Over at Climate Audit Steve McIntyre has started a new series on the “the trick.” To this day the trick is still largely misunderstood by nearly everyone discussing it, except Steve and a few of his readers. The trick deniers, are back at it using some old stupid pet tricks –moving the pea under the thimble. They clearly do not have a command of the mathematical operations underlying the trick or a command of all the versions of the trick. As Steve writes:
“All too often writers like Morgan Goodwin at desmog here or Brian Angliss at S& R here think that tricks are a “good way to solve a problem” (as per Gavin Schmidt at realclimate.)
In a recent post, Angliss moves the pea under the thimble, using an IPCC diagram to supposedly rebut a criticism of Jones’ trick email (about the WMO 1999 diagram), and then, after this sleight-of-hand, accuses me of making claims “not supported by the published record” – relying on this trick to supposedly justify his claim. Desmogblog, without doing any due diligence of their own to determine whether Angliss’ claims are valid, spreads this disinformation.” Read the rest of Steve here.
Recently, Angliss contacted me to ask me questions about the climategate mails and whether or not I thought they were being taken in context. I’ll excerpt a bit of our discussion to illustrate his ability to question his own bias:
Angliss:….. In his testimony before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Phil Jones estimated that he had sent about 1.5 million emails over the period covered in the published CRU emails. That compares to approximately 200 emails that were from Jones in the published emails (via a quick search at eastangliaemails.com). Do you think that not having access to those other emails limits what we can say about the context of the published emails, and why or why not?
Mosher: “From 1996 to 2009 is say 13 years. 1,500,000, mails is what 115K mails per year. 365 days a year so 316 mails a day or about 13 mails per hour 24 hours a day. Wilt Chamberlain claims to have had sex with 20,000 women. I regard both claims with the some skepticism. Who knows perhaps Jones does have a mighty pen.”
Angliss: “Even if we assume that Jones’ email estimate is an exaggeration, even 1100 emails represents a very small percentage of the total email output of CRU over the past 20 years. Does it bother you that to date we don’t know who edited the emails, why they did it, and what criteria they used to choose between what emails they published and what emails they deleted?”
People should watch this tactic closely. Jones makes a claim. Angliss, unthinkingly, not pausing two seconds to do a back of the envelope check, proceeds on the assumption that Jones is telling the truth. That’s his bias. When his source is challenged, rather than rethink his assessment of Jones, he reaffirms his bias and the storyline that some person selected and edited the mails. There is strong evidence, as I argued in our book, that indicates there was little human intervention in the selection of the texts. That the selection was done algorithmically. But that doesn’t fit the story line of an evil hacker who cherry picked the worst mails. Angliss cannot see how Jones exaggeration is relevant. He cannot see that Jones is a serial hyperbolist. We may never know who picked the mails or how they were selected. But we can watch the things Angliss chooses to discuss and which things get ignored.
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Goebbels that spin doctor supreme, or was it Vladimir Ilich said to paraphrase:
If you repeat a lie often enough, people eventually would believe it.
Perhaps emails were auto- self- generated (every 5 minutes, according to my calculations) in order to reinforce the ‘truth’ about AGW.
Even if we assume that Jones’ email estimate is an exaggeration, even 1100 emails represents a very small percentage of the total email output of CRU over the past 20 years.
So?
I don’t like to use criminal analogies, because I doubt any crime has been committed, but it’s like a lawyer arguing that his client hardly ever mugged people!
Interesting article by Christopher Booker today…
Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming – but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
I would think the e-mails were picked by a random search using key words through a search engine just like the files that were released were probably also a random selection. Using 10 key words for individual searches then sorting by date would probably give similar results. We did that at work to find specific options and when they were applied.
Put up a straw man, knock it down, it is just another trick.
“But that doesn’t fit the story line of an evil hacker who cherry picked the worst mails.”
If Jones wants to corroborate his assertion that the climategate emails are indeed the worst he could simply release the lot. ‘They have been taken out of context’ can only be proven by providing the context they were removed from.
He may have had that many emails, but how much was spam and how many did he respond back too? Assistants are good for sorting through mail as well.
“JB Williamson says:
June 13, 2010 at 4:29 am
Interesting article by Christopher Booker today…
Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming – but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
”
»In die Ecke,
Besen! Besen!
Seid’s gewesen.
Denn als Geister
Ruft euch nur, zu seinem Zwecke,
Erst hervor der alte Meister.«
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Zauberlehrling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
Hide the hiding.
==========
In the post modern scientific era, it is evidently reasonable (and seemingly,easy)to provide a robust defence of the indefensible.
Three enquiries so far have proved it.
I do not want to believe that there is a major conspiracy which goes way beyond the hockey team but the possibility and evidence seems to be increasingly pointing in that direction.
Where are the voices of moderate scientists who are well placed to understand what is happening out there. Why are they staying so tight lipped. Where is their propriety.
I don’t think its fair to describe what happened as saying the emails were ‘edited’. A better choice is ‘filtered’ or ‘selected’.
Using the term ‘edited’ will lead casual readers to believe that content of individual emails was changed in some way, and I never heard that was the case.
MikeEE
Let’s say I hadn’t been a ClimateAudit reader for years, and so was utterly unsurprised by anything in the emails, and suspected that most of it was there and my only shock was to see it all confirmed at the hands of a leaker.
I would give them their argument on “trick”, or I might conceivably give them their argument on “Hide the decline”, but both? Naah.
It is like that line, I think from the movie “Road Trip” that talks about “shortcuts.” If it is really shorter, it wouldn’t be called a “shortcut”, it would be called “the way.”
Just can’t give up on all that money without trying every trick in the book.
Why don’t they spend sometime looking for Al Gore’s CO2 blanket.
I see something different.
When buying a car from a dubious car salesmen, he starts the price very high. The car dealership knows that only a few people are going to accept that amount. The goal is, not to sell you a car at the high amount, but to make you won when in fact they have won. For example, let us suppose I wanted to buy a car dealership purchased at $10,000. If I wanted to buy that car, the dubious seller may given me an opening bid of $14,000. I, having played the game before, counter with a bid of $12,000. A fair price to pay for that car is $10,500 to $11,000. But because the initial amount was way too high, I think I am getting a good deal by asking $2000 less. I am not; the dealership has won.
In the emails above, the 1.5 million was an obviously bogus amount. Only the gullible would believe it. And sadly, there are many gullible ones out there. So Phil Jones and Angliss started high, and if you here the sense to do call them to task for that amount, they lower it greatly. Just like that dubious car salesmen. Now you think you have won, when in fact they have won.
That is what I see. Angliss would make a very good car salesman.
Nicely done, Steven.
This underscores the necessity for good skeptics to understand propaganda techniques and their variations to be able to recognize when the alarmists are resorting to such things — especially logical fallacies.
I think we have an idea of what the larger context of the “hide the decline” statement would be because there have been answers given and responses made. Using the words and phrases of their camp, “hide the decline” only becomes, “hide the divergence problem.” So we know that there is indeed a problem, the divergence problem, and that since artifice is employed to distract us from the problems with their data, these people behaving more as advocates or adversaries than judges. If we seek the truth in the matter of climate science we will have to continue seeking and judge for ourselves. This is the clear message I get, so I continue on my skeptical quest.
In 1993 Islam’s supreme doctrinal authority Sheikh Abdel-aziz ibn Ba’az, Grand Mufti of Mecca and Medina, issued a binding edict (fatwa) declaring that the world is flat. (If it is not, the Prophet’s Star-and-Crescent is not as advertised.) “Anyone of the round persuasion” is an infidel at war with Allah, subject to termination with extreme prejudice (Carl Sagan, “The Demon Haunted World”, p. 325; Ballantine, 1996).
Grand Mufti, indeed! Blinkered climate hysterics deserve no more credibility than Sheikh ibn Ba’az. (Note, by the way, that Sagan’s exhaustive index makes no reference whatever to this passage. Mecca and Medina’s Religion of Peace has a way of resolving such disputes with bloodthirsty violence.) To True Believers of any stripe, Reality is quite beside the point.
I don’t recall Jones actually put a figure on the number of emails he wrote at anytime during his testimony before the House of Commons Committee so where 1.5 million came from I have no idea. I suppose reading the minutes of evidence would help.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387b/38701.htm
Another day and time Jones et al would have had a fair trial and a nice hanging.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387b/38701.htm
Q158 Dr Harris: The Institute of Physics say—and this is quite strong—”The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima face evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.” That is partly, I suppose, coming back to transparency, but what is your view on that? Do you think the emails reveal anything that you may be vulnerable on or are you confident that the emails, if looked at as a whole, will clear you as it were in the review? I am not asking you to forecast the result of the review, I just want to ask your state of mind in respect of this.
Professor Jones: You have to realise that you have only seen a tenth of 1% of my emails in this respect.
Q159 Graham Stringer: We do not want to read the rest.
Professor Jones: But I do not think there is anything in those emails that really supports any view that I or CRU have been trying to pervert the peer review process in any way. I have just been giving my views on specific papers.
“a tenth of 1% of my emails in this respect”. = 1.5 million apparently metaphorically
Steve in SC says:
June 13, 2010 at 7:50 am
Another day and time Jones et al would have had a fair trial and a nice hanging.
_____________________________________________________
If we get a nasty Russian or Icelandic volcano causing major cooling as in a “year without summer”, it may be a mob and guillotine al la French Revolution.
martyn says:
June 13, 2010 at 8:19 am
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387b/38701.htm
Q158 Dr Harris: The Institute of Physics say—and this is quite strong—”The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima face evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.” That is partly, I suppose, coming back to transparency, but what is your view on that? Do you think the emails reveal anything that you may be vulnerable on or are you confident that the emails, if looked at as a whole, will clear you as it were in the review? I am not asking you to forecast the result of the review, I just want to ask your state of mind in respect of this.
Professor Jones: You have to realise that you have only seen a tenth of 1% of my emails in this respect.
Q159 Graham Stringer: We do not want to read the rest.
Professor Jones: But I do not think there is anything in those emails that really supports any view that I or CRU have been trying to pervert the peer review process in any way. I have just been giving my views on specific papers.
“a tenth of 1% of my emails in this respect”. = 1.5 million apparently metaphorically
_____________________________________________________________________
Sounds like two counts of perjury by MR. Jones right there.
This is a not-uncommon tactic by various political pundits of a certain leaning. They will throw out an exaggerated or made-up claim/percentage/number that supports their position, then quickly move on to a slightly different point before the exaggeration can be challenged.
Steve, you made this same basic claim at S&R in the comments. So allow me to make the same point here that I made there.
First, I didn’t repeat Jones’ claims in either the original post (linked above) or in the original “there’s not enough context to draw broad conclusions” post. I didn’t repeat them precisely because they weren’t credible, and you weren’t the only person to say so. Tom Wigley pointed out to me in his communications that suspected Jones was referring to the sum of his sent and received emails, not just to his sent emails. Given your quick analysis and Wigley’s concurrence that it was a likely exaggeration, I didn’t spend any more time on that particular detail and intentionally didn’t mention it when I pointed out the email output of multiple different professions including a climate researcher
S&R surveyed its own members as well as Tom Wigley to estimate how many emails were sent per year by different occupations. We found that
approximately 1,500 emails per year sent by the electrical engineer
approximately 1,100 emails were sent by the home manager
between 2,500 and 3,500 emails sent by the marketing professional
about 1,500 emails were sent by the university English professor
and about 5,500 emails sent by climate scientist Wigley (with another 33,000 received emails).
If we estimate that the S&R writers surveyed each receive three emails for every email sent, then we get a yearly total of 6,000 emails, 4,400 emails, 10,000 emails, and 6,000 emails respectively for the S&R writers plu a total of about 39,000 emails per year for Wigley. Over the course of 13 years and for a 15-member workgroup (the period of the CRU emails and the size of the CRU), the total for both the electrical engineer and the English professor is 1.17 million emails, 858k emails for the home manager, a minimum of 1.95 million emails for the marketing professional, and 7.51 million emails for Wigley’s.
Furthemore, I didn’t “change the subject” or ignore it, however, as you claim. My followup question is in the exact same line of inquiry as the original question.
There are plenty of possible reasons to be skeptical of Jones’ opinions and statements, but rhetorical exaggeration is not one of them.
Apologies – should have been “Brian Angliss.”