Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Judith Curry posted here on WUWT regarding rebuilding the lost trust we used to have in climate science and climate scientists. This is my response to her post, an expansion and revision of what I wrote in the comments on that thread.
First, be clear that I admire Judith Curry greatly. She is one of the very, very few mainstream climate scientists brave enough to enter into a public dialogue about these issues. I salute her for her willingness to put her views on public display, and for tackling this difficult issue.
As is often my wont in trying to understand a long and complex dissertation, I first made my own digest of what Judith said. To do so, I condensed each of her paragraphs into one or a few sentences. Here is that digest:
Digest of Judith Curry’s Post: On the Credibility of Climate Research, Part II: Towards Rebuilding Trust
1 I am trying an experiment by posting on various blogs
2 Losing the Public’s Trust
2.1 Climategate has broadened to become a crisis of trust in climate science in general.
2.2 Credibility is a combination of expertise and trust. Trust in the IPCC is faltering.
2.3 The scientists in the CRU emails blame their actions on “malicious interference”.
2.4 Institutions like the IPCC need to ask how they enabled this situation.
2.5 Core research values have been compromised by warring against the skeptics.
2.6 Climategate won’t go away until all this is resolved.
3 The Changing Nature of Skepticism about Global Warming
3.1 Skepticism has changed over time.
3.2 First it was a minor war between advocacy groups. Then, a “monolithic climate denial machine” was born. This was funded by the oil industry.
3.3 Because of the IPCC reports, funding for contrary views died up. It was replaced by climate auditors. The “climate change establishment” didn’t understand this and kept blaming the “denial machine”.
4 Climate Auditors and the Blogosphere.
4.1 Steve McIntyre’s auditing became popular and led to blogs like WUWT.
4.2 Auditors are independent, technically educated people mostly outside of academia. They mostly audit rather than write scientific papers.
4.3 The FOIA requests were motivated by people concerned about having the same people who created the dataset using the dataset in their models.
4.4 The mainstream climate researchers don’t like the auditors because Steve McIntyre is their arch-nemesis, so they tried to prevent auditors publishing in the journals. [gotta confess I couldn’t follow the logic in this paragraph]
4.5 The auditors succeeded in bringing the climate establishment to its knees because people trusted the auditors.
5 Towards Rebuilding Trust
5.1 Ralph Cicerone says that two aspects need attention, the general practice of science and the personal behaviours of scientists. Investigations are being conducted.
5.2 Climate science has not adapted to being high profile. How scientists engage with the public is inadequately discussed. The result is reflexive support for IPCC and its related policies.
5.3 The public and policy makers don’t understand the truth as presented by the IPCC. More efficient strategies can be devised by recognizing that we are dealing with two groups: educated people, and the general public. To rebuild trust scientists need to discuss uncertainty. [“truth as presented by the IPCC? say what?]
5.4 The blogosphere can be a powerful tool for increasing credibility of climate research. The climate researchers at realclimate were the pioneers in this. More scientists should participate in these debates.
5.5 No one believes that the science is settled. Scientists and others say that the science is settled. This is detrimental to public trust.
5.6 I hope this experiment will demonstrate how the blogosphere can rebuild trust.
Having made such a digest, my next step is to condense it into an “elevator speech”. This is a very short statement of the essential principles. My elevator speech of Judith’s post is this.
Climategate has destroyed the public trust in climate science. Initially skepticism was funded by big oil. Then a climate auditing movement sprang up. They were able to bring the climate establishment to its knees because people trusted them. Public and policy makers don’t understand the truth as presented by the IPCC. To rebuild trust, climate scientists need to better communicate their ideas to the public, particularly regarding uncertainty. The blogosphere can be valuable in this regard.
OK, now what’s wrong with Judith’s picture?
Can The Trust Be Rebuilt?
First, let me say that the problem is much bigger than Judith seems to think. Wiser men than I have weighed in on this question. In a speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854, Abraham Lincoln said:
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. You may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
So it will not be easy. The confidence is forfeit, that ship has sailed.
The biggest problem with Judith’s proposal is her claim that the issue is that climate scientists have not understood how to present their ideas to the public. Judith, I respect you greatly, but you have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. The problem is not how climate scientists have publicly presented their scientific results. It is not a communication problem.
The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence. The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.
And most disturbing, for years you and the other climate scientists have not said a word about this disgraceful situation. When Michael Mann had to be hauled in front of a congressional committee to force him to follow the simplest of scientific requirements, transparency, you guys were all wailing about how this was a huge insult to him.
An insult to Mann? Get real. Mann is an insult and an embarrassment to climate science, and you, Judith, didn’t say one word in public about that. Not that I’m singling you out. No one else stood up for climate science either. It turned my stomach to see the craven cowering of mainstream climate scientists at that time, bloviating about how it was such a terrible thing to do to poor Mikey. Now Mann has been “exonerated” by one of the most bogus whitewashes in academic history, and where is your outrage, Judith? Where are the climate scientists trying to clean up your messes?
The solution to that is not, as you suggest, to give scientists a wider voice, or educate them in how to present their garbage to a wider audience.
The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence there was deafening. Now there is another whitewash investigation, and the silence only deepens.
And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes.
And you still don’t seem to get it. You approvingly quote Ralph Cicerone about the importance of transparency … Cicerone?? That’s a sick joke.
You think people made the FOI (Freedom of Information) requests because they were concerned that the people who made the datasets were the same people using them in the models. As the person who made the first FOI request to CRU, I assure you that is not true. I made the request to CRU because I was disgusted with the response of mainstream climate scientists to Phil Jone’s reply to Warwick Hughes. When Warwick made a simple scientific request for data, Jones famously said:
Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?
When I heard that, I was astounded. But in addition to being astounded, I was naive. Looking back, I was incredibly naive. I was so naive that I actually thought, “Well, Phil’s gonna get his hand slapped hard by real scientists for that kind of anti-scientific statements”. Foolish me, I thought you guys were honest scientists who would be outraged by that.
So I waited for some mainstream climate scientist to speak out against that kind of scientific malfeasance … and waited … and waited. In fact, I’m still waiting. I registered my protest against this bastardisation of science by filing an FOI. When is one of you mainstream climate scientist going to speak out against this kind of malfeasance? It’s not too late to condemn what Jones said, he’s still in the news and pretending to be a scientist, when is one of you good folks going to take a principled stand?
But nobody wants to do that. Instead, you want to complain and explain how trust has been broken, and you want to figure out more effective communication strategies to repair the trust.
You want a more effective strategy? Here’s one. Ask every climate scientist to grow a pair and speak out in public about the abysmal practices of far, far too many mainstream climate scientists. Because the public is assuredly outraged, and you are all assuredly silent, sitting quietly in your taxpayer funded offices and saying nothing, not a word, schtumm … and you wonder why we don’t trust you?
A perfect example is you saying in your post:
Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this …
For you to say this without also expressing outrage at realclimate’s ruthless censorship of every opposing scientific view is more of the same conspiracy of silence. Debate is not “alive and well” at realclimate as you say, that’s a crock. Realclimate continues to have an undeserved reputation that it is a scientific blog because you and other mainstream climate scientists are unwilling to bust them for their contemptuous flouting of scientific norms. When you stay silent about blatant censorship like that, Judith, people will not trust you, nor should they. You have shown by your actions that you are perfectly OK with realclimate censoring opposing scientific views. What kind of message does that send?
The key to restoring trust has nothing to do with communication. Steve McIntyre doesn’t inspire trust because he is a good communicator. He inspires trust because he follows the age-old practices of science — transparency and openness and freewheeling scientific discussion and honest reporting of results.
And until mainstream climate science follows his lead, I’ll let you in on a very dark, ugly secret — I don’t want trust in climate science to be restored. I don’t want you learning better ways to propagandize for shoddy science. I don’t want you to figure out how to inspire trust by camouflaging your unethical practices in new and innovative ways. I don’t want scientists learning to use clever words and communication tricks to get people to think that the wound is healed until it actually is healed. I don’t want you to learn to use the blogosphere to spread your pernicious unsupported unscientific alarmism.
You think this is a problem of image, that climate science has a bad image. It is nothing of the sort. It is a problem of scientific malfeasance, and of complicity by silence with that malfeasance. The public, it turns out, has a much better bullsh*t detector than the mainstream climate scientists do … or at least we’re willing to say so in public, while y’all cower in your cubbyholes with your heads down and never, never, never say a bad word about some other climate scientist’s bogus claims and wrong actions.
You want trust? Do good science, and publicly insist that other climate scientists do good science as well. It’s that simple. Do good science, and publicly call out the Manns and the Joneses and the Thompsons and the rest of the charlatans that you are currently protecting. Call out the journals that don’t follow their own policies on data archiving. Speak up for honest science. Archive your data. Insist on transparency. Publish your codes.
Once that is done, the rest will fall in line. And until then, I’m overjoyed that people don’t trust you. I see the lack of trust in mainstream climate science as a huge triumph for real science. Fix it by doing good science and by cleaning up your own backyard. Anything else is a coverup.
Judith, again, my congratulations on being willing to post your ideas in public. You are a rara avis, and I respect you greatly for it.
w.
PS – In your post you talk about a “monolithic climate denial machine”?? Puhleease, Judith, you’re talking to us individual folks who were there on the ground individually fighting the battle. Save that conspiracy theory for people who weren’t there, those who don’t know how it went down.
This is another huge problem for mainstream climate scientists and mainstream media alike. You still think the problem is that we opposed your ideas and exposed your errors. You still see the climate scientists as the victims, even now in 2010 when the CRU emails have shown that’s nonsense. Every time one of your self-appointed spokes-fools says something like “Oh, boo hoo, the poor CRU folks were forced to circle their wagons by the eeevil climate auditors”, you just get laughed at harder and harder. The CRU emails showed they were circling the FOI wagons two years before the first FOI request, so why haven’t you noticed?
The first step out of this is to stop trying to blame Steve and Anthony and me and all the rest of us for your stupidity and your dishonesty and your scientific malfeasance. [Edited by public demand to clarify that the “your stupidity” etc. refers to mainstream climate scientists as a group and not to Judith individually.] You will never recover a scrap of trust until you admit that you are the source of your problems, all we did was point them out. You individually, and you as a group, created this mess. The first step to redemption is to take responsibility. You’ve been suckered by people like Stephen Schneider, who said:
To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
That worked fine for a while, but as Lincoln pointed out, it caught up with you. You want trust? Disavow Schneider, and STOP WITH THE SCARY SCENARIOS. At this point, you have blamed everything from acne to world bankruptcy on eeevil global warming. And you have blamed everything from auditors to the claimed stupidity of the common man for your own failures. STOP IT! We don’t care about your pathetic justifications, all you are doing is becoming the butt of jokes around the planet. You seem to have forgotten the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Read it. Think about it. Nobody cares about your hysteria any more. You are in a pit of your own making, and you are refusing to stop digging … take responsibility.
Because we don’t want scientists who are advocates. We’re not interested in scientists who don’t mention their doubts. We’re sick of your inane “simplified dramatic statements”. We laugh when you cry wolf with your scary scenarios. Call us crazy, but we want scientists who are honest, not scientists who balance honesty and effectiveness. You want trust? Get honest, kick out the scoundrels, and for goodness sakes, get a clue about humility.
Because the truth is, climate science is one of the newest sciences. The truth is, we know little about the climate, we’ve only been studying it intensely for a couple decades. The truth is, we can’t project the climate of the next decade, much less that of the next century. The truth is, we have no general theory of climate. The truth is, we don’t know if an average temperature rise of a couple degrees will be a net benefit or a net loss. The truth is, all of us are human, and our knowledge of the climate is in its infancy. And I don’t appreciate being lectured by infants. I don’t appreciate being told that I should be put in the dock in a Nuremberg style trial for disagreeing with infants. You want to restore trust? Come down off your pedestals, forsake your ivory towers, and admit your limitations.
And through all of this, be aware that you have a long, long, long climb back up to where we will trust you. As Lincoln warned, you have forfeited the confidence of your fellow citizens, and you will be damn lucky if you ever get it back.
[Update: please see Dr. Curry’s gracious response below, at Judith Curry (04:34:45)]
[Update 2: Dr. Curry’s second response is here, and my reply is here]
[Update 3: Dr. Curry steps up and delivers the goods. My reply.]
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@jim Clarke (11:50:42) :
“…She believes that computers models (the IPCC argument) speak truth! She apparently believes in science by authority and/or majority, and not by reason or logic!”
While your post was overly harsh imho, I do agree with that quote right there. It seems that a big disconnect, even with Judith’s essays, is that science-by-authority-or-citation somehow goes without saying. It seems to be not just an accepted way of doing things in that field, but the default! It is like Climate Science as a field has never had a reality check with data until the past few months, which amazingly might not be too far from the truth.
Willis,
In your comment at 9.42:33 you said: ” My take is that she’s not much different from me or most of us, just another fool whose intentions are good.”
This tells me quite a lot about you. You were probably at university in 1965 when the Animals released ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, which means that you are probably in your early 60s now. Further, it tells me that you are a bit of a music buff.
Wikipedia: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is a song written by Bennie Benjamin, Gloria Caldwell and Sol Marcus for the singer/pianist Nina Simone, who first recorded it in 1964. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” has been recorded or performed by many artists, and is widely known by the 1965 blues rock hit recording from The Animals.
@ur momisugly IsoTherm (07:49:32) : An unprecendented change in temperature at the same time as an unprecedented (post ice-age … I may be wrong) change in CO2, would be strong circumstantial evidence of a link.”
Logical fallacy–appeal to ignorance. It’s also a cum hoc ergo propter hoc, Ignoring Common Cause (A and B regularly occur together, but no common cause is looked for; therefore, A causes B) AND a Post Hoc.
I guess you could say that the whole AGW scam is built on a bunch of fallacies. From start to finish, it’s bad reasoning. Appeal to Emotion? It’s in there. Appeal to Negative Consequences? It’s in there. Appeal to Fear? Ditto. Personal Attack? Got that too, and lots of it. Appeals to Authority? Yep. And the big one…Appeal to Popularity. “There’s a scientific consensus; therefore it’s true.” Um, no.
Or how about Circumstantial ad hominem, like claiming that because Fred Singer used to work in the tobacco industry, that makes him unfit to comment on AGW…or that because Big Oil funds the skeptics, their arguments are automatically suspect. Well, following that line of reasoning, the warmers are ALSO funded by Big Oil, so their arguments are suspect as well. While a person’s interests will provide them with motives to support certain claims, the claims stand or fall on their own. However, the mere fact that the person has a motivation to make the claim does not make it false–and that goes for both sides.
MIsleading vividness? “Hurricane Katrina was caused by AGW; therefore, we can expect these events to occur more often in the future”…despite statistical evidence to the contrary.
I could keep going, but I think you get the picture. This is what happens when you bring AGW out of the realm of science (if indeed it was ever IN the realm of science) and into the realm of the religious.
Lucy Skywalker (10:50:31) :
IsoTherm (06:50:50) : …can I remind everyone that there is good scientific evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. … Now can anyone tell me where this argument is wrong?
Yes. Click my name
Lucy a good webpage and well worth a read, but you haven’t covered the essential question in climate science: “is the recent perturbation consistent with natural variation”. This is a very simple test that anyone familiar with signal processing would understand: how unlikely given the normal variation, would it be to get the signal under consideration. If it isn’t unusual then we cannot say the warming was caused by anything except natural variation – which is an engineers cop out for “we haven’t a clue what caused it but it certainly isn’t unusual”.
But to understand what is “abnormal” you must first determine what is normal, and it turns out that the normal climatic variation has a strong frequency variation with dramatically higher long term components. What this means is that the variation tends to see natural long-term swings, which people who don’t understand can easily misconstrue as some kind of “external” forcing on the system. Think of it as smaller waves, on top of the natural tide (plus a long in between). You see the smaller waves, and then you watch and it appears as if the sea level is rising, as if it would continue to rise forever. In the climate the frequency components are much closer together, more like a small wave on a larger wave – but the effect is the same, the climate “scientists” see the small variations, and don’t realise that these are sitting on much bigger and longer natural variations, so when they see a trend they think it is “something” happennig and don’t recognise it as normal larger-scale noise within this type of system.
I would personally suggest that the failure of climate “science” to understand the basics of noise, is the reason why they have deluded themselves that there is a signal when what we see is entirely consistent with natural variation.
One of the characteristics of the natural noise pattern which it seems to me (and to the IPCC by their report) is dominant in the climatic signal, is that you can often find small sections of the graph that appear remarkably similar to the overall graph, and just to take an example the 1945-60 section has this property. It is a shorter and smaller amplitude section, but when you expand the (time) and amplitude of the shorter section it appears like the whole 150 years.
So if you want to “predict” the future turn it around, and look at the section after the 1945-60 mini-temperature record and what follows is one possible scenario for climate after 2000.
And for those who didn’t follow: go to this link (http://www.tursiops.cc/fm/) scan down to look at the graph “Pinknoise” (below whitenoise) and see if you think the first quarter has a remarkable resemblence to the global temperature graphs?
Great post! I link it at http://rasmusen.dreamhosters.com/b/2010/02/991/
One comment in case you rewrite this: explain more what you mean about RealClimate. I think you mean that they edit the comments section to keep out persuasive arguments against their position, and don’t link to opposing websites like this one (as I recall, they have a blogroll with conspicuous absences, which is the most irrefutable evidence of an attempt to avoid good opposing arguments). But say that in your post. Newcomers won’t know what you’re talkinga bout otherwise.
I applaud Dr. Judith Curry for making the effort to open this discussion. It has been posted on many skeptic blogs, but on the other side, I could only find it on Joe Romm’s blog. Real Climate, DeSmog, Rabbet Run, and Dot Earth did not have it. But unfortunately, I don’t know all of the other blogs so I don’t know where else it might have been.
I hope the Dr. Curry found the response enlightening. I would like to add that I think that there is a big difference in culture between the scietific establishment and the skeptics. As an engineer, I think I can relate to this. In my early years, the process was to create a design, have a design review with our peers, and throw it over the wall and hope there was no feedback. This I think is similar to the scientific process. They get through their peer review, get their work published and that is the end of the process. In the late 1980’s, because of primairly Japanese influence, there was an effort to change the culture. People from manufacturing, quality, customers and customer support became part of our design team. It was amazing the valuable input that we got and what a tremendous resource these additional people were.
When this process was first introduced, we would allow for a period of venting. This is exactly what Dr. Curry got when she opened this discussion. I do hope that she finds this discussion helpful. I think that the skeptic community can add a great deal to the advancement of science. The areas that come to mind are managing and archiving data, configuration management and statistics.
Smokey (09:00:38) :
IsoTherm (06:50:50),
‘CO2 has risen by about one-third over the past century, but global temperatures are not much different than they were thirty years ago. Something is wrong with the CO2=CAGW hypothesis. It’s too bad Dr Curry can’t bring herself to admit that the assumptions used by climate alarmists are consistently wrong for a self-serving reason: they want to scare the public into shoveling more money their way.’
The “End justifies the Means” The “End” = Close down all fossil fuel production by CO2 regulations. The “Means” = bend and/or break Scientific rules. Why? Big Money and Cronyism Politics and the belief in “We have the high moral ground on this issue”.
I wish I had a dollar (due to inflation) for ever time I have heard, “It’s the right thing to do”.
Perhaps the AGW cult could get Michael Crichton to write their next treatise, er, IPCC report. One of the reasons his novels are so popular is that they usually contain 95-99% verifiable facts, even though the story line may(?) not be true. That would make a report that many more people believed and the skeptics had a harder time disproving. But, I believe he is also a skeptic.
McIntyre is trusted because he is open with what he does, true.
And, if he is proven to be wrong, I fully expect him to say so —
And he will still be trusted.
Jones, Hansen, etc?
They will never be trusted by the public. Never again. Not so long as the internet is able to freely remind people of who and what they are.
Yes; 1) Atmospheric window at 10 um corresponding to 2) peak in the Planck curve for warmer earth temperatures.
At best, CO2 effects are marginal owing to bracketing on either side by water vapor …
For a ‘warmer’ earth, you are fighting radiative power with an exponent to the 4th power with Planck’s curve (LWIR radiation) in conjunction with the path to space through the atmospheric window as well. I would say there is good reason why earth’s surface temperature is in and about the 10 um atmospheric window in relation to the peak occurring in Planck’s curve; the system’s temperature having reached a state of relative equilibrium over the eons …
.
.
“kwik (11:55:53) :
Another funny thing is that leftist’s dont understand what a shareholder is, and how the private sector works. They are afraid of it, and hide in some government institution.”
Spot on, kwik. My christian socialist landlord (not kidding!) told me he would like to see the stock market and shares abolished because shareholders suck the lifeblood out of society… they’ll believe anything Der Spiegel writes i think and misunderstand it along the way.
Funnily, i had no problems convincing him that AGW ain’t real. Go figure…
Sorry to go on, but I’ve just worked out how to explain this to people without signal processing backgrounds. There is an argument for the existence of god that there must be a supreme being being the universe exhibits such a find mechanism that just as the existence of a watch shows that there must have been a watchmaker even though we have never seen them.
The counter-argument to the watchmaker is that systems can exhibit complex patterns without there being a need for a “watchmaker” aka god. A classic example is evolution, whereby entirely random events are built up and collected into the natural characteristics of species.
Just as pre-Darwin, people believed that the variation of species must indicate some “external” force which they attributed to god, so the climate-scientists look at the natural patterns in the climate, and can’t conceive that the short-term variation could possibly explain the long term variation they see, so seeing unexplained trends, they looked for a “watchmaker” and found CO2.
QED. The the climate god called “CO2” must exist, we must sacrifice to the climate god and unless we do so we shall all go to global warming hell. (Except those who buy Al Gores Carbon Credit indulgences which exempt these righteous people from global warming hell)
“UzUrBrn (12:53:59) :
Perhaps the AGW cult could get Michael Crichton to write their next treatise, er, IPCC report. ”
Unfortunately, Michael Crichton ain’t available anymore… he passed away a few years ago.
[ snip – call to action you mentioned was just a bit OTT and can be misconstrued]
Dr Curry has been quite happy to be part of the climate “science” gravy train until now, taking money from hard pressed taxpayers.
Her posts are just CYA as she sees which way the wind is blowing. “Denier” and “Big Oil conspiracy” indeed. RealClimate a useful blog? Get real. It is a mouthpiece for extremist fanatics funded by deep green propaganda organisations.
The current crop of climate researchers involved in the AGW fraud need to stand up publicly, declare that their research is untrustworthy at best, fraud at worst and warn politicians and policy makers that no action should be taken as a result of it. Then retire, be investigated and some face appropriate criminal charges. Reduction of sentences for those who admit the error of their ways
This is a fight for the existence of technological civilization. There’s no room for compromise or mercy. Those who were on the other side must have their reputations utterly destroyed.
This is a complex issue that can’t be solved with (often goofy) hyperpartisan oversimplification.
One problem is constriction of flow of ideas, so further tightening of an already narrowly-focused review process is the opposite of what is needed in many cases. Strategic liberalization might help ensure alternative ideas are not so easy to choke.
The main thing is that whatever gets published needs to sensibly qualify conclusions. For example, “If assumptions A, B, & C hold, then …”, etc.
It has become mainstream convention in disciplines like biology, economics, & climate science to apply untenable assumptions (in calculating p-values for example) without even being explicit. Since most people, including the majority of academics, lack the deep foundations necessary to realize this, nonsensical notions about statistics & their interpretation have (dangerously) become mainstream convention.
Perhaps sometimes the answer is to (rather than block a paper) require that words like “proves” be toned down to something a whole lot more sober.
So in a nutshell: Liberalization with appropriate qualifiers coupled with statistical miseducation reduction (the latter of which will require decades or more).
Willis,
Your essay, in the guise of this retort, was brilliant. Well done, indeed!
I sincerely hope that you, Anthony & Steve can truly appreciate the impact you have had on all of mankind’s trajectory toward good health & welfare.
Thank you, thank you very much. btc
Willis Eschenbach : great posting, although a mite long, and it’s taken me 4hours to read all the comments. Glad I did!: Willis Eschenbach (10:36:22) no wonder you think like a real person, I’ve walked many of the same paths to enlightenment.
Dr Curry complains about tomatoes from both sides. 🙂 better then the brickbats and stones that have come our way. The new”peer” review is, publish here, and get a real examination by your peers, the auditors of the world, WUWT.
Willis, I get the impression that there’s a few realclimate folks in here trying to burn the Doc with their sarcasm and venom and poison any future communication by her with WUWT. The lady has, very apparently, made an honest attempt toward “rebuilding the lost trust we used to have in climate science and climate scientists” –as you said. Time to call for a separate peace with anyone coming to the door who genuinely wants to work toward common ground; especially someone with Doctor Curry’s qualifications. In future, might be prudent to use less hot curry powder in any rebuttal to a guest’s blog entry.
UzUrBrn (12:53:59) :
Perhaps the AGW cult could get Michael Crichton to write their next treatise, er, IPCC report . . . I believe he is also a skeptic.
**************************************
Aside from the fact that he’s dead, this is an excellent idea.
UzUrBrn (12:53:59) :
UzUrBrn, Michael Crichton died in 2008, I’m sad to say.
If you look at his site on AGW, you will see that he was on our side. He was firmly footed in the world of facts.
And, scroll down to the bottom; IPCC itself debunked models already in 2001!!!
So how the Carbon Cult can use model-outputs from models as scientific proofs, in papers used by the IPCC….is beyond me.
Here;
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html
@ur momisugly Judith Curry (04:34:45):
This fair minded community welcomes your participation. Not because you are brave. We welcome the interaction with practitioners, including Drs Christie and Spencer, and nobody congratulates them for being brave.
You are entitled to expect respect when your articles have earned the right to be respected. But your thesis is infuriating and I totally support Willis in his forthright rebuttal.
I will not dwell on the “Big Baccy” (or whatever) and “Well Funded Denial” (or whatever) nonsense. I’d just like to advise you to leave that kind of lazy, empty-headed conjecture out of your future attempts to make friends and influence.
You have sought to open a discussion on the grounds that winning over the public is only a matter of better presentation. Bad move!
As another poster has already said – how much “presentation” does your argument really need? Surely that alone should have told you something.
But that’s not what reall bothers me about your argument. I reserve the most criticism for the arrogant assumption that the public is gullible and ignorant enough to buy the same dead arguments, if they were better presented. That’s well below the standard of thinking that we should expect from you.
You have still not come to terms with havng lost control and the initiative to the bloggers. Somebody mentioned number of psychological stages for change (Denial, Anger, Depression and Acceptance) and you appear to be struggling to dig yourself out of denial.
It must be tough for institutional academia to suffer the indignity of losing the agenda to “outsiders”. People who lack the luxuries of reputation and funding enjoyed by academia.
But that’s what has happened, and it happened for one simple reason. Think of it as a measure of the quality of the science as practised in academia versus the standards of science being promoted by McIntyre, Watts and many others.
They may be “outsiders”, but you make a mistake when you assume that people outside academia are stupid. There are plenty of people out there who are just as well qualified, clever and experienced as you’ll find in academia.
That should warn you to forget about trying to put old wine in new bottles in a new campaign of persuasion.
The only way to get back the initiative is to beat the “outsiders” at their own game. Do better science and do it according to the well tried and tested priciciples of the scientific method.
Come back and talk on those terms, and perhaps people around here will not be so harsh and critical.
But right now Judith, you are hoping to persuade the public that they won’t get their fingers dirty if they pick up a turd by the clean end.
Willis,
A homerun IMHO, yes a Homerun. I think you verbalized what so many people that follow this debate FEEL. I also want to thank Judith for offering up the Talking points. As well thanks to Anthony and his hard working crew. Also a hand can be given to all the people who visit here and post here. It shows how important this debate is to so many that have it rammed down their throat from the one-sided, one sighted, Blind Alarmists……Like the worst of the worst Joe Romm…….Sincere Thanks to You, John T.
UzUrBrn (12:53:59) :
Perhaps the AGW cult could get Michael Crichton to write their next treatise, er, IPCC report. One of the reasons his novels are so popular is that they usually contain 95-99% verifiable facts, even though the story line may(?) not be true. That would make a report that many more people believed and the skeptics had a harder time disproving. But, I believe he is also a skeptic.
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Except that Crichton died on November 4, 2008.
There is little that I disagree with in Willis’s post. I too am angry, livid angry, and deeply regret not delving into the debates when I first read of M & M’s critique of the “hockey stick”. I am late to the party but thankfully not too late.
Every poster here should at least recognize Dr. Curry’s attempt at dialogue as more then reasonably brave . Dr. Curry had to know that she was putting herself squarely in the middle when her post was published. If she didn’t she does now. I trust that those who post disagreement with her article and her past assertions re: climate will remain respectful in their comments regarding Dr. Curry.
Dr. Curry holds a view on climate change that most on this blog do not. But the last 2 days of dialogue involving Dr. Curry’s post have been stimulating and informative. How much more productive the debate would be if more scientist and advocates of “warming” had a least 1/10 the courage and grace that Dr. Curry does.
Why would you respect this woman? She is certainly no scientist worthy of the name based on her arguments that, summed up, still blame the “deniers” for the increasing public doubt about her “scientists”.