Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
Alarmist claims: inference from incomplete, inadequate and ambiguous observations
Climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry has recently posted a number of sharply worded essays providing stinging critical rebukes of assertions of climate harm by alarmists derived from biased and highly selective reading of the UN IPCC AR5 reports.
In an April 21 posting she says the following regarding the so called ‘facts’ cited by climate alarmists to try to make a case for man made climate harm:
“With regards to climate science, the biggest concern that I have is the insistence on ‘the facts.’ This came up during my recent ‘debate’ with Kevin Trenberth. I argued that there are very few facts in all this, and that most of what passes for facts in the public debate on climate change is: inference from incomplete, inadequate and ambiguous observations; climate models that have been demonstrated not to be useful for most of the applications that they are used for; and theories and hypotheses that are competing with alternative theories and hypotheses.
I particularly like Dyson’s clarification on facts vs theories:
Facts and theories are born in different ways and are judged by different standards. Facts are supposed to be true or false. They are discovered by observers or experimenters. A scientist who claims to have discovered a fact that turns out to be wrong is judged harshly.
Theories have an entirely different status. Since our understanding is incomplete, theories are provisional. Theories are tools of understanding, and a tool does not need to be precisely true in order to be useful. A scientist who invents a theory that turns out to be wrong is judged leniently. Mistakes are tolerated, so long as the culprit is willing to correct them when nature proves them wrong.
The loose use of ‘the facts’ in the public discussion of climate change (scientists, the media, politicians) is enormously misleading, damaging to science, and misleading to policy deliberations.
I would also like to comment on the ‘good loser’ issue. I wholeheartedly agree with Dyson. In the annals of climate science, how would you characterize Mann’s defense of the hockey stick? Other good or bad losers that you can think of in climate science? The biggest problem is premature declaration of ‘winners’ by consensus to suit political and policy maker objectives.”
Dr. Curry’s entire essay on climate science significant limitations and inadequacies is here:
( http://judithcurry.com/2014/04/21/the-case-for-blunders/)
In an April 19 posting she addresses the increasing trend of climate alarmists and their supporters in the media to try to suffocate and eliminate free speech by attacking those who offer opposing viewpoints, scientific analysis and alternative theories to unproven claims of man made global warming theories. She notes the following regarding this attach by alarmists on free speech:
“I am broadly concerned about the slow death of free speech, but particularly in universities and also with regards to the climate change debate.”
“With regards to climate change, I agree with George Brandis who is shocked by the “authoritarianism” with which some proponents of climate change exclude alternative viewpoints.
While the skeptical climate blogosphere is alive and well in terms of discussing alternative viewpoints, this caters primarily to an older population. I am particularly pleased to see the apparent birth of resistance to climate change authoritarianism by younger people, as reflected by the young Austrian rapper.
Climate change ideology, and attempts to enforce it in the media, by politicians and by the cultural practices of academia, leads us down a slippery slope:
Because the more topics you rule out of discussion — immigration, Islam, ‘gender fluidity’ — the more you delegitimise the political system. . . A culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast. – Mark Steyn”
The complete essay dealing with attacks on free speech by climate alarmists is here: ( http://judithcurry.com/2014/04/19/in-defense-of-free-speech/)
In a January 6 posting Dr. Curry performs an analysis of the UN IPCC AR5 WGI report addressing the hiatus in surface warming and discrepancies that outcome creates with climate models, the WGI evidence of lowering equilibrium sensitivity of climate to doubling CO2 concentrations, lack of WGI evidence for increasing rates of sea level rise, lack of WGI evidence explaining increasing Antarctic sea ice levels and reduced WGI confidence in connections between atmospheric CO2 levels and the occurrence of extreme weather events.
She addresses in detail the failure of the climate models to project the global temperature hiatus of the past 15+ years and the need to instead use “expert judgment” to create an estimate for future temperatures to year 2035 as noted in her essay material below.
Dr. Curry also addresses the WGI reports treatment of equilibrium climate sensitivity which clearly trends toward lowering the expected value of this variable noting as follows:
She summarizes her analysis of the WGI report by noting:
The entire assay addressing the AR5 WGI report analysis can be found here:
( http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/06/ipcc-ar5-weakens-the-case-for-agw/)
In these remarkable essay’s Dr. Curry demonstrates and documents the huge limitations and inadequacies of climate alarm science and the attempts of alarmists, media propagandists and ideologically driven politicians to ignore extensive contrary scientific evidence challenging man made climate harm claims, falsely condemn and demonize qualified and competent scientists peer reviewed work which exposes the huge shortcomings of alarmist climate science claims and alarmists ever increasing efforts to eliminate free speech concerning the climate science debate.
I read them all on her blog. I sense a lot of frustration on her part. She sees her chosen profession being destroyed in the name of expediency. And even then, the alarmists are trying to parrot Mann and tar [her] for the simple reason she is for good science. She remains a warmist. But more than that, she is an ethical scientist, and that goes against the grain of “the team”.
Thank you Dr. Curry. You are casting pearls before swine, but we are pulling for you none the less.
Judith Curry’s “This came up during my recent ‘debate’ with Kevin Trenberth. I argued that there are very few facts in all this” caught my eye at Climate Etc. I commented there; let me rephrase my comment slightly more succinctly as a simple question here.
Of the thousands of department chairmen in the US, which of them have expressed an even lower opinion of their colleagues’ understanding of their field?
Thank Dr Curry. The more I read and learn about this ( and others) whole debate and the larger picture of what is happening on our planet the more and more I see history repeating itself . From the Sumerian / Egyptian / Greek / Roman and ALL following Empires all across this planet The rise and fall cycles are apparent.
Sadly, I think our decline maybe the fastest and most spectacular and devastating ever if not the end of us for generations (as we know it today) to come. I sincerely hope reason will prevail.
..and we sceptics are accused of denying the science…? What Dr Curry demonstrates is that the alarmists not only deny the science, they obfuscate it, muzzle alternative perspectives and castigate those who would speak out. Utterly despicable.
I don’t know how many years it will take, but some day we will look back at this time when major news outlets willingly aligned with politicians, universities, and pseudo scientists to censor opposing viewpoints and wage inquisition against dissent and skepticism as the dark ages of modern science.
A scientist is suppose to be interested in Truth, not in “making policy.”
Hansen’s talk of “death trains” seems to focus more on policy than on facts. Once a person starts to feel policy is more important, then “adjustments” become more allowable. They are not. I personally feel “adjustments” are tantamount to the falsification of public documents. Even when “adjustments” are in some way helpful, the fact they are adjustments should be stressed. Raw data should rule.
The attempt of some Alarmists to ostracize and marginalize differing opinions is especially ironic, when you consider how many who assert such demands also make a show of respecting “diversity.”
In actual fact it is not so much that some Climate Scientists live in an Ivory Tower divorced from reality, as it is they are attempting to create a new Apartheid.
Great Post- Thanks.
The term “scientific consensus” should be anathema to anyone with an appreciation of the methods of science — and aware of the long history of wise certainties widely agreed among the learned which eventually were debunked as complete nonsense.
By the way, I second the motion of thanks to Dr. Curry.
Louis says:
April 22, 2014 at 5:41 pm
“I don’t know how many years it will take, but some day we will look back at this …”
Louis, perhaps you’ve been looking in the wrong place. “Some day” for me happened years ago.
Brilliant
Judy is smarter than the average bear.
Judith has struck at the AGW’s soft underbelly, Well done Dr Curry.
I seem to remember about two Reports back, it was pretty clear that solar and volcanoes had no impact in their=”warmists” work. But I just noticed in Judith Curry’s summary she quoted the IPCC that “The decline in the rate of increase in ERF is primarily attributed to natural (solar and volcanic) forcing…” So does anyone know what peer review lit they cited to support that? I’d like to see what/how they quantified their ‘new’ ideas on solar and volcanics.
give thanx for judith curry.
22 April: WSJ: California’s Carbon Spending Rush
Sacramento proves that cap and trade is about income redistribution
The Senate leader last week proposed a “long-term investment strategy” to divvy up the revenues from California’s cap-and-trade program…
So far the auctions have generated $1.5 billion, but cash will start to pour in next year when the cap is applied to fuel suppliers, which account for nearly 40% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Revenues will balloon as the California Air Resources Board reduces both the cap and the free allowances. The state legislative analyst predicts that cap and trade will raise between $12 billion and $45 billion in toto by 2020.
While state law requires that these cap-and-trade “fees” fund programs that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Governor Jerry Brown last year seized, er, “borrowed” nearly all of the auction proceeds for general-fund expenses…
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303626804579507840884336078
judith, please help save us from these daily pronouncements:
22 April: Phys.org: In Mediterranean marble, secrets of the global carbon cycle
Scientists at Yale University have clarified how carbon dioxide escapes minerals deep inside Earth and seeps into the planet’s atmosphere, a significant step in the planet’s natural carbon cycle. Deeper insight into the cycle helps scientists more accurately assess how humans are altering carbon’s movement and affecting the planet’s climate…
In new research published in the May 2014 issue of Nature Geoscience, the Yale team presents evidence that the mineral aragonite, which is composed of calcium carbonate, can dissolve to release carbon dioxide in water-based fluid. This reaction occurs in high-pressure subduction zones, places where one slab of Earth’s outer rocky shell slides beneath another…
http://phys.org/news/2014-04-mediterranean-marble-secrets-global-carbon.html
I still regard her as a reformer, a Martin Luther rather than Charles Darwin, of the warmist tribe. She has exquisite logic in pointing out numerous technical errors of the warmists but what she does not do is attack their basic doctrine, their raison d’etre that started with the Hansen theatrical in 1988. If you missed it or have forgotten it, Hansen’s senate hearing was deliberately scheduled for June 23rd, the warmest day in Wahington D.C. Not only that, but Senator Wirth, the chairman, went out at night before the hearing, opened all the windows in the hearing room, and disabled the air conditioner too. Next day everyone at the hearing, including Hansen himself, sweated profusely. But what was his argument that the greenhouse effect has been detected? He showed a rising temperature curve that went from 1880 to 1988, then pointed to its peak in 1988 and stated that this was the warmest day within the last 100 years. There was only a 1 percent chance that this could happen by chance alone, he said. And since chance had to be ruled out as a cause of this warming, it proved that “…global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” This is it, and it is still statistical, not absolute proof. But this is not the worst of it. If you examine the temperature curve he submitted to the Senate you find that his “100 year warming” includes the early century warming that started in 1910, raised global temperature by half a degree, and then stopped on 1940. Not even IPCC has the nerve to use any warming before 1950 as greenhouse warming because of signal to noise problems. But the 1910 to 1940 warming is provably not greenhouse warming because of radiation laws of physics. You cannot start any enhanced greenhouse warming without simultaneously increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And this did not happen in 1910. Likewise, you cannot stop it without removing the gas from the atmosphere, something we can be sure of did not happen in 1940. Because of these physical requirements we have to lop off the last sixty years before 1940 from Hanson’s 100 year warming curve. What is left of it after surgery is a temperature segment consisting of 25 years of cooling followed by 23 years of warming. No way can this be called proof of the existence of the greenhouse effect. Hansen just screwed up and thought he had discovered the greenhouse effect when actually he didn’t. No one else has discovered it either. It follows that the entire global warming establishment built upon Hansen’s great discovery has been venerating the emperor’s new clothes. It should take just a little child to point it out to them. Or a person not hypnotized by the one billion dollars a day this scam generates for THE CAUSE worldwide. I will deal with further consequences of this in a paper I am working on.
“Facts are supposed to be true or false.”
Umm. if it’s false, how can it be a fact?
There is Science and then there is politics.
Judith is a scientist trapped [in] a non-science world.
What a living hell.
Her good science and tempered approach is the right one, except the world is just politics and ego.
Keep saying the right thing Judith! The rest of us will roll in the muck with the lying jerks and keep them occupied with our rhetoric. I will never quit!
The only kind of “death train” that I know of is one without air-conditioning.
“Umm. if it’s false, how can it be a fact?”
There are such things as ‘false’ or negative facts. E.g. you cannot divide by zero.
There are also unknown facts (for lack of a better term). E.g. you cannot define the square root of -2.
Jeff Alberts says: April 22, 2014 at 7:21 pm
Jeff, she means assertion of fact, give her a break.
Meanwhile, I renew my offer to her of penang curry, or any darned curry she likes – massaman, jungle, red, yellow, or even green.
queue mosh drive-by…
In the 1990’s an educational movement known as “Whole Language” swept across the country. Claiming to be based on the latest science, it became mandated curriculum in California. Massachusetts was heading in the same direction, until some 40 Massachusetts professors of linguistics wrote to the state Commissioner of Education challenging the claims to scientific support. Their letter read, in part (my bold):
The authors of the draft Content Chapter claim that research on language supports their views of reading…These supposed developments in linguistic research are used as arguments for a
comparable view of reading. We are entirely unaware of any such shift in research.
We want to alert the educational authorities of Massachusetts to the fact that the view of language research presented in this document is inaccurate, and that the claimed consequences for reading instruction should therefore be subjected to serious re-examination.
Their letter and followup correspondence with the state agencies are online at:
http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9608E&L=aera-c&F=&S=&P=684
The result of the conversation was a modified proposal for the state framework, that, IMHO, may have kept Massachusetts from going off the deep end.
The climate ruckus might be deja vu all over again, but for one thing. The leaders in Massachusetts were willing to listen to scientific dissent. The leaders in Washington, not so much.
A Welch moment? We can only hope.
I do not read Luke warmer websites.