Guest post by Indur M. Goklany
Over at the Wall Street Journal a group of pedigreed individuals headed by Dr. Kevin Trenberth argue:
Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.
Wrong answer!!
If you need surgery you DON’T want “a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.” What you want is “a highly experienced expert in the field who has CONVINCING EVIDENCE THAT HIS OR HER OPERATIONS HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL!”
And if before I go to a dentist, I would like evidence that the dentist does not pull the wrong teeth (even on occasion).
Unfortunately, there is no convincing evidence that climate models can successfully predict future climate — and I mean “climate” not just “temperature.” [The latter is just one aspect of the climate and for many impacts it may not even be the most relevant.]
Climate models, which are the source of the apocalyptic vision of global warming, have not been validated using data that were not used in their development. Even the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and the IPCC acknowledge as much. Specifically, the IPCC does not say that “all” features of current climate or past climate changes can be reproduced, as a reliable model of climate change ought to be able to do endogenously. In fact, it notes:
“… models still show significant errors. Although these are generally greater at smaller scales, important large scale problems also remain. For example, deficiencies remain in the simulation of tropical precipitation, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Madden-Julian Oscillation (an observed variation in tropical winds and rainfall with a time scale of 30 to 90 days).” (AR4WG1, p. 601).
And the CCSP has this to say in its 2008 publication, Climate Models: An Assessment of Strengths and Limitations. A Report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research:
“Climate model simulation of precipitation has improved over time but is still problematic. Correlation between models and observations is 50 to 60% for seasonal means on scales of a few hundred kilometers.” (CCSP 2008:3).
“In summary, modern AOGCMs generally simulate continental and larger-scale mean surface temperature and precipitation with considerable accuracy, but the models often are not reliable for smaller regions, particularly for precipitation.” (CCSP 2008: 52).
So before one pulls society’s economic teeth, validate the models or else you could end up pulling society’s economic teeth in error.
In the medical profession this would be known as “evidence-based medicine.” Exactly the same principle should apply to climate change remedies. We should insist on nothing less.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If your dentist was employed by the government and was paid more money for extractions than for examinations, do you think you might have unnecessary operations?
Is it safe?
Well, since I consider climate models the equivalent of “homeopathic” medicine…………………………
Jason Joice M.D. says:
February 1, 2012 at 4:10 am
“Look, I’m the expert here. Just shut up and sign this consent form”.
====================================================
At least you try to get a consent form signed, “The Team” is just shoving the medication down our throats without even asking if we want/need it.
If Trenberth has a headache does he go to a Neurosurgeon for surgery or to a Proctologist to have his head removed from his ass?
There are obvious parallels between Surgeons and Climatologists.
At least 12,000 Americans die each year from unnecessary surgery, according to a Journal of the American Medical Association report. And tens of thousands more suffer complications.
http://articles.cnn.com/2007-07-27/health/healthmag.surgery_1_hysterectomy-surgery-uterine-cancer?_s=PM:HEALTH
Perhaps Trenberth sees climatology more like dentistry:
Some patients may expect their dentists to check for cavities during their visit, but instead, they find the dentist drilling for dollars inside their mouths. Insurance companies pay out millions annually in unnecessary dental claims.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=4162797&page=1#.Tyk4Sfk2xI4
Kevin Trenberth sez:
“In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work.”
This puts the Climategate e-mails into perspective. The CAGW climate scientists like Mann, Trenberth, and Santer clearly did EVERYTHING they could to keep skeptic papers out of peer-reviewed journals, because they knew that publishing in the journals would severely undercut their authority. Just shameful!!
Time to zero-fund these people…in November.
I don’t think I would be going to a doctor who laments missing stuff while practicing medicine. Just sayin.
Funny thing about surgeons. While drugs are subject to endless tests before approval, surgical procedures are not. There is a procedure where a surgeon opens up your knee and removes rubbish, trims your cartilage and such like. One day, some bright spark got the idea of actually doing a trial on this procedure. So when people came in for it, they all got the anaesthetic and the cut, but only half got the rest of the procedure. When they were followed up some time later, there was no difference in knee function between the two groups.
You can read about it at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/healthreport/arthroscopic-surgery-for-osteoarthritis-of-the-knee/3184850.
But as for climate models and predictions, they do a lot better than the “skeptics” predictions, so they must be doing something right. Of course “skeptics” are unfairly disadvantaged when it comes to making predictions, because they can’t predict rising temperatures or falling arctic sea ice (not without getting kicked out the “skeptics” club anyway).
Sorry Indur, I always go to dentists that pull the wrong teeth. LOL!
Love your comparisons, and they are spot on.
John Brookes says:
“But as for climate models and predictions, they do a lot better than the “skeptics” predictions…”
John Brookes doesn’t understand. Individuals might make predictions. But scientific skepticism doesn’t make predictions, it only questions conjectures and hypotheses. Skeptics have turned up so many failed alarmist predictions that in any other branch of the hard sciences, the purveyors of the CO2=CAGW nonsense would be the laughingstock of their peers.
John Brookes says:
February 1, 2012 at 5:41 am
WOW!
“In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work.”
Even if we have to redefine peer-reviewed.
Don’t make me laugh.
Since few if any of the people behind the CAGW scare have degrees in “climatology”, this argument can be used against them as well as against the skeptics.
Isn’t Hansen an astronomer? Isn’t Pachuri a railway engineer?
Much of the support for CAGW comes from statistics, yet none of the team has ANY training in statistics.
Smokey says:
February 1, 2012 at 5:54 am
John Brookes doesn’t understand that one does not do an invasive procedure just as a placebo. In my mind, such an act is criminal.
If Tren[snip . . c’mon] is so expert in his field, why can’t he account for all the missing heat? If only he’d ask I could tell him where it is. Its all at the end of my garden keeping my Fairies warm 🙂
It’s clear that these guys (the so-called REAL “scientists”) are truly freaking out. I suppose I might be too, if I was in the precarious position of seeing my career be laid to rest because the data just won’t comply with the models and dire forecasts. And this is why I got out of (health sciences / epidemiological) research 20 years ago, as my superiors – the grant/funding rainmakers, tried steering me towards finding results that just weren’t in the data, instead of allowing me to let the data to speak for itself. Funding is gained by presenting a very strong hypothesis. If the data don’t end up supporting that hypothesis, that should be a significant result in itself. But not in the eyes of those whose careers depend on finding results that support a given hypothesis. Sad to say, but funding entities seem to only be interested in funding those who have a track record of presenting interesting hypotheses and consequently finding interesting results.
In the case of AGW, the next 10 years of global temperature data will determine whether this matter will continue to be the contentious battle that it is now. If the temperatures do not rise, and actually begin to fall, well, I just hope all these fervent advocates and enablers are around to face the music.
Appeals to authority are always to be viewed with suspicion, but especially in cases where the “true” answer is not available. While the number of surgeries performed doesn’t necessarily correlate with a surgeon’s skill, there is at least a mechanism (knowledge of poor outcomes becoming public in the surgeon’s lifetime) that can help identify who the true experts are.
Not so much for climate scientists. A better analogy here would be to the arson investigators of a few decades ago who condescendingly touted their many arson investigations as evidence of their expert abilities. Google “crazed glass” to see how that worked for them.
Another commenter also pointed out that claiming expertise in which actions should be taken to address whatever climate change is actually ongoing is certainly not within the expertise of these folks, and it it hubris at its worst that they do not realize this.
Even if someone were a fine neurological diagnostician that would not make them a fine brain surgeon.
The last thing you want to do is go to an expert alone for his advice. His bias is to promote what he knows best. It’s the “if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” situation. Get a second opinion. And a third. From intelligent people, but who are uninvested in the outcome. From many counselors comes wisdom.
“Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work.”
The trouble with climate science is that it attempts to be a jack-of-all-trades and proves itself a master of none. In a certain sense, there is no such thing as climate science. There is only physics, chemistry, biology, statistics, etc. And the practioners of climate sciences seem to have notable weaknesses in these areas, with statistics being an especially glaring one. When I first found out that they essentially practice do-it-yourself statistics, and don’t have, as a matter of course, a trained statistician working intimately with their teams, in many cases, I was flabbergasted. All the work by Steve McIntyre should have been done before those papers had ever seen publication. It is, to quote Trenberth, a true “travesty”. And we’re supposed to upend the world economy and spend trillions of dollars based on people who can’t even get the fundamentals right and whose idea of scientific rigor seems to be back-of-the-envelope calculations based on incomplete and poorly gathered data (I’m thinking Yamal)? Heck, they can’t even understand Excel, and yet they claim to be masters of the universe.
In fact, the point made in the quote above is 180 degrees wrong. “Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?” What they’re asking us to do is consult a climate scientist about physics. And consult a climate scientist about chemistry. And consult a climate scientist about meteorology. And consult a climate scientist about statistics. And, most laughably, consult a climate scientist about engineering, power generation, and economics. The truth is, climate scientists are the equivalent of the GP, the jack-of-all-trades. If I have a problem with my heart, though, I want my GP to send me to a heart specialist – not the other way around. The same is true with climate scientists. They’re not the cardiologists, they’re the GPs. But unfortunately they don’t recognize the limits of their expertise and knowledge. They’re too arrogant for that. So is it any wonder people are averse to letting them do heart surgery?
As to peer review, that pretty much says it all. If your peers are arrogant, under-educated, and lacking in self-awareness and got their job because they think just like you do (and you freeze them out if they don’t) then it’s no wonder you’re the experts in the field, as judged by your peers. You haven’t actually been tested against a rigorous standard. What should happen is every climate science paper should get non-peer reviewed – by a chemist, a physicist, a statistician and anyone else in a rigorous hard science that could bring relevant expertise to bear. Then we would maybe have confidence in the results. But this wishy-washy, manipulative, closed club of “climate scientists” will never inspire confidence.
So, essentially, since the peer review system for the climatology has become an instant-self-publication-mill we’re to trust them as “experts”.
Sorry, but I’d listen to real doctors and only if they have proof, otherwise I get a second opinion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_fools
“Correlation between models and observations is 50 to 60% for seasonal means on scales of a few hundred kilometers.”
So they can’t predict the rain for the season any better than they can predict the rain from an oncoming storm.
But I can reliably predict continued denial and mendacity from the climatological-bureaucratic complex.
Let me get this right. Trenberth says,
I’m quite sure that this is true, computer models do predict warming in the deep oceans.
But in private, Trenberth says,
Trenberth’s use of the word “account” has, admittedly, created confusion. But he has clarified this confusion in this editorial, writing,
So Trenberth believes that the reason we can’t find the deep ocean heat predicted by the computer models is because the sensor network is inadequate.
There is great irony in the fact that the same people who argue that a handful of tree rings extracted from one set of isolated trees growing on the Yamal peninsula are perfectly adequate to project global surface temperature back 1000 years, now argue that we don’t have adequate sensor coverage to measure ocean heat content, despite having nearly complete surface coverage by sophisticated, highly calibrated satellites, We now find ourselves in Alice’s wonderland where tree rings are held up as precision scientific instruments and satellites are dismissed as inadequate and untrustworthy — this can only happen in climate science.
How long must we be abused by the False Analogy between climate scientists and physicians? Kevin Trenberth states his version of the fallacious argument as follows:
“Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.”
Physicians practice healing of patients. Scientists create understanding of the universe. The two fields do not have the same goals and cannot be measured by the same standards. Does anyone believe that the surgeon who decided to cut a hole in his patient’s leg so that he could access an artery and thread a tube into the patient’s heart so that he could inflate a balloon on the end of the tube was practicing science? Of course not. Does anyone believe that the surgeon was justified in his novel actions because he had presented evidence of its likely success? Of course not. Does anyone believe that the surgeon was justified because he had done a large number of this kind of operation? Of course not. The surgeon was justified because all known means of treating the patient’s condition had failed and the surgeon’s unproven technique offered the only hope of relieving the patient’s suffering.
No doubt the reason that people like Trenberth continue to compare themselves to physicians is that they believe that they deserve the respect that physicians receive from patients. But the comparison is made in vain because the respect that physicians receive is based on a record of success in relieving the suffering of patients. By that standard, climate scientists deserve no respect whatsoever. They have failed completely in their efforts to produce scientific theories which explain the behavior of our climate, which rest on empirical evidence, and which can be understood by the highly educated among the masses of humanity. They have failed just as completely in their efforts to offer reasonable paths to healing for what they see as the planet’s sickness.
Some have suggested that Trenberth and friends are wedded to the fallacious comparison because they view themselves as physicians to the planet and to humanity. If there is any truth to this suggestion then Trenberth and friends are truly dangerous.
The goal of scientists and the chief duty of scientists is to produce understanding of their piece of the universe. Climate scientists have failed to offer something beyond unvalidated computer simulations and nonempirical claims about proxies such as tree rings. On all the standard measures of scientific success, they have failed. The most telling failure is in their inability to present well confirmed physical hypotheses which explain the connections between rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and the so-called “feedbacks” such as cloud behavior. Even Arrhenius knew that the effect of CO2 on Earth’s temperature could not be determined without the knowledge provided by such well confirmed physical hypotheses.
Finally, climate scientists commit the fallacy of False Analogy because they want the trust that patients have for physicians who have a record of healing people like them. They do not want to be held to a standard of clarity and evidence. They do not want to explain their own science in a way that the prospective “patients,” consumers of science, can understand. To that attitude, I say “Scientist, explicate yourself.”