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
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Watch Lew’s eyes as he talks. Deep down he doesn’t even believe this crap himself!
@ntesdorf
One can only hope.
vigilantfish says:
December 16, 2012 at 10:12 am
@ur momisugly FrankK (December 15, 2012 at 6:13 pm):
Regarding Lewandowsky’s background: Toronto academics enthusiastically embraced political correctness in the 1980s, when he was doing graduate studies there. All the trendy group-thinkers became fellow travellers in the quest to throw off all the bonds of truth. Those of us of a different academic leaning managed to acquire and retain critical thinking abilities and even make it into tenured positions by keeping our heads down and keeping our thoughts to ourselves.
But it was a magnificent period for those who embraced the ‘right way of thinking’ (i.e. thoughtlessly parroting the new politicized interpretation of everything, including the weather) as it enabled them to float into the ivory towers in the rising tides of political correctness without ever having to have an original thought. On top of that, they are so well buffered by each other that they develop a robust complacency that cannot be punctured by any application of truth, logic, or arguments to appeal to human decency.
It seems to me that with our Human Rights Commissions and our new (thanks to PM Trudeau) constitutional limits on free speech (which said commissions interpreted to mean that nobody could say anything critical of politically-protected special-interest groups), Canada, and especially Toronto, were ground zero for the emergence of virulent, and politically muscular, political correctness. Lewandowsky is a prime example of the miasma of toxic invective that these people spew out when others resist this political movement’s accepted narrative. Lewandowsky is definitely a product of Canada, not Australia.
By the way, I too am of U of Toronto ‘alumnum’
—————————————————————————————————————
Thanks for that clarification vigilantfish. Your clear summary explains it all.
Regards F
On the AGW side is the claim that suggests only people engaged in climate research are qualified intellectually to participate in the debate, as in the 77 out of 78, or otherwise sold as the 99%. Everyone else is not welcome to the party.
However, apparently the real hypocrisy is this psychology researcher, Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, can now be added to the claimed qualifications, along side Al Gore, which is so tightly scrutinized by AGW experts. He stands before the world with the hard science background by which to apply his superior cognition and dictate who is a “denier” and who is not. I am curious as to his collegial hard science background that qualifies him to make such judgements, after all, it is pretty evident he can’t even put together a survey based on the rudiments of a basic statistical research class.
So if jet-fuel guzzling climate warming politicians and (cough-cough) scientists win the day and gain the throne we will by taxed out of any means to pursue our constitutional freedoms (can’t even guess who will be the court jester – there are SOOOOO many choices). Then the question becomes, what will WE do when those sitting on the throne respond to our protest with “let them eat cake”?
If only climate scientists can understand this, “believers” must take it on faith, just as one does in religion. The same question applies here as it does to religion–do you trust the all-knowing, benevolent creature telling you if you don’t want to destroy the world, you have to go back to the stone age?
Other_Andy says:
“climate deniers”
“a researcher of climate change denial”
I have NEVER met a ‘climate denier’ or a ‘climate change denier’ in my life.
The latter might be a good description of people who believe that only humans can possibly change climate 🙂
Klimarealist says:
@DirkH
it’s the GDR, German DemocraticRepublic
DDR was Deutsche Demokratische Republik
German Democratic Republic (GDR) being a direct translation from German.
Other_Andy says: “This pseudo scientist is an embarrassment for Australia” … and an imported one at that. We already have our own home grown pseudos the likes of Stevenson et. al. so why employ cast-offs from the US of A?
joe arrigo says:
December 15, 2012 at 5:34 pm
….So we have Venus at almost twice the distance from the Sun as Mercury, and its temperature is almost three times as hot, seemingly contradictory to common sense—how could that be possible?….
___________________________
Read:
Venus part I
Venus part II
There is no mystery as to why Venus is hot and the cause is not CO2.
Graph log temp response to CO2
“preliminary documents ought to remain confidential until they have been improved and checked through peer review”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well Looney Lew blew it right there.
The papers cited are supposed to already have passed peer review BEFORE they got to the IPCC…. right, right? After all how many times do we hear Dana or who ever asking for peer review papers and not only peer review papers but papers from vetted and approved scientists.
Classic projection. It is the alarmists that never want the public to see the entire body of evidence.
Please, good doctor, explain how the following fits the narrative:
1) Missing hot spot.
2) Temperature during the last interglacial.
3) Missing water vapor feedback.
4) Missing reduction in outgoing IR.
5) How even a 100% increase in CO2 that is only a 1.1% increase in GHE could possibly cause a 20% increase in temperature.
I’ll tackle two of these. The reduction in outgoing IR isn’t “missing” because the net outgoing IR cannot be reduced. It has to add up to balance the insolation. If you are arguing that there is no IR hole in the bands of the various GHGs, well that’s simply not the case. If you are arguing that it is difficult/impossible to resolve an change in the emission temperature/height associated with the concentration, given the noise that is quite possibly true although I believe that there are papers that claim to have done so. However, there are serious signal to noise problems with only 33 years of reliable data (at most) and with large changes associated with ENSO that may or may not be related only to “CO_2”. In that case, however, the reduction isn’t “missing”, it is just difficult to resolve and hence perhaps unproven.
5 you just didn’t mean. A 20% increase in temperature would be over 50 K. Remember, temperature is properly measured in K, not C. Nobody asserts that doubling CO_2 will produce a 50K+ increase in temperature.
A 5K increase in temperature is around 2%. That is within the bounds of possibility, depending on the feedback. If feedback/climate sensitivity is “high”, every degree of CO_2 warming is accompanied by 1-2 (or more) of H2O produced warming. Is that water vapor feedback missing? Arguably — again, there are some data that suggests a correlation, but a failure of sorts over the last decade plus. So your real point is 3, because 5 is an (accidental) straw man.
The real question is — will we experience the ~1 to 1.5 K increase we might reasonably expect from a doubling of CO_2 all other things being equal, or will we experience more, or less than this depending on the magnitude, sign, and nature of the feedback, against a background of considerable natural variation we have no control over that could easily produce effects of this magnitude on its own over a century plus timescale?
I’d argue that the answer is not yes, it is not no, it is that we do not know. The most plausible answer is — in my opinion only, as it is impossible to meaningfully predict it at this time — that we will indeed see around 1 K total warming, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all by 2 K or 0 K, or much surprised by 2.5K or -0.5K. Or both — we could go down by 0.5K in the short run and still go up in the end by 1 K or more.
But the next twenty to 80 years of good data should help us develop a good theory. Of that I have a lot of confidence.
rgb
markx says:
December 15, 2012 at 7:08 pm
….Psychologists have not always been highly regarded;….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They are still not.
Seem cognitive psychology already has a lot of mud on its face.
UPDATE:
IMHO science is getting a black eye as more and more fraud makes headline news.
It is getting bad when you see articles like this: The juiciest science scandals of 2011 with a picture of a scientist in hand cuffs at the top.
The article links to “The Scientist magazine has helpfully gathered together all the weirdest and worst science scandals of 2011 as well as bringing us updates on some ongoing science trainwrecks that started way back in 2010.”
Others I have seen are:
Red wine researcher flagged for fake data
FDA says CRO Cetero faked trial data; pharmas may need to redo tests
A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform
US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds
A must read:
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
Looney Lew is not helping the reputation of science or academia and neither are the ‘Climate Alchemists’.
LazyTeenager says:
December 15, 2012 at 7:51 pm
…Accompanied by a gracious thankyou for providing a dataset that proves what you guys said was right all along.
____________________________________
WHY?
We paid for it. And it is a healthy chunk of change too.
eo says:
December 15, 2012 at 1:58 pm
LOL!
Sorry, some of my fellow sceptics’ humour modules are out of calibration and they missed the clues in the text.
DaveE.
In response to Eliza’s comment that there are now very few Australian universities in the Top 200.
According to the Times Higher Education University Rankings, Australia has the following universities in the Top 200 as of 4 Oct 2012:
University of Melbourne – No 28
Australian National University – No 37
University of Sydney – No 62
University of Queensland – No 65
University of New South Wales – No 85
Monash University – No 99
University of Adelaide – No 176
University of Western Australia – No 190
In a country with around 40 universities, I’d say it’s not that bad.
Unimportant fact, from ABC Radio of all places. Just 26,000 trees are cut down to provide the world’s Lew paper, every day. From a book being discussed called “Bum Fodder”. No, Lew didn’t write it, it was fact, not fiction. (Bum Fodder: now in all good bookshops! « Wild Ink)
Pamela Gray says:
December 16, 2012 at 11:47 am
….. Then the question becomes, what will WE do when those sitting on the throne respond to our protest with “let them eat cake”?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well the last time round the idiots in power said “let them eat cake” there was a ‘cold spell’ aka the Little Ice Age, a bad volcanic eruption followed by famine and Madame Guillotine.
So far we have got a wimpy sun. In the USA we have gotten rid of the Strategic Grain Reserve. We are using a lot of acreage to grow corn for ethanol since that pays the best. In March of 2012 “Inventory levels “…lowest in more than three decades” the fewest since 1977, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. Global food prices rose for a second consecutive month in February on higher costs for cereals, cooking oils and sugar, as shown by the index of 55 food items tracked by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.” link
Meanwhile the USDA made some sort of five year deal with China on agriculture, 16 million kids in America are going hungry, the real unemployment is ~23%. Oh, and our energy costs are set to skyrocket thanks to the EPA. The government will be regulating farms soon thanks to a new food law and the government has started registering home gardens. Mean while there is talk of a fiscal cliff and stagflation Not a political climate I consider warm and fussy even before you add in a carbon tax.
Back to the VOLCANO
The Laki or Lakigígar volcano of Iceland eruption in 1783-4 is thought to have sparked the French Revolution. (Some think the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull means the larger Katla Volcano is Overdue. The whole area is of course ‘active’)
OH and here is a really great article on the subject.
(They still bow to the CO2 climate god)
So it looks like we are DOOMED, even without a major volcanic eruption we are DOOMED and must therefore sacrifice our politicians to the volcano gods or was that GAIA?
Takes tongue back out of cheek.
Eliza says:
December 16, 2012 at 9:12 am
Australian Universities are full of second rate American Scientists who have not been able tomake it there. There are now very few Australian academic institutions who are even listed on the top 200. This a a really goodexample
—————————————————————————————————————————-
@Eliza
You may be right about some overseas academics and certainly about Lewandowsky. He is not a scientist even if he purports to be one and is not in the field of hard science where his approach just would not be tolerated.
I suggest you are a bit loose when you speak of the uni standards – even today. Oz has a population of 23 million. Depending on which uni rankings one chooses but:
– Seven Australian universities (out of 39) ranked in the top 100, and four ranked in the top 50
– 64 per cent of Australia’s universities ranked in the top 500
http://www.studyinaustralia.gov.au/northamerica/Education-in-Australia/University-Rankings/University-Rankings
It was published at “The Conversation” on the 15’th, a Saturday. Initially comments weren’t allowed. Today is the 17’th (Monday); probably they opened comments today. Right now, 6:03 pm, comments have been closed. Some conversation that was.
It is good that he mentions Newton’s ‘law of gravity’ as this original piece of fiction was really what started the modeling bandwagon rolling centuries ago and like ‘global warming’ when a theory/model can explain just about everything,then people know there is something radically wrong with the followers of the bandwagon.
observational law uniquely a 
one.)
, it failed miserably and he became quite agitated and depressed. However, the problem was not with his hypothesis, it was with the measurement — the measurer had neglected to correctly account for the Moon’s substantial orbital motion during the overnight period during which angular measurements were taken to perform a parallax estimation of distance. When this was rectified by others and new numbers announced by letters, Newton plugged in the new numbers and his hypothesis worked perfectly.
for the larger mass. Henry Cavendish, almost a century later, finally managed to measure G in a laboratory and thereby “weighed the Earth” (and the sun, and Jupiter, and Saturn, and Mars).
Wild rant, but you’re picking on the wrong person. First of all, Newton was the polymath supergenius to end polymath supergeniuses. The guy invented calculus just so he could invent physics, and then in later life he invented the modern system of banking and currency. He isn’t/wasn’t on the English pound note for F = dp/dt.
Second, Newton didn’t operate in a vacuum of data. His work was informed by the observational work of one Tycho Brahe, who was this really rich guy who had little actual work to do and who loved observational astronomy as a hobby and practiced it a ton in the latter years of the 16th century. He built up a mountain of the coordinates — accurate to within 1-2 arcseconds, IIRC — of nearly everything of interest that is visible to the naked eye on cold nights in northern europe. But he sucked at math.
So he hired a mathematician — physicists not being invented yet — to go over the data, and then promptly died, possibly poisoned (possibly even poisoned by the mathematician, although this is a bit doubtful) who de facto inherited said mountain of data and spend the next decade analyzing it. Johannes Kepler discovered that there were certain regularities visible within the data concerning the planets, which he reduced to three “laws” although it must be admitted that his use of inductive inference was rather extreme given the number of planets he actually analyzed.
In case anybody cares, Kepler’s Laws were:
* Planets move in elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus
* Planets sweep out equal areas in equal times
* The semimajor axis of a planetary orbit cubed is directly proportional to its period squared, with the same constant of proportionality for all planets.
He performed this analysis at almost exactly the same time that Galileo, using his own version of the recently invented telescope, was affirming the Copernican heliocentric model (which had to be compared to the Ptolemaic/Platonic geocentric model which also worked but which was more complex and hence lost points to the razor) with direct observation. Sadly, Galileo and heliocentrism ran afoul of the Pope, one Saint Cardinal Bellarmine, and a belligerent reaction to loss of power and the protestant movement by the Catholic Church, which effectively ruled Europe at the time, and Galileo was forced to recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. (The Church had only years before burned one Bruno alive, in part for deducing without a telescope that the Universe was infinite, the stars the same things as our sun, uncountable and too far away to see with the naked eye, and very probably surrounded by planets and filled with life, where we are only within the last twenty years starting to verify the last of this remarkable series of scientific predictions.)
Rene Descartes was preparing to release a mathematical work supporting heliocentrism but — faced with Galileo’s persecution — thought better of it. Still, his invention of analytical geometry was the foundation of Newton’s analytical calculus and hence of the discovery/invention of physics. Thus matters stood for over half a century.
Newton did not, in fact, attempt to explain “the Universe” with his law of gravitation, nor did it come entirely out of his ass. He was a charter member of the brand new Royal Society, the world’s first formally funded scientific organization (although, bear in mind, there were many stupendous discoveries made over the years with government support — nearly all of them, in fact, since one typically required a royal grant to hold a position at a University or to teach) and one Robert Hooke, officer of the Royal Society, very likely gave him the hint to look at inverse square laws. Nobody knows where Hooke might have come up with it, but he invented/discovered the force law for springs and may have thought deeply on the matter to the extent that one can crippled by a lack of calculus or a dynamical principle.
Newton formed the hypothesis that the same force that makes apples fall with constant acceleration g pulls the moon around in a (nearly) circular orbit. If that is true, an inverse square law relates their accelerations, kinematically evaluable using the calculus of circular motion in the case of the moon and hence knowable, directly measurable for the apple, so that the ratio of accelerations is the opposite ratio of the distances from the center of the earth squared. (Incidentally, similar algebra based on this calculus makes the force that preserves the
Sadly, while the radius of the earth was by then reasonably well known (it and the fact that the world is round and revolves around the sun was known as early as 500 BCE, but was lost/suppressed over the intervening millennia) the orbital radius of the moon was known badly. When Newton checked his hypothesis against the current claims for
This then inspired the completion of the work — the full development of calculus, the formal statement of his dynamical principle (laws of motion), and his careful demonstration that the theory that resulted from an inverse square gravitational force law that is bilinear in the masses of the objects leads strictly to trajectories that are conic sections and satisfy Kepler’s observational laws and more, correctly describing (for example) the orbits of comets that are sometimes hyperbolic and not elliptical. By then telescopes were ubiquitous, heliocentrism (at least as far as our solar system was concerned) was a proven fact, Brahe’s work had been extended a dozen times over to additional planets and many moons of planets, and there was no lack of data to test against Newton’s theory. It worked perfectly — with a catch.
The catch is that one cannot determine the constant G from either the theory or from remote observation. One can only measure G by measuring the force between two known masses separated by a known distance. From remote observation where neither mass is known, one can only determine products like
Over the centuries in between then and now, Newtonian gravitation has proven amazingly robust. First, it is a law of nature — this explains or describes its extremely broad explanatory power. Second, it appears to work adequately to explain almost everything we can see that interacts at long distances via astronomical observation, with only very recent “problems” that have required new hypotheses such as dark [matter/energy] and/or modifications of the form of the law to be proposed. It is also not a completely consistent law (because physics is still not a completely consistent theory!). We have no idea, really, how to make it quantum mechanical and how to resolve the apparent paradox between the Einsteinian general relativistic description of gravity and quantum field theory.
It is, quite truly, absolutely absurd for any well-educated scientist to equate our knowledge of climate science and ability to predict on the basis of climate models to our knowledge of the law of gravitation and our ability to predict trajectories far into the future with astounding accuracy. The limits of our ability to do the latter are not theoretical, they are computational — the trajectories we numerically compute in many body problems with gravity being the coupling force are numerically unstable in the long run, with small errors from unaccounted for perturbations accumulating and eventually destroying the accuracy of the prediction. We are, on the other hand, certain that we do not have a complete theory for the climate, and the computational problem that eventually limits the accuracy of long range predictions even for gravity limit the accuracy of climate predictions instantly, because the weather and climate are not only chaotic systems, they are the specific systems where the theory of deterministic chaos was discovered.
Claims of this sort are nothing but political hyperbole — they are not scientifically, computationally, mathematically, or ethically defensible. Much is made of the “religious” nature of this debate, but invoking Newton in it is precisely as meaningless as the invocation of the saints and holy fathers in Bellarmine’s rather famous letter to Galileo, where he draws a line in the sand between the “heresy” of heliocentrism that contradicts the Bible and Biblically endorsed flat-earth solid-sky geocentrism.
rgb
rgb (elective diminutive no surprise) – take a bow. . . . a truly awesome comment. The comments columns on here would benefit greatly from intermittent and wholly unexpected gales to cleanse them of the chaff they gather, but yours are always amongst the most nourishing, flourish inducing and encouraging I’ve ever read and would survive even the most phenomenal of tempests. Thank you.
Thank you.
You’re welcome. A did that off the top of my head because I just wrote most of it (some in a lot more detail) into my chapter on gravity in my online physics textbook:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/intro_physics_1.php
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/intro_physics_2.php
(last chapter in volume 1). The history of gravity is the history of the Enlightenment and discovery and implementation of the scientific method to cast off the antique mythologies of the past and develop an objective, empirical scientific worldview. Enjoy.
Oh, and if you want to read a truly fabulous fictionalized account of it all that is remarkably accurate, I strongly recommend reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World, wherein Newton, Hooke, Christopher Wren and others are major characters. Brilliantly researched, engagingly executed, with some amazing characters and a horrendously intertwined set of plots and subplots set against the political and social revolutions that were occurring in parallel with (and to some measure caused by) the scientific revolution.
rgb
Gail Combs says:
December 16, 2012 at 6:36 pm
Hmmm. Not many $$$$ to be had if speculation is made worthless by the buffer of storage. Same in Eurozone – destroy the butter mountain/wine lake and the powers of darkness can feed off the uncertainty.
rgbatduke says:
December 17, 2012 at 6:33 am
Fabulous (thank you) – except for Lew 😉 ” … well-educated scientist … ” he aint.
sarc/ Maybe that’s why he continuously fails. /sarc
Lewandowsky is like the parents of a lying child that claims their child isn’t lying – even though they don’t have any knowledge of what transpired.