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.
I doubt that ice road study had even one significant digit.
What (climate) research shows is that what (climate) research shows is virtually never correct.
Why? Are they chicken? Or trying to duck the issue? What turkeys! I can imagine them goose-stepping alltogethernow, leaving foul deposits in their wake ….
😉
;PpPp
North of 43 and south of 44 says:
June 28, 2011 at 6:59 pm
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. That makes the error bars rather large and likely well outside + or – 1 degree. For some reason 52.345 degrees F + or – 10 degrees doesn’t really mean a whole lot.
Do they? I’ve spent quite a lot of time looking at temperature data – mainly from GHCN, CRUTEM3 and CET – all of these are expressed in tenths of a degree. Whilst this might well be too fine a resolution, particularly for historical temperatures, I don’t believe it’s correct to say that anyone claims thousandths of a degree accuracy.
As each day goes by the laughter from future generations can now be heard louder and louder.
These people do realise that there vanity project will live years after they have left this mortal coil. Imagine being known for the rest of human civilisation for science such as this.
The teachers may teach in the future, ‘No that’s wrong your using climate change science, all hot air, no facts’.
Watching the US program ‘Ice Road Truckers’ shows that the Arctic roads are ephemeral not everlasting. They are a winter and spring use only feature because they degrade too far for safe use. Don’t these people ever watch TV.
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 28, 2011 at 11:40 pm
” Bad Number Detector™ ”
Common sense works just as well. Sadly there’s not much of that around these days.
Here in the UK we have exactly zero ie 0.00000000 recurring Sq KM of ice-road accessible Arctic land. I’m trying to work out if that is good or bad.
Since this is an arctic related article, i thought I might ask a question about “polar amplification” that a “climate scientist” mentioned (that I read in a recent The Vancouver Sun article).
The average increase of the earth of 2 degrees will mean an increase of 6 degrees in the arctic.
Now I was wondering, what would the average temperature increase have to be outside of the arctic so adding the arctic regions, of 6 degrees above, to the rest of the world of some value less than 2 degrees to come up with an average of 2?
Ok, I admit that I could do the math myself, and will do so, at some unspecified time in the future. Also could you calculate the area in terms of “Manhattans” that would have to be 4 degrees below average to compensate for the 4 degrees above the 2 degrees average of the whole planet average.
Or is Polar Amplification all horse pucky?
I hear wailing about the hypothetical loss of permafrost as if permafrost was some natural treasure. Melting permafrost is only a problem to structures already built on permafrost. Once it melts, you can build much cheaper regular structures on real ground. It is much less hassle to have a town NOT built on permafrost. The same with “ice roads”.
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 29, 2011 at 12:27 am
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.
I think the problem is worse than that. The ‘foolery and the deception’ about AGW has meant that people have stopped believing in many other areas of science that we often see paraded in the newspapers etc. Perhaps that is a good thing.
If this publication is so good at using math to predict the future, then maybe they can mathematically calculate for me what the winning numbers will be for the jackpot in the next Powerball or Megamillions lottery drawing. On second thought, never mind — they probably would have done it for themselves a long time ago.
LdB says:
June 28, 2011 at 10:42 pm
A climate scientist who doesn’t waste time on the formalities of inaccurate engineering science … whats your favourite number?
42 of course – what other number could it be?
We should take that quote seriously. I didn’t think that the glaciers of the coming ice age would have advanced so far by 2050!
I saw no support your claim that they claimed to be actuate to 1 sq km. It is obvious they are making rough estimates.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n3/full/nclimate1120.html
http://www.maritimesun.com/news/trucks-lose-ships-win-in-warmer-arctic/
Robert of Ottawa says:
June 28, 2011 at 5:49 pm
Spurious accuracy, or precision, is a new logical fallacy to be added to the classic ones. It enables us to determine the average temperature of the planet in 1855 to 3 decimal places, although the original measurements may have been accurate, at best, to +/- 1.0 degrees.
It gives the appearance of accuracy, which suggests the rightness of the argument that the number is supporting.
————————————————————————————————–
Excellent point. But don’t give them any ideas or they will round up and claim it’s “worse than we thought!”
While significant digits are certainly a common way to deal with uncertainly, especially by chemistry teachers it seems, they are not now, nor have they even been, best way to deal with uncertainty. For example, you can read what NIST has to say about the subject here: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Uncertainty/basic.html
There is not a word anywhere that I can find about “significant digits”. All the huffing and puffing above about how exactly to use significant digit is similar to worrying about how to best use epicycles to to describe the motion of planets. Sure, it can give a pretty good approximation in many cases, but it is not best way to approach the problem and can lead to errors even when done correctly.
That said, the result “1,211,287 Square kilometers” does not carry any specific estimate of uncertainty, so in that sense it is poor science. They could have said “1,211,287 Square kilometers +/- 20%” for example. Furthermore, they should have said more specifically what calculations or models were used to reach this estimate. But that does not mean they should use the “high school” version of uncertainty analysis (significant digitis) promoted by so many people here.
And has been pointed out, this is a summary of a report. And we only have as much as Willis quoted. Since I don’t have access to either the full article in Science or the original article in Nature Climate Change , I can’t comment on what they may or may not have said about uncertainty in the original articles. Maybe they did say “1,211,287 Square kilometers +/- 20%” or something to that effect!
Mr. Ackerman at Farmingdale Highschool (NY) used to yell “Digits!” at us all the time in my physics class in 1974. Great teacher.
Mike says:
June 29, 2011 at 4:48 am
I saw no support your claim that they claimed to be actuate to 1 sq km. It is obvious they are making rough estimates.
Hmm, and googling the phrase Willis quoted returns only three results, two of them here on WUWT, and one here: http://pindanpost.com/2011/06/29/nature-climate-change-numbered/ which is a repost of WIllis’ post.
Willis, can you post a link to the item on Science magazine’s website? Or is it only available in the dead tree version?
I assume the number of miles of ice roads is exactly the same from year to year? Count me among those who finds the precision of that prediction likely inaccurate.
Climate Science does not have a monopoly on this issue.
This from a Canadian Federal Government regulatory document relating ammonia toxicity to pH :
y = 306132466.34 x (2.7183^(-2.0437 x pH))
Odd that they didn’t provide the time of day on June 28, 2050 that the predicted reduction would be achieved
When you are trying to convince people that a 0.6C warming over a century is something they need to start worrying about, it doesn’t help your case if you have to admit that the accuracy of the thermometers used is only about +/- 1.0C. What you do is that you claim that by averaging all of these thermometers, you have increased the accuracy, which allows you to claim that you know what the temperature is out to .001C. Then, by magic, the 0.6C warming starts to look scary.
That’s nothing. Look at the computer models — they have thousands or maybe millions of input parameters which were simply made up (possibly with great care). Then when the model says the average temperature will increase by a few tenths of a degree per year people believe them. For example, what is the heat content profile of the oceans in detail per cubic unit? There is no data, so just make it up.
Back in the mid 70’s I worked briefly on building sites, where they had a mixture of scaffolding boards – the older ones had “Support every 5 feet” stamped into the metal band at the end, whereas the newer ones had “Support every 1.524 metres”.
I didn’t see anyone using a millimetre scale measure to determine the spacings, tho.
No time to write more, heading out to the Naval Air Museum today before heading for DC.
Slide rules are great – I have Pickett N4-ES (Eye Saver) still, and know how to use it. (Shoulda gotten just the N3-ES though, never did need the haversine scales.) I could rearrange calculations and jump from C/D scales to CF/DF scales to minimize slide movement. People looking over my shoulder had no idea what I was doing.
I’ve run into store owners who still use circular slide rules to apply their standard markup to products they sell. They understand significant digits just fine!
They also run 80% off clearance sales, never “price 4X lower” (or is is 5X lower?), a major pet peeve of mine on supposedly scientific colloquial speech.
See you in DC.
For those asserting that Willis’ number “is not in the article”, suggest you read his reply to jon shively at 8:43 PM. He states the number is from table 1 in the Nature Climate Change article.