Dr. Michael Mann gives a lecture on his work at the University of Rhode Island.
People send me stuff, and for that I’m always grateful, and happy to oblige posting relevant comments and content for the wide distribution WUWT now enjoys. Gary Boden writes:
I video taped Mann’s lecture at the University of Rhode Island last month and finally was able to get it converted to digital format and uploaded to Photobucket. The quality isn’t great, but not so bad considering it was shot with a handheld mini-DV camcorder from the balcony.
Here are the links to the several parts (I had to split it up for size-constraints). The lecture is in parts A – E and there are two questions and answers. The very last item (Q and A part 2) is Mann being asked to respond to Steve McIntyre’s criticisms – and Mann’s comments about Steve.
Here is the event description from URI:
September 23 — Scientific Evidence of Global Climate Change — Michael E. Mann, director, Earth System Science Center at Penn State. Click here for more information. Please Note: change of venue from Chafee 271 to Edwards Auditorium.
While Dr. Mann certainly seems committed to his work, and his work is important to many, the lack of courtesy for even basic recognition to other professionals whom have also worked equally hard is troubling. You can watch the videos (at the links below) of his entire lecture, and judge the content for yourself.
Each of these videos will open in a new full sized window, you can then resize the window to your liking.
Jeff (09:17:50) You know, I kind of feel sorry for them. They have a fragile and untenable paradigm to defend which appears doomed. How about the latest from Livermore about the tropospheric temperatures? Is it just more data manipulation and inappropriate statistics?
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Readers of this item will be interested to know that Mann will have a session at the next EGU General Assembly in 2009 (see http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2009
Here are the details
CL10 Climate of the last millennium: reconstructions, analyses and explanation of regional and seasonal changes
Convener: Mann, M.
This subject has received considerable attention over the last 10-15 years. The purpose of this session is to bring together paleoclimatologists working on higher-resolution proxy information and climate modellers simulating the period. Emphasis will be given to presentations of the regional and seasonal detail (particularly for Europe) in both reconstructions (single and multi-proxy) and climate model output. The importance of a reliable knowledge of forcing histories (both global and regional aspects) within the modelling framework will also be addressed.
Main Scientific Organiser and Convenor Mann, M. Dept. of Meteorology Penn State University Walker Building 16802 University Park, PA United States of America. E-mail: mann@meteo.psu.edu; mann@psu.edu
Deputy Organizer(s)/ Co-Convener(s) Jones, P. Climatic Research Unit University of East Anglia Watton Road NR4 7TJ Norwich United Kingdom Tel.: +44 1603 592090 Fax: +44 1603 507784 E-mail: p.jones@uea.ac.uk and Jouzel, J. France E-mail: jouzel@lsce.saclay.cea.fr
I suppose a key part of the session will be about how much Mann and ‘the team’ has learnt from Steve McIntyre and colleagues and the continuing debate on Climate Audit.
I think it would be good if Anthony started a thread for discussion on the compact fluorescent bulbs – sorry to suggest more work! When we bought our previous house back in 1987 there was a Philips Compact in one of the lights, I suspect it was made in Holland. It was still going when we sold the house in 2007, 20 years on. Admittedly it was in a room where it didn’t get everyday use, but 20 years is still pretty good. A couple of years back I started to replace other lights in the house with the newer CF fittings but had all sorts of trouble with them, a number just snapped off at the glass/plastic interface at the base. Others just gave up the ghost. These fittings are no being made in their billions in China and I don’t think the technology or quality has really advanced that much, if anything they’ve gone backwards. I think its a bit of a racket to get people to buy expensive bulbs that I’m not convinced will give people much more extended life over incandescent globes which is supposedly one of their biggest plus points. I think the quality is very poor these days. End of rant.
I’m with Pete and Pompous Git on this.
EGU groupie (19:43:52) It seems pretty obvious from the changed postings that the Piltdown Mann has done that he plagiarizes Steve McIntyre’s work without attribution. This is supposed to be a big No-No in academia.
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Neil,
I am a pragmatic environmentalist (I even used to donate to NRDC) and what amazes about environmental extremists is that they bought so quickly into the “energy saving benefit is greater than the environmental and human health risk” cost/benefit/risk trade off for fluorescent bulbs. Actually, I have a sneaking suspicion that they didn’t even think about such a trade off, and this may be a good illustration of how rational thought does not apply. Environmentalism is a religion.
I just did a quick google search on “fluorescent MSDS” and low and behold, phosphor dust, mercury vapor, safe handling for broken bulbs and procedures for disposal as a hazardous material. One advised that in large quantities the concerns were greater. What happens now when no individual disposes of in large quantities, but collectively, the land fills and any municipal incinerators start getting many small ‘deposits’ that end up turning into the need for an Environmental Street bailout.
Also, I’m not saying that fluorescent bulbs are not a reasonable trade off, and, yes, some of the new ones are getting better but I’d like to see an objective analysis done to support their use. In a similar manner, I think it would be interesting to develop the carbon cap and trade (tax) need with an objective cost/benefit/risk assessment.
Neil,
My experience mirrors yours. The 12-year-old CFL in our kitchen has been glowing away reliably despite frequent on / off switching and thousands of hours of use. All the rest of our bulbs are newer ones, installed in the last year, many of which are flood-style, and thus very expensive. Their failure rate seems extraordinary, compared to the older bulb, or even to incandescents. In the last year, one of our CFLs broke during installation, and three others burnt out (one, in my daughter’s bedroom, went with a visible puff of spoke).
I’ve started marking the ceramic base of all new bulbs with install dates and place of purchase. And of course, we keep receipts.
I agree this is quite OT for this thread. Still, it’s a terrible thing to have to keep one’s righteous indignation all pent up.
The scary part is the applause Mann received from the audience.Are students getting educated or merely degreed? Then again maybe most of the audience is made up of true believers anyway.I am glad someone questioned him.
Most definitely the skeptics must debate these alarmists, but it seems that the alarmists are the ones avoiding the debate.
Me thinks global warming alarmism is taking on the characteristics of a psuedoscience, with the high priest calling for decertification of credentials of the skeptics, the bringing of lawsuits and treason charges, and okaying of vandalism and civil or uncivil disobedience to “protect the planet”
In the words of John Paul Jones, “I have yet to begun to fight’ as the motto to be adopted by the skeptics.
Gary said: “his conclusions did NOT reach the level of statisical signifificance (95%) expected for scientific research”.
Professor John Brignell at Numberwatch doesn’t think 95% is rigorous enough and explains why:
Statistical significance:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/significance.htm
It is difficult to generalise, but on the whole P<0.01 would normally be considered significant and P<0.001 highly significant.
The provenance of the P<0.05 criterion goes back to the great pioneer of significance testing, R A Fisher, who is deemed to have given it his imprimatur. He did not in fact do this and late in his life stated that he had just used this level in his calculations as a “mathematical convenience”. Furthermore, he also stated that “without randomisation there is no significance”.
Many leading scientists and mathematicians today believe that the emphasis on significance testing is grossly overdone. P<0.05 had become an end in itself and the determinant of a successful outcome to an experiment, much to the detriment of the fundamental objective of science, which is to understand.”
This pushback by Mann, to continue to pretend there was no Medieval warming period, and that his so-called hockey stick is credible is just part and parcel with the echo-chamber AGW creates.
The promoters of the apocalypse now are smoothing out the differences between the troposphere temps and their models, to creat the impression that their models have accuracy.
As mentioned up thread, we are seeing an entire science getting higjacked by apocalyptic prophecy.
How about the latest from Livermore about the tropospheric temperatures? Is it just more data manipulation and inappropriate statistics?
Seems not. A team of 17 researchers from 12 institutions have produced a study that is, among other things, a comprehensive rebuttal of the “data manipulation and inappropriate statistics” of Douglass, Singer, Christy et al. Apparently this was
‘based on use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets, and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability, and application of an inappropriate statistical consistency test.’
Apparently the Climate ‘Auditors’ missed that one….
REPLY: Nope nobody missed it, but we know not to trust anything with Gavin Schmidt’s name on it. As you’ll note, the author list is the same crowd of usual suspects.
For example, Gavin won’t post anything I have (and many others) with links back to this website, or to Climate Audit. He doesn’t play fair, he’s not a gentleman, and his regular censoring actions excluding other ideas are not trustworthy of a scientist, IMHO.
BTW your first link does not work, it is temporary.
John (14:14:19) I suspect Steve is hard at work on this. Your simple assertion that the data was not manipulated nor statistics applied inappropriately is not convincing. I don’t buy their explanation for reworking the data and am not competent to evaluate their statistics, but someone is. Furthermore, this study just partly explained the discrepancy.
Also, the globe is cooling, for how long, even kim doesn’t know. The horse this study wants to ride is out of the barn already.
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John (14:14:19) Also, on May 1st of this year, Steve posted a communication from Douglass defending his statistics that this recent paper criticizes and extensive discussion followed.
The ‘amateurs’ at climate audit are already licking their chops, see the recent ‘moving team’ thread.
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John (14:14:19) and others. In particular, see Cliff’s comment #499 on the 5/1/08 Douglass thread at climateaudit.org
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Dennis A,
I have in my recent post demonstrated a high statistical significance to Mann’s own temperature proxies and a negative slope. In fact higher than his own correlation to ground measured temperature. (maybe he needs better thermometers)
I am not a statistician but the smoothing of proxy data ‘dramatically’ changes the significance criterion through auto correlation. There are probably a bunch of readers with more experience that could expound on that point.
The p level is entirely arbitrary and its meaning often leads to incorrect conclusions. I believe it also is used as a convenient way to make a false claim with the auto correlation difficult to quantify and disprove. It sounds nitpicky on Climate Audit when the posters discuss the difference but it goes right to the heart of the matter at times.
In the second link from John Philip “data manipulation and inappropriate statistics” which states:
“”The bottom line is that we obtained results strikingly different from those of Douglass et al. The “robust statistical test” that they used to compare models and observations had at least one serious flaw – its failure to account for any uncertainty in the “signal component” of observed temperature trends (see QUESTION 7). This flaw led them to reach incorrect conclusions. We showed this by applying their test to randomly generated data with the same statistical properties as the observed temperature data, but without any underlying “signal trend”. In this “synthetic data” case, we knew that significant differences in temperature trends could occur by chance only, and thus would happen infrequently. When we applied the Douglass et al. test, however, we found that even randomly generated data showed statistically significant trend differences much more frequently than we would expect on the basis of chance alone.””
Well SMcI has shown this for MBH9X and yet Climate science still considers these works of Mann to be great science, and MM worthy of your snide remark. Obviously, the problem is that Douglass et al are not part of the team. Different teams … different rules. Perhaps, you, John Philip, can help with this, or even explain this since you posted it. And please note that Wegman agreed with the criticisms directed at MBH.
FYI P 0.05, (for example that P<0.1), then one would say that the investigator is using a “rubber ruler” for his measurement of uncertainty.
Kim,
Puzzled. Of the global mean temperature datasets produced by various agencies UAH shows the lowest rate of warming. However even the linear trends in this data for 120, 240 and 360 months are +0.11, +0.18 and +0.13C / decade respectively (in line with IPCC projections). So on what evidence do you conclude that the globe is cooling?
JP
Thanks, Anthony, here’s the permalink: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121433727/abstract
Apart from NASA, the organisations who employ these ‘usual suspects’ are:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Hadley Centre,
the University of Vienna, the NOAA, The CRU at University of East Anglia,
RSS and Yale.
I guess there’s going to be a lot of egg on a lot of faces when Steve McIntyre publishes his riposte in the International Journal of Climatology!
John Philip (16:15:56) Nobody much doubts that the earth warmed for the last quarter of the last century. It is this century that the temperature flattened out and has now started dropping. I maintain that the warming of the last part of the last century was from the PDO in its warming phase and now that the PDO has flipped, we’ll cool for another 20-30 years. If the sun is going into a Grand or Lesser Minimum, we may cool for 50-100 years. Whence: We are cooling; for how long, even kim doesn’t know.
In my opinion, the natural warming of the last quarter of the last century co-incided with the rise in CO2. That the warming has been blamed on CO2 is simply the grandest example ever of the Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc logical fallacy ever. Note that temperature is dropping while the CO2 keeps rising. Watt’s Up With That?
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John (16:15:56) Also, see lucia’s Blackboard at rankexploits.com for disconfirmation of the IPCC’s projections. The temperature plot is no longer in line with IPCC projections, in fact, it is not even close.
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John (16:15:56) Also, the Arctic is freezing back up. Maximum melt was two summer’s ago. Last summer ended with 10% greater ice extent than the year before and ice extent is rising rapidly, right now. I don’t really expect a freeze-up this year as dramatic as last year’s winter because of van Loon’s prediction of a mild winter, but with the resurgence of the La Nina next year, I don’t expect next year’s melt to even reach this year’s let alone last year’s.
Whence, the Arctic is freezing back up, because the globe is cooling. For how long, even kim doesn’t know.
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Darkness falls atop the world,
Still and cold.
Go, Baby Ice, Go.
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Professor Wegman ripped this duckhead apart only a couple of years ago. Us australians emit lots of carbon dioxide making stuff like steel and aluminium. If this fool ever holidays downunder he better not mention what he does. We do not like our boys out of work.