Guest post by Professor Robert G. Brown of Duke University.
Not all scientific research is equal, in terms of its probable impact on humanity. If one is studying poison dart frog species in tropical rain forests, getting a number wrong or arriving at an incorrect conclusion will generally have very little impact on the life of somebody living in California, India, China, or for that matter, in the tropical rain forests in question.
On the other hand, medical research has a profound impact on us all and has a long history of abuse, both deliberate and accidental. From the egregious claims of snake-oil salesmen whose very name has come to be the universal metaphor for “science” subverted to special interest to modern cases of confirmation bias and manipulation of data in e.g. drug testing, because of the potential for profit from medical science and technology it has proven to be necessary to defend the public against bad science. All medical research at this point is strongly regulated at or before the point where the rubber meets the road and actual patients might be adversely affected or killed by bad science or self-serving deliberately manipulated science.
Some of the key standards of this regulation of research include transparency and reproducibility, as well as the near-universal use of double-blind experiments to prevent the pernicious advent of confirmation bias, backed up by the threat of liability if the research process is deliberately subverted because of any sort of vested interest (including the simple desire to “be famous”, or “win tenure”, or “keep one’s grant funding”).
Engineering is a second place where doing science (in this case applied science) badly is dangerous to the public weal. If a bridge, a car, a space shuttle is designed poorly or carelessly, society ultimately pays a significant cost. In this case the needs of engineering firms and private individuals for protections of intellectual property are carefully balanced against the need to protect society. Consequently, the building of bridges, cars, and space shuttles — with or without proprietary components — is subject to oversight, inspection, and again, legal liability.
Climate research has long since passed from the realm of being a tiny discipline with a handful of researchers whose mistakes had almost no impact on humanity to being an enormous, publicly funded research machine that has a huge impact on the public weal. Whether or not you agree or disagree with the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis, there is no denying that it has a huge impact on people all over the world. Quite literally every human on earth is currently at risk either way relative to the conclusions of what is still a relatively small community of scientists with a remarkably homogeneous point of view.
Whether or not these scientists are honest — do or do not sincerely believe their own conclusions is not an issue (any more than it often is in the case of medical research or large scale engineering projects); what is important to the general public is that the scientists at this point have a clear interest that potentially conflicts with their own. At risk (to the scientists) is: loss of (enormous) funding; loss of prestige; loss of political power and influence. Many of them have staked their entire reputation and career on stating conclusions as near-certain scientific fact that have a multi-trillion dollar price tag to society associated with their conclusions — however objective and well-intended — turning out to be correct or incorrect.
This dwarfs the potential damage that could be done even by unscrupulous drug companies, by medical researchers seeking to make a name for themselves, by incompetent physicians and all of the other scientific activities in the general field of medicine that are so tightly regulated. It dwarfs the damage that can be done by a faulty braking system in an automobile, by whole cities of buildings that cannot (as it turns out) withstand earthquakes, by faulty O-rings in space shuttles. It dwarfs even the damage that can be done by unregulated banking systems leading to global financial collapse that lower the standard of living “suddenly” on a worldwide scale. It is larger than the combined probable damages from all of these activities put together over any reasonable time scale.
I must emphasize that from the public point of view, this risk is in some sense symmetrical. Taking global steps such as creation of an entire cap and trade financial instrumentation in order to combat CAGW is without any doubt enormously expensive and the loss in this case is certain and immediate. However, as proponents of CAGW theories are quick to point out, society is required to make some kind of wager regardless because the cost of doing nothing if their hypothesis is true may also be extreme.
However, it must be carefully noted that one is balancing a multi-trillion dollar and immediate certain cost against a future possible cost that is by no means certain. It is simply a matter of responsible governance that the cost-benefit of this risk be soberly and, above all, openly assessed. Furthermore, both regulation and liability are absolutely necessary — indeed, long overdue — in any scientific endeavor that has long since left the ivory tower of pure research and become the basis for such far-reaching policy decisions.
Unfortunately, climate research that not only has impacted, but has led the way in the public debate and scrutiny that should correctly attend the collective expenditure of vast amounts of wealth that could otherwise be put to better use has not, thus far, been conducted in an open way. Critical data and methodology have been hidden and treated as if they were proprietary by the scientific researchers involved, in spite of the fact that the data itself has rather often come from governmental organizations or is the direct product of research funded entirely by public research grants, as in most cases is the published work itself. That this has occurred, and continues to occur, is not at issue here — the evidence that this has occurred and continues to occur is conclusive and indeed, ongoing. The simple fact of the matter is that whatever the truth of the hypothesis, the methodology and data used to support it are largely hidden, hidden well enough that it is routinely true that they cannot easily be merely reproduced by a third party, let alone the conclusions be intelligently and critically challenged.
In the ivory tower it is not unreasonable or uncommon for this sort of practice to exist, at least for a time. Scientists’ only “commodity” of value at a research University or government organization is their ideas and their research work, and theft of both is far from unknown. It is perfectly reasonable for individuals to initially hide their research goals and methods from everyone but perhaps a small set of trusted collaborators until they are proven to the satisfaction of the researcher, lest some key discovery or idea be co-opted or pre-empted by a competitor.
Even in the ivory tower, such obfuscation is supposed to — and typically does — come to an end when a work is published. Publication is the final goal of the research process in the ivory tower of the University (and often in a government laboratory) and in both cases there is a careful separation between work that is done with an eye to obtaining a patent or protected intellectual property and work being done (especially work being done with public funding) for open publication with no related rights being preserved.
Once a scientist has published in the latter case, it is expected that they will make both methods and data public upon request and invite others to reproduce and either verify or criticize the methods and any results derived from them. Anything less is a corruption of the scientific process that — when it works correctly — eventually rejects error and advances the sound. This process is often imperfect — even with levelling/protecting structures such as “tenure”, there are differential rewards to scientists based on how well they keep key ideas, methods, or even data back to maintain an advantage over their competitors and it is not uncommon for only part of the story to be told in any given publication, especially early on in the development of a new idea.
Although one can therefore understand the origins of this sort of reticence and inclination to hide research methods and data or share them only with carefully selected collaborative colleagues, and although one might even still respect this right up to the point of publication in climate research, in the specific field of climate research the public stakes are too high for this practice, however common it might or might not be in the study of poison dart frogs or the physics of graphene, to be tolerated.
The conclusions of modern climate research are almost exclusively based on published results such as the (now infamous) “Hockey Stick” graphs produced by Mann, et. al. and data sets such as HadCrut3. HadCrut3 itself is currently made readily available, but only as processed results obtained by some means from streams of raw data that are not. It is, in fact, essentially impossible for a third party to take the actual data used in the current HadCrut3 snapshot published by the Met Office at the Hadley Center, feed it to the actual code used to generate the processed data, and verify even the very limited fact that the data and the code do indeed produce the same result when run on different computers, let alone that the methodology used to produce the result from the data is robust and sound.
It must once again be emphasized that public policy decisions that have been made, are being made, and will be made in the future based on the raw data and methodology used will cost every living person on earth on average several thousand dollars, at least. Again this is stated without prejudice concerning whether or not the published temperatures are, or are not sound, or whether CAGW is, or is not, a well-supported scientific hypothesis. If it is true and we do nothing, it will cost thousand of dollars per living person and many lives over decades. If it is false and we spend money like water to prevent it anyway, it will cost thousands of dollars per living person and many lives over decades; in addition, it will do incalculable cost to the credibility of “the scientist” in the minds of the public that further amplifies this monetary damage by altering the profile of government funded research and the level of trust accorded to all scientists in the public eye.
I am writing this article to call for new legislation to address this issue, legislation that creates direct oversight for climate researchers whose work directly impacts the decision making process directing this enormous but unavoidable gamble. I am writing this as a citizen that is already paying for decisions based on the “certain” conclusion of CAGW — if this conclusion is certain, then it is certainly true that it can be transparently certain, with the entire process used to arrive at it right back to the original raw data open to public and scientific scrutiny not only by those that agree with it but by those that honestly disagree with it or merely have doubts that it is true and would like to verify it for themselves.
I would suggest that this legislation be soberly and conservatively drafted so that it in no way hinders climate researchers from carrying out their research but adds the following requirements that must both precede and follow any published result that impacts the decision process.
a) All numerical code, and input data (that is, the raw input data including any that is for any reason available from one’s source but not included in the computation, along with the provenance of all the raw data) used in arriving at some conclusion must be openly published in an immediately usable form and made readily available to anyone in the world as of the date of publication in any journal, public presentation at conferences or workshops, or publication or inclusion as a reference in policy document such as IPCC reports.
This legislation shall apply to publications based on proprietary data as well as data from public sources. The immense cost of the public decisions based on such publications and the risk of corruption of the results cherrypicked or data that might have been altered in hidden ways by vested interests is too great to permit data to be used or selected from any source that cannot be checked in its entirety, including the data that is left out.
Note well that this precise measure is indeed needed. The FOIA has already proven to be inadequate to compel the release of code and data used to generate datasets such as HadCrut3 or the “Hockey Stick” or “Spaghetti Graph” curves that currently support many of the conclusions of climate researchers.
Note also that this is hardly a burdensome requirement. It is sound practice already to carefully provide provenance and good organization for one’s raw data, to provide sound backup and revision control for the computer code used to process the data that permits “snapshotting” of the code actually used to produce a result, and to archive both for any given publication in case one’s methodology is ever called into question. The only additional requirement this imposes is to set up a website and put the data and code snapshot there with a short piece of documentation accompanying it that frankly will be of as much benefit to the researchers in the long run as it is to anyone seeking to download code and data to check results. Nowadays the cost of this is so low as to be “zero” and in any event is trivially within the means of any grant funded climate research program that almost certainly is already using one or more web servers to disseminate both results and data.
b) The establishment of a board of governance for the science with the specific and narrow purview of addressing abuses of the open scientific process. The need for such a board, and the need to staff it with people who are completely disconnected from climate or environmental research or any political organization or corporate organization with any possible interest in the outcome is clearly demonstrated in the occult Climategate conversations where it is revealed that certain researchers working in the field are far more concerned with “causes” and “winning the PR war” than with the science and are willing to deliberate tamper with data and methodology to hide results that confound their desired conclusions or to directly and deliberately subvert e.g. the objectivity and independence of the journal review process to suppress competing points of view right or wrong as they might be! The only place such discussions should occur is openly, in the literature itself, in the form of critical counter-articles or published comments, not in behind the scenes efforts to discredit editors or have them fired.
Note well that implementing provision a) will make tampering with data or methods far more difficult, but not (as evidence from medical research abuses reveals) impossible, and nothing (so far) seems to have worked to maintain any semblance of fair play in the public debate — on both sides of the climate issues. Even if the only sanction used by the oversight board is public censure and the probable elimination of future funding, those are probably enough in a world where one’s scientific reputation and ability to continue work are one’s greatest treasure.
c) The establishment of personal liability for any work that is published wherein it is later shown that the researcher did knowingly and deliberately manipulate data or methods so that their arguments lead towards a predetermined end (confirmation bias, cherrypicking data) without openly indicating what was done and why in the publications. Again, there is ample precedent for such liability (and the corresponding governance and oversight) in all scientific and technical endeavors that directly impact on the public weal, in particular in medical research. There should be considerable freedom under this rule to make honest mistakes or to pursue unpopular or popular conclusions — one of the major purposes of provision a) above is that it should ensure that there should never again be a good reason for sanctioning a researcher after the fact of publication by guaranteeing transparency — but just as would be (and historically, often has been) the case when it is determined that a published medical study where the researcher or corporation sponsoring the research “fudged” the data and as a result patients died or suffered losses makes the researchers and/or sponsors legally liable for the damage, there need to be at least limited liability and public sanctions in climate research to provide a strong disincentive to academic dishonesty or the protection of interests that, in the end, are not strictly the pursuit of scientific truth.
Needless to say, no researcher can afford to pay the true liability cost of a mistake in a ten-trillion dollar public policy decision driven by their work, but actual overt dishonesty and work performed with hidden/vested interests cannot be allowed to proceed unpunished, either. This has proven to be absolutely true in countless other, far less costly, realms of scientific, economic and sociopolitical endeavor — wherever an unregulated marginal advantage exists to be exploited by an unscrupulous individual, sooner or later such an individual shows up to exploit it. There is far too much at stake here not to protect the public good.
To conclude, much of what happens on this and other blogs, e.g. Climate Audit, is ultimately fruitless. Much energy and time is expended discussing this abuse or that abuse of good scientific methodology without any real hope of putting it right or on e.g. FOIA requests and other straightforward (but openly obstructed) attempts to simply understand how various numbers that purport to show anomalous warming were generated. The place progress has been made is primarily in a very few, but extremely significant cases (e.g. the deconstruction of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that at this point is completely discredited in spite of having dominated public discourse and public policy decisioning for over a decade) when access has been obtained to raw data and actual computational code. Mistakes that may well have misdirected hundreds of billions of dollars of public money could easily have been averted by legislation like that suggested above mandating a completely open and above-board process.
Those who advocate the CAGW hypothesis should welcome such legislature — if they have nothing to hide and their results can indeed convince “97% of scientists” as claimed, then they should make it easy for those scientists to not just read their published results (working from hidden data) but to be able to verify how their work advances from the hiddent. They, and their “cause”, can only benefit from a completely data-transparent process if their conclusion is correct.
Advocates are mistaken in treating the CAGW hypothesis as a public relations problem to be solved or a cause to be fought for in the first place (terms bandied about in a most disturbing way in the Climategate communications however they were intended), often discussed as alternatives to the far simpler option of publishing papers that address and attempt to refute competing claims, ideally acknowledging points where they might have a point. Scientific discourse has no room whatsoever for either of these as the popularity of an idea is irrelevant to its probable truth, and “causes” smack of either political or religious thinking, both of them ultimately irrational in different ways. An idea is held to be correct when it is well-supported by a mix of good fundamental science, reliable data, and openly reproducible, openly critically examined methods, and any good scientist will always bear in mind the fact that however much they “like” their own conclusions, they could be wrong.
There is little that is certain in science, and good science is honest about the uncertainties even when — perhaps especially when — there is a lot at stake.
Yes, this is a high standard of truth, one that will take time to achieve, especially in a field as complex as climatology, where many results are obtained by means of rather complex computational or statistical methods that rightly should be closely scrutinized as it is all too easy to either “lie” with or be honestly misled by an incorrect model (again this happens so often that we have a whole terminology such as “garbage in, garbage out” to describe it) or incorrect statistical analysis — the latter especially is a bete noire in sciences (and medical research) with far less impact on the public purse than climate research.
Nowhere are the stakes higher; nowhere is the oversight lower and the methodology ultimately more deliberately hidden than it currently is in climate research. And why? If CAGW is indeed true, a truly open process of research and decision making should be openly and even enthusiastically embraced by supporters of CAGW, because it will equally well compel skeptics of CAGW to provide full access to their methods and data and reveal possible vested interests. How often have we all heard the litany “anyone who criticizes CAGW is supported by the oil industry” (and seen scurrilous allegations to that effect in the ongoing discussion revealed by Climategate). Well, here is an opportunity to provide objective oversight and liability in the unlikely event that this is true — but in both directions.
I would therefore strongly suggest that a sympathetic advocate be found who would sponsor the a-b-c rules above as actual legislation to govern all climate research, publicly funded or not, that is actually used to influence large scale public policy decisions. Indeed, I would call on all climate researchers and journal editors to enforce “voluntarily” compliance with rule a) whether or not such legislation is ever written! Climategate 1 and 2 documents have clearly, and shamefully, revealed that many climate researchers currently knowingly and deliberately refuse to make either data or code/methods publicly available even when proper FOIA requests have been made. Journals such as Nature or Science have a deep responsibility to ensure transparency in any papers they choose to publish that have such a huge real cost and impact on public affairs either way their hypotheses are ultimately resolved. Papers published in climate science that specifically address the issue of global warming, including papers published in the past, should be given a reasonable opportunity to provide provenance and access to raw data and methods and, if that provenance is not forthcoming for any reason, the papers should be publicly repudiated by the journal and withdrawn.
Perhaps we could call it “Mcintyre’s Law”, since few people have fought this battle more frequently, and more fruitlessly in far too many cases, than Steve Mcintyre.
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@Robert Brown
“Furthermore, both regulation and liability are absolutely necessary — indeed, long overdue — in any scientific endeavor that has long since left the ivory tower of pure research and become the basis for such far-reaching policy decisions.”
Uh huh. And how would the United States regulate research in, for instance, China?
“society is required to make some kind of wager regardless”
Really. You global village fruitcakes never cease to amaze me with how totally disconnected from reality you are. Nine tenths of the people in the world don’t know or care about global warming. They’re more interested in local supply of food and clean water and dream of someday having electricity. There is no “society” dufus. There are a million societies and most of them don’t know there’s anything being wagered and if they did know they wouldn’t care because they have more immediate concerns.
This whole notion of passive wagers you’ve invented is nonsense, of course. Society “must” make a wager about whether terrorists get ahold of biological weapons of mass destruction for instance. Hell even a naturally arising communicable disease could wipe out 2/3 of the human race and there’s probably a better chance of that happening than any adverse consequence of global warming. A coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun at the magnitude of the 1859 Carrington event would kill hundreds of millions and cripple the industrial world by trashing continent-wide electrical grids. There’s greater chance of that happening than the wholly imaginary adverse effects of global warming and the cost of drastically limiting the damage is orders of magnitude less than the impossibly high cost of limiting CO2 emission enough to make a difference. Hell a cure for cancer would cost less and benefit more people.
These are all passive wagers that “society” is making. I could list a lot more of them like fresh water supplies and phosporous for fertilizers that are far more immediate and concrete threats than global warming. This whole global warming brouhaha is insanely misrepresented and mispriortized by any objective measure. We should just hunt down the perps behind it like so many coyotes.
wayne Job says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:17 pm
It was my understanding that data and methods including code must accompany peer review papers in scientific journals.
That the hockey team have been getting away with not complying in peer review papers, it should be that these offending papers are cancelled and rejected until compliance with the correct scientific procedure is met.
That’s all that needs to be done. Nature and ilk purporting to require full disclosure having set themselves up as the creme de la creme upholding scientific principle should be held accountable for by-passing the process for these hooligans and for being complicit in blocking publication from real scientists.
And, all of these reports taken out of the IPCC, which should anyway be disbanded but certainly not treated as if upholding scientific standards. It is a political organisation with its brief to prove agw and its deliberate corruption of science method and principles is government and big business funded, designed to help create a climate of more government control over peoples lives and control of the world’s resources by manipulating data. The propaganda that it is ‘analysis from the work of scientists’ and so should be trusted is political spin, that’s exactly what it isn’t and wasn’t set up to be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change
It is party to the corrupt science practices of this inner cabal of Jones, Trenberth and Mann who are just bit players, useful idiots, in the bigger picture of government and big banking/business in control of government policies, who set up the UN in the first place. More regulations will not change that, you’re (Brown) asking the corrupt in government to create legislation against their own corruption..
And quite frankly the silliness of such as ideas as the ‘EPA does a good job because I know some friends of friends who work there and they’re very nice’ is more useless drivel. The EPA is in unaccountable control of the lives of US citizens able to pass legislation seriously affecting the well being on personal and business levels contrary to the Constitution, as I understand it, an outside agency given powers to exist by congress which should never have been given. There’s a good discussion on WUWT on the effect the EPA has had on businesses, worth reading. Big business interests aren’t affected by it, they control it. Just as the pharmaceutical companies are in the process of taking away even more of our rights to the Earth’s resources by government legislation, our use of plants for medicines..
(As they were party to the demonisation of hemp, that great all rounder which can be used to make paper, beautiful hard wearing but soft cloth, rope, fuel, is a high in protein food source, and is medicinally one of the great, if not the greatest, plant around being so attuned to our own bodies’ workings. If you ever get to see a programme on the hype that the business interests at the time produced against hemp (by calling it Marijuana because it was too well known by everyone as hemp, grown everywhere in the US for its multiple uses and world wide), it’s the campaign prototype to how easy it is to manipulate people through fear and lies and control of government to further their own interests, in now full expression with their control of governments and propaganda world-wide in their manufactured AGW scare.)
Here’s some typical spin from the corrupt cabal about this fact that the IPCC is set up to prove AGW: http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=400
What do you expect them to say? They’re working for the same programme. Twitching on the end of the same strings.
Here’s a real science look at the predictive power of the IPCC, link from this page to Dr. J. Scott Armstrong and Dr. Kersten Green’s paper which analyses this and concludes the IPCC is junk science: http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/07/forecasting-experts-say-ipcc-warming.html
Please, do read it. There is zilch predictive power from the IPCC models. Junk science the lot of it. Any real scientists are thrown out or marginalised, or resign.
squareheadedsquareheaded says: “All right! Government is so purposeful, so loving, so all knowing, so benevolent, I can hardly stand it! Government is the liberator of all mankind! Save us please!”
Quite.
More government regulations is just what we don’t need.
A very practical way to reestablish Trust.
Justin J. says:
December 3, 2011 at 4:59 pm
….The markets for money and credit were at all relevant times regulated by the following….
And that’s just at the federal level, and just in the USA. Whether you look at the GFC from interventionist theory (government has the competence and selflessness to manage the economy) or the Austrian theory (government printing money causes depressions) the interventionists lose the argument….
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One of the other points Brown makes that is a logical fallacy is that we only see advances in science and technology because it is “Government funded” – BULLOCKS!
The USA did not have an income tax until we passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The two go hand in hand as a mechanism to move wealth FROM the private citizen TO the bankers period. All the rest is just window dressing to make the raped citizen feel guilty about wanting not to be raped.
The true cause of the industrial and technological revolution is LEISURE TIME. It does not matter how smart you are if you are spending from dawn to dusk working your hindend off and fall into bed exhausted.
The real revolution was in farming methods that freed up people so they could devote more time to inventing. This was from about 1820 to 1840. From that period on the industrial and technological revolution exploded and it had NOTHING to do with the government.
This change to an Industrialized North and an Agricultural South was a main part of the Civil War BTW Get rid of slavery and the farmers have to buy northern factory made equipment to replace them…. Cui Bono.
It was the Industrial/Agricultral revolution that really freed the slaves (and the rest of us serfs)
Myrrh says:
December 4, 2011 at 2:50 pm
Gail – the 2001 foot and mouth mass slaughtering of healthy animals further reduced Britain’s bio-diversity, which began on joining the then Economic Community which resulted in among other things, the majority orchards being grubbed up and the production of English apple varieties given to France, and a general ban on the diversity of seeds of veg and fruit which became illegal to sell, kept alive by forming clubs. The Monsanto destruction by making it illegal, for example in Iraq, of farmers saving their own seeds and being forced to buy Monsanto, is becoming better known, but this surely has been in the pipe line for a long time…..
_____________________________________
Thanks for the info. I was aware of the law in the EU but not about the loss of the orchards. In my copious notes I had:
June 2006 Global Diversity Treaty: Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) a standardized contract that will enable much easier access to crop diversity. [ germplasm for patenting] royalty payment (1.1% of sales) is paid only if product is unavailable for further breeding and research. funds will be devoted to conservation efforts. Translation: Bio-techs Corporations steal seed from third world farmers, patents it and pay money to Bioversity International http://www.bioversityinternational.org/publications/pdf/1144.pdf
December 2006 “In the EU, there is now a list of ‘official’ vegetable varieties. Seed that is not on the list cannot be ‘sold’ to the ‘public’ To keep something on the list costs thousands of pounds each year…Hundreds of thousands of old heirloom varieties (the results of about eleven thousand years of plant breeding by our ancestors) are being lost forever . http://www.defra.gov.uk/planth/pvs/pbr/app-procedure.htm & http://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html & http://www.euroseeds.org/pdf/ESA_03.0050.1.pdf”
However the DEFRA link { http://www.defra.gov.uk/planth/pvs/pbr/app-procedure.htm } is no longer any good. Do you have a better link?
Also I had seen in my reading where Monsanto got someone on the board of one of the seed saving clubs and “stole” their entire bank of seed genetics so they can patent it. Do you have a link to that?
After researching the history of seed patenting I want NO laws about science. It is better to have a completely free internet and go after the propaganda machines we call the MSM.
FRAUD, Miss use of Government funds and Government PROPERTY ~ Phil Jones lost GOVERNMENT PROPERTY when he “Misplaced the raw data set” ~ is really all that is needed.
OH and honest politicians and judges.
“Right. CAGW [and for that matter, AGW] are not hypotheses, because they are neither testable nor falsifiable. They are at the conjecture stage of the scientific method.”
Not strictly true. They are both testable and falsifiable. They are being tested, and may turn out to be false — or true.
It’s just that it is going to take time to test them. If you want me to break this down into small pieces, I’m happy to do so.
* GW — the hypothesis that the world has warmed since the LIA is testable, and is almost certainly true. It could be false, I suppose, but the direct evidence of many actual thermometers suggests that it is true.
* AGW — the hypothesis that some of that net warming is due to increased CO_2 concentration is almost certainly true! Not “90%, or “97%” — 99.999% certain. In order for it to be false, all sorts of falsifiable physics would have to be false. Again, this is an error made all too often on this blog that does not increase its credibility. I understand the human tendency to (over)simplify and say “AGW is false” or “AGW is an unsupported, unfalsifiable hypothesis” when what they mean is that the assertion that the anthropogenic component to the total average global temperature has not reliably been shown to be larger than X%, but this is not the way science operates.
To put it a very simple way that is easy to understand, there is an S-shaped (logistic) function that represents P(x) (true) of the hypothesis that anthropogenic CO_2 is responsible for at least x degrees C of the temperature anomaly. I think that any reasonable scientist who knows enough to make an informed judgement would agree that the left hand side of this curve is pegged at 1 (with very little support on the left hand side, a negative anomaly). It is nearly certain that CO_2 is responsible for at least e.g. 0.1C, slightly less certain (but still quite likely that it is responsible for 0.2C, still less for 0.3C, and so on. On the right hand side, by the time the anomaly is out there to 3C or thereabouts nearly any reasonable person would agree that the function is asymptotically approaching zero — by that time one is alleging that anthropogenic CO_2 is responsible for more than all of the warming seen since the LIA, or the invention of the thermometer and beginning of a moderately reliable global temperature record in the first place if you don’t happen to “believe” in a LIA. Somewhere in between there is a value of x for which this monotonic function equals 0.5 — it is 50% likely that the anthropogenic contribution to the total CO_2 is responsible for at least this much warming of the total warming observed in the GW recorded since the invention of thermometers, given our existing knowledge of things like physics, and the available data. Note well that this is a conditional probability.
It is silly to assert that there is no evidence that pertains to this, that the hypothesis itself is not falsifiable, provided that you understand what “falsification” really means in science. It never means anything more than “given the evidence and evidence-based consistent rules that we think are very likely true (e.g. laws of physics), this logistic curve has gotten sufficiently close to a step function” for some suitable mapping of an underlying parameter space, with the measured parameters from “reality” being on one side of the step (and hence “very probably true”) or the other (“very probably false”). You can read E. T. Jaynes lovely book on “Probability Theory, the Logic of Science” if you want to see how it works, or David Mackay’s online (but arguably more difficult) book on artificial intelligence that covers Jaynes’ result and shows how it is almost certainly the basis for how we actually think (and how neural networks themselves function).
In this case, as in all cases, one has to use Bayes’ theorem to properly assess the evidence and improve the (really multidimensional) logistic. One has to account for the priors and the conditional probabilities. The hypothesis “increased CO_2 causes increased global temperatures does not stand alone”, only capable of being answered by a direct measurement. That is because the probability that it is true depends on other statements upon which it depends, that can be tested.
For example, consider “CO_2 in a gas mixture like our atmosphere acts as a selective reflective/absorptive filter to incoming vs outgoing wavelengths of light”. This is true and well understood. Consider “Energy comes into the Earth primarily in the form of visible light (blackbody radiation from a high temperature object, the Sun), is absorbed (warming the Earth and atmosphere) and is reradiated away primarily as infrared radiation (blackbody radiation from a much lower temperature object, the Earth).” Hard to argue with any of that, isn’t it? Completely understood physics, plenty of evidence, any undergrad physics major could derive most of this as a conclusion from completely accepted laws of nature plus a handful of simple observations and common knowledge anytime after their freshman year.
Combine the two into “Increased CO_2 in the atmosphere increases the some fraction of the outgoing radiation which is absorbed by the atmosphere and partially reflected back towards the earth. This decreases the overall rate of radiative energy loss (the energy has to be reabsorbed and diffuse into other wavelengths that make it through before having a good chance of escaping) and produces a net warming effect.” Based on the previous two statements, this is almost certainly true, and it can be independently tested at least in laboratory scale experiments. This statement has been confirmed in laboratory scale experiments many times, one of them that you can watch for yourself on mythbusters (youtube).
The kiddy-scale demos aren’t proof at scale, of course — they leave way too many questions unanswered in a truly complex and chaotic thermal system — but to argue that this phenomenon does not occur at all or is unlikely to occur is absurd. CO_2 is indeed a greenhouse gas, and the greenhouse effect is without reasonable question a significant contributor to the overall global average temperature, contrast the temperature of the Earth with that of the moon. Atmosphere matters, the composition of the atmosphere matters, and it is almost certain that increasing CO_2 concentration (all other things being equal) will monotonically increase average global temperatures, at least up to some saturation.
There are a fair number of questions left at the end of the day that make the overall magnitude of this effect and its functional dependence on CO_2 uncertain, but it seems very difficult to argue that there is no monotonic relationship between increased CO_2 and increased heat retention. This sort of Bayesian reasoning increases and even helps to tentatively quantify AGW, with correspondingly large remaining uncertainties. This is hardly “not-falsifiable” or “unsupported by evidence or reason”, it is merely uncertain as to raw magnitude, with even greater uncertainty ascribable to the climate sensitivity and correctness of global climate models that attempt to use AGW as one component of many to predict global temperatures.
* Catastrophic AGW. This is certainly falsifiable. As is the case with any hypothesis concerning the future, to verify it or falsify it all we have to do is wait. That doesn’t make it a “conjecture” as something distinct from hypothesis or proposition — a conjecture is nothing but a hypothesis you happen to think is poorly or weakly supported and hence it states an opinion, not something quantifiable.
If we experience a catastrophic warming and the improving science eventually soundly connects a significant part of that warming to anthropogenic CO_2, it will be very likely that it is true after the fact, will it not? Similarly, if CO_2 continues to increase, and temperatures either decrease or stabilize or increase, but not enough to lead to catastrophe, then it will be falsified, will it not? All we have to do is wait! Oh, and improve the GW and AGW science a bit, because we could have a catastrophe and it might not be blamable on AGW, it might have happened anyway. We don’t know the underlying science, and what we don’t know might melt the icecaps over the next century no matter what we do or it could bring about the start of the next ice age, also no matter what we might do. By any of the theories of global climate, some 98-99.9% of global temperature is and will continue to be driven and explained by factors utterly beyond our control, not atmospheric CO_2.
Indeed, to some extent the Catastrophic hypothesis is being falsified. AGW is occurring and has been occurring at some rate (even if we might not agree on what rate that is), yet objective studies have failed to produce any sort of catastrophic consequences so far! Indeed some of the consequences are counterintuitive — total energy expended in e.g. tropical storms may well be decreasing instead of increasing, perhaps because temperature/pressure differences drive strong winds and more polar warmth or upper atmospheric warmth actually decreases the free energy available to the “engines” that drive hurricanes. Nor is there any evidence of any sort of catastrophic increase in droughts or floods or other extreme and destructive weather events (whatever nonsense Al Gore might spout in public forums). Weather is always extreme, somewhere, literally every day. Weather extremes are usually not catastrophic — most people don’t even notice them because they do no harm. Destructive events have as much of an origin in butterfly effect micro events as they do in any smooth, gradual increase in overall warming.
In the meantime, to falsify CAGW can simply be done by falsifying GW or falsifying the more extreme claims of AGW. If temperatures decrease by a significant amount on some significant timescale, well, there goes the monotonic GW and CAGW becomes much less likely. If GW continues but at a modest pace, that weakens the AGW claim to the point where CAGW becomes much less likely. To probably falsify CAGW — where the only ultimate proof or disproof can come from waiting, of course — we are stuck with trying to improve the science underlying the claims of GW on a scale longer than 100-150 years (which is increasingly dubious in part because of a lack of raw data, in part because of a lack of reliable proxies, in part because thus far climate researchers have used terrible, non-robust methods to extrapolate the temperature reconstructions of the proxies and deliberately hidden the uncertainties in the process from everyone outside of a select circle). Transparency in this process is greatly needed, if only so that the true uncertainties can be honestly stated, because the uncertainties weaken — or should weaken, in a sane Universe — the case for CAGW.
To empirically quantify the “A” in AGW, we need first to quantify GW. To quantify GW we need to have reliable and accurate global temperature reconstructions that extend over millennial timescales (if only to get an idea of the true magnitude of global temperature natural variability). To get global temperatures over those timescales we need to get a lot of local temperature reconstructions over those timescales because even on the timescales where we have good data, the north pole warms while the south pole cools, the atlantic warms while the pacific cools, land masses may or may not follow the oceans or poles, the equatorial temperatures don’t necessary vary with anything else in particular — we cannot, it seems, use temperatures from just one proxy dataset or place as a good indicator of global temperatures. See the just-a-few-minutes ago post from Bob Tisdale on reliable SST reconstructions from different oceans — one can easily go up, while others go down!
This is a difficult problem, in other words, and one that isn’t made any easier by cherrypicking and rampant confirmation bias in the selection of only proxies, locations, and results that seem to “confirm” a previously held belief or that support a previously stated conclusion. At the moment, the fairest answer we have is probably that we do not know what global temperatures were over the last 2000 years, not really. Our probable uncertainties alone are almost certainly as large as the entire reliable GW trend post the invention of the thermometer, the variation from the LIA to the present. A few relatively honest reconstructions show that, but not many, and most don’t even show the error bars post the LIA correctly. We have 30 years worth of reliable global temperature data, period. I might even go for 40. Everything beyond that is dubious even during the 19th and 20th centuries.
We do know (that it is very probable) that at least some places on the Earth were at least as warm at many points (for intervals centuries long) over the entire Holocene as they are now, variation that cannot reasonably be attributed to CO_2 let alone anthropogenic CO_2. We do know that over the last 1000 years it is very likely that there was at least one warm period where it was close to as warm as it is now (maybe warmer than it is now, but there are large uncertainties), and at least one cold period where it was much colder than it is now. We do know — based on the best existing temperature reconstructions across the entire Holocene that the warmth we are experiencing is probably not remarkable or extreme — it might be, sure, but it isn’t probable that it is because a number of straight up proxy reconstructions suggest that the Holocene Climate Optimum was warmer. The cold experienced in the LIA, on the other hand, was somewhat remarkable across the whole Holocene, suggesting that some fraction of the warming we can RELIABLY observe post-LIA is regression to a warmer mean being driven by processes that have nothing to do with CO_2.
Considering the entire thermal record, in other words, weakens the CAGW hypothesis when Bayesian reasoning is used. If it was ever, even once as warm as it is now during the Holocene without anthropogenic CO_2, then it is true that natural climate variability can produce warming as extreme as that which we are experiencing. Since we cannot predict the global temperature across the entire Holocene with any model, and really have no friggin’ idea why the temperature in the best reconstructions go up when it goes up, down where it goes down, we cannot really say what the temperature outside should be without ACO_2, and hence cannot use subtraction to empirically confirm how much of the expected and reasonable post-LIA warming is due to CO_2 and how much is due to as yet unknown factors that appear to be capable of causing large shifts in global temperatures over millennial time scales.
This doesn’t completely weaken the “C”, by the way — it opens up the chance that natural variations will continue to cause temperature increases independent of CO_2 to which any AGW contribution will be added. This might well permit the AGW component to trigger a C. However, the observation that within the recent climate record, temperature extremes are very strongly correlated with extremes in solar state — the LIA with a Maunder (Grand) minimum, the 20th century with an as-yet unnamed Grand maximum, and the empirical observation that the sun has returned to a more normal state of reduced activity and that this may have influenced (decreased) the rate of warming again does weaken the C, independent of the AGW.
It therefore seems to me that believably quantifying the global temperature record in not only pertinent to GW and AGW, it is quite capable of significantly weakening the entire CAGW hypothesis using Bayesian reasoning, which is as close to “falsification” as one can get with a theory or hypothesis. I’m a bit surprised that no one has reviewed the literature in just this way — the Bayesian argument against CAGW is quite strong, which is why most of you are on this list — because you can intuitively see that there are too many inconsistencies with existing measurement to make the hypothesis very believable even with the observed GW from the end of the Dalton minimum or thereabouts on.
Or to put it in terms I think everybody on this list would agree with, without the smoking gun of the MBH hockey stick erasing the MWP and LIA, nobody would have given the CAGW hypothesis more than a single glance before rejecting it as being relatively unlikely rather than relatively likely. Even with this hockey stick, graphs of the Holocene temperature reconstructions make the result unlikely. When one realizes that the hockey stick is nothing but transformed white noise and returns to reconstructions where the MWP and LIA once again occur, this should once again reduce degree of belief in the CAGW hypothesis. But at no time is this even formally stated, let alone quantitatively estimated using actual data from reconstructions (that, admittedly, may or may not be reliable, but the lack of reliability again weakens the CAGW hypothesis, it does not strengthen it, as it amplifies the expected noise and variability).
Scientific propositions are not quite the same as mathematical ones, because the reasoning process one applies is statistical and inferential, not strictly deductive. If I assert that in 28.5 days the moon will return to a position in its orbit very close to its position today, I have stated a very narrowly proscribed hypothesis. It can be falsified or verified — in 28.5 days. In the meantime, I ascribe to it a degree of belief that follows from an involved Bayesian reasoning process that includes hypothesizing a law of gravitation, working out many consequences of this law (one of which is the return of the moon to a nearby orbital position at the end of one approximate period), performing countless experiments that give me confidence that the law itself is probably true.
On the other hand, a failure of the moon to behave would count as negative evidence for the priors involved in the process that led me to believe in the assertion in the first place. If it gets there in 20 days, bad news for gravity, or calculus, or one of the other unwritten assumptions (no black holes happen to wander by etc).
This entire process applies just as well to the CAGW hypothesis as it does to my hypothesis about the moon. It is falsifiable (by waiting to see if it comes true). In the meantime we would like to be able to use science and observation to compute an estimate of the probability — at least relative probability — that the hypothesis will be, eventually, verified or falsified. Given an ensemble of Earths in the current state and a distribution of small perturbations and future trajectories of e.g. the state of the sun, how many of those future Earths experience “Catastrophe”? Could be many. Could be none. So far, I’d say nobody knows the answer to this question well enough to peg any number in as the answer.
Understand?
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This is a reply from my Member of Parliament on the need for legislation on CAGW secrecy:
“Thank you very much for your email about the need for legislation in relation to freedom of information regarding climate change science.
I will raise it with the Government on your behalf and I will send you any reply I receive.
Yours sincerely
Bill Wiggin MP”
“Hardin’s “How To Legislate Temperance?” section in The Tragedy of the Commons http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full was a reminder to me of the danger of administrative law without corrective feedbacks. Climate Science seems to be missing the internal corrective feedbacks associated with more mature fields of science.”
Enormously well said. The entire CAGW argument on both sides is about the commons, and it is a part of the tragedy that by its very nature, objectivity is difficult to come by when the commons is involved. No single piece of trash makes the roadways a mess, and ultimately not even large fines suffice to keep all the people from throwing a beer can or drink cup out of the windows of their cars. Hardin’s basic point is proven any time you drive down almost any road in the country. See all the trash? That trash is the clearly visible proof of the tragedy of the commons.
To me the real tragedy is that it isn’t clear that anything will provide the internal corrective feedbacks in the long run in any arena of human activity that involves a commons with scarce resources. The only counterfoils are rational ethical systems combined with coercion, and even with coercion the problem is not eliminated, it is merely brought into a possibly sustainable balance. Once the fines are large enough, the roadways get clean enough not to be an eyesore. Oh, and education. Well educated people who are brought up to understand the need to regulate the commons are more likely to metaphorically not through their trash out of the window as a rational act because they don’t want to look at trash on the roadway and only by universally practiced restraint — plus coercion of and sanctions applied to defaulters — can we achieve this.
Of course bear in mind that the CAGW argument is that CO_2 is trash that corrupts the road and that it must be regulated by coercion because it won’t just be an eyesore, it will be a disaster if unchecked. I think that this is why they become so “devout”. I would hypothesize that one of the major constructive purposes of religion in human society is the social regulation of the commons. I would guess that we are evolved to accept socially directed axioms as “religious truths” that regulate the commons by promising reward and threatening punishment, lest the commons be overrun by anarchy and greed and human civilization itself become impossible. Scientists don’t stop being human just because they’ve moved past believing in the literal truth of religious mythology — they remain susceptible to the lure of simple ideas that sound like they ought to be true, and retain the passion for the enforcement of commons-linked behavior.
Why do we get angry over the Soon and Baliunas/de Frietas paper as discussed in Climategate? Because it is an abuse of an accepted scientific commons (equal and unbiased access to publication, protection of academic freedom for the editor, the authors, the referees). Why do we find “hiding declines” repugnant? Because it is akin to dumping trash from your cars only at night when nobody can see you while during the day preaching about how important it is that the roadways be kept clean and did you see how that de Frietas guy dumped a whole bucket of rotten S&B right there ontot he side of the road. Why do we find it inexcusable that they would know that MBH was a crap result and yet ride its coattails to fame and ever more grants by telling everybody that this pile of car parts and old mattresses was a great sculpture and not roadside trash? Again, an abuse of the commons for personal gain.
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I failed to explicitly state what my purpose was in citing Google: that the buy-out of the paywall is do-able, without succumbing to massive gaming of the system or stepping onto an unavoidable sharp slippery slope. Assuming the government is less diligent and efficient than Google, and more “game-able,” a near-certainty, that just reduces the benefit-to-cost ratio a bit.
I estimate the benefits of open-access to science by all the world very high, and the cost of paying-off the paywall as $30 million per year. (I think that is the amount the current organization that collects money and disburses paywalled papers collects. I read about it in an article a month or two ago about a Harvard (?) student who surreptitiously downloaded millions of articles from their website with the intention of posting them freely online.) Think of the benefits to society if we contrarians could freely surf and cite that literature. It’s 1000-to-1. And that’s just one topic.
Of course, that amount of money per year is something a private foundation could afford–and that would provide lots of bang (social benefit) for the buck. So maybe we should regularly suggest that the Pew, Packard, and Gates foundations should fund this rather than the mostly futile and more expensive crusades they’re on currently. But philanthropists are notoriously unimaginative, as Mencken wrote in an article devoted to that topic, so it’s hopeless to expect anything from them. so the government is likely our only hope.
I’m more of a conservative than a libertarian on this issue–and many others. (Although my political hero is Gary Johnson, the budget-cutting ex-NM governor. I was a budget-cutter too, when I was student council prez.) That is, I think that the stance regarding government intrusion in the private sector should be one of skepticism, but not outright refusal. I.e., on a case-by-case basis, some intrusion and spending is justified. Anyway, standing fast against intrusive government is like resolutely keeping ones finger in the dike while the waters have risen ones chin. The dike has been breached, in practical terms. Allowing an additional trickle in through that finger-hole won’t make things materially worse. One has to rise above principle on some issues.
Robert Brown,
Whew! That’s a looong answer to a quibble over definitions. I agree with most of it, but not all. For example, the onus is totally on those claiming the CO2=CAGW conjecture to show, per the scientific method, that human emissions are directly responsible for rising temperatures. But since educated folks can’t even agree on a climate sensitivity number, it is clear that there is no testable evidence showing X amount of warming per Y molecules of CO2 emitted. If there were testable evidence, the argument would be settled. It’s not.
I have to go out for a while and will complete my response later. In the mean time I’ll leave you with this. And this. As you can see, when a correct, non-arbitrary x-axis is used to show a trend, there is no accelerated warming. The scary charts that use an arbitrary zero line [or any arbitrary temperature line] falsely show accelerating temperatures. It’s a chart trick. They do it deliberately because climate alarmism pays.
Here’s a way to keep my “payfree” subsidy program away from gaming and the slippery slope: Cap its spending at (say) $30 million per year, with a COLA elevator, and a stipulation that the “most scientific” and longest-established journals would go to the head of the line. That would exclude fringe journals and ones recently set up to cash in on the free money.
@Robert Brown
Have you seen Michael Mann’s piece in the WSJ today? He does not acknowledge any issue at all with MBH98 and the “hockey stick” it seems. What is the process for trying to get him and other climate scientists to confront and address serious statistical criticism of that kind of work?
“Wow, I never would have expected to see so much space on WUWT given to a long-winded Marxist troll, just because he might have a little scientific integrity, or disbelieves the CAGW fairy tale, or refutes the existence of Santa Claus.”
Why not? It even tolerates all sorts of ad hominem and irrelevant comments. Like yours. Of course your world, however much it is a fantasy that exists in your own mind, is very simple. One is either in agreement with you or “a Marxist”. Please, don’t make me laugh. Marx was an idiot. So was Ayn Rand!. Non-idiocy is somewhere in between.
Being a non-idiot sometimes means that you need to study things. If you studied things you might then learn, for example, that Michael Faraday (the actual inventor of the electrical generator and co-discoverer and inventor of many other devices that contributed to the development of electricity, see “Faraday’s Law” was originally employed by Humphrey Davy as a chemist. Humphrey Davy was, at the time, employed by the Royal Society — that is, he was supported by the government. Later, Faraday was himself promoted to a position at the Royal Institution, where he was also supported by and did research with the Royal Society. Oops, sounds like government grants to me, not “private industry”. He actually did sometimes work for private industry — as a sideline, as a consultant. I’m guessing that the pay for being one of the greatest physicists and inventing a significant fraction of the basis of modern society then, as now, didn’t pay particularly well.
You can really go down the list of great science done in the 16-19th centuries. Even though there was significant technology transfer in the 19th century (people like Faraday would invent something fabulous and die a person of modest means, while people like Edison would later make fortunes off of their work) the vast majority of work was done by people who either had their own wealth because they were noble (and hence got a lot of their money in “rents” that were basically taxes) or who worked for the crown. Faraday himself was sufficiently revered that he was given a house and stipend for life so that he retired in relative comfort.
Maxwell, for example, was the scion of weath and nobility and was funded by the ivory tower (teaching at several colleges) plus various royal awards and grants (plus, no doubt, his inheritance). Coulomb was nobility and worked eventually for the National Institute of France — government supported, in other words. Gauss was born poor (and never felt secure in his support) which was — yes, you guessed it, government support, mixed with University support.
If you go down any list of fundamental physics and science that underlies modern civilization — if this very short list isn’t convincing enough, we could always add Ampere, born to french nobility (his father lost his head in the revolution) who worked teaching and as a University professor and complete a grand slam of Maxwell’s equations — you will find government support and work that was not done for hire by people working for corporations at the heart of almost all of it. Not 100% — we could look at James Watt — oh, no we couldn’t, employed as an instrument maker at a University when he invented the steam engine, and had great difficulty in commercializing his machine that one day indeed did come to “move the world” a la John Galt. Good thing there was a publicly (and privately) supported University for him to work for or he would have been shoeing horses or plowing fields, you think? Watt is also reknowned as one of the first inventors who had to sue because his invention was blatently stolen by others who then refused to pay his modest royalty. He won, but never recovered the loss.
Then we could work on the 20th century. We could, for example, read the original paper by Gordon, Zieger and Townes that is considered the invention of the maser. We could then look at the little blurb at the end on how the work was supported. That’s right, folks the maser — and the laser and the internet and the list goes on and on and on — was invented with government support! Sure, Bell Labs got the patents because our government had and continues to have this habit of using our money to pay for something, and then giving the value of that invention to somebody else who then charges us for it. I’m not criticizing this — it works well enough — but don’t even think of pretending that some company was at risk on the time and resources that went in to most of the most famous inventions of the last 500 years. In the specific cases of Henry Ford, of Edison, maybe, although again a huge amount of GE’s work has been federally funded at some point or another, a lot of Ford’s stuff had some measure of government contracts behind it, if not actual federal funding.
There is no doubt that some inventions are still done the old-fashioned romantic idealized way — somebody has a good idea and pays to develop it, or works for a company that really is farsighted and deep-pocketed and lets them work on something that isn’t a trivial improvement on things that already work so that they can make sure money without all that nasty risk — but generally speaking companies are risk averse and prefer for somebody else to bear the majority of the risk, so that they can then step in and reap the reward (if any). Yet another abuse of the commons, but so very, very common. But sure it happens the other way, the “honest” way too, sometimes.
Honestly, I think that the Faraday approach is a bit more ethical in the case of publicly supported work. Give an inventor who invents something while publicly supported additional support “for life” that in some way reflects the value of the invention and then put the invention, and/or the science behind it in the public domain since the public, after all, paid for it. Then let anybody who wants to make a product out of it, but without the unearned exclusive rights that should correctly go to somebody who risks their own resources developing something. Or, let them do the work in their spare time, at their own risk, or at the risk of whoever they can find to support them while they work. And the very best of luck with that, don’t quit your day job.
Oh, by the way, I’m an entrepreneur with one failed company and one not-yet failed company under my belt. I lost a chunk my own damn money in the first failure (plus uncounted hours of sweat equity). I’m at risk of a huge amount of sweat in the second one. I can tell you all about risk and reward. I have had, and have now, no government support for my entrepreneurial activities beyond support for doing specific research in something else and teaching for many years, and some tiny fraction of the support that the government gives to all Universities that enables them to exist in the first place. So your calling me a “Marxist” is not only ad hominem and irrelevant to bringing transparency to climate research, and very irrelevant to any discussion of the value of government funded science, basic or otherwise (where a simpler approach might be to just read some papers and look at the little bits at the end where the sources of support are acknowledged, or look over really important patents that aren’t e.g. turning a Mobius strip into a belt that wears on both sides, it is so wrong it is really a bit funny.
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D.S. states something like: “I’d thought this was common knowledge amongst the more literate. I guess I was wrong about that.”
Oh, thank you for inserting a link to an article that clearly indicates that it was the advantageous economics of slavery that was perhaps the most important cause of the Civil War, not slavery itself. Certainly one of the most important causes. I was confused on that point — I thought they just wanted to own lots of human beings on those big plantations because it was fun, or they liked collecting and trading people the way kids like to trade Magic cards nowadays. I had no idea that they were afraid that they couldn’t afford to economically maintain their stately “southern” way of life without large numbers of workers with a high cash value, paid quite literally a subsistence wage with no way to quit so that it was all economics.
Of course, if you ask yourself “If slavery was not an issue, because it had been outlawed in the constitution at the time the Republic was founded, would the Civil War have occurred?” it is a bit difficult to come up with a plausible reason why it would have occurred. It took a lot of passion to drive the southern states to secession, and the notion that the Northerner were interfering with their property rights was a major driver. See, you’re right, economics! Of course, the fact that the property in question was exclusively human beings — not factories, money, land, clothing, houses — is irrelevant, it’s the property part that matters. I’m sure that the southerners were equally certain that the Northerners were getting ready to come on down and seize their plantations and houses and other forms of property as well or take their pants away from them if they wore them into a “pants free” Northern state. The latter would surely make me want to secede.
The causes of the Civil War were complex — FWIW, in the middle of watching its history on Netflix, so a lot of this is very much up to date in my mind — and there were other issues, other points of conflict, perhaps the greatest of which was that the South was less concerned with industrial production and preferred a rural “gentrified” way of life, close to Thomas Jefferson’s ideal. So sure, you can always point to this, point to that, and say “they helped cause the Civil War and there might well be some truth to it.
Unfortunately, the true cost of that way of life included human slavery; with the slaves went the high profit margins and wealth, with the wealth went the way of life. Frankly, it still offends me to hear someone state that the most important single (proximate) cause of the Civil War wasn’t slavery. Everything else, all the other points of potential conflict, were not only negotiable, they wasn’t the sort of thing one could get passionate about, especially when it was a long way from New York to Mississippi so that what happened in New York or Washington didn’t matter much in Mississippi. Another major factor was that neither side had any clue about just how damn bloody and horrific the war was going to be — war was still viewed romantically by both sides, and both sides were confident that they could quickly beat the other. There wasn’t enough disincentive to prevent the war and motivate cheaper, more humane, more peaceful resolution.
It is also quite true that the North’s early motivation carefully excluded emancipation and focused on holding the Union together for lots of reasons that were both economic and political; it was already clear that slavery was doomed as a way of life and nothing but moral pressure and a refusal to acknowledge the ownership of human property once it crossed the line into a free state was enough to bring it down eventually. Also, while in the North blacks were free, they were far from equal citizens and they weren’t, for example, permitted to fight in the Civil War.
Even so, the primary point of conflict was slavery, even for the North — they surely weren’t fighting to try to prevent the south from industrializing or to take any other sort of property rights away. Lincoln would, apparently, have reluctantly left the slaves to rot if by doing so he could have preserved the Union, at least at first, because with the Union intact slavery was going to end anyway — in thirty, fifty, a hundred years. In a United States it could not endure as an institution much longer, as the greater political power and population and wealth of the North gradually weakened the South’s ability to maintain it and hence their “way of life”. But the propertied elite in the South knew this as well as the North, and knew equally well that a separate south could preserve the institution far, far longer — perhaps indefinitely.
The whole economy was ultimately tied back to that propertied elite, and even the local version of Christianity had worked out easy ways of justifying the ownership of blacks as being a God given right (the Old Testament openly endorses slavery, including brutal slavery, and the New Testament doesn’t say a word against it aside from advising slaves to obey their masters). Throw in a touch of regional pride (statism), blind yourself to the moral realities and costs of your decisions and the war was inevitable once Lincoln was elected.
Oh, and finally, one could also read Lincoln’s Republican National Platform — see if you can find the provisions that caused the civil war. To make it easy for you, I’ll just copy them here:
7. That the new dogma, that the Constitution, of its own force, carries Slavery into any or all of the Territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent; is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country.
8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; That as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished Slavery in all our national territory, ordained that “no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to Slavery in any Territory of the United States.
9. That we brand the recent re-opening of the African slave-trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age; and we call upon Congress to take prompt and efficient measures for the total and final suppression of that execrable traffic.
10. That in the recent vetoes, by their Federal Governors, of the acts of the Legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, prohibiting Slavery in those Territories, we find a practical illustration of the boasted Democratic principle of Non- Intervention and Popular Sovereignty, embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and a demonstration of the deception and fraud involved therein.
Good luck at finding a Casus Belli in the rest of it.
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Mr. Brown:
You keep “proving” that there wouldn’t be any roads if the government didn’t build them, by arguing: See? All these roads are built by the government!
It would be nice to know exactly why FOIA failed so dramatically to stop warmers from commandeering this discussion over the last 50 years. (FOIA started in the 60’s, I believe?)
Mr. Brown, I wonder if you could briefly explain what you state in your headline, namely that the “FOIA is not enough”.
As a bystander forced to listen to the ongoing drumbeat of AGW catastrophists over the last four or five years, I’m aware of the frustrating (frustrated) FOIA requests for data, codes and methods from the scientists who are proclaiming the future catastrophe. Much of this was referenced, if a bit sketchily by CA readers. It appears that the FOIA, however sincerely endorsed by succeeding administrations, is 10% law and 90% exemptions. http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_guide09.htm
I am also in favor of transparency. And I’m also fond of saying, “There oughta be a law… (for various societal problems)” But since there already is a law which ostensibly provides us with access to this information, I guess it would be useful to know how / whether that law can still be employed to the ends for which it was designed – casting some light on this science. To that end:
Why is FOIA “not enough”?; how has this federal law failed us people in the commons? (or, if you wish)
Why is creating a new law mandating compliance better than giving some teeth to the existing FOIA?
Thank you.
Robert Brown,
This isn’t about slavery, your original article was about the impotence of the FOIA. It’s very difficult to find all the grants that flow into “climate studies”. I’ve tried. Here are just a few, since MBH98 was submitted for publication:
Some of Michael Mann’s grants [not a complete list]:
Development of a Northern Hemisphere Gridded Precipitation Dataset Spanning the Past Half Millennium for Analyzing Interannual and Longer-Term Variability in the Monsoons, $250,000
Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, $1,884,991
Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model, $541,184
A Framework for Probabilistic Projections of Energy-Relevant Streamflow Indices, $330,000
AMS Industry/Government Graduate Fellowship, $23,000
Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network in Ghana, $759,928
Analysis and testing of proxy-based climate reconstructions, $459,000
Constraining the Tropical Pacific’s Role in Low-Frequency Climate Change of the Last Millennium, $68,065
Acquisition of high-performance computing cluster for the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC), $100,000
Decadal Variability in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Integrating Paleo & Coupled Model Results, $102,000
Reconstruction and Analysis of Patterns of Climate Variability Over the Last One to Two Millennia, $315,000
Remote Observations of Ice Sheet Surface Temperature: Toward Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Antarctic Climate Variability, $133,000
Paleoclimatic Reconstructions of the Arctic Oscillation, $14,400
Global Multidecadal-to-Century-Scale Oscillations During the Last 1000 years, $20,775
Resolving the Scale-wise Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere, $214,700
Advancing predictive models of marine sediment transport, $20,775
Multiproxy Climate Reconstruction: Extension in Space and Time, and Model/Data
Intercomparison, $381,647
Detecting and understanding climatic change, $266,235
Patterns of Organized Climatic Variability: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Globally Distributed Climate Proxy Records and Long-term Model Integrations, $270,000
Investigation of Patterns of Organized Large-Scale Climatic Variability During the Last Millennium, $78,000
Total: $6,232,700
And a few selected Briffa grants:
£106,423: ECOCHANGE- Challenges in assessing and forecasting biodivesity and ecosystem changes in Europe
£125,000: Climate Change – Fellow 1 -modelling of the Earth’s climate
£123,789: Process-based methods in the interpretation of tree-growth/ climate relationships
£121,880: To What Extent Was The Little Ice Age A Result Of A Change In The Thermohaline Circulation?
£226,981: Quantitative applications of high resolution late Holocene proxy data sets: estimating climate sensitivity and thermohaline circulation influences
£3,732: Statistical calibration of Eurasian tree ring records [Calibrate tree rings!!]
£1,000: ARC (Academic Research Collaboration): Long tree ring chronologies in the Alps.
A few more recent CRU grants:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/research/grants.htm
This is a titanic waste of taxpayer resources. But it also shows why Penn State closed ranks behind Mann, unethically whitewashing his scientific misconduct. Mann is the rainmaker who brought in the payola. So they faced a choice:
a) Do an honest investigation
b) Sell their souls
We know which one they chose.
Finally, regarding the mistaken idea that government must be involved in everything, keep in mind that:
1. Government is force
2. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others
3. Bad ideas should not be forced on others
4. Liberty, both personal and economic, is necessary for the difference between good ideas and bad ideas to be revealed
You could pay $100,000 for an Econ education and never learn that. But you learned it here at WUWT. Government is a necessary evil. But it is still evil. The framers of the Constitution knew that. So smaller government is better. More local is better. And we do not need government regulating most facets of our lives. The U.S.A. did not become a great country because of big government. That came later, and as a direct result we are now in decline.
President Eisenhower warned of the grave danger of a government techno-elite. That time has arrived. Incompetent scientific charlatans like Mann and Jones are lavishly rewarded, while much more deserving science is starved of funds. I noticed a report of a large asteroid recently passing between the moon and the earth. Asteroids can be deflected if they’re spotted in time. Where’s the money to prepare for that very real danger? Answer: it’s being wasted on “climate studies”.
Robert Brown;
If you go down any list of fundamental physics and science that underlies modern civilization >>>
Robert, as much as I am impressed with your writing, you keep making the same errors over and over again.
Your examples of various physcists doing ground breaking work while being public servants makes the point I raised earlier. Theoretical (or, to use your word, fundamental), research should be funded by government. I have no problem with that. But the MOMENT the research moves from fundamental to research to APPLIED research, there is now a profit motive. Where there is money, there is corruption.
Once we’re talking about research to serve an applied purpose, there is conflict. The funding body cannot possibly regulate the research body that it is funding! It is paying the research body to come up with an applicable result as asked for by the funding body. Is the researcher going to go back to the funding body and say the actual results are the opposite of what they want? He’s risking his job to do so, particularly if the funding body is politicaly motivated. They’ll just keep firing researchers and hiring new ones until they get one who tells them what they want to hear. What happens if the researcher, under pressure to keep his job, fakes his results? You think the funding body will take him to task? Not a chance! They paid the researcher to tell them what they wanted to hear, and the moment they heard it, it became fact in their minds.
Worse, if the funding body and the research body are doing applied science, they are competing with the private sector. If the funding body is the regulator, and also a competitor, do you think the funding/regulator will apply the same standards to themselves as they do to the competition?
Worse still, the larger an organization is, the more difficult it is for that organization to allow good ideas to thrive. Take a look at the technology industry. The giants started out as innovators. Somewhere along the way, they lost the ability to innovate. Those who are good innovators are rarely good at internal politics. Lest they become powerful, the internal fiefdoms bury their ideas. Start up companies are frequently founded by people who became frustrated trying to get the companies they worked for to listen, and struck out on their own. Similarly, take a look at “new” technology from major companies. With a bit of research, you’ll soon find that very little of it was developed “in house”. It is almost always an acquisition with a new logo on the acquired company’s product because internal politics buried all the internal options that the company had to build something of their own.
These are the reasons that for applied science, the funder, the researcher, and the regulator should be separate. These are the reasons that fundamental research should be government funded, but applied research should not. These are the reasons that climate science, the biggest “applied science” project in history, has become poisoned by politics and the these are the reasons that the regulatory systems that should have reigned in the dispicable behaviour we have witnessed failed to do so.
Gail Combs says:
December 5, 2011 at 9:11 am
December 2006 “In the EU, there is now a list of ‘official’ vegetable varieties. Seed that is not on the list cannot be ‘sold’ to the ‘public’ To keep something on the list costs thousands of pounds each year…Hundreds of thousands of old heirloom varieties (the results of about eleven thousand years of plant breeding by our ancestors) are being lost forever . http://www.defra.gov.uk/planth/pvs/pbr/app-procedure.htm & http://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html & http://www.euroseeds.org/pdf/ESA_03.0050.1.pdf”
However the DEFRA link { http://www.defra.gov.uk/planth/pvs/pbr/app-procedure.htm } is no longer any good. Do you have a better link?
I can’t find a page that matches that, but got this page up in searching the old pages: http://search.defra.gov.uk/search?q=planth+pbr&btnG=Google+Search&access=p&client=default_frontend&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&entqr=0&entsp=a__defra_policy&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&ud=1&site=default_collection
The second is:
Defra, UK – Science Search … meetings. Further information about UK PBR can be obtained from Defra`s web
site at http://defra.gov.uk/planth/pvs/pbrguide.htm. Contact …
randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&Completed=0&ProjectID=11361 – 20k – Cached
[ More results from randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx ]
which is: http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&Completed=0&ProjectID=11361
“Plant Breeders` Rights (PBR) are a form of intellectual property protection available to breeders. A grant of PBR can be made in respect of any plant species. UK PBR is under the control of The Controller of Plant Variety Rights, who is also a senior Defra official.
In order to qualify for Plant Breeders` Rights a candidate must be shown to be distinct from any other varieties of the species in common knowledge, uniform and stable ie DUS.”
and which has a url on it to: http://defra.gov.uk/planth/pvs/pbrguide.htm
which comes back to page not found.. 🙂
In the plants and seeds section there are a number of studies, the names of the organisations might help you here.
http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=ProjectList&Completed=0&FOSID=23
This page has list of organisations who do DEFRA testing, there might be some who have the old pages, perhaps in documents.
http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=Contractor&Completed=0
Perhaps easier, a couple of years ago DEFRA was trying to sell off the national apple collection into private hands, bit of stink ensued and even Chas stepped in, it’s now being looked after by the University of Reading, perhaps they’d be able to help you with background info about DEFRA plants and seed from its library, or know a man who can: http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/newsandevents/releases/PR17720.aspx
Also I had seen in my reading where Monsanto got someone on the board of one of the seed saving clubs and “stole” their entire bank of seed genetics so they can patent it. Do you have a link to that?
I recall reading that.., but where..?
I was interested because I used to belong to such a club many years ago, small one, (not allowed to buy seeds because illegal, but through membership given a choice of some packets every year). I’ll have a look for it, meanwhile, some other Monsanto shenanigans for any that are interested, gives a flavour of the problem farmers have with them: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=monsanto&printerfriendly=true
After researching the history of seed patenting I want NO laws about science. It is better to have a completely free internet and go after the propaganda machines we call the MSM.
FRAUD, Miss use of Government funds and Government PROPERTY ~ Phil Jones lost GOVERNMENT PROPERTY when he “Misplaced the raw data set” ~ is really all that is needed.
I wonder if the mystery email man has anything on the raw data?
OH and honest politicians and judges.
🙂 you don’t want much then..
Gail – while I’ve got the pages up,
http://www.infowars.com/monsanto-trying-to-take-over-world-seed-supply-nation-by-nation/
beginning to fight back:
http://gmo-journal.com/index.php/2011/06/02/more-organic-growers-join-the-suit-against-monsanto/
http://www.naturalnews.com/031922_Monsanto_lawsuit.html
A link from the last which explains where the amazingly resistant to antibiotics e-coli came to be: http://www.naturalnews.com/032622_ecoli_bioengineering.html
If you recall recently there was an outbreak in Germany which the Germans immediately blamed on the Spanish, who suffered financial loss as a result before they could clear their name, and then after some other German sources accused, finally nailed to some sprout farm. At the time I was reading about melanin (looking at how uv works), and was amazed to find what an amazing substance it was in us and found that there are labs trying to synthesise it and so on, one of the ways of growing it is on e-coli, I bet there’s a lab next to the German outbreak, just as there was in Mexico where swine flu just appeared and killed many. But like the bird flu ‘epidemic’ in China, it just didn’t have wings to spread around the world, the pigs wouldn’t fly, but they managed to get rid of the vaccine stock anyway.. At least, it was bought up by the health service in Britain for rather a lot of money, who ended up with stockpile no one wanted regardless of the big scare campaigns in press and on tv. In Scotland they put every case of death by flu, there’s always some every year, down to swine flu.
Found it again – this is a fascinating look at melanin: http://www.blackherbals.com/melanin_and_bio_nanotechnology.htm
And especially for the Americans here: http://www.naturalnews.com/034291_SB_1867_war_on_terror.html
Prof Brown,
I said I would complete my post upthread later. Later is now.
Regarding chart tricks, when a zero baseline is used it shows rapidly accelerating recent temperatures. It is an artefact of that type of chart and its x-axis, which Michael Mann used to stunning visual effect in his [repeatedly falsified] hockey stick chart. In reality, however, we are still on the same rising trend line we have been on since the bottom of the LIA. There has been no unusual acceleration in global warming, despite a ≈40% increase in CO2.
This chart shows what is really happening. The LIA was one of the coldest episodes of the entire Holocene. The planet is still emerging from it. Yes, human CO2 emissions probably have a small effect, but natural variability, as expressed in the long term trend, is the primary reason for the temperature rise. Can there be any doubt after seeing a trend chart, versus a zero baseline chart?
Finally, I have proposed the following hypothesis repeatedly, without any takers:
At current and projected concentrations, CO2 is harmless and beneficial.
That hypothesis is testable and falsifiable. Simply show, via the Scientific Method, global harm as a direct consequence of human-emitted CO2 [around 3% of all CO2 emisions]. Up to now no one has even tried to falsify that hypothesis, because there is no evidence of global harm from anthropogenic CO2. Thus, CO2 is ipso facto harmless.
And there is ample evidence that more CO2 is beneficial to the biosphere:
click1
click2
click3
[Many similar links available on request.]
The facts that deconstruct the CO2=CAGW conjecture are readily available. They are empirical, and testable. That is why the alarmist crowd avoids honest, open debates. The facts simply do not support their conjectures.
Robert Brown says:
December 5, 2011 at 10:58 am
“Right. CAGW [and for that matter, AGW] are not hypotheses, because they are neither testable nor falsifiable. They are at the conjecture stage of the scientific method.”
Not strictly true. They are both testable and falsifiable. They are being tested, and may turn out to be false — or true.
It’s just that it is going to take time to test them. If you want me to break this down into small pieces, I’m happy to do so.
* GW — the hypothesis that the world has warmed since the LIA is testable, and is almost certainly true. It could be false, I suppose, but the direct evidence of many actual thermometers suggests that it is true.
* AGW — the hypothesis that some of that net warming is due to increased CO_2 concentration is almost certainly true! Not “90%, or “97%” — 99.999% certain. In order for it to be false, all sorts of falsifiable physics would have to be false. Again, this is an error made all too often on this blog that does not increase its credibility. I understand the human tendency to (over)simplify and say “AGW is false” or “AGW is an unsupported, unfalsifiable hypothesis” when what they mean is that the assertion that the anthropogenic component to the total average global temperature has not reliably been shown to be larger than X%, but this is not the way science operates.
Carbon Dioxide lags temperature by c 800 years – countless studies show this, it’s on the graph used by Gore, the Vostok data. During those hundreds of thousands of years the graph covers there have been several massive temperature changes as every 100,000 years or or so we move from being in the depths of the Ice Age we are currently still in, into brief respites of interglacials lasting around 15,000 years when the stupendous amounts of ice covering us in our Ice Age melts and raises sea level over 300 ft because of dramatic rises in temperature at the beginning of interglacials. And then we move back into the Ice Age proper, another period of dramatic sea level drops as it piles on top of us as ice a mile or two thick. All the while carbon dioxide levels lag behind by around 800 years, and, do look at the Vostok graph, unless you can prove that carbon dioxide has some magical capability of creating these dramatic rises and falls in temperatures 800 years before it makes a move one way or the other, you have not provided any testable hypothesis.
All you have provided here, and the rest of your post is likewise, is wishful thinking. By all testable properties, carbon dioxide is incapable of being what the claims from AGW say of it. For example, how is it possible ‘carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere’? For a start it’s heavier than air and so will always displace air and head for the ground, and then also it’s fully part of the Water Cycle, spontaneously combining with water vapour which condenses out to fall as rain, all pure rain is carbonic acid. In other words water vapour is continually taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. What is the Water Cycle? It is the main greenhouse gas cooling the Earth.
Anyway lighter than air, water vapour absorbs heat at the surface and rises with it into the cooler levels of the atmosphere where it releases its heat and condenses out into rain or ice, and carbon dioxide is fully part of that.
As it rises colder air from above displaces it, that’s how winds are formed, again cooling the Earth. Without the water cycle the Earth would by 67°C not the 15°C it is, so, the main greenhouse gas cools the Earth, it doesn’t heat it, or rather, it’s cooling role is so much greater than any warming it may give, temporary cloud slowing heat loss by convection and so on, that it is a misnomer to say that ‘greenhouse’ gases warm the Earth. The Earth would be 52°C hotter without the Water Cycle, and, even if carbon dioxide wasn’t part and parcel of that, what possible significant effect could it have in counteracting the 52°C of cooling the water cycle is producing?
That’s why AGW excludes the Water Cycle in the energy budget. Too much reality brought into the claims would show that an AGW hypothesis for carbon dioxide isn’t even on the cards. The AGW claim isn’t built on solid physics. Actually, it’s not built on any real physics at all, it’s all fiction, describing a fictional world.
To put it a very simple way that is easy to understand, there is an S-shaped (logistic) function that represents P(x) (true) of the hypothesis that anthropogenic CO_2 is responsible for at least x degrees C of the temperature anomaly. I think that any reasonable scientist who knows enough to make an informed judgement would agree that …..
Understand?
Do you?
Myrrh;
For example, how is it possible ‘carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere’? For a start it’s heavier than air and so will always displace air and head for the ground>>>
Dust is heavier than air too, yet there’s a considerable amount of it at considerable heights. Really Myrrh, if you are going to lecture on physics, don’t you think it is about time that you actually read some physics texts as I and many others have encouraged you to do?
The question isn’t can CO2 do one thing or another, the question is, it it significant compared to other factors? It matters not if Robert Brown is 100% correct but the amount is so small that it can’t be measured and his statement would still be correct. So, let’s focus on what we’ve measured, and what it tells us about how significant CO2 is (or isn’t).
davidmhoffer says:
December 5, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Myrrh;
For example, how is it possible ‘carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere’? For a start it’s heavier than air and so will always displace air and head for the ground>>>
Dust is heavier than air too, yet there’s a considerable amount of it at considerable heights. Really Myrrh, if you are going to lecture on physics, don’t you think it is about time that you actually read some physics texts as I and many others have encouraged you to do?
The question isn’t can CO2 do one thing or another, the question is, it it significant compared to other factors? It matters not if Robert Brown is 100% correct but the amount is so small that it can’t be measured and his statement would still be correct. So, let’s focus on what we’ve measured, and what it tells us about how significant CO2 is (or isn’t).
Yeah right, I’m going to be lectured by those who have no idea of scale or properties, dust settles. Perhaps you and those who think to educate me should get themselves and duster and do some housework, practical physics experience..
Carbon dioxide is insignificant in the whole of this, whatever heat it takes up in the atmosphere it will either give it water spontaneously, you do understand what spontaneous means in the physics don’t you?, like heat spontaneously always flowing from the hotter to the colder.., and so be part of the great cooling of the EArth by ‘greenhouse’ gases, or, it will, like heavier than air dust, sink, to where plants expect it to be since they have evolved with stomata on the underside of their leaves to capture it. Carbon dioxide can’t help but sink in the atmosphere displacing air, because it is heavier than air. It takes work, wind etc., to alter that. Just as methane and water vapour, both lighter than air will rise, separating out from the rest of the bulk of the great heavy volume of the fluid gaseous atmosphere we have above us, the ocean of gas bearing down on us a ton per sq foot.
It doesn’t matter if Brown isn’t 100% correct, as long as he keeps it to himself and stops pretending he knows what he’s talking about..
Myrrh;
Yeah right, I’m going to be lectured by those who have no idea of scale or properties, dust settles. Perhaps you and those who think to educate me should get themselves and duster and do some housework, practical physics experience..>>>
Think it through Myrrh. There is ALWAYS dust in the atmosphere. If it “settles” how is it that there is always dust in the atmosphere?