Over at Steve McIntyre’s place. It’s a lot better than the “peer-reviewed” stuff, mainly because they aren’t drinking their own bathwater. And speaking of which, I’m disappointed, but not really surprised, at Jeff Masters, whose hurricane opinions I value a great deal, and his latest ad hominem attack. Delingpole needs to add this one to the list:
The history of the Manufactured Doubt industry provides clear lessons in evaluating the validity of their attacks on the published peer-reviewed climate change science. One should trust that the think tanks and allied “skeptic” bloggers such as Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That will give information designed to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry. Yes, there are respected scientists with impressive credentials that these think tanks use to voice their views, but these scientists have given up their objectivity and are now working as lobbyists. I don’t like to call them skeptics, because all good scientists should be skeptics. Rather, the think tanks scientists are contrarians, bent on discrediting an accepted body of published scientific research for the benefit of the richest and most powerful corporations in history. Virtually none of the “sound science” they are pushing would ever get published in a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal, and indeed the contrarians are not scientific researchers. They are lobbyists. Many of them seem to believe their tactics are justified, since they are fighting a righteous war against eco-freaks determined to trash the economy.
Well, gee, which is it? Are they hired guns, or ideologues? And in what way does that differentiate them from the people who are taking grants from government bureaucrats whmo, if all of a sudden the supposed problem disappeared, would equally suddenly find better things to do with the money? Even Masters admits that the evil lobbyists have their value, in the very next paragraph:
I will give a small amount of credit to some of their work, however. I have at times picked up some useful information from the contrarians, and have used it to temper my blogs to make them more balanced. For example, I no longer rely just on the National Climatic Data Center for my monthly climate summaries, but instead look at data from NASA and the UK HADCRU source as well. When the Hurricane Season of 2005 brought unfounded claims that global warming was to blame for Hurricane Katrina, and a rather flawed paper by researchers at Georgia Tech showing a large increase in global Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, I found myself agreeing with the contrarians’ analysis of the matter, and my blogs at the time reflected this.
This is why I’m disappointed. Jeff has to take off the blinders, and recognize that much of what he’s been told by his colleagues in the climate-change industry is built on a house of quicksand. I hope that, on further reflection, he will realize that those “paid skeptics” (hey, some of us do it for nothing — are they supposed to be monks?) have it right on much of this.
[Update in the morning]
I’ll probably have more thoughts on Masters’ “Manufactured Doubt” industry versus the “Manufactured Crisis” industry later, but we’re flying to Denver today for a few days, and I may not get time till later in the weekend. In the meantime, you might want to see House of David for more on the subject. (Off topic, I’m not sure that sbcglobal.net is a very secure long-term domain for blog permalinks. He should consider getting his own URL)
Check out the Wikipedia article on Pseudoscience, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience, particularly the section on “Identifying pseudoscience”. Does any of this sound familiar?
“Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims”
(Even if you have to work to make them untestable.)
“Over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation”
(I.e. concentrate on the evidence that is consistent with your theory, while ignoring evidence that flatly rules it out. In this case, e.g., the satellite temperatures for the tropical mid-troposphere, which the models say have to be warming faster than the rest of the atmosphere, but simply isn’t.)
“Lack of openness to testing by other experts”
(Snicker)
“Absence of progress”
(The first overview of modern global warming theory was the Charney Report of 1979. It gave the expected warming for a doubling of CO2 as 1.5C to 4.5C. So did the IPCC First Assessment Report of 1990. So did the IPCC Seceond Assessment Report of 1995. So did the IPCC Third Assessment Report of 2001. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 changed this to 2.0C to 4.5G, immediately followed by the statement that “values less than 1.5C are highly unlikely.”)
“Personalization of issues”
(Snicker)
“Use of misleading language”
(I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader.)
In fairness, your example of absence of progress is bogus. For a couple of hundred years, F=ma would have given the same answer for the acceleration of an object acted on by a force. A more accurate way of indicating the absence of progress would be to note that climate models have never been able accurately to predict the future from current data, or the past from a point in the further past. In other words, the climate models are not accurate, and not getting more accurate.
Other than that, good points all.
In other words, the climate models are not accurate, and not getting more accurate.
Actually, if the temperature reconstructions based primarily off of dendroclimotology get dumped, the models would actually be taking a giant leap backwards. The models predict a giant general flatness as you hindcast backwards from the pre-carbon dioxide-dominated era.
That is: They don’t predict a LIA, a MWP, a RCO, or any of the other climate excursions historians have slapped labels on.
I noted Masters’s horrible post too (link on my name). It cannot call that overblown farrago of obfuscation anything other than Greenwaldesque.
I also caught him at weasel wording saying of the infamous emails and then the RealClimate discussions, “There is no sign of a conspiracy to alter data to fit a pre-conceived ideological view.” Since the issue in the emails is a conspiracy to *exclude* data from alternative “views”, and since the evidence to fudge data is in the “harry-readme”, it’s all very convenient for Masters.
Masters is not going to “take off his blinders”. He’s not a mule; he’s the rider, and he thinks of US as his mule.
I need coffee.
For “It cannot call that”, read “I cannot call that”; and for “he’s the rider” the analogy should be “he’s the driver”.
“In fairness, your example of absence of progress is bogus.”
Many of the characteristics of pseudoscience are due to its proponents believing they’re Newton when they’re Velikovsky. Newton’s laws didn’t change for centuries, but people felt no need for change until measurements became precise enough to show small discrepancies. Pseudosciences don’t change because pseudoscientists won’t admit to discrepancies. This is seen repeatedly in the infamous emails (e.g. replacing discrepant temperatures with “the real temperatures”). If there were really no discrepancies, the question of pseudoscience would hardly come up.
By contrast, the persistence of so large a range as 1.5C to 4.5C in the climate sensitivity bothered people. In 1995 a news article in Science mentioned how disappointing it was, but described a paper in the same issue that might finally improve matters. It was titled “Darker clouds may mean a brighter future for climate models.” But as we have seen, the darker clouds made no difference. (The paper presented the first measurements of how much sunlight is absorbed by clouds, which turned out to be about 6 times more than the models assumed.)
This was a common pattern: improvements or changes that one would expect to cause significant changes in the climate sensitivity, had no effect. Consider what computers were like in 1979 compared to 2007. The models of the 1970s were grossly simplified compared to those of 2007; they had to be. Is it plausible that those simplifications accidentally made no difference?
The infrared calculations for the global warming models are based on the HITRAN database of atmospheric absorption parameters. (I’m a contributor to HITRAN, CO2 frequencies.) An error in the 1996 update caused water vapor absorption to be off, by about the same amount that doubling CO2 would increase absorption. The climate modelers never noticed. After a couple of years, one of the other contributors noticed it, and it was fixed, again to indifference from the climate community. Improved measurements on water vapor, incorporated to later versions of HITRAN, caused a legitimate change in IR calculated to be absorbed by the atmosphere, amounting to about 60% of a doubling of CO2. Crickets.
So there was no improvement, not even a random change, despite a perceived need for improvements, and greatly improved (or at least changed) inputs.
In fact, we seem to have a model whose outputs do not depend on its inputs. It’s not even Garbage In/Garbage Out! It’s Anything In/Same Old Garbage Out.
In evaluating how AGW matches Wikipedia’s criteria for a pseudoscience, I consider “Lack of progress” a slam dunk, along with the ones I snickered at, and “Over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation”. The ones I think it meets but they aren’t slam dunks, are “Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims” and “Use of misleading language”. Of course, those are themselves somewhat vague criteria, so it’s harder to be sure.
Bob
Can I ask you a question about HITRAN? It is my understanding that it is derived from the work that the USAF did as far back as the late 40’s in characterizing the atmosphere. Due to the purchase of the ATK library from Redstone arsenal, I have an incredible amount of information on infrared technologies, measurements, and data. I have even purchased a 1965 book on Military infrared science and engineering that has great data that is at variance with a good bit of the AGW group produced data.
In science, academics will always look down on those in private industry. They are considered cheap sell-outs. And physicists will always look down on chemists, who look down on biologists…
I am noting people invoking the precautionary principle in comments to justify reductions in CO2 release. This one kind of needs debunking.
Climate scientists tend to suffer from what I might call the categorical fallacy, studying one tree in great detail and then assuming it to be the whole of the forest, so to speak. A natural and understandable consequence of their necessary intense specialization. For example, economics is a very large part of the global warming question and solution, yet one rarely considered by climate scientists.
Now if we were serious about applying the precautionary principle to the survival of life on this planet then limiting CO2 release would be a long way down the list. Backing up life off planet might be a first priority, ensuring sustainable global prosperity a second priority, and so forth.
Protecting the Earth’s climate from natural and unnatural disasters of all types would be high on my precautionary list. Slightly reducing only anthropomorphic CO2 release would be incredibly economically expensive (a strong economy is one of the best precautions), have very little effect on global warming, and have virtually no affect on the thousand other possible environmental disasters that might affect the world at the global and local level.
One obvious consequence of the precautionary principle is that we should be strengthening and adding reserves into the Earth’s global ecosystem. We should be fertilizing the oceans, irrigating the land, and generally greatly increasing the quantity and diversity of life on this planet. But I do not see this being suggested by those selectively invoking the precautionary principle.
The serious scientists who are defending The Team would do well to remember the serious academics who defended Michael Bellesiles against charges of fraud for Arming America.
Thanks for the hat-tip :^)
I’ve been told by others that sbcglobal.net is a bad domain name. But I’ve been there for over seven years. I’m a blogosphere Ancient. Dog/new/tricks, etc
Poor Bernie Madoff. Not only did he get caught but he lost his place in Guiness for biggest scam.