Update 5 pm Eastern: 1,000 comments on thread at http://judithcurry.com, and some very “feisty” discourse in this new era of civility.
Since my post on the “RealClimate’s over-the-top response” of Gavin and the Team has been getting a lot of discussion, I thought it only fair to mention that Dr. Judith Curry dropped in to leave a note. She said:
For more fun and games with Gavin, see my latest post at Climate Etc “Hiding the Decline” http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/
Judging from comments like this one:
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“I’m calling it like I see it”
How brave of you.
My point is that by lowering yourself to insult, you block off all sensible discussion of specific technical points – if you are so certain in your thinking that no further discussion is required, then fine. No more discussion will occur. But it would have been far better for you to have had the character to allow for disagreements without being disagreeable (did you not pick up anything in Lisbon?).
…
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It seems there’s a veritable free for all going on there. Gavin’s having a little trouble managing in a format that he doesn’t get to manage. See:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/
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Maybe someone in the USA could do a FOIA request to see how much NASA time Gavin is spending on RealClimate? After all budgets are tight…
For me the highlight of Dr. Curry’s article was the link to Dr. Richard Muller’s talk on global warming. Richard Muller is a physics professor from Berkley University and has written several books on global warming. In about 2004 Dr. Muller was contacted by McIntyre and McKitrick for help in the hockey stick controversy and was stunned by what they were showing him. His talk is about 52 minutes long but it is worth watching a real scientist talk about global warming.
Jim
Over there one of Gavin’s regulars thinks RealClimate allows only worthy conversations.
dhogaza | February 23, 2011 at 12:11 am | Reply Thank God real climate doesn’t let this sort of conversation happen, which basically consists of Judith Curry launching unsourced ad hom attacks against various scientists, with piling on by random posters.
dhogaza, who’s almost as bad as Ray Ladbury, must think it noble that Gavin has doctored, edited, manipulated and censored many conversations.
Those RC folks are incapable of honest discussion as demonstrated by Curry’s thread.
Wow. Gavin attempted to defend himself by claiming that the hockey stick was merely a summary graph and not meant to show “everything.”
Then, he compared the hockey stick to some satellite hurricane graph that didn’t show any data prior to 1970. I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out why he would do that. The hurricane graph didn’t attempt to splice in data in an attempt to make the graph look better.
I’m shocked that Gavin doesn’t have a better argument.
As a graduate student I collected a difficult spectrum that was going to be the central piece of data in a public presentation. There was an extra peak due to an electronic spike (which was fairly common). As I put the talk together, I used the spectrum as it came out of the instrument: extra peak and all. My advisor stopped me and said “Erase that peak”. I said “Isn’t that dishonest…the peak really happened” He said “Do you know why that peak is there?” I said “Of course, there was an electronic spike when the mechanical arm hit the MCP” He said “Are you sure?” I said “yes, it happens frequently..I can even make it happen on command”. He said “Do you want to talk about it in your presentation”. I said “No, that peak has nothing to do with my talk” to which he responded “precisely….that peak does not help tell your story. You know why it’s there. And if you include it, the audience will focus on that and you’ll have to spend valuable time discussing a moot point”. From that day on I didn’t see “massaging” data as wrong as long as I was honest about it.
In the case of “hide the decline” it seems to me they got rid of the data because it didn’t help them tell their story, but they had no good reason as to why it was in deviation to the story. It would have been like my situation in graduate school except I was telling my advisor that the peak showed up sometimes and I had no idea why and it was also inconvenient to the story I wanted to tell so I want to erase it. He would have made me figure that random peak out or to include it as unexplainable….but not to erase it. That would be dishonest.
@Smokey
> Gavin and the rest of his scare crowd stayed away like spoiled children.
This slant is very telling.
> You can’t keep poking your finger into someone’s chest, and call them vile names [“denialists”, etc.] without eventually getting some push-back.
You really do have a jaundiced view of the history of this “debate”. You’re also very quick with the insults in your response. Classy.
> Judith Curry has put herself in a tough spot. She is trying to at least get a dialog going.
I see no evidence of a serious attempt at any dialogue with anyone outside of the “skeptical” view, which means all she’s managing to do is alienate anyone who does not hold that viewpoint. As far as I can tell, all she’s done is provide a venue where every crackpot can air their pet prejudices in the comments and feel like it has some kind of seal of scientific approval, because Dr Curry never calls anyone out on thier garbage (unless they are *completely* off the wall, but then it is only very rare). She’s provided a forum that is absolutely impervious to any sort of dialog.
Unless of course your idea of “dialog” is just repeating the same untruths and insults until the other side gets bored and goes elsewhere, whereupon you can declare yourself “the winner”.
“While I am encouraged by Dr. Curry’s challenge to Gavin, why does she not also question his non-climate background (mathematics) or for that matter the Don of GISS – James Hansen.”
She’s right not to descend into ad hominem. Best to let the science and only the science speak and focus on the science alone.
Distraction is not argument, its a diversionary stratagem usually employed because a more robust response is not available.
The biggest problem will always be, convincing the average person that weathermen can predict the future…
….throw in lying, cheating, obnoxious behavior, the liberal media, things that just do not make common sense, taxes, the UN, predictions that do the opposite, claiming warmest year on record when people are snowed in and dying from the cold, telling everyone your taxes and utilities are naturally going to go up, making cars that have to be plugged into the grid, claiming warmer makes it colder, attributing every weather event as proof of global warming, claiming weather is unprecedented and hasn’t happened since it happened last time 10 years ago, claiming their science is robust and presenting the total opposite at the same time, using “may, might, coulda, woulda, shoulda in every paper, running websites to promote it and censoring everything…………
warmcold, snowrain, flooddrought, creasing………..
Only a total idiot would believe this mess……………
Judith’s post is a huge development (a potential tipping point) in terms of the propaganda war. This is the main reason why Gavin is freaking out. It opens the door for other scientists to speak out. She’s giving them a ton of cover.
I’m totally gobsmacked.
I have come to admire Judith Curry’s honesty as a person and as a scientist; fronting up to any nastily-adversarial situation takes real strength of character. I am delighted she has risen to Bishop Hill’s challenge to Sir John Beddington to explain ‘hide the decline’, the phrase which which was hurled into the midst of an astounded sceptical community by the Climategate emails. Gavin has lost any credibility he once had and his troglodytic followers are digging the hole he is in ever deeper by their mad statements. Gavin’s tactic of demanding citations to illustrate self-evident facts or even opinions is one that AGW supporters use to shut down rational discussion of any kind on the Guardian’s CiF. The shoddy cloth that CAGW is woven from is unravelling in front of our eyes.
I agree with Dickens Goes Metro.
This could be a seminal moment. Perhaps, just perhaps, the sight of Judith Curry – former hockey team supporter – challenging the great leviathan on its favourite stomping ground – MBH98, will prove sufficient to encourage other, less hardy souls from the climate community to break ranks and support her. Goodness knows, it’s time!
In any case, this is the most exciting day since climategate, witnessing Curry and Schmidt locking horns in public…..let’s hope this is just the start!
Mark T says: “High humor. I limited my comments mostly to misconceptions regarding PCA. It is amazing, but people really think there is some magical way to just tease out “temperature” as if it had some sort of name tag throughout time in tree rings. Sigh…”
If you believe in fairies, you’ll arrange to see fairies everywhere you look. Dr. Curry asks for photographs. Instead, she gets a spittle-spewing rant.
Ken Hall says: “I am very disappointed in the replies. Almost every time Gavin posts a comment, Dr Curry folds immediately and leaves rebuttals to others in the comments….”
That happens fairly far down the chain. Dr. Curry figures out partway down that cognitive dissonance is driving the other side of the debate, and there’s not much point in trying to argue with someone that disturbed. It’s too much like trying to have a game of dominoes at tea with Hannibal Lecter. Ah, the heartbreak of proctocraniosis.
The brilliance of Dr. Curry is she drew the rat out of the hole to test the cheese. In her follow-up article she’ll be testing the trap. I too look forward to the follow up article. It will prove interesting and I dare say even worse for the rat.
John Whitman says in a note to Anthony:
“Note to Anthony: I am accessing WUWT right now in the P.R.C. I thought someone commented last year that WUWT couldn’t be reached from here.”
Possibly was me and as of late December last year, it was still true. It depends on where you have logged on and for certain locations (Schools affiliated with western countries and large hotels) it may be occasionally possible to escape the “Great Firewall”. However, I have been in at least 10 different locations not of the former, where the firewall was working very well. The only way to escape this block was to use “tools” to get around it. The price of that is horrible internet speeds to fool the censors. Sorry it’s a bit off topic, but think it is important to know who is censoring and has access to these views. PRC does not want the Chinese populous to know or be exposed to anything divergent from their Party Line, which closely matches RC mantra.
With China now with the largest internet population, this is a significant exercise of censorship of WUWT views.
Gavin comes across as a pompus jackass in his posts. Which, I suspect, he quite possibly is.
I am an engineer. I deal with data every day, all day. As I type this, I have an Access query running in the background. As I’ve said before, when the tree rings “lost correlation with surface temp” in 1961, you cannot possibly then assume that there ever really was a correlation to begin with. Especially when you have absolutely no explaination for the loss of correlation. I swear if I produced a graph where I cut out sections of data and spliced in what I wanted, I may very well be fired. “Dishonest” doesn’t quite cover it.
This clarifies in my mind that Gavin does not get it. And on top if it, he doesn’t understand that he doesn’t get it…
There now are over 800 comments on that one JC post alone!
(Funny how they never get 800 comments on anything at RC.)
Gavin must have been hopping mad to pop out of his hole into the light of day like that. It is sort of like a mole jumping up from his molehill, clenching his tiny fists, and taking a swing at the sunrise.
Glad to see it happen, even as a silent lurker.
I wonder how many have visited the JC site silently, like I did. Any figures? More than visited RC today?
As a mathematician, Gavin should know enough statistics to know that the hockey stick is a mathematical and methodical can of worms. I think “the team” is getting really desperate now, because their house of cards of little cheats has really started to collapse. I’m glad to see that dr Curry has decided to finally address the question of the hockey stick, which (in addition to Al Gore’s commercialization of the subject) was what made me a “skeptic”.
Having read Judith Curry’s article, it is difficult to find much to disagree with. Unless, of course, you have another agenda and something to hide.
The only other point I wish to make is that there is one group of people who have a deep insight into climate history – they are called geologists.
And by geologists I mean those scientists working in the private sector, not the bureaucrats who ‘work’ in government. Finding a private sector geologist who believes in AGW is as rare as finding rocking horse poo.
MattN:
I’m absolutely sure Gavin gets most of it by now. He’s basically cornered in a trap of his Team’s own manufacture. He cannot bring himself to back up and condemn the trick, and there is no way to move forwards and defend it – because it is scientifically indefensible. What he may not yet realise is that his bitter and vitriolic prattling on Judith’s blog, along with the awful contributions of his most vehement defenders (ianash, dhogaza et al), is highlighting the main event – Gavin’s credibility as a scientist, bleeding out before our eyes.
Gavin and all of the team, responsible for creating “the trick” in order to “hide the decline”, are exposed directly as practitioners of pseudo-science. There is no escaping this predicament now. Beddington wanted the pseudo-science exposed and condemned, and that’s exactly what he’s going to get.
Well said. The rest of your comment is good, too. I agree 100%.
It’s laughable that Gavin attempts to claim that those who understand the issue don’t have a problem with the hockey stick.
Reading Gavin’s comments at JC’s site I am reminded of the recent comments by Gaddafi.
@al gored
‘Reading Gavin’s comments at JC’s site I am reminded of the recent comments by Gaddafi’
They were mistranslated from the original Arabic. I have it on good authority that what he actually said was
‘Oh dearie me. We seem to be in a bit of a bind. WTF do we do now?’
But maybe you were right all along….
MattN says:
February 23, 2011 at 9:52 am
As I’ve said before, when the tree rings “lost correlation with surface temp” in 1961, you cannot possibly then assume that there ever really was a correlation to begin with.
I think it’s still possible that there’s a correlation, but not with “global temperature”, but with local temperatures in some areas, for instance on the Yamal peninsula… Just look at the graph of the closest long-running station to Yamal, Ostrov Dikson: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222206740006&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Jimmy Haigh says:
February 23, 2011 at 5:45 am
Gavin didn’t hang around for long. Is that all we’re going to get from him? Looks like he’s not being allowed out to play with the big boys any more.
It’s the middle of the day in the US, and we know that Gavin doesn’t post during work hours.
/sarc
“I’m absolutely sure Gavin gets most of it by now.”
Quite possibly. But he sure isn’t going to let it get in his way of continuing to defend the indefensible.
The ENTIRE thing hinges on an approx. 100 year period (1850ish -1961) where certain tree rings appear to correlate to surface temp. I get that. Had this correlation continued past 1961 ans well past Y2K, they quite possibly might have had a decent point. But the fact that correlation was lost, I immediately want to know “how many times in the past 1000 years did they lose correlation?” The answer is, of course, “we have no idea”. Which makes the graph complete junk.
An Engineering student would get an “F” on a project presenting data with this quality. And we are trying to base policy on this?