Guest post by Alec Rawls
Andrew Orlowski at the UK Register has an anecdotal account of Downing College’s skeptics-vs-believers mash-up. Ace of Spades pulled the juiciest bit:
In short, the day lined up Phil Jones, oceanographer Andrew Watson, and physicist Mike Lockwood, the latter to argue that the sun couldn’t possibly have caused recent warming. He was followed by the most impressive presentation from Henrik Svensmark, whose presentation stood out head and shoulders above anyone else. Why? For two reasons. The correlations he shows are remarkable, and don’t need curve fitting, or funky statistical tricks. And he has advanced a mechanism, using empirical science [image above], to explain them.
At the other end of the scale, by way of contrast, the Met’s principle research scientist John Mitchell told us: “People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful,” adding, “Our approach is not entirely empirical.”
Yes, you could say that.
Lockwood’s failed argument against a solar explanation
Orlowski on Lockwood:
The strongest argument, according to Lockwood, for the sun not being a driver in recent climatic activity is that “it has been going in the wrong direction for 30 years.”
Hmmm. So as soon as solar magnetic activity passed its peak, when it was still at some of the highest levels ever recorded, these very high levels of solar activity could no longer have caused warming?
As I have noted a number of times, this argument depends on an unstated assumption that, by 30 years ago (by 1980 or so), ocean temperatures had equilibrated to whatever forcing effect the 20th century’s high level of solar activity might be having. Otherwise the continued high level of forcing would continue to create warming until equilibrium was reached, regardless of whether solar activity had peaked yet. (The actual peak seems to have been solar cycle 22, from 1986-96, not 1980, as Lockwood claims.)
When I pressed Lockwood on his implicit equilibrium assumption he justified it by citing evidence that ocean temperature response to solar activity peters out (as measured by decorrelation) within a few years:
Almost all estimates have been in the 1-10 year range.
But decorrelation between surface temperatures and solar activity is very different from equilibrium. All decorrelation is measuring is the rapid temperature response of the upper ocean layer when solar activity rises or falls. That rapid response indicates that the sun is indeed a powerful driver of global temperature, but it says next to nothing about how long it takes for heat to carry into and out of deeper ocean layers.
This was brought out by AGW believers like Gavin Schmidt who are concerned about the energy balance implications of equilibration-speed. In a simple energy balance model, rapid equilibration implies (other things equal) that climate sensitivity must be low. Since belief depends on high climate sensitivity, the rapid equilibration claim cited by Lockwood had to be shot down, which was managed quite successfully (ibid).
In sum, Lockwood’s rapid equilibrium assumption is dead and buried, leaving him no grounds for dismissing a solar explanation for post 70’s warming. I’ll keep an eye out for video of Lockwood’s presentation, but I doubt he mentioned the rapid equilibrium assumption upon which his argument depends.
More punk students
Remember these graduate student “climate scientists,” going all Clockwork Orange for the planet or something:
Sounds like they made an appearance at Downing College too:
The audience had been good enough to heed Howard’s opening advice that “if anybody mentions Climategate, they’ll be evicted”. Nobody ambushed the CRU crew all day – it was all very polite. I noted that the skeptics made a point of listening politely to the warmists, and applauding them all. A group of students and a few others, simply giggled and mocked the skeptics, however from start to finish. One of their tutors (I presume) was in hysterics all day.
Give ’em an A. They learned their “observational evidence is not very useful” lesson well.
Silly me! And here I always thought models used temperature record databases and other “observed” proxies as core data, hmmmm……
J.
@-Stephen Wilde says:
May 18, 2011 at 3:22 am
“I anticipate continuing low solar activity and a continuing negative PDO which should translate into continuing jetstream meridionality, more clouds, higher albedo, less energy into the oceans and in due course noticeable tropospheric cooling.”
Do you ‘anticipate’ the timescale for this reversal of the trend over the last century?
How many decades will this “in due course” take to get back to 1980s levels of temperature?
@Smokey:
May 17, 2011 at 6:45 am
The TSA has plenty to hide.
====================
They keep getting caught stealing from travelers, too. Some excerpts from article that came out today:
[…]
Yet another TSA agent has been caught engaging in criminal behavior. The regularity with which this occurs makes it look like committing felonies is a prerequisite to get a job in airport security.
“A Transportation Security Administration officer at LAX has been arrested for stealing from a traveler’s suitcase,” reports KABC.
“Ryan Driscoll, 31, was arrested on May 10 at Terminal 6. He faces a felony theft charge.”
The case is the 14th in just the last three years (which the TSA admits to) of its workers stealing large amounts of cash and other valuables from airport travelers. Back in February, TSA agents Persad Coumar and Davon Webb were arrested for stealing $40,000 dollars from a check-in bag at John F. Kennedy Airport. They were later discovered to have stolen an additional $160,000 in valuables from people’s luggage, mostly laptops and jewelry.
[…]
Just days prior to this case, TSA supervisor Michael Arato pleaded guilty in a federal court to multiple counts of theft, as well as admitting to taking bribes and kickbacks from another TSA worker to “look the other way”, while the agent he was supervising stole more money from travelers at Newark Liberty Airport. Arato stole up to $700 a day from passengers for a staggering eight years before he was caught.
[…]
http://truthiscontagious.com/2011/05/18/is-criminal-behavior-a-prerequisite-to-get-a-job-with-the-tsa
“If the rock concert is too loud and I can’t hear what the person nearby is saying, I can certainly try to guess what they might have said, but I know I am just guessing.”
LOL. You could find NLP/audio recognition programs that would predict what they are saying. But I wouldn’t make or break a friendship based on the model’s output. I might decide to get them a hot-dog vs a hamburger at the concession stand based on the model’s output because it’s not a very important decision.
But if the decision is important, I would want a high degree of certainty about what he is saying. In the modeling world, that’s the “cost” of a wrong decision. Spending trillions of dollars and remaking the world economy would fall into the “important decision” category for me.
And that’s really the main difference between AGW advocates and “skeptics.” If you push them hard enough on the empirical data, most will fall back to “well, getting rid of carbon based fuels would be good for so many reasons, we should not be worried about holes in the data.” If you ask a skeptic, the skeptic will usually tell you that he wants a good reason to remake the world economy and spend trillions of dollars. There are value judgments at the bottom of both positions. But most skeptics do not pretend that science proves their value judgment or that their position is free of value judgments.
I find it amusing that when you point out the models are flawed, they point to observational data. Glaciers melting, icepack etc..
The biggest thing to me that shows the models are flawed is this. The original hockey stick was created by Michael Mann from models. This hockey stick has been shown to be completely wrong. Model used produce the same result even when garbage is input. Yet some how all the models since then (produced by the team) get the same result. So, Mann did it totally wrong, but got it right? What is the statistical likely hood of that? The more logical explanation is that when a model used did not get the previously thought of as “correct” result, it was tweaked until it produced the near same result as Mann’s. Thus, affirming the model was “correct” and the results ready for publication. His statement may have been accurate if it placed the modifier a “properly done” in front of model. But, as we now know and the climate gate emails show data was tweaked to get the expected results. My personnel favorite was the email where the two “scientists” discussed smoothing out the bump in ocean temps so that they got the desired result, but then discussing how they made sure they did not remove it entirely because someone may notice it was in the land temps and question the descrepancy.
“This is not predictive modeling science. It is scrambling to make complex models fit the modeler’s preconceived notions.”
Exactly, the models are not predicting future climate. They are predicting what the model builders expect the future climate to be. If they don’t, the model builders will “adjust” them until they do.
This “experimenter-expectation” effect is well documented and result when double blind controls are not applied to the experiment (model). The classic example was “Clever Hans”, the horse that could do aritmetic. Now we have “climate models”, the computers that can predict the future.
“In honour of Pfungst’s study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition.”
Hindcasting is a form or machine learning as you are training the model to reproduce the past. As with animal cognition studies it requires double blind techniques.
“In experimental science, experimenter’s bias is subjective bias towards a result expected by the human experimenter. David Sackett,[1] in a useful review of biases in clinical studies, states that biases can occur in any one of seven stages of research:
1.in reading-up on the field,
2.in specifying and selecting the study sample,
3.in executing the experimental manoeuvre (or exposure),
4.in measuring exposures and outcomes,
5.in analyzing the data,
6.in interpreting the analysis, and
7.in publishing the results.
The inability of a human being to be objective is the ultimate source of this bias. It occurs more often in sociological and medical sciences, where double blind techniques are often employed to combat the bias. But experimenter’s bias can also be found in some physical sciences, for instance, where the experimenter rounds off measurements.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimenter's_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect
fdf says:
“And that’s really the main difference between AGW advocates and “skeptics.” If you push them hard enough on the empirical data, most will fall back to “well, getting rid of carbon based fuels would be good for so many reasons, we should not be worried about holes in the data.” If you ask a skeptic, the skeptic will usually tell you that he wants a good reason to remake the world economy and spend trillions of dollars. There are value judgments at the bottom of both positions. But most skeptics do not pretend that science proves their value judgment or that their position is free of value judgments.”
Exactly.
This is something that’s been written about a lot by a philosopher/psychologist/mystic called Ken Wilber. He was a biochemistry student who got interested in Eastern religions, and Western psychology, and whether, if at all, any of it was approachable with a modern rational questioning mind. Eventually, he found, in his thinking, that you had to recognise that values and science were two different domains. By “domain” he meant that they involved different methods of inquiry. Science is primarily about objectivity, whereas values are primarily about how people ought to treat each other — and to find that out, you need people talking about their experience, so it isn’t objective, rather, it is inter-subjective. Thus, most discussions that try to mix the two, values and science, are mush. You can’t mix objectivity with inter-subjectivity; that’s like trying to prove scientifically that Picasso was better than Mondrian.
One thing to bear in mind is that inquiry into values does have a method, or a set of methods. We can as people come to certain agreements about what is Good. Although, from developmental psychology, it was found that “what is good” changes for a person as they go through life. It takes about 10 years for major changes in an individual. See the people who were major players in a movement, and then left. What’s really interesting is that people tend to go in one direction, from one set of values, to another, to another. So you can model them as value A, value B, value C, etc. There are various models. And they chart on there, what many of us here call “greenies”, and, if you waited ten years, how those greenies might change.
Of course those models might be very wrong, but the point is, they’re using a method to investigate into our inter-subjective values. The method is there but it isn’t “science” in the usual sense of cold hard instruments. When people talk values they have to use interpretation and that’s a whole mine field. On the other hand, we already have a feel for what a “greenie” is, simply because there’s a lot of people out there who tend to say similar things. What the models add is that if you follow people over time, you tend to see shifts in values in a certain direction.
Anyway, I’m trying desperately to keep this brief. Wilber noticed that the ecology movement was desperately worried about the planet, however, because they were trained in the usual notion that its only real if its “science”, they ignored all the psychological side of stuff. So Ecology claims to be “holistic” but it leaves out psychology, or just, the basic questions about what motivates people. Given that it is people who are consuming and throwing stuff away, wouldn’t ecology want to understand what motivates people to do that? Sorta like, how economists might be interested in whether individuals are actually motivated to act as rational choosers, or whether there are other things that also motivate people… like say, different sets of values? If 10 million religiously fundamentalist people moved into a country, people who valued social cohesion and tradition above all, people who didn’t value self-interested pursuits of career and achievement, if they moved into your country, what effect would that different values set have on the economy? There’s all sorts of qualities or parameters to what makes up a values system and we see many different worldviews and people and movements and sub-cultures around. The greens are one such movement.
So here’s the situation: ecologists want to save the world, and they consider themselves scientists. But the way to save the world might involve getting people to change their behaviour (because you don’t value entrepreneurship, you value quite village life, so you’re anti-industrialisation, and that’s a different lifestyle, so you want people’s behaviour to change). Now that’s a psychological problem. But from an ecology point of view, there’s nothing special about humans, we are just another species. The ecologists themselves have an inherent values system, which they don’t recognise — who don’t realise that they themselves are operating out of a particular viewpoint and values system. They don’t like colonialism, sexism — many are also feminists, for instance — they don’t like phallologocentrism, and they don’t like species-ism… the imagining that humans are any better than other species. They have this inherent values system (which the psychologists have noticed as a particular distinct values system, one of about 7 or 8 major systems around today.)
So the ecologists are in a bind: they want people to change, but they ignore values as a topic, they ignore what it is that motivates people. They want people to change to become more caring about the environment, but they deny that humans are better than animals. I mean, I don’t see lions caring about the environment. But humans often do — strange, interesting, useful? Nope, humans are worse than animals, they say. Now if humans are not better than animals, how do you get humans to be better humans?
“Better” is all about values. Having tried to remain “scientific” about the planet, they ignored entirely the human developmental inter-subjective story about values, and how people gradually move from being selfish to becoming more selfless.
As you’ve seen, greenies don’t actually care about global warming, or any of the science. At the end of the conversation, they’ll just drop down to their core and say something like, “but isn’t life just moving too fast?” The psychologists who study values say that this is what you do; you keep asking and keep asking until you come to the statement that they settle on at the end. That is their values.
They found this also with many Vietnam war protesters. After talking about pros and cons of the war, many protesters eventually settle on, “nobody tells me what to do!!” ie. that’s really why they were refusing to fight, not out of selflessness for the “enemy”, but out of the selfishness of putting themselves above their country’s needs.
The green movement is all about values. Anybody who’s glanced at the models of values can recognise that when they say “the science” it is really more like a shampoo advert, where they always say “here’s the science” because “science” is supposed to be objective and rational and convincing. But then they add their own agenda on top of it, an agenda that look suspiciously like a set of values. It is obvious because when geoengineering or other technical fixes are suggested, they recoil in horror. See, that’s an affront to their values.
But whilst greens continue to mush their values into the guise of a scientific certainty, the whole thing will go nowhere.
If those psychology models have any predictive value, here’s what they suggest: there is another values set that has been identified more recently in people, people who are part of the generations that came after the 60s. If green is sorta correlated with post-modernism, this new values set is post-post-modern. These are kids who have incorporated the green values but also re-incorporated modern rationality and other stuff. According to the models they are also much more effective at getting things done. Unlike say, green wind farms that don’t produce anything, the post-post-moderns are interested in what works, and they are willing to get there in very flexible and adaptable ways. It is estimated that a significant percentage of kids today are arriving with this new set of values. (ie. about 5%)
They actually value flexibility and adaptability in a complex world where multiple cultures are at war with different values systems. So, in many way, the green generation from the 60s got into politics and NGOs and got some power. But they were never very good at getting things done.
The newer generation is very likely to value ecology, but also value industry and human development, and so find adaptive flexible ways to reintegrate systems.
Sorry for the long comment, but you mentioned “values” 🙂