Thursday
Dec182014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Sans ifs, sans buts, sans everything
Dec 18, 2014 Climate: Models Climate: other Ethics Judith Curry quotes this sentence from Peter Lee's GWPF essay on climate change and ethics
Omitting the ‘doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts’ is not a morally neutral act; it is a subtle deception that calls scientific practice into disrepute.
I couldn't help but recall the reaction from climate scientists when I said it was "grossly misleading" of Keith Shine to omit any caveats when explaining the efficacy of GCMs to parliamentarians.
I stand by what I said.
Reader Comments (132)
As in my comment below on Quote of the Day!
Further evidence, as if it were needed, that what "scientists" are telling government is not science but dogma, using the excuse that politicians want certainty.
Well, too bad! Only two things in life are certain, as Benjamin Franklin reminded us, death and taxes.
Any conjurer knows that misdirection is the essence of the performance. Climatologists would not be best pleased by having their tricks revealed to the public.
Maybe you should have a quiet chat with Nic Lewis and Matt Ridley?
The dogmatic section of the climate scientology community knows that its message will only get attention once the caveats have been removed.
Troll alert. DNFTT
Phillip
I agree that it's an attempt at trolling, and a tu quoque to boot. One assumes that if he had some specific concerns he would have outlined them. Looking on the bright side it does seem that ATTP agrees with the general principle that scientists leaving out caveats is not acceptable and no doubt will be lining up alongside me to criticise Keith Shine.
I think aTTP is just tired of the company on his own blog, BBD, Willard, etc dana pops in occasionally ;-)
PB: Troll alert. DNFTT
Definitely, he's only here to derail discussion of the topic and is obviously encouraged by the success he's been having of late.
The silence in the face of such destructive alarmism by the climate "scientists" is complicity.
Billions of dollars have been wasted which could have been used to help millions of poor people, instead we have rising fuel poverty and long term damage to our economy. Climate "scientists" seem to think they are blameless, but there again their gravy train is still running at full speed.
The biggest enemy of all environmental campaigns is uncertainty (few will want to do something about a maybe), hence the ruthless suppression of doubt and dissent.
I think we should be celebrating the cross-party consensus here. We must have the caveats!
Bishop,
I've done it many times, in many different places, including with Matt Ridley and Nic Lewis directly (unsuccessfully, I might add). I also assumed that since you appear so able to identify these issues, that I might not need to have to do so. Additionally, given the typical tone of the response to my comments here, I don't really think there's much point in putting in much effort. On the other hand, if you would really like to know, you need only ask. FWIW, I agree with the point you're making; we should be willing to acknowledge caveats and ifs and buts. However, this should apply to all. Also, we should be careful of making the mistake of thinking that an "if" or a "but" means that we don't understand something. There are always caveats and "ifs" and "buts", so it is important to understand the significance of these issues.
Caveats included then ignored as the precautionary principle is thrown into the mix.
Bish
Having had a look at the SST bucket corrections for canvas buckets I think it's often a bit more subtle than that.
With regards to the SST correction you have a result that had been backed up by a model then experiments. It's a scientific result and as such it's a good start. So for 20 years or so 1900 to 1940s temperature anomalies have been adjusted up by around 0.5 degrees based on this bit of work. All subsequent uncertainty studies rely on this work.
Now I've no problem with trying to approach a correction in the way it has been done. My problem is that I can't seem to find more data and more experiments. In effect that the full force of characterisation then came down and this correction was mapped to a higher, engineering standard. After all the temperature data set is policy relevant.
So the issue from what I've seen is that scientific studies are being used raw and unfiltered. So any normal process of validating and expanding on work in order to increase understanding and often to challenge assumptions isn't being done. It's as if one experiment alone has dictated the course of climate science in this particular case. Sounds familiar? One good tree in Yamal and all that.
The issue is that I don't think any of these scientists has been told that their work needs engineering validation. It might even be an insult. I think that once an experiment has been shown to give a reasonable answer in the ballpark then those assumptions are assumed valid. Almost like the age old problem of a theorist arguing with an empiricist. An empiricist refusing to believe until it's measured.
Doing one or two experiments is fine for the generalities of scientific progress but it's not so good if your results have real world money implications. In this case you need to do the often monotonous job of characterisation. And you also need someone to have the talk as to why as a scientist your opinion isn't the final word by a long shot.
As ever hopefully I'm wrong and much more characteristion has been done.
ATTP
What caveats do you think should be carried against the observational studies?
What Martyn said: science + precautionary principle = no science. Science can give the best estimate, these will be constrained by available data and such approaches will carry the inability to exclude extreme values with full confidence. If you don't like this, don't do energy budgeting based estimation of sensitivity in the first place, become a Taleb-ian pseudoscientific fear mongerer - you can never be wrong and your position will always include the best interests of humankind.
Science and physics is about the reduction of probabilities, and prediction. If these are irreducible, it either means we don't understand the physics or the system includes fundamentally irreducible emergent properties. In that case, don't tell the world '...And then there's Physics'.
Bishop,
Here are the fundamental assumptions associated with energy balance models. They assume feedbacks are linear. They might not be and hence an EBM cannot tell you what will happen if they are. They assume the forcings are homogeneous. Again, they might not be and an EBM cannot tell you what would happen if they were. They cannot compensate for internal variability, which can clearly influence the rate at which we warm on decadal timescales. So, although EBMs are very useful and the results are interesting, these assumptions mean that you can't assume that the results are somehow more robust than other methods. In particular, a number of these assumptions - if wrong - would imply that climate sensitivities from EBMs are lower than they are in reality. Internal variability could work either way, but given that we've had a slowdown in the last 10 years or so, might suggest that its producing cooling, rather than warming.
Additionally, no EBM analysis allows one to rule out, with high confidence, high climate sensitivity. Focusing only on the best estimate and ignoring the range is, in my view, not presenting a complete picture of what EBMs are suggesting with respect to future warming.
Physics - no method will rule out high values with high confidence. The problem comes with the domain - that of trying calculate probabilities for sensitivity estimates. On the other hand, it is impossible to not get higher and higher low-probability values by incorporating longer and longer time intervals and varied climatic conditions, like in paleoclimate.
'Additionally, no EBM analysis allows one to rule out, with high confidence, high climate sensitivity. Focusing only on the best estimate and ignoring the range is, in my view, not presenting a complete picture of what EBMs are suggesting with respect to future warming.'
And yet, attp, 'climate scientists' appear to focus on the highest climate sensitivities they possibly can, to get the scariest scenarios. So we are definitely NOT getting a complete picture from them, nor are the politicians who listen to them. Thanks for pointing that out.
Micky Corbett: "Having had a look at the SST bucket corrections for canvas buckets I think it's often a bit more subtle than that."
Does the whole CAGW thing rely on measurements made with canvas buckets 100 years ago by people who had better things to do?
[O/T]
[O/T]
aTTP
"Focusing only on the best estimate and ignoring the range "
But Nic always presents the range and for far too long he used the higher median value rather than the best estimate (mode). So this is just a strawman argument.
The fact that these methods are not reliable is not the issue - they were the methods used previously to indicate alarm. Now that they don't indicate alarm thanks to 18 years of no warming, the authors disown them.
In fact the no-feedback scenario is the only one that is plausible and backed by measurements (Lindzen) and it is yet still within the vast IPCC range. The real problem is too many people focusing on the less likely tail of the range when all the observations are pointing to the more scientific lower end. And the reason for scientists doing that is because they want to influence policy: 4 degrees is scary, 2 degrees not so much, 1 degree is likely beneficial.
James,
In his papers he does, publicly I don't think he does (at least, not obviously). Just to be clear, I think his work is quite good. I've learned quite a lot from what he does. However, he appears reluctant - in my experience at least - to acknowledge this when speaking publicly. Matt Ridley also appears reluctant to acknowledge this and Nic Lewis appears reluctant to criticise him when he does.
Gotta love ATTP- always good for a laugh.
The highlight of my day.
Carry on trolling.
ATTP
Don't you think that one problem that Lewis and Ridley (and others) have is that with too many climate apologists pushing the extremes, as otter points out above, there is no space for those who disagree to lay out a reasoned case and expect to be heard?
It's probably worth remembering that the IPCC reports by and large do indicate the level of confidence or degree of uncertainty, whichever you prefer; it's the compilers of the SPM, the government advisers and the NGOs with an axe to grind that are mainly to blame for the refusal to countenance anything other than a worst-case scenario, for reasons of their own.
If the climateers call it always black and white (and almost always black in this case) then what else do you expect from those who challenge them except black and white?
Mike,
Nope, I think that's a particularly poor argument. Firstly, I think what you define as the extreme is probably more like the middle and, secondly, even if some do push one extreme, doesn't excuse pushing the other.
Mikky
There's a discussion thread on this and in older posts. Steve Mc also tackled it a few years ago from a slightly different perspective than me.
But yes HADSST3 relies on trying to get as best estimate of the true SST values and since the early 20th century is dominated by buckets it has a direct effect on estimates of temperature change. And hence AGW policy.
Let me give you another analogy: the Orion spacecraft uses a heat shield that is a modern day rework of the Apollo heat shield. The material is called Avcoat and in reality the only difference is that some materials were replaced with substitutes that are now declared toxic. Now why did NASA end up using a 50 year old design rather than modern better equivalents?
There are a few reasons but it mostly comes down to:
Avcoat is monolithic. There are no seams - so much less risk of a Columbia type incident.
Avcoat was subject to about 3000 arc jet tests over the span of Apollo in addition to flight heritage.
When lives are at stake you tend to up your game and test more. SpaceX got away with less testing for Dragon because it was unmanned.
aTTP
The argument really descends therefore into pessimists versus optimists. But an objective person must consider that we had 0.6K/century up to now, none of which was in the last 18 years yet some folk pretend that their unvalidated and now uniformly disproven computer models (or rather the all-too-human assumptions made for their inputs) can project 3+ degrees for the next century despite failing to predict anything correctly thus far. It's an absolute farce!
If you lot would just come out and admit that you want to move society away from fossil fuels and any excuse will do to achieve that end then at least it would be honest. Then we can all discuss how best to achieve it without doing more harm than good.
Lennart Bengtsson resigned from the GWPF citing harassment by scientists. Like so many others must of been pushing the other way.
James,
No, I don't think it does. My optimism or pessimism has no bearing on physical reality. Climate sensitivity will be whatever physical reality dictates. The real debate, in my view, is between balancing the risks associated with climate change (i.e., what kind of emission pathway will we follow in the future, and what is the probability of warming by amounts that could be damaging) and the risks/costs associated with minimising the risks associated with climate change.
No, because that wouldn't be honest. Maybe what would help would be if people like yourself didn't paint others in this simplistic way. Maybe what would really help is for those who aren't in denial admitting that climate change does present a risk and then we can discuss what sensible things we can do to minimise this risk.
I'm trying to recall occasions when Nic has spoken about the energy budget studies in public. Evidence to the ECC committee of course and there was the Radio 4 interview, but the bit broadcast in was about his opinions on the models. I'm wondering what your "experience" is?
In other words, the precautionary principle...even though the likelihood of catastrophic Mann Made Global Warming (tm) is likely somewhere between zero and near zero. But hey, why let Real Life (tm) get in the way. Why dont we continue to p1ss trillions literally in to the wind for absolutely NO benefit what so ever.
Mean while millions around the world die from preventable diseases, poverty, lack of access to medical care who all could be helped if only we stopped diverted trillions away in to vanity projects that will deliver not one bit of benefit for humanity.
Anders, your post above actually tells me a lot about yourself...actually, more like confirms what I already thought of you. That you really dont have a clue.
Mailman
"My optimism or pessimism has no bearing on physical reality. "
History says otherwise - the neoMalthusians jumped on the global warming project using (1) the Montreal protocol/ozone template (2) rising global temperatures as an excuse. The science, i.e., 'physical reality' followed. What physical reality was there in 1985?
Bishop,
Well, the two examples you give, broadly qualify. I think he did a poor job of presenting the range or acknowledging the caveats when he spoke to the select committee and on radio 4. I believe that his work features quite heavily in his report with Marcel Crok and - unless I'm mistaken - discussion of the range and caveats was not prominent in that report. Nic Lewis commented on my blog and appeared reluctant to acknowledge the range and when he responded to a comment of mine on Mark Lynas's blog, he chose top nit pick something I'd said, rather than the address the actual issue and never came back to respond to my next comment. To be clear, I'm not specifically trying to pick on Nic Lewis here, but if you're going to promote what you did in this post, then - IMO - it should be applied evenly. On the other hand, saying things like it calls scientific practice into disrepute is - IMO - hyperbole and we'd all benefit if we avoided implying such things.
I'm also not a big fan of attributing meaning to what people choose to say publicly. Nic Lewis, Matt Ridley, yourself are free to present whatever message you choose to present. I'm, of course, free to point out that what some might infer from that message isn't consistent with the best evidence available. My view is that this is all a risk analysis problem and presenting a message that appears to suggest that there is little chance of any risk even if we follow a quite high emission pathway (which I would argue is the kind of message yourself, Nic Lewis and Matt Ridley promote) is not consistent with the best evidence available. That doesn't mean that there will definitely be severe consequences if we do, but - IMO - the chance that there will be is too large to ignore (and by suggesting we shouldn't ignore it, I don't mean panic and stop emitting fossil fuels instantly).
The onus of proof and persuasion is on those who want to channel public money to particular projects or mitigations, not on the unpersuaded, or "deniers" if you will.
From the executive summary of Lewis and Crok:
And in Parliament:
And of course in giving evidence to Parliament you answer the questions asked.
Lewis should caveat his study with findings derived from other methods. Other scientists should caveat their results with findings derived from Lewis'. Do we see that happening? Do we see IPCC admitting openly that the higher end estimates are not well supported by observationally constrained estimates? Where is the admission that the probabilities do not cluster at the higher end?
Moreover, if this is a 'risk-management' problem - which is just a buzzword for the precautionary principle - then the highest climate sensitivity estimate automatically wins, regardless.
Bishop,
Well, I think he's stressing the central estimate and playing down the range (you can disagree). I also think the above statement is completely wrong. In what sensible scenario do you base policy on some middle value and ignore the risks associated with the extremes (or even the risks associated with it being different from the central value)? There is only one value for climate sensitivity. The range gives you an idea of the likelihood of it being with a certain range of a particular value. In a sensible scenario you consider the risks associated with various scenarios and balance that with the risks/costs associated with mitigating those risks. You don't say "don't worry, nothing bad will probably happen".
We don't know what climate sensitivity actually is. That's why we present a range. Knowing the actual distribution is clearly relevant and Nic Lewis's results suggest that it is skewed towards lower values. That would be really good if it turns out to be true. However, arguing that we should simply consider the central estimate and largely ignore the range, and failing to present the caveats, is - in my view - a very poor argument. Also, what happened to all the outcry about climate scientists presenting policy views (not that I think they shouldn't, but I thought you did)?
Well, yes, and this is the point isn't it? The extreme warming scenarios carry the high risks. I would argue that's why we should be aiming to minimise these risks. Arguing that they're unlikely and that they only sound bad because of the extreme damage that economic models suggest will occur, seems like completely the wrong argument to make. I would argue that we want to minimise these outcomes, not ignore them. That, I suspect, is not an argument that you agree with.
ATTP have you ever heard of "Chicken Little", or "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"?
If not I suggest you pay a quick visit to your oracle/Font of all Knowledge (Wikipedia) and read up.
It may, for once, teach you something useful.
OK, I think you are backing away from alleging that Nic is "reluctant" to discuss the range: on the two occasions he has discussed climate sensitivity in public he has discussed ranges. Now you are saying that he emphasises central tendency rather than range and indeed you go so far as to say that he thinks one should only use central tendency. You can only come up with this completely daft allegation by ignoring the rest of what he said in that answer, in which he discussed the skewness of the climate sensitivity PDFs. Clearly you both agree that the shape of the distribution is vital. How you would communicate that skewness in oral testimony without discussing the central tendency as well as the range is beyond me.
Another thing. Some time ago you tweeted that you were trying to wind me up. I blocked you then, because I have better things to do than deal with time-wasters. If I thought you were trying to waste my time here by conjuring up a series of strawmen for me to respond to I would block you just as quickly.
Bishop,
That was based on my recollection and I still maintain that's he reluctant to discuss it in a manner that I would regard as reasonable. Certainly in my interactions with him (which have been public) this has appeared to be the tendency. The point I was getting at, though, is that you're happy to make claims about what Keith Shine should or should not have said and make hyperbolic comment about the implications for science as a whole. I can make similar claims with regards to Nic Lewis or Matt Ridley. You can find an argument as to why you think what they said was reasonable and I can probably do the same for Keith Shine. At the end of the day it's a bit of a judgement. It would be better if we addressed what was actually said, than implied some kind of nefarious intent.
Ahh, well I said that because I was acknowledging that I had been trying a bit to wind you up, which isn't a great way to behave. It wasn't because I was specifically trying to do so, but I realised I probably had. I also assumed that being of - I assume - British decent, you might be able to take a bit of a wind up. Apologies if not (I must admit, I have become rather surprised by how sensitive some are who comment on this site. I would never have guessed).
I'm always more than happy to engage politely and seriously with those who are willing to do the same. Of course, people who throw around accusations of strawmen and don't actually address what the other person has said, are often not worth engaging with. You seem to think that you've somehow proven me wrong, but your own examples indicate that he tends to focus on the best estimates and argues that the range isn't really relevant for policy. You can be pedantic and argue that this isn't what I first said, but that would seem a bit of a dodge.
If you were interested, you could address the points I made in my earlier comment. If not, don't. Block me if you want. I don't really care. You may actually be doing me a favour if you did.
Complete nonsense as usual from Mr Troll. Lewis's paper is packed full of discussion of uncertainties and ranges.
Paul,
And yet, if you read anything about it, or looked at what Matt Ridley says about it, or even read the final bits of the report, there's little mention of it. Even if I ask Nic Lewis directly about the range, he seems reluctant to acknowledge that it is broadly consistent with the IPCC range. I didn't say he doesn't mention it, I suggested he's reluctant to discuss it in public. Saying something is one thing. Drawing conclusions from it is another.
Just out of interest, are you capable of actually having a discussion with someone with whom you largely disagree, because from I've seen you are not, and simply stop by to make snide unpleasant remarks and never address any substantive point whatsoever? Look I know you clearly despise me, but maybe you could try to say something substantive rather than simply behaving like a typical online commenter. If you want to make me look stupid, you'd be better off actually trying to do so, rather than simply appearing to be an unpleasant arse.
Bishop, maybe you should ban me, because I doubt I'll be able to refrain - in future - from saying what actually think of Paul Matthews if you don't.
Calm down old chap. You've made false accusations about Lewis, such as "discussion of the range and caveats was not prominent in that report", that Bish has demonstrated to be false simply by quoting the report, and anyone can check by looking at the report itself.
The best way to respond to such a situation is not by having a temper tantrum.
Paul,
[snip]
Funny guy, ATTP. He doesn't realize that if the low-sensitivity folks be forced to acknowledge systemic factors that might imply higher values, means high-sensitivity folks would be required to acknowledge the extreme assumptions that lead to high values?
He 'winds up' the Bish because he is of British descent but gets wound up easily himself even though he is of British descent?
What a strange argument - "British descent"!
He bans people at his blog for not answering all commenters' questions and here he selectively answers questions.
Methinks ATTP's professional jealousy is at the root of his problem with Nic Lewis.
LOL. At least he has a sense of humour!
aTTP -
Actual quotations, rather than arm-waving, might bolster your argument.
"Bishop, maybe you should ban me, because I doubt I'll be able to refrain - in future - from saying what actually think of Paul Matthews if you don't."
Poor ATTP - so much intellect, so much to offer the debate yet so little self discipline. Tragic.