed via this link
https://www.google.com/search?q=Consensus+distorts+the+climate+picture&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
When the paywall subs window appears, just click on the cancel x in the top right of the paywall subs window...
@KNR
Most of Cook's data is indeed still in hiding.
Johanna,
Thanks for catching- and correcting- my Americanization of one of Le Carre's great bits of wordsmithing.
I love his turn of phrase and still on occasion re-read the tremendous books produced under that name. His George Smiley character is one of the most fascinating characters in literature, imho.
His "Perfect Spy", where the 'neverwozzer' comes from is a chilling self-deconstruction and examination of the price extracted by the cold war, plus an amazing good tale.
As we watch Cook, Gleick, Lewadowsky, Gore, etc. etc. etc. break up on the reef of reality I see striking similarities to some aspects of the cold war.
@ Richard Tol
"Most of Cook's data is indeed still in hiding"
And this despite your estimable and persistent efforts to have it made available.
The kidz at Cartoon Central have no shame.
Cook's data release is partial. With it, inter-observer reproducibility of Cook's rating scheme is shown to be poor. The differences between initial rating and second ratings are statistically significant. The tests show the rating scheme will fail to distinguish abstracts belonging to different categories.
Cook's statement that authors rating their own paper verifies the volunteers ratings is an absolute fraud.
Bish wrote: "carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas” and “mankind affects the climate.” These are propositions that almost everybody in the climate debate accepts. The argument continues to be over how much greenhouse gases have affected us in the past and how much they will affect us in the future, and whether any of this represents a problem."
I only wish this were true. These are not proposition that almost everyone in the climate debate accepts, including far to many readers of this blog. As for the public at large, the vast majority of those who disagree with the consensus probably believe that it is a hoax, making knowledgeable skeptics look like idiots.
The argument NEEDS to be over how much GHGs will affect us in the future and HOW MUCH of a problem this represents. (Other than the last 3/4 century, the past is fairly irrelevant since uncertainly limits our ability to learn much from it.) Pretending that no possible problem exists is stupid since ice ages
Excellent arguments, Your Grace. Your exposition of the "97%" propaganda is the clearest, simplest, and most concise that I have seen.
Frank,
The "hoax" part of AGW refers to the social madness associated with enabling rent seeking self serving people and groups to profiteer from demonstrably bad science and worse policies. If you have a better adjective than 'hoax' for the ideas that Germany with its un-sunny weather is somehow wise to build solar arrays, or that wind power is effective or that we are suffering from a cliamte crisis, please share the new descriptive. I forone am all for it.
@Frank: the statement that CO2 is a ghg is a misnomer because although CO2 molecules do accept IR quanta from a higher temperature source, there can be no thermalisation** of that energy in the gas phase. This is because of the requirement for Equipartion of Energy, part of Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium. What happens is that to keep the correct proportion of activated CO2 molecules 'photons' from thermally activated molecules move out of the local volume to exactly balance the number coming in.
So, thermalisation is at heterogeneous interfaces; clouds or Space, the latter via the cosmic microwave background. This is very different to what the Bish and most others assume, but it is most definitely true and has been proven by Nahle who showed that if you replace the PET bottle with a PET balloon, 1/12th the wall thickness, there is no heating.
The energy travels from the initial absorption site by pseudo-diffusion. The clouds heat up a little, causing more convection. As the IR absorbed by the atmosphere is just 23 W/m^2 (forget about 157.5 - that is bunkum) there is very little heating anyway.
**Thermalisation is the conversion of radiative to kinetic and other mechanical energy.
There is no problem.
hunter, nice to meet someone who appreciates Le Carre at his best as much as I do. His work after "A Perfect Spy" is mostly dross, IMO. Still, few writers have produced even one good book, let alone at least half a dozen.
"The Looking Glass War" is one of the finest descriptions ever written about bureaucracy (although the chapter about the mandarins' meeting in The Honourable Schoolboy comes close).
Back to the point, your depiction of people like Cook and Flannery as "neverwozzers" is priceless.
humans are producing a lot of CO2
In absolute terms, Yes. In relative terms, 3.7% of atmospheric co² or 1.5ppm / yr. So to double CO²ppm from the preindustrial approximated level of 280ppm would take 186yrs. So no panic then.
Sep 21, 2013 at 8:00 PM | Unregistered Commenter
Frank
That looks like gobble di gook. I can't make head nor tail of what you are saying.
Andrew Montford ( and most sceptics ) say
"Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas"
That is CO2 causes warming of the atmosphere. So he is correctly included in the shallow consensus. The warming varies and may be overwhelmed by other factors but it is always there lurking.
He is hiding the lack of consensus among sceptics
The only way to defeat CAGW is to ( IMO correctly ) argue that CO2 cannot and does not cause warming of the atmosphere
I agree with John Marshall that H2O drives climate
Radical Rodent asks "what do the sceptic deny?"
Not enough, that is why they are included in the consensus.
It seems to me that Cook et al's "scientific research" methodology did not have a control group. It would be interesting (for me anyway) for these researchers to scan 12,000 abstracts that make no mention of global warming or climate change or whatever to see if they give an impression of supporting the concensus position.
Getting back to John Cook:
Sorry. This was near the start of my interest in the subject, and there were a large number of AGWistas™ making similar claims, then. I made a point of reading many of the e-mails preceding and following any quoted e-mail, to see if they fitted in with the point the poster was trying to make, or if it was “cherry-picked” and out of context. While not having access to the e-mails (no idea where they have gone) to quote verbatim, what I do remember is that many of the protagonists referred to “the cause”, etc; more as if it is the beginnings of a religion than a scientific treatise. In their discussions about Chris de Freitas’s critique of their paper, they did not discuss how to destroy his argument but, how to destroy his career! Not, I would have thought, a particularly scientific approach.
Stephen Richards
The atmospheric CO2 concentration is currently increasing at around 2 ppm per year (see here), and the current CO2 concentration is about 395 ppm - so, if the CO2 rise continues at the current rate, double pre-industrial levels will be reached in just over 80 years from now.
But this 2 ppm per year is not actually the amount that humans are producing - it's less than half. We're currently emitting just over 10 billion tonnes of carbon per year in the form CO2, but the 2 ppm annual CO2 rise is only about 4 billion tonnes of carbon per year - see here.
The rest is being taken up in the oceans and land ecosystems. If this didn't happen, CO2 would be rising at 4 or 5 ppm per year, and we'd be nearly at doubled CO2 already.
Richard Betts,
To ask the obvious....if about half of the additional CO2 from fossil fuels is being absorbed by the ecosystem, does that mean that CO2 levels would have been dropping but for our output?
(I have posted another query in the same vein on the IPCC discussion thread: maybe you could address both? Thank you).
mikeh
Thanks for the question.
The answer is no, because the net uptake on land (by increased photosynthesis) and in the oceans (by increased dissolving of CO2 in water) is a direct consequence of the higher CO2 concentrations. It's a negative feedback on CO2 rise.
Also I think it is important to note that among the treehut files is very important documentation of the inception and discussions between the majority of the activist raters of Cooks paper.
In there they are seen discussing how to define consensus, individual papers , what to do with deniers, how to change the process of rating on the fly.
Some even mention disquiet at this contamination of the purity of the idea, by discussing it like this, and Cook is seen leading them away from any qualms.
I think the critique of this paper shouldn't focus on its technical issue - a la Tol - it should be as the Bish and Monckton (when he isnt being childish) have laid out.
Show it is incredibly shallow and meaningless.
If the peer review system accepts papers that essentially only show the results of 12 activists staying up all night and gossiping while getting RSI rating papers, then so be it.
I bet Cook knows this. His bluster about its significance is the ultimate naked emperor pose ;)
Hunter: Far too many people at skeptical sites either believe or tolerate Dragon Slayers who reject the fundamental scientific principles of the poorly-named and -explained greenhouse effect that explains why GHGs will warm the planet. AlecM's pseudo-scientific babble above is one example, although I gather many readers here try to ignore him. Most people who use the word "hoax" appear to consider climate change to be a scientific hoax, not as the BIsh suggests, a debate about the amount of future warming.
What you call "social madness", I would call "economic madness": How much value are the German people receiving from their investments in solar power? For individuals in most of the US, however, solar power is currently a reasonable investment. (Andy Watts has put solar panels on his roof, for example and it would be a reasonable deal for me if I expected to remain where I am for longer.) Solar panels aren't such a good deal for the power company (that is required to supply power when solar panels do not) and rates will rise because the same capital investment is required, but less power will be sold. I'm much more skeptical about wind because of its intermittency and because output that depends on wind velocity cubed. The possibility of 20% lower wind speed than forecast means a possibility of 50% less power than forecast, requiring a large reserve often provided by fossil fuel plants running in spinning reserve.
Those who claim that a 0.5 degC of warming in the last half century is already causing a catastrophe ARE participating in a hoax. We don't have any idea of whether the net effect has been harmful or beneficial.
Steven Richards: Sorry I posted some gobble di gook by mistake. I was trying to say that AGW has serious potential to cause harm because of what we know about sea level rise after ice ages. Sea level has risen about 120 m since the last ice age. Handwaving estimates suggest that SLR was caused by perhaps 5 degC of warming. That's 24 m of SLR per degC of warming over millennia.
The no-feedbacks climate sensitivity for 2X CO2 is about 1 degC and that warming will be amplified somewhat by water vapor feedback. Let's say Nic Lewis is right and climate sensitivity is 1.6 degC. It would certainly be inappropriate to translate 1.6 degC into 40 m of SLR, but even 4 m of SLR would represent a potential problem! There probably are many other ways to demonstrate the potential for serious problems.
Bish wrote: "how much [GHGs] will affect us in the future, and WHETHER any of this represents a problem." IMO, potential for a very serious SLR problem obviously exists, but it might develop very slowly. Let's stop pretending about "whether a problem exists". How much will the problem cost? (That depends on how much warming occurs.) How much will it cost to do something about it? What is the best thing to do? Is it politically practical? These are some of the questions Richard Tol correctly asks.
The Bish is correct in pointing out that the disagreement about the amount of warming is the key issue, but he is wrong to imply that warming may be small enough to not pose any significant problem. As best I can tell, he is also wrong to imply that public opposition is main focused on the amount of future warming, rather than on the existence/hoax of future warming.
The only relevant passage in Cook's "Australian" response is:
What if we only use symmetrical definitions of consensus; for example, humans are causing more than half of global warming versus less than half? Scientists who rated their own papers by these definitions show a consensus of 96.2 per cent.
Is that a fact?
It's an interesting question because the IPCC have used the word "most" for a decade, and working scientists have tended to interpret that word as meaning 'almost all'. But in the leaked AR5 SPM it's been replaced by "more than half" which means 51% and is a horse of an entirely different colour.
For all the rest, it doesn't matter a fig what he concluded or why he did so. There's no argument that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or that the climate changes or that some warming has happened or that SKS is a shower.