[Vision2020] More Junk Climate Science Hoodwinking the Public...Or "How to cook a graph in three easy lessons"

Sat Apr 3 11:50:15 PDT 2010

I did not bother to suffer through Warren Meyer's pseudo-scientific
presentations.   I only briefly scanned his written analysis. The analysis
below from Bennett Kalafut (bio here:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46102/bennett_kalafut.html ) supports
my belief Meyer is not worth my time.  And regardless of Kalafut's
dismantling of Meyer's analysis, that I have pasted in below, there are
published climate scientists whose work is far more worthy of study, even
scientists who question the probability of severity of future impacts of
human activity on climate, for example, Roger Pielke, retired professor of
atmospheric science, interviewed at the website below:

http://www.ecoworld.com/global-warming/interview-with-roger-pielke-sr.html

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/
---------------------

Paul Rumelhart wrote:

"I do think it's possible that, despite the thousands of hours of work that
climate researchers have performed that they may have painted themselves
into a corner for many of the reasons cited in the PDF.  Namely that more
pedestrian conclusions don't bring in the grant dollars."
----------
The ridiculous claim that the work of thousands of climate scientists over
decades, on anthropogenic climate warming, involves widespread scientific
fraud of some sort, to bring in grant dollars, is laughable, were it not for
the fact so many people actually believe this nonsense.  For it to be true,
it would involve an international conspiracy among thousands of scientists
working in numerous scientific organizations.

I would expect fraud, manipulation of data or ethical violations to occur
among some climate scientists, just as any profession, doctors, lawyers, law
enforcement, computer programmers, teachers, etc. has a percentage of
unsavory behavior among its ranks.  But to perpetrate a widespread
scientific fraud on anthropogenic climate warming science, as you allege,
for grant dollars, would require the complicity of most climate scientists
to not point out the scientific errors that such a fraud would entail, or
that most climate scientists are duped by a secret cabal of
scientists manipulating data...

This is simply an incredible claim!
-------------------------
http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-warren-meyer-and-feedback.html

Sunday, December 6, 2009
 On Warren Meyer and
feedback<http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-warren-meyer-and-feedback.html>

*Elsewhere*<http://goldwaterstate.blogspot.com/2009/11/few-words-about-warren-meyers-bona.html>,
FOTB Martel Firing asks for my take on a bit of *'blog
science*<http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/>:
(would-be) "Climate Skeptic" Warren Meyer's thoughts *regarding
feedback*<http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2009/06/its-all-about-the-feedback.html>.
The request is as follows:

Ben,
I must admit that I'd find the papers beyond my knowledge as I remember
nearly nothing from HS Chemistry decades ago. But thanks for the offer.
My point was simply that I think you were a bit harsh on Meyer, who although
he has a good scientific/engineering education admits to being an amateur --
kind of like Benjamin Franklin and thousands of other amateurs who kept
meticulous climate records before there was a single climatologist. For
example, the world-wide effects when Krakatoa blew up in 1883 were
chronicled in great detail mostly by amateurs. (See: Krakatoa by Simon
Winchester)
If you want to refute Meyer's argument about AGW, I'd really like you to
respond succinctly to his questioning of positive feedbacks needed to
justify the catastrophic AGW climate models, e.g. what is the source of the
positive feedbacks assumed by the models and what physical phenomenon and
measurement thereof justifies a theory or run-away temperatures? (Less than
200 words, please, and no math. Thanks.) (...) See
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2...e-feedback.html and be sure to review the
links therein, including the video.

The "no math" request is a plea for a reason for the claimed positive
feedback which seems rare in nature.

200 words is a bit short for such a big lump of errors, and to address
feedback without math is a bit like trying to make a baby without using
testicles, but I'll give it a go, anyway, with the caveat that I don't
usually have patience for video, especially for video from people who can't
get things right in the appropriate medium, which is writing, so the
following addresses only the text. Here goes:
------------------------------

Naming positive feedbacks is easy. In paleoclimate, consider the effect of
albedo changes at the beginning of an ice age or the "lagging CO2" at the
end. In the modern climate, consider water vapor as a greenhouse gas, or
albedo changes as ice melts. In everyday experience, consider convection's
role in sustaining a fire. Consider the nucleation of raindrops or
snowflakes or bubbles in a pot of boiling water. At the cellular level,
consider the voltage-gated behavior of the sodium channels in a nerve axon
or the "negative damping" of hair cells in the cochlea.

On to the meat of Meyer's argument: he seizes on one word ("feedback") and
runs madly, from metaphor to mental model. Metaphor: "like in an ideal
amplifier". Model: The climate experiences linear feedback as in an
amplifier--see the math in his linked post or in the Lindzen slides from
which he gets the idea. And then he makes the even worse leap, to claiming
that climate models (GCMs) "use" something called "feedback fractions". They
do not--they take no such parameters as inputs but rather attempt to
simulate the effects of the various feedback phenomena directly. This error
alone renders Meyer's take worthless--it's as though he enquires about what
sort of oats and hay one feeds a Ford Mustang. Feedback in climate are also
nonlinear and time-dependent--consider why the water vapor feedback doesn't
continue until the oceans evaporate--so the ideal amplifier model cannot
even be "forced" to apply.

Meyer draws heavily from a set of slides from a talk by Richard Lindzen
before a noncritical audience. These slides are full of invective and
conspiracy talk, and their scientific content is lousy. Specifically,
Lindzen supposedly estimates effective linear feedbacks for various GCMs and
finds some greater than one. The mathematics presented by Lindzen in his
slides does not allow that, and he doesn't provide details of how such
things even could be inferred. An effective linear feedback greater than one
implies a runaway process, yet GCMs are always run for finite time, so there
cannot be divergence to infinity. Moreover, as far as I know, all of the
GCMs are known to converge once CO2 is stabilized.

In short, Meyer has the wrong idea about models (they don't take an
amplifier-like feedback as a parameter), the wrong mental model of feedback
(feedback in climate is nonlinear and time dependent) and he relies on a
situationally unreliable source for numbers.

 Posted by B. Kalafut at *9:52
PM*<http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-warren-meyer-and-feedback.html>
* *<http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=4748718710584527356&postID=1691640156679040095>
* *<http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4748718710584527356&postID=1691640156679040095>
Labels: *climate
modeling*<http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/search/label/climate%20modeling>,
*climatology* <http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/search/label/climatology>,
*meta* <http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/search/label/meta>,
*requests*<http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/search/label/requests>,
*Warren Meyer*<http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/search/label/Warren%20Meyer>
 ------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 4/2/10, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>   The "rebel skeptic" thing was an obviously failed attempt at humor.  I
> happen to know what my intentions are perhaps better than anyone else.
>
> I do think it's possible that, despite the thousands of hours of work that
> climate researchers have performed that they may have painted themselves
> into a corner for many of the reasons cited in the PDF.  Namely that more
> pedestrian conclusions don't bring in the grant dollars.
>
> Also, I'm not claiming that Warren Meyer is a god, just that he brought up
> some interesting points.  Not all of them may be valid.  He also thinks that
> Greenland was named based on it's climate during the MWP.  This is not true
> - it was named Greenland as a sort of marketing ploy to attract settlers.
>
> What did you think of either the PDF or the video presentation?
>
> Paul
>
> --- On *Fri, 4/2/10, Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com>
> Subject: More Junk Climate Science Hoodwinking the Public...Or "How to cook
> a graph in three easy lessons"
> To: "Paul Rumelhart" <godshatter at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "Vision2020" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
> Date: Friday, April 2, 2010, 1:40 PM
>
>
>  [Vision2020] A Skeptical Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2010-April/069550.html
>
> From post above by Paul Rumelhart:
>
> "We rebel skeptics?"
>
> For one thing, many of the "skeptics" are trying to disprove the
> anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, so your statement that "we rebel
> skeptics are not trying to disprove the AGW hypothesis" I quoted at the
> bottom here, is simply false.
>
> Perhaps more importantly, your comment misrepresents the hard work of
> thousands of scientists who have worked for decades on understanding our
> planet's climate.  *As if scientists, who are skeptics by training, have
> not been rigorously and skeptically* *analyzing and testing the
> fundamental physics regarding CO2 atmospheric impacts (and other climate
> variables), for over a century?  Now "rebel skeptics" are rebelling against
> conformist scientists, who are no longer skeptics?*
>
> Why should I trust Warren Meyer's analysis or presentation of climate
> science, that I have gathered in part relies on MIT's Richard Lindzen's
> climate science theories (that have been peer reviewed and found to be
> faulty)?  You wrote you thought Meyer did "rather well" with presenting
> science.  Really?
>
> Meyer is exposed as presenting questionable, actually, faulty, analysis on
> climate science by Bennet Kalafut (what a name!) a PhD student in physics (
> *Bio:
> *PhD student, single-molecule biophysicist *Education/Experience:
> *MS, physics, U. of Arizona; BS, physics and mathematics, magna cum laude,
> Tulane University
> http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46102/bennett_kalafut.html )
> on his blog at the following website.  I'll offer an excerpt:
>
> http://stochasticgain.blogspot.com/search/label/Warren%20Meyer
>
> "I just caught Meyer claiming--despite my link to his original post, and
> despite the link to Lindzen in his, that he never claimed that climate
> models "use" feedbacks, that I'm making a straw man argument, and that he
> didn't use an obviously bad analysis of feedback from a set of Lindzen
> slides as reference. It's "I don't know what Kalafut's talking about, it's a
> straw man argument!" in a way to make me seem like a liar and a loon. Again:
> Not cool. Mr Meyer: you've been caught. Perhaps your understanding of the
> science has matured in a year, but that doesn't retroactively correct your
> past blunders nor does that retroactively turn criticism of your past
> statements into straw-man arguments."
>
> ------------------
> For those who are interested in climate science from a reliable source, I
> recommend the following websites, from the
> American Institute of Physics, on the history of the science regarding CO2
> impacts in our atmosphere, etc.
>
> http://www.aip.org/history/climate/
>
> http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
> ------------------
>
> I would dismiss your "rebel skeptics" efforts with a shrug and a laugh, if
> it were not for the fact that the junk science promoted (for whatever
> reasons) in general is blocking efforts to address human impacts on climate,
> that have a high degree of probability, according to well researched and
> rigorous science, of causing profound changes to our planet.
>
> The public, and many politicians and corporations, are being hoodwinked
> into accepting continued and increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, by
> clever pseudo-scientific garbage, some of which is exposed in the
> analysis "How to cook a graph in three easy lessons" from well published
> climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert (
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/raymond-t-pierrehumbert/
>  ):
>
> How to cook a graph in three easy lessons
>
>
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/how-to-cook-a-graph-in-three-easy-lessons/
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
> On 4/1/10, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com<http://mc/compose?to=godshatter@yahoo.com>>
> wrote:
>
> Keep in mind
> that we rebel skeptics are not trying to disprove the AGW hypothesis,
> we're merely, well, skeptical of some of the claims and some of the
> science.  Read or watch more to find out some reasons why.
>
> Paul
>
>
>
>
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