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Viscount Monckton's assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.

As Abraham explains at the beginning of his investigation, his scientific credentials didn't mean that he was automatically right, any more than Monckton's lack of scientific credentials meant that he was automatically wrong. Every claim Monckton made would be judged on its merits. Where Monckton gave references, Abraham would follow them up, seeking to discover whether he had accurately represented the papers he cited, or whether the authors of those papers agreed with his interpretation. Where he did not give references, Abraham would see whether Monckton's claims were consistent with published scientific data.

The results of Abraham's investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation, as he explains in the article he has written for the Guardian. Some of Monckton's assertions are breath-taking in their brazen disregard of facts. He has gravely misrepresented papers and authors he refers to, in some cases he appears to have created data, graphs and trends out of thin air: at least that was how it appeared to Abraham when Monckton gave no references and his graphs and figures starkly contradicted the published science.

an interesting article I read recently, penned by Julian Savulescu for the Practical Ethics blog.

Savulescu discusses an ongoing controversy in Germany about genetic testing of human embryos. The Leopoldina, Germany’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, has recommended genetic testing of pre-implant embryos, to screen for serious and incurable defects. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has agreed to allow a parliamentary vote on this issue, but also said that she personally supports a ban on this type of testing. Her fear is that the testing would quickly lead to “designer babies,” i.e. to parents making choices about their unborn offspring based not on knowledge about serious disease, but simply because they happen to prefer a particular height or eye color.

He infers from Merkel’s comments (and many similar others) that people tend to think of selecting traits like eye color as eugenics, while acting to avoid incurable disease is not considered eugenics. He argues that this is exactly wrong: eugenics, as he points out, means “well born,” so eugenicists have historically been concerned with eliminating traits that would harm society (Wendell Holmes’ “three generation of imbeciles”), not with simple aesthetic choices. As Savulescu puts it: “[eugenics] is selecting embryos which are better, in this context, have better lives. Being healthy rather than sick is ‘better.’ Having blond hair and blue eyes is not in any plausible sense ‘better,’ even if people mistakenly think so.”

wrote a piece about James Delingpole's unfortunate appearance on the BBC program Horizon on Monday. In that piece I refered to one of his own Telegraph articles in which he criticizes renowned sceptic Dr Ben Goldacre for betraying the principles of scepticism in his regard of the climate change debate. That article turns out to be rather instructional as it highlights perfectly the difference between real scepticism and the false scepticism commonly described as denialism.

It appears that James has tremendous respect for Ben Goldacre, who is a qualified medical doctor and has written a best-selling book about science scepticism called Bad Science and continues to write a popular Guardian science column. Here's what Delingpole has to say about Dr Goldacre: Many of Goldacre’s campaigns I support. I like and admire what he does. But where I don’t respect him one jot is in his views on ‘Climate Change,’ for they jar so very obviously with supposed stance of determined scepticism in the face of establishment lies.

Scepticism is not some sort of rebellion against the establishment as Delingpole claims. It is not in itself an ideology. It is merely an approach to evaluating new information. There are varying definitions of scepticism, but Goldacre's variety goes like this: A sceptic does not support or promote any new theory until it is proven to his or her satisfaction that the new theory is the best available. Evidence is examined and accepted or discarded depending on its persuasiveness and reliability. Sceptics like Ben Goldacre have a deep appreciation for the scientific method of testing a hypothesis through experimentation and are generally happy to change their minds when the evidence supports the opposing view. Sceptics are not true believers, but they search for the truth. Far from challenging the established scientific consensus, Goldacre in Bad Science typcially defends the scientific consensus against alternative medical views that fall back on untestable positions. In science the consensus is sometimes proven wrong, and while this process is imperfect it eventually results in the old consensus being replaced with a new one.

Consistently being wrong and consistently producing one-sided analyses that are quickly debunked in the literature should lead scientific journals and the entire scientific community (and possibly the media) to start ignoring your work. But when you are one of the last remaining “serious” professional scientists spreading global warming disinformation who retains a (nano)ounce of credibility because you are associated with a major university — M.I.T. — and your name is Richard Lindzen, apparently you can just keep publishing and repeating the same crap over and over and over again.

is this more, or less, support for the calls of some — most notably James Annan — for journals to shift at least some of the peer review cycle to an open format? http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 11/ 30/ more-on-the-climate-files-and-climate-trends/

Also, Gavin seemed to say that — with or without flaws– this paper’s approach was “a useful contribution to the literature”: “Even if it now turns out that the analysis was not robust, it was not that the analysis was not worth trying, and the work being done to re-examine these questions is a useful contributions to the literature –- even if the conclusion is that this approach to the analysis is flawed.” http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2010/ 01/ 08/ a-rebuttal-to-a-cool-climate-paper/ #more-13033

Simon Singh as in the popular mathematician and bestselling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem. And also, more germanely to this story, the recent victim of an expensive libel action brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA). The BCA eventually dropped its action – but not before Singh had run up £200,000 in legal costs. Though some it his lawyers will be able to claim back, he’s still likely to lose £60,000 of his own money as a result of his brave, principled decision to fight the case rather than cave in earlier. I hugely respected him for what he did. He won a victory (albeit a financially Pyrrhic one) not just for himself but for all those of us who trade in robust opinion and who believe that English libel laws are outrageously biased in favour of vexatious complainants, which is why we have unfortunately become a haven for libel tourists, some of them representing unspeakable causes.

Among those “serious matters of public interest”, you might imagine, would be Climate Change.

Yet in the opinion of Singh, the worldwide Climate Change industry is the one area where the robust scepticism and empiricism he professes to believe in just doesn’t apply. Apparently, the job of a journalist is just to accept the word of “the scientists” and take it as read that being as they are “scientists” their word is God and it brooks no questioning or dissent. That’s it. Finished.

An article on energy efficiency over at Yale e360 has this quote allegedly from Energy Secretary Steven Chu: "it’s a myth that the wealth of a country is proportional to its energy use."I do not believe that this can possibly be an accurate quote, for the simple reason that it is wrong (and I can find no evidence of it online other than in the Yale e360 story).  The figure at the top of this post comes from Gapminder (the exact graph can be found here), and shows the very strong relationship of the wealth of a country to its energy use.  No myth.

UPDATE: A colleague emails to suggest that a linear-linear graph might show something different.  Good question, it does not.

UPDATE 2: Here is the source of the quote, a few minutes into Steven Chu's 2008 speech at the National Clean Energy Summit. Chu is clearly saying that beyond a certain level energy use, metrics of quality of life (and he shows a graph using the Human Development Index) do not increase proportionately to increases in energy consumption. I have no problem with such a claim. However, it is highly misleading to reduce that to "it’s a myth that the wealth of a country is proportional to its energy use" absent the broader context, as was done at Yale e360. Thus, the quote is accurate but used improperly. The wealth of a country is indeed proportional to its energy use, which is quite different than saying, once you are very wealthy, consuming more energy does not increase proportionately indicators of quality of life. Thanks to the folks at Yale e360 for quickly responding to my query!

Jonathan Haidt's talk (above) at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology was written up last week in a column by John Tierney in the NY Times.  This was soon followed by a dismissal of the work by Paul Krugman.  The entire sequence is interesting, but for me the best part, and the one that gets to the nub of the issue, is Haight's response to Krugman: My research, like so much research in social psychology, demonstrates that we humans are experts at using reasoning to find evidence for whatever conclusions we want to reach. We are terrible at searching for contradictory evidence. Science works because our peers are so darn good at finding that contradictory evidence for us. Social science — at least my corner of it — is broken because there is nobody to look for contradictory evidence regarding sacralized issues, particularly those related to race, gender, and class. I urged my colleagues to increase our ideological diversity not for any moral reason, but because it will make us better scientists. You do not have that problem in economics where the majority is liberal but there is a substantial and vocal minority of libertarians and conservatives. Your field is healthy, mine is not. Do you think I was wrong to call for my professional organization to seek out a modicum of ideological diversity?

On a related note, the IMF review of why the institution failed to warn of the global financial crisis identified a lack of intellectual diversity as being among the factors responsible (PDF): Several cognitive biases seem to have played an important role. Groupthink refers to the tendency among homogeneous, cohesive groups to consider issues only within a certain paradigm and not challenge its basic premises (Janis, 1982). The prevailing view among IMF staff—a cohesive group of macroeconomists—was that market discipline and self-regulation would be sufficient to stave off serious problems in financial institutions. They also believed that crises were unlikely to happen in advanced economies, where “sophisticated” financial markets could thrive safely with minimal regulation of a large and growing portion of the financial system.Everyyone in academia has seen similar dynamics at work.

One of the most frustrating experiences produced by the winter from hell is dealing with the airlines' automated answer systems. Your flight has just been canceled and every second counts in getting an elusive seat. Yet you are stuck in an automated menu spelling out the name of your destination city.

Even more frustrating is knowing that you will never get to ask the question you really want to ask, as it isn't an option: "If I drive to Newark and board my Flight to Tel Aviv there will you cancel my whole trip, as I haven't started from my ticketed airport of origin, Ithaca?"

A human would immediately understand the question and give you an answer. That's why knowledgeable travelers rush to the nearest airport when they experience a cancellation, so they have a chance to talk to a human agent who can override the computer, rather than rebook by phone (more likely wait on hold and listen to messages about how wonderful a destination Tel Aviv is) or talk to a computer.

[UPDATE: Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a post on this subject that  -- surprise, surprise -- is perfectly consonant with what I write below.] [UPDATE 2: Andy Revkin has a great post on the representations of the precipitation paper discussed below by scientists and related coverage by the media.]  

Nature published two papers yesterday that discuss increasing precipitation trends and a 2000 flood in the UK.  I have been asked by many people whether these papers mean that we can now attribute some fraction of the global trend in disaster losses to greenhouse gas emissions, or even recent disasters such as in Pakistan and Australia.

I hate to pour cold water on a really good media frenzy, but the answer is "no."  Neither paper actually discusses global trends in disasters (one doesn't even discuss floods) or even individual events beyond a single flood event in the UK in 2000.  But still, can't we just connect the dots?  Isn't it just obvious?  And only deniers deny the obvious, right?

The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.

The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.

The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.

Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.

That's a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it's hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren't paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they're somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.

This is all, of course, ignoring what someone who can do the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform might make if they went to Wall Street.

Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet's temperature.

Muller is fed up with the politicised row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone, the Berkeley team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global warming. In no other field would Muller's dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps, so naive.

"We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious," Muller says, over a cup of tea. "We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find." Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change? "We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close," he says.

climate (mis)communication. Two sessions explored a focal point of this blog, the interface of climate science and policy, and the roles of scientists and the media in fostering productive discourse. Both discussions homed in on an uncomfortable reality — the erosion of a longstanding presumption that scientific information, if communicated more effectively, will end up framing policy choices.

First I sat in on a symposium on the  future of climate communication in a world where traditional science journalism is a shrinking wedge of a growing pie of communication options. The discussion didn’t really provide many answers, but did reveal the persistent frustrations of some scientists with the way the media cover their field.

Sparks flew between Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist long focused on hurricanes and warming, and Seth Borenstein, who covers climate and other science for the Associated Press. Borenstein spoke highly of a Boston Globe dual profile of Emanuel and his colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  Richard Lindzen. To Emanuel, the piece was a great example of what he described as “he said, he said” coverage of science. Borenstein replied that this particular piece was not centered on the science, but on the men — in the context of their relationship, research and worldviews. (It’s worth noting that Emanuel, whom I’ve been interviewing on hurricanes and climate since 1988, describes himself as  a conservative and, mainly, Republican voter.)

There is a large expert consensus and strong evidence that below-cost energy efficiency measures drive a rebound in energy consumption that erodes much and in some cases all of the expected energy savings, concludes a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" covers over 96 published journal articles and is one of the largest reviews of the peer-reviewed journal literature to date. (Readers in a hurry can download Breakthrough's PowerPoint demonstration here or download the full paper here.)

In a statement accompanying the report, Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote, "Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a direct and easy way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions." The lead author of the new report is Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough's Director of Energy and Climate Policy; Nordhaus and Shellenberger are co-authors.

The findings of the new report are significant because governments have in recent years relied heavily on energy efficiency measures as a means to cut greenhouse gases. "I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency," said President Obama recently. "We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life." While there is robust evidence for rebound in academic peer-reviewed journals, it has largely been ignored by major analyses, including the widely cited 2009 McKinsey and Co. study on the cost of reducing greenhouse gases.

N.Y.U. professor Clay Shirky—the author of “Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident

Shirky believes that we are on the crest of an ever-surging wave of democratized information: the Gutenberg printing press produced the Reformation, which produced the Scientific Revolution, which produced the Enlightenment, which produced the Internet, each move more liberating than the one before.

The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

rather than being forced to wait for parliament to meet to air their dissent, now opposition parties are able to post pre-emptively their criticisms online, shifting the time and space of Singapore's political debate

Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP)-dominated politics are increasingly being contested online and over social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Pushed by the perceived pro-PAP bias of the mainstream media, Singapore's opposition parties are using various new media to communicate with voters and express dissenting views. Alternative news websites, including The Online Citizen and Temasek Review, have won strong followings by presenting more opposition views in their news mix.

Despite its democratic veneer, Singapore rates poorly in global press freedom rankings due to a deeply entrenched culture of self-censorship and a pro-state bias in the mainstream media. Reporters Without Borders, a France-based press freedom advocacy group, recently ranked Singapore 136th in its global press freedom rankings, scoring below repressive countries like Iraq and Zimbabwe. The country's main media publishing house, Singapore Press Holdings, is owned by the state and its board of directors is made up largely of PAP members or other government-linked executives. Senior newspaper editors, including at the Straits Times, must be vetted and approved by the PAP-led government.

Rosling has maintained a fact-based worldview – an understanding of how global health trends act as a signifier for economic development based on hard data. Today, he argues, countries and corporations alike need to adopt that same data-driven understanding of the world if they are to make sense of the changes we are experiencing in this new century, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

the world has changed so much, what people need isn’t more data but a new mindset. They need a new storage system that can handle this new information. But what I have found over the years is that the CEOs of the biggest companies are actually those that already have the most fact-based worldview, more so than in media, academia or politics. Those CEOs that haven’t grasped the reality of the world have already failed in business. If they don’t understand what is happening in terms of potential new markets in the Middle East, Africa and so on, they are out. So the bigger and more international the organisation, the more fact-based the CEO’s worldview is likely to be. The problem is that they are slow in getting their organisation to follow.

Companies as a whole are stuck in the rut of an old mindset. They think in outworn categories and follow habits and assumptions that are not, or only rarely, based on fact.

Last year the InterAcademy Council recommended that The IPCC should develop and adopt a rigorous conflict of interest policy that applies to all individuals directly involved in the preparation of IPCC reports

  Now we get treated to sights like the following: . . . Steve Sawyer, who contributed a chapter to an upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on managing climate disasters, which will be published in May. . . According to Sawyer, the forthcoming IPCC report will reveal that carbon emissions from nuclear power facilities clock up between 100 and 200 grams of carbon emissions per kilowatt hour (kWh). 'Clean' gas emits around 350 grams of carbon per kilowatt hour.    But wind turbines emit no carbon when producing electricity. One life-cycle assessment of the Vestas V90-3.0MW onshore turbine – which includes the manufacture of components – found that even here, only 4.64 grams of CO2 per kWh were created. "Nuclear power is generally the most expensive, complicated and dangerous means ever devised by human beings to boil water," Sawyer said, summing up the anti-nuclear argument. "Why anyone would want to use it to generate electricity is beyond me, unless they were interested - as most European states were in the early days of nuclear history - in what comes out the other end, which is fissionable material for nuclear weapons," he added.Who is this IPCC author Steve Sawyer you might wonder?  He is the Secretary General of the Global Wind Energy Council, an advocacy group for wind energy with a strong anti-nuclear stance, as Sawyer's comments indicate. He also spent 30 years as a top official for Greenpeace.

the spectacle of an IPCC author with a clear conflict of interest writing part of the report and then using that same report in his political advocacy just does not look good. If the IPCC were recommending drug safety standards and an author happened to be a top official at a company benefitting from the recommendations, the issues here would be obvious and unacceptable. The IPCC however plays by different rules.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

I got an email from a science teacher about a 13-year-old pupil. Both have to remain anonymous. This pupil wrote an article about Brain Gym for her school paper, explaining why it's nonsense: the essay is respectful, straightforward, and factual. But the school decided they couldn't print it, because it would offend teachers in the junior school who use Brain Gym.Now, this is weakminded, and perhaps even vicious. More interesting, though, is how often children are able to spot bullshit, and how often adults want to shut them up.

Emily Rosa is the youngest person ever to have published a scientific paper in JAMA , one of the most influential medical journals in the world. At the age of nine she saw a TV programme about nurses who practise "Therapeutic Touch", claiming they can detect and manipulate a "human energy field" by hovering their hands above a patient.

Rosa conceived and executed an experiment to test if they really could detect this "field". Twenty-one experienced practitioners put their palms on a table, behind a screen. Rosa flipped a coin, hovered her hand over the therapist's left or right palm accordingly, and waited for them to say which it was. The therapists performed no better than chance, and with 280 attempts there was sufficient statistical power to show that these claims were bunk. Therapeutic Touch practitioners, including some in university posts, were deeply unhappy: they insisted loudly that JAMA was wrong to publish the study.