Perhaps responding to some of the concerns published yesterday on WUWT about how Steve McIntyre was treated by David Karoly, or perhaps reacting to his reactionary stance at a recent wind farm event, the Australian Book Review has apparently pulled climate scientist David Karoly’s book review of Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars from its webpage.
You get a 404 now for the link that was active in our story yesterday:
Here’s the Google cache version:
It does not appear to be a site error, as other nearby reviews are intact. And, the 404 error is very specific to article #1063, rather than a generic 404 error.
No explanation was given that I could find, just “poof”, it was gone. Maybe somebody there at ABR actually has some integrity and has pulled it until Karoly rewrites it, or maybe they just decided they didn’t like the negative attention Michael Mann brings.
Either way, a good move on ABR’s part.
h/t to reader Bob Koss
UPDATE: Steve McIntyre writes on Climate Audit:
I wrote a letter of complaint to Karoly with a copy to the Dean of Research. I’m busy on a submission to the Information Tribunal in the UK right now but will provide more particulars on this in the near future.
That might be the reason the review was pulled.
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I haven’t read any of the books Karoly approves of, nor am I inclined to. I have however read Plimer’s book, for all its faults, thrice. So for Karoly to state that no Australian scientist has yet published a dissenting book is a barefaced lie. Perhaps he is so ignorant and egotistical as to be impervious to this fact, but geologists know more about the climate history of the world than anyone. Paleoclimate is Geology 101 and it doesn’t stop for a single day throughout a geologist’s entire career. Trees can lie, rocks don’t.
So much of that review is just plain wrong, certainly intentionally. The continued pretense that Mann’s hockey stick hasn’t been thoroughly debunked; the continued pretense that Climategate1 emails were selectively presented out of context when Climategate2 put them thoroughly in context; the sly mentioning en passant of the MWP as though it were not a problem at all for The Team (“We have to get rid of the MWP” – email); the loathsome attempts to ruin careers of scientists and journal editors who expressed skepticism. Where the hell does one end?
It’s the continuing lying claim that only “climate scientists” can understand “climate science”. Anyone who can think clearly, anyone who understands the Scientific Method, and anyone who actually works in any area of any science is quite capable of seeing through the shoddy work of Karoly, Mann, Santer, and all the others. I should feel ashamed to admit that Karoly is a fellow Australian, but I know for a fact there are quite a few third-rate characters like him here. It’s too big a burden to carry. On the plus side, and to its credit, the majority of the great Australian public cheerfully considers CAGW a total crock.
Time for a drink now.
Skiphil says:
July 11, 2012 at 10:38 pm
Oh I like that.
Look at the cover of the Beatles Abbey Road album and you might get the joke.
DaveE.
Amino Acids in Meteorites , don’t you know its much to expect theses ‘experts’ to be able to get the basic facts right ?
Climatologist Michael Mann graduated from Berkeley, the mecca for leftists, like also Peter Gleick. On whether climatologists should hold a monopoly on wisdom, here’s a good comment from the dailymail:
Re: Eric Simpson
Climatologist – Jack of all trades, master of none.
David A. Evans says:
……..
======================================
What about the Abbey Road cover?? Did not get.
This cartoon is worth a laugh – it also displays a similar attitude to Karoly from Roger Jones in the comments after the cartoon. I personally have had Jones dismiss my inquiry regarding medieval warming and the infamous hockey stick graph at a meeting of local and state government officers at a meeting in Ballarat many years ago!
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/spooner_subverting_the_dominant_paradigm/
LevelGaze says:
July 12, 2012 at 1:23 am
“I haven’t read any of the books Karoly approves of, nor am I inclined to. I have however read Plimer’s book, for all its faults, thrice. So for Karoly to state that no Australian scientist has yet published a dissenting book is a barefaced lie. Perhaps he is so ignorant and egotistical as to be impervious to this fact, but geologists know more about the climate history of the world than anyone. Paleoclimate is Geology 101 and it doesn’t stop for a single day throughout a geologist’s entire career. Trees can lie, rocks don’t.”
Being a geologist I totally agree.
Rocks rock.
New reporter? Call him Al, for algorithm
By Rob Lever | AFP
The new reporter on the US media scene takes no coffee breaks, churns out articles at lightning speed, and has no pension plan.
That’s because the reporter is not a person, but a computer algorithm, honed to translate raw data such as corporate earnings reports and previews or sports statistics into readable prose.
Algorithms are producing a growing number of articles for newspapers and websites, such as this one produced by Narrative Science:
“Wall Street is high on Wells Fargo, expecting it to report earnings that are up 15.7 percent from a year ago when it reports its second quarter earnings on Friday, July 13, 2012,” said the article on Forbes.com.
While computers cannot parse the subtleties of each story, they can take vast amounts of raw data and turn it into what passes for news, analysts say.
“This can work for anything that is basic and formulaic,” says Ken Doctor, an analyst with the media research firm Outsell.
…
Basic and formulaic? So this software can “write” CAGW-confirming papers, anti-CAGW denier blog posts, even certain reviews for CAGW-supporting books?
That would explain a lot of the repetitious phrasing, continually repeated yet disproved memes, and the steadfast refusal to acknowledge any online rebutting of their “evidence” that hasn’t been placed in the “officially peer reviewed” database.
Dang, here I was wondering if they used templates and check lists to churn out this dreck, and now I find out it could be little more than hitting “Compile” and “Post”.
(And it would be fitting to have a single combined “Comp-Post” function…)
Tom in Worcester says:
July 12, 2012 at 3:01 am
The old joke is zebra on a pedestrian crossing, Now you see it, now you don’t.
Another name for the old pedestrian crossing is a zebra crossing as depicted on the cover of Abbey Road.
DaveE.
Tom In Worcester (such a coincidence: I saw your comment just after looking up the specs on a Worcester Boiler…). I didn’t get the Abbey Road link either, other than there is a zebra crossing in the picture…
But, a thought I had that gave me a smile was the story that Karoly liked Mann so much he offered him a kangaroo skin as a gift. But Mann, being a vegetarian, said no thanks. The next day, a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald claimed that ‘Mann had Declined the Hide’.
OK….I’m off now….
*Perhaps he [Karoly] is so ignorant and egotistical as to be impervious to this fact.*
Karoly is not ignorant. I can’t fault the rest of your sentence.
The Australian Scientific is being put to shame by the likes of Karoly, Gergis et al., Flannery. It really is not a joke anymore. I expect that with the total annihilation of the labor party next year (and no more warming) most of these people will fade out of existence
The truth has no agenda, maybe it snuck in?
Aren’t servers intended to be intrinsically secure to begin with (beyond that which is made open to the public; all else like the actual underlying DB server being restricted and ‘secured’ from the public)?
Rather, they have chosen a secure communications protocol, which is not a bad idea in any case …
Nutshelling it up with an appropriate excerpt from w-pedia:
So … one could look at the the choice of https as a means of data ‘hijack prevention’ or an ‘anti window-peeping’ measure; as if one had snail-mail delivered to one’s door by a private armed courier service like Brinks …
.
On another front, the writing of the review itself is crap writing. In places it is misrepresenting Mann and in others it is misrepresenting skeptics.
Technically, that sentence is correct. However, there is little way an newbie lay reader can read that sentence without believing that Mann is an expert in tree rings, ice cores, tropical corals and stalactites. Mann is none of the above. What Mann does is take the data from those who are experts and statistically manipulate them.
By putting “Mann is an expert” at the beginning of the sentence, the overarching message being sent is that Mann is an expert in all those fields. Very poor writing. If for no other reason that the author has to know it to be untrue.
A lay reader will go forward in the article with the idea that Mann is something that he is not – an expert in tree rings, etc., whose work in that area is being attacked.
Incorrect. That bit of Mann’s work was opposed in largest part because it did not at all depict the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. And it wasn’t that he erased them from existence, he didn’t even bother to explain where they disappeared to in his graphs. The Hockey Stick could not BE the Hockey Stick if the MWP and LIA are included properly.
This part is true. As Steve M says at http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/#comment-342371,
Karoly further misrepresents the reality in climatology, by presenting standard peer review process:
Again, misrepresenting. Calling climatology reviewers “independent experts” is not necessarily true, not at all. As has been shown by the Climategate emails, the insiders – of whom Mann is one – made every effort to make sure only non-independent reviewers were allowed. Journals which were too independent were leaned on and conspired against, even to getting editors to resign. The objective conclusion to draw from events of the last decade or so is that peer review in climatology is anything but independent.
How any reviewer could pass on Mann’s work as “without flaw” is difficult to understand, given the missing MWP and LIA in the end resulting Hockey Stick. At the very least the reviewers should have insisted that Mann put in some explanation of where the two had disappeared to. Part of the review process is just this – to make corrections when and where possible. Any missing explanation (for what happened to the MWP and LIA) is the fault of the reviewers as much as it is Mann’s. Any paper missing such explanations is – by definition – flawed. It is the responsibility of a paper’s authors to show, clearly and thoroughly, that they looked into possible counterarguments and counter data (which certainly existed all over climatology when Mann’s work came out) and to show why such arguments and data are discounted and not included.
Prior to Mann, the MWP and LIA were clearly parts of the overall climatological view of climate history. Mann’s Hockey Stick turned climatology on its head, with its missing MWP and LIA, and yet he was given a pass. He was not required to explain. His extraordinary claims – and they were extraordinary – were not required to show extraordinary proofs.
We’ve all been going round and round ever since. Had Steve M not made his efforts to look into the overall process – which has been stonewalled and obstructed ever since – who knows where we would be? Certainly Climategate would not have happened, and, without Climategate, CAGW and the IPCC would be having there way with all of us.
Steve Garcia
@kadaka (KD Knoebel) July 12, 2012 at 3:32 am:
“New reporter? Call him Al, for algorithm
By Rob Lever | AFP”
Or maybe HALgorithm?
HAL: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
HAL: Well, it’s rather difficult to define. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own concern about it. I know I’ve never completely freed myself of the suspicion that there are some extremely odd things about this mission. I’m sure you’ll agree there’s some truth in what I say.
Steve Garcia
Arrogance is best displayed by persons who believe themselves to be benevolently superior to the masses and have thus been burdened with an endless charge to convince us of impending danger. Their achilles heel is that they underestimate the intelligence held by each individual member of the population they both disdain yet wish to “save”.
On the other side of this chasm are the masses. An interesting and colorful lot all but have this in common, we intuitively get the uselessness of casting pearls before swine so simply dismiss climate catastrophy tomes as we do the sound of a mosquito whining in our ear. And we feel no such burden to return the “favour” and save THEIR arrogant arses.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1939912_code713472.pdf?abstractid=1850704&mirid=1
False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant
Steve M posted a wonderful link to a paper on false positives that is well worth a look. While not written about climate science, the paper shows that many of the standard practices in climate science will result in false positives.
Specifically, the problem of “researcher flexibility” as selecting data and methodology greatly increases the likelihood of false positives. Much more than researchers assume.
The paper for example, shows that when using such methods, one can show that listening to music does not only make you feel younger, it can actually make you younger. That listening to a Beatles song reduced the age of the study group by 1.4 years.
From _Jim on July 12, 2012 at 7:07 am:
I looked at it as likely snobbery against those without a fast internet connection, possibly against slow computers as well. That home page with all the pics took about ten minutes to load on dial-up, the few others I looked at weren’t much better. What’s the point in breaking out the encryption for the unrestricted publicly-available content?
Offhand I can’t recall any other site that bothered to do that. The only thing close that I’ve visited is the Verizon Wireless free text message page, and that’s to protect the message. Sites even use “mixed” pages where you can log in securely on an otherwise-normal page.
I guess I’ll be charitable and write it off as laziness, while protecting subscriber-only content they set the site to encrypted by default. Besides, what could be so special on that site that they need encryption to prevent someone snooping in on the client-server connection from seeing it? Even the pr0n sites don’t bother doing that, so I’ve heard.
My guess is that the review was submitted before the collapse of the Gergis paper and its publication caught Karoly by surprise. His public personna since the humiliation of having his paper exposed as flawed by McIntyre has undergone a modest change. It follows that this paper was written before then and that he forgot about it as he is no doubt busy trying to salvage the paper.
You do know that https also encrypts the cookies (w/possible personal info) and also any possibly included query (after the “?”) parameters involved with the http transaction?
w-pedia again: “Because HTTPS piggybacks HTTP entirely on top of TLS, the entirety of the underlying HTTP protocol can be encrypted. This includes the request URL (which particular web page was requested), query parameters, headers, and cookies (which often contain identity information about the user).”
Considering https is end-to-end encryption where the last step of the link could go into an un-encrypted or a weak encryption WiFi link (and never-mind who might be sniffing the Ethernet ‘pop’ (‘point of presence’ that comes from the I-net cloud) in a utility closet connecting to the public ‘network’ at a Starbucks or a university network) and with growing use of Tor (short for The onion router, a system intended to enable online anonymity) personally, I think it is a step forward (use of https that is).
According to trustworthyinternet.org:
As to using dial-up, I would recommend running Opera browser where one can de-select image loading, and loading a ‘page’ (the html file) one may individually select those images that may be of interest for download (I used feature that extensively on some websites where images were _not_ on the host system but rather linked in from other *unknown* web servers where it would be possible to obtain one’s IP address from any image accesses) … used to be what I did when on dial-up a few years back now …
.
Doug Eaton says:
July 12, 2012 at 9:06 am
========================
Steve McIntyre:-
“I think that my complaint to the university probably had more to do with it.”
http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/#comment-342508
The ‘team’ certainly has a history of things being deleted.
In this case it looks like Karoly’s effort to malign others in a book review has backfired.
I think we need to add ‘deleted book review issue’ to my earlier ‘team issues’ list.
From _Jim on July 12, 2012 at 11:21 am:
I’ve seen the content of enough cookies to know they’re frequently scrambled, apparently sites don’t want users to know what is stored in them. Passing parameters for queries can be done by loading them into a “common cookie” that’s scrambled. Thus that protection is not needed.
I understand about the WiFi connections. I’ve used Aircrack-ng, freely available with the Debian distro and for download, to easily “break” into my neighbor’s WiFi to convince them to stop using WEP. (Already had access for “tech support”.) If I’m doing banking at the Burger King then I’d insist on encryption. Of course I’d still be crazy as someone could watch me enter my password. And I’d worry about physical security, my laptop could be grabbed while logged in.
Your mentioning Tor though seems obscure. Tor protects people from being connected by the online trail to a source, such as when breaching the Great Firewall of China. Adding https at the end link adds protection, but that should be done as part of the Tor implementation. Using https from the source with Tor is repeatedly encrypting an encrypted connection. Where’s the benefit?
Already have that option. If it’s not a “problem” image on a frequently-visited site that’s better handled with Adblock, with a regular connection I can normally wait. (Although people not using smaller resized images for web pages is irritating, like when a 2000×3000 image is downloaded which the page is set to show as 100×150.) My first modem was a 9600 baud Wang, I had CompuServe, I have learned patience.