Submitted by Marc Hendrix – correspondence with Steve Woodman, reproduced with permission:
For your reference, today I sent this challenge to the Climate Commission regarding a recent University of Tasmania study on growth rates in the banded morwong and the alarmist promotion of its suspect findings.
In a recent ABC story on the study, much was made of the threat of fish dying from hot ocean water when in fact the sample size of the component of the study which looked at the physiological stress on fish consisted of only TWO fish.
The authors admitted: “This result may reflect the small sample size of our experiments, and further work is needed to determine the effect of increasing temperature on swimming activity in banded morwong.”
(See abstract and full text of study here in Nature Climate Change)
Unfortunately Dr Thresher of the University did not inform the listeners to the ABC of this significant limitation to the study and its findings.
I present three other peer reviewed studies that show that marine ecosystems adapt well to warmer water and that there is no cause for such rank alarmism from activist scientists.
Marc, over the last three months I’ve sent over twenty challenges to the Commission regarding peer reviewed papers that do not toe the party line, apart from the usual automatic acknowledgement of receipt they have not yet responded to me.
Steve Woodman BSc (Hons) Psych
P.S I am a private citizen without any political affiliations or vested interests in coal, nuclear or any other industries or business concerns.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I have a fish tank. In it are 5 fish. The temperature of the water in this 40 gallon tank is all over the place, because I don’t really care. The fish are 5 years old and doing fine.
Some scientist wants to convince me that there’s a global catastrophe looming because the sea has changed temperature by .08degC per decade and the fish are in peril??
My tank changes temperature by that much in an hour as the ambient temp in my house changes from 60 to 85 degF during the day. (never mind the chemistry….)
Karoly will always stand out in my mind for the way he leveraged the 156 deaths in the Victorian bushfires while Marysville was still smouldering.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/4/7438/09041
For what it’s worth (okay not much) he is also in the Climate Science Hall of Shame.
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/hall_of_shame.htm#List_of_institutions
It’s easy for this guy to p155 you off, but remember to win over the idle public we need to fight a good clean fight, all evidence, no insults.
Bury your feelings, skeptics. They do you credit, but they could be made to serve the Emperor.
Kindle Kinser Thanks.
“On the first day of warming my alarmist gave to me..”
Seeing as you’re waxing a bit lyrical there Oscar, it’s about time the young digital generation took a leaf out of we oldies book and Come Out from behind their anonymous keyboards, cyber-bullying their climatology profs and Getup them openly on the campuses. Get Out them gitars and Ipods and start a singing and a chantin some of them old time favourites-
Whadda we want? Scientific proof! Whenda we wannit? NOW!
and-
Come gather ’round drones
Wherever you roam
And admit that the taxes
Around you have groan
And accept it that soon
You’ll be skinned to the bone
If overtime to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start objectin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the climes they’re always changin’.
Come blogger and critics
Who analyse like wise men
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And speak up real soon
For the windmills in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s harmin’
For the losers now
Will be later to win
For the climes they’re always changin’.
Come senators, congressmen
Best heed our call
Don’t stand in the freeway
Don’t block up the coal
For he that gets hurt
Will be those you have tramelled
There’s a battle outside
And it’s worth wagin’
It’ll soon shake your windmills
And shatter your panels
For the climes they’re always changin’.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And best criticize
What only you understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are being given commands
Your wise road is
Rapidly cravin’
Please stand up to the new order
If you can’t bend your hand
For the climes they’re always changin’.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slick ones now
Will be gone fast
As the present now
Will later be past
Their new order is
Rapidly cavin’
And the first ones now
Will later be last
For the climes they’re always changin’
If you read at the study, or supplementary materials , the main part of the paper uses over 1000 fish in it’s sample size, the absract and conclusions are based off this evidence. The study also includes a related ‘preliminary study’ within it which uses 2 fish as a initial test. The paper doesn’t draw any concrete conclusions from the preliminary study but notes it as an area for future research.
While the headline of ‘2 fish used in study’ is a catchy and funny title, it is disingenuous and misleading to say that the results are based on only on those 2. Lost a little respect for this site because of this.
Link for the supp materials
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n2/extref/nclimate1084-s1.pdf
Frankly, I do not see a problem here. The rules of statistical significance have absolutely no place in a genuine pseudoscience.
Brian H says on June 4, 2011 at 12:22 am
I concur. Think of: Step up to the party line. Not to get out of line! Not to get out of step.
It is toe the party line, damn it!
Here’s the link to Wikipedia’s discussion of toe vs. tow (favoring the former): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
You can also google for:
toe the line or tow the line
To get two fish I believe you would tow the line, behind the boet… bowt… no, boat.
There is a simple answer to all this nonsense. Surface tension. Physical heat can not pass from the atmosphere to the ocean, it will only accept suns radiation. Don’t believe me, try heating a bucket with a heat gun.
That’s just plain silly. Why deal with smelly fish at all? Just model them.
Pretty well what we are coming to expect from the alarmist camp in Australia, they have an open go in the majority of the Media and invariably get no questioning even when they make extreme claims that are not supported by the science.
To me its hardly surprising that the free go, and suppression of any sceptic side to the issues, is just building frustration as there is no real political voice for sceptics, no wonder that some (certainly not all!!) who object to the spin and lies, resort to abuse.
In Karoli’s case he has been responsible for some extremely bad comments, he just cannot help himself. I must say that like Flannery he has toned down some of his extreme and offensive claims and now liberally sprinkles mights and possibly where he knows there is uncertainty, but after doing that, he ignores all those uncertainties and reverts the we know that catastrophe is certain after saying the opposite, so the public is left with the lies (dogma) as the last word.
A sad individual who is certainly not honest in his approach to science or the scientific method or even interested in truth.
Clive Hamilton was the same, an ardent spouter of lies, suppresses any suggestion of uncertainty in “their science” and really just an argument from authority or repeats of the worn out claim of consensus of climate “experts” and then they wonder why ordinary people get heated in their response to their more outrageous claims.
I’d rather that guys like Cook, Karoli, Hamilton should engage in searching and open debate with sceptical scientists, instead of the rubbish they keep coming out with. As jobs go down the drain, I fear that frustration (at not having any voice, representation or ability to vote on the issue) will build enormously in Australia.
We see certain groups who seem to think its all right to threaten to sabotage generating plants, attack logging operations, treatment of caged birds, use of furs, and any other number of environmental issues, graffiti buildings as a right of passage among the young hotheads and I fear the same lawbreaking might be the end result.
Of course there are certain fringe anarchist style groups very active in fomenting trouble as well, so quite capable of carrying out that type of campaign to polarize and leverage issues. Not hard to inject venom into a debate and attack both sides.
Australia, like other parts of the world has had incidents in the past from dissident groups recruiting to exploit.
I’m rather sad that otherwise intelligent people can’t see the potential issues that can arise from one sided bias and denial of voice to the other.
The level of invective directed against sceptics by a rabid element, including veiled threats that they will be silenced is similarly concerning. The worse the warmist science performs the more offensive and threatening those words become.
Re Death Threats
According to the ABC “Media Watch” TV Show, Dr Karoli recently tried to debate Radio shock jock Alan Jones, and got something of a hiding. For those outside of Sydney, Mr Jones takes no prisoners in debate. He makes Rush Limbough look like a compete wimp. I could imagine that some of Mr Jones’s more “red neck” listeners could be to blame for threats against Dr Karoli. But that is just speculation, I don’t have any actual information.
Ah. Looked at the supplemental information. Oscillation of iron fertilization and plankton bloom, along with temperature change, have great affects on Salmon growth, population, and migration patterns. That has been going on for 100’s of years and is documented in fishing fleet ship logs before there were scientists worried about CO2.
I also noticed that temperature changes in the seas in the present study were identified as secondary to ENSO conditions.
I hardly think this study leads to any conclusion other than what is already known about fish, especially commercial fish. Their numbers and size change with the NATURAL oceanic and atmospheric oscillations, in particular the decadal ones, and that overfishing during less favorable oscillations can devastate a fishing industry. CO2 is not even a speck of dust in that frame of reference.
…AND regarding the case study of two fish. Great way to introduce bias into a larger random? sample study. If you want to see the evidence you are sure will be there, you will see it. And because correlation cannot prove causation, the door is open to the suggestion of anthropogenic warming of the waters along with saying that ENSO parameters were also correlated to this warming. The unspoken but ubiquitous talking point is to subliminally suggest that ENSO is whut dunnit in the past, but AGW is the perp now.
I’ve heard it. Got anything new?
In a normal population, a sample size equal to the square root of the population is typically representative of the population.
So, in a study using 2 fish as a sample, it would be representative if the total population of fish was 4. If however the fish population was more likely in the millions, then you would need a sample measured in the thousands to draw any meaningful conclusion.
As has been mentioned in more than a few expert reviews of climate science, the findings are largely based on faulty use of statistics. Climate science has by and large ignored disciplines outside of climate science in drawing its conclusions. As a result, they have been mislead as to the statistical significance of their findings.
If you have one foot in the freezer and another in the oven you are statistically comfortable according to climate science. Global average temperature is calculated in this fashion. Then if the freezer is turned off, while the oven is left on, you will experience a net increase in average temperature – global warming. Only then will you be uncomfortable.
As can be seen from this simple example, the increase in average temperature has nothing to do with how comfortable you are, or how suitable the overall temperatures are for living creatures. Comfort has to do with the range of extremes, which is hidden when you average the temperature data.
As such, the underlying premise of AGW, that average temperature is statistically significant is what gives rise to the misleading conclusions. You are measuring something that can be shown to be statistically of no significance, and then trying to draw meaningful conclusions.
You might as well be reading tea leaves. Predicting future climate based on historical average temperatures is no different that predicting future stock prices based on the past Dow Jones averages. It will have the same skill level. Exactly the same skill level as throwing dice or tossing a coin.
Like a stopped clock, sooner of later the time will be right. If you are accidentally at the right time when you make your prediction, you will become famous (Hansen 88). If you are accidentally at the wrong side you will become infamous (Gore 08).
The difference is that every 30 years the climate switches from warming to cooling. Gore wasn’t wrong about global warming happening, only about when it would happen. But in the end it didn’t matter, he rode the Katrina disaster to fame and fortune, ignoring the human causes of the disaster.
New Orleans flooded because the levies were not maintained. Al Gore was in a position to influnce this during his time in office from 1977-2001. Coincidence? Or a politician having helped create the problem, then wanting to take credit for solving the problem?
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Is this a science blog or a grammar blog?
Yes, it is both mike g. And possibly a “capitalize proper names” blog.
“… for tirelessly speaking the truth about Climate change.”
So, it is not about science any more. It has truly become a religion.
Since my favorite past time is shooting and fishing, I have to ask. How big do they get? What bait should I use? And…does anyone have a good recipe?
In my observation, when it gets hot the fish will swim to deeper, cooler water. When it cools off, they come back to the shallow water. Could it be that fish are smarter than some scientists?
“Pamela Gray says:
June 4, 2011 at 10:55 am
Since my favorite past time is shooting and fishing, I have to ask. How big do they get? What bait should I use? And…does anyone have a good recipe?”
In NZ they we call them Red Moki. They eat seaweed, hard to catch with a hook. They are reef dwellers and swim very slowly. Only beginner spearfishingpersons shoot them. They are just too easy and allegedly slow growing and long lived. Good eating though.
Actually, I think they can swim quickly when they want to, but because few people hunt them, they do not flee from humans. If people started hunting them more, I suspect they would flee more, making them harder to catch.
Adaptation.
Something that humans can also do when circumstances change.
It seems they caught some 1200 specimens of the fish at five locations,
made otolith age determinations on at least 130, maybe 200 specimens
(partly missing text below figure 2). Based on this, statistical tests were
made and a solid conclusion drawn, sufficient for a decent article:
“Increasing temperatures coincide with increased growth for populations
in the middle of the species range, but with reduced growth for those at the
warm northern edge of the species’ distribution, indicating that temperatures
may have already reached levels associated with increased metabolic costs.”
IN ADDITION, they made a physiological test to elucidate the mechanism
by measuring oxygen consumption and swimming activity on two fish
individuals in a tank. A useful supporting component.
THEN the so called science blog WUT steps in and runs it backward:
a sample of two fish only!! Who needs this kind of distortion and manipulation?
How does my fridge cool water down?