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

Paul Rumelhart godshatter at yahoo.com
Sat Apr 3 13:04:16 PDT 2010


Oh, OK.  Should you deign to read it someday, let me know what you think.

There is a big difference between outright fraud and the tendency for scientists to know which side their bread is buttered on.  If your research comes up with conclusions that are contrary to the political consensus, you won't get as much funding next year.  If you want to study an aspect of the climate that is not part of the CO2/positive feedback scenario, you'll have a harder time getting funding than someone who does.

The reason this can happen is the fact that the entire debate is incredibly politicized.  You even have people suggesting that anyone with an opposing outlook, or who even questions anything treated as if they are sabotaging the Manhattan Project.  

If the threat of global climate change is so dire, then it would be in everyone's best interest to make sure that all aspects of the problem are being looked at.  The scientists involved should not be fighting requests for information because they think the person requesting it only wants access to poke holes in it.  Let's grow up a little here.  I propose that the datasets and programs are too important to be kept private.  If the government wants to do something positive here, then I would suggest that they mandate that all data, all enhancements to the data, and all programs involved in the process be placed on a public website, whether the organization is public or private.

Paul

--- On Sat, 4/3/10, Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: 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: Saturday, April 3, 2010, 11:50 AM

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 


Elsewhere, FOTB Martel Firing asks for my take on a bit of 'blog science: (would-be) "Climate Skeptic" Warren Meyer's thoughts regarding feedback. 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   

Labels: climate modeling, climatology, meta, requests, Warren Meyer 


------------------------------------------
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> 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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