From Tom Nelson, it was too good not to repost, especially when Lewandowsky hands out moral lessons while being immoral himself with his labeling skeptics as “moon landing deniers” with a gussed up survey and statistical slight of hand that turned out to be a an academic scam used as a tool to dehumanize people that have legitimate doubts about the science.
Now that Lewandowsky has declared the AR5 draft leak issue “dishonourable” (something not even the IPCC itself said in their statement) I expect we won’t see any use of AR5 draft information by his mouthpiece pawns, John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli on “Skeptical Science”, because well, using that new “dishonourably” obtained information would be wrong according to Lew.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a researcher of climate change denial at the Cognitive Science Laboratories at the University of Western Australia, said the premature leak of the report was “dishonourable.”
“Science is one of the most transparent endeavours humans have ever developed. However, for the transparency to be effective, preliminary documents ought to remain confidential until they have been improved and checked through peer review,” he said in an emailed comment.
“The leak of a draft report by a reviewer who has signed a statement of confidentiality is therefore regrettable and dishonourable.”
“However, what is worse than the leak itself is the distortion of the content of the draft chapter by some deniers (no, they are not skeptics),” he said.
Prof Lewandowsky said that the report’s statement that humans have caused global warming was a “virtual certainty” meant it’s authors had 99% confidence in that view.
“That’s up from ‘very high confidence’ (90% certain) in the last report published in 2007,” he said. [Hey Stephan: How, specifically, were those 90% and 99% numbers calculated? What, specifically, changed between 2007 and now that accounts for the alleged 90% reduction in uncertainty?]
“In other words, the scientific case has become even stronger and has now reached a level of confidence that is parallelled only by our confidence in some very basic laws of physics, such as gravity or thermodynamics.”
To claim otherwise by cherry-picking part of a sentence out of context is absurd, he said.
“Although it illustrates the standard approach by which climate deniers seek to confuse the public. Climate denial lost intellectual respectability decades ago, and all that deniers have left now is to misrepresent, distort, or malign the science and the scientific process.”
For the last few years, my new passion has been rock climbing…Most airlines [Wait, with the fate of my grandchildren allegedly hanging in the balance, this guy still takes unnecessary fuel-guzzling trips to climb on rocks?!] can handle that, whereas few take sailplanes as check-in luggage
joe arrigo says:
December 15, 2012 at 5:34 pm
We can take a powerful lesson from our planetary neighbors, Mercury and Venus in this regard—the average distance of Mercury from the Sun is 36 million miles, and the average temperature is 355 degrees Fahrenheit. The average distance of Venus from the Sun is 67 million miles, and its average temperature is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
=======================
Joe,
Like the reason for your adherence to a dubious hypothesis the reason Mercury has a cooler atmosphere than Venus is almost entirely due to density, although in one case it’s atmospheric and in the other it’s intellectual.
So he hopes to start gliding again at Narrogin? 200Km drive each way from Perth where he works. 7 to 9 liters of Avgas for a launch, more if you need a retrieve after an outlanding.
I’m with Glenn Reynolds: ” I’ll believe it is a crisis when the people who say it is a crisis start acting like it is a crisis.”
I really hope he starts flying at Narrogin. He’ll see the name of this skeptic on the soaring instruments in the instrument panel that I designed and manufactured.
Lest we forget.
Please tell me tax payers are paying his wage! I’ve just watched that video above from Chris B. And that is an illegal form. full stop.
Sorry, I meant to say-> He’s an unproductive, aggressive leach, hell bent on controlling what makes you tick, I’m aloud to say that, right? wafp
Allowed
Creepy …
Started watching the Lewan-Whatever-His-Name-Is video and just could not go through with it.
What a weird presentation, this man has.
Can you guys please take him back to the USA? Please?
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
– Donald Rumsfeld – Former United States Secretary of Defense – February 12, 2002
Chris B …
Gees, this Lewy guy hasn’t even learnt to shave yet.!
And I bet he FAILED “attribution calc” intro (never got to 101) .
ps.. those “attribution” guys are downright weird, I’ve met a couple of them !!
Computer geeks that know nothing else !! (remind you of some modellers somewhere, perhaps ???)
If you paid them enough, they would try to prove Mother Teresa was behind Pearl Harbour and 9/11 …………….Which is essentially what they have done with CO2.
Hyperbollox……
Josh’s rendition of Lew is far too flattering. He really looks slimey in the video. He seems to be a very insecure little boy, feeling threatened by “climate deniers”. Really?
Joe arrigo; the high temperature on Venus is nothing to do with GHG warming.
This is because to get thermal equilibrium between two emitters, the surface and the adjacent atmosphere at the same temperature, the thermal GHG emission form the atmosphere, nearly black body, annihilates the same wavelength emission from the surface.
Yes, there can never be any CO2-GW on Venus, Mars or the Earth. There is no surface IR to cause it.
If this, standard heat transfer physics, did not happen the World would have been a ball of hot gas a long time ago.
How you can spout this stupid nonsense that the heating of the Venusian atmosphere is due to ‘trapping of IR’ by CO2 is beyond me.
Did you never do any high school radiative physics?
So let’s take the good professor’s statements and look deep into his soul.
1. “…the premature leak of the report was dishonourable…”
Yet “climate science” has no problem using or quoting papers that haven’t been reviewed or published – in some cases they’ve created press releases about these “grey-papers”. Sounds dishonourable to me.
2. “…Science is one of the most transparent endeavours humans have ever developed. However, for the transparency to be effective, preliminary documents ought to remain confidential until they have been improved and checked through peer review,” he said in an emailed comment…”
Well, in most “climate science” papers, data remained “confidential” AFTER they’ve been peer-reviewed and published. Where’s the “transparency” there?
BTW, tell us again how the words “transparency”, “improvement” and “peer review” apply to YOUR recent “survey paper”. From what came out, I think the “improvement” step was missed.
3. “…The leak of a draft report by a reviewer who has signed a statement of confidentiality is therefore regrettable and dishonourable…”
One word here – Gleik.
4. “…However, what is worse than the leak itself is the distortion of the content of the draft chapter by some deniers (no, they are not skeptics),” he said…”
Actually, what’s worse than the leak itself is the distortion (or omission) of the facts by some of the drafters (no, they are not scientists).
5. “…Prof Lewandowsky said that the report’s statement that humans have caused global warming was a “virtual certainty” meant it’s authors had 99% confidence in that view…”
First, he has to remember that this is just a draft report, and is not official until it’s been “improved” and has gone through the “Climate Science Peer Review” process. Rest assured, it’s virtually certain that when the CSPR process is done they’ll be up to 99.99% confidence.
But that comment also means he’s read the released draft (maybe even getting a copy from a colleague who was also a reviewer). Either way, by commenting on the contents he goes against the IPCC request: “…Each page of the draft makes it clear that drafts are not to be CITED, QUOTED, OR DISTRIBUTED and we would ask for this to continue to be respected…”
Oops.
Well this thread is certainly a fun read. Somewhere up there, was a nice candidate for the Bullwer Lytton Prize; complete with a Cockney accent too.
As for the “virtual certainty” of man made global warming; Iwouldn’t quite go that far in dismissing it.
I do know what “virtual images” are; I deal with them and see them every day; and of course, I can see them, even though they aren’t really there, like real images are.
So psychologist Lewandowski, should know better than anyone, that “virtual certainties” are just a figment of one’s imagination; it’s all in his head.
Funny thing language; how often do people use words that mean the exact opposite of what they think they mean.
Which is why people who think they are so sophisticated, usually are.
“In other words, the scientific case has become even stronger and has now reached a level of confidence that is paralleled only by our confidence in some very basic laws of physics, such as gravity or thermodynamics.”
Just wondering…
Is it “Out of his depth on a wet pavement”, “So far out of his depth the fish have lights on their Noses.” or “So far around the bend he can no longer see daylight.”?
The madness of Lewandowsky cannot end well. Sceptics will never forgive and the Internet will never forget. For Lewandowky there is no avenue of escape. There is no easy exit with “CO2 does cause warming, just less than we thought”. The reality is that radiative gasses cool the atmosphere. Warmists are not just wrong by degree but by sign. The hoax cannot be indefinitely sustained. Lewandowsky is on a path to a rubber room.
joe arrigo says:
December 15, 2012 at 5:34 pm
” … we are spewing this gas into our atmosphere … ”
I find it interesting, in a psychological kind of way, that the drive-bys, such as yourself (prove me wrong – return here with some facts to back up the guesswork) nearly always use the word ‘spewing’ when referring to our CO2 emissions.
I much prefer the open-minded ‘liberating’. It rolls off the tongue, describes the effect and wont cover me in projection if performed to windward.
AndyG55:
At December 16, 2012 at 12:03 am you say
You point to one of the (possibly THE) most egregious error of IPCC so-called “science”.
‘Attribution studies’ are a possible method to discern mechanisms which are NOT capable of being a suggested cause of an observed phenomenon.
In an attribution study the system is assumed to be behaving in response to suggested mechanism(s) that is modeled, and the behaviour of the model is compared to the empirical data. If the model cannot emulate the empirical data then there is reason to suppose that the suggested mechanism is not the cause (or at least not the sole cause) of the changes recorded in the empirical data.
It is important to note that attribution studies can only be used to reject a hypothesis that a mechanism is a cause for an observed effect. Ability to attribute a suggested cause to an effect is not evidence that the suggested cause is the real cause in part or in whole.
An understanding of this is provided by consideration of the game called Cludo. At the start of the game there are several ‘suspects’ who can be attributed as the possible ‘murderer’. Data is acquired which reduces the suspects who can be so attributed. Eventually sufficient data is obtained until all except one hypothesis of the ‘murderer’ is rejected, and the remaining hypothesised ‘murderer’ is assumed to be guilty.
In ‘climate science’ only one cause of unexplained climate change is hypothesised. That hypothetical cause is AGW. And anything which cannot be explained is attributed to be AGW. However, there may be many other causes both known and unknown.
In other words, ‘climate science’ attribution studies are merely a version of the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’; i.e. “We don’t know the cause of this degree of climate change so it must be AGW”.
As I have often pointed out, ‘climate scientists’ are not the first ‘experts’ to adopt this logical fallacy. In the Middle Ages ‘experts’ said, “We don’t know the cause of this crop failure so it must be witches”
Attribution studies as practiced by ‘climate scientists’ are superstitious pseudoscience.
Richard
Only thing I have to say is that since the affair around Dutch psychology ‘scientist’ Diederik Stapel, I don’t take anybody in the field of psychology serious anymore.
JimRJBob says:
December 15, 2012 at 11:33 pm
Allowed
Admit (an event or activity) as legal or acceptable.
Give (someone) permission to do something.
In context,
It sounds right.. But I said, “Aloud,” not silently or in a whisper. But with “Clear definition”
Confirmed.
Firmly settled.
richardscourtney says:
You point to one of the (possibly THE) most egregious error of IPCC so-called “science”.
Yep, these guys are like rabid dog with a bone.. give them ONE idea, that’s what they will try to prove.
ZERO thought of any other possibiliy !!!
And try to suggest any other possibility, darn do they get uppity !!
Remind you of any particular group.???? 😉
@Camburn
Lewandowsky has no science qualifications and is not a product of the Oz universities – to the extent I that I can discover.
His Degrees: B.A. Washington College, Chestertown, MD, U.S.A., 1980 M.A. University of Toronto, 1981 Ph.D. University of Toronto (Supervisor: Bennet Murdock), 1985
It is indeed “sad to watch” the demise of UWA with the importation of clowns like this one given that it used have a good reputation.
Lewandowsky’s lacks the basic understanding of what the principles of science are and what sets it apart from other fields of study. I suggest he could sit through a Feynman lecture on these principles and delusionally believe his work is a pristine example of those principles – just with a bit of psych rationalization.
@Anthony Mills
“Lewandowsky’s lacks the basic understanding..”
no need to say more. sufficient, and concise !!
‘Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.’ Reinhold Neibuhr.
H/t Janet.
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@ur momisugly Richard,
Further in this ‘attribution’ stuff-up
I suspect that in the case of climate science, the attribution programmers were only ever given one alternative (CO2 causes temp rise), and their sole monetary aim was to prove that attribution,
The fact that they STILL haven’t managed to scientifically prove the causation, even after billions of wasted dollars, pretty much points to there being basically ZERO causation.
As a fellow Aussie I’ll second TBear.
Please, America, take him back.
We have far too many F-rated Yanks infesting our universities and scientific institutions because they couldn’t cut it back home. And I have to pay their grants and wages!