Tuesday
Jul282015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Quote of the day, Boyd edition
Jul 28, 2015 Academia Climate: WG2 Journals I see too many studies...assigning causation to climate change when the evidence for this is quite poor...I think this is bad for climate science in general and authors and journal editors need to try to avoid the temptation of headline-grabbing when it is not justified by the evidence.
This comes from Professor Ian Boyd, the chief scientist at Defra, whose blog can be found here. It doesn't seem to be updated often, and the quote is from an old post. But fun nevertheless.
Reader Comments (12)
"Climate models are rigorously validated..."
I gave up before the end of that sentence. What planet is he on?
He sees "too many studies...assigning causation to climate change when the evidence for this is quite poor"
The rest of us are assaulted daily by similarly-diagnosed BBC reports and dead-tree press articles.
Is there some remote possibility that an element of arse covering is going on in the warmist camp? I smell the stench of "oh we never actually said this/that/ortheother, or "you misunderstood what we said!" As to climate models being rigorously validated? I don't fink so! It seems the only validation is that "the model says what we told it to say therefore it must be right", mentality!
Ian is much more grounded in the real science than the activists like Lord Deben, however he has to watch his step or he too will be strung up by the usual suspects,
I'll bet the witches of greenpi88 have put a hex on him, a thousand curses too from the corporate sphere and politicsdom. Defra [wot dey?], here's me thinking that the forgotten runt sometimes relation to her Maj's government had all but lost their tongues [minds?] but no! Here's Ian and making, actually talking some sense.
Wow, oh God, wow.
Pray, where next? "To the Met Office", should be the shout.
I don't think he knows what it is necessary to do in order to validate a computer model of highly complex, non-linear and not fully understood physical processes.
Partly as an update to the DECC policy advice request, we need a Government that is:
Tough on Climate Change Lies, and Tough on the Causes of Climate Change Lies
If people are paid to find problems, and selling problems requiring fixing, becomes marketing strategy for a politician, science magazine or nursery school teacher, problems will be found, and magnified. Making up problems is a logical extension to marketing/salesmanship.
On the contrary, it has been good for "climate science", but bad for science in general.
The root problem is that if you fund activists/environmentalists to 'prove' that the world is going to hell in a handcart, then that is what they will do, and come back for more.
The physical world is not going to hell in a handcart, but our political and educational systems are.
Schrodingers' Cat, computer generated climate models ARE rigorously validated.
Unfortunately, they use other computer generated climate models, to demonstrate the importance of Equality in Climate Science.
Imagine how unfair it would be if one climate scientist, produced one climate model, with some form of accuracy. It would prove what a waste of money, over 97% of climate science has been for 30 years.
If you really want to hear Climate Change being blamed for everything under the sun just listen in to Farming Today on R4 each day. This week was all about oyster beds failing as water warms due to AGW/CC and the fact that oysters have had to move further north to find waters more attractive to them. And what, you may ask, do they find to replace the migratory oysters? Pacific Oysters - which are imported from other waters (I wonder where...)
Whilst we are on the subject of quotes from academics here is one from James Galbraith son of the famous one:-
Much like his father in writing A Tenured Professor, the junior Galbraith is also a critic of his own profession:
Leading active members of today's economics profession, the generation presently in their 40s and 50s, have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule — as one might expect from a gentleman's club — this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. They offer a "rape is like the weather" fatalism about an "inevitable" problem (pay inequality) that then starts to recede. They oppose the most basic, decent, and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs. And when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained, they do not re-examine their ideas. Instead, they simply change the subject.[7]
I blame it all on making Social Science a Science all based of course on Scientific Socialism