NOTE: This has been running two weeks at the top of WUWT, discussion has slowed, so I’m placing it back in regular que. – Anthony
UPDATES:
Statistician William Briggs weighs in here
Eduardo Zorita weighs in here
Anonymous blogger “Deep Climate” weighs in with what he/she calls a “deeply flawed study” here
After a week of being “preoccupied” Real Climate finally breaks radio silence here. It appears to be a prelude to a dismissal with a “wave of the hand”
Supplementary Info now available: All data and code used in this paper are available at the Annals of Applied Statistics supplementary materials website:
http://www.imstat.org/aoas/supplements/default.htm
=========================================
Sticky Wicket – phrase, meaning: “A difficult situation”.
Oh, my. There is a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue. According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann. It seems watertight on the surface, because instead of trying to attack the proxy data quality issues, they assumed the proxy data was accurate for their purpose, then created a bayesian backcast method. Then, using the proxy data, they demonstrate it fails to reproduce the sharp 20th century uptick.
Now, there’s a new look to the familiar “hockey stick”.
Before:
After:
Not only are the results stunning, but the paper is highly readable, written in a sensible style that most laymen can absorb, even if they don’t understand some of the finer points of bayesian and loess filters, or principal components. Not only that, this paper is a confirmation of McIntyre and McKitrick’s work, with a strong nod to Wegman. I highly recommend reading this and distributing this story widely.
Here’s the submitted paper:
(PDF, 2.5 MB. Backup download available here: McShane and Wyner 2010 )
It states in its abstract:
We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.
Here are some excerpts from the paper (emphasis in paragraphs mine):
This one shows that M&M hit the mark, because it is independent validation:
In other words, our model performs better when using highly autocorrelated
noise rather than proxies to ”predict” temperature. The real proxies are less predictive than our ”fake” data. While the Lasso generated reconstructions using the proxies are highly statistically significant compared to simple null models, they do not achieve statistical significance against sophisticated null models.
We are not the first to observe this effect. It was shown, in McIntyre
and McKitrick (2005a,c), that random sequences with complex local dependence
structures can predict temperatures. Their approach has been
roundly dismissed in the climate science literature:
To generate ”random” noise series, MM05c apply the full autoregressive structure of the real world proxy series. In this way, they in fact train their stochastic engine with significant (if not dominant) low frequency climate signal rather than purely non-climatic noise and its persistence. [Emphasis in original]
Ammann and Wahl (2007)
…
On the power of the proxy data to actually detect climate change:
This is disturbing: if a model cannot predict the occurrence of a sharp run-up in an out-of-sample block which is contiguous with the insample training set, then it seems highly unlikely that it has power to detect such levels or run-ups in the more distant past. It is even more discouraging when one recalls Figure 15: the model cannot capture the sharp run-up even in-sample. In sum, these results suggest that the ninety-three sequences that comprise the 1,000 year old proxy record simply lack power to detect a sharp increase in temperature. See Footnote 12
Footnote 12:
On the other hand, perhaps our model is unable to detect the high level of and sharp run-up in recent temperatures because anthropogenic factors have, for example, caused a regime change in the relation between temperatures and proxies. While this is certainly a consistent line of reasoning, it is also fraught with peril for, once one admits the possibility of regime changes in the instrumental period, it raises the question of whether such changes exist elsewhere over the past 1,000 years. Furthermore, it implies that up to half of the already short instrumental record is corrupted by anthropogenic factors, thus undermining paleoclimatology as a statistical enterprise.
…
We plot the in-sample portion of this backcast (1850-1998 AD) in Figure 15. Not surprisingly, the model tracks CRU reasonably well because it is in-sample. However, despite the fact that the backcast is both in-sample and initialized with the high true temperatures from 1999 AD and 2000 AD, it still cannot capture either the high level of or the sharp run-up in temperatures of the 1990s. It is substantially biased low. That the model cannot capture run-up even in-sample does not portend well for its ability
to capture similar levels and run-ups if they exist out-of-sample.
…
Conclusion.
Research on multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the earth’s temperature is now entering its second decade. While the literature is large, there has been very little collaboration with universitylevel, professional statisticians (Wegman et al., 2006; Wegman, 2006). Our paper is an effort to apply some modern statistical methods to these problems. While our results agree with the climate scientists findings in some
respects, our methods of estimating model uncertainty and accuracy are in sharp disagreement.
On the one hand, we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data. The fundamental problem is that there is a limited amount of proxy data which dates back to 1000 AD; what is available is weakly predictive of global annual temperature. Our backcasting methods, which track quite closely the methods applied most recently in Mann (2008) to the same data, are unable to catch the sharp run up in temperatures recorded in the 1990s, even in-sample.
As can be seen in Figure 15, our estimate of the run up in temperature in the 1990s has
a much smaller slope than the actual temperature series. Furthermore, the lower frame of Figure 18 clearly reveals that the proxy model is not at all able to track the high gradient segment. Consequently, the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.
Our main contribution is our efforts to seriously grapple with the uncertainty involved in paleoclimatological reconstructions. Regression of high dimensional time series is always a complex problem with many traps. In our case, the particular challenges include (i) a short sequence of training data, (ii) more predictors than observations, (iii) a very weak signal, and (iv) response and predictor variables which are both strongly autocorrelated.
The final point is particularly troublesome: since the data is not easily modeled by a simple autoregressive process it follows that the number of truly independent observations (i.e., the effective sample size) may be just too small for accurate reconstruction.
Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models. We have shown that time dependence in the temperature series is sufficiently strong to permit complex sequences of random numbers to forecast out-of-sample reasonably well fairly frequently (see, for example, Figure 9). Furthermore, even proxy based models with approximately the same amount of reconstructive skill (Figures 11,12, and 13), produce strikingly dissimilar historical backcasts: some of these look like hockey sticks but most do not (Figure 14).
Natural climate variability is not well understood and is probably quite large. It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries. Nonetheless, paleoclimatoligical reconstructions constitute only one source of evidence in the AGW debate. Our work stands entirely on the shoulders of those environmental scientists who labored untold years to assemble the vast network of natural proxies. Although we assume the reliability of their data for our purposes here, there still remains a considerable number of outstanding questions that can only be answered with a free and open inquiry and a great deal of replication.
===============================================================
Commenters on WUWT report that Tamino and Romm are deleting comments even mentioning this paper on their blog comment forum. Their refusal to even acknowledge it tells you it has squarely hit the target, and the fat lady has sung – loudly.
(h/t to WUWT reader “thechuckr”)
RE: John Baltutis: (August 16, 2010 at 12:20 am) “Here are two simple Excel charts of that data. The top one shows a linear fit and the bottom an exponential fit. To my 20×20, 70-yeae old eyes, I can’t tell them apart.”
Not that it makes any difference, but I have found that it seems possible to get a very good fit to the Mauna Loa season corrected data (to within 0.677 ppm average RMS error) over the current segment of available data using a hyperbolic curve where:
X=decimal_date – 1941.106
CO2=126.146 + 2.721347*SQRT(4516+X^2)
The curve is now at about 70 percent of its ultimate linear rise rate of 2.72 ppm / yr. This curve seems to work with the Mauna Loa data as it is now – it says nothing of the future or of the past. The primary residual error appears to be a two-cycle periodic function that might be related to El Nino events.
Bill Tuttle & BPW: Not sure if this was the first one, but Gavin’s response to my own initial post is still there. #235 on thread about expert credibility.
For the warmists among us, please look at the temperature reconstruction from Greenland ice Core GISP2 for the Holocene (10,000 years):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GISP2_ice_core_eng.svg
On this graph a thousand years ago looks cold.
So it now appears that the current warm period is actually one of the coldest periods of the Holocene.
@ur momisugly two moon,
You are correct. I missed it. Looked at the wrong thread. My apologies to Mr. Schmidt for having intimated that he retracted/erased it. I was wrong.
Will be interested in seeing how it is addressed in full over there when the time comes.
BPW
“Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.” Barack Obama
sTv says:
August 16, 2010 at 2:22 pm
I’ve read Stu’s comments about his views and apparently, but not suprisingly you are missing the point.
First: Stu says, “changing climate”, get it? I did not find one comment (maybe I didn’t look long enough, I haven’t read ALL his stuff) mentioning AGW or CAGW. In fact he said at the outset, His delivery was, IMHO, was logical, level headed and well laid out. He did say that he was formulating this report for about 2 years (as of OCT 2009), so you’re a little behind the times to be claiming some sort of voctory (?).
Stu, in fact, opens with:
‘Before you fire up the flamethrower, though, let me say what this long entry is NOT about.
It’s not about H.R. 2454 (more commonly known as the Waxman-Markey bill).
And I’m not telling you that you can’t drive your SUV.
This blog is about the effect of climate change upon day-to-day weather. About physics and thermodynamics not politics.’
See, NOBODY, denies that the climate changes…that would be just plain stupid. Enough factual evidence has surfaced in the last 650,000 years, its been culled, extrapolated, and presented by scientists…real scientists, and some not-so-real. We want is the truth, plain and simple. What we don’t want:
1. 1200km smoothing of surface station temps “planted” in warm locals.
2. Ice retreat when it’s actually advancing.
3. Warming when it’s actually cooling.
4. Subversion of the peer-review process (See Obama’s quote at top of post).
4. A trillion dollar tax that won’t control anything.
The Anthony’s, M&M’s, Wegman’s and now M&W’s are helping to sift through the blatant, flagrant, and I believe malicious and premeditated, attempts by purely political parties to make/take more of our money, “out of thin air”.
I will post the link to Stu’s post here, but not to my claims above due to the fact that they are OLD, OLD, OLD news and anyone can find them. I really don’t like doing people’s homework for them.
Another reason is that I have seen few (if any) people come back from said, “source checks”, no matter how reasonable, factual, or peer-reviewed and say, “You now what, that was good. I’m going to have to do some more research and re-think my position. I’ll let you know what I find.” No, they typically come back with responses (see above from the AGW, CAGW, and YOU) missing the point entirely of said ‘source’.
Through lies and misdirection your position attempts to make this a competition (I know, we also post/report when someone in the AGW community becomes sceptical).
As far as the science goes, honestly, what do you prefer: scepticism or consensus?
Here’s the link,
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/10/stu-ostro-senior-meteorologist-twc-off.html
A fifth-order polynomial, also fits well:
y = 1E-07x^5 – 0.0012x^4 + 4.8096x^3 – 9446.3x^2 + 9E+06x – 4E+09
but still isn’t easily distinguishable from a linear fit. So, Mr. Hanley, what say you now?
the horizontal en verical scales in the ‘before’ and ‘after’ graph in the article are different (do measure yourself!) and are manipulating me in the direction of your opinion;
regards
REPLY: Oh puhleezze, and you expect me to make the authors of an IPCC work and the authors of a new work create graphs on an identical basis? Just like that?
Perhaps you also think I can change the gravitational constant of the universe and make rainbows at the snap of a finger?. OTOH if I redid the graphs, I’d be vilified for “modifying” them. Catch-22.
Your comment qualifies for “comment of the week” – Anthony
John Mason 1:53 PM
“Oh, my indeed, Anthony. You have whipped this one up into a right old meringue! Google McShane Wyner 2010…..”
John,
I did just that and it is astounding the interest in this paper (19,100 results). Wow. And WUWT (specifically Anthony Watts) is to blame? Not surprising given that WUWT is a top science blog. Welcome John, to the discussion here. Yes, I am interested in further analysis of this paper and apparently so are a lot of other interested parties. Isn’t that exciting? I can hardly wait for publication, cross examination, and further analysis.
Something tells me the “Ya-Hoos” you see here are just the beginning…
Oh incidentally, on my Google search, I found a good source collecting like papers:
http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/20419/
John, I am interested in hearing what you have to say on this paper once it has properly aged for you.
“If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. “If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”
Since the Russian heat wave could be counted in days, and the American dust bowl can be counted in years -decade-, ‘splain it.
I have one thought about the silence of the ‘team’ on this one. It could be that there is an ‘official’ response pending and they are under embargo to not speak publicly about the issue. I recall Steve M. having similar issues wrt his Nature submission a while back.
Gaylon says:
“Through lies and misdirection your position attempts to make this a competition (I know, we also post/report when someone in the AGW community becomes sceptical).
As far as the science goes, honestly, what do you prefer: scepticism or consensus?”
I neither lied nor attempted misdirection. Mr. Ostro made it clear that he has changed his mind, and the fact that he works in such a prominent position at The Weather Channel should give some deniers reason to pause. At least, one would hope so.
Having said that, when can we expect you, Gaylon, to join Mr. Ostro, and other prominent former skeptics? I’m afraid Mr. Watts, sTeve, Mr. Monckton, M&M and Dr. Singer will take a little more urging before they come around. I’m hopeful that more catastrophes are not necessary to convince them.
We’ll hold places for each of you at table. You’re welcome anytime.
-sTv
CodeTech says:
August 16, 2010 at 11:56 am
James Sexton quoted:
“We assume that the data selection, collection, and processing performed by climate scientists meets the standards of their discipline.
It is an unfortunate fact that, most likely, this is completely true. And it’s not just hurling insults to point out that the discipline of “climate scientist” does not appear to include high quality data selection, collection or processing.
Mann, to me, aspires to be the Ringo Starr of climate science, but alas, has only risen to the level of Justin Beiber’s drummer.”
Lol, and I was expecting a Pete Best to be at the end of the Beatles analogy. Justin Beiber has a drummer?
James Sexton says:
August 16, 2010 at 8:08 am It seems to me, the authors knew many would have taken exception to the data collection and processing(including the imputation) and were forced to put an early disclaimer in the paper as opposed to some footnote. To me, it reads something akin to “Yes, we know they gathered and processed the data in errant fashion, but there’s only so much we can write about without publishing a textbook on how not to apply statistics.” The sentence “We assume that the data selection, collection, and processing performed by climate scientists meets the standards of their discipline.”, seems to be a particular harsh slap at an entire profession. OUCH!!!
___________________________________________________________________
I had the feeling there were a few more “hidden” slaps besides that one.
Remark from paper
“For example, 1998 is generally considered to be the warmest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere. Using our model, we calculate that there is a 36% posterior probability that 1998 was the warmest year over the past thousand. If we consider rolling decades, 1997-2006 is the warmest on record; our model gives an 80% chance that it was the warmest in the past thousand years. Finally, if we look at rolling thirty-year blocks, the posterior probability that the last thirty years(again, the warmest on record) were the warmest over the past thousand is 38%. […] For k = 10, k = 30, and k = 60, we estimate a zero posterior probability that the past thousand years contained run-ups larger than those we have experienced over the past ten, thirty, and sixty years (again, the largest such run-ups on record). This suggests that the temperature derivatives encountered over recent history are unprecedented in the millennium.”
So whats all the fuss about? Everyone is acting as if this is the silver bullet?
Swap short for long and you got it nailed. Sun emits primarily in visible spectrum (violet through red) and the clear sky is largely transparent to it. These rays hit the ocean and are mostly absorbed in the first 30 meters or so. It warms the water. The warm water then emits the energy upward in long wave infrared. Visible light is shorter wavelengths. CO2 and especially water vapor are not transparent to infrared like they are to visible light. Those gases absorb a portion of the upwelling infrared and then the gases in turn get warmed up and emit the energy in long wave infrared. The difference is, as you noted, that the warm gases emit the energy in all directions, a portion of which is straight back down from whence it came. The net effect is it slows downs how quickly the infrared radiation can escape into space. The gases are insulators. They don’t actually trap much energy because the gases have so little heat capacity compared to water. The net effect is that the water doesn’t cool off as quickly.
Think of two separate rocks heated nice & warm by sun during the day. You throw a blanket over one of them at night. The one with the blanket over it will be warmer in the morning. Now imagine the blanket is transparent so it lets the light in during the day to warm the rock but still insulates it at night because heat doesn’t pass through the blanket like light does.
Tallbloke put it in the best nutshell I’ve seen:
The sun heats the ocean, the ocean heats the air, the air is cooled by the cold empty void of outer space.
Just curious, for I don’t know the answer, and can’t find it. What are the requirements to be a climatologist? For that matter, a pollution meteorologist, as some say they are ?
Pardon my ignorance on the subject, and TIA~
and the fact that he works in such a prominent position at The Weather Channel should give some deniers reason to pause
==========================================
Yes it does, and the second they get Cantore in the same state the hurricane is in, I’ll get back to you……..
I thought when weathermen disagreed, we were supposed to ignore them because they are not climatologists.
bob paglee says:
From New York Times:
“If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. “If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”
————–
Gavin has now given us as “persons” the green light to call the recent COLD SNAP in South America CLIMATE, this includes all cold weather events. Just wait till this winter man. :o)
do a google news search on any aspect of this McShane & Wyner paper and u will find NOT A SINGLE MENTION in the MSM.
extraordinary but not at all surprising.
Roughly 1 degree C of surface warming per doubling of atmospheric CO2 content is consistent with both physics, historical observations, and proxy evidence from the distant past in the geologic column.
Because CO2 must be doubled each time to get the same amount of surface warming (which is consistent with the physics) this handily explains why in the distant past the earth’s average surface temperature was never more that 7 or 8C warmer than today even though atmospheric CO2 content was up to twenty times more than today. It’s actually all quite consistent in both theory and observation.
Whether the CO2 rise since 1880 is anthropogenic I suppose is debatable but the circumstantial evidence that it’s anthropogenic is pretty convincing.
The bottom line from thus becomes a question of what we have to fear from burning all the fossil fuel we can dig up. There isn’t enough fossil fuel available to quadruple atmospheric CO2 so we’re looking at a maximum of 2C temperature rise and 1400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere.
If we look again at the geologic column these conditions have existed before and when they did the earth bloomed. When it was 5C warmer than today with ten times the amount of CO2 the earth was green from pole to pole and the biosphere reached its most productive point ever. It was called the Ecocene Optimum and occured about 55 million years ago.
So if you like lots of plants and animals then when it comes to fossil fuels the word is “burn, baby, burn”. If you like bare rocks and ice instead then you want to do just the opposite. Personally I like plants and animals more than rocks and ice so it’s an easy choice for me.
Henry Pool says:
August 15, 2010 at 10:59 am
“on what measurements do you base your believe that CO2 is a greehouse gas i.e that its warming properties are greater than its cooling properties?”
The optical depth of CO2 at visible wavelengths emitted by the sun compared to the optical depth of CO2 at infrared wavelengths emitted by the ground. Those would be the measurements. CO2 is transparent to visible wavelenghts and an insulator at infrared wavelengths.
Insulators insulate. Write that down.
Shouldn’t someone be updating all the Wikipedia Global Warming subjects with hockey stick diagrams to reflect this update and statistical correction ???
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa, Bill and Kim may not approve.
Wow! It has taken me nealry 2.5 hours just to read through the comments. I agree with a couple of others above, this is devastating to CAGW science due to the reliance on that Mann paper as the lynchpin of proxy-instrument temp constructions.
For those who are CAGW true believers it is difficult to not want to see in these new graphs something they know has to be there. M and w (2010) simply show that there just is not any there, there.
John Mason says:
August 16, 2010 at 1:53 pm
“Oh, my indeed, Anthony. You have whipped this one up into a right old meringue! Google McShane Wyner 2010…..”
Mr. Mason, how is it you believe Anthony is “whipping” this paper in any way? He simply posted it for people to read and comment on. Does that qualify as “whipping up”? Honestly, do you see Anthony or the moderators encouraging or discouraging the posts or the content? Further, WUWT wasn’t the first science blog to post this paper. I believe, but I could be wrong, that http://climateaudit.org/ was the first place it was posted. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with CA or not, but McIntyre(CA is his blog) did a similar paper a few years back. Here is a comment you should read.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/14/breaking-new-paper-makes-a-hockey-sticky-wicket-of-mann-et-al-99/#comment-458319
As far as whether we should be commenting on it or letting the “experts” chime in first, forgive me if I think that is a blathering, yet in a greatly condescending way, ignorant(I mean no insult but apparently you’re not familiar to the reasons why blogs such as this exist) statement. Admittedly, for myself, the statistical ability presented in this paper is probably beyond my reach, for now. (I’m working through it as we speak, but I’ll probably have to consult some trusted friends in the field.) However, in this blog, I’m not anywhere close to some of the people in terms of ability in the maths/statistics science.
That’s from Lucy Skywalker. In it she said, “Have you considered the function of WUWT and how it dovetails into, and balances, the function of Climate Audit?” While there may be some here that disagree, I don’t. I don’t often post there, because the forum lends itself to a different direction than what I can contribute to. That being said, many, if not most of the regular readers/posters here often go there, and visa versa. If you are doubting the abilities of the commentators here and there, you should do as Lucy suggests in her post and click on her name and enter into a mathematical discussion with her. Or, try Steve McIntyre, or many of the other commentators here or there.
Yes, there have been several “yea!’s” and several “boo!’s”. So what? As stated, I’m not a statistician, but the paper is well written and clear and can be followed quite easily. To use a baseball analogy, (consistent with the Cricket theme) while I’m not a pitcher, I know a strike when I see one. (Someone please translate that in Cricket terms for me!) When I learned Mann was discarding proxies that didn’t fit a criteria of his, I knew he wasn’t accurate in his conclusions regarding his proxy studies. But, so did Steve Mac. So did Lucy, (I’m not sure when Anthony converted) so did the rest of the world that cared to know. As far as waiting for the “experts” to chime in, I did. Even before 1998. When Hansen was turning off air-conditioners and giving literally thousands of interviews about how the government was silencing him, I waited, and waited, and waited. As far as your “experts” go, and I’m no where close to being one, (as I alluded to before, there are several, here and now, much more skilled at climate science than myself)I’d take a one-on-one with Gavin, Hansen, Phil, Pachy, Mann, or any of the other cast of …..and hand them their azz walking away.
P.S. I wrote a complete post, but I thought it rather lengthy, so I broke it up in two. Also, Mr. Mason, if this post seems angry, it is because it is. Only, it isn’t directed at you. Believe it or not, I enjoy discussing things of import with people of different views and different points of view, as do many here. Please come back and contribute to the discussion.
Second part:
The point is, WUWT, and CA, and many others exist because people fell down on the job while we waited for the “experts”. If they had done their job and showed just a little intestinal fortitude, the arbitrary altercations of historical data would not have happened as they continue to do today. The manipulation of the peer-review process would not have happened as continues to be done today. The idiotic hockey stick would have never been in a paper much less journals and text books as is today. The 1200 meter invention of thermometers would have never happened as it is today. Concern over the polar bears would have never happened. Does any alarmist know the polar caps had essentially melted in the middle of the last century? If the “experts” had been doing their job, we’d all know this. The Urban heat would have been accepted much earlier. The inspection of the thermometers would have, should have been done much earlier than Anthony’s endeavor. How many “experts” corrected Gore’s work of fiction? I could and probably should go on, and on, and on. Just as much as I waited. Now, if you subtract the hysteria generated by the things that should have never happened and add the things that should have happened when they should have happened, consider where this discussion would be today.
Sorry, if it hasn’t registered by now, it will soon. Even Gavin alluded to it earlier.
WE ARE THE EXPERTS NOW. The rest capitulated that title when they capitulated their integrity. Apparently, grant money holds more value than convictions to them. If they want the title of expert back, all they have to do is be open and honest and correct when they make assertions, or state that it is an assumption and admit there is a possibility they could be in error.
Personally, I’d be very happy to be able to quit worrying about what law is going to be passed to keep the polar bears from eating all the penguins and go back to focusing my energies on something more egocentric.
P.S. If my previous sentence is confusing, or any parts of my posts for that matter, just ask.