Bishop Hill Official: Bob Ward is a smearmonger
Jan 29, 2015 Climate: Ward This was just posted by Richard Tol. I reproduce it here for public edification:
Mr Robert ET Ward BSc, employed by the London School of Economics and Political Science to promote the research of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, has engaged in a smear campaign against me.
At least, according to the Daily Mail.
Mr Ward was not so pleased with that characterization of his work, and complained to the Independent Press Standards Organization.
Yesterday, IPSO ruled that a "smear campaign" is a perfectly fine description of Mr Ward's work.
My response to Mr Ward's work is here.
Professor John P. Abraham highlighted Mr Ward's work in the Guardian. See my response. Unfortunately, the Guardian is not regulated by IPSO. The Guardian is regulated by the Guardian.
Bishop Hill
Richard Tol has now posted the decision notice of IPSO. I don't think the decision is exactly as he described it.
Reader Comments (86)
Paid-to-smear shill for bigger, richer boy in psychological projection shocker...
Bob Ward is a smearmonger, true but the most amazing thing is that despite not actually being good at it he keeps getting paid to do it .
Mr Robert ET Ward BSc, employed by the London School of Economics . false and its important that we do not make this claim has it gives him to much credit . His is actually employed by an institute that thanks to handing over to the LSE a big bag of cash , uses some of their facilitates and at times hides under their name.
Bob 'fast fingers ' Ward is not employed by the LSE , he does not acedmic work for them at all at any level and has no LSE id nor even an LSE e-mail address .
The LSE has for a long time been willing to sell its 'reputation ' for far more than 30 Pieces of Silver, true.
But Bob is not their 'bitch' that honour belongs to another that uses him , and he is more than happy to be used , to further their own interest, why given has I said his actually not very good at it , is their own business their very rich and hopping that ridding the AGW train will make then much , much richer so perhaps he does not mind given Bob his lose change just for comedy value.
Mike Jackson:
I initially read "lycra"! Not enough mind bleach for that!!Saw the update by Tol. Ward did indeed request the IPSO to consider his complaint on the veracity of his claim - that Tol was on a campaign, and on grounds that merely repeating Tol constituted a violation of the code of practices - and got beaten back on it. I believe Tol has it right.
Richard Tol,
I've just done some digging on that time bar - a (geologist) friend who wrote her PhD between 1989 and 1993 had a time bar in place at a leading UK university. I know it was in place for mine later that decade.
Result - Mr Robert Ward BSc once again deceives.
SNTFM,
Brian May, lead guitarist with Queen, started his Astrophysics PhD in 1970 and submitted in 2007.
I think some of you are being a bit precious.
Ward claimed Tol was telling porkies and called him names. The IPSO told Ward he had no grounds to complain and in effect upheld Tols claim that Ward was running a smear campaign, which any person with two brain cells to rub together can see that is EXACTLY what Ward is doing.
Mailman
Hi Michael, you're right - certainly in the '70s there wasn't a time bar on PhDs - as I said above one of my lecturers celebrated getting his doctorate forty years after beginning it - just in time for his retirement - and as Richard Tol says, it's not when you finish but when you start that the rule applies.
But a time bar was introduced which meant this was no longer possible. Robert Ward, unless that's a VERY old photograph and he's hiding decades of complete inactivity between bottling out of the hard work of writing up his PhD (assuming he did any research in the first place) and getting that job with the RS, simply isn't old enough for the time bar not to apply.
Well I hate to defend Bob Ward but the errors he caught most certainly were significant and without Tol's single paper the graph showing the economic effects of warming would be relentlessly downward as Ward says. In fact there are not enough datapoints to support such a curvefit upon which the claim of beneficial warming below 2.5K is based on.
Having said that, the worst aspect of this collection of economic estimates is that only one other economist bar Tol has even seemingly even bothered to consider mild warming at all, never mind consider that all of history and all current satellite measurements that resolutely show the greening of the planet over the last 30years, overwhelmingly support Tols work. Indeed most economists have not even bothered to assume any warming rise below 2.5K, based no doubt on the now hugely discredited models showing parabolic rises that just didn't happen. Bearing in mind that, as admitted by Edenhofer (possibly the only Marxist economist the IPCC could even find) the economics models are far worse than the climate models, it means the entire exercise is mind-blowingly useless and becomes increasingly useless the further out in time you go. It would be nice though if someone other than Tol bothered to consider the possibility of mild warming since that's what all the recent data indicate is most likely. But then again, since very few economists managed to predict the current financial crisis (something that many skeptics, including myself, saw as blindingly obvious btw) then what the hell use are they at prediction anyway?
Tol: "The "hidden computations" are an inner product."
This was one of the justifications by Mann against sharing data with McIntyre
I note this without giving an opinion on Shollenberger v Tol,
JamesG
Your point might have some relevance if you could make the claim that the job of an econocmst is to predict the future like a weather forecaster....and we know how well they perform.
Try this link
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/01/frederic-bastiat-football-punditry.html
Shub's explanation shows that Tol is more more right than wrong
Yes at first glance Tol rushed & could have chosen his language more carefully.
\\Yesterday, IPSO ruled that a "smear campaign" is a perfectly fine description of Mr Ward's work.//
Hmm, come on Tol mate that does sound a bit like spin.. And you should go back and change it.
1. IPSO didn't say that it thinks Ward was running a smear campaign.
2. It did say that it was "fine" for the Mail to report that that was Tol's opinion
3. It did say that that opinion was not so groundless that merely reporting it constitutes a breach by the Mail.
- So Yesterday, IPSO ruled that it was OK for the Mail to report that Tol believes Bob Ward was running a "smear campaign"
Bish should change the headline as it overextrapolates Tol's point. If the situation were reversed we wouldn't have a headline "Official Tol a .."
- I think we all pick up bad tricks from being around Ward.
..Two wrongs don't make a right.
However Tol and all on the skeptics side deserve some slack. Matt Ridleys essay show it's damm hard for sceptics to stick their head above the parapet.
I believe the IPSO said to Ward you're barking against the wrong tree, the Daily Mail only expressed the opinion of Tol of Ward having smear campaign and allowed Ward in the same article to express his own opinion. Therefore there's no reason to accuse Daily Mail of a smear campaign.
In other word IPSO did not in any way decided whether it was a smear campaign or not, just that the Daily Mail is not guilty of that. I dont agree with Tol on that.
IPSO decided that on all points the Daily Mail article was fair and balanced.
@AndyL
Only one person ever asked for the data and computations. I explained how the computations were done and were the data could be found. He never got back to me saying that he was unable to replicate the results.
We have now made available an organized and documented spreadsheet.
Not quite Mann, I would think.
Note that economics etiquette has that you first try yourself before approaching the author. As the paper was published in 2009 and the first data request came in 2014 (while the paper was cited a lot and used in class), I had no reason to assume that replication was a problem.
That said, we learned from this. We now teach our students that papers come with replication code, and my papers now do.
That is most certainly un-Mann like!
Good on you for making data available. Now if only climate scientists would follow your lead!
Mailman
AndyL:
I've been tempted to call Richard Tol "Mini Mann" before. There are a lot of similarities, including the use of legal threats to try to silence their critics. Tol just does everything on a smaller scale than Mann did.
mailman:
I wish you would realize Tol is not telling the truth. I showed Tol is being deceptive with that argument just 20 comments ago. You'll note Tol hasn't responded to what I said. That's because he can't because he's wrong. Tol knew Bob Ward couldn't replicate his work because Tol never disclosed his data (or calculations), and he never told Ward how to find the data or perform the calculations. Instead, he just mocked Ward for not being able to do it.
It is exactly like Mann. Mann told people he had described his methodology and provided his data so people could replicate his work. In reality, his descriptions were wrong and his data had errors (until critics pointed them out). The exact same thing seems to have happened here, except Tol never actually made his data available.
Diogenes
As most of my points were extremely relevant and on topic I presume you are just miffed at the last one; ie should economists be expected to predict or not.
Well you tell me then what the point of an economist is! Because if it isn't for prediction then it can only be as a historian. Mind you they can't even agree on theories about the causes of the 1930's depression. And if they are not expected to be any good at prediction then why ask them in the first place?
In fact those who warned about the financial crisis were mainly extreme left-wingers and libertarians, few of whom were classical economists. You could count the number of economists who predicted it correctly on one hand and they were mostly of a left-wing persuasion too. They jeered en masse at Nouriel Roubini as 'Dr Doom'. But if you are trying to argue that it wasn't at all predictable then you have to face the fact that a lot of people did actually predict it quite accurately, as indeed did I very strongly (even archived on the web in the 'Economists view' blog) and knowing this saved myself and my friends a lot of money. Unlike the BOE and the FSA and uk.gov, I wasn't surprised at all and neither were a heck of a lot of other contrarian investors.
The real problem is that they were mesmerised by models and the flawed, guessed inputs to these models. I had hoped this might have taught some folk a lesson - including climate scientists btw - but apparently not. Economists are currently crowing about UK growth but deep down everyone knows it is mostly due to artificially inflated house prices (using public money) and rising private debt again - ie exactly what cause the last bubble and crash.
Bob and Brandon, sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.
JamesG, I'm glad I'm not the only person who recognizes Bob Ward's criticisms were right. I'm not too impressed by Ward as there were a couple significant points he missed, but still, the errors he found were real and they definitely matter.
On the issue of mild warming, there's actually a strange aspect to all this. It's one of the thing Ward missed. Richard Tol put all of the estimates on a graph together, and he ran calculations using all the data points, but the reality is they aren't directly comparable. In fact, they might not be comparable at all.
You see, the various data points come from different people who used different assumptions. Most of them depend heavily upon things like projected population growth and rate of warming. Economic damage isn't just a function of the total amount of warming. The rate of warming matters a great deal too. Tol simply ignores that.
Even worse, Tol treats estimates from the 1990s as the same as estimates from this decade. Some of the warming considered by the earlier papers had already happened by the point some the later papers were published. Despite that, Tol puts them all on the same scale like they are all discussing the same scenario. He even put one paper which estimates damage for warmth since preindustrial times on the same scale as papers estimating damage for wamth after ~2010.
Perhaps the craziest part is most of the papers estimate damage in nominal GDP. One paper estimates damage in PPP GDP. Tol puts them all on the same scale. He just ignores the fact the one paper measures something entirely different from the others. (This one paper just so happens to be the paper which shows the greatest amount of harm from global warming.)
I struggle to see why anyone would believe single point estimates from ~20 models can give us meaningful insight into the effects of global warming, but there's certainly no way they would if all 20 estimates use different baselines for economic growth and temperature changes (or the rates thereof).
JamesG given left wing economists are 'always' predicted that capitalism will lead to 'doom ' being right every so often takes no effort at all , because all systems have their up and downs , oddly its the systems the left wing economists ardour that have more and much bigger downs . Which may explain why they chose to live in capitalists countries and not in a 'socialists paradise ' Like many on the left admiration always seems to be something that can best be done at 'safe distance' form that which is admire , these guys are not queuing up to live in Cuba any time soon.
Your Bishop,
Bob Ward, is probably pulling a Mann every time he claims to work for the London School of Economics. He works for that enviro-hustler Lord Grantham, at an institute he has funded to promote his investment interests, and which gets some access to the LSE.
JamesG, Schiff is not exactly a lefty or libertarian, nor is Paulson, not sure about Med Jones, but don't think so.
@RR
Ward - "hair trimmed neatly" - that's making a virtue out of a necessity
re: "Shollenberger vs. Tol"
It should be fairly clear to anyone who has followed this that Brandon is in the right.
Brandon's earlier criticisms of Richard Tol's draft comment on Cook's consensus paper were also correct, and Tol's response to it greatly reduced his credibility, imo.
Hoi Polloi
Neither is Vince Cable lefty or libertarian. But then I did write 'mainly'! The fact still remains that the majority of the so-called 'experts' didn't have a clue regardless of their political affiliation, which is a gross indictment of the profession as a whole and a good thing to remember every time you see any of them spouting predictions with absolute conviction.
KnR
Your opinion reflects the worldview that you long ago decided was always correct regardless. I could list many examples of right wing economists being equally wrong but I have no left-right dogma - something either works or it doesn't and sometimes the left wingers turned out correct, sometimes the right-wingers, sometimes the moderates. In this particular case - the financial collapse - if you didn't predict it yourself then you have nothing to teach me!
@oneuniverse
It's called a placebo test. You'd expect to find nothing, but if you do, something is amiss.
[Snip - bad language]
JamesG no it reflects the view that in no time in human history has any approach been nothing but prefect and any system can be subject to downs as well has up as normal part of it process .And there is no reason to think that will change, so predicting that at some stage their will be a down is frankly a very easy.
The point remains however that those that spend such much time telling us how wonderful countries like Cuba , ,as opposed to the ' evil west', choice to do so not from these places but from the same 'evil west ' Which is odd as there is nothing to stop them from becoming a first hand precipitate of these 'socialists paradises '
KnR - so off topic but this is the last I'm saying
Your first argument is a variation on 'a stopped clock is always right at least twice in a day' which was a phrase actually used by some of those who had jeered Nouriel Roubini as Dr Doom. But they just looked adolescent; incapable of manning up, apologising and admitting that they had been brainless cheerleaders for casino capitalism and that Roubini had been right all along.
In fact I was only referring to all those who predicted the financial collapse by explaining exactly why it would happen, and not including any rabid anti-capitalists who bemoan the entire system at all times. This is my remembrance at the time when everyone, including the New Labour Blairite drones, seemed to be hanging on every twisted phrase of Alan Greenspan as if he was the Oracle of Delphi and quants with their 'sophisticated' risk models were the high priests of the 'boom-bust is a thing of the past' doctrine. Now with 20-20 hindsight you can say everyone should expect a coming downturn in the cycle but few people were saying it then!
On Socialists I've been in this odd cross-purpose argument before because Americans seem to have a different definition ie they equate socialists to Marxists but in fact modern socialist parties exist all over Europe and they had all fully embraced capitalism pre-crisis just like New Labour (not so much now though I admit). As it happens the most pro-socialism countries of all (by which I mean those where the gap between rich and poor is the least) are the Scandinavians who by-and-large came out of the global financial collapse unscathed. Hence it is not as black and white as you like to present. The countries who got into financial trouble by contrast were those who assumed that the US and Wall Street knew what they were doing (despite all evidence to the contrary) and so bought up all that toxic US debt with little aforethought.
Cuba is obviously an entirely unique Marxist state and I had earlier made myself clear the disdain I have for Marxist economists like Edenhofer. However I fully expect Americans to holiday in Cuba and likely settle there too in the future. Many Americans are clearly jealous of the Cuban health care system even if nothing else appeals to them. I'll guarantee now that if you are refused by your US insurer because your care costs just too much then you won't be thinking the US system is so great either.
"I don't think the decision is exactly as [Tol] described it."
Quite so. See my comments on Mr. Tol's blog.
Jim Hunt, at Toll's place you call Ward's response "evidently well considered". I wonder what might be so evidently well considered in a simple whining about not liking the IPSO's decision...
Sven - What I meant by that turn of phrase was that Bob Ward obviously took a long time to come back with a "considered response".
And no, I don't think it was merely "simple whining" either. Where are "the amendments [that] should now be made promptly" that IPSO demanded for example? You did read the bit that said "The Committee found that the newspaper had failed to take care not to publish misleading information" I presume?
Yes, Jim, I did read that and I consider it to be simple whining about not liking the IPSO's decision and not particularly well considered.
JamesG well limiting 'socialites' countries to those that can be claimed to a success , although even that depends on what you look at , rather than those countries that say their running on 'socialites' principles is certainly one way of doing . But I think your only 'singing when your winning ' here .
The ability to predict a down turn in any system is like the ability to predict a horse will win a horse race , is dead easy when all you say is that is will be a horse but much harder when you have to say which horse .
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