Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Over at Roy Spencer’s usually excellent blog, Roy has published what could be called a hatchet job on “citizen climate scientists” in general and me in particular. Now, Dr. Roy has long been a hero of mine, because of all his excellent scientific work … which is why his attack mystifies me. Maybe he simply had a bad day and I was the focus of frustration, we all have days like that. Anthony tells me he can’t answer half of the email he gets some days, Dr. Roy apparently gets quite a lot of mail too, asking for comment.
Dr. Roy posted a number of uncited and unreferenced claims in his essay. So, I thought I’d give him the chance to provide data and citations to back up those claims. He opens with this graphic:
Dr. Roy, the citizen climate scientists are the ones who have made the overwhelming majority of the gains in the struggle against rampant climate alarmism. It is people like Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts and Donna LaFramboise and myself and Joanne Nova and Warwick Hughes and the late John Daly, citizen climate scientists all, who did the work that your fellow mainstream climate scientists either neglected or refused to do. You should be showering us with thanks for doing the work your peers didn’t get done, not speciously claiming that we are likeable idiots like Homer Simpson.
Dr. Roy begins his text by saying:
I’ve been asked to comment on Willis Eschenbach’s recent analysis of CERES radiative budget data (e.g., here). Willis likes to analyze data, which I applaud. But sometimes Willis gives the impression that his analysis of the data (or his climate regulation theory) is original, which is far from the case.
Hundreds of researchers have devoted their careers to understanding the climate system, including analyzing data from the ERBE and CERES satellite missions that measure the Earth’s radiative energy budget. Those data have been sliced and diced every which way, including being compared to surface temperatures (as Willis recently did).
So, Roy’s claim seems to be that my work couldn’t possibly be original, because all conceivable analyses of the data have already been done. Now that’s a curious claim in any case … but in this case, somehow, he seems to have omitted the links to the work he says antedates mine.
When someone starts making unreferenced, uncited, unsupported accusations about me like that, there’s only one thing to say … Where’s the beef? Where’s the study? Where’s the data?
In fact, I know of no one who has done a number of the things that I’ve done with the CERES data. If Dr. Roy thinks so, then he needs to provide evidence of that. He needs to show, for example, that someone has analyzed the data in this fashion:
Now, I’ve never seen any such graphic. I freely admit, as I have before, that maybe the analysis has been done some time in the past, and my research hasn’t turned it up. I did find two studies that were kind of similar, but nothing like that graph above. Dr. Roy certainly seems to think such an analysis leading to such a graphic exists … if so, I suggest that before he starts slamming me with accusations, he needs to cite the previous graphic that he claims that my graphic is merely repeating.
I say this for two reasons. In addition to it being regular scientific practice to cite your sources, it is common courtesy not to accuse a man of doing something without providing data to back it up.
And finally, if someone has done any of my analyses before, I want to know so I can save myself some time … if the work’s been done, I’m not interested in repeating it. So I ask Dr. Roy: which study have I missed out on that has shown what my graphic above shows?
Dr. Roy then goes on to claim that my ideas about thunderstorms regulating the global climate are not new because of the famous Ramanathan and Collins 1991 paper called “Thermodynamic regulation of ocean warming by cirrus clouds deduced from observations of the 1987 El Niño”. Dr. Roy says:
I’ve previously commented on Willis’ thermostat hypothesis of climate system regulation, which Willis never mentioned was originally put forth by Ramanathan and Collins in a 1991 Nature article.
Well … no, it wasn’t “put forth” in R&C 1991, not even close. Since Dr. Roy didn’t provide a link to the article he accuses me of “never mentioning”, I’ll remedy that, it’s here.
Unfortunately, either Dr. Roy doesn’t fully understand what R&C 1991 said, or he doesn’t fully understand what I’ve said. This is the Ramanathan and Collins hypothesis as expressed in their abstract:
Observations made during the 1987 El Niño show that in the upper range of sea surface temperatures, the greenhouse effect increases with surface temperature at a rate which exceeds the rate at which radiation is being emitted from the surface. In response to this ‘super greenhouse effect’, highly reflective cirrus clouds are produced which act like a thermostat, shielding the ocean from solar radiation. The regulatory effect of these cirrus clouds may limit sea surface temperatures to less than 305K.
Why didn’t I mention R&C 1991 with respect to my hypothesis? Well … because it’s very different from my hypothesis, root and branch.
• Their hypothesis was that cirrus clouds act as a thermostat to regulate maximum temperatures in the “Pacific Warm Pool” via a highly localized “super greenhouse effect”.
• My hypothesis is that thunderstorms act all over the planet as natural emergent air conditioning units, which form over local surface hot spots and (along with other emergent phenomena) cool the surface and regulate the global temperature.
In addition, I fear that Dr. Roy hasn’t done his own research on this particular matter. A quick look on Google shows that I have commented on R&C 1991 before. Back in 2012, in response to Dr. Roy’s same claim (but made by someone else), I wrote:
I disagree that the analysis of thunderstorms as a governing mechanism has been “extensively examined in the literature”. It has scarcely been discussed in the literature at all. The thermostatic mechanism discussed by Ramanathan is quite different from the one I have proposed. In 1991, Ramanathan and Collins said that the albedos of deep convective clouds in the tropics limited the SST … but as far as I know, they didn’t discuss the idea of thunderstorms as a governing mechanism at all.
And regarding the Pacific Warm Pool, I also quoted the Abstract of R&C1991 in this my post on Argo and the Ocean Temperature Maximum. So somebody’s not searching here before making claims …
In any case, I leave it to the reader to decide whether my hypothesis, that emergent phenomena like thunderstorms regulate the climate, was “originally put forth” in the R&C 1991 Nature paper about cirrus clouds, or not …
Finally, Dr. Roy closes with this plea:
Anyway, I applaud Willis, who is a sharp guy, for trying. But now I am asking him (and others): read up on what has been done first, then add to it. Or, show why what was done previously came to the wrong conclusion, or analyzed the data wrong.
That’s what I work at doing.
But don’t assume you have anything new unless you first do some searching of the literature on the subject. True, some of the literature is paywalled. Sorry, I didn’t make the rules. And I agree, if research was public-funded, it should also be made publicly available.
First, let me say that I agree with all parts of that plea. I do my best to find out what’s been done before, among other reasons in order to save me time repeating past work.
However, many of my ideas are indeed novel, as are my methods of analysis. I’m the only person I know of, for example, to do graphic cluster analysis on temperature proxies (see “Kill It With Fire“). Now, has someone actually done that kind of analysis before? Not that I’ve seen, but if there is, I’m happy to find that out—it ups the odds that I’m on the right track when that happens. I have no problem with acknowledging past work—as I noted above, I have previously cited the very R&C 1991 study that Dr. Roy accuses me of ignoring.
Dr. Roy has not given me any examples of other people doing the kind of analysis of the CERES data that I’m doing. All he’s given are claims that someone somewhere did some unspecified thing that he claims I said I thought I’d done first. Oh, plus he’s pointed at, but not linked to, Ramanathan & Collins 1991, which doesn’t have anything to do with my hypothesis.
So all we have are his unsupported claims that my work is not novel.
And you know what? Dr. Roy may well be right. My work may not be novel. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong … but without specific examples, he is just handwaving. All I ask is that he shows this with proper citations.
Dr. Roy goes on to say:
But cloud feedback is a hard enough subject without muddying the waters further. Yes, clouds cool the climate system on average (they raise the planetary albedo, so they reduce solar input into the climate system). But how clouds will change due to warming (cloud feedback) could be another matter entirely. Don’t conflate the two.
I ask Dr. Roy to please note the title of my graphic above. It shows how the the clouds actually change due to warming. I have not conflated the two in the slightest, and your accusation that I have done so is just like your other accusations—it lacks specifics. Exactly what did I say that makes you think I’m conflating the two? Dr. Roy, I ask of you the simple thing I ask of everyone—if you object to something that I say, please QUOTE MY WORDS, so we can all see what you are talking about.
Dr. Roy continues:
For instance, let’s say “global warming” occurs, which should then increase surface evaporation, leading to more convective overturning of the atmosphere and precipitation. But if you increase clouds in one area with more upward motion and precipitation, you tend to decrease clouds elsewhere with sinking motion. It’s called mass continuity…you can’t have rising air in one region without sinking air elsewhere to complete the circulation. “Nature abhors a vacuum”.
Not true. For example, if thunderstorms alone are not sufficient to stop an area-wide temperature rise, a new emergent phenomenon arises. The thunderstorms will self-assemble into “squall lines”. These are long lines of massed thunderstorms, with long canyons of rising air between them. In part this happens because it allows for a more dense packing of thunderstorms, due to increased circulation efficiency. So your claim above, that an increase of clouds in one area means a decrease in another area, is strongly falsified by the emergence of squall lines.
In addition, you’ve failed to consider the timing of onset of the phenomena. A change of ten minutes in the average formation time of tropical cumulus makes a very large difference in net downwelling radiation … so yes, contrary to your claim, I’ve just listed two ways the clouds can indeed increase in one area without a decrease in another area.
So, examining how clouds and temperatures vary together locally (as Willis has done) really doesn’t tell you anything about feedbacks. Feedbacks only make sense over entire atmospheric circulation systems, which are ill-defined (except in the global average).
Mmm … well, to start with, these are not simple “feedbacks”. I say that clouds are among the emergent thermoregulatory phenomena that keep the earth’s temperature within bounds. The system acts, not as a simple feedback, but as a governor. What’s the difference?
- A simple feedback moves the result in a certain direction (positive or negative) with a fixed feedback factor. It is the value of this feedback factor that people argue about, the cloud feedback factor … I say that is meaningless, because what we’re looking at is not a feedback like that at all.
- A governor, on the other hand, uses feedback to move the result towards some set-point, by utilizing a variable feedback factor.
In short, feedback acts in one direction by a fixed amount. A governor, on the other hand, acts to restore the result to the set-point by varying the feedback. The system of emergent phenomena on the planet is a governor. It does not resemble simple feedback in the slightest.
And the size of those emergent phenomena varies from very small to very large on both spatial and temporal scales. Dust devils arise when a small area of the land gets too hot, for example. They are not a feedback, but a special emergent form which acts as an independent entity with freedom of motion. Dust devils move preferentially to the warmest nearby location, and because they are so good at cooling the earth, like all such mechanisms they have to move and evolve in order to persist. Typically they live for some seconds to minutes and then disappear. That’s an emergent phenomenon cooling the surface at the small end of the time and distance scales.
From there, the scales increase from local (cumulus clouds and thunderstorms) to area-wide (cyclones, grouping of thunderstorms into “squall lines”) to regional and multiannual (El Nino/La Nina Equator-To-Poles warm water pump) to half the planet and tens of years (Pacific Decadal Oscillation).
So I strongly dispute Dr. Roy’s idea that “feedbacks only make sense over entire atmospheric circulation systems”. To start with, they’re not feedbacks, they are emergent phenomena … and they have a huge effect on the regulation of the climate on all temporal and spatial scales.
And I also strongly dispute his claim that my hypothesis is not novel, the idea that thunderstorms and other emergent climate phenomena work in concert planet-wide to maintain the temperature of the earth within narrow bounds.
Like I said, Dr. Roy is one of my heroes, and I’m mystified by his attack on citizen scientists in general, and on me in particular. Yes, I’ve said that I thought that some of my research has been novel and original. Much of it is certainly original, in that I don’t know of anyone else who has done the work in that way, so the ideas are my own.
However, it just as certainly may not be novel. There’s nothing new under the sun. My point is that I don’t know of anyone advancing this hypothesis, the claim that emergent phenomena regulate the temperature and that forcing has little to do with it.
If Dr. Roy thinks my ideas are not new, I’m more than willing to look at any citations he brings to the table. As far as I’m concerned they would be support for my hypothesis, so I invite him to either back it up or back it off.
Best regards to all.
w.
Willis,
slow down man!!
” It’s called mass continuity…you can’t have rising air in one region without sinking air elsewhere to complete the circulation. “Nature abhors a vacuum”.
Not true. For example, if thunderstorms alone are not sufficient to stop an area-wide temperature rise, a new emergent phenomenon arises. The thunderstorms will self-assemble into “squall lines”. These are long lines of massed thunderstorms, with long canyons of rising air between them. In part this happens because it allows for a more dense packing of thunderstorms, due to increased circulation efficiency. So your claim above, that an increase of clouds in one area means a decrease in another area, is strongly falsified by the emergence of squall lines.”
How do squall lines disprove the basic physics of necessary circulation??? If air goes up, air somewhere else goes down, PERIOD. Circulation happens!! Your squall limes could not happen if the first one left a vacumn in its path.
In the area where the air is coming back down, will there be clouds Willis?? In our atmosphere does the air convected upwards by the thunderstorms generally come back down within, say, a 50 mile radius or does it generally move much further horizontally before returning to the surface?? I think the buzz word is Hadley Cell??
I would suggest the proper argument to refute Spencer’s statement would be to question whether the AREA of the air movement changes or primarily the SPEED!!! That is, the warming increases the speed of the convection over the same area. As you pointed out earlier, Spencer seems to be confusing the general Cloud Feedback theory with your theory of not only increased albedo, locally around the thunderstorm, but increased convection and evaporation.
@ur momisugly Max
It is interesting that the Waliser paper appears to have been ignored until Willis independently came up with apparently independent confirmation. Also interesting that Willis has attracted opprobrium for it.
Roger Sowell says in part: ”It has been taught as basic science in elementary schools far earlier than 1963.” Clearly he does not suggest that the “It” here was the complete thesis of the rainstorm-cooling/thermostatting – at least not in the fourth grade (else I am very impressed).
Did his class discuss the 2nd Law, latent heat, convection, phase changing, radiation, density, etc.? Certainly the ancients noticed the correlation of rainfall and cooling. But causality or even the implications? But it is quite silly to suggest modern atmospheric science (relative to the ancients, or even to Roger’s 1963 4th-grade) does not involve at least several orders of magnitude increases in knowledge, with more people contributing than you can count. It is unwise to suppose that most accounts do not involve at least some new ideas.
A personal and very satisfying learning (or teaching) victory is achieved when we examine information, draw a correct conclusion, and then read the same conclusion (not as well described as we now understand it ourselves!) in the text book we were supposed to have already read. In such a case, we are unlikely to ascribe precedence to ourselves. But likely we will correctly “feel” that “I am as smart as the authors and in fact got it ‘before’ they did”. According to reports, this was Feynman’s SOP. It served him well.
The specific instances when we ourselves learn (or teach) something are what is most notable for us. But not unlikely, the notions were embarrassingly nearby, and perhaps well-known, all along.
The road to priority is full of bumps and almost always, at best nebulous. But even if supposedly just a retelling, something new and important may emerge. In engineering and many sciences, “Introductory” texts are ubiquitous and are largely copied (kind of plagiarized if you prefer). “Advanced” texts are newly written (often in a stilted and useless style). “Intermediate” level texts are hen’s-teeth rare, but it is from them that genuine progress in true understanding could be made. Many blog posts constitute, in fact, intermediate level texts. Let’s not discourage participation in them, or underestimate the contribution of citizen-scientists to them.
Poptech says:
October 10, 2013 at 7:31 pm
As I replied above, I grant you of course that Mann is ideologically biased, & financially motivated to boot, as shown by his childish “hide the decline” trick. What I’m not sure about is whether the statistical incompetence on shameful display in the Hockey Stick graph resulted from the same bias & self-interest or ignorance & stupidity.
I’m late to this forum, lots of comments to read.
The posts criticizing Willis and defending Spencer are for the most part breathtakingly condescending of Willis and of amateur science enthusiasts. I’ve avoided threads that get into a Willis vs ad hom. critics like the plague, but the tenor of Spencer’s article and some comments here are completely inappropriate. If Spencer thinks Willis is misleading people here, the place to offer criticisms is within the threads, rebutting specific points – or in a rebuttal article, not an ad hominem article that offers generalized condemnation, however mild and ‘well-intentioned’.
If the only misleading that is going on is a ‘re-invention’ of theories already buried in dry literature, inaccessible to amateur scientists and enthusiasts, then ABSOLUTELY no harm is being done. It is no sin, academic or otherwise, to think things through and write about your ideas, based on your personal and independent processing of data that is freely available. As others have pointed out, moreover, many great scientific discoveries were made by multiple scientists working independently of each other. Eg Newton’s fluxions vs. Leibniz’s calculus. Robert Merton, the great sociologist of science, had a lot to say about this, and I believe was the first to draw scholars’ attention to this phenomenon.
I have been appreciating Richard S. Courtney’s comments – glad he was not away from WUWT for long.
Conversely, Steve Garcia’s comment about the relative uselessness of WUWT and Climate Audit caused massive localized splenetic warming. He says the only thing that has altered the climate conversation was Climategate. I suppose we would all know about it in the absence of WUWT and Climate Audit? (sarc) Because these blogs did nothing at all to bring together a community of interested and largely skeptical thinkers, academic and amateur alike? (further sarc)
As I stated the first few times I dared to post here, after lurking for nearly a year – well before Climategate – WUWT was performing a valuable service, giving interested amateurs a chance to critique scholarly articles, or at the least abstracts and puff pieces. I was blown away by the adeptness of regular bloggers, including Willis — who in those days did not post articles nearly as frequently — in quickly finding gaping holes in the ‘scientific’ arguments of the highly speculative computer-model-driven rubbish and analysis that passes for science in the professional climate science community.
I want to reiterate something I said several times pre-Climategate: WUWT was doing and continues to perform a service that is beyond value. I predicted that it would become historically important, and what impressed me the most about WUWT, Climate Audit and a few other blogs was their opening up the forum of science to everybody who wanted to participate. For the first time in a hundred years, amateur scientists have a role to play – and it is not a trivial role.
Contrary to some of the condescending comments here from sheeple who revere men and women with science PhDs, the loss of respect for climate scientists did not come from a lack of ability to understand the turgid rubbish and jargon they often use to communicate, or the niceties of their ‘science’. No – our respect was lost over their inability to form arguments using basic logic, and their inability to see the logical inconsistencies in the ‘evidence’ and theory.
I am too familiar with the vanity and close-mindedness of some academics whose PhDs and well-funded work and comfy pal-reviewed papers turn them into complacent, arrogant and condescending jerks. These are people, folks, not heroes. In too many cases, they are blinded by their political ideologies, and unlike Willis, have no interest in the truth that they do not even believe exists.
I do not think Spencer falls into this category but am disappointed that he treated Willis like a well-funded academic sparring partner needing to be put down a notch.
Keep the wonderful posts coming, please, Willis.
Thank you, Anthony and dedicated moderators.
I urge Willis to take advantage of the literature search crowd sourced here on WUWT to work his hypothesis into traditional scientific paper format & submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. It should be possible to point out the similarities & differences between his conclusions & those of previous studies published on related topics, thereby highlighting precisely what is indeed original in his conception.
Nothing wrong with being a citizen scientist. Darwin was one such. However it does not absolve you from the need to study the literature to find out what has been done. To take an example:
ThePompousGit says ” It is interesting that the Waliser paper appears to have been ignored until Willis independently came up with apparently independent confirmation.”
The Waliser paper has been cited 118 times since its publication. This means it is regards as significant in its field, and so, far from being obscure, it is something that should be found by a proper literature study. It is can also be found through Google Scholar so excuses that it is “paywalled” would not be valid.
The Pompous Git says:
October 10, 2013 at 4:08 pm
This causes excitement because despite having been published in several journals, Willis is not one of the anointed priests of scientism. I surmise that in thirty years’ time one will read of the Eschenbach Effect, rather than Herr Professor Doctor Doctor Schmidthead’s Hypothesis.
——————–
Bingo! It’s the alliteration of “Eschenbach Effect”, which does rather have a ring to it, that probably excited “someone’s” interest in Willis’s work. I hope you are right.
RC Saumarez says:
October 10, 2013 at 8:09 am:
Wow, that is one hell of an inferiority complex you have there, dude. I haven’t seen any “mathematics, signal processing blah blah” out of you worth reading. Write something that is original and/or stimulative and other than an outright incoherent attack on another’s work, and get Anthony to publish it (after all, he publishes the “rubbish” that Willis writes.)* Otherwise you appear like a gnat on the withers of an ass, biting and bothering, but adding nothing to the process.
Likewise, to good old JJ and Poptech, the latter one of the more pitiful cynics I have seen in a while.
Note added at * : That was purely sarcastic, in case some of you brilliant minds missed it.
milodonharlani says:
October 10, 2013 at 8:21 pm (Edit)
I’ve already published it, three years ago, in Energy and Environment. It’s available here.
w.
Cross posted from Dr. Roy’s blog …
Dear Dr. Roy:
Let me start by expressing my surprise and my sadness at your words and graphic. It seems as if I’ve unknowingly done something that has deeply upset you, but I’m not clear what it is. If so, you have my apologies.
Regarding my thunderstorm thermostat hypothesis, back in 2010 I did what you and many other people have advised I do with my ideas. I published my thunderstorm thermostat hypothesis in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It’s available here. Oh, it was published in the journal that alarmists love to hate, Energy & Environment, but to the alarmists’ dismay E&E publishes peer-reviewed science. Heck, Tom Wigley even advised his confidantes in the Climategate emails that E&E is peer-reviewed, quite funny actually.
And among the peer-reviewed papers they’ve published is my hypothesis. Heck, you’re even listed among the references … but not Ramanathan and Collins, because they were looking at an entirely different mechanism.
My paper starts, of course, with an abstract, which opens by stating my hypothesis:
I went on to detail how this happens, primarily through changes in the daily time of onset of the tropical cumulus threshold and thunderstorm threshold. When the earth is cool, those phenomena emerge later in the day or not at all. This allows the full power of the sun to heat the surface. And conversely, when the earth is warm they emerge earlier in the day.
So my hypothesis, as clearly laid out in that paper, is that variations in the daily times of onset of the tropical cumulus and cumulonimbus regimes regulate the tropical surface temperature with scant regard to changes in forcings. And thus eventually this regulates the global surface temperature, through a whole host of cloud-related mechanisms. The hypothesis contains the corollary stated in the abstract, that this keeps the temperature within fairly tight bounds (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th century) without much regard to what the forcings do. Another way to say this is that the thresholds for the formation of cumulus and thunderstorms are temperature-based, not forcing-based.
Note that my hypothesis is radically different from the hypothesis put forwards in Ramanathan and Collins 1991. Their abstract says:
Their hypothesis is about the effect of cirrus clouds on the local maximum sea surface temperature from a “super greenhouse effect” that occurs in and around the Pacific Warm Pool … and my hypothesis isn’t about any of those things. Not one of them. My hypothesis is not about cirrus clouds. Not about a “super greenhouse effect”. Not about maximum sea surface temperatures. And not about the Pacific Warm Pool.
Now, perhaps as you say, someone before me advanced the same hypothesis I’ve put forward, which is that the time of the daily onset of the tropical thunderstorms and cumulus clouds regulates the global temperature with little regard for changes in forcings. But it certainly wasn’t Ramanathan and Collins …
So I still await your identification of the study which put forward that hypothesis prior to my own journal publication. Note that I’ve never said such a study doesn’t exist—to the contrary, here’s what I wrote in my post on the subject:
That’s all I’m asking—if not mine, then whose name should we put on the idea that the time of onset of the tropical cumulus and thunderstorm regimes regulates the global temperature?
Now to your other point, which is whether I give sufficient acknowledgement to prior art and studies. At any point in my life, I only know what I know. I do my best to acknowledge scientists and cite prior work. I think such acknowledgement is important. As I said, I cited your own work in my journal paper on thunderstorms. I acknowledge prior work when it is relevant.
R&C’s hypothesis about a “super greenhouse effect” in the Pacific Warm Pool was and is not relevant to my hypothesis about cumulus and thunderstorm regimes regulating the temperature. So I did not cite or mention it in that context. Instead, in 2012 I said the following:
At that time, no one provided any examples of prior analysis similar to mine … and if they were known, people would certainly have posted them. Lots of folks out there would like nothing better than to prove me wrong, and that’s wonderful. I’m serious. It is precisely that hostile audience, full of folks who love to hate on me, that is the essence of science. If those people can’t punch holes in my claims, if they can’t falsify my claims, I can sleep easy.
On the other hand, when I wrote in 2012 about maximum SSTs in the Pacific Warm Pool, R&C 1991 and the CEPEX experiment were definitely relevant … and so I said:
SOURCE
So yes, Dr. Roy, I definitely do acknowledge prior work as you advocate, like you I think it’s important … but only when it is relevant to my work.
I’m also uninterested in doing anything that someone has done before. I read voraciously, and could do so for another fifty years without being able to read all the studies. But I want to create new looks at things. So I am constantly inventing novel techniques and ideas and putting them in practice.
Now, it’s not unusual for me to later find out that some technique I invented was invented before me by someone else. I actually take a curious pride in finding that out, it means I’m on the right trail. And it’s also not unusual for me to find out that my ideas and methods and techniques and hypotheses are in fact new and novel. I take pride in that as well.
You seem to be interpreting what I say as somehow dissing the work of previous climate scientists. Not in the slightest. However, many of them have been seduced by the simple-but-wrong idea that changes in global temperature are a linear function of changes in forcings. This fundamental misconception has left vast areas of the climate realm relatively unexplored. That’s where I spend my time.
w.
PS—Since you have such distaste for citizen scientists, I’m curious. My hypothesis is published in a scientific journal. If you have objections, why are you making them on the web? Surely a professional scientist would write a letter to the editor of the journal, pointing out the prior work that shows my ideas about time of onset to be derivative.
At least that’s what people always advise me to do …
In any case, Dr. Roy, next time … could you give me a phone call first?
jimmi_the_dalek said @ur momisugly October 10, 2013 at 8:47 pm
There’s no doubt that it’s an important and certainly interesting paper. However, Google Scholar returns on the search terms “thunderstorm thermostat”:
Waliser does not appear in the first five pages of 977 results. While I would agree that this is not a “proper” literary search, it does have the virtue of not costing a great deal. Does this mean you are volunteering to do literary searches for Willis gratis? I doubt that his family budget stretches to paid lit. searches.
Willis Eschenbach says:
October 10, 2013 at 9:01 pm
I know. I read it & commented on it in this blog.
But in that version of your hypothesis, you explicitly state that you’re not following standard paper protocol. With the researches here, you could rework that piece & bring it up to date, citing it, & resubmit it to a more widely circulated journal.
PS: My prior comment on your published paper on this topic:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/09/dr-roy-spencers-ill-considered-comments-on-citizen-science/#comment-1443985
Why people don’t take Willis seriously,
Willis Eschenbach, B.A. Psycology, Sonoma State University (1975); California Massage Certificate, Aames School of Massage (1974); Commercial Fisherman (1968, 1969, 1971, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1994, 1995); Auto Mechanic, People’s Garage (1969-1970); Cabinet Maker, A.D. Gibson Co. (1972); Office Manager, Honolulu Emergency Labor Pool (1972); Construction Manager, Autogenic Systems Inc. (1973); Assistant Driller, Mirror Mountain Enterprises (1975-1976); Tax Preparer, Beneficial Financial Company (1977); Accountant, Farallones Institute (1977-1978); Peace Corps and USAID (1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1993, 1994); Cabinet Maker, Richard Vacha Cabinets (1986); County Director, Foundation for the People of the South Pacific (1986-1988); General Manager, Liapari Limited (1989-1992); Regional Health Coordinator, Foundation for the People of the South Pacific (1994-1995); Project Manager, Eschenbach Construction Company (1995-2003); Construction Manager, Koro Sun Limited (1999); Construction Manager, Taunovo Bay Resort (2003-2006); Accounts/IT Senior Manager, South Pacific Oil (2007-2010)
Poptech, your pettiness is showing…
Wrong, he is concerned with people being misinformed by Willis.
Mr. Eschenbach is the pied-piper of the “dumb like me crowd” who think everyone is intellectually equal, despite obviously education and experience gaps.
His rambling stories attract fanboys who obviously do not understand what Dr. Spencer is saying so they knee-jerk attack him. I have long just ignored most of Willis’s posts but these people are like a virus and spread throughout the skeptic community wasting scientist’s like Dr. Spencer’s time. I highly doubt he is the first or the only one who shares that view of Willis but it needed to be said. So I am saying what they will not say.
Of course these same people who think credentials don’t matter have either never held a job or never applied for one. They conflate credentials with being scientifically right, instead of scientifically competent. They also look for conspiracies when things can be explained by ideologies.
Poptech says:
October 10, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Why people don’t take Willis seriously,
++++++++++++
Your personal and quite offensive immature attack tells us more about you than Willis. Think back to your childhood and grow.
Willis fanboys don’t know how to use Google Scholar? Why am I not surprised.
Why would Google Scholar return a result that does not include one of the words you used in your search query?
So listing a person’s credentials is now considered a personal attack? Is that some form of a joke?
Could Roy be tweaked because, as I have noted before, he wrote a very nice account himself of how the speed of the rain cycle acts as what he called “nature’s thermostat,” with section headings like: “precipitation systems: nature’s air conditioner?” For reasons I never understood Roy took this extended essay down in 2008, only to see Willis go on a tear with the same terminology and the same subject matter starting in 2009, with Willis’ own ever elaborating additions and understandings piling up.
When I saw that Roy had taken his Thermostat essay down I went and found it on the Wayback Machine and posted a copy on my own website. It was/is much to important to be out of the public eye:
http://www.crescentofbetrayal.com/SpencerThermostat.htm
I always thought this essay was the best account I had seen of why the feedback effects of the hydrological cycle could well be negative, so that the warming effects of changes in forcing would be dampened rather than multiplied up. Roy said it was his attempt to flesh out Lindzen’s “iris effect,” which is very necessary, since Lindzen’s paper is practically unreadable, being written in energy balance terms that leaves the possible mechanisms poorly explained (at least to my untrained eye). According to Wayback Roy’s essay was first posted in March of 2007, two years before Willis’ Thermostat Hypothesis post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
Just as Willis says that his thermostat hypothesis is entirely different from the mechanism put forward by Ramanathan and Collins in 1991, so too Roy seemed to think that his Willis-like “thermostat” hypothesis was entirely different from R+C 91. At least, there is no mention of R+C in Roy’s essay. He only mentions Lindzen. So it is very strange to see Roy now criticizing Willis for not crediting R+C for an analysis similar to the one that Roy himself did not credit R+C for.
Maybe Roy took his Thermostat essay down because he decided that such a partial analysis would not illuminate feedbacks (his statement that clouds rising in one place means clouds descending in others, so you can’t resolve the effects of the whole by looking in one place). But maybe Willis’ idea of looking at precipitation systems as a governor, not a numeric feedback effect, gets around that objection. Could it be that Roy took his essay down prematurely and is miffed that Willis has grabbed his thunder?
Roy is one of my favorites just as he is one of Willis’ favorites. Hell, Roy is my number one favorite climate scientist, but he is off on a bender criticizing Willis for doing what he once did. And how can Roy write on and on about other researchers having previously written about the rain cycle as a thermostat without mentioning that he himself is one very prominent such person? Roy seems to be pretending that his earlier really super great essay never existed, as if he is ashamed of it or something. Hey Roy: that essay is the number one reason why I consider you the number one climate scientist in the world! Don’t be embarrassed about it, even if it is only a partial analysis, and good for Willis for taking up what Roy dropped, even if he did not know that Roy had ever held it or dropped it.
Poptech writes “They conflate credentials with being scientifically right, instead of scientifically competent.”
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Your sentence makes no sense, or you don’t understand the words you’ve written. You suggest that that only a title of a specific degree or credential can be competent in that subject matter. You sound like the kind of person who jumps in when you feel it’s safe, but lack the courage to lead.
Use that argument when you apply for a job you have no credentials in, tell me how it goes. Tell them “I’m smart because I say so”.
Pied-pipers lead people very well, right off cliffs.
Poptech says:
October 10, 2013 at 10:32 pm
Mario Lento says: Your personal and quite offensive immature attack tells us more about you than Willis. Think back to your childhood and grow.
So listing a person’s credentials is now considered a personal attack? Is that some form of a joke?
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Poptech, I expected you to not understand. There is nothing about Willis credentials that prevents him from being smarter than you. No reasonable person could take what I wrote to imply that listing Willis’ credentials was the attack. It’s everything in your post except Willis credentials that was offensive. Read that as YOU are offensive.
Mario, sorry if I hurt your “feelings”. Obviously when you reply by quoting a certain post of mine I am REALLY supposed to interpret that to what is only in your mind.