The Unbearable Complexity of Climate
wattsupwiththat.com
wattsupwiththat.com
Journalist disclose their interests and their companies interests to avoid losing credibility this way.
You mean like researchers who get money to "confirm" AGW?
> Journalist disclose their interests
Oh really? Do you know how many NYT reporters are married to or involved with folks they cover? (Hint - the answer is not 0. The NYT's response when asked is that they've cleared things with their editor....)
You're mistakenly assuming I'm taking a position on this particular topic.
If it's true that someone else has a stake in this or some other debate, then indeed they also have an obligation to reveal it.
The only thing I'm arguing is that anyone who has stake in a debate has an obligation to make that stake clear.
That's it.
That's a nice goal, but it's not going to happen.
Which reminds me - it's not clear that "a stake" has a useful definition. One would like it to correlate with bias, but most biases have nothing to do with money. In fact, it's the true believers who are the most dangerous in this respect.
Note 1: saying "climategate" doesn't constitute presenting evidence; pointing to something in the pilfered emails that says (e.g.) "Of course I have to fudge this because otherwise I'll lose my job" and that isn't clearly a joke would constitute presenting evidence.
Note 2: observing that very few people who get paid to do climate science are denying AGW doesn't constitute presenting evidence either. Very few people who get paid to do biology are denying evolution, but that isn't because they're paid to confirm evolution; it's because evolution is, in fact, correct, and studying enough biology to get paid for doing it usually leads people to realise this. So you'd need to rule out that sort of explanation in the case of climate science.
What do you think that rigging the peer-review process accomplished?
> it's because evolution is, in fact, correct, and studying enough biology to get paid for doing it usually leads people to realise this. So you'd need to rule out that sort of explanation in the case of climate science.
Are you asserting that AGW is as "settled" as evolution? If not, the analogy doesn't hold and neither does the conclusion that you'd like to impose.
Climate researchers outside of CRU are acknowledging that the thumb was on the scale. Is denying that really the hill that you want to defend?
In science, being a "good person" doesn't count as evidence. Neither does "the folks who disagree are bad people". AGW may turn out to be real (although that's looking unlikely), but it will take us much longer to find that out because "good people" behaved badly and did cargo cult science. Which reminds me - why do we consider them good people?
In addition to rigging peer review and trying to stack grant committees, it's pretty much SOP to add some blather about "consistent with AGW" to almost anything these days, in part because that's how the money flows. Of course, this isn't new. We saw the same thing with AI and "computers".
No, I am not asserting that AGW is as settled as evolution. I'm pointing out that "everyone being paid to work on this agrees with X, which shows that you can't get on in the field without agreeing with X, which shows that there's a bias against non-X" is a lousy argument, because in the case X=evolution it produces a result that is (to reasonable people) not credible. Note for the avoidance of doubt: I was attempting to pre-empt that argument, not accusing you of having made it.
(The cases X=evolution and X=AGW are somewhat parallel, though certainly not identical. In both cases there is a robust scientific consensus challenged by a minority. In both cases at least some of the challenging minority have an obvious reason for making the challenge that doesn't have much to do with truth. In both cases the challenging minority has strong ties to a particular political group -- the same group in both cases, as it happens. In both cases the challenging minority accuses the majority of having similarly non-truth-directed motivations, and in both cases it's not terribly clear what those are really supposed to be.)
I don't know what non-CRU people you are referring to, nor what acknowledgement they've made that "the thumb was on the scale", so I can't comment on your statement about that.
The stuff about "good people" and "bad people" is a red herring; neither I nor anyone upthread made any claim even slightly resembling "these people are Good and those are Bad, therefore these are Right and those are Wrong". Eschenbach has a clear incentive to do whatever it takes to make AGW look less likely; that's true whether he's a good person, a bad person, or (like maybe 99.9% or so of the human race) a mixture of the two. And, unless he is an incorruptible saint concerned with nothing but truth, it is rational to apply some discount to things he says that make AGW look less likely: not because he is a bad person and bad people never tell the truth, but because he is a (probably quite rational) person with a strong incentive to say such things even if they are wrong or misleading.
Similarly, no one (I hope) is saying that mainstream climate scientists must be right because they are good people and good people never say false things. But I will happily make the following argument: Imagine someone in the field of climate science who is inclined to put his or her own interests ahead of truth, and who doesn't mind doing bad or dishonest science for that purpose. Do you think that person is more likely to turn to Shell or the AEI or the Republican party, or to Greenpeace or Al Gore? Where is the readier flow of money likely to be found?
Is your last paragraph just vague handwaving, or is there an actual argument there? On the face of it it looks almost like you're suggesting that the reason why climate scientists almost all defend AGW is that people writing papers on other subjects tend to say "and by the way this is consistent with AGW" whether it is or not, but every part of that looks very silly so you probably have something more sensible in mind.
Not at all. Peer-reviewed publications lead to grants. Shut off the former and you strongly influence the latter.
> No, I am not asserting that AGW is as settled as evolution.
If AGW is not settled, the funding disparity is "interesting". There's clearly a bias, the only question is its reason. Since it isn't science....
> The stuff about "good people" and "bad people" is a red herring; neither I nor anyone upthread made any claim even slightly resembling "these people are Good and those are Bad, therefore these are Right and those are Wrong".
Good people vs bad people not a red herring. It's the basis for much of the climategate defense. "Those good scientists were beset by bad people, so naturally/it's okay that they did bad things."
> Imagine someone in the field of climate science who is inclined to put his or her own interests ahead of truth, and who doesn't mind doing bad or dishonest science for that purpose.
You assume that money is the only interesting motivation, and that's simply not true. It isn't even the dominant motivation among folks doing bad science - true belief is.
> Do you think that person is more likely to turn to Shell or the AEI or the Republican party, or to Greenpeace or Al Gore? Where is the readier flow of money likely to be found?
Al Gore and Greenpeace don't fund research and neither does the Republican Party. However, the folks that do have spent far more funding AGW than anything else.
So, if you're purely motivated by money, you'd have gone with "AGW is happening" because that's where the money is, as you agreed upstream. (You only argued about why that's where the money is.)
> you're suggesting that the reason why climate scientists almost all defend AGW
"almost all" turns out to be way too strong. Moreover, the basis for their support is often data from other fields where many of the folks involved disagree with that interpretation.
However, my point was that much of of the "AGW is happening" literature consists of quips in other fields where the connection is tenuous at best. They're studying something else and threw in an AGW comment because that's an easy way to get some points. (I'm ignoring the bogus cases like the islands off India that have been sinking pretty since anyone started paying attention.)
As I wrote, we see this all the time. When something looks like a winning story, folks adopt it. Remember "turbo"?
AGW is not as settled as evolution, but it's still pretty damn settled. I think that is sufficient to account for the disparity in publications. (As for disparity in funding: disparity in total funding is a consequence of the fact that the great majority of climate scientists are AGW believers; if there's a disparity in funding per person then I haven't heard of it, and I'd rather suspect it's in the wrong direction for your argument.)
I don't believe I have ever heard anyone defending the CRU people, or the climate science community in general, or the proposition that the climate is warning and much of that is the result of human activity, say anything like "Those good scientists were beset by bad people, so naturally/it's ok that they did bad things". I have heard "Those scientists were being harassed, so naturally they did bad things", but that isn't a claim about good people or bad people. In any case, the discussion here wasn't (last time I looked) about Things People Have Said About The CRU Emails, but about whether it's correct to say that climate scientists are "paid to confirm AGW".
I do not assume, or believe, that money is the only interesting motivation. The question was whether climate scientists are "paid to confirm AGW"; I was not the person who framed the matter in terms of money. I do think, though, that money is an extremely common motivator for dishonest work, and that when people claiming some kind of AGW fraud conspiracy actually deign to suggest why there would be one it's usually money that they suggest.
The question about funding wasn't "who funds research on this stuff?", but "who would fund unscrupulous research on this stuff?". If it's easier to get your dishonest research paid for by one side than the other, then that's the side that will likely attract a higher proportion of dishonest research.
(So, drawing together two of the above points: what determines which way an unscrupulous person who cares only about the money will jump is not the total amount of funding obtained by people on each side, but the amount of funding per person available to unscrupulous people on each side. I don't see any reason to think that that disparity works in favour of AGW; I suspect it works strongly in the other direction, but that's just a guess.)
I dispute your claim that "almost all" is way too strong. See, e.g., http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf which surveyed a bunch of earth scientists and found ~90% agreement among the whole population and ~97% agreement among those who (1) list climate science as their area of specialization and (2) have climate change as the subject of more than half their recently published papers. (I don't know where those criteria came from, and therefore can't rule out the possibility that they were dishonestly chosen to get the result the authors wanted; but I have no reason to think they were.) Or http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/Oreskes2007.pdf which looks at the abstracts of 928 papers found by searching the literature for "global climate change".
I'm afraid I still don't really understand your point about "quips in other fields". Maybe it's because I don't spend much of my time reading scientific literature from randomly chosen fields (and the fields I'm competent to read scientific literature in aren't terribly close to climate science) that I haven't seen this alleged torrent of quips that (it seems like you're saying) is somehow responsible for climate scientists' belief in AGW. I really don't see how that could work, but perhaps I'm being dim.
I don't remember anything called "turbo" that illustrates that "when something looks like a winning story, folks adopt it"; sorry.
You're "forgetting" that the AGW folks fixed the peer review system. I know that that's an "inconvient truth", but ....
> AGW is not as settled as evolution, but it's still pretty damn settled.
Then you're not paying attention. The tree data "trick" means that the "before thermometers" estimates by the AGW folks are wrong, which guts the trend argument. The "no warming since 2000" means that the models are wrong. The accounting for how temperature stations were moved is broken. The AGW folks mis-represented the Russian data. It goes on and on.
> I would only say that someone is paid to do X if they understand that their job depends on their doing X.
Since one can get the desired effect without doing that, that's an absurd standard. You pick people based on whether you think that they've bought in and are not going to rock the boat. You never have to say anything.
That's part of why I mentioned "true believers".
> I haven't seen this alleged torrent of quips that (it seems like you're saying) is somehow responsible for climate scientists' belief in AGW.
I didn't say that it was "responsible", I said that it constituted much of the supposed consensus. The amount of research that actually concerns AGW is fairly small. However, there's lots of research where it can seem relevant. Since AGW is "hot", there's a huge temptation to just throw in a "consistent with AGW" comment that isn't actually supported by the research being reported.
This happens all the time in every field. Making a tenuous connection to a hot topic is a common way to jazz up a paper.
The tree data trick does not mean what you say it does; see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.full... (key finding from conclusions section: "We find that the hemispheric-scale warmth of the past decade for the [Northern Hemisphere] is likely anomalous ... This conclusion appears to hold for at least the past 1,300 years ... from reconstructions that do not use tree-ring proxies, and are therefore not subject to the associated additional caveats."). Temperatures vary a lot on a timescale of a few years, so the much-ballyhooed "no warming since 2000" doesn't in the least mean that the models are wrong; see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warm... and also figure 4 in http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2009/20091216_Tempe... (and the text below that figure). Your claim about "accounting for how temperature stations were moved" is too vague to respond to. The AGW folks did not "misrepresent the Russian data" so far as I can tell; see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000732.
Do you have any actual evidence that climate scientists "pick people based on whether [they] think that they've bought in and are not going to rock the boat"?
I simply do not believe your claim that throwaway "this is consistent with AGW" remarks in papers on other topics "constitute[s] much of the supposed consensus". Are you suggesting, e.g., that a large fraction of the papers in Oreskes's study were really about other topics and had only throwaway references to AGW (it sure doesn't seem like it from her description), and that if those papers were excluded then the study would find much less acceptance of AGW (it sure doesn't seem like it from her description)?
I'd like to point out that you have a nice two-way argument here. If papers by climate scientists support AGW, that's because climate scientists are all "true believers" who have been picked based on whether they've bought in and aren't going to rock the boat. If papers by other people also support AGW, that's because they've just slapped brief pro-AGW remarks onto papers about other things. So, I wonder, is there anything the peer-reviewed literature could contain that you would regard as good evidence that careful scientific study supports AGW?
What part of "you get grants for peer-reviewed publications" don't you understand?
> Also, so far as I can tell it isn't true for any sensible meaning of "fixed".
The folks who wrote the "ClimateGate" e-mails disagree, but then they did the fixing.
> So, I wonder, is there anything the peer-reviewed literature could contain that you would regard as good evidence that careful scientific study supports AGW?
This fixation on "peer-review" is interesting. You claim that the "peer"s all agree, so their review is subject to all that that implies. You might remember http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_accept_defeat/ .
The climate people have threw away raw data, so we can't know whether "normalization" was actually reasonable. They're still saying "trust us" even though every time someone finds an error in their work, the error goes the same direction....
BTW - Scientific truth isn't defined by consensus.
It was you, not me, who introduced peer review into the discussion; I've no idea what your basis is for talking about a "fixation".
Most of the raw data that the CRU threw out in the 1980s are, AIUI, still available elsewhere. CRU's model produces results extremely similar to everyone else's models.
I don't think it's true that every time an error is found it goes in the same direction. (Specifically, I think I remember seeing a counterexample. I don't remember what it was, but then you haven't mentioned any specifics of anything at any point so I don't feel too bad about that.) It might be true that every time an error is found and trumpeted about by disbelievers in AGW it's in the same direction, but there is an obvious explanation for that, no?
Of course scientific truth isn't defined by consensus, and of course I neither said nor suggested that it is. But for someone who isn't an expert in any scientific field, the consensus of experts is typically pretty much the best estimator they have for the truth.
Uh, I actually wasn't particular inclined against the line of argument present by the original post but this gets ugly...
PS: If you actually carried out the experiment using the picture as a guide you would measure a rise in body temperature. The human body trys to maintain constant temperature, but it can't ignore the laws of physics.
What are all the inputs and outputs? Which are significant? Does anybody know the answer to either of these questions? You can build a model without knowing all the inputs and outputs, but it's called a guess.
PS: He used "tera-watt scale" which is about as true as saying watt scale. Well he was only off by 1000x so it's not quite that bad.
http://homepage.mac.com/williseschenbach/.Public/Constructal...
The paper doesn't back up the author's claim that "there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature". It includes an assumed factor y=0.4 for the infrared reflectance 'greenhouse factor', and any increase in that value will affect the expected results.
If anything applying the Constructal Law would be more worrying than current models, since there's potentially a more chaotic response to increased CO2 levels, increasing the risk of dramatic climate changes.
(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
Moon surface temp:
equator Min 100k, mean 220K max 390K
85°N min 70 K mean 130K max 230K
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
Earth: min 184k mean 287K max 331 K
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
Also, the phraseology of your points couldn't get into any scientific journal, so what are you quoting, your summary?
I think you are talking about
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161v4 - It's referenced by Alexander Cockburn in his most recent nation article.
It's arxiv with no journal listed as publishing it. You do correctly quote the abstract but the language of this abstract is pretty overwrought - it doesn't read like something that would be published in a serious journal whether it's correct or not. Part of the problem with the language might be a poor translation.
Climatology is a complex thing and I'm actually sympathetic to exploring skepticism about global warming. The problem is that the skeptics seem to often be their own worst enemies.
Seriously? What next, are we going to discover that black holes aren't actual literal holes, and that no particular quarks are really any more charming than others?
Sorry, but that is stupid. Just because changing one thing (ie making a short cut in the river) doesn't change one other thing doesn't imply that no matter what you change, nothing will change. Also, the author never seems to have seen a redirected river in a bed of concrete.
It's been nice to have learned about the constructional law, but other than that, I have to take this article with a grain of salt. It clearly doesn't seem to be neutral in motivation.
it starts out fine, explaining how complex systems are, well, complex. but then it starts to seem a bit odd because it ignores statistical properties (you can't predict the movement of every gas molecule in a box, but you can know the average temperature pretty damn accurately). and then suddenly it jumps to "constructal law":
> The Constructal Law applies to all flow systems which are far from equilibrium, like a river or the climate.
wtf? how can something as vague as "the climate" follow a law? and what's the constructal law? and so you go to wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory - and it all starts to look a bit flakey...
[edit: less flippant]
The human body is a 'flow system far from equilibrium.' So while it's true that if you dunk the feet of a healthy person in hot water and wait, the temperature of their forehead may not increase by that much, it does not imply that the temperature of their feet won't increase, it does not imply that the forehead temperature of a hypothermic person won't increase, and it does not imply that the forehead temperature of a healthy person exposed to a flamethrower will not increase...
Does the Constructal law say anything about the environment were the Sun to suddenly disappear?
Contrary to the article, climate models don't assume a relationship between CO2 and global warming; rather, they reflect what we know about the physical properties of CO2 in the atmosphere, as born out in laboratory experiments and field measurements. The relationship with global warming emerges from the models, not the other way around.