[Vision2020] Vision2020 "Witch-Hunt?"
Paul Rumelhart
godshatter at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 29 21:53:05 PDT 2011
On 08/29/2011 04:24 PM, Ted Moffett wrote:
> The issue is a matter of the objective pursuit of scientific truth, on
> a very important impact for the future of humanity and our planet. To
> defend your "skeptical" (actually, rather dogmatic, though
> masquerading as skepticism) stance on the scientific consensus
> regarding human impacts on climate, demands you demonstrate that
> hundreds of climate scientists are making fundamental errors, or are
> corrupt, as is obvious from the following major point I made at the
> beginning of my post on your "witch-hunt:"
> An example of a "witch-hunt" on Vision2020 is the extreme absurd claim
> there is international widespread incompetence or political
> manipulation of climate science among thousands of scientists in
> numerous scientific organizations around the globe, to generate the
> international scientific consensus that human impacts on climate are
> profound, and increasing as we continue to increase atmospheric CO2
> levels and other human impacts.
You have made that claim and foisted it upon me. There is plenty of
room for agreement between climate scientists and myself. To recap:
1. The earth is warming. Although certain scientists play fast and
loose with the surface temperature records with spurious updates
sometimes, this seems generally true. We've basically been warming
since the lowest point of the Little Ice Age in the 1600s or so.
2. Some of the warming is due to mankind. This seems generally straight
forward, though the obvious question is "how much?". I don't think that
question has been answered perfectly, since they (as far as I can tell)
have little notion as to what the natural causes of the temperature
variations are. It wasn't the massive burning of fossil fuels that
started warming things up in the 1600s, and it certainly wasn't involved
in bringing the earth out of the last ice age. We have, as far as I can
see, no clue what natural variation will do in the future, since we
don't understand it much at all. More warming? Cooling? Who knows?
How does it compare to Man's contribution? Again, who knows?
3. The warming due to CO2 will at best raise the temperature by 1.2C for
a doubling of CO2 levels. That's straight from the latest IPCC report.
Feedbacks, positive or negative, will either amplify or diminish this
number. This is the area in which we have the least idea of how things
work. Since it can change the number from about 0.5C (if the feedbacks
are negative) to whatever the latest most alarming climate model number is.
There is a lot of good science going on. Satellite data is helping, but
the window of time they cover is still far too short. There is a lot of
work on glaciers, the arctic, sea temperatures, sea level rises,
possible impacts, etc. To be skeptical of certain areas of climate
science, I don't need to posit a cabal of UN-programmed scientists in
lab coats and a mind-control ray. I'm not claiming that anything and
everything that has to do with climate science is rubbish. It's just
too early to be as overtly assured that we know what's really
happening. Don't get me started on climate models.
Below, I describe in detail exactly why I think one of the foremost
climate scientists in the U.S. who is one of the "in-crowd" with the
IPCC has, at best, made some mistakes and refused to take responsibility
for them or, at worst, is being actively deceptive. This isn't some
third-string graduate assistant somewhere, we are talking about the
graph that was spammed all over the IPCC Third Assessment Report. Read
the PDF, written by one of the author's of the paper that showed that
Mann et. al screwed up the math and introduced a set of errors that
would have randomly produced a hockey stick shape 99% of the time.
Coincidentally, that's exactly what they wanted to show.
Now, if the IPCC wants to get some semblance of scientific integrity
back, they would demote Mann to stamping "IPCC Authorized" on all their
brochures down in the third level of the sub-basement of the UN building
(a few doors down from the guy that keeps the rifles cleaned and the
blue helmets polished and ready for their world takeover ;)). The
Hockey Stick chart was rather prominently displayed, and then quickly
removed once that paper was published. It's not like they haven't
realized that it was crap.
Since the tendency of the UN and the media is to whitewash these kinds
of concerns, I remain skeptical and vigilant.
> --------------------------------
> You have so often presented errors and misrepresentations and one
> sided pseudo-scientific claims regarding climate science, that I
> immediately assume, maybe unfairly, what you present on this topic is
> an expression of your agenda against climate scientists in general.
I have nothing against climate scientists as a group, just a few
individuals that are gaming the system (in my view). I'm sure, as a
whole, that climate scientists are nice people and are dedicated to the
pursuit of knowledge.
> And the fact you do not present well researched opposing analysis that
> supports the science behind the hockey stick, in your presentation
> against scientist Michael Mann, is an example of your witch-hunt
> confirmation bias filtered approach to this subject. You might
> consider a more balanced approach, and do an in-depth study of
> everything involved with the following website:
> http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/02/12/deep-climate-investigation-of-denialist-and-%E2%80%9Cskeptic%E2%80%9D-attack-on-hockey-stick-temperature-record/
Read the PDF. Ross McKitrick goes into the problems with the hockey
stick chart in great detail. All I did was summarize it, probably badly.
Also, the web page you linked to is a great example of a political,
apologetic site. They throw the usual crap around. After their paper
was published, they were the darlings of the anti-global warming crowd.
They haven't published much, as if the number of papers was more
important that the quality of this one. They attended debates sponsored
by groups associated with Exxon/Mobil. The Wall Street Journal had them
on the front page. The success of their critique inflamed two
congressmen to investigate climate scientists. The chairman of that
committee may have plagiarized something. This panel asked Steve
McIntyre (the other author of the paper referenced in the PDF) some
technical questions. This congressional committee, in no way connected
to the McKitrick and McIntyre other than being inspired by what they
found out, was a Republican setup. The blogosphere went nuts with their
conclusions. Some other people, inspired by M&M, have accused climate
scientists of manipulation of data. Michael Mann, a nice fellow, is a
victim in all this. The National Academy of Sciences thinks the Hockey
Stick is still A-okay. The earth is now at it's hottest in 2,000 years,
so the Hockey Stick must be correct. Blahdeblahblahblah.
What they conspicuously don't do is show where they were wrong from a
scientific or mathematical point of view. It's just damage control.
> Assuming all of the charges described below in your email, against
> Mann, are correct, which is highly doubtful, if you study the analysis
> just presented, this means one scientist's credibility is in
> question. This does not undermine the credibility of thousands of
> other climate scientists who in general terms agree on the magnitude
> of human impacts on climate, and that they will increase as human CO2
> emissions push up atmospheric CO2 levels, with other human impacts.
Why is it highly doubtful that the charges are correct? Because I
summarized them?
> What you have presented does not address this fundamental fact, nor do
> you address the numerous other issues that you are in error about
> regarding climate science, that I presented in my first post in this
> thread.
> In short, you are refusing to engage in an open and honest dialog on
> this subject, where important mistakes are acknowledged.
> This undermines your credibility, to my mind, considerably.
And you have not addressed the criticisms of the Hockey Stick chart, the
subject of my post.
Paul
> -----------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com
> <mailto:godshatter at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>
> Here is why I don't trust one of the most prominent climate
> researchers in the field.
>
> Let's talk hockey sticks. Here is a PDF put together by Ross
> McKitrick, a member of the department of Economics and the
> University of Guelph:
>
> http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf <http://www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf>
>
> The PDF does a much better job than I could ever do explaining
> what the "hockey stick" debate is about, but I'll go ahead and
> summarize it here. Please read the document for more details.
>
> Basically, Professor Michael Mann produced a graph in 1998 from
> various temperature proxies purporting to show the surface
> temperature history for the past thousand years or so. If you've
> even cursorily looked into climate science, you've seen this
> graph. It's called a "hockey stick" because it's more or less
> flat up until recent history where it turns upward strikingly.
> This was featured prominently in the 2001 Third Assessment Report
> put out by the IPCC (the UN International Panel on Climate Change).
>
> The tale this graph tells is a surprising one. Previously, it was
> assumed that there was a period of time in the 1300s or so where
> temperatures were much warmer than they are now (called the
> Medieval Warm Period), followed by a period of time where
> temperatures were much colder than average (called the Little Ice
> Age). Current temperatures were thought to be on the rebound from
> the LIA, presumably on their way back to MWP temperatures. There
> was a graph of this in the IPCC report that came out in 1990,
> which shows how canonical this idea was. The hockey stick graph
> tells a different tale, though. According to that graph,
> temperatures for the last thousand years have been pretty much
> steady, albeit a little colder than now. Lately, though, the
> temperature has sky-rocketed upwards, presumably due to Man and
> his evil ways.
>
> In 2003, a retired minerals prospector and mathematician, Stephen
> McIntyre, was curious about the graph and wanted to look at the
> data. After some delay, the data was turned over to him. He
> found out quickly, though, that he could not replicate some
> statistical constructs necessary to the analysis called principal
> components or PCs
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_components). He joined up
> with Ross McKitrick (the author of the PDF), and they attempted to
> find out why things couldn't be replicated. Initially, they found
> some errors relating to truncated series, location labels, and
> other things, and found that if the errors were corrected for and
> the PCs recomputed, the hockey stick-like curve on the graph
> disappeared.
>
> They corresponded with Mann, who told them they had not computed
> the PCs correctly. When they asked him for his computer code, he
> refused to make it available. He also told them they had the
> wrong data set, so they went to the FTP site Mann pointed them to
> and downloaded the correct one (which was almost identical to the
> one they had). They later found that some of the code used to
> compute the PCs was actually present on the FTP site, which
> explained why there were discrepancies, Mann et al hadn't used the
> proper procedure for scaling his PCs: instead of subtracting the
> mean for the whole series, he only subtracted the mean for the
> 20th century. This causes any series in the data that have a
> large increase in the 20th century to be weighted much higher than
> any other random series.
>
> McKitrick and McIntyre figured this out and showed how when they
> ran 10,000 runs of random data using correctly computed PCs, they
> almost never got a hockey stick shape in the data, but when they
> ran it with Mann's method of computing the PCs, they got a hockey
> stick 99% of the time.
>
> This is pretty damning stuff. They wrote it up for Nature (where
> Mann's original paper was published) and they refused to print it.
> So they went back and studied the data in more depth, and
> concluded that a small number series of bristlecone pines in North
> America were being severely weighted by the incorrect PC
> calculation which was causing most of the problem, and that when
> they removed just those series (from 5000 of them), the hockey
> stick went away. Now, the really damning bit is that at that
> original FTP site was a folder called "CENSORED" that contained
> evidence that Mann himself had done this same analysis, and thus
> knew that his paper was incorrect, and has done nothing about it.
>
> There is more (read the PDF for details), but that's enough to
> show that Mann is not to be trusted.
>
> There is one other thing from the PDF that I find really damning
> for Mann. In the PDF, a paleoclimatologist named David Deming
> tells of how he had done some work with borehole temperatures for
> the past 150 years that showed a warming trend. Here is a quote
> from him that was in the PDF:
>
> "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained
> significant credibility in the
> community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I
> was one of them,
> someone who would pervert science in the service of social and
> political causes. So one
> of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of
> climate change and
> global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to
> get rid of the
> Medieval Warm Period.”"
>
> The PDF was written in 2005, and the Climategate emails came out
> in 2009. In one of them, Mann is quoted as saying to Phil Jones
> (head of the Hadley Center) that "it would be nice to try to
> "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet
> have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back".
> This email is from June of 2003. This tells me that they didn't
> just make an error with their statistical analysis, they
> deliberately misconstrued the data in order to prove a political
> point (i.e. everything was just fine a thousand years ago until
> Man mucked it all up). It wasn't a surprising result that they
> innocently didn't recognize as an actual error, it was a guided
> attempt to deceive others. In my opinion, of course.
>
> This isn't just some lowly climate scientist wannabe, this is
> arguably one of *the* main guys in climate science, and he holds a
> lot of power at the IPCC. Certainly, the IPCC spammed his hockey
> stick graph everywhere before McIntyre and McKitrick published
> their paper.
>
> Now, the interesting thing is that the NSF recently "exonerated"
> Mann from any research misconduct, (see
> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/climate-change-scientist-cleared-in-u-s-data-altering-inquiry.html).
> But if you read the actual report from the NSF
> (http://www.nsf.gov/oig/search/A09120086.pdf) you find that they
> basically concluded that Mann was not under their jurisdiction at
> the time he published his paper, that his data is (now) available
> to researchers, that there were concerns raised about his
> statistical analysis techniques (which is the subject of this
> email), that he hadn't altered any data (which wasn't as far as I
> can tell a charge ever laid against him), and that his research
> has influenced the debate greatly in the climate science
> community. Not exactly out of synch with what Ross McKitrick says
> in his PDF, and hardly "exonerating' him of his untrustworthiness.
>
> Anyway, it's time for dinner. There is far more I could write
> about one the major climate researchers telling us to trust them
> because they Know What They Are Doing, but this should really be
> enough.
>
> It goes without saying that I am highly skeptical of anything
> coming from Michael Mann.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On 08/26/2011 10:58 AM, Ted Moffett wrote:
>
> An example of a "witch-hunt" on Vision2020 is the extreme
> absurd claim
> there is international widespread incompetence or political
> manipulation of climate science among thousands of scientists in
> numerous scientific organizations around the globe, to
> generate the
> international scientific consensus that human impacts on
> climate are
> profound, and increasing as we continue to increase
> atmospheric CO2
> levels and other human impacts.
>
> Paul Rumelhart godshatter at yahoo.com <http://yahoo.com/>
> Thu Aug 25 18:04:41 PDT 2011 wrote:
>
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2011-August/077920.html
>
> "Maybe we should wait until we have something we
> know we should be angry about before we start venting about it."
> ---------
> Implying scientists are censoring journals or hiding data based on
> criminally hacked and possibly altered private emails, before
> a full
> independent investigation, is a good example of not following the
> advice given above, an example of which be read at the following
> Vision2020 post: [Vision2020] Hacked Climate Reseach Unit E-mails:
> 1,092 Responses to “The CRU hack”
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2009-November/067469.html
> ---------
> "...wait until we have something we know we should be angry
> about..." ?????
>
> The author or this sage advice has refused to accept that the
> scientists he quoted on Vision2020 from the email hack of the
> Climatic
> Research Unit of East Anglia University in the UK, have been
> investigated and cleared of any significant misconduct, as the
> following two sources indicate:
>
> http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2011/08/24/michael_mann_climategate_.aspx
>
> "The final investigation report from the National Science
> Foundation,
> published on Aug. 15, confirmed the initial investigation
> results from
> a Penn State panel also investigating Mann’s research, finding
> that
> “there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael
> E. Mann,”
> according to the document."
>
> http://www.pewclimate.org/blog/gulledgej/sixth-independent-investigation-clears-climategate-scientists
>
> "In the course of 2010, five investigations—three in the U.K.
> and two
> in the United States—cleared scientists working for the CRU and an
> American scientist working at Penn State University of any
> scientific
> wrongdoing.
>
> That said, in my experience climate science is already more
> open and
> transparent than most other scientific fields, with gobs of data
> publicly available and many assessment reports and other climate
> science products intended specifically for public consumption
> (examples: here, here, here). No other field I can think of
> has been
> laid so bare to public scrutiny."
>
> --------------------
> His witch-hunt has continued, with errors and misunderstandings
> regarding climate science, repeated over and over, coupled with a
> refusal to admit mistakes and misrepresentations of the science on
> this subject, when they are clearly pointed out, as can be
> read in my
> response on Vision2020 below:
>
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2011-July/077266.html
>
> [Vision2020] Climate& Science
>
> On 7/13/11, Paul Rumelhart<godshatter at yahoo.com
> <http://yahoo.com/>> wrote:
>
> I find it just as frightening that *any* criticism of
> climate scientists
> is seen as a statement that there is a "paranoid extreme
> conspiracy". I
> have good reasons for not trusting some of the major
> figures in climate
> science. Mann, for example, and his "hockey stick" graph.
>
> Climate scientists criticize each other every day, and I have
> never
> observed anyone behaving as though any criticism of climate
> scientists
> implies a "paranoid extreme conspiracy."
>
> The paranoid extreme conspiracy mentality is expressed by
> those who
> think the entire international field of climate science is
> involved in
> a deliberate hoax to promote anthropogenic climate change as a
> serious
> problem, aimed at a political or economic agenda. Many of
> those who
> obsess on the email hack from the Climatic Research Unit from
> EAU in
> the UK express this mentality.
>
> The very implication you are suggesting, that there is to any
> significant degree in the world of science, or in media or
> Internet or
> any form of public discourse, a level of censur occuring that
> attacks
> any criticism of climate scientists as an expression of
> paranoia, is
> itself an example of paranoia!
>
> Climate science is a young field. The first actual degree
> offered in
> climatology was a BS in climatology offered by the
> University of South
> Queensland in Australia with the first enrollments in the
> degree in
> 2001. I think it's a bit soon in a field that looks at
> time spans of
> 30+ years to say that we've pretty much concluded what the
> answers are.
>
> For one thing, study of climate science is often called
> meteorology.
> Degrees in meteorology have been offered for decades, though I
> don't
> know when the first one was offered. Thus some scientific
> organizations focusing on climate are the World Meteorological
> Organization and the American Meteorological Society.
>
> If you examine the degress of some prominent climate
> scientists who
> have been publishing in the field for decades, you won't find
> "climatology" as a degree title: MIT's Professor of Meteorology
> Richard Lindzen, a very often quoted and interviewed skeptic
> of a high
> value for climate sensitivity (i.e. human sourced CO2 in the
> atmosphere has a limited impact), has degrees in physics and math:
> http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/CV.pdf
>
> NASA's climate scientist James Hansen, who in his book "Storms
> of My
> Grandchildren" ( http://www.stormsofmygrandchildren.com/ ) called
> Lindzen the "dean" of anthropogenic climate warming skeptics, has
> degrees in physics, math and astronomy:
> http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jhansen.html
>
> Climate science has been a major field of scientific study for
> over
> 100 years, at least since Nobel winner Arrhenius in 1896,
> sometimes
> referenced as publishing the first serious attempt to quantify
> climate
> sensitivity. Here is long list of published scientific studies of
> climate sensitivity, from 1896 to past 2006:
> http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ClimateSensitivity.html
> Levenson in detail addresses the often heard comment that climate
> models are untestable or unreliable here:
> http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ModelsReliable.html
>
> I recall you once wrote on Vision2020 Levenson's climate
> sensitivity
> list reveals climate sensitivity to be "all over the board."
> Yet when
> I responded that in fact all the results show temperature
> increases,
> that none show temperature decreases from negative feedbacks that
> overcome the radiative forcing of atmospheric CO2, so
> therefore these
> results are not "all over the board," you ignored this rather
> compelling fact.
>
> I dispute that climate science it is a "young" science, as is
> often
> stated, to undermine the credibility of climate predictions.
> It could
> be argued modern genetics is a younger science, given DNA was not
> fully unraveled till the 1950s, yet we trust DNA evidence in
> court.
>
> Climate science has researched time scales of millions of years of
> Earths history, as anyone studying the subject knows, as revealed
> here: "Climate Change: Evidence from the Geological Record"
> http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/climatechange
>
> The peer reviewed publication in this field are vast.
> Consider just
> one, GFDL climate scientist Manabe's publication record, 164
> publications, from 1955 to 2011, counting articles now "in press."
> http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/results.php Manabe is
> well know
> for publishing in 1980 what is sometimes considered the first
> serious
> discussion of "polar amplification": Manabe, Syukuro, and Ronald J
> Stouffer, 1980: Sensitivity of a global climate model to an
> increase
> of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Journal of Geophysical
> Research, 85(C10), 5529-5554. available in full (26 pages pdf)
> free
> here:
> http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/sm8001.pdf
>
> While on the subject of meteorology, read the statements on human
> influenced climate change from the AMS and WMO:
>
> http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html
>
> How will climate change in the future?
>
> There will be inevitable climate changes from the greenhouse gases
> already added to the Earth system. Their effect is delayed several
> decades because the thermal inertia of the oceans ensures that the
> warming lags behind the driving forcing. For the next several
> decades
> there is a clear consensus on projected warming rates from human
> influences among different models and different emission
> scenarios.
> ----------------------
> http://www.wmo.int/pages/themes/climate/causes_of_climate_change.php
>
> Since the industrial revolution, human activity has increased the
> amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (shown in the
> graph to
> the right). The increased amount of gases which absorb heat, has
> directly lead to more heat being retained in the atmosphere
> and thus
> an increase in global average surface temperatures. This change in
> temperature is known as global warming. The increase in
> temperature is
> also leading to other effects on the climate system. Together
> these
> affects are known as anthropogenic (human caused) climate change.
>
> There may indeed be a well funded, politically supported
> junk science
> agenda, I wouldn't know. That's not where I get my info.
>
> How many times have you posted to Vision2020 defenses of junk
> climate
> science websites and articles? More times than I can count...
>
> I''ll reference one notable example, a website you have referenced
> numerous times.
>
> National Snow Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze called Anthony
> Watt's junk climate science website "Watts Up With That" an
> expresion
> of "breathtaking ignorance."
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/realpolitic/worlds-oceans-warmest-on-_n_289210_31196131.html
>
> Yet you vigorously defended Watt's confirmation bias filtered
> statements on Arctic sea ice extent predictions for 2010 from
> "Watts
> Up With That," with profanity laced responses, revealed in the
> following Vision2020 posts from June and July 2010:
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2010-June/070679.html
> http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/2010-July/070799.html
>
> The final Arctic sea ice extent for 2010 refuted Watt's
> scientifically
> irresponsible spring predictions, a result you never followed
> up on
> regarding our discussion of Watt's confirmation bias filter.
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
>
> On 8/25/11, Rosemary Huskey<donaldrose at cpcinternet.com
> <mailto:donaldrose at cpcinternet.com>> wrote:
>
> Paul,
> Please help us to understand what you mean by "witch
> hunts" and "over
> reactions."
>
>
> Rose Huskey
>
>
>
>
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