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Adventures in Flay-land: James Delingpole and the "Science" of Denialism - 0 views

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11 - No Cached

Perhaps like me, you watched the BBC Two Horizons program Monday night presented by Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society and Nobel Prize winning geneticist for his discovery of the genes of cell division.
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James. He really believes there's some kind of mainstream science "warmist" conspiracy against the brave outliers who dare to challenge the consensus. He really believes that "climategate" is a real scandal. He fails to understand that it is a common practice in statistics to splice together two or more datasets where you know that the quality of data is patchy. In the case of "climategate", researchers found that indirect temperature measurements based on tree ring widths (the tree ring temperature proxy) is consistent with other proxy methods of recording temperature from before the start of the instrumental temperature record (around 1950) but begins to show a decline in temperature after that for reasons which are unclear. Actual temperature measurements however show the opposite. The researcher at the head of the climategate affair, Phil Jones, created a graph of the temperature record to include on the cover of a report for policy makers and journalists. For this graph he simply spliced together the tree ring proxy data up until 1950 with the recorded data after that using statistical techniques to bring them into agreement. What made this seem particularly dodgy was an email intercepted by a hacker in which Jones referred to this practice as a "Mike's Nature trick", referring to a paper published by his colleague Mike Hulme Michael Mann in the journal Nature. It is however nothing out of the ordinary. Delingpole and others have talked about how this "trick" was used here to "hide the decline" revealed by the other dataset, as though this was some sort of deception. The fact that all parties were found to have behaved ethically is simply further evidence of the global warmist conspiracy. Delingpole takes it further and casts aspersions on scientific consensus and the entire peer review process.
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When Nurse asked Delingpole the very straightforward question of whether he would be willing to trust a scientific consensus if he required treatment for cancer, he could have said "Gee, that's an interesting question. Let me think about that and why it's different."
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Instead, he became defensive and lost his focus. Eventually he would make such regrettable statements as this one: "It is not my job to sit down and read peer-reviewed papers because I simply haven’t got the time, I haven’t got the scientific expertise… I am an interpreter of interpretation."
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In a parallel universe where James Delingpole is not the "penis" that Ben Goldacre describes him to be, he might have said the following: Gee, that's an interesting question. Let me think about why it's different. (Thinks) Well, it seems to me that when evaluating a scientifically agreed treatment for a disease such as cancer, we have not only all the theory to peruse and the randomized and blinded trials, but also thousands if not millions of case studies where people have undergone the intervention. We have enough data to estimate a person's chances of recovery and know that on average they will do better. When discussing climate change, we really only have the one case study. Just the one earth. And it's a patient that has not undergone any intervention. The scientific consensus is therfore entirely theoretical and intangible. This makes it more difficult for the lay person such as myself to trust it.
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Sir Paul ended the program saying "Scientists have got to get out there… if we do not do that it will be filled by others who don’t understand the science, and who may be driven by politics and ideology."
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f proxy tracks instrumental from 1850 to 1960 but then diverges for unknown reasons, how do we know that the proxy is valid for reconstructing temperatures in periods prior to 1850?
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This is a good question and one I'm not sure I can answer it to anyone's satisfaction. We seem to have good agreement among several forms of temperature proxy going back centuries and with direct measurements back to 1880. There is divergence in more recent years and there are several theories as to why that might be. Some possible explanations here:http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies-divergence-problem.htm
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In the physical world we can never be absolutely certain of anything. Rene Des Cartes showed it was impossible to prove that everything he sensed wasn't manipulated by some invisible demon.
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It is necessary to first make certain assumptions about the universe that we observe. After that, we can only go with the best theories available that allow us to make scientific progress.
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Hiding the Decline | Climate Etc. - 0 views

judithcurry.com/...hiding-the-decline Climate Science ClimateGate Mike's Nature Trick AGW Temperature Proxy

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 11 - No Cached

we need to understand the magnitude and characteristics and causes of natural climate variability over the current interglacial, particularly the last 2000 years.  I’m more interested in the handle than the blade of the hockey stick.  I also view understanding regional climate variations as much more important than trying to use some statistical model to create global average anomalies (which I personally regard as pointless, given the sampling issue).
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I am really hoping that the AR5 will do a better job of providing a useful analysis and assessment of the paleodata for the last millennium.  However I am not too optimistic. There was another Workshop in Lisbon this past year (Sept 2010), on the Medieval Warm Period.  The abstracts for the presentations are found here.  No surprises, many of the usual people doing the usual things.
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This raises the issue as to whether there is any value at all in the tree ring analyses for this application, and whether these paleoreconstructions can tell us anything.  Apart from the issue of the proxies not matching the observations from the current period of warming (which is also the period of best historical data), there is the further issue as to whether these hemispheric or global temperature analyses make any sense at all because of the sampling issue.  I am personally having a difficult time in seeing how this stuff has any credibility at the level of “likely” confidence levels reported in the TAR and AR4.
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There is no question that the diagrams and accompanying text in the IPCC TAR, AR4 and WMO 1999 are misleading.  I was misled.  Upon considering the material presented in these reports, it did not occur to me that recent paleo data was not consistent with the historical record.  The one statement in AR4 (put in after McIntyre’s insistence as a reviewer) that mentions the divergence problem is weak tea.
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It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document.  Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one).  The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced.  I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process  (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that corrupted the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.
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McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way.  If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted.  I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues.  Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable?  I sure don’t.
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paleoproxies are outside the arena of my personal research expertise, and I find my eyes glaze over when I start reading about bristlecones, etc.  However, two things this week have changed my mind, and I have decided to take on one aspect of this issue: the infamous “hide the decline.” The first thing that contributed to my mind change was this post at Bishop Hill entitled “Will Sir John condemn hide the decline?”, related to Sir John Beddington’s statement:  It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence.
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The second thing was this youtube clip of physicist Richard Muller (Director of the Berkeley Earth Project), where he discusses “hide the decline” and vehemently refers to this as “dishonest,” and says “you are not allowed to do this,” and further states that he intends not to read further papers by these authors (note “hide the decline” appears around minute 31 into the clip).  While most of his research is in physics, Muller has also published important papers on paleoclimate, including a controversial paper that supported McIntyre and McKitrick’s analysis.
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