Via a commenter, I see that James Randi, who has sort of a history of spotting scientific fraud, has apparently lost his mind and become a “denier”:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that “global warming” is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.
Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong. Failing in that, they arrive at a statement that appears — based on all available data — to describe a limited aspect about how the world appears to work. And not all scientists are willing to follow this path. My most excellent friend Martin Gardner once asked a parapsychologist just what sort of evidence would convince him he had erred in coming to a certain conclusion. The parascientist replied that he could not imagine any such situation, thus — in my opinion — removing him from the ranks of the scientific discipline rather decidedly.
History supplies us with many examples where scientists were just plain wrong about certain matters, but ultimately discovered the truth through continued research. Science recovers from such situations quite well, though sometimes with minor wounds.
I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.
Emphasis mine. I think that claiming that there is a “consensus” and that “the science is settled” are semantically equivalent to “I can’t imagine any such situation.” Such people are many things, but they are not people who truly respect, or even understand, science. They are politicians, encouraging political acts.
[Update a while later]
I’ve deleted my reference to Little Green Footballs, pending the outcome of an ongoing civil email conversation with Charles.
“What will Charles Johnson say?”
Well, the first thing he’ll do is ban anyone who ever mentions Randi. 😀
Wow! I haven’t looked at LGF in years anyway, but just clicking through I can’t tell the difference between that site and Daily Kos! It’s like he decided to one-up Andrew Sullivan or something.
Well,
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/806-i-am-not-qdenyingq-anything.html
I see I got beat to it. That “I’m not a denying anything” link is full of the sort of weasling I’ve come to expect from people who get attacked by the Gaianists out to extinguish apostasy wherever they find it. Like they way all highschool non-conformists wear black and listen to the same music, there seem to be far too many independent minded thinkers who don’t want to be seen as too indpendent minded.
Personally, I see the general issue as this:
1) The raw data apparently shows no warming.
2) Unfortunately, the raw data is obviously flawed.
3) The adjusted data shows obvious warming.
So the real issue is with the adjustments – it seems unreasonable at first glance that all of the adjustments would add warming. Adjustments are difficult/impossible to get an exact answer for. They are just the kind of thing where bias could creep in. People are trying to prove warming in data that has adjustments much larger than the warming they are looking for!
For example: This data series doesn’t seem to match the warming everyone is seeing. I better look closer, I don’t want to be shown a fool. You then keep looking for adjustments, until you finally match everyone else.
This supposition explains why widely available data is so critical – the only counter to your own personal bias is an opposing bias in another human. You won’t stop until warming is seen, they won’t stop until it isn’t. Eventually, either all of the factors are included or it is decided that there is too much noise in the signal and a different approach is needed.
The approach used for UHI adjustments appears superficially ok, but the actual effect is to depress historical temperatures while holding current values to whatever the satellites say.
Fundamentally broken.
If Charles Johnson actually said something; then yeah, you can’t be snide about him saying nothing.
Let us know how the civil approach works out for you.
1) The raw data apparently shows no warming.
Actually it does, here and there and over certain time intervals. It does not, in other places and over other time intervals.
I was at the American Geophysical Union Annual conference today in San Francisco and a very senior scientist lamented the politicization of climate science and said that Al Gore is the worst thing that ever happened to the discipline.
It appears to me that the land data in now in serious doubt, because of the large adjustments being applied. The logical thing to do is to look for a better data set. It seems that the satellite data is the place to start. Amazingly enough, the satellite data is freely available online:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
The satellite data shows warming of about 0.1 C per decade, depending on how you slice it. So far it seems that AGW is proven. But there is a serious issue – statistics. The global temperature according to the satellite data has a standard deviation of 0.2 C! That means that the 95% confidence bounds for the warming are -0.1C to 0.3C. In other words, the entire observed warming trend could be noise. Indeed, if you pick the decades correctly you can report global cooling!
Randi is dishonest but politically astute. Thus he is a significant straw in the wind.
The other interesting thing I learned about the satellite data is that it also originally showed no warming. Because it showed no warming, and everyone knew there was warming, the data was examined until errors were found. Now that it shows the expected warming, no one is looking for errors anymore.
Could be unintentional bias. Could be everything settling to the actual value.
Not something I would place a trillion dollar bet on, though.
David, there’s another significant piece one needs to show to prove -A-GW. The actual warming hasn’t been debated too much since the late 1990s – primarily because of the satellite data.
The flat over the surface records goes beyonds “Ok, so our data 1900-1980 is crap” to “Ok, wait, we’ve been calibrating and comparing our tree proxies and everything else to the data we’ve just discovered is complete crap.”
Michael Mann’s hockeystick finding algorithm actually chucks 99.8% of proxies… because they don’t match the exact same surface data we’ve been discovering is complete crap. Ignoring the flaw of “Well, it wouldn’t matter what the recent temperature is doing, Mann’s method is going to make an exceedingly flat shaft on this stick and thus eliminate historical temperature fluctuations.”
Prior to 1998 there was still intense uncertainty over how much of the observed warming might be attributed to warming. The (now broken) hockeystick was the key piece pushing the ‘consensus’ to “Ok, 100% humans!”
“There was no scientific consensus that the Earth was entering an ice age. And you can blame the media for creating this false impression.”
From Charles Johnson, here: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35383_Video-_Climate_Deniers_Love_the_70s/comments/#ctop
And yet he doesn’t seem to be able to go the next step…
Here’s the story on Randi’s ‘change of heart’ from the guy who replaced him as the president of JREF:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/17/randi-and-global-warming/
The issue with LGF is that Charles is a liberal to the bone who otherwise has eyes wide open about the threat of militant islam to western civilization. What that lead to was a great many readers who were from the right side of the aisle who were alienated when he began to revert to his leftist core on many issues.
His tendency to ban commenters who disagree with himalong with his slavish devotion to AGW led me to drop him from my RSS feeds. I like arguments and discussion but he simply will not accept that people disagree with him on topics, so he kicks them out of his sandbox. Frankly I think he ruined what could have been a very influential site with his pettiness. Oh well.
I was at the American Geophysical Union Annual conference today in San Francisco and a very senior scientist lamented the politicization of climate science and said that Al Gore is the worst thing that ever happened to the discipline.
He was lionized by that body a couple of years ago when he was a “Union session” plenary speaker at the annual Fall meeting in San Francisco. How soon we turn on our “heroes.”
With all due respect to Phil–I’m a long-time reader of his blog–he’s got a blind spot on the AGW issue. There is certainly ample cause to question the significance of anthropogenic factors in any warming trend or, in fact, that we’re even in a sustained warming trend at all. I was very surprised years ago to see him support so vehemently the conclusion that AGW is an established fact and that fairly radical steps “must” be taken. That is not a warranted position for a scientist and a skeptic in my admittedly lay opinion. But, of course, we all have our blind spots.
My beef with all of this is that if there really is an AGW problem, it’s getting lost in all the politics. We’re dealing with a vastly complex system when we deal with the climate, which leaves all sorts of room for manipulation of data and subtle and not-so-subtle biases to creep into conclusions. If the general message were, “We’re not sure, but the data seems to indicate a potential problem. . .it might be a good idea to try to pollute a little less”, I think the credibility of the messengers (usually not the climatologists, of course) would be much greater.
I like a lot of what Randi, Martin Gardner, and Phil have to say about skepticism, but that doesn’t mean I always agree with them. When it comes to things like the paranormal and evolution, we’re usually in accord. But on this issue, I think some people are jumping in headfirst.
I never heard of Randi before today, but according to the “About James Randi” page on his website, he’s something of a professional skeptic. Why would that make him a bellweather of public opinion on AGW?
(Great Sherlock Holmes quote at the end of his piece.)
David,
re your stats: what standard deviation are you quoting? is that the sample sigma, or did you divide by sq-root(N) to get the std dev of the mean, or is it the 1-sigma uncertainty in the linear trend?
He’s not a bellwether of public opinion on AGW any more than he is on angels or UFOs. He is a bellwether for a large strand of elite/subelite/activist opinion, and in particular for the post-Gardner “skeptical” movement.