This essay from Willis appeared on WUWT overnight Saturday while I slept. After reading it this morning, I decided to make it a sticky at the top of WUWT (I also added the open letter reference) because it says everything that needs to be said about the current state of affairs in climate science and the skeptic position. I ask readers not only to read it, but to disseminate it widely at other websites and forums. Hopefully, the right people will read this. Thanks for your consideration, and thank you, Willis.
UPDATE: I’ve made this essay available as a PDF here: Willis_Trenberth_WUWT_Essay suitable for printing and emailing. – Anthony
UPDATE2: Trenberth reacts: edits speech to fix copying, leaves “deniers”
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I would like to take as my text the following quote from the recent paper (PDF, 270k also on web here) by Dr. Kevin Trenberth:
Given that global warming is “unequivocal”, to quote the 2007 IPCC report, the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence [on the climate].
Figure 1. The game of Monopoly’s “Community Chest” card that was randomly drawn by Dr. Kevin Trenberth. Some guys are just lucky, I guess.
The “null hypothesis” in science is the condition that would result if what you are trying to establish is not true. For example, if your hypothesis is that air pressure affects plant growth rates, the null hypothesis is that air pressure has no effect on plant growth rates. Once you have both hypotheses, then you can see which hypothesis is supported by the evidence.
In climate science, the AGW hypothesis states that human GHG emissions significantly affect the climate. As such, the null hypothesis is that human GHG emissions do not significantly affect the climate, that the climate variations are the result of natural processes. This null hypothesis is what Doctor T wants to reverse.
As Steve McIntyre has often commented, with these folks you really have to keep your eye on the pea under the walnut shell. These folks seem to have sub-specialties in the “three-card monte” sub-species of science. Did you notice when the pea went from under one walnut shell to another in Dr. T’s quotation above? Take another look at it.
The first part of Dr. T’s statement is true. There is general scientific agreement that the globe has been warming, in fits and starts of course, for the last three centuries or so. And since it has been thusly warming for centuries, the obvious null hypothesis would have to be that the half-degree of warming we experienced in the 20th century was a continuation of some long-term ongoing natural trend.
But that’s not what Dr. Trenberth is doing here. Keep your eye on the pea. He has smoothly segued from the IPCC saying “global warming is ‘unequivocal'”, which is true, and stitched that idea so cleverly onto another idea, ‘and thus humans affect the climate’, that you can’t even see the seam.
The pea is already under the other walnut shell. He is implying that the IPCC says that scientists have “unequivocally” shown that humans are the cause of weather ills, and if I don’t take that as an article of faith, it’s my job to prove that we are not the cause of floods in Brisbane.
Now, lest you think that the IPCC actually did mean that ‘humans are the cause’ when they said (in his words) that ‘global warming was “unequivocal”‘, here’s their full statement from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Summary For Policymakers (2007) (PDF, 3.7 MB):
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level (see Figure SPM-3).
Despite the vagueness of a lack of a timeframe, that is generally true, but it says nothing about humans being the cause. So he is totally misrepresenting the IPCC findings (which he helped write, remember, so it’s not a misunderstanding) to advance his argument. The IPCC said nothing like what he is implying.
Gotta love the style, though, simply proclaiming by imperial fiat that his side is the winner in one of the longest-running modern scientific debates. And his only proffered “evidence” for this claim? It is the unequivocal fact that Phil Jones and Michael Mann and Caspar Amman and Gene Wahl and the other good old boys of the IPCC all agree with him. That is to say, Dr. T’s justification for reversing the null hypothesis is that the IPCC report that Dr. T helped write agrees with Dr. T. That’s recursive enough to make Ouroboros weep in envy …
And the IPCC not only says it’s true, it’s “unequivocal”. Just plain truth wouldn’t be scientific enough for those guys, I guess. Instead, it is “unequivocal” truth. Here’s what “unequivocal” means (emphasis mine):
unequivocal: adjective: admitting of no doubt or misunderstanding; having only one meaning or interpretation and leading to only one conclusion (“Unequivocal evidence”)
Notice how well crafted Dr. T’s sentence is. After bringing in “global warming”, he introduces the word “unequivocal”, meaning we can only draw one conclusion. Then in the second half of the sentence, he falsely attaches that “unequivocal” certainty of conclusion to his own curious conclusion, that the normal rules of science should be reversed for the benefit of … … well, not to put too fine a point on it, he’s claiming that normal scientific rules should be reversed for the benefit of Dr. Kevin Trenberth and the IPCC and those he supports. Probably just a coincidence, though.
For Dr. Trenberth to call for the usual null hypothesis (which is that what we observe in nature is, you know, natural) to be reversed, citing as his evidence the IPCC statement that the earth is actually warming, is nonsense. However, it is not meaningless nonsense. It is pernicious, insidious, and dangerous nonsense. He wants us to spend billions of dollars based on this level of thinking, and he has cleverly conflated two ideas to push his agenda.
I understand that Dr. T has a scientific hypothesis. This hypothesis, generally called the “AGW hypothesis”, is that if greenhouse gases (GHGs) go up, the temperature must follow, and nothing else matters. The hypothesis is that the GHGs are the master thermostat for the globe, everything else just averages out in the long run, nothing could possibly affect the long-term climate but GHGs, nothing to see here, folks, move along. No other forcings, feedbacks, or hypotheses need apply. GHGs rule, OK?
Which is an interesting hypothesis, but it is woefully short of either theoretical or observational support. In part, of course, this is because the AGW hypothesis provides almost nothing in the way of a statement or a prediction which can be falsified. This difficulty in falsification of the hypothesis, while perhaps attractive to the proponents of the hypothesis, inevitably implies a corresponding difficulty in verification or support of the hypothesis.
In addition, a number of arguably cogent and certainly feasible scientific objections have been raised against various parts of the hypothesis, from the nature and sign of the forcings considered and unconsidered, to the existence of natural thermostatic mechanisms.
Finally, to that we have to add the general failure of what few predictions have come from the teraflops of model churning in support of the AGW hypothesis. We haven’t seen any acceleration in sea level rise. We haven’t seen any climate refugees. The climate model Pinatubo prediction was way off the mark. The number and power of hurricanes hasn’t increased as predicted. And you remember the coral atolls and Bangladesh that you and the IPCC warned us about, Dr. T, the ones that were going to get washed away by the oncoming Thermageddon? Bangladesh and the atoll islands are both getting bigger, not smaller. We were promised a warming of two, maybe even three tenths of a degree per decade this century if we didn’t mend our evil carbon-loving ways, and so far we haven’t mended one thing, and we have seen … well … zero tenths of a degree for the first decade.
So to date, the evidentiary scorecard looks real bad for the AGW hypothesis. Might change tomorrow, I’m not saying the game’s over, that’s AGW nonsense that I’ll leave to Dr. T. I’m just saying that after a quarter century of having unlimited funding and teraflops of computer horsepower and hundreds of thousands of hours of grad students’ and scientists’ time and the full-throated support of the media and university departments dedicated to establishing the hypothesis, AGW supporters have not yet come up with much observational evidence to show for the time and money invested. Which should give you a clue as to why Dr. T is focused on the rules of the game. As the hoary lawyer’s axiom has it, if you can’t argue facts argue the law [the rules of the game], and if you can’t argue the law pound the table and loudly proclaim your innocence …
So now, taking both tacks at once in his paper, Dr. T. is both re-asserting his innocence and proposing that we re-write the rules of the whole game … I find myself cracking up laughing over my keyboard at the raw nerve of the man. If he and his ideas weren’t so dangerous, it would be truly funny.
Look, I’m sorry to be the one to break the bad news to you, Dr. T, but you can’t change the rules of scientific inquiry this late in the game. Here are the 2011 rules, which curiously are just like the 1811 rules.
First, you have to show that some aspect of the climate is historically anomalous or unusual. As far as I know, no one has done that, including you. So the game is in serious danger before it is even begun. If you can’t show me where the climate has gone off its natural rails, if you can’t point to where the climate is acting unusually or anomalously, then what good are your explanations as to why it supposedly went off the rails at some mystery location you can’t identify?
(And of course, this is exactly what Dr. T would gain by changing the rules, and may relate to his desire to change them. With so few examples to give to support his position, after a quarter century of searching for such evidence, it would certainly be tempting to try to change the rules … but I digress.)
But perhaps, Dr. T., perhaps you have found some such climate anomaly which cannot be explained as natural variation and you just haven’t made it public yet.
If you have evidence that the climate is acting anomalously, then Second, you have to show that the anomaly can be explained by human actions. And no, Dr. T., you can’t just wave your hands and say something like “Willis, the IPCC sez you have to prove that what generations of people called ‘natural’, actually is natural”. There’s an arcane technical scientific name for that, too. It’s called “cheating”, Dr. T., and is frowned on in the better circles of scientific inquiry …
(N.B. – pulling variables out of a tuned computer model and then proudly announcing that the model doesn’t work without the missing variables doesn’t mean you have established that humans affect the climate. It simply means that you tuned your computer model to reproduce the historical record using all the variables, and as an inevitable result, when using only part of those variables your model doesn’t do as well at reproducing the historical record. No points for that claim.)
Third, you have to defend your work, and not just from the softball questions of your specially selected peer reviewers who “know what to say” to get you published in scientific journals. In 2011, curiously, we’ve gone back to the customs of the 1800s, the public marketplace of ideas — except this time it’s an electronic marketplace of ideas, rather than people speaking from the dais and in the halls of the Royal Society in London. If you won’t stand up and publicly defend your work, it’s simple – you won’t be believed. And not just by me. Other scientists are watching, and considering, and evaluating.
This doesn’t mean you have to reply to every idiot with a half-baked objection and a tin-foil hat. It does mean that if you refuse to answer serious scientific questions, people will take note of that refusal. You must have noticed how such refusal to answer scientific questions totally destroyed the scientific credibility of the website RealClimate. Well, they’re your friends, so perhaps you didn’t notice, but if not, you should notice, here’s an example. (PDF, 147K) Running from serious scientific questions, as they make a practice of doing at RealClimate, makes you look weak whether you are or not.
And Always, you have to show your work. You have to archive your data. You have to reveal your computer algorithms. You have to expose everything that supports and sustains your claims to the brutal light of public inquiry, warts and all.
Dr. T., I fear you’ll have to get used to the sea change, this is not your father’s climate science. The bottom line is we’re no longer willing to trust you. You could publish in the Akashic Records and I wouldn’t believe what you said until I checked the figures myself. I’m sorry to say it, but by the actions of you and your colleagues, you have forfeited the public’s trust. You blew your credibility, Dr. T, and you have not yet rebuilt it.
And further actions like your current attempt to re-write the rules of science aren’t helping at all. Nor is trying to convince us that you look good with a coat of the finest English whitewash from the “investigations” into Climategate. Didn’t you guys notice the lesson of Watergate, that the coverup is more damaging than the original malfeasance?
Dr. T, you had a good run, you were feted and honored, but the day of reckoning up the cost has come and gone. Like some book said, you and the other un-indicted co-conspirators have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting. At this point, you have two choices — accept it and move on, or bitch about it. I strongly advise the former, but so far all I see is the latter.
You want to regain the trust of the public, for yourself and for climate science? It won’t be easy, but it can be done. Here’s my shortlist of recommendations for you and other mainstream climate scientists:
• Stop trying to sell the idea that the science is settled. Climate science is a new science, we don’t even have agreement on whether clouds warm or cool the planet, we don’t know if there are thermostatic interactions that tend to maintain some temperature in preference to others. Or as you wrote to Tom Wigley, Dr. T,
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
SOURCE: email 1255550975
Curious. You state strongly to your friend that we’re not close to knowing where the energy is going or to balancing the energy budget, yet you say in public that we know enough to take the most extraordinary step of reversing the null hypothesis … how does that work again?
At this point, there’s not much about climate science that is “unequivocal” except that the climate is always changing.
• Don’t try to change the rules of the game in mid-stream. It makes you look desperate, whether you are or not.
• Stop calling people “deniers”, my goodness, after multiple requests that’s just common courtesy and decency, where are your manners? It makes you look surly and uncivilized, whether you are or not.
• Stop avoiding public discussion and debate of your work. You are asking us to spend billions of dollars based on your conclusions. If you won’t bother to defend those conclusions, don’t bother us with them. Refusing to publicly defend your billion dollar claims make it look like you can’t defend them, whether you can or not.
• Stop secretly moving the pea under the walnut shells. You obviously think we are blind, you also clearly believe we wouldn’t remember that you said we have a poor understanding of the climate system. Disabuse yourself of the idea that you are dealing with fools or idiots, and do it immediately. As I have found to my cost, exposing my scientific claims to the cruel basilisk gaze of the internet is like playing chess with Deep Blue … individual processors have different abilities, but overall any faults in my ideas will certainly be exposed. Too many people looking at my ideas from too many sides for much to slip through. Trying anything but absolute honesty on the collective memory and wisdom of the internet makes you look like both a fool and con man, whether you are one or not.
• Write scientific papers that don’t center around words like “possibly” or “conceivably” or “might”. Yes, possibly all of the water molecules in my glass of water might be heading upwards at the same instant, and I could conceivably win the Mega-Ball lottery, and I might still play third base for the New York Yankees, but that is idle speculation that has no place in scientific inquiry. Give us facts, give us uncertainties, but spare us the stuff like “This raises the possibility that by 2050, this could lead to the total dissolution of all inter-atomic bonds …”. Yeah, I suppose it could. So what, should I buy a lottery ticket?
• Stop lauding the pathetic purveyors of failed prophecies. Perhaps you climate guys haven’t noticed, but Paul Ehrlich was not a visionary genius. He was a failure whose only exceptional talent is the making of apocalyptic forecasts that didn’t come true. In any business he would not have lasted one minute past the cratering collapse of his first ridiculous forecast of widespread food riots and worldwide deaths from global famine in the 1980s … but in academia, despite repeating his initial “We’re all gonna crash and burn, end of the world coming up soon, you betcha” prognostication method several more times with no corresponding crashing burning or ending, he’s still a professor at Stanford. Now that’s understandable under tenure rules, you can’t fire him for being a serially unsuccessful doomcaster. But he also appears to be one of your senior AGW thinkers and public representatives, which is totally incomprehensible to me.
His string of predicted global catastrophes that never came anywhere near true was only matched by the inimitable collapses of the prophecies of his wife Anne, and of his cohorts John Holdren and the late Stephen Schneider. I fear we’ll never see their like again, a fearsome foursome who between them never made one single prediction that actually came to pass. Stop using them as your spokesmodels, it doesn’t increase confidence in your claims.
• Enough with the scary scenarios, already. You’ve done the Chicken Little thing to death, give it a rest, it is sooo last century. It makes you look both out-of-date and hysterical whether you are or not.
• Speak out against scientific malfeasance whenever and wherever you see it. This is critical to the restoration of trust. I’m sick of watching climate scientists doing backflips to avoid saying to Lonnie Thompson “Hey, idiot, archive all of your data, you’re ruining all of our reputations!”. The overwhelming silence of mainstream AGW scientists on these matters is one of the (unfortunately numerous) reasons that the public doesn’t trust climate scientists, and justifiably so. You absolutely must clean up your own house to restore public trust, no one else can do it. Speak up. We can’t hear you.
• Stop re-asserting the innocence of you and your friends. It makes you all look guilty, whether you are or not … and since the CRU emails unequivocally favor the “guilty” possibility, it makes you look unapologetic as well as guilty. Whether you are or not.
• STOP HIDING THINGS!!! Give your most private data and your most top-secret computer codes directly to your worst enemies and see if they can poke holes in your ideas. If they can’t, then you’re home free. That is true science, not hiding your data and gaming the IPCC rules to your advantage.
• Admit the true uncertainties. The mis-treatment of uncertainty in the IPCC reports, and the underestimation of true uncertainty in climate science in general, is a scandal.
• Scrap the IPCC. It has run its race. Do you truly think that whatever comes out of the next IPCC report will make the slightest difference to the debate? You’ve had four IPCC reports in a row, each one more alarmist than the previous one. You’ve had every environmental organization shilling for you. You’ve had billions of dollars in support, Al Gore alone spent $300 million on advertising and advocacy. You’ve had 25 years to make your case, with huge resources and supercomputers and entire governments on your side, and you are still losing the public debate … after all of that, do you really think another IPCC report will change anything?
If it is another politically driven error-fest like the last one, I don’t think so. And what are the odds of it being an honest assessment of the science? Either way the next IPCC report won’t settle a single discussion, even if it is honest science. Again, Dr. T, you have only yourself and your friends to blame. You used the IPCC to flog bad science like the Hokeyschtick, your friends abused the IPCC to sneak in papers y’all favored and keep out papers you didn’t like, you didn’t check your references so stupid errors were proclaimed as gospel truth, it’s all a matter of record.
Do you truly think that after Climategate, and after the revelations of things like IPCC citations of WWF propaganda pieces as if they were solid science, and after Pachauri’s ludicrous claim that it was “voodoo science” to point out the Himalayan glacier errors, after all that do you think anyone with half a brain still believes the IPCC is some neutral arbiter of climate science whose ex-cathedra pronouncements can be relied upon?
Because if you do think people still believe that, you really should get out more. At this point people don’t trust the IPCC any more than they trust you and your friends. Another IPCC report will be roundly ignored by one side, and cited as inerrant gospel by the other side. How will that help anyone? Forget about the IPCC, it is a meaningless distraction, and get back to the science.
That’s my free advice, Dr. T., and I’m sure it’s worth every penny you paid for it. Look, I don’t think you’re a bad guy. Sadly for you, but fortunately for us, you got caught hanging out with the bad boys who had their hands in the cookie jar. And tragically for everyone, all of you were seduced by “noble cause corruption”. Hey, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s happened to me too, you’re not the first guy to think that the nobility of your cause justified improper actions.
But as far as subsequently proclaiming your innocence and saying that you and your friends did nothing wrong? Sorry, Dr. T, the jury has already come in on that one, and they weren’t distracted by either the nobility of your cause, nor by the unequivocal fact that you and your friends were whitewashed as pure as the driven snow in the investigation done by your other friends … instead, they noted your emails saying things like:
In that regard I don’t think you can ignore it all, as Mike [Mann] suggests as one option, but the response should try to somehow label these guys a[s] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database.
Indeed technology and data handling capabilities have evolved and not everything was saved. So my feeble suggestion is to indeed cast aspersions on their motives and throw in some counter rhetoric. Labeling them as lazy with nothing better to do seems like a good thing to do.
SOURCE: email 1177158252
Yeah, that’s the ticket, that’s how a real scientist defends his scientific claims …
w.
“it still can only see half of the planet at one time.”
Not even half, significantly less if the satellite is in an orbit below geosynchronous.
Mark
Well put Willis,
Now do you think the good(?) Doctor will listen and heed one single bloody word of it?
I truly hope I am wrong, but the man has a history….
Jim D says:
January 16, 2011 at 11:50 am
“Is the cold water hiding beneath ready to come back, or is it crazy to think the extra CO2 warmed the surface instead as would be completely explained by AGW?”
The problem with your thinking is that you believe that you can ask a meaningful question about some state of the oceans totally in absence of any hypotheses that could explain the phenomenon in question. Like all modelers, you believe that science is a matter of opening some door not yet opened and discovering the answer in all its glory. In thinking like this, you put the cart before the horse. No scientific questions about our natural world make any sense apart from some network of hypotheses that explain the phenomena in question and that have been used to predict interesting aspects of the phenomenon. As stated, your question has no meaning whatsoever. That is because there is no framework of hypotheses to which you can refer that can explain what would count as an answer to the question.
“Discounting AGW puts you in a tight spot trying to make the observations fit, which is why the null hypothesis is hanging by a statistical thread, yet so many cling to it.”
In absence of reasonably well-confirmed physical hypotheses that can be used to explain and predict what you mistakenly call “observations,” no meaningful statements about those “observations” are possible. If your statement has any meaning at all then it refers to computer code and to no other part of the real world.
To have a tiny hope of attaining some humility, every person must learn that the fact that you can imagine a man six hundred feet tall does not mean that the question “Could there be a man six hundred feet tall?” has a scientific meaning. The physical hypotheses which explain the human body provide a definitive answer to the question. The answer is no. Get your head out of the computer code and out of your imagination and into the real world. If climate science advances, it will do so on the basis of reasonably well confirmed physical hypotheses. At this time, it has none. That is not a reason for climate scientists to despair but a reason to get to work. What is needed first and foremost is a measurement regime for temperature and various other factors that satisfies the demands of climate scientists and what you would call critics of climate science.
“Nobody expects the
SpanishAGW Inquisition!”Jim D says:
January 16, 2011 at 11:50 am
I don’t expect many people here to be reading the latest science papers, but 20% comes from the JGR paper by Schmidt et al. in 2010. This being the latest refinement of estimates going back to the 1980′s. The 1990 IPCC report said 25% by a different measure.
_____________________________________________________________
The keyword here is ESTIMATE. An estimate is still an estimate, no matter how well-informed it is. Do Schmidt et al claim it is a definitive answer? I’m guessing not….
“The sun hasn’t strengthened since the 1940′s, and the ocean somehow everywhere has warmed above average, which seems hard to explain with PDO and AMO redistributions.”
It may not have strengthened, but it may not have to. Solar activity remained at historically-high levels throughout the second-half of the 20th. century – that’s why it’s called the “modern maximum”. High enough to cause the warming? We just don’t know. Which, by definition, means we can’t rule it out either.
@eadler:
January 16, 2011 at 12:08 am
“Can you define for us what the potential energy of vapor condensate is, and explain why its effect is important enough to warrant consideration by climate models?
Can you do the same for the other assumptions that were made to simplify the execution of the climate model which you referenced?
You ridicule the modelers who wrote the paper you referenced for having made these simplifying assumptions it, but you haven’t shown that they are causing significant errors in the models.”
Eadler, that is simply the most elegantly ass-backwards reversal of logic I have ever read. I can only think of three explanations for it:
1. You either don’t really believe a word of what you type into these boxes and assume gullible accept your assertions without criticism or debate, a la Trenberth (in which case you’ve come to the wrong place).
2. You are actually a bored AGW Skeptic with a sharp wit, penning an acerbic parody of the sort of bizarre inverted reasoning typical in warmist propaganda.
3. You suffer from a cognitive dissonance so poetic in its completeness, it’s perfection, it should be put in a museum and held up for all to behold as an example of quite how far out of whack the human brain can go when it wants, beyond all logic, common sense and reason, not to have to admit to being totally wrong.
You may have noticed that I haven’t attacked the substance of your comment [snipped]. It’s just that I don’t have to any more, now it’s acceptable to reverse the burden of proof in an argument. It’s up to you to prove that everything you say isn’t complete [snip].
[That language might be accurate, might even be deserved or earned, but it still isn’t appropriate. 8<) Robt]
Richard S Courtney says:
January 16, 2011 at 11:38 am
HAS:
Your post at January 16, 2011 at 1:24 am is a disgraceful attack on science.
You assert:
“And remember one persons null can be another’s alternate.”
No! Absolutely not! That is a falsehood!…
…Any attempt to assert that “one person’s null can be another’s alternate” is an assertion that enlightenment thought should be abandoned.
YOUR ASSERTION IS WRONG.
Richard, yes! But just to glom on to your rightful, meaning supporting statement – obviously because otherwise no one would be able to understand anything said, including what we are saying right now – to emphasize that HAS’s assertion, paradoxically to HAS, is also an assertion that would prove to everyone who is objective, or at worst “biased” toward objectivity, that Climate Science is not doing real, scientific method, science, and is essentially permanently delusional, since it claims that everything is “subjective”, including facts, reality, etc.. – except for the objective claim that everything is subjective, of course.
Therefore, Climate Science would be telling us that it is not telling us anything, because everything is subjective, so that it and, allegedly, we wouldn’t be able to know that we understood anything it said, including what it is apparently telling us about itself. Which is what happens if “everyone has their own interpretation of things,” so that even the meaning of words is terminally or hopelessly subjective, and communication itself is impossible – again, because “everything is subjective”.
Bottom line, once having destroyed Science and word meanings, Post Normal Science wants to get everything down to some kind of emotional or “after tasty” vote, at least until brute Totalitarian control makes even that unnecessary.
Vince Causey says: January 16, 2011 at 5:32 am
“[DR T] is saying that since he has changed the null hypothesis to be that co2 has caused modern warming, then until such time that somebody falsifies it, this will remain an axiomatic truth. And if nobody is able to falsify it, then what is the world supposed to believe?
Changing the null hypothesis has no impact on the burden of proof notwithstanding Dr T’s sophistry in claiming the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence [on the climate]. This perhaps indicates either how little Dr T knows about science, or the extent to which the politics are overwhelming his commitment to it.
Vince, Dr T can change the null hypothesis he uses, but this has no impact on axiomatic truths, what is true or false, or the ability of other people to test other hypotheses.
Dr T is simply saying this for effect, don’t buy into it, but do take the opportunity to force him to state his null clearly in a testable way. It will be the first time this has happened AFIK, and it will lead to a significant improvement in the debate.
jae says January 16, 2011 at 7:01 am
By switching the null hypothesis in this manner, scientists are forced to try to prove a negative. This is logically impossible, and Trenberth probably knows that. What a perfect hypothesis for them! Society would then have to cave in to the CAGW nonsense because they cannot prove there’s nothing to it (and it looks like there is not)
No, the debate is about whether a scientist tries to falsify “man made CO2 causes the majority of global warming” (Dr T’s suggestion) or falsify “man made CO2 doesn’t”. neither are logically impossible to do, and in my view both are worthy of study. See also comments to Vince.
Richard S Courtney says January 16, 2011 at 11:38 am
Richard, the particular null is not part of the scientific method, only the process of falsifying a null as a means to adding weight to the alternate (rather than directly trying to demonstrate the alternate – this was Fisher’s contribution).
However we are not going to settle this by each reasserting our positions. Perhaps have a look at a statistical reference or two – e.g. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NullHypothesis.html and particularly note the use of the word “usually”.
On the question of whether one person’s null can be another’s alternate have a look at the pair I suggest for consideration in response to jae. I frankly think either leads to a useful information about what’s going on, and neither leads to the end of the scientific method as we know it.
Wow!
A riveting, profound, utter excoriation.
A tour de force tar and feathering.
A complete and thorough intellectual whipping.
Willis I hope you forward some version of this to every major newspaper as an op ed piece.
[And of course, most newspaper editorial departments these days are cowards when it comes to challenging the AGW scam, so they probably won’t publish it. Grrrr!]
Extremely well done, though. Keep up the great work!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Willis,
I applaud your tenacity, but arguing with izen is like beating the puppy for peeing on the rug yesterday. He doesn’t realize why he’s wrong and it won’t do any good. I’ve read izen’s comments on many blogs over the last 6 months or so. He’s a thoroughly entrenched ideologue. No amount of evidence or logic will shake his conviction. The same for Smokey. Brother, I love to read your comments, but sometimes it’s best to let a dolt be dolt and leave it at that.
Dr. Dave,
Thanks for the feedback. Most times I’m not responding to educate an individual [you can see that their minds are made up and can’t be changed]; I’m pointing out their errors for a wider audience.
The problem is that on most alarmist blogs, comments that correct bad information, or that refute incorrect facts, are censored [held permanently in moderation, then deleted], or snipped in such a way that the meaning or intent is changed.
This site allows, and even encourages contrary comments. The down side is that casual readers are often being given wrong information. I think that’s really the intent of the handful of warmist repeat commentators. They make quite a few false assertions, and if they’re not corrected, readers who are less familiar with the topic can be led down the garden path. There’s too much misinformation in the media as it is.
If we don’t correct wrong information here, there are not many other places where the real facts can get out. If climate progress, realclimate, tamino, etc., would allow a real, uncensored debate, it wouldn’t be so necessary to set the record straight here.
Let’s not be too rough on Mr. Belleville – he’s just doing his job, ie , training environmental trial lawers to derail projects and extort monies from industry . This is already a lucretive career and surely stokes the ambitions of up and coming bloodsuckers . However , I suspect he is not the most popular guy in Buchanan County , which is the most important coal producing county in Va .
Oh, good. Buzz the lawyer is back, to give me neatly numbered objections to my statements, starting with:
Buzz Belleville says:
January 16, 2011 at 6:31 am
That’s lawyerly booshwah. You said it was a dishonest posting. Now you want to change the record, and claim that you really, truly meant it was intellectually dishonest. Sorry, Buzz, your moving finger writes, and having writ …
But heck, I’m a nice guy. So let me amend my previous statement to fit your preferences. Are you ready?
You happy now?
Now please, do go away and don’t come back until you give up on insulting people. You’ve been a lawyer too long, my friend. I am not a hostile witness that you are free to abuse or accuse, although at this point I’m definitely feeling hostile.
You come in here and open the dialog by insulting me. Now you come back to say you you were just a poor innocent misunderstood poster. OK, so far, so good … then you explain the misunderstanding, it turns out you really didn’t mean I was dishonest, you really meant I was intellectually dishonest. Thanks.
… short break while I take the clothes off of the line …
Taking in the clothes on a sunny day is a very good thing to do. While I was out there I thought “Hmmm … I’m not reading this situation right.” I so was upset that before I went out to get the clothes I had actually written:
What I realized, as the tide of my blood pressure ebbed while I was getting the clothes, was that when I thought I was kidding you about your social skills, I wasn’t. You really don’t understand what you are doing. Perhaps you’ve been a lawyer too long …
You open by saying you are sorry. Of course, you are not sorry for opening your post with insults. That’s what lawyers do, perhaps, I don’t know, but whatever, you’re not sorry for doing it.
No, you are sorry that I find insults distasteful. Buzz, in the real world, insulting people as an opening move is generally … oh, never mind. I give up. Never mind.
Bro’, I’m totally serious. You are way out of line, and the fact that you don’t realize it is scary. Think about what you just did. You need professional help with your people skills, my friend. My amateur advice, neatly numbered, is:
1.Don’t enter a thread with an insult. It doesn’t get you points, it pisses people off, it invites resistance when your stated aim is to make converts, and your words and ideas immediately lose weight with the readers. It is that unusual combination, both bad tactics and bad strategy. Come in politely and you’ll get listened to. Come in with insults blazing and you’ll be shot down. Simple as that.
2. If you are called on for doing something that foolishly suicidal, don’t re-enter the thread by refining, defining, extending, clarifying, or in any way explaining your insult. That gets your vote totally cancelled, it’s what we plebians call “lawyerly tricks”. Nobody will listen to a word you say after that, at that point you’re a recidivist, a repeat offender, you’re a convicted serial lawyer and I think you have to register as an offender under Megan’s Law or something like that, but the bottom line is you’re just talking to the hand from then on.
Buzz, it might assist you if you thought of entering a new thread as if you were entering a man’s house in a foreign country. Would your first act upon entering be to insult the man?
And if the man said “Hey, insulting the host when you enter his house is against our custom, it’s taken as a big insult”, would you:
a) Apologize, and admire the fine construction of the man’s house?, or
b) Tell the host that you are sorry that he was so thoughtless as to be offended by your insult, and repeat the insult in different words?
Am I getting through here? After you insulted the man a second time, do you think he would be receptive to your brilliant insights?
So. I’m a patient man, and besides, I just brought in the laundry and there’s football on TV, the kind with the pointy ball, life is good. I’m not going to answer a single one of your issues in your second (and equally unpleasant) attempt at opening a dialog. You know why? Because I didn’t even read them, and have no intention of doing so.
But if you want to take a third try at the brass ring, Buzz, go right ahead, like I said, I’m a patient man. However, it will be as stunningly successful as your first two forays unless you first take off the lawyer hat and drop the lawyer ‘tude. You are the guest in a foreign house here, just state the facts and leave your provincial prejudices and puffed-up self-esteem back wherever you hail from. There, you are no doubt an important man, and you are free to insult your students or your witnesses at will.
Here, you’re not a lawyer or a professor or anyone with any status or standing at all, here you’re the same as the rest of us, just another fool whose intentions (hopefully) are good.
w.
Mark T says:
January 16, 2011 at 12:55 pm
True, and I didn’t want to complicate things. The satellites measuring many climate variables are way below geosynchronous height. In addition, for many kinds of measurements they can only measure in their “footprint”, or even only in the center of their footprint, which is much, much smaller than the horizon to horizon view.
So while it’s great to have the satellite measurements, at any instant any given satellite can only measure a tiny fraction of a planetary variable.
netdr2,
-You will notice Trenberth talks about the missing heat, and it doesn’t change his views on AGW. It is about the energy budget in the few years where they should have good data, but it is not yet adequate to make exact enough attributions of global temperature change by their standards.
-Ocean temperatures over 30 years are warmer now than before. This is what needs explaining, not five-year ups and downs. AGW doesn’t pretend to explain short-term trends that are unlikely to be statistically meaningful because natural variability creates larger uncertainty in trends as you look at shorter periods.
-If the sun stopped increasing its irradiance in the 40’s, you hypothesize that the ocean hasn’t yet finished adjusting to the new irradiance half a century later. Even with positive water vapor feedback, the solar irradiance change since the LIA (0.5 W/m2 in the earth’s budget) may cause up to 0.5 C, and that had already been fully realized by the 40’s. The irradiance change therefore can’t account for the warming since then.
-El Nino refers to a small fraction of the ocean. Are you saying El Ninos warmed the Arctic Ocean? I was saying all the oceans are now above average when you look at the decadal average specifically to cancel out ENSO cycles.
-The lack of recent warming could be due to the down cycle of the solar minimum we just had. We have had these every decade. If it continues to pause as the solar activity increases, that would be something, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Richard S Courtney,
The null hypothesis, as defined in the Trenberth piece, is that human activity has had no effect on global climate. Take out the effects of increased CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) and it becomes very hard to explain the warming of the last 30-100 years, and it is becoming ever harder with each decade until eventually it will be impossible, and many say we are already at that point (with ‘very high confidence’ which is 90% in IPCC terms).
Now, I just noticed, it seems you have an ‘out’ in that you can claim greenhouse gases are increasing but not from human activity, but that is your only out, otherwise the null hypothesis will soon be dead, if not already.
I see that Theo Goodwin and Anything is possible also have replies, but I will leave it at this for now. Maybe it is sufficient for them too (I don’t think so).
HAS:
At January 16, 2011 at 1:32 pm you assert to me:
“On the question of whether one person’s null can be another’s alternate have a look at the pair I suggest for consideration in response to jae. I frankly think either leads to a useful information about what’s going on, and neither leads to the end of the scientific method as we know it.”
That is an assertion by you that “the scientific method as we [sic] know it” is not science.
You do NOT get to define basic principles as, how and when you want. Consider the item you cite and provide a link for athttp://mathworld.wolfram.com/NullHypothesis.html .
It provides this definition of the null hypothesis (n.b. one definition and not two as you pretend):
“A null hypothesis is a statistical hypothesis that is tested for possible rejection under the assumption that it is true (usually that observations are the result of chance). The concept was introduced by R. A. Fisher.
The hypothesis contrary to the null hypothesis, usually that the observations are the result of a real effect, is known as the alternative hypothesis. ”
In the case of AGW, according to that definition, the important point is that the “contrary hypothesis” (n.b. NOT the null hypothesis) is “usually that the observations are the result of a real effect”.
So, according to the definitions you present, an assumption that AGW is a real effect is an example of a contrary hypothesis to the null hypothesis.
Your attacks on the scientific method and your misrepresentation of the evidence which you cite are reprehensible.
Richard
Might I point out that you have left out a couple of stages?
It is necessary and but not sufficient to
1. Show a strong probability that ex-normal global warming will occur.
2. That if such warming occurs, that it will have catastrophic consequences – with likely impacts in extent and in place.
At this point the Climate Scientists pass the problem over to the economists.
3. Even, if you accept the disaster scenarios, there is no policy available that will contain CO2 at 2 or 3 degrees of further warming, without imposing greater costs on humanity that impose greater costs on humanity than the worst case scenarios. However, some will say that Stern solved this problem and showed this was theoretically possible. However, it was one that would work by hitting the poorest hardest.
4. Even if you accept that a mitigation policy is theoretically possible, it will only work if every country contains their emissions. If the rapidly growing countries, especially China and India, do not contain their emissions then the emissions- cutting of the West will be of no effect. Further, if the policies to not fall into Stern’s maximum cost of $80 per tonne of CO2 saved (The IPCC’s is much lower), then the policies are doing more harm than good.
So there are four stages of this justification – Forecast, consequences, policy and implementation.
Just because a doctor diagnoses a new condition does not give him the instant insight into the cure, nor the ability to know the dosage or the side-effects of any new medicine.
It might be that the climate scientist have to admit that they don’t understand the climate. No one does. What do we believe then? The null hypothesis !!
Should we, the inhabitants of Earth, restrict our CO2 emissions because we don’t know whether they have impact on the climate. Just to be sure. Or are we allowed to ignore CO2 because we can’t measure its alleged consequences.
So, the null hypothesis is important.
“Buzz Belleville says:
January 16, 2011 at 6:31 am
All of the temp keepers (NCDC, GISS, HadCRUT, RSS, UAH) show broad agreement that this past decade averaged between 0.16-0.18 degrees C warmer than past decade. It is a false statement of fact to say that the planet hasn’t warmed in the past decade, and it is shameless to claim otherwise.”
The first statement above can be accepted as totally true. However this does NOT mean that your second statement is true. The warming that you are talking about stopped in 1998. It has been cooling ever since.
See the five green bar graphs for 5 and 10 years, including GISS at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates
The most recent 5 years ones are smaller than the 10 years ones in every case. So in other words, it was cooler from 2006 to 2010 on the average than from 2001 to 2005.
CAGW: What does this stand for?
In context here:
…= Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.
But according to http://abbreviations.yourdictionary.com/cagw, it is
…= Citizens Against Government Waste.
Which I find ironically opposite in meaning.
eadler says:
January 16, 2011 at 12:08 am
No, I can’t explain what the potential energy of whatever it might be that you are calling “vapor condensate”. If you are talking about water vapor and condensate, sure, I’d be glad to assist. The potential energy in water vapor is the latent heat. It is released back into the atmosphere by condensation. This released heat is the driving force for the thunderstorms.
Potential energy in the condensate is occasioned by the fact that the water condenses at altitude. Its potential energy is released when it falls to the surface. Part of it goes to entraining a wind that falls with the rain and spreads out when it hits the earth, cooling the entire surrounding area.
These processes are important to a climate model because they occur in thunderstorms, and thunderstorms function as the governor of the tropical energy system. However, because they are “sub-grid” phenomena (smaller than a gridbox in a model), they cannot be included in the current models.
Is it important that cool winds blow downwards from thunderstorms and cool the entire area? As a long-time tropical resident, I know that it is a major part of the energy flow at the surface … but it’s not in the models.
I hope that helps with your understanding, but I can discuss it more if you like.
I do note that you didn’t answer my question about the lack of progress, despite huge improvements in computer speed and model complexity, in improving things like the estimates of climate sensitivity. To me that means increasing the model complexity even further won’t answer the question … and if they can’t answer that most basic question, why should we trust them for 100 year forecasts?
w.
No theory can be undeniably proven by saying “It cannot be explained entirely with the ocean and sun, so it must be CO2”
Sorry, but you are committing the same mistake as Dr. T. The proponents of the theory are the ones who have to provide the explanation, not the skeptics. You still have to prove your theory, and “It must be CO2 because we cannot explain it otherwise” is not scientific enough.
eadler says:
January 16, 2011 at 12:08 am
Man, this thread is lethal, snorted coffee up my nose again, either coffee or this thread have got to go.
Eadler, you could fit all of the critically investigative “climate modeling literature” on the head of a pin and still have room for 36, no, 37 angels to dance …
Climate modelers don’t write critical evaluations of another person’s model, oh my goodness, no. I mean, if they did that, someone else might do the same thing to their model, and then what would happen to the field of computer modeling?
They are so unwilling to take a critical look at anyones model, particularly and specifically including their own, that any old model that runs the simulations gets into the IPCC model olympics. No entry exam, not even a “pass-fail” grade. Everyone gets to play, IPCC takes the average and calls it a “model ensemble”, and there you have the Fifth Assessment Report.
The modelers don’t write critical papers of each other, and every single model gets a star, it’s all very California. After all, you wouldn’t want the kids to lose self-confidence from the shock of seeing someone else get an award for outstanding performance, so all the kids get awards …
I invite you, eadler, to search the climate model literature for one paper from the “red team”, one example of someone taking a model apart with the harsh, unyielding, and critical attitude appropriate to the investigation of a tool to be used to make billion dollar decisions.
Report back with your findings, I’m interested. Because all I can find is modelers patting each other on the back and telling each other how much progress has been made. It’s like an endless film loop of some bizarro “Tony” awards for climate models, with everyone congratulating each other and saying “You look faabulous, you haven’t changed a bit” and gushing about how they loved the other person’s last climate model and boring speeches about how “I don’t feel I really deserve this prize, and I’d like to thank the funding agencies and mom and dad, and God for making the climate, and thanks to my co-modellers …
But I digress.
The guys that actually write the code are software engineers. The folks in Boulder run ads for jobs on a fairly regular basis. Not that there is anything wrong with software engineers developing models, but they are by no means required to be experts on physics of the climate.
I’ll post one of the listings next time I see one (I live in Colorado and search job boards for software related jobs regularly.)
Mark
Jim D:
Your post at January 16, 2011 at 2:21 pm is offensive. It ignores everything I wrote and reasserts your nonsense that I had refuted. And it attempts to obfuscate the issue under discussion by a (deliberate?) mis-statement together with the provision of a ‘red herring’.
Your original post was at January 16, 2011 at 11:50 am and it said;
“The sun hasn’t strengthened since the 1940′s, and the ocean somehow everywhere has warmed above average, which seems hard to explain with PDO and AMO redistributions. Is the cold water hiding beneath ready to come back, or is it crazy to think the extra CO2 warmed the surface instead as would be completely explained by AGW? Discounting AGW puts you in a tight spot trying to make the observations fit, which is why the null hypothesis is hanging by a statistical thread, yet so many cling to it.”
I refuted that at January 16, 2011 at 12:48 pm by writing:
“ Please note that the inability of you or anybody else to “fit” known explanations for climate behaviour to observed climate behaviour merely proves you do not know the causes of climate behaviour. That inability has no relevance of any kind to consideration of the null hypothesis of climate behaviour. And what can or cannot be “completely explained” by anything has no relevance to the null hypothesis.
As I and others have repeatedly explained above, the null hypothesis is that in the absence of evidence of a change then it has to be assumed there has been no change.
So, it has to be assumed that climate behaviour has not changed from previous climate behaviour unless and until there is evidence that climate behaviour has changed.
The null hypothesis of climate behaviour would be disproved if some change to climate behaviour were observed to not be explicable as being similar to previous climate. Then – and only then – would the null hypothesis of climate behaviour be disproved.
Therefore, unless and until the null hypothesis is disproved, the governing assumption of climate behaviour is that it and its causes have not changed (i.e. they continue to be natural variation). And, importantly, there is no scientific need for AGW – or any other hypothesis – to explain a phenomenon of altered climate behaviour which is not observed to exist.
Your offensive response at January 16, 2011 at 2:21 pm was this:
“The null hypothesis, as defined in the Trenberth piece, is that human activity has had no effect on global climate. Take out the effects of increased CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) and it becomes very hard to explain the warming of the last 30-100 years, and it is becoming ever harder with each decade until eventually it will be impossible, and many say we are already at that point (with ‘very high confidence’ which is 90% in IPCC terms).
Now, I just noticed, it seems you have an ‘out’ in that you can claim greenhouse gases are increasing but not from human activity, but that is your only out, otherwise the null hypothesis will soon be dead, if not already.”
• That response iterates your original assertions (copied above in this post),
• is offensive in that ignores everything I said concerning those assertions(copied above in this post),
• is offensive in that it mis-represents what Trenbereth said, and
• provides a ‘red-herring’.
Trenberth said;
“Given that global warming is “unequivocal”, to quote the 2007 IPCC report, the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence [on the climate].”
That is the precise opposite of your assertion saying;
““The null hypothesis, as defined in the Trenberth piece, is that human activity has had no effect on global climate.”
However, it is true that the null hypothesis is that human activity has had no effect on global climate.
And your mention of CO2 emissions could be thought to be irrelevant except that I have published on the carbon cycle and my views on it are well known. Hence, this is clearly a ‘red herring’ provided with the intention that I will grab it and so be deflected from the real issue. I won’t.
Apologise for your trollish behaviour.
Richard