The APS Topical Group on the Physics of Climate: reply to Roger Cohen

Warren S Warren;
I believe the posters on this web site, for the most part, have “made up their minds” that AGW is a hoax, and as I said at the beginning I do not agree.
>>>>>>>>>
I sense that the value of meaningful debate is lost on Dr. Warren, but this comment is so egregious that I feel it deserves response regardless.
For starters Dr. Warren, as a long time commenter on this site, I’m advising you that you speak from ignorance. Yes, there are a number of commenters who, without critical examination, endorse every snippet of information that seems to confirm the skeptic case. But if you believe that these are representative over all of the opinion of the average commenter on this site, then I can suggest that you are not only ignorant of the facts, but insulting both the intelligence and integrity of many of us.
Which is why I suggested upthread that you show up.
I repeat my suggestion now.
Show up. Engage. Participate.
Or quit the field and STFU.
We’ll draw our conclusions accordingly. So far, you’ve done your cause more harm than good. Quitting now won’t change that.

“In Roger’s post on this website, he presented himself as the voice of sanity in a biased group.”
Hmmm. Does Warren come across as the “voice of sanity?”

rgbatduke says:
October 25, 2012 at 4:07 pm
I find this statement a bit odd.
“This, I seriously feel, a sad aspect of WUWT as it seriously diminishes the quality of scientific discussion when you accuse those you disagree with of bad faith from the beginning. I see no particular reason to think that Dr. Warren spoke in bad faith up above,”
Warren clearly in his second post admits he spoke in bad faith.
“I fully expected a hostile reception-I believe the posters on this web site, for the most part, have “made up their minds” that AGW is a hoax, and as I said at the beginning I do not agree.”
Its true we gave him what he wanted… which is what his first post requested we give him. He also notes in this post that he lied in the first post as he clearly states at the end, that indeed he has made up his mind on the issue as well. Counter to his claim in the first post. Not only that but both the first and second post clearly display a complete unwillingness to debate, argue or have any interaction on the topic. He has issued an edict from his ivory tower and that is the end of the story. warren at anytime can decide to debate, engage or do a host of other things to challenge this now well established fact he’s a *****bag. Many people have asked him to show proof and debate his argument. He like the tool he is and clearly seen to be from his first post refuses. It is clear his complete and only plan was to abuse the people of this site with with the logical fallacy of his authoritarian attitude problem. Why should we be “respectful” to someone who is so blatantly disrespectful from the start. More so when that disrespect comes from one of the worst of the logical fallacy known.
Much like 97% of climate “scientists” belief in global warming is real and man made… whenever you remove enough of everyone views you can always find “consensus”. warren never bothers to wonder why this and a handful of other websites happen to be filled with evil deniers… Clearly doesn’t put two and two together that when people resign from groups, leave and that groups of people are censored from areas that they tend not to hang out in those areas. Clearly numerous scientists agree that the APS is not a free and open society in which they can debate global warming… WHICH IS WHY THEY RESIGNED. You would think in warren’s position he would at least take a humble approach to this issue… you know since he “supposedly” “admits” that he/APS is/was “in the wrong”. Nope… not him or APS, ivory tower authoritarian attitude problem all the way.
“As long as Dr. Warren is willing to ensure that that sort of crap never happens again, I could care less what his personal conclusions on a complex question are.”
Isn’t that exactly what warren is however allowing? Cohen has clearly stated that was pretty much his problem with warren in the first place. While its true that Cohen hardly produced transcripts and video on this issue, he has two fundamental facts going for him on that. One we know its happened before… many times in fact. Two Cohen is not likely legally allowed to release the info. Being warren has admitted to the fact that APS loves its “closed door science”.

Dear Curt: When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

Empirical measurement required; I believe “debunking” heat loss measurements, without the rest of the body swaddled, and with less drastic temperature gradient. show something on the order of 10%. Still disproportionate, but …

Warren S. Warren says:
Again, thanks to Anthony for his willingness to accept a post from me. I fully expected a hostile reception-I believe the posters on this web site, for the most part, have “made up their minds” that AGW is a hoax, and as I said at the beginning I do not agree.
What an ass. Hey Warren, do you think that the ‘hostile reception’ had any little tiny bit to do with the fact that your post was a content free ad hom response to Cohen? Or perhaps the contempt you demonstrate of us here by making that self serving post – and now this comment?
I for one do not believe that CAGW is a hoax. I belive that it is a politically convenient conjecture, advanced by people who refuse to back up their assertion by exposing it to the light of dissenting inquiry. They run away, as you do here. Faced with inconvenient questions, you hop into a handy dodge and speed away … as you look down your nose at the swine whom you tell yourself are undeserving of your pearls.
I posted because I did not think his narrative should go unchallenged.
Funny thing to say, given that is precisely what you did. The body of your post was 433 words. You spent 238 of those talking about yourself, another 111 making snarky personal attacks on Cohen, and 84 on bald assertion that your program is “balanced”. Your priorities are clearly enumerated, and Cohen’s narrative walks away reinforced.
You missed your calling. Surely, you should be the chair of the Committee for Informing the Public.

He has issued an edict from his ivory tower and that is the end of the story. warren at anytime can decide to debate, engage or do a host of other things to challenge this now well established fact he’s a *****bag. Many people have asked him to show proof and debate his argument.
Argument? Argument? Was there an argument in there somewhere? Let’s see:
Since I have been involved in organizing the Topical Group from the beginning, my views on climate change are relevant. I have never published in that field (my background is chemical physics, and research focus is on medical imaging) and I am not an advocate for either “side” in this discussion. But I could make the same statement about virtually everyone else involved on those committees. I don’t buy the arguments that only “experts on climate change” can understand the data and draw conclusions-any more than I would accept the same argument about astrology or homeopathic medicine. I can say that I am appalled by the highly unscientific and highly unprofessional way I see many prominent individuals, on both sides of this discussion, behave in public. For example, every tiny bit of new noisy data seems to get blown up into “conclusive evidence” one way or the other-ignoring what Judith Curry is fond of calling the uncertainty monster that clearly has not been tamed. I also feel that the APS statement on climate change (with the word “incontrovertible”) was very ill-advised, but the controversy focused on one badly-chosen word has harmed science by discouraging other scientific organizations from helping to sort wheat from chaff in this field. Finally, I think formation of the Topical Group on the Physics of Climate is a very positive step, and has the potential to dramatically improve the scientific discourse in this field.
Personally, I think that this is amazingly, enormously, totally rational. I rather believe that he is not an advocate of either side in the discussion. I do think he missed the point (in this comment, at least) concerning the APS statement — it wasn’t inappropriate only because only because of the word “incontrovertible”, however absurd such a word is in scientific debate in a field with an absolute mountain of weak hypotheses and questionable data supporting its main conclusions, it was inappropriate because it claimed to speak for the APS membership as a whole on a political issue.
As I said above, if the APS is going to start doing that, let’s do it where it counts — stating that the incontrovertible cosmological evidence concerning the age and natural history of the visible Universe is incompatible with the Book of Genesis and hence all derived religious beliefs — that would be the entire spectrum of Abrahamic faiths — must be incorrect. After all, 46% of U.S. citizens still believe in Genesis and the Flood, which surely is a crisis of the highest proportions as those poor saps vote and their vote counts as much as mine! The APS can publicly weigh in on the evolution question at the same time, since the validity of radiometric dating is a major factor in that argument and incontrovertible radiometric dating is pure physics.
Next, since the APS will at that point have appointed itself as an ethical guardian of the human race on matters associated with “physics” concepts, it might as well issue a statement about the ethics of energy generation and consumption, stating that it is the position of the rank and file membership of the APS that every possible step should be taken to ensure equal access to inexpensive energy for every citizen of the world, because it is surely unethical for me to sit here in my prolifically wired home, burning electrical lights while typing on my laptop in climate-controlled comfort and drinking hot coffee prepared without any sort of sooty and dangerous fire, while in India and Africa families are living in rude, dark huts without any light at all after dark and cooking their food within the huts themselves on smoldering fires burning dried animal dung. They might as well comment on the subversion of physics into building vast stores of weapons capable of ending human civilization by accident or on a whim, on the further subversion of physics into building invisible and nearly invulnerable planes, ships and tanks that can be remotely manned so that we can destroy any number of human lives and any amount of human property without even the tiny modicum of restraint brought about by a shared risk while doing so. Indeed, there is no limit as to the statements the APS could issue on behalf of its members. Listen up, world, the APS has determined that there is incontrovertible evidence that large asteroids fall on the planet every few hundred million years and one of at least moderate size could fall tomorrow and pushes politically for an orbital platform capable of doing something about this threat as well as colonies in space, on the moon, on Mars so that the human species has a small chance of being preserved in the event that somebody unleashes an Armageddon bug, an asteroid hits, or we have the long delayed civilization-ending nuclear war I lived in fear of throughout most of my life.
After all, the APS has assumed the right to speak on behalf of all of its members on highly controversial issues and to actively abuse the terminology and philosophy of science as it does so. Why should it stop with global warming? There are far more pressing concerns. Let’s start endorsing presidential candidates. Let’s get an APS spokesperson on CNN after the debates analyzing candidates from the point of view of what they are going to do for physicists (not just climate scientists). I want my piece of the pie.
And they might as well go ahead and officially endorse or reject all of the other equally “incontrovertible” hypotheses physicists study while they are at it. Why stop with climate science? As of now, the speed limit of the Universe is c, the speed of light, and no further research into transluminal physics will be permitted, funded, encouraged, and papers submitted on the subject will be instantly rejected without being read by journal editors who will be fired if they dare do anything but comply. They might as well make a pronouncement about the Higgs Boson and Standard Model while they are at it and save the world a ton of money — why bother actually doing research on it when the evidence is already incontrovertible? Lessee, what else can the APS poke its nose into, what controversies can it end with its vox dei speaking from on high? I’m sure the membership won’t mind.
Faugh. This is the problem, and I don’t think that the APS leadership has the faintest clue about the world of trouble they created for physicists in general with this statement. A public retraction and apology accompanied by an official retreat to neutral ground is the only thing that can possibly salvage the objective credibility of the entire organization. And as I said, I’m hardly alone in my being rather incensed at the statement made on behalf of “all physicists” that has no purpose whatsoever save to provide political ammunition to those seeking to impose an enormous cost on all of human civilization to address the certain conclusions of the incontrovertible evidence provided by numerical models of awesome complexity and lousy skill together with a mere thirty to fifty year baseline of halfway good instrumental evidence that is supposed to allow us to make predictions a hundred or more years into the future and explain all of the past, quantitatively.
But Warren clearly states that he personally agrees with this — he doesn’t express it quite so effectively, perhaps, but then he has to get along with people, even people he privately considers to be fools, where I don’t. If I read his words correctly, he has no chance, politically, to get the APS to retract the statement, which everybody is indeed hoping will just fade away instead of coming back to haunt the entire organization as it will if temperatures have the temerity to drop or remain stubbornly level instead of rise over the next decade. If anything, his personal stance appears to be one of general agreement with Judith Curry — the science is far from settled, catastrophic warming seems unlikely, but there is lots of science left to do and that science should be done without gatekeeping, without over bias, and above all, without any sort of political agenda supported or endorsed by the APS.
Which is my stance as well, so how can I argue with it? I stubbornly refuse to accept or reject the various grades of hypotheses in the range from C to A to GW — I assign them degrees of (Bayesian) plausibility, based on my own personal assessment of the quality of the data and probable truth of the underlying hypotheses. At the moment this makes my personal assessment read C very unlikely, A almost certainly true to some degree (but that degree is highly uncertain, uncertain even in its sign, GW absolutely on average from the LIA to the present, allowing for the double dip of the Dalton minimum and Tambora etc. Dr. Warren’s assessment might be similar, or he might weight things warmer than I do. That is not grounds for questioning his objectivity or accusing him of all sorts of things. Scientists can actually honestly disagree, and indeed should honestly and openly disagree as the resolution of the disagreements in a respectful and systematic manner is how our knowledge progresses.
This is why I strenuously object to you, and a number of others, on the list calling Dr. Warren all sorts of horrible names, impugning his character and motives, and generally abusing him with a rain of invective and ad hominem. Is this a good way to actually encourage him to participate in any sort of discussion? If I went into a room to present a point of view or debate an issue in good faith and was immediately pelted with rotten tomatoes and jeered, my inclination would be to back slowly out of the room. Well, to be honest, back slowly out of the room and toss a stinkbomb in behind me as I exited, but that’s just me and my vindictive nature.
Name calling smacks not of reason, but religious zealotry. It is quite possible to be respectful and still forceful as all hell in advancing logical arguments and presenting evidence to attack or defend any hypothesis or point of view. Attack the proposition, not the proposer. This isn’t a kindergarten playground.
Now, to address the actual nominal topic of the top article, which isn’t global warming it is irritation with a colleague, Dr. Cohen, over his “dramatic” resignation from the topical committee. Public resignation from committees and organizations is a time-honored way of drawing attention to a point of view. It is often done to support a claim of a lack of objectivity or fair play. However, it is also done for many other reasons — a failure to convince committee members that you are right and they are wrong, a failure to have your own way. Or because of personality conflicts, time conflicts, interest conflicts.
The APS topical group on climate change was doomed from the beginning to be a hotbed of controversy and acrimony. I was approached concerning the possibility of joining it myself but a) wasn’t a member of the APS anymore and would have to rejoin to join, so to speak; b) was still pissed off at the APS statement; c) am not a climate scientist — this is a hobby, not a profession; d) I’m enormously busy already; and e) it would be a thankless job, one requiring a very thick skin and the patience of Job. Warren appears to have the latter, which is good. Perhaps Cohen does not, or perhaps his allegations of ill-use and a continuing lack of objectivity have some merit. Either way, one can be absolutely certain that certain members of the group are effectively religious extremists on both sides of the controversy, and because of the nature of religious belief that those members are without a doubt a cosmic pain in the ass to everybody else that still maintains some semblance of an open mind and scientific objectivity.
I do not envy Dr. Warren his position, in other words.
I still urge him to consider re-addressing not the objectivity of the science, but the APS statement itself. I refuse to accept the statement that nothing can be done about this. One thing that can be done about it, for example, is for the topical group itself to issue an equally public statement that effectively rescinds it, openly acknowledging the unsettled nature of the science, the large uncertainties, and establishing as a principle that the topical group itself will remain aloof to both the political and scientific controversy and never, ever, make a claim that the issue is settled or make a recommendation to the public endorsing or rejecting some political or economic course of action.
That should never, ever, be necessary anyway. Well-done, convincing science speaks for itself. By its nature it is what reasonable people will agree on, given the bulk of the evidence, if they have no vested interest or personal agenda. I don’t make a dime from supporting “global warming”. I don’t make a nickel “opposing” it. My primary interest in the entire controversy is that we as a civilization do not make enormously expensive bets on highly uncertain grounds when those bets are proposed by bookies certain to profit from them no matter how they come out. That’s not science, that’s common sense, but the science has been twisted and co-opted by the bookies and that offends me. Almost as much as the APS helping the damn bookies sell a gullible public a most unbalanced portrayal of the odds.
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