Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I always love seeing what Science magazine thinks is important. In their June 10th edition, in their “BY THE NUMBERS” section, they quote Nature Climate Change magazine, viz:
1,211,287 Square kilometers of ice road-accessible Arctic lands that will be unreachable by 2050, a 14% decrease, according to a report online 29 May in Nature Climate Change.
I busted out laughing. Sometimes the AGW supporters’ attempts to re-inflate the climate alarmism balloon are an absurd burlesque of the scientific method.
Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. I love it that they claim to know, to an accuracy of one square kilometre, both a) the current amount of Arctic lands reachable by ice roads around the globe and b) how that amount will change over the next forty years.
People continue to be perplexed that what they like to call the “scientific message of the dangers of climate change” is not reaching the US public. Over and over it is said to be a communications problem … which I suppose could be true, but only if “communications” is shorthand for “trying to get us to swallow yet another incredible claim”.
The idea that a hyper-accurate claim like that would not only get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but would be cited by another peer-reviewed journal, reveals just how low the climate science bar is these days. Mrs. Henniger, my high school science teacher, would have laughed such a claim out of the classroom. “Significant digits!” she would thunder. “What did your books say about significant digits”.
“The output of a mathematical operation can’t have more significant digits than the smallest number of significant digits in any of the inputs,” someone would say, and the class would grind on.
This waving of spurious accuracy is useful in one way, however. When someone does that, it is a valuable reminder to check your wallet—you can be pretty sure that they are trying to sell you something.
Because scientific studies have shown that when someone comes up with hyper-accurate numbers for their results, in 94.716% of the reported cases, what they are selling is as bogus as their claimed accuracy.
w.
North of 43 and south of 44 comments:
Even worse they add the high and low for the day and divide by 2 to get the average temperature for the day when in fact the true average temperature is somewhere between those two figures but not likely exactly half way.
Preliminary calculations on the (min+max)/2 method are a little closer to the true average than I thought:-( The data I used was from a few days ago and consisted of putting a USB thermometer set to sample once/minute in an indoor non-air conditioned area away from the sun. For simplicity, I just used minima and maxima for two days which were: (72, 79) (73, 81) degrees F. Computing the average with the (min+max)/2 method yields an average temperature of 76.25 F for the two day period. When one takes all 2880 individual minute readings for the two day period and averages those, the mean is 76.15 F. Considering that one can only have 3 significant figures in this result, and application of the elementary school rounding rules I was taught, the average temperature from both methods is 76.2 F. I was surprised at the result and have to look at more of the temperature data I’ve been recording but will have to write a quick program to find daily maxima and minima so I don’t have to do this manually. The natural assumption is that more data is better but all the minute by minute temperatures may be doing is giving nicer looking graphs than just the minimum/maximum temperatures. Will dig up my winter shop temperatures to see if this simple relationship is season dependent.
The best way to get someone to have an idea about significant figures is to give them a slide rule to use for a while. On a large slide rule once can, at best, get 4 significant figures. Use of a slide rule makes one work in implicit floating point mode and often the exponent is far more important than the mantissa in medical calculations; eg 0.1 mg vs 100 mg – one significant figure but a huge difference in physiologic effect if one is computing the dose of iv fentanyl to give.
So speaking of accuracy and precision, I got this when I was going to UBC engineering classes in the 60’s:
An ENGINEER is one who passes as an exacting expert on the strength of being able to turn out, with prolific fortitude, strings of incomprehensible formulae calculated with micrometric precision from extremely vague assumptions which are based on debatable figures acquired from inconclusive tests and quite incomplete experiments, carried out with instruments of problematic accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and rather dubious mentality under the influence of ….
A Climatologist is …
As my engineer father says:
An expert is just a drip under pressure.
Come on its obvious
A climate scientist who doesn’t waste time on the formalities of inaccurate engineering science … whats your favourite number?
I was once told by a minor political advisor that if you are going to make a number up in order to convince you audience it should end in a three or a seven. For some reason numbers which do that are the ones most easily believed. Clearly that advisor is now working for the AGW camp.
I remember an old Star Trek where Kirk and Spock were stranded on a Klingon-run planet. Kirk asked Spock to estimate the chances of success for their sneak attack. His response was something like 152,432.25 to 1. Kirk said “.25?” And Spock replied, “well, its difficult to be precise.” Absurd for the same reasons cited here.
“Because scientific studies have shown that when someone comes up with hyper-accurate numbers for their results, in 94.716% of the reported cases, what they are selling is as bogus as their claimed accuracy”.
Yeah, like “If you put this stuff on your hair (which, admittedly, costs a fortune), it could make it up to 43.12% more vibrant!”
There is the opposite too:
The over precise approximation:
“The ship can carry approximately 378 passengers on board…”.
_Jim says:
June 28, 2011 at 7:09 pm
I loved my slide rule. In addition to my K&E, I had a circular slide rule that just fit in my shirt pocket. I used that one all through high school. I ascribe the accuracy of my mental Bad Number Detector™ to the use of the slide rule. With no decimal point, you have to mentally estimate the size of the answer. As a result of making those estimations over and over, hundreds and hundreds of times, I developed a good sense of when a numerical claim was out by an order or magnitude or more.
(My Bad Number Detector™ can’t falsify anything. It just tells me where I might profitably look for something irregular.)
w.
Until the elder reached his teens, I responded to the children´s questions,¨How much longer?¨ ¨How much further?¨ ¨How heavy?¨ ¨What does it cost?¨ with precise values, including either fractions or decimals, if I was clueless. They learned to depend on my estimates: about, almost, over, more than your allowance. I trust they laugh, even now, when some authority claims prescient precision.
Thanks, Willis, for the humor. Or is it wit, more accurately?
“reveals just how low the climate science bar is these days.”
And that is about all you can say about climate “science”. They have a bar so low that it would make a politicians wince to think what they get away with.
As far as I can tell the bar they have to get over is: “climate ‘scientists’ can say anything so long as they can’t be proven to be wrong” (this generation).
http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=business/2011/06/23/taylor.psychic.economy.cnn
About this date of 2050. This is a kind of trap (accidentally or intentionally).
Just using really rough guesses here …
*if* we have entered a 25-30 year cooling micro-cycle it could reach out to 2030-ish.
*if* after that there is a corresponding 25-30 year warming micro-cycle it could reach out past 2060-ish.
That projection easily cover this mid-century talk that seems to keep popping up. Because of that rough calculation I like to simply respond to these AGW predictions by saying: “Yes, it is supposed to warm up around mid-(21st)-century. And your point is?“
Joshua says:
June 28, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Hmmm … I see that humor and indirection is, in some cases, a hindrance. So let me speak plainly.
The specificity of the number mentioned above is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. I’m sorry that distinction wasn’t clear to you.
The problem is the plethora of bad climate science, of which this example of innumeracy by the author and the journals is only one poor specimen among far too many.
Funny you should ask that. Regarding my statements, I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin of this email is too small to contain.
w.
PS – If Americans are so happy with climate science and things are going so swimmingly, why is Trenberth trying to reverse the null hypothesis? Why do mainstream AGW folks spend so much time discussing their failure to convince the American public of the urgent need for action? Heck, even RealClimate is discussing the “communication problem” and what to do about it.
Me, I don’t think that the problem is bad communications. I think that the problem is bad science. Do I have “data” to back that up? I don’t, and I don’t even know what it might look like. But the main issue that I hear brought up, over and over, is not “we don’t understand you AGW climate scientists.”
It is “we don’t believe you AGW climate scientists,” which is a very different thing.
I ascribe that to the “Fool me once, your fault. Fool me twice …” philosophy that most people have. People hate being fooled. They’d rather be wrong than be suckers. And with the foolery and the deception having been disclosed, both by Climategate and by Steve McIntyre and many others, you’ll have to go a long way before they’ll believe AGW apocalyptic predictions again.
Do I have data to back that up?
Only the undeniable fact that lots of people don’t believe you, and that even AGW supporters say that the constant drone of [failed] apocalyptic forecasts, each attempting to be worse than the last, is not working …
The appearance of accuracy intended to lend credence extends to computer models. Computer-generated graphics and other output looks like it must be true, because it appears to be precise and lacking error. X-ray crystallography is one example. Protein structures look very accurate, but they are full of errors. For one thing, the crystal structure is not necessarily the solution strucuture. Also, someone has to place the amino acids into the density. That is an educated guess. The real resolution of a structure might be 3 to 10 Å, but a graphical rendering might imply 0.01 Å resolution.
Then we have the false precision based on the position of the presenter. Credibility can be enhanced by association with an institution, by official funding, a title, or a degree. The ideas might be wacky, but because of the added weight of the association, people may be less critical. Examples: Al Gore (ex VPOTUS), Michio Kaku (you won’t believe this ego trip… http://mkaku.org/home/), and AAAS Board making declarations of the seriousness of AGW. About this last one, among these highly regarded scientists making the statements about global warming, few knew much about climate or weather. At the time, then A.G. Jerry Brown had a link to the AAAS statement on his state website [1]. There are other amazing examples at AAAS [2].
1) http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/aaas_climate_statement.pdf
2) http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/
I love Mrs. Henniger already – a girl who knows (or knew) her stuff, obviously. I say that as someone whose calculations are normally done to a couple of figures in my head before I reach for the slide rule or calculator. And yes, it was learning how to use a slide rule that taught me that. Too many people born post-calculator appear to be unable to work out one plus two without their digital doodad to confirm the result – and regard the result as gospel even when they have miskeyed something in.
Jae (11th, 7:58pm) – just maybe this will help explain why that darn “greenhouse effect” just doesn’t seem to have the teeth we’ve been warned about. Seems to make sense.
JPeden says:
June 28, 2011 at 7:59 pm
Even more “accurately”, we’re surely doomed if those ice roads are no longer needed! All we’ll have on tv is reruns.
But all we have are endless reruns today…..
Many unscientific statements in that quote from Science – including the word “unreachable”. So we can put a man on the moon but we can’t reach parts of the Arctic without ice roads? Obviously, we can reach those places by other means, and if the ice is gone (which I am not convinced by) then it may justify investment in other modes of transport.
Incidentally, there are operations that can increase the number of significant digits in a result over the starting data. But as a first cut rule of thumb, maintaining the lowest number of significant digits when multiplying is a good first bet, and maintaining the worst case fixed point accuracy when adding.
“Jacques Laxale says:
June 28, 2011 at 7:51 pm”
Unfortunately for Australia Labor, with increasing pressure form the Greens, will introduce a tax on carbon acting on advise from Ross “Gold Mine” Garnaut, an economist. With energy prices set to rise by about 18% on the 1st of July, petrol prices already ~AU$0.05c/l over priced (Oil companies price gouging – What a surprise in the lucky country) and average grocery bills UP ~AU$1300 p/a from 2 years ago, Aussie voters really have no idea what the downstream effects of this tax on carbon will be. Gillard is bribing cash poor people with “buffers” and/or “compensation” (Compo). Big businesses are also crying fowl and wanting some sort of corporate welfare compo too. Gillard is totally ignoring the trends world-wide with regards to ETS and/or carbon taxes. The Gillard Govn’t is totally broke and needs new revenue streams, namely a tax on carbon and a mining tax. Australians are begining to realise these taxes are nothing to do with the environment.
Rather obviously not true, since they did.
Open and Close Dates for the North West Territories Ice Bridges
http://www.dot.gov.nt.ca/_live/pages/wpPages/Open_Close_Dates_Ice_Bridges.aspx
[1] Mackenzie River Crossing Fort Providence
[2] Liard River Crossing at Fort Simpson
[3] Mackenzie River Crossing at Tsiighetchic
[4] Peel River Crossing
[5] Mackenzie River Crossing at Camsell Bend
Last 10 Years Average (2000/2001 – 2009/2010)
Open [1] 28-Dec, [2] 28-Nov, [3] 21-Nov, [4] 11-Nov, [5] 19-Dec
Closed 16-Apr 21-Apr 4-May 5-May 21-Apr
Last 5 years average (2005/06 to 2009/10)
Open [1]19-Dec, [2] 29-Nov, [3]18-Nov, [4] 9-Nov, [5] 20-Dec
Closed 16-Apr 22-Apr 3-May 6-May 21-Apr
This information is for the MACKENZIE DELTA ICE ROADS (Inuvik area) http://www.dot.gov.nt.ca/_live/pages/roadreportsHistory/WinterRoad_MackenzieDelta-InuvikArea.pdf
The 5 year average against the 25 year average indicates the ice roads are opening earlier and closing later. This could be better techniques for making and maintaining the ice roads being applied, but either way there still has to be ice.
Regarding the “communication problem” – this is a modern myth that has taken hold in so many areas, it may be one of the major causes of mistrust of all forms of authority.
In the UK, we have fairly regular by-elections, caused by the death of an MP, and absolutely without fail the morning after the election there will be a politician who performed especially badly claiming that “we obviously failed to get our message across”.
And the journalists simply lap it up – never does anyone raise the possibility that nobody voted for you because you did get the message across, and they don’t like the message.
If anyone read the Michael Tobis’ analogy (at Kloor’s, I believe) of how he would simply have to ignore his wife’s desire for new decking if the roof of the house was falling in, I think you’d see how these failing communicators think. They are so absolutely convinced that they are right, and that the case is so incontrovertible, that the only possible reasons for dissent are either malicious (incl. bribery from Big Oil), stupidity, or failure to get the message across.
And as most of these CAGW folk are I think basically honest at heart, and like to think the best of their fellow man, the only reasonable explanation for dissent in the general public must be a failure in communication.
“The idea that a hyper-accurate claim like that would not only get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but would be cited by another peer-reviewed journal, reveals just how low the climate science bar is these days.”
Nonsense. First, as far as I can see the ‘hyper-accurate claim’ do not occur in the original (peer-reviewed) journal article. Second, Science News magazine is not peer-reviewed. Stop making things up, will you? Of course, it is ridiculous to present the number at an accuracy of 1 km2.
< Total Volume of water on planet earth: 311,083,303 cubic miles.
< Great arithmetic, shame about the mathematics.
This reminds me of the story of a guide in a museum, who told visitors that the age of a mummy was 4003 years. To a lady who asked how that age could be known so accurately, the guide replied: "When, three years ago, I started with my job here in the museum, my boss told me that the mummy was 4000 years old."
Whence, indeed, 4000 + 3 = 4003.