All you can do is laugh.
Brandon Shollenberger writes at Lucia’s about the new Fuzzy Math consensus “proof” paper from the ever entertaining John Cook at Skeptical Science, rated with the help of 27 of the SkS kidz club. The method is simple:
“Each abstract was categorized by two independent, anonymized raters.”
With a simple premise like that, what could go wrong? Well for starters, they don’t seem to understand what the word “independent” means. Shollenberger continues:
==============================================================
That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that people would make topics in the SKS forum like:
Does this mean what it seems to mean?
second opinion??
how to rate: Cool Dudes: The Denial Of Climate Change…
That’s right. The “independent” raters talked to each other about how to rate the papers. This must be some new form of independence I’ve never heard of. I’m not the only one thrown off by this. Sarah Green, one of the most active raters, observed the non-independence:
But, this is clearly not an independent poll, nor really a statistical exercise. We are just assisting in the effort to apply defined criteria to the abstracts with the goal of classifying them as objectively as possible.
Disagreements arise because neither the criteria nor the abstracts can be 100% precise. We have already gone down the path of trying to reach a consensus through the discussions of particular cases. From the start we would never be able to claim that ratings were done by independent, unbiased, or random people anyhow.
One must wonder at the fact an author of the paper calls the work independent despite having said just a year earlier, “we would never be able to claim” it is independent. Perhaps there is some new definition for “never” I’m unaware of.
And it gets even more hilarious. Read it all at Lucia’s.
For those who don’t know Inigo Montoya:
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The cartoonist would have become a great social scientist.
Inconceivable
This is disputing the wrong question. There is no doubt about that the scientific literature is dominated papers that accept global warming. The question that scientists should have been asked if there was consensus on the magnitude of the needed action. Is it indeed sufficient to eat tofu, drive Toyota Prius and vacation in space (http://business.iafrica.com/worldnews/858696.html) once a year or it will need more? Perhaps cutting back our living standard to the level of the Pennsylvania Amish. If it is the later, would the danger of global warming warrant that level of sacrifices.
I do not think that word means what you think it means….
Sorry but when I saw the words “independent” and “John Cook” “Skeptical Science ” I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.He’s a tryer you’ve got to give him that at least LOL.. trying ever ones patience with this clap trap.
I’m waiting for: “I’m not skeptically-oriented”.
(Swordfight scene)
C’mon Sarah Green, you’ve made the first step. Now, if your willing to go a little further,….
your -> you’re
Perhaps the quality of Cook’s studies could be improved by the use of simple objectivity enhancing tools we all learned about in grade school. For example:
The fact that they choose their “reviewers” exclusively from the readers of a warmist propaganda site also argues against the “independance” of the reviewers.
Beyond the blatantly contrived nature of this “study”, lurks another issue. Even if the data was 100% fairly assessed, it would still be wrong.
Science doesn’t stand still. Papers are published to either confirm those that came before them, or to bring forward new information that might change the interpretation or even debunk entirely previous papers. More recent papers carry more weight (or should) than do older papers because they are predicated on additional information that the older papers didn’t have available at time of writing.
My understanding is that this study was done on papers ranging in time from 1991 to 2011. Let’s put that in a more meaningful context. In 1991 most people had never heard of e-mail, much less used it. How valid would a paper written in 1991 about the influence of postal unions be today? There were many books and papers written in 1991 about the information age. I challenge anyone to find a single one that predicted the existence of Google or blogs and is remotely relevant in today’s technical environment. Leading edge thought on the information age in 1991 is not only irrelevant in the context of modern technology, most of it would seem rather laughable today.
By the same token, papers from 1991 are simply not relevant. Temps were, in fact, increasing at that time. They didn’t peak until 1998. The fact that they had peaked and were starting to fall wasn’t really obvious in the data for a good ten years after that. In brief, the bulk of the papers in this study have insufficient data to be relevant in the current context, and many of them are just as laughable today as articles in the early 1990’s about the continued power of postal unions, and how corporations may one day have the ability to store as much as a gigabyte of data for less than $50,000.
Orwell brought us, in 1984, the notion of the allowing only good or double-good has possible opinions on Big Brothers acts or words . These guys just follow on in that tradition , and has in 1984 its sign of weak arguments and the overuse of BS that they have to resort to it in the first place.
Nothing like picking your own jury.
What’s truly hilarious is that it takes their expert categorizers quite a while to collude on what they will claim is the “correct” rating of each paper. However the gullible victim is only allowed to view the abstract without reading the paper to get the same information.
“What number am I thinking of? Sorry, wrong! As a bonus for me, your mistake proves you are an ignorant conspiracy-theory knuckle-dragging scoffer who LAUGHS AT TEH SCEINCE!!1!”
OK slightly off topic, except for the laughs….
The Force was with Star Wars fans at the University of East Anglia…
The Police Force that is.
It seems rival Doctor Who and Star Wars fans had a rumble at the UEA.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-22542222
Finally proof that its all science ‘fiction’ at the UEA.
I wonder how many participants were from the ‘climate’ department?
‘ … Led by John Cook at the University of Queensland, the study has been published today, Thursday 16 May, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters … ‘.
======================
Cook’s capers wouldn’t bug me so much if I wasn’t forced to pay for them, ditto Lewandowsky.
You know you must be on the right side of the question when you discover you are hanging out with a bunch of other Princess Bride fans.
Being a scientist (Plant Molecular biology), I am very jealous with this Mr Cook, who does a completely off limits internet survey, and gets his results published before the period of questioning is finished. I do experiments in the lab, every day, and I have to struggle to get two publications accepted/year, sometimes after severe opposition from the referees, who want entire sets of experiments repeated. Climate science does not qualify for me as science, it’s just humbug. Or a scam.
Can anyone say confirmation bias?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/16/climate-research-nearly-unanimous-humans-causes?mobile-redirect=false
To borrow from the scene in which Wesley is revived…
Miracle Max: He probably owes you raw data huh? I’ll ask him.
Inigo Montoya: He’s independent. He can’t spin.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY independent. There’s a big difference between mostly independent and all independent. Mostly independent is slightly skewed. With all independent, well, with all independent there’s usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What’s that?
Miracle Max: Go through his e-mails and look for the sheep..
Rodents of unusual size DO exist!
Ian H at 3:18. Inconceivable!!!!
I think they’ve released their paper, they (Cook and Nuccitelli) are busy tweeting all about it, with links to the usual sites:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/consensus-confirmed-97-of_b_3282447.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/15/2014211/study-finds-97-consensus-on-human-caused-global-warming-in-the-peer-reviewed-literature/
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/05/16/3759876.htm
Paper is here:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024
Did members of the Crusher Crew help?
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/09/skeptical-science-drown-them-out.html