Current peer review science, by attempting to explain away model failure, in fact confirms that the science is wrong
Guest essay by David M. Hoffer
It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science. With this simple strategy, they at once excuse themselves from the need to know anything about the science, and at the same time seek to discredit skeptic arguments on the grounds that, not having been published in peer reviewed journals, they may be dismissed out of hand.
A retreat to authoritarian arguments in the face of dead simple observations is not new. It is a repeat of history. Not having learned from it, we appear to be condemned to repeat it. But both history and the current peer reviewed science are, if one steps back and looks at the big picture, on the skeptic side.
In the fifth century BC, Empedocles theorized that one could see by virtue of rays emanating from one’s eyes. Falsifying this notion required no more than pointing out that one cannot see in a dark room. Despite this simple observation, his theory enjoyed substantial support for the next 1600 years.
Galileo died while under house arrest for supporting the notion that the earth orbited the sun. His was convicted in part on the basis of peer reviewed literature of the time insisting that the movement of the planets as observed from the earth could be explained by the planets simply reversing direction in orbit from time to time. For nearly two thousand years, into the early 1800’s, when people fell ill, the peer reviewed literature confirmed that the best course of action was to let some blood out of them. The simple observation that death rates increased when this treatment was applied was dismissed out of hand on the premise that, if it was true, it would appear in medical journals. Sound familiar?
History is replete with examples of what seems today to be utterly absurd ideas. Ideas which stubbornly refuse to die, sustained in part by the equally absurd notion that evidence to the contrary was not to be accepted simply because it hadn’t appeared in the “right” publications. But is the notion of climate science today as easily falsified by simple observation? I submit that it is. We have the climate models themselves to upon which to rely.
For what are the climate models other than the embodiment of the peer reviewed science? Is there a single model cited by the IPCC that claims to not be based on peer reviewed science? Of course there isn’t. Yet simple observation shows that the models, and hence the peer reviewed literature upon which they are based, are wrong. We have none other than the IPCC themselves to thank for showing us that.
The leaked Second Order Draft of IPCC AR5 laid bare the failure of the models to predict the earth’s temperature going forward in time. In fact, if one threw out all but the best 5% of the model results…they would still be wrong, and obviously so. They all run hotter than reality. Exposed for the world to see that the models (and hence the science upon which they are based) had so utterly failed, the IPCC responded by including older models they had previously declared obsolete as now being part of the current literature:
Even with those older and supposedly obsolete models included, the models look to be complete failures. In other words, confronted with the data showing that thousands are dying from bloodletting, the IPCC is resurrecting old studies showing that three or four patients recovered once in an old study from a long time ago. They are point blank asking you to believe that planets reverse direction in orbit quite of their own volition. They’ve contrived a theory that you can’t see in the dark because the rays from your eyes must interact with light to work.
As ridiculous as that may seem, for the IPCC, it is (literally) even worse than that. For this we have the foremost climate scientists on the planet to thank.
Kevin Trenberth, arguably the most politically powerful climate scientist on earth, famously lamented in the ClimateGate Emails that we cannot account for “the missing heat”, a tacit admission that the models are wrong. Since then we’ve seen multiple papers suggesting that perhaps the heat is being sequestered in the deep oceans where, conveniently, we cannot measure it. If true, this also invalidates the models, since they predicted no such thing.
Dr Roy Spencer’s paper suggests that the heat is escaping to space. If he’s right, the models are wrong. More recently we have the paper by Cowtan and Way, which tries to make the case that the heat is hiding in places on earth where we have no weather station or satellite data. Pretty selective that heat, going where nobody can measure it, but not where we can. If they are right, then not a single model predicted any such thing, and so, once again, the models would be wrong. Spencer’s paper stands apart from the others because it doesn’t twist itself into absurd contortions in a blatant attempt to preserve the CAGW storyline. But make no mistake about it, all these papers are being published, not because the models (and the science they are predicted upon) are right, but because they are wrong, and obviously so.
No longer is the debate in regard to if the models are wrong. The debate is now about why the models are wrong. The models having fallen, the peer reviewed science they purport to represent falls with them.
But you need not believe me in that regard.
Just the peer reviewed science by the foremost climate scientists on earth.
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‘Peer review’ may become ‘pal review’, or less politely a ‘circle jerk’ of like-minded colleagues boosting one another’s fortunes.
Responses that I get when I present peer-reviewed research that runs counter to what the True Believer ‘knows’:
‘cherry-picking’
‘out-of-date’
‘fraud’
and more!
Witness some of that here, from a person who claims to be a ‘journalist’ http://scythemantis.deviantart.com/journal/MEEERRY-KAJMSMAS-422842842
(note: his claims that I mention him all the time? … come to about 11 words over the past year. Narcissism, pure and unadulterated)
I think the post would be stronger without the Galileo reference.
Recall that Galileo (and Copernicus) were technically mistaken. They maintained that the planets orbited the Sun in circular orbits. As Kepler showed, this was not the case. Because of the desire for circular orbits, the Copernican theory of the time also required resort to ‘epicycles’. Galileo’s problem with the authorities was as much or more due to personality issues than his doctrine – after all Copernicus went unmolested.
Without Newtonian ‘Universal Gravitation’ there was no good way to explain the motion of the planets. Tycho, the greatest observational astronomer of that era, also did not believe that Earth orbited the Sun, though he did believe the planets orbited the Sun. With the information available to educated men of that time, I have a feeling I’d have been an adherent of the Tychonic system myself.
In a recent modeling project, it takes 72 hours of computing time to generate 1/3 of a second of a simulated worm movement :
http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/26/openworm-project/
How many hours of computing time does it take for a climate model to produce one second of simulated earth climate? What is missing from climate models in order to create simulations that span years?
Well done, David M. Hoffer (if I may, smile). Glad to see an article by you. When I saw you were this post’s author, I even came off my WUWT vacation to read it. You (and other WUWT science giants) certainly provided irrefutable demonstrative evidence of your above assertion in your valiant attempt last week to educate that troll-of-contrived-ignorance whose name I will NOT give the benefit of even mentioning ( = home for a legion of rabbits, going nicely with Monckton’s hive metaphor in the post below which your comments appeared).
Thanks, David. Well put!
I agree. Not only that but most of the so-called science authors and the peer reviewers are incompetent. I saw on another blog that (Dr ) Gavin Schmidt was asked about the the Schmidt number. He looked it up on Wiki then responded “what use was that”. By that admission he has no understanding of heat and mass transfer (which is an engineering discipline not understood by the so-called scientists). When peer reviewers (Gavin Schmidt has been one many times) do not understand the basics of what they are supposed to be reviewing one gets junk being published. Do any of the so-called climate scientist understand air conditioning, fluid dynamics, reaction kinetics (eg formation of ozone & ozone reactions) etc. or even simple thermodynamics? So-called climate science is political science in disguise.
OldCrusader is quite right.
The Copernican-Gallilean heliocentric system offered exactly zero improvement over the Ptolemaic geocentric one in predicting planetary positions. It gave the exact same errors for the exact same reasons.
Kepler’s revolutionary heliofocal system, in contrast, yielded planetary positions more accurate than the margin of measurement error of the time.
Yet Kepler gets very little credit or fame, while the other two bask in historical glory for their failed hypothesis.
Warmist “peer review” is as dishonest as their pseudo-scientific religion. Now we have thousands of Shaman desperately searching for the missing heat. It’s got to be here somewhere, otherwise it all falls apart, along with our reputations and grant money. We should be reaching the tipping point for AGW theory soon. However, that won’t dissuade the true believers, who will just develop a new theory (probably AGC).
Anthony Watts
I try to actually introduce as many of my friends to your excellent website as a focus of general science (which it does a better job than fully dedicated ones) but when ironic S@*te like this appears it dilutes some of the excellent pieces posted here.
BTW, your recent post on the moon landing and the words of those who landed – EXCELLENT. Compared to an age of giant achievements, and perhaps the words of those of the greatest of all, expressing such humility, it should shame our age that has nothing more to offer than hubris from the rather vacuous underachieving generation that makes a living from of their [all those of NASA pre-1970] great achievements.
If Mosher makes one of his lightning raids here, please please ignore him.
TheOldCrusader says: “I think the post would be stronger without the Galileo reference.
Recall that Galileo (and Copernicus) were technically mistaken. They maintained that the planets orbited the Sun in circular orbits. As Kepler showed, this was not the case. Because of the desire for circular orbits, the Copernican theory of the time also required resort to ‘epicycles’. Galileo’s problem with the authorities was as much or more due to personality issues than his doctrine – after all Copernicus went unmolested…”
Nonsense. Copernicus went unmolested not for his political correctness, but because he was dead before his work was published. Galileo (and Copernicus) were essentially correct: The planets do revolve around the Sun and most of the (then-known) planets do have fairly circular orbits. Mars and Mercury were two exceptions because of their higher orbital eccentricities, which resulted in more epicycles in the Copernican theory than the Ptolemaic. Kepler did not reject the Copernican theory as “mistaken” or “technically mistaken.” He merely used Tyco Brahe’s data to add eccentricity to the orbital theory.
“So-called climate science is political science in disguise.” Couldn’t have said it better.
Peer-review is not always the first line of action for innovators, for whatever reason.
“Dr Roy Spencer’s paper suggests that the heat is escaping to space. If he’s right, the models are wrong.” – Given a choice as to where that heat went to on a cold cloudless winter night, even the least educated man in the street would go with “into space” over “into the oceans”.
The problem is the lack of common sense among some highly educated and overpaid government dependents, and the belief in computer simulations as the truest reflection of reality for everything.
David, thank you.
All too often it seems that the only understanding people have of the models is ‘they predict warming’. All too often, any argument that any warming has occurred satisfies such people. A reminder that, no matter the answers to these questions; is the heat in the oceans, is it at the poles, is it not there at all, is natural variability greater than we thought, etc. the models did not project what was observed, and they failed to do so in a statistically conclusive way is clearly overdue.
Kepler’s Laws are taught in schools in detail as the working model for planetary movements even today (the relativistic ones are a bit tricky) – Galileo gets a passing mention. I think Kepler does OK.
David – you don’t have to go so far back in history to find the ignorance of consensus you seek.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
What he alone knew changed everything once everyone else saw the light. It wasn’t that long ago.
There aren’t many issues of controversy out there where one side can win its argument by actually using the data of the other side. It no longer matters whether or not Warmists listen to our side of the argument (not that they did anyway). No, all they have to do now is look at their own arguments to see that they are wrong.
I do hope that Mr. Hoffer is not misremembering George Santayana when he says, “It is a repeat of history. Not having learned from it, we appear to be condemned to repeat it.”
History is written by the victors that are ignorant of the fallacy of historicism or that are trying to legitimize some claim. Santayana dictated that we remember our past, those that cannot are damned to repeat it. Read The Poverty of Historicism and it’s foundations in The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Galileo’s problem with the authorities was as much or more due to personality issues than his doctrine – after all Copernicus went unmolested. – OldCrusader
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII decreed that cats were evil creatures to be burnt with witches.
I guess cats just didn’t have the right kind of “personality” for the Catholic Church, huh?
Thankfully, the Church is no longer the authority on what we can think and say.
Welcome to the enlightenment…
= = = = = =
Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. His renowned conflict with the Catholic Church was central to his philosophy, for Galileo was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.
Galileo had believed Copernican theory (that the planets orbited the sun) since early on, but it was only when he found the evidence needed to support the idea that he started to publicly support it. He wrote about Copernicus’s theory in Italian (not the usual academic Latin), and soon his views became widely supported outside the universities. This annoyed the Aristotelian professors, who united against him seeking to persuade the Catholic Church to ban Copernicanism.
Galileo, worried about this, traveled to Rome to speak to the ecclesiastical authorities. He argued that the Bible was not intended to tell us anything about scientific theories, and that it was usual to assume that, where the Bible conflicted with common sense, it was being allegorical. But the Church was afraid of a scandal that might undermine its fight against Protestantism, and so took repressive measures. It declared Copernicanism “false and erroneous” in 1616, and commanded Galileo never again to “defend or hold” the doctrine. Galileo acquiesced.
In 1623, a longtime friend of Galileo’s became the pope. Immediately Galileo tried to get the 1616 decree revoked. He failed, but he did manage to get permission to write a book discussing both the Aristotelian and Copernican theories, on two conditions: he would not take sides and would come to the conclusion that man could in any case not determine how the world worked because God could bring about the same effects in ways unimagined by man, who could not place restrictions on God’s omnipotence.
The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was completed and published in 1632, with the full backing of censors – and was immediately greeted throughout Europe as a literary and philosophical masterpiece. Soon the pope, realizing that people were seeing the book as a convincing argument in favor of Copernicanism, regretted having allowed its publication. The pope argued that although the book had the official blessing of the censors, Galileo had nevertheless contravened the 1616 decree. He brought Galileo before the Inquisition, who sentenced him to house arrest for life and commanded him to publicly renounce Copernicanism. For a second time, Galileo acquiesced.
Galileo remained a faithful Catholic, but his belief in the independence of science had not been crushed. Four years before his death in 1642, while he was still under house arrest, the manuscript of his second major book was smuggled to a publisher in Holland. It was this work, referred to as Two New Sciences, that was to be the genesis of modern physics.
– Stephen Hawking
= = = = = =
D Hoffer
Oh dear – a paper which starts by defining anyone who dares question the views of the author as a ‘troll’. The beauty of this bit of sophistry is that the author virtually sets up, and automatically ‘wins’, a circular argument: trolls are wrong and bad. Hoffer is not a troll. Therefore D Hoffer is right!
Verbal alchemy – logical dross into gold!
D Hoffer goes on to assert:
‘Galileo died while under house arrest for supporting the notion that the earth orbited the sun. His was convicted in part on the basis of peer reviewed literature of the time insisting that the movement of the planets as observed from the earth could be explained by the planets simply reversing direction in orbit from time to time.’
Galileo was done for heresy (ie breaching matters of faith and morals) by an organisation that bases itself on being the sole and divinely-directed arbiters of those well-known pieces of peer-reviewed scientific literature – the gospels. In other words, according to those who defined this stuff at the time, at the core, Galileo’s transgressions were theological.
And if you think that the Roman Catholic Church has subsequently 100% rehabilitated Galileo, not quite – there are still (somewhat thin and scanty) currents of thought that Galileo was a heretic, regardless of modern scientific progress on heliocentrism.
The RC church organised an exhibition on Galileo on his 400th anniversay in a church not far from the Rome railway station. It was quite open in some ways, but remarkably grudging in others. Inter alia, the exhibition went to some extent to demonstrate that Galileo was a believer, he really was.
They can’t even agree amongst themselves on whether to erect a statue to him in Vatican City!
D Hoffer may also consider that there is an internal contradiction to his position on Galileo. It was the peer-reviewed literature that was mostly right. It was the religious science-deniers of the day who refused to accept the peer-reviewed literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Church_reassessments_of_Galileo_in_later_centuries
I agree that the Galileo reference might be a bit misplaced, as the Galileo persecution is probably more lore than fact. In it’s place, one might include William Harvey. Harvey shattered the accepted wisdom put forth by the great physician to gladiators and Roman emperors, Galen. Galen had written, in the 2nd century AD, that there were two kinds of blood carried by essentially two different vascular systems. And all the assorted fluids in a human body were imbued with invisible pneuma, “spirits” if you will. Galen’s system was taught in medical schools for 1,400 years before being successfully challenged by Harvey’s studies.
The general public who get their news from the networks and NPR will never have their minds changed by what is reported here and elsewhere. In the people’s republic of Ann Arbor, it’s just not news if it’s not from these select sources. I’ve done everything I can to enlighten, illuminate, refute, and nothing works. I suspect this somewhat willful ignorance is widespread. Unless they’re interested in the subject, they just take the word of John Stewart, Diane Rhem or Brian Williams as fact.
And now for a public service announcement. If you live in the Great Lakes or upper Midwest, you have one week to prepare for “history making cold”. If you have livestock or pipes that need protecting, if you have any malfunctioning heaters, cranky furnaces, a broken window somewhere in a barn, a vehicle that won’t start in severe cold, you have about one week to get it in good order. Places like WI, IL, IN, ND, MN, IA are going to see temperatures possibly 50 degrees below normal according to the latest forecast model runs. Chicago might see -30F.
David: Good article! Thanks for posting.
crosspatch: I recall minus 21ºF in Ohio in the ’60’s. You realize how many nerve endings are in your nose and ears when that happens!
With all of California’s problems, at least the lack of global warming isn’t one of them!
Galileo died while under house arrest for siupporting the notion that the earth orbited the sun.
Popular idea but not entirely true. What got him in trouble was his total lack of tact. He went out of his way to insult the pope who had encouraged him to write up his ideas. You might say he was one of the first nerds.