Bishop Hill Computer crimes
Sep 21, 2015 Climate: Models ;)
With Professor Shukla (and Kevin Trenberth) calling for sceptics to be put in the dock last week, it is perhaps unsurprising that a Guardian article on climate and the law provoked a bit of an overreaction. The article in question, by Adam Vaughan, was about a speech by prominent lawyer Philippe Sands and was entitled "World court should rule on climate science to quash sceptics, says Philippe Sands". This was taken by many to mean that sceptics should be prosecuted, particularly as the standfirst then read "International Court of Justice ruling would settle the scientific dispute and pave the way for future legal cases on climate change, says high-profile lawyer".
However, examination of the text of Sands' speech reveals that the Guardian headline writers had actually been playing a little fast and loose with the facts. What Sands actually wants is for the international courts to rule on some of the scientific questions surrounding the global climate. He gave as examples the following:
A first tier of issues might include: is climate change underway? have sea-levels risen? Have anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions been the main cause of atmospheric warming?
The first two questions are desperately ill-posed of course, given that both sides of the climate debate agree (I think) that we have yet to identify a period when the climate was stable and also that sea levels have been rising for tens of thousands of years. A court ruling on matters that are not in dispute seems somewhat superfluous.
Yet even if we restate these two questions within an AGW framework, we still run into problems. Everyone seems to agree that you can't demonstrate that global temperatures have done anything out of the ordinary at least in terms of a statistical model, and signs of acceleration in sea levels are hard to discern too.
So all of this - and also Sands question on attribution - leads rapidly back to computer simulations of the global climate. And here I think we have to wonder whether he has actually thought this through at all. Asked by a reader on Twitter whether a court could decide on scientific questions, he referred to the decision of the International Court of Justice to make a ruling on the question of whether Japan's whaling programme was "scientific" or not; apparently there were competing scientific opinions on the subject.
However, the ruling on whaling was about whether science was being done or not. On climate, the court would be addressing a very different question: whether the output of an unvalidated computer simulation was a "fact". When you think about it, if the court was to press ahead it would turn centuries of legal practice on its head. According to Black's legal dictionary, the definition of the word is:
A thing done; an action performed or an Incident transpiring; an event or circumstance; an actual occurrence...An actual and absolute reality, as distinguished from mere supposition or opinion; a truth...
It's hard to see how the output of a computer simulation could possibly be made to fit that. So any decision by the courts to make a ruling on the facts of climate change would represent an extraordinary definitional expansion. And when you think about it, the implications are terrifying: if a court was to accept a computer simulation as a fact then how long would it be before someone was condemned to lifetime imprisonment because a computer model had determined his guilt?
Reader Comments (65)
Jimmy Haigh, the historical vandals of climate science do not recognise any Warm Period, prior to London Heathrow airport. In climate science, only Mannmade treemometers existed before LHR.
Post LHR, modern thermometers are only deemed reliable, if installed near tarmac, and jetwashed every minute or so, to sanitise them, and homogenise any natural variability.
This would amount to a pre-crime as in the Minority Report. It's not hard to imagine, that similarly to the movie, any dissenting opinion in such cases would be hidden from view.
Adam Vaughen was the guy who presented to the world via ScribD, the "KPMG review of personal financial records of Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri and other records of TERI for the period 1 April 2008 to 31 December 2009".
Why a Guardian deputy editor should have been given the report by KPMG, with the authority of Pachauri and the climate establishment, to publish on a fringe self-publishing outlet, remains a mystery....
The Japanese government famously employed a panel on earthquakes in order to placate the population to a false sense of security that they would have sufficient warning of a monster quake or tsunami. The reality, they had around thirty seconds warning since they always on a tectonic plate boundary. It seems to me at least that to allow judges to decide on any natural event is equally ludicrous, the subtle difference being that leaders today promote alarm as against a feeling that they are remotely in charge of events.
The curious thing is that the denier of warmist alarm mostly doesn't exist. Those that do are very much on the fringes. By continually bringing this fictional bunch up, the warmists gives them credibility. The public often think 'no smoke without fire'. Some of the public think there has been no warming at all and if they knew the actual figure in degrees C, most of them would be convinced (wrongly) that there has been no warming to speak of. Very few know that points of a degree matter. From Professor Shukla downwards, very few people know what the facts CAGW are supposed to be, let alone what might or might not be wrong with them. The serious and honest warmists should hang their heads in shame that so few people know or care about the science. Their much vauted IPCC report is as clear as mud to those who should know it off by heart.
The only thing that people are fighting over is the politics. We all know that the politicians are nowhere near ready to do the kinds of things that significantly cutting CO2 would require. Deindustrialise the western world? You're havin' a larf. Spend an unlimited amount on technologies that barely work? Yeah, right. So when each Climate conference is over and sod all is agreed, who can the warmists blame for failure? The cowards option is to point fingers at us. The dumb ones have fallen for their own lies.
If only all climate science computer data, was as reliable as Volkswagen's.
"A first tier of issues might include: is climate change underway? .....
The first two questions are desperately ill-posed of course, given that both sides of the climate debate agree (I think) that we have yet to identify a period when the climate was stable...."
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And herein lies a fundamental misconception of what climate is.
Climate is regional consisting of a range of parameters each one of which continually (ie., from year to year, and may be from decade to decade, and possibly even from century to century) is constantly and continually changing. These variables meander between bounds and may lie towards the upper bound, or the lower bound, or somewhere in between not simply for decades but for centuries.
Temperature is just one of many such variables, others being cloudiness, rainfall, snowfall, drought, flooding, windiness, storminess etc etc.
Since these variables are constantly changing (or as some would say climate is constantly changing), mere change of any one or more of these variables is not climate change, nor even evidence of it. I emphasise that since 'climate constantly changes' change in and of itself is not evidence of real climate change. change is simply what climate does, and it is only once the constantly changing parameters has crossed the bounds of natural variability for a protracted period is there even the slightest suggestion that the climate may be changing.
It is noteworthy that not one single country has changed its Koppen classification.
If one looks at the UK (and there was a good Channel 4 programme on this but for the last 5 minutes which spouted the AGW mantra), there have been periods when it is warmer than today, colder than today, drier, wetter, stormier, calmer/less windy, periods of more droughts, periods of more flooding, snowier, less snow etc.
There has simply been no climate change once one properly understands what climate is.
The misunderstanding in this debate is to frame climate as the average of weather over a short period of time such as 30 years. Even the Team (in the Climategate emails) recognised that they may be measuring no more than multi- decadal natural variation. One has to look at the climate of a country (region0 over centuries to understand what the climate truly is. This is particularly so since it is the oceans that dominate weather patterns, and it is well known that there are oceanic cycles not simply measured in tens of years but far longer than that. Hey, the thermohaline circulation is measured in millennia, and since we have no data on how that operated over the last say 8,000 years, we do not know whether subtle and small changes in this are driving the recovery from the LIA.
Since when were scientific questions ever answered in a court of law?
Sep 21, 2015 at 11:46 AM | Unregistered CommenterPaul Homewood
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Every day.
Almost every medical negligence case involves scientific issues. Almost every construction dispute involves scientific issues, Almost every dispute involving the breakdown of machinery, failure to properly maintain, damage to cargo etc involves scientific issues. The list is endless.
Every day, the Court is faced with competing expert evidence and has to make a decision as to which expert to favour. The problem is that the Court is ill equipped to do so.
But of course, before the Court even embarks upon the deliberation, one needs to know who carries the burden of proof, and on what basis will that burden be discharged.
In criminal cases, the accused is considered innocent until proved guilty. if you like, in criminal cases, the null hypothesis is that the accused stands innocent. What will be the stating point in the proposed World Court hearing? Will it be that all such change as we have seen to date is natural, unless those advocated AGW can prove otherwise?
Further, will the discharge of this burden be on the balance of probabilities (ie., 50.1% to 49.9%), or will it be on the basis of beyond all reasonable doubt (which does not have a fixed and measurable definition and which is inevitably subjective, even if one is doing ones best to be objective, no doubt the subjectivity of this issue explains why jurors come to different conclusions when considering the same evidence).
I certainly would not wish to see a determination based upon the balance of probabilities. Heck, even the IPCC strives for something more than that.
The climate scam is based on a 1976 GISS mistake. Wang et al modelled atmospheric temperature gradient but it was too high (Climate Alchemists created 40% extra energy than reality by assuming surface exitance is a real energy flux then offsetting it by assuming OLR is over 360 degrees).
To fix it, they claimed lapse rate was controlled by 'negative convection'. Heat convection to a higher temperature does not exist. Present models replace this with a more plausible but incorrect Kirchhoff's Law of Radiation approach and use ~double low level cloud albedo in hind-casting to invent greater oceanic evaporation than reality.
The EGHE is imaginary; I am willing to appear for the defence but dare they open Pandora's box?
Erratum: (keep on making this mistake!). The positive feedback scam is to use about a third more low level cloud albedo from double optical depth (in Sagan's aerosol optical physics). Because cloud area is two thirds, the sunlit ocean is twice as warm above the modelled mean temperature as it is cooler under clouds. This is how they purport correct mean temperature in hind-casting but get imaginary positive feedback. It's all quite simple to work out! The person who detected this 'error' works in Trenberth's department but has not been able to publish!
richard verney, the 'beyond all reasonable doubt' is beautifully non specific. In legal terms, 'the man on the Clapham omnibus' is a much travelled man.
In climate science, in the absence of proof, the need to establish a 'consensus', by any means, became all important.
Climate science now offers the 'consensus' argument, BECAUSE they have nothing else. Unfortunately no climate scientist has tried the consensus argument in a court of law.
Nobody expects the California Inquisition
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2015/09/who-said-inquisition-left-la-jolla-in.html
Sands is a lawyer, advocating lawfare.
Only a little bit OT: John Keegan, the late and wildly over-rated military historian, tried to argue that a court of law was the proper place to decide the historical truth about the Klagenfurt deportations, at the end of the Second World War. It was an early version of lawfare, where the defendant was battered into submission by legal costs and not, despite the pious tripe that emanated from Keegan, by anything resembling evidence. Keegan demonstrated that he was no true historian, by claiming that a law-court was competent to decide historical questions.
There is a well-known climate-connected case in the United States, where the plaintiff seems entirely happy to spin the
proceedings out ad infinitum, without ever being willing to share his own evidence with any actual court of law. People have wondered where that plaintiff gets his own funding (something palindromic springs to mind). If climate orthodoxy were ever to acquire legal status, vexatious litigants could rely on the taxpayer to support their lawfare.
Damn fine article this. Just shows how they are in the process of making their own petard. Kudos to the author.
Foxgoose: It's not post-modernism. It's how the law and politics work. It's simply a different way of arriving at something called "the truth" - and a prime example of why courts should never mess with matters scientific.
John Silver: The Court can do whatever it damn well pleases, especially if it has political backing. It isn't required even to make sense, let alone be scientifically accurate - which was Foxgooses point in the first place.