Current peer review science, by attempting to explain away model failure, in fact confirms that the science is wrong
Guest essay by David M. Hoffer
It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science. With this simple strategy, they at once excuse themselves from the need to know anything about the science, and at the same time seek to discredit skeptic arguments on the grounds that, not having been published in peer reviewed journals, they may be dismissed out of hand.
A retreat to authoritarian arguments in the face of dead simple observations is not new. It is a repeat of history. Not having learned from it, we appear to be condemned to repeat it. But both history and the current peer reviewed science are, if one steps back and looks at the big picture, on the skeptic side.
In the fifth century BC, Empedocles theorized that one could see by virtue of rays emanating from one’s eyes. Falsifying this notion required no more than pointing out that one cannot see in a dark room. Despite this simple observation, his theory enjoyed substantial support for the next 1600 years.
Galileo died while under house arrest for supporting the notion that the earth orbited the sun. His was convicted in part on the basis of peer reviewed literature of the time insisting that the movement of the planets as observed from the earth could be explained by the planets simply reversing direction in orbit from time to time. For nearly two thousand years, into the early 1800’s, when people fell ill, the peer reviewed literature confirmed that the best course of action was to let some blood out of them. The simple observation that death rates increased when this treatment was applied was dismissed out of hand on the premise that, if it was true, it would appear in medical journals. Sound familiar?
History is replete with examples of what seems today to be utterly absurd ideas. Ideas which stubbornly refuse to die, sustained in part by the equally absurd notion that evidence to the contrary was not to be accepted simply because it hadn’t appeared in the “right” publications. But is the notion of climate science today as easily falsified by simple observation? I submit that it is. We have the climate models themselves to upon which to rely.
For what are the climate models other than the embodiment of the peer reviewed science? Is there a single model cited by the IPCC that claims to not be based on peer reviewed science? Of course there isn’t. Yet simple observation shows that the models, and hence the peer reviewed literature upon which they are based, are wrong. We have none other than the IPCC themselves to thank for showing us that.
The leaked Second Order Draft of IPCC AR5 laid bare the failure of the models to predict the earth’s temperature going forward in time. In fact, if one threw out all but the best 5% of the model results…they would still be wrong, and obviously so. They all run hotter than reality. Exposed for the world to see that the models (and hence the science upon which they are based) had so utterly failed, the IPCC responded by including older models they had previously declared obsolete as now being part of the current literature:
Even with those older and supposedly obsolete models included, the models look to be complete failures. In other words, confronted with the data showing that thousands are dying from bloodletting, the IPCC is resurrecting old studies showing that three or four patients recovered once in an old study from a long time ago. They are point blank asking you to believe that planets reverse direction in orbit quite of their own volition. They’ve contrived a theory that you can’t see in the dark because the rays from your eyes must interact with light to work.
As ridiculous as that may seem, for the IPCC, it is (literally) even worse than that. For this we have the foremost climate scientists on the planet to thank.
Kevin Trenberth, arguably the most politically powerful climate scientist on earth, famously lamented in the ClimateGate Emails that we cannot account for “the missing heat”, a tacit admission that the models are wrong. Since then we’ve seen multiple papers suggesting that perhaps the heat is being sequestered in the deep oceans where, conveniently, we cannot measure it. If true, this also invalidates the models, since they predicted no such thing.
Dr Roy Spencer’s paper suggests that the heat is escaping to space. If he’s right, the models are wrong. More recently we have the paper by Cowtan and Way, which tries to make the case that the heat is hiding in places on earth where we have no weather station or satellite data. Pretty selective that heat, going where nobody can measure it, but not where we can. If they are right, then not a single model predicted any such thing, and so, once again, the models would be wrong. Spencer’s paper stands apart from the others because it doesn’t twist itself into absurd contortions in a blatant attempt to preserve the CAGW storyline. But make no mistake about it, all these papers are being published, not because the models (and the science they are predicted upon) are right, but because they are wrong, and obviously so.
No longer is the debate in regard to if the models are wrong. The debate is now about why the models are wrong. The models having fallen, the peer reviewed science they purport to represent falls with them.
But you need not believe me in that regard.
Just the peer reviewed science by the foremost climate scientists on earth.
‘Peer review’ may become ‘pal review’, or less politely a ‘circle jerk’ of like-minded colleagues boosting one another’s fortunes.
Responses that I get when I present peer-reviewed research that runs counter to what the True Believer ‘knows’:
‘cherry-picking’
‘out-of-date’
‘fraud’
and more!
Witness some of that here, from a person who claims to be a ‘journalist’ http://scythemantis.deviantart.com/journal/MEEERRY-KAJMSMAS-422842842
(note: his claims that I mention him all the time? … come to about 11 words over the past year. Narcissism, pure and unadulterated)
I think the post would be stronger without the Galileo reference.
Recall that Galileo (and Copernicus) were technically mistaken. They maintained that the planets orbited the Sun in circular orbits. As Kepler showed, this was not the case. Because of the desire for circular orbits, the Copernican theory of the time also required resort to ‘epicycles’. Galileo’s problem with the authorities was as much or more due to personality issues than his doctrine – after all Copernicus went unmolested.
Without Newtonian ‘Universal Gravitation’ there was no good way to explain the motion of the planets. Tycho, the greatest observational astronomer of that era, also did not believe that Earth orbited the Sun, though he did believe the planets orbited the Sun. With the information available to educated men of that time, I have a feeling I’d have been an adherent of the Tychonic system myself.
In a recent modeling project, it takes 72 hours of computing time to generate 1/3 of a second of a simulated worm movement :
http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/26/openworm-project/
How many hours of computing time does it take for a climate model to produce one second of simulated earth climate? What is missing from climate models in order to create simulations that span years?
Well done, David M. Hoffer (if I may, smile). Glad to see an article by you. When I saw you were this post’s author, I even came off my WUWT vacation to read it. You (and other WUWT science giants) certainly provided irrefutable demonstrative evidence of your above assertion in your valiant attempt last week to educate that troll-of-contrived-ignorance whose name I will NOT give the benefit of even mentioning ( = home for a legion of rabbits, going nicely with Monckton’s hive metaphor in the post below which your comments appeared).
Thanks, David. Well put!
I agree. Not only that but most of the so-called science authors and the peer reviewers are incompetent. I saw on another blog that (Dr ) Gavin Schmidt was asked about the the Schmidt number. He looked it up on Wiki then responded “what use was that”. By that admission he has no understanding of heat and mass transfer (which is an engineering discipline not understood by the so-called scientists). When peer reviewers (Gavin Schmidt has been one many times) do not understand the basics of what they are supposed to be reviewing one gets junk being published. Do any of the so-called climate scientist understand air conditioning, fluid dynamics, reaction kinetics (eg formation of ozone & ozone reactions) etc. or even simple thermodynamics? So-called climate science is political science in disguise.
OldCrusader is quite right.
The Copernican-Gallilean heliocentric system offered exactly zero improvement over the Ptolemaic geocentric one in predicting planetary positions. It gave the exact same errors for the exact same reasons.
Kepler’s revolutionary heliofocal system, in contrast, yielded planetary positions more accurate than the margin of measurement error of the time.
Yet Kepler gets very little credit or fame, while the other two bask in historical glory for their failed hypothesis.
Warmist “peer review” is as dishonest as their pseudo-scientific religion. Now we have thousands of Shaman desperately searching for the missing heat. It’s got to be here somewhere, otherwise it all falls apart, along with our reputations and grant money. We should be reaching the tipping point for AGW theory soon. However, that won’t dissuade the true believers, who will just develop a new theory (probably AGC).
Anthony Watts
I try to actually introduce as many of my friends to your excellent website as a focus of general science (which it does a better job than fully dedicated ones) but when ironic S@*te like this appears it dilutes some of the excellent pieces posted here.
BTW, your recent post on the moon landing and the words of those who landed – EXCELLENT. Compared to an age of giant achievements, and perhaps the words of those of the greatest of all, expressing such humility, it should shame our age that has nothing more to offer than hubris from the rather vacuous underachieving generation that makes a living from of their [all those of NASA pre-1970] great achievements.
If Mosher makes one of his lightning raids here, please please ignore him.
TheOldCrusader says: “I think the post would be stronger without the Galileo reference.
Recall that Galileo (and Copernicus) were technically mistaken. They maintained that the planets orbited the Sun in circular orbits. As Kepler showed, this was not the case. Because of the desire for circular orbits, the Copernican theory of the time also required resort to ‘epicycles’. Galileo’s problem with the authorities was as much or more due to personality issues than his doctrine – after all Copernicus went unmolested…”
Nonsense. Copernicus went unmolested not for his political correctness, but because he was dead before his work was published. Galileo (and Copernicus) were essentially correct: The planets do revolve around the Sun and most of the (then-known) planets do have fairly circular orbits. Mars and Mercury were two exceptions because of their higher orbital eccentricities, which resulted in more epicycles in the Copernican theory than the Ptolemaic. Kepler did not reject the Copernican theory as “mistaken” or “technically mistaken.” He merely used Tyco Brahe’s data to add eccentricity to the orbital theory.
“So-called climate science is political science in disguise.” Couldn’t have said it better.
Peer-review is not always the first line of action for innovators, for whatever reason.
“Dr Roy Spencer’s paper suggests that the heat is escaping to space. If he’s right, the models are wrong.” – Given a choice as to where that heat went to on a cold cloudless winter night, even the least educated man in the street would go with “into space” over “into the oceans”.
The problem is the lack of common sense among some highly educated and overpaid government dependents, and the belief in computer simulations as the truest reflection of reality for everything.
David, thank you.
All too often it seems that the only understanding people have of the models is ‘they predict warming’. All too often, any argument that any warming has occurred satisfies such people. A reminder that, no matter the answers to these questions; is the heat in the oceans, is it at the poles, is it not there at all, is natural variability greater than we thought, etc. the models did not project what was observed, and they failed to do so in a statistically conclusive way is clearly overdue.
Kepler’s Laws are taught in schools in detail as the working model for planetary movements even today (the relativistic ones are a bit tricky) – Galileo gets a passing mention. I think Kepler does OK.
David – you don’t have to go so far back in history to find the ignorance of consensus you seek.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods
What he alone knew changed everything once everyone else saw the light. It wasn’t that long ago.
There aren’t many issues of controversy out there where one side can win its argument by actually using the data of the other side. It no longer matters whether or not Warmists listen to our side of the argument (not that they did anyway). No, all they have to do now is look at their own arguments to see that they are wrong.
I do hope that Mr. Hoffer is not misremembering George Santayana when he says, “It is a repeat of history. Not having learned from it, we appear to be condemned to repeat it.”
History is written by the victors that are ignorant of the fallacy of historicism or that are trying to legitimize some claim. Santayana dictated that we remember our past, those that cannot are damned to repeat it. Read The Poverty of Historicism and it’s foundations in The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Galileo’s problem with the authorities was as much or more due to personality issues than his doctrine – after all Copernicus went unmolested. – OldCrusader
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII decreed that cats were evil creatures to be burnt with witches.
I guess cats just didn’t have the right kind of “personality” for the Catholic Church, huh?
Thankfully, the Church is no longer the authority on what we can think and say.
Welcome to the enlightenment…
= = = = = =
Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. His renowned conflict with the Catholic Church was central to his philosophy, for Galileo was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.
Galileo had believed Copernican theory (that the planets orbited the sun) since early on, but it was only when he found the evidence needed to support the idea that he started to publicly support it. He wrote about Copernicus’s theory in Italian (not the usual academic Latin), and soon his views became widely supported outside the universities. This annoyed the Aristotelian professors, who united against him seeking to persuade the Catholic Church to ban Copernicanism.
Galileo, worried about this, traveled to Rome to speak to the ecclesiastical authorities. He argued that the Bible was not intended to tell us anything about scientific theories, and that it was usual to assume that, where the Bible conflicted with common sense, it was being allegorical. But the Church was afraid of a scandal that might undermine its fight against Protestantism, and so took repressive measures. It declared Copernicanism “false and erroneous” in 1616, and commanded Galileo never again to “defend or hold” the doctrine. Galileo acquiesced.
In 1623, a longtime friend of Galileo’s became the pope. Immediately Galileo tried to get the 1616 decree revoked. He failed, but he did manage to get permission to write a book discussing both the Aristotelian and Copernican theories, on two conditions: he would not take sides and would come to the conclusion that man could in any case not determine how the world worked because God could bring about the same effects in ways unimagined by man, who could not place restrictions on God’s omnipotence.
The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was completed and published in 1632, with the full backing of censors – and was immediately greeted throughout Europe as a literary and philosophical masterpiece. Soon the pope, realizing that people were seeing the book as a convincing argument in favor of Copernicanism, regretted having allowed its publication. The pope argued that although the book had the official blessing of the censors, Galileo had nevertheless contravened the 1616 decree. He brought Galileo before the Inquisition, who sentenced him to house arrest for life and commanded him to publicly renounce Copernicanism. For a second time, Galileo acquiesced.
Galileo remained a faithful Catholic, but his belief in the independence of science had not been crushed. Four years before his death in 1642, while he was still under house arrest, the manuscript of his second major book was smuggled to a publisher in Holland. It was this work, referred to as Two New Sciences, that was to be the genesis of modern physics.
– Stephen Hawking
= = = = = =
D Hoffer
Oh dear – a paper which starts by defining anyone who dares question the views of the author as a ‘troll’. The beauty of this bit of sophistry is that the author virtually sets up, and automatically ‘wins’, a circular argument: trolls are wrong and bad. Hoffer is not a troll. Therefore D Hoffer is right!
Verbal alchemy – logical dross into gold!
D Hoffer goes on to assert:
‘Galileo died while under house arrest for supporting the notion that the earth orbited the sun. His was convicted in part on the basis of peer reviewed literature of the time insisting that the movement of the planets as observed from the earth could be explained by the planets simply reversing direction in orbit from time to time.’
Galileo was done for heresy (ie breaching matters of faith and morals) by an organisation that bases itself on being the sole and divinely-directed arbiters of those well-known pieces of peer-reviewed scientific literature – the gospels. In other words, according to those who defined this stuff at the time, at the core, Galileo’s transgressions were theological.
And if you think that the Roman Catholic Church has subsequently 100% rehabilitated Galileo, not quite – there are still (somewhat thin and scanty) currents of thought that Galileo was a heretic, regardless of modern scientific progress on heliocentrism.
The RC church organised an exhibition on Galileo on his 400th anniversay in a church not far from the Rome railway station. It was quite open in some ways, but remarkably grudging in others. Inter alia, the exhibition went to some extent to demonstrate that Galileo was a believer, he really was.
They can’t even agree amongst themselves on whether to erect a statue to him in Vatican City!
D Hoffer may also consider that there is an internal contradiction to his position on Galileo. It was the peer-reviewed literature that was mostly right. It was the religious science-deniers of the day who refused to accept the peer-reviewed literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Church_reassessments_of_Galileo_in_later_centuries
I agree that the Galileo reference might be a bit misplaced, as the Galileo persecution is probably more lore than fact. In it’s place, one might include William Harvey. Harvey shattered the accepted wisdom put forth by the great physician to gladiators and Roman emperors, Galen. Galen had written, in the 2nd century AD, that there were two kinds of blood carried by essentially two different vascular systems. And all the assorted fluids in a human body were imbued with invisible pneuma, “spirits” if you will. Galen’s system was taught in medical schools for 1,400 years before being successfully challenged by Harvey’s studies.
The general public who get their news from the networks and NPR will never have their minds changed by what is reported here and elsewhere. In the people’s republic of Ann Arbor, it’s just not news if it’s not from these select sources. I’ve done everything I can to enlighten, illuminate, refute, and nothing works. I suspect this somewhat willful ignorance is widespread. Unless they’re interested in the subject, they just take the word of John Stewart, Diane Rhem or Brian Williams as fact.
And now for a public service announcement. If you live in the Great Lakes or upper Midwest, you have one week to prepare for “history making cold”. If you have livestock or pipes that need protecting, if you have any malfunctioning heaters, cranky furnaces, a broken window somewhere in a barn, a vehicle that won’t start in severe cold, you have about one week to get it in good order. Places like WI, IL, IN, ND, MN, IA are going to see temperatures possibly 50 degrees below normal according to the latest forecast model runs. Chicago might see -30F.
David: Good article! Thanks for posting.
crosspatch: I recall minus 21ºF in Ohio in the ’60’s. You realize how many nerve endings are in your nose and ears when that happens!
With all of California’s problems, at least the lack of global warming isn’t one of them!
Galileo died while under house arrest for siupporting the notion that the earth orbited the sun.
Popular idea but not entirely true. What got him in trouble was his total lack of tact. He went out of his way to insult the pope who had encouraged him to write up his ideas. You might say he was one of the first nerds.
Peer reviewed climate science seems to be little more than the art of ignoring one’s ignorance for the greater good of the clique. Maybe five percent of the hydrosphere has been visited? Never mind. Almost all of the hot, plasticky ball called Earth unvisited, unexamined? Bor-ing. Get to all that later. Gotta publish.
Why, if everybody waited to know stuff before they published stuff there wouldn’t be any “findings” to dismiss after ten years to make way for new publications. And in this electronic age it should soon be possible to discredit old tripe and publish fresh tripe with a five-year max turnaround. That’s including full peer review of all new tripe!
If the comparison is between peer-reviewed science and blog posts, give me the peer-reviewed stuff any time. It is not they are right all the time. It is that they are more likely to be right more of the time than the bloggers.
Peer-reviewed science gives you clinally-tested medicines, model-based weather forecasts, safe aircraft travel and so and so forth.
Bloggers gives you magic stone cures, 400 different (literally) conspiracy theories for who really killed Kennedy, divining rods for finding water, astrology, more Noah’s arks on Ararat than you can poke a stick at, perpetual motion machines, star signs, aromatherapy and other fantastical and untested wonders of the fertile human imagination. These guys just make stuff up and then move right along when logical heat is applied.
He evidently felt the need for extra clout to fend off his detractors. His daughter revealed that he was really “Harley”, and invented “J Harlen” as a more impressive moniker.
Climateace-
Assumption-“Oh dear – a paper which starts by defining anyone who dares question the views of the author as a ‘troll’. ”
Fact-Essay begins- “It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science.”
There is no definition made by the author as to what constitutes a “troll” to him. At all. Your attribution to him that he defines it as “anyone who dares to question his views”, is truly a piece of….er…um…sophistry, which is gloriously ironic and hypocritical in it’s context. It’s called a STRAWMAN.
“D Hoffer may also consider that there is an internal contradiction to his position on Galileo. It was the peer-reviewed literature that was mostly right. It was the religious science-deniers of the day who refused to accept the peer-reviewed literature.”
Maybe your sophistry gets in the way of your reading comprehension, maybe it blocks the view.
“But both history and the current peer reviewed science are, if one steps back and looks at the big picture, on the skeptic side.”
You see, he made it clear that, because MOST of the peer-reviewed literature today does not support the AGW theory, there is no internal contradiction. The vast majority of actual scientific research contradicts AGW outright, (unless your name is Cook or Nuccitelli and you think everyone else on the planet is too gullible to actually check your work) and shows a complete lack of consensus on the matter. It is the ” AGW religion/ science pretenders” of our day who refuse to accept the REAL peer-reviewed literature. In attacking Mr. Hoffer with logical fallacies and appeals to authority, you only solidify his argument and make him a “heretic” in your eyes.
In the fifth century BC, Empedocles theorized that one could see by virtue of rays emanating from one’s eyes. Falsifying this notion required no more than pointing out that one cannot see in a dark room.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Incredible. But true– no optics for the next 1500 years.
In the 4th century BC, Anaxagoras argued that the sun was a fiery stone, larger than the Peloponnese. He must have seen the relationship between fire and light. But he was banished from Athens for heresy.
Thanks David. An interesting article.
Happy New Year to all that help making WUWT!
Even sceptics fall into the trap of regarding peer review as a verification and testing of a paper. Much better to think of it as unpaid copy editing, a quickie once-over to check for obvious slip-ups — with the “payoff” that one gets to greenlight views that agree with yours, and put stumbling blocks and caltrops in the way of those that don’t. Not to mention requiring citations of papers your name happens to be attached to, for valuable Index points.
Thanks crosspatch, I’m glad to be far away to the SE.
See http://www.weatherbell.com/saturday-summary-december-28-2013 (Joe Bastardi @ Weatherbell).
Is there some law that says if you’re having an argument about science and you compare yourself to Galileo you automatically lose?
True, Galileo’s regrettable censorship in the 1630-1650’s occurred, but it is memorable most in the collective socialist memories of those who deliberately want to propagandize skeptical attitudes with their “flat-earth” denialism and tarnish all skeptics with a fervid anti-religious framework of distortion and exaggeration, compared of course, to the “truth” and “knowledge” purported to be exampled by the “Science” of their peer-reviewed (in pal-edited) journals paid for by government-granting money. Recall, at the time, there was no real evidence of motion around anything. Only dots of light criss-crossing back and forth over a round image of Jupiter through a blurry telescope. It is to Galileo’s credit that he WAS able to “see” that circular motion as he looked at the image sideways!
Today, ALL of the “evidence” points to the fallacy and exaggerations-for-money/power/profit/publication/promotions/politics of CAGW across the entire “scientific” horde of consensus-seekers and tax-suckers.
More accurately, more timely is the utter disdain and hatred expressed AGAINST the continental drift theory first proposed in the mid-1920’s, not plotted until September 1952, and not accepted until the mid-60’s with satellite data and magnetic field information by the “consensus” of geologists.
Or the Royal Society “consensus” authorities that opposed using chronometers, that falsely tested chronometers against their “favorite” moon-offset calculations – that were deeply flawed, more difficult to use, but employed “LOTS” of Royal Society clerks and book makers and which promised great rewards … to the Royal Society “leadership” … Bias? Nah.
Rather, I would challenge “climateace” to name ONE scientific principle now taught that did NOT first have to “break through” the “scientific consensus of its time” to show that EVERY contemporary expert in every field at every breakthrough – at the time of the evidence and the proposal itself – was “dead wrong.”
Bravo! The journals and their “peers” have been allowed to frame the debate.
http://geosciencebigpicture.com/2013/12/16/science-and-government/
crosspatch said @ 5:50 pm
“…you have one week to prepare … Chicago might see -30F.”
Not as outrageous as 5 meters of sea level rise by 2100, but outrageous nevertheless.
‘Khwarizmi says:
December 29, 2013 at 6:39 pm
In the fifth century BC, Empedocles theorized that one could see by virtue of rays emanating from one’s eyes. Falsifying this notion required no more than pointing out that one cannot see in a dark room.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Incredible. But true– no optics for the next 1500 years.
In the 4th century BC, Anaxagoras argued that the sun was a fiery stone, larger than the Peloponnese. He must have seen the relationship between fire and light. But he was banished from Athens for heresy.’
Which particular heresy? The one where he reckoned that the Earth is flat?
Aphan
‘It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science.”
There is no definition made by the author as to what constitutes a “troll” to him.’
I have just read the first two lines of your post and that was enough, methinks.
D Hoffer defines a troll as ‘someone who declares their belief in peer reviewed science’.
‘RACookPE1978 says:
December 29, 2013 at 6:54 pm
True, Galileo’s regrettable censorship in the 1630-1650′s occurred…’
Um, parts of Galileo’s work was on the index of banned books well into the 19th Century. I am not sure exactly when the last of Galileo’s work was unbanned.
In any case, you are out by around two centuries of Roman Catholic Church censorship of Galileo’s works.
Quote- climateace says: December 29, 2013 at 5:41 pm
“Galileo was done for heresy (ie breaching matters of faith and morals) by an organisation that bases itself on being the sole and divinely-directed arbiters of those well-known pieces of peer-reviewed scientific literature – the gospels. In other words, according to those who defined this stuff at the time, at the core, Galileo’s transgressions were theological.”
Religions speak with one voice on climate policy
Many religious groups – Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Uniting Church, Baptists, Salvation Army, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Baha’i – have statements upholding humanity’s responsibility to protect the environment on which life depends. While these statements are often not well known or widely proclaimed, increasingly these traditions are beginning to appreciate the importance of protecting the environment, and especially facing up to the urgent question of climate change caused by carbon pollution.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/06/27/3791330.htm
Not much has changed, climateace.
Does anyone here have a clue on what problem Galileo and other astronomers where trying to solve anyway?
History anyone?
Mark McGuire
An interesting post.
The erstwhile head of the Roman Catholic Church in Australia, and now close advisor to Pope Francis in the Vatican Curia, Cardinel Pell, is a vociferous anti-warmist.
I have been beating this drum for about 7 years. The denizens of Climate Etc are probably, and justifiably, tired of my continually saying that I only trust hard, measured, empirical data, and nothing else. It is a pleasure to see what I so firmly believe set out in such an eloquent paper. Thank you very much indeed.
I should note that in discussing CAGW with warmists, on ANY subject they can invariably quote a pal (peer) reviewed reference that “proves” the CAGW side is correct. It is simply impractical to show that the science in pretty well all of these papers, leaves a lot to be desired.
‘Steve Case says:
December 29, 2013 at 6:57 pm
crosspatch said @ 5:50 pm
“…you have one week to prepare … Chicago might see -30F.”
Not as outrageous as 5 meters of sea level rise by 2100, but outrageous nevertheless.’
Well, looking at the probabilities, I suggest you pack your kayak and bathers in the cellar, and get your fur parkas, snow-shoes and cross country skis out of the attic.
“Let the light that shines in your eyes, shine on me …”
http://umeshmadan.wordpress.com/tag/empedocles/
climateace,
Anaxagoras was charged with “impiety” and banished from Athens for promoting several speculative ideas, including the burning stones hypothesis for the stars and sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaxagoras
But you cheery pick the flat earth portion of the picture as if doing so justified the persecution, in the same way that some people invoke Galileo’s insubordination to the Catholic “authorities” to justify his persecution.
Please stop bombing threads with your deluge of disruptive trolling posts.
Great essay, David. But, isn’t it a stretch to say the GCM’s are models? Aren’t they really just elaboate curve fitted equations that attempt to predict outside the bounds of the data? Yes, all GCM’s have a verification phase, but then they have a hard wired predictive phase.
But each model has one common, basic assumption: when CO2 goes up, temperture will go up. So all GCM’s “models” force CO2 to rise & voila: temperature goes up.
Where’s the “model?” There’s no other assumption that would allow temperature to fall… ever!
Yes, there may be some intermediate step, like clouds & albedo, but all the models merely predict outside the bounds of their data, according to an assumption that says, higher CO2 causes higher tempertaures.
That is probably important in some bizarre context not obvious to the rest of us.
Peer review does not ensure the veracity of a scientific conclusion, just that the researcher made no blatant flaws, as far as the peer reviewers could see, in his/her research. The best example I know is Hubble vs Van Maanen on whether spiral nebulae were external to the milky way. Both were “authorities, both were “peer” reviewed, both published in the same prestigious journals sometimes in the same issues. But time and falsification would show that one was irredeemably wrong, and the other was unassailably right.
http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/ideas/bad-evidence.htm
So anytime one quotes “peer” review, just snort and say, well that just means someone checked for typos.
addendum to Hubble vs Van Maanen
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/228963?uid=3739560&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103272240203
Another recent case of the establishment fighting tooth and nail against a challenge to the orthodoxy: the fairly recent discovery of h. pilori as the primary cause of gastric ulcers.
The fact is that, prior to a Kuhnian paradigm shift, it is to be expected that the majority of researchers will hold the wrong opinion. Going along with majority opinion is not generally a winning strategy on the frontiers of science. In the case of Anthropogenic Global Warming, it is now readily apparent that the Emperor has been going about starkers, and plunging temperatures are causing noticeable shrinkage.
‘Khwarizmi says:
December 29, 2013 at 7:33 pm
climateace,
Anaxagoras was charged with “impiety” and banished from Athens for promoting several speculative ideas, including the burning stones hypothesis for the stars and sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaxagoras
But you cheery pick the flat earth portion of the picture as if doing so justified the persecution, in the same way that some people invoke Galileo’s insubordination to the Catholic “authorities” to justify his persecution.’
(1) Most of the histories (there are several stories for each of the important events in his life) around Anaxagoras are speculative. In general, Anaxagoras’ stories lend little to the discussion about people who rather prefer their science peer-reviewed aka ‘trolls’.
(2) There is a Roman Catholic Church (Sainte-Chapelle) in the centre of Paris which has a stained glass window depicting the earth as flat. The Church was built around 800 years ago and was the main church of the Roman Catholic Kings at the time.
(3) These Mediaeval flat earthers would have welcomed Anaxagoras for his ‘piety’.
(4) Just as their successors condemned Galileo for his impiety (aka heresy).
‘Please stop bombing threads with your deluge of disruptive trolling posts.”
Trying for a bit of censorship yourself? The guys who locked up Galileo would have some pointers for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte-Chapelle
Silly Season’s Greetings, climateace.
Indeed Pell Has been known to say that.
” A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no-one believes individually.”
Abba Eban.
climateace says:
“If the comparison is between peer-reviewed science and blog posts, give me the peer-reviewed stuff any time.”
I would agree with that — except in mainstreal climate pal review, which has been thoroughly corrupted.
Don’t believe me? Then you have never read the Climategate I & II emails.
Regarding a prediction of -30°F in Chicago by next week
climateace said @ 7:23 pm
“Well, looking at the probabilities, I suggest you pack your kayak and bathers in the cellar, and get your fur parkas, snow-shoes and cross country skis out of the attic.”
I’m 100 miles north of Chicago and the coldest here has been -26°F about 30 years ago. I am very suspicious of outrageous predictions.
MM
‘Silly Season’s Greetings, climateace.
Indeed Pell Has been known to say that.
” A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no-one believes individually.”
Abba Eban.’
If he managed to pass over rubbish like that as an intellectual insight, it is little wonder that he made a good diplomat.
Lol – the AGW peer review cartel – paid monkey. But, but, but if you pay the third world billions the sky won’t fall – even the IPCC can’t keep a straight face on that one anymore.
SC
‘ I am very suspicious of outrageous predictions.’
Well, I would be too.
The problem appears to be working out which ones are ‘outrageous’. Leaving it until after the event is not necessarily a terribly good risk management strategy6.
climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 7:51 pm
“… about people who rather prefer their science peer-reviewed aka ‘trolls’.”
AKA, those who believe that two wrongs make a right, i.e., an argumentum ad verecundiam + an argumentum ad populum = truth.
I love it… McGuire…
Going from “peer review” right back to “carbon pollution” . Them meme of a true believer of CAGW.. Circle the wagons and they wont know where to start…
Churches acknowledge good stewardship not the political theft of God given freedoms that CAGW is. Your view IMHO is very short sighted. CO2 is needed and expelled by all life on earth.
Anyone who uses Galileo as an example of anti-science bigotry has not studied the Galileo affair – at all or the history of science for that matter. It is THE religion versus SCIENCE (trademark) myth and all argument then ceases. Commenters will then throw in a few ancient quotes about witches and cats, ignore the horror of modern totalitarian genocides and the mass slaughter of children by abortion and consider themselves heroically in the age of reason and virtue – so unlike those superstitious and anti-science medievals! Then there’s Global Warming to contend with. Burn the deniers! Burn them!
What greatly angers me about, for example Reddit’s Nathan Allen, is that, IMO, He hides the truth that he is biased beyond belief. FACT He works for Dow Chemical; FACT Dow is heavily invested in the carbon trade, in fact, Dow is even the “carbon partner” for the next Olympics! So the truth, should glib warmers as i call them, be bothered to question it: is Allen is hiding his financial interests, and that of his employer?. Start by looking at his patents, then look at his paycheck provider.
I said this was going to be possibly history making cold. As in coldest yet recorded in many locations:
‘dbstealey
climateace says:
“If the comparison is between peer-reviewed science and blog posts, give me the peer-reviewed stuff any time.”
I would agree with that — except in mainstreal climate pal review, which has been thoroughly corrupted.
Don’t believe me? Then you have never read the Climategate I & II emails.’
I have not said that all peer-reviewed science is either good science or particularly right. It is a matter of probabilities. Personally, I hope that 97% of today’s climate scientists are dead wrong. If for no other reason than that I have children and grandchildren.
You can take the peer reviewed science of thousands of climate scientists and the take what dozens of peak science organisations put on all this stuff, or you can go for bloggers (whose motivations are obscure, to say the least) who make up dozens of theories on the run and who dodge from one to another as they move right along.
Personally, I hope all the climate models are completely and utterly wrong. I hope that the oceans and deep oceans are not warming at all. I hope that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are completely irrelevant to climate. I hope that the chemical changes in the oceans are irrelevant to ocean biodiversity. I hope that the thousands of taxa that are on the geographical and phenological move are wrong as well.
It is just that no-one has come up with the comprehensive Kuhnian moment, have they?
Bloggers who whinge about thousands of climate scientists and peak science bodies secretly getting together to bodgie up tens of thousands of papers just do not cut it for me.
‘ Bart says:
December 29, 2013 at 8:01 pm
climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 7:51 pm
“… about people who rather prefer their science peer-reviewed aka ‘trolls’.”
AKA, those who believe that two wrongs make a right’
That was precisely my original point.
And this is the anomaly forecast currently. Note these are not absolute temps, they are departures from normal. Up to 50F below normal in some locations.
:large
Ever notice that Warren and Climateace are never in the same room at the same time?
Re: Ms. Clima Teace — “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
***********************************************************************
@dp — lol. (and Pippen-Poppen is MIA, too)
What was the date of the last time warming harmed us or nature? I misremember. To the nearest millennium will do, thanks.
All the BOOM! -ing and BAM!-ing from the WUWT Big Guns above has been a thrill to hear. lol, you’ve blown that poor little tub of an S. S. Clima Teace out of the water so high and so many times that her crew probably thinks they signed up for astronaut duty.
WAY TO GO, WUWT SCIENCE GIANTS!!!
(I know, I know, I’m going)
[Just bold, capital letters? No italics? 8<) Mod]
Another one who spoke up against consensus:
“Seven centuries ago a sickly English friar dispatched a strident missive to Rome. Addressed to Pope Clement IV, it was an urgent appeal to set right time itself. Calculating that the calendar year was some 11 minutes longer than the actual solar year, Roger Bacon informed the supreme pontiff that this amounted to an error of an entire day every 125 years, a surplus of time that over the centuries had accumulated by Bacon’s era to nine day. (In the same treatise Bacon elsewhere uses the figure once in every 130 years. The actual error is closer to once every 128 years)
Left unchecked, this drift would eventually shift March to the dead winter and August to spring.
More horrific in this pious age was Bacon’s insistence that Christians were celebrating Easter and every other holy day on the wrong dates, a charge so outrageous in 1267 that Bacon risked being branded a heretic for challenging the veracity of the Catholic Church.”
Text taken from “The Calendar – The 5,000 year struggle to align the clock and the Heavens and what happened to the missing ten days, by David Ewing Duncan.
The discussion of Galileo and others versus Kepler lacks consideration of Occam’s razor. Galileo’s simple theory explained more observations than did the Ptolemaic theory and was therefore a big advance in science.
The fact that Kepler was able to explain more than Galileo is as irrelevant as the fact that Einstein’s theories of relativity can explain more than Kepler’s theory.
David you did fail to define troll, however Climate A showed up to correct that omission.
Arguing from authority is the mark of a fool, often a very well informed fool but a fool none the less.
The peer review argument is an intelligence test, prior to climate gate, I too assumed there was more to peer review than an underpaid,pal pass system.
I did understand that peer review did not mean being correct about the topic, but I assumed it to mean a reasonable approach to the speculation and that proper documentation of the methods and data were done.
But is it true?. This requires the ability to replicate, I never suspected that non-replicatable nonsense would be the norm of climatology, every time we get a better insight into this climate science it is worse than we thought. But how much worse can I believe it to be, before I must disregard it as science?
The other side of this , the appeal to the authority of science.
Wonderful how those who insist they have scads of science, seem appalled when asked to display their goods, using that old scientific method.
Is the method, out of fashion?
I do not comprehend how one can claim a scientific case can be made, but then refuse to use the only means available to have a debate.
That old fashioned method, spell out your case, present your measurements, show your work, diss your beliefs, show what might prove you wrong, challenge your peers to rip your speculation apart and start again.
Without the method, any argument will be circular and rest on the authority of beliefs.
From 2009, the 400th aniversay of the telescope. A good discussion of the Galileo debacle and associated revisionism hereabouts:
http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/5726515
climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 8:10 pm
It is just that no-one has come up with the comprehensive Kuhnian moment, have they?
I think we have had one. As this article says:
No longer is the debate in regard to if the models are wrong. The debate is now about why the models are wrong.
Today I bought the magazine “New Scientist”, 7 December 2013 whose cover story was: CLIMATE SLOWDOWN IS IT TIME TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING?
They talk about all kinds of things, including why the rate of surface warming has slowed. Here are some reasons given: a series of cold La Ninas; extra low in solar output; higher volcanic emissions; much heat going into the ocean; and soaring aerosol emissions from China.
Regarding heat in the ocean, they quote Trenberth who says: “ Part of the heat is lost. Some of the heat comes back in the next El Nino.”
Most of the peer-reviewed science is very good, including some of the peer-reviewed papers cited by the author; some of the peer-reviewed papers have serious liabilities, but all of them have flaws. The same disparities occurred in the papers of Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac.
This comment was a waste of reading time.
crosspatch says:
December 29, 2013 at 8:09 pm
I’m 100 miles north of Chicago and the coldest here has been -26°F about 30 years ago. I am very suspicious of outrageous predictions.
I said this was going to be possibly history making cold. As in coldest yet recorded in many locations:
———————————————————–
You won’t get much sympathy around here. We hit -31F for a new state record for Oklahoma two winters back.
RACookPE1978 says:
December 29, 2013 at 6:54 pm
. . . Recall, at the time, there was no real evidence of motion around anything. Only dots of light criss-crossing back and forth over a round image of Jupiter through a blurry telescope. It is to Galileo’s credit that he WAS able to “see” that circular motion as he looked at the image sideways!
———————————————————-
I think that the evidence that convinced Galileo of the correctness of the heliocentric system was his observation of the phases of Venus. That places it between us and the sun in the “new Venus” phase and opposite the sun in the nearly “full Venus” phase.
Hey Jim,
I don’t need wooden teeth to teach about George Washington. (Uncle Si Robertson, Duck Dynasty)
P.S.Thanks for re-posting that Geo-Engineering video for me on the previous thread.
@Matthew R Marler
If you had any real experience with academic/scientific journals, you would know that most of the published material is trash. It is not a “climate” issue. It is not even a “political” issue. In my opinion, the problem is partly caused by a catastrophically awful review system (I blame the editors). There exist, of course, particular fields and specific journals that fair better but, in general, the quality is appalling.
One never knows where the discussion of an article one writes is going to go, particularly on this site. What interests me about this thread the most is where it didn’t go.
Of all the comments critical of my article, not a single one even attempted to refute my main assertion; The climate models are wrong, demonstrating that the science upon which they are founded is wrong, and the biggest proponents of the CAGW meme in the climate science community are now reduced to increasingly implausible explanations as to why.
That’s a pretty stark accusation to go unchallenged by the CAGW cheer leaders. Was hoping for a rollicking debate with one or more of them on that point. I’m now conflicted. I’m not sure if I should feel disappointed or vindicated.
Matthew R Marler;
This comment was a waste of reading time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well yes it was. Now would you care to comment on the article?
DHoffer
It is a bit rich expecting potential critics to take you seriously when you begin your article by defining everyone who disagrees with you as a ‘troll’.
Davidmhoffer, there is ample evidence that climate models have no useful predictive output (probably because they include CO2 levels which have no influence on climate and discount to a large extent the large influence of changes of ground level & stratospheric solar radiation input). The acceptance of poor modelling is a strong indicator of the incompetence of so-called climate scientists.
The climategate emails show that incompetent persons have peer reviewed journals from incompetent mates and have stopped contrary articles being published by through the review system. It only takes a few incompetents in important influential positions to skew the public mindset of unqualified people. It has happened many times in the past and will happen again in future. Religions were a mechanism to control the public in the past. It is still happening in the middle east. Many say belief in environmental harm is a religious influence in western nations.
climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 11:23 pm
DHoffer
It is a bit rich expecting potential critics to take you seriously when you begin your article by defining everyone who disagrees with you as a ‘troll’.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
1. I did no such thing. I made an observation as to the tactics frequently used by trolls.
2. You claim not to take me seriously, but felt compelled to post several comments critical of my article.
3. I repeated my challenge to discuss the main point of my article, and you respond with excuses not to.
I see that the personal abusers have come out from under their rocks.
The troll from fire-ravaged Canberra lent nothing of value to the discussion when it said: “In general, Anaxagoras’ stories lend little to the discussion about people who rather prefer their science peer-reviewed aka ‘trolls’.”
= = = = = = =
Category error: climatology isn’t a science–it’s a peer-reviewed religion.
The missing heat was never created. It goes CO2 -> warming -> more water vapour -> more warming. The observations tell that this is not happening. Warming due to CO2 only is too small to observe and positive feedbacks do not occur.
DHoffer says
‘It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science.’
Let’s change that around a bit to clarify what is going on:
‘It is a favourite tactic amongst denialist trolls to declare their belief in un-peer reviewed blog posts.’
Then follow this up with some trashy and illogical analogies involving people like Galileo. Of course anyone who takes up the cudgels in support of un-peer reviewed blogs is automatically a denialist troll by definition. Then you announce that the central point of the article is not about dissing people for being trolls or laying out some rubbish about Galileo. It is something else entirely and if they do not want to talk about that they shows that not only are they trolls, they are cowardly trolls.
You could start a completely different quality of conversation here by withdrawing without qualification your unproductive and abusive comment about trolls.
climateace said;
“If the comparison is between peer-reviewed science and blog posts, give me the peer-reviewed stuff any time. It is not they are right all the time. It is that they are more likely to be right more of the time than the bloggers.”
You have made a key point. Those who matter in deciding our future is as a high cost, intermittent energy society, paying reparations to those who now emit more co2 than we do, will not read blogs and rely on their science to make decisions, no matter how good they might be.
Peer review-with all its faults enables ideas to gain credence and have impact where it matters-with our decision makers.
I am currently working on two papers that I hope to put forward for peer review during 2014. It is up to other authors what they do, but every week I see here many interesting ideas that are worthy of an audience that peer review will provide.
tonyb
‘ Khwarizmi says:
December 29, 2013 at 11:41 pm
The troll from fire-ravaged Canberra lent nothing of value to the discussion when it said: “In general, Anaxagoras’ stories lend little to the discussion about people who rather prefer their science peer-reviewed aka ‘trolls’.”
= = = = = = =
Category error: climatology isn’t a science–it’s a peer-reviewed religion.
“The position of science in the past was by no means surprising. Men of science affirmed things that were contrary to what everybody had believed. Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a red hot stone and that the moon was made of earth. For his impiety he was banished from Athens, for was it not well known that the sun was a god and the moon a godess?” –Bertrand Russell, 1948
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1948_reith3.pdf‘
All that that demonstrates is that as a philospher, Russell was a mediocre historian.
climateace says:
Personally, I hope all the climate models are completely and utterly wrong.
They are. If you disagree, show us where they have been right. Take your time…
And:
I hope that the oceans and deep oceans are not warming at all.
They’re not.
And:
I hope that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are completely irrelevant to climate.
They are.
…And so on. Everything you’re worrying about is a baseless scare. Really. There is simply no truth to the “carbon” scare, or anything related to it. Study up on the Null Hypothesis, and you will see that everything currently being observed has happened before, and to a greater degree — and when “carbon” was much lower.
Now, I suggest worrying about real, concrete threats to society, like a possible Carbon Tax.
Excellent article! As you say, the gap between prediction and reality should have proved fatal for the CAGW models to an objective observer. Sadly, a prior commitment to CAGW on philosophical grounds trumps actual data for many folks.
I see very similar reactions whenever someone points out the scientific flaws and missed predictions of the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis. The usual response is ad hominem attacks, accusations of being a creationist (sort of like being labeled a climate denier), etc, etc. Again, a prior commitment trumps actual experience & evidence.
d stealey says
‘climateace says:
Personally, I hope all the climate models are completely and utterly wrong.
They are. If you disagree, show us where they have been right. Take your time…
And:
I hope that the oceans and deep oceans are not warming at all.
They’re not.’
You then give a reference which shows a graph with only eight years of data in it.
See?
My Compliments, Old Crusader, on getting it right on Galileo, most people have no clue that this so called persecution was totally self created.
From another thread;
“climateace says:
December 28, 2013 at 11:51 pm
By the way, for all you bleeding heart desk jockeys, elites, easy-come-easy-go wordsmiths, faux experts on the hard life, so-called self-styled battlers and sundry victims of governments, bureaucrats, big business, plus all the genuine whingers who have never had to do a real hard day’s work for a living in their lives…”
And in this thread;
“climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 11:44 pm
You could start a completely different quality of conversation here by withdrawing without qualification your unproductive and abusive comment…”
On one hand you like throw around “abusive comment(s)” then on the other you dislike comment(s) about trolls. I think you are seriously insecure somehow as a result of your “my life is/was harder than yours” experiences and “woe is me” type postings.
Most of the misinterpretations of science boil down to the following sort of argument:
Tom Cruise is a man who has slept with Hollywood actresses.
I am a man too.
Therefore I can also sleep with Hollywood actresses.
It is the extension of the particular into the generality without considering whether that is appropriate so to do.
When I worked in cancer research back in the day, if you were a young PhD student without 10 years lab experience, you would read paper after paper explaining in detail how ‘gene expression worked’.
What you actually read was how a gene was expressed under a very specific set of circumstances, usually during the exponential growth of tissue culture cells in 2-D.
If you weren’t careful, you would extrapolate that narrowly rigorous analysis into how genes behaved, in 3-D, within a tumour grown artificially under the skin of a mouse lacking an immune system.
If you were a journalist, you might extrapolate that even further into implying that you could, from the first set of data, design a drug to treat a human tumour too.
The history of drug development tells you that those assumptions usually, but not always, turn out to be inappropriate.
Nowadays, of course, you can do whole-genome analysis of RNA and protein extracted directly from excised human tumours, which is a far better model to identify imbalances of gene expression between normal and tumorous tissues. You can create transgenic mice with specific human gene insertions which will develop tumours containing those gene alterations, which are a better first test for potential anti-cancer drugs than using mouse tumours. You can retain an immune system and still develop tumours in those models, which is better than an immune-deficient system (although many cancer patients are immunocompromised).
Even then, some treatments which seem to work great in rodent models fail to work in humans, simply because humans are different and more complicated than rodents.
After all, no-one could detect an LD50 for thalidomide in rodents and we all know what happened in humans……
The lesson in analysing all PRAs is to write down, rigorously, all the assumptions made by the authors and to match that to the observed reality in the whole system about which you wish to gain understanding.
At that point, you must decide how much useful information can be extracted from the model system and, once it has been extracted, move to a more complex one which may be less amenable to simplistic analysis but will, when utilised correctly, provide a closer insight to the true reality.
The final point to note is that it is a matter of prospective uncertainty and retrospective exactitude exactly when a particular model has run its course of usefulness.
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you know the answer to that one.
Usually, the decision is made on a combination of experience and intuition, although beyond a certain point it is dogged stubbornness which prevents certain folks from moving on.
In my opinion, the key question moving forward in climate science should be:
‘What are the conditions, forcings and stochastic events which cause a thermostat model of earth’s climate to break down and how is a new equilibrium position reached and determined?’
But that’s just my opinion as an outsider.
It’s free for everyone interested, capable and active in the field to frame their own key questions.
And it’s the responsibility of those who fund climate science to decide which questions are the most important ones for their funds to address.
crosspatch says:
December 29, 2013 at 5:50 pm
You know it’s cold when you ride on squared (flat on one side actually) tires for a few miles to work in the am. 🙂 We’re just a few mins north of the St. Lawrence, in SE Ontario and we’ve had a -34C already one night this past month. Our forecast has this cold front starting on Mon PM and running until about the weekend. Will be running the wood stove full tilt for sure.
Patrick
That comment came at the end of numerous instances of personal abuse.
Someone called me a ‘hobby farmer’, for example. I worked hard as a kid and as a young man in hard rural work. If people can dish that sort of personal rubbish out, they ought to be able to take it, don’t you think?
And if D Hoffer actually starts his blog with abuse about so-called trolls (aka people who disagree with him), he ought to be able to cope with the consequences, don’t you think?
Seems to me that would depend on the computer, wouldn’t it?
And that is really the crux of the issue. The more detailed you make the model, the more difficult it becomes. But I do think there are some basic problems our models do not address. For example, you can not consider the atmosphere to be one monolithic thing. We have a barrier to convection at the tropopause that needs to be taken into account. So the troposphere should, in my opinion, be modeled more like a balloon. If you heat it up, it expands. If it expands, it increases its surface area and tries to cool itself down. Warming the troposphere raises the tropopause and thereby the tops of convective clouds in things like storm cells which allow them to rise above more of the atmospheric CO2. A greenhouse is not a good analogy for Earth’s atmosphere because it is a convective heat engine that carries a lot of heat beyond the LWIR barrier. Sure, if we had a dry atmosphere with no clouds with a smooth surface of the same composition across the entire face of the planet and no convection, it would be easy to model how much LWIR emitted from the surface from solar warming would be re-emitted downwards from atmospheric CO2 but that is not how Earth’s atmosphere works. If the surface shed heat only by radiation, sure, the models make sense but they don’t. They also shed heat by conduction. warming air in direct contact with that surface which then rises. As it rises, there is less CO2 above it than below it so a photon emitted upwards has a greater chance of passing into space than it did at the surface. Add water and now you have an active coolant introduced to the system. Water is evaporated, rises to altitude, condenses and releases that heat high above most of the CO2.
The current climate models in my opinion are basically baloney. They model a planet of Earth’s size and distance from the sun — just not a planet like Earth.
@climateace – so someone here talks about trolls and you jump right in and loudly protest, repeatedly …
This post is a jumble of nonsense. It is clear that Hoffer has no idea of what the peer review process is and what it is supposed to do.
As other commenters have observed, Galileo et al. have nothing whatever to do with the case.
In itself, the peer review process is nothing to do with maintaining an orthodoxy (although it may be misused as ‘pal review’ to do just that).
Nor does peer review – when properly carried out – make the conclusions of a paper right or wrong: other procedures of the scientific method do that.
Editors of learned journals cannot hope to subject all the articles that come their way to specialist scrutiny – most will be outside their direct subject specialities.
Peer reviewers do that job.
What is this specialist scrutiny?
1- Is the paper an important/worthwhile contribution to its field?
2- Does the paper accord with standard publishing practice (references, style, data etc.)
3- Does the paper make comprehensive reference to other relevant publications. Are these references correct?
4- Is the paper free of egregious errors?
This last point does not mean that the content of the paper is true, just that it is not obviously wrong in some matter of fact.
None of Hoffer’s windy statements about Galileo and orthodox science would survive if subjected to a peer review process. QED.
Dear,oh dear ,oh dear.
The working principles for determining the motions of the Earth for Copernicus who originally proposed them and those who followed like Galileo and Kepler relied on a core observation that the wandering motions of the other planets as they appeared to move in one direction against the background stars and then the other direction was due to the orbital motion of the Earth itself –
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html
Least anyone decide to elevate Kepler over Copernicus in order to promote contemporary perceptions then the words of Kepler himself should be enough –
“. . . the ancient hypotheses clearly fail to account for certain important matters. For example, they do not comprehend the causes of the numbers, extents and durations of the retrogradations and of their agreeing so well with the position and mean motion of the sun. Copernicus alone gives an explanation to those things that provoke astonishment among other astronomers, thus destroying the source of astonishment, which lies in the ignorance of the causes.” Kepler ,1596, Mysterium Cosmographicum
The real problem for the Pope along with Galileo and most any astronomer at the time was whether the system which predicts astronomical events and the positions of celestial objects to each other can be used to prove the Earth’s motions –
“Better still, if someone wishes, he can assign to the sky those motions of the earth that [Copernicus] adds to the first two, and use the same calculation procedures. But that highly learned and intelligent man considered it inadvisable, on account of these undisciplined minds, to invert the entire system of his hypotheses, and he contented himself with having established
that which was sufficient for the true discovery of phenomena.” Gemma Frisius
It is still such a complex argument to discriminate between predictive astronomy based on the calendar system and the fairly simple arguments which determine that the Earth moves in an orbit between Mars and Venus.
Today it is even possible to partition the resolutions for apparent retrogrades between the outer planets and the faster moving Earth from the entirely separate resolution for the faster moving inner planets.
“Of all the comments critical of my article, not a single one even attempted to refute my main assertion; The climate models are wrong, demonstrating that the science upon which they are founded is wrong, and the biggest proponents of the CAGW meme in the climate science community are now reduced to increasingly implausible explanations as to why.”
1. you assert it but do not show your work.
2. Of the 43 models which did you test? what test did you use?
3. You realize that some of the models perform better than others. Which performs the best?
and on what tests? Of the 2 or three models that cannot be rejected by statistical tests
how did you “falsify” them?
4. The experiment has only been run once. How did you do your statistics?
5, Dont make the mistake of averaging the models. That approach has been discredited here.
6. If a model doesnt match observations this is all you know.
A) the observations are wrong, do the experiment again.
B) some inputs may be wrong. you need to find out which ones
C) some portion of the model is wrong. Which part? models and theories are never
rejected in total because every model relies on multiple interconnected parts including
laws of logic and math. See Duhem- Quine
D. some or all of the above.
7. The models are found on known physcial laws ( gravity for example) and radiative physics.
They also have physics that is less well known. When you reject the science in the models do you reject it all or only a part? how did you decide which parts? or do you reject it all?
climateace
I have a question for you, what do you believe or think the peer science says about the temperature increase comes from doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere? Is it 4C, 2C, 1c or .5C there has been peer reviewed papers that have said any one of those numbers, Secondly what the observation telling us in your mind? I know what the data is tell me, that at best it is .5 and at that we have seen most of the warming already. As to you 5 meter rise in the oceans well the sophistry does not even warrant a retort. As far as the temperature in Chicago, well since have spent most of my life in the Fargo, western Minnesota and western North Dakota area I know cold and heat the temperature extremes of the region is well over 150 degrees, As to the cold in that region I knew a young man from Chicago whom had come up to Moorhead Minnesota for collage education, when i had ask him how he spent his first winter in Moorhead he said indoors. Yes I do believe Fargo could use some global warming all though I no longer affected by it since I now live in Arizona and yes 116 is a lot better the -50 and mind you I have experience both and the -50 was not a wind chill temperature, I consider wind chill an idiots measurement of temperature since only and idiot would stand out in the direct wind. I do believe from your post you and such and idiot would have much in common.
Hoffer: “…my main assertion; The climate models are wrong…”
Silly me! Thanks for clearing that up, that out of the 20 or so rambling assertions in your piece titled ‘peer review’ that was your main one.
Stakhanov medal to @climateace, for plugging on! But it is futile – you won’t get through to him, nor all the others here writing learned tracts on Galileo.
“climateace says:
December 30, 2013 at 12:36 am”
You pretty much answer your own questions. Hey, I’ve been called a troll, or similar, by people in very influential positions, even here at WUWT. As for name-calling, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If you don’t like it, don’t respond nor take the bait and respond likewise.
We (Scientists) are either wrong or right (Tecnically speaking when talking about the effect of ~3% of CO2 has on climate) however, so far there is no testable, measureable, empriacle evidence to support the claim that that amount of CO2 is driving climate to change in a bad way. None!
There are more important issues, as you point out, facing Aus, like native soil, plant and animal degredation. Reducing CO2 emissions (The greens want 30% of ~1.5% – LAUGH).
I have been called a troll in other blogs for stating that it is completely rediculous to suggest that any reduction to the ~1.5% (Australian contribution) of the ~3% (Annual IPCC estimated total human contribution) to ~400ppm/v CO2 (Given we know certain facts about CO2 like time lag and effect at concentration) is going to change anything other than our economies for absolutely no benefit at all to climate, the environment or anything. This is the whole agrument!
GlynnMhor says:
OldCrusader is quite right.
The Copernican-Gallilean heliocentric system offered exactly zero improvement over the Ptolemaic geocentric one in predicting planetary positions. It gave the exact same errors for the exact same reasons.
Kepler’s revolutionary heliofocal system, in contrast, yielded planetary positions more accurate than the margin of measurement error of the time.
Yet Kepler gets very little credit or fame, while the other two bask in historical glory for their failed hypothesis.
===
Kepler’s modification of circular orbits to slightly elliptical orbits was a valuable scientific improvement. However, it is incomparable to the total change of mentality and belief that is required to accept that the Earth and the human race, as God’s creations, is not the centre of the universe.
That is what makes the earlier discoveries so much more important, not the mathematical precision.
There was no theological requirement for any intelligent Christian to believe the Earth was the center of anything and in fact the opposite as the great Christian works were then promoting the belief in God everywhere. The views certainly changed around the juncture of the Galileo affair but this was a political maneuver with little to do with the astronomical culture preceding the discoveries of Copernicus.
I wish the modern reader would grow up and not demote the reasoning our ancestors applied to observations for, like any great discovery, it is not just proving the Earth moves,it is finding just the right arguments to satisfy observations and experiences.One of the old arguments is spectacular in that it tries to account for the dual motions of the Earth but falls short with annual solar declination –
“..just as Cleanthes thought it right that the Greeks collectively should impeach Aristagoras the Stoic, of impiety, for overthrowing the altar of earth, because the fellow attempted to account for visible phenomena by supposing that the sky remains fixed, and that the earth rolls round down an oblique circle, turning at the same time upon its own axis.” Plutarch
Galileo knew himself it was political even if he inflicted it on himself so he is caught between two stools although he tries to accurately present the historical position of the Church before things went sideways –
“At that time the calendar was defective because the true measures of the year and the lunar month were not exactly known. The Bishop of Fossombrone, then in charge of tills matter, assigned Copernicus to seek more light and greater certainty concerning the celestial motions by means of constant study and labor. With Herculean toil he set his admirable mind to this task, and he made such great progress in this science and brought our knowledge of the heavenly motions to such precision that he became celebrated as an astronomer. Since that time not only has the calendar been regulated by his teachings, but tables of all the motions of the planets have been calculated as well. Having reduced his system into six books, he published these at the instance of the Cardinal of Capua and the Bishop of Culm And since he had assumed his laborious enterprise by order of the Supreme Pontiff, he dedicated this book On the celestial revolutions to Pope Paul III. When printed, the book was accepted by the holy Church, and it has been read and studied by everyone without the faintest hint of any objection ever being conceived against its doctrines. Yet now that manifest experiences and necessary proofs have shown them to be well grounded, persons exist who would strip the author of his reward without so much as looking at his book, and add the shame of having him pronounced a heretic. All this they would do merely to satisfy their personal displeasure conceived without any cause against another man, who has no interest in Copernicus beyond approving his teachings.” Galileo
http://inters.org/Galilei-Madame-Christina-Lorraine
There was no requirement that the Earth be at the center of creation and the Pope to be at the center of that power which is obviously the story we have inherited for those today who are hostile to Christianity and think it a political entity based on myth.
The technical issues which were brought up at the juncture of Galileo and the Pope before it all became crude and remains so are as valid today as they were back then as the objections have never been resolved.
Peer review has its shortcomings, sometimes bad papers are published and they gain traction. Andrew Wakefield’s paper on dangers of vaccines, Seralini’s rat study paper, to mention two. Both gained huge popularity and fame among anti-vaxxers and anti-GMO crowd.
Both papers were later found faulty and were retracted. That’s how science works.
In both cases, the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed studies contradicted the findings.
While peer review is not perfect, it acts like a fence that keeps all kinds of lunatic theories from being touted as “science” and gaining support.
Just as a test, how many of you would like to be treated for the rest of your natural lives according to peer-reviewed medicine? How many would like to put their lives in the hands of alternative medicine (not based on scientific method and peer-reviewed studies)?
What your dealing with here is one of the ‘dirty secrets of science ‘ for the public have for a long time be sold the line that peer review acts a ‘perfect ‘ way to check work, therefore if a paper passes through peer review it must be honest and valuable.
The trouble is that is dead wrong , pal review , self review , missing data , and even outright lies have all be found in many papers which have passed through peer review over the years. And that is before we get to the problem that the majority of scientists working in area can actual be dead wrong and its the minority who hold different views , who are actual right.
Peer review has become the sacred cow which can never be questioned , the trouble like any cow it still produces its fair share of shit . In some areas you could even suggest that is what it mostly does.
Jarmo
Let’s be honest,peer review is there to keep the reviewers in salaries and reputations and not the person writing an article.It is like the principle of why people smoke where the craving caused by the last cigarette justifies the lighting up of the next one hence the craving is relieved – the only reason people do harm themselves in the first place.I read that from Allan Carr and peer review ,at least as it exists presently, is just as insidious in the way it goes about its business .
Do you really think a person is going to get a salary in their given field without a certificate mounted behind them given by people who only approve ideas that they themselves subscribe to. Wayward notions, and human control over planetary temperatures is among them, would normally fall by the wayside in a world that truly held interpretation as the stable foundations for terrestrial sciences but unfortunately a vicious empiricism is a speculative/predictive animal so they get into trouble when their predictions don’t pan out.
I loved the commentaries on the ‘Piltdown man’ affair where they waited until everyone died before they admitted a hoax so don’t tell me about the honesty and dignity of mainstream agendas –
” Anthropologists refer to the hoax as ‘another instance of desire for fame leading a scholar into dishonesty’ and boast that the unmasking of the deception is ‘a tribute to the persistence and skill of modern research’. Persistence and skill indeed! When they have taken over forty years to discover the difference between an ancient fossil and a modern chimpanzee! A chimpanzee could have done it quicker. Far from being a triumph of Science the hoax points to common and
dangerous faults. The hoax succeeded in large part because of the slipshod nature of the testing applied to it; careful examination using the methods available at the time would have immediately
revealed the hoax. This failure to adequately examine the fossils went unmarked and unnoticed at the time – in large part because the hoax admirably satisfied the theoretical expectations of the time.” Daily Sketch on Piltdown Man hoax
People hellbent on conclusions and filling in the details can be a lovable bunch but it has got out of hand lately and is now mainstream policy in trying to put speculation ahead of interpretation,not just with climate but most everything where terrestrial and astronomy are involved.
I enjoyed my few days here but it is time to go.
‘ Gerald Kelleher says:
December 30, 2013 at 1:47 am
There was no theological requirement for any intelligent Christian to believe the Earth was the center of anything and in fact the opposite as the great Christian works were then promoting the belief in God everywhere.’
The safest way to go about this, IMHO, is to separate science and faith-based religion completely. It really does not matter whether faith is ‘intelligent’ or non-intelligent because faith does not require an IQ; nor does it require reason. It requires faith which is a different cognitive domain entirely.
This separation would save lots of confusion. We have even had Lord Monckton, Third Viscount of Benchley, Noble Prize Winner, Birther, Climatologist, Health Scientist, Classicist and Mathmatician muddy these very waters a few strings ago.
That apart, the practical problem for Galileo seems to be that you were not running the Vatican in Galileo’s time.
Mark Luhman says:
I was about to respond to your post when I came upon the last line. You lost your cedibility there, buddy.
knr & Gerald Kelleher:
You discredit the scientific method (peer review is part of it) because you disagree with results it has produced in a certain field (climate science) during a relatively short time period (1990-2013).
Gentlemen, you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater…
Many thanks, excellent post.
Very good article, David. I agree with Theoldcrusader that Galileo is not a good example. In those days they did not yet have the theory of relativity. The article could use a reference to Karl Popper, who considered falsification the hall mark of science. This principle is rooted in the logical asymmetry that a false theory implies both true and false statements but a true theory only implies true statements. One falsification suffices to declare a theory false. As simple the principle is, people have enormous difficulties with believing that a false theory may imply true statements. Just take the false flat-earth model. It implies millions of true observations to be done on the beach. All those confirmations are worthless compared with one falsification. AGW is falsified several times and so it is already more dead than dead. (i’m late in the discussion because of time zones)
Jarmo the problems of peer review are ones you admit to yourself , but then you see highlight them as discrediting the scientific method ! And that is why its a ‘dirty’ secrets , the fear that is if the public know about this issues than there much too lose. The irony is pal review , missing data , and outright lies etc do far more to undermine the scientific method than mentioning some of the issues with peer reviewer , and there are more , will ever do.
At the base of this is the fact your dealing with humans , who like anyone else can be self serving lairs, greedy , arrogant or just afraid to lose face. And its not just climate ‘science’ , although for political and funding reasons issues seen there quite often, that has this problem its all science. Be careful of who you make gods for they may turn to be very human after all.
As for not liking the the results , not that is not it , want I do not like is those that seek to speak for the data rather than let it speak for itself and those that kick the crap out of the ‘scientific method ‘ for their own ends but try to hind under the name of ‘scientists’
Think about way any area of science should need to take views expressed by Jones infamous words ‘ why should I give you the data when you only want to find something wrong with it’
Jarmo – Just as a test, how many of you would like to be treated for the rest of your natural lives according to peer-reviewed medicine?
= = = =
1/2 a million Americans had their natural lives terminated prematurely thanks to peer-reviewed Vioxx. Evidence-based choices, not peer-reviewed prescriptions for me.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth.”
– Vincenzo Galileo
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Climateace; you say that ‘D Hoffer defines a troll as ‘someone who declares their belief in peer reviewed science’.
No, what he says is “It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science. With this simple strategy, they at once excuse themselves from the need to know anything about the science, and at the same time seek to discredit skeptic arguments on the grounds that, not having been published in peer reviewed journals, they may be dismissed out of hand.”
I notice that in a typical troll posting, reference is often made to video clips, Wikipedia, and indeed ‘peer reviewed science’. Rarely are actual figures produced and discussed – in other words, precious little to indicate that they’ve actually bothered to obtain any original papers and read them.
On the subject of peer review, having spend many years in science and technology, I’ve seen examples of peer-reviewed rubbish because those concerned didn’t have detailed knowledge of certain aspects of the paper they were looking at.
Science also throws up surprises, and an open mind to all possibilities is essential. Peer review is no guarantee of truth.
Fra Giordano Bruno had it all over over Galileo both in awareness and guts. It was Bruno’s death by burning at the stake in February 1600 AD that convinced Galileo to shut up and not risk Bruno’s end. Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, Bruno’s torturer and prosecutor, used Bruno’s death to convince Galileo not to risk it.
Giordano Bruno correctly stated that the earth and the planets orbited the sun. He also believed that the Sun was simply another star in an infinite world of infinite solar systems, and he believed (wrote) that the universe contained an infinite number of worlds inhabited by intelligent beings. Bruno maintained that this infinite universe was constructed by love and he called that God. His written arguments denying the existence of planetary spheres à la Ptolemy predate those of Tycho Brahe. The theosophical ideas that also got him in trouble was the belief that God existed as plainly on Earth as it did in the heavens; he had no use for a heavenly God that lived up above and who would administer The Last Judgment; further he did not believe in the absolute divinity of Jesus Christ.
I can’t remember his exact ideas on human beings existing as atoms in God’s infinite universe, but Bruno’s ideas only saw scientific confirmation in the 20th C with the discovery of quantum physics. To this day, the Catholic Church refuses to exonerate him.
Bellarmino worked on him for eight years to get him to recant before his death in 1600. But he wouldn’t.
Ingrid Rowland wrote one of the definitive biographies about Bruno, using his writings and the court docs about his time in jail. Some of it is pretty raunchy. His cell mate (at the promise of a pardon) said in court docs that Bruno called Jesus a dog and a c**t (Rowland’s word). The book is Giordano Bruno.
@Eiting
‘This principle is rooted in the logical asymmetry that a false theory implies both true and false statements but a true theory only implies true statements.’
You need to re-read Popper before you start expounding on his ideas.
In the Popper-world, there aren’t any ‘true theories’, just hypotheses waiting to be falsified.
“It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science”.
In the unlikely situation where we are experts in every field of science and study, do we have any option other than to trust peer reviewed papers in areas beyond our own knowledge? If the peer reviewed paper supported a sceptical viewpoint, be honest here, would you be so quick to dismiss it using the same philosophy?
The “peer reviewed” mantra was demolished by the climategate emails. Of course it continues to be used to avoid the question of correctness. A heap of expensive crap with the official seal of approval.
“Khwarizmi says:
December 30, 2013 at 3:18 am
Jarmo – Just as a test, how many of you would like to be treated for the rest of your natural lives according to peer-reviewed medicine?
= = = =
1/2 a million Americans had their natural lives terminated prematurely thanks to peer-reviewed Vioxx. Evidence-based choices, not peer-reviewed prescriptions for me.”
I believe Merck (manufacturer of Vioxx) was tried and found guilty for trying to suppress and downplay information from research that indicated Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks.
” Merck MRK +0.14% & Co. agreed to pay $950 million and plead guilty to a criminal misdemeanor charge to resolve government allegations that the company illegally promoted its former painkiller Vioxx and deceived the government about the drug’s safety.” http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204531404577054472253737682
Steven Mosher says:
December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am
Yes Steve, but this seems to have become the latest piece of sophistry thrown about to paper over the fact that the climate models do in fact perform extremely poorly, not because of any physical laws but because of the many variables which are either omitted or whose true effect is unknown or incalculable.
You could just as well argue that astrology incorporates sound scientific laws. It predicts the position of the planets and which constellation they will be in quite accurately – and the outcome is still a load of junk.
Models of course can be useful, but it is necessary to aware of their limitations. The first step in that awareness is recognising that at present their predictive record is dismal.
It is interesting how many of the posts here dive into the specifics of historical characters. The more interesting issue discussed by Mr. Hoffer is the quality of peer review. Science progresses largely by accepting prior work as a foundation and building on it. Peer review is supposed to strengthen the foundation. In general it works. In some cases (perhaps current climate science is one) it goes off course.
None of the prior comments suggest a way to build scientific foundations better than is done by peer review. I can’t think of one. Lacking an alternative to peer review perhaps we can suggest ways to improve it. My only suggestion, at this early hour, is to identify the “peers” openly and encourage the “peers” peers to comment on their reviews.
It has been said that the making of laws and sausages are processes one should not observe on an empty stomach. Perhaps we could add science to that list. But how can we do it better?
Steven Mosher says:
December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am
“The models are found[ed] on known physcial laws ( gravity for example) and radiative physics”
The question is the proportions, not the existence.
Most things will kill you but it is the deviation from the ‘normal’ that most often determines if they will or will not.
The models may have all of the physics right and correct. If they are not in the right proportions though the answers will be meaningless.
Poorly sub-sampling a domain in space and time and then trying to propose a field (and the future projections of that field) from such an under-sampling is always going to be more ‘art’ than ‘science’ and subject to very wide interpretation.
It would be foolish, in my opinion, to ignore that.
AllanJ: Right on the money.
Climateace,
It’s obvious to me that you’re a clever and knowledgeable guy. Rise above Hoffer’s troll/Gallileo distraction and demolish his main points – points that he reiterated in his own comment.
“Steven Mosher says:
December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am
7. The models are found on known physcial laws ( gravity for example) and radiative physics.”
Interesting because almost all alarmists I blog with claim gravity is just a unproven theory.
I did not get past Moshers point number 1 ‘1. you assert it but do not show your work’
the point of the article is that the modellers themselves are providing excuses and reasons why their own models do not work
A Model is simply an Hypothesis. It is an Hypothesis of how the climate works. If the data does not agree with the Hypothesis from high school science we must reject the Hypothesis. Therefore we must reject the Model. It is that simple.
Jarmo
A bigger modification than Kepler’s is the partitioning of inner and outer planetary retrograde resolutions which is really only possible using contemporary imaging power,time lapse footage and animated graphics.This new approach is a lot of fun, easily understandable and nothing like the hoops Copernicus had to jump through in his time even if it lacks any sort of astronomical authority to recognize the partitioning and how it is done (there are historical reasons for this much the same as Piltdown man disrupted anthropological studies).
I did say I was leaving the group but it would be unfair to leave without at least drawing attention to the resolution of the inner planetary retrogrades but perhaps a teacher might encounter this explanation and pass it on to their students.
The apparent retrograde motion of the outer planets are easy enough to resolve in that the faster moving Earth overtaking these slower moving outer planets temporarily causes the planets to fall behind in view much like a faster car overtaking a slower moving car in an outer lane on a roundabout –
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html
Galileo explains this observation but when it comes to the faster moving Venus and Mercury he goes astray –
“Now what is said here of Jupiter is to be understood of Saturn and Mars also. In Saturn these retrogressions are somewhat more frequent than in Jupiter, because its motion is slower than Jupiter’s, so that the Earth overtakes it in a shorter time. In Mars they are rarer, its motion being faster than that of Jupiter, so that the Earth spends more time in catching up with it. Next, as to Venus and Mercury, whose circles are included within that of the Earth, stoppings and retrograde motions appear in them also, due not to any motion that really exists in them, but to the annual motion of the Earth. This is acutely demonstrated by Copernicus . ” Galileo
Again,it is not faulting Galileo as such but rather praising 21st century technology which allows observers here and now to appreciate what Galileo himself fell short of as the apparent retrogrades seen in Venus and Mercury rely very little on the motions of the Earth as with the outer planets but rather due to their own motions hence the partitioning resolutions.
It just takes people who are more curious than they are afraid to venture into interpreting imaging hence an open forum is more suitable for this material rather than academics with reputations,salaries and pensions to protect.
“3. You realize that some of the models perform better than others. Which performs the best?
and on what tests? Of the 2 or three models that cannot be rejected by statistical tests
how did you “falsify” them?”
It’s up to those producing these models to validate them. In the absence of such validation, there’s nothing to “falsify”.
How can a post titled “Peer Review; Last Refuge of the (Uninformed) Troll” hope to achieve anything constructive! I fear it is only because I’m holding on to the hope that WUWT is principled, that I’m not admitting too the sinking feeling that it is really just about politics. ;-(
Such a provocative heading, should to be backed up with careful argument, otherwise you risk offending everyone. While I am sympathetic to the presumed intention of this article, I find it embarrassing and as far as I’m concerned, it is not defensible.
Climateace
I am an astronomer because I am a Christian hence it is easy enough to move through the actual
technical and historical details we inherited from other generations without having to consider lowly terms such as ‘science vs religion’ or ‘faith vs experience’. Even Augustine copped out when it came to this question and it has always been present until the Church itself voluntarily jettisoned its astronomical heritage after the Galileo affair .Here is St Augustine commenting on stellar circumpolar motion –
“Some of the brethren raise a question concerning the motion of heaven, whether it is fixed or moved. If it is moved, they say, how is it a firmament? If it stands still, how do these stars which are held fixed in it go round from east to west, the more northerly performing shorter circuits near the pole, so that the heaven (if there is another pole unknown to us) may seem to revolve upon some axis, or (if there is no other pole) may be thought to move as a discus? To these men I reply that it would require many subtle and profound reasonings to find out which of these things is actually so; but to undertake this and discuss it is consistent neither with my leisure nor with the duty of those whom I desire to instruct in essential matters more directly conducing to their salvation and to the benefit of the holy Church.” St Augustine
When Copernicus produced his discoveries he basically ignored stellar circumpolar motion and relied on the observed behavior of the planets to extract the Earth’s orbital motion and relied on the daily return of the Sun to account for daily rotation.In the late 17th century they tried to account for stellar circumpolar motions using the motions of the Earth and this is a big astronomical no-no even though it is still mainstream policy.
Naturally people want to believe that the Church required the Earth to be at the center of the Universe when clearly it did not,,Augustine took the sensible view and classified it properly that it takes subtle reasoning to determine what motion belongs to what cause. The great fault of present day denominational Christianity is that it takes the same view as Augustine even though that period around Copernicus was alive with Christians deeply engaged in structural and timekeeping astronomy so the decisive strategy to leave science to one side has wrecked havoc and led to this absurd notion that people of spirit are at odds with physical phenomena or ‘science vs religion’ as it is now called. Where are the practical Christian people who can at least take something from Augustine’s comments ? –
“If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken; for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation, not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there.” Augustine
DaveS says: December 30, 2013 at 5:03 am “It’s up to those producing these models to validate them. In the absence of such validation, there’s nothing to “falsify”.”
Falsification turned on its head! If it is not falsifiable in principle then it is non-science. If it is validated then it is mere technology and subject to infinite adhockery.
Oh my that calender thingie really get the panties bunched up I’d say….
As for –
AllanJ says:
December 30, 2013 at 4:09 am
It is interesting how many of the posts here dive into the specifics of historical characters. The more interesting issue discussed by Mr. Hoffer is the quality of peer review. Science progresses largely by accepting prior work as a foundation and building on it. Peer review is supposed to strengthen the foundation. In general it works. In some cases (perhaps current climate science is one) it goes off course.
***************************************************************************************************************
Your last sentence says it all. Unfortunately those that believe in AGW have turned into a religion and have violated the principle you eschew.
AGW ‘science’ lives in an echo chamber where people who question the science are condemned to be treated as heretics.
The left believes that man is bad and they hold they keys to his salvation,,, sound familiar?
Bingo.
The great thing about the normal peer reviewed literature is we aren’t subjected to long redundant nonsensical pieces that are pretty normal on blogs.
That’s the combination of editors, rules, and the reviewers.
And reviewers normally help to point out the scientific flaws and thus strengthen the work.
And, to date, anonymous peer review (of manuscripts and grant applications) has been the most successful method of determining the best work.
DavidHoffer, in addition, regular people had reported “stones” falling out of the sky for centuries, but it was contemptuously dismissed by the authorities — those were volcanic rocks they said. It wasn’t until a few centuries ago (can’t remember exactly when) when a “rockfall from the sky” was observed by hundreds in a French village & samples were recovered that the authorities finally admitted it. Simple observations can trump authorities.
Aphan says:
December 29, 2013 at 6:37 pm
…
You nailed climateace perfectly.
+10
It’s unfair to call them trolls, liars or deniers, ad hominem and insults belong firmly in their camp and we shouldn’t lower ourselves to their level.
Lawrence Krauss, of ‘The Universe from nothing ‘-fame, says that most peer reviewed science he reads is rubbish. There you go. Read his Wiki if you don’t know him. – might just learn something…
@ Richard M
RE: what Aphan said on December 29, 2013 at 6:37 pm
I agree.
What is even better is that Aphan did not engage climateace further.
Why waste time with a troll, especially one who has demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension in his/her first post?
It seems to be part of the human condition that we can find ourselves, as a species, engaged in forms of herd behaviour: this can particularly apply where there is some perceived threat (CAGW) as well as financial incentives (research grants, green subsidies etc) reinforcing the behaviour.
This behaviour is essentially irrational while it takes place – appeals to reason do not help: the only way is to let the stampede run its course until the herd slows down, individuals take stock and start becoming rational once again.
I think the CO2 scare essentially started with Hansen’s testimony before the US Congress in 1988 – just over 25 years ago now. Let’s hope that this 25th anniversary, coupled with the absence of warming for over half the period, now actually causes people to slow down, look around and start thinking and behaving critically once again.
As long as there is free money granted without accuntabilty by our democratic or liberal governments, no amount of correct or truthfu science seems to fix this science without morals . As we saw with the Summary for Policymakers meeting in Stockholm,even the policymakers participated at hiding the truth from the public , a truth that said , if there has been no global warming for 17 years , so why are we giving away all these billions of dollars to special interest groups. In US this is about $21 billion dollars yearly and world wide it is nearly a one billion dollars per day business. Some of these people seem to be willing to go to any length to keep this gravy train of free money coming. United Nations want their cut at 100 billion dollars yearly.
I’ve said it before: “Peer reviewed” is the weasliest of weasel words
Decades ago, I read of an interesting psychological experiment regarding what Scientists could perceive in data.
It concluded that Scientists “believe what they are predisposed to believe”. They easily rationalize rejecting evidence that is not in agreement. They could not even perceive evidence that definitely contradicted what they believed.
In my years in Science, I observed that is pretty much the case — Scientists miss the “obvious” if it contradicts their beliefs. I even “fell” to it “once”. I swore I never would again. Then, despite my intentions, I partially did it once again. I still shudder thinking about it — apparently atypical.
Seems to have morphed from trolls to Galileo. Oh well…
Galileo observed the “four” moons orbiting Jupiter and later the phases of Venus. He knew from observation that the Geocentric Universe was wrong.
The Catholic Church was not the author of the Geocentric Universe. They can thank Aristotle for that – 300 years before the birth of Christ. Ptolemy in 140 AD would write several volumes on the Geocentric Universe, which was accepted by the Catholic Church because it was consistent with scripture which had the sun moving and the earth fixed.
The above point may appear a mere quibble but it is important to note that the Church did not originate the theory, they merely helped to enforce it. The scientists in Galileo’s day were adamant defenders of Aristotle and Ptolemy, more so than the Church.
Reading up on Galileo I get the sense he was an arrogant turd in the spirit of Michael Mann (not at all comparing the two on intelligence, only on how they treat others who disagree with their theories). The difference of course is that Galileo’s work offered an improvement in our knowledge of the universe.
David M. Hoffer, I enjoyed reading your commentary and thus I thank you for posting it. I also agreed with pretty much 100% of what you said ….. because it is what was needed to be said, …… and said again n’ again n’ again.
And you were 100% correct when you stated this, to wit:
“A retreat to authoritarian arguments in the face of dead simple observations is not new. It is a repeat of history. Not having learned from it, we appear to be condemned to repeat it.”
I believe it was the above statement that “sparked” a lot of posted commentary about Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, et el, which in my opinion was “much ado about nothing” simply because all their “trials and tribulations” were the result of “history repeating itself” during the 2nd Millennium AD.
Which by the way, was just a “repeat of history” that occurred at the beginning of the 1st Millennium AD. And we are now on track for a “repeat of history” in the 3rd Millennium AD iffen the “authoritarian arguments” win out over common sense and factual science.
If the “authoritarians” had not burned the Library of Alexandria in the 1st Millennium AD ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria ) …….. and the “authoritarians” (Church of Rome) had not mandated subservience during both the 1st and 2nd Millennium AD, …. then the likes of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler et el would have had access to the knowledge of the world’s great astronomers such as Hipparchus (162 to 127 BC – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus ), … and therefore they would not have been subjected to said “trials and tribulations” during the Dark Ages of Authoritarianism .
Pippen Kool says:
December 30, 2013 at 6:05 am
“And reviewers normally help to point out the scientific flaws and thus strengthen the work.”
In the same way that ‘miasma’ was a supported/undisputed theory for so long?
Group think has been and always is a potential problem and thus peer review is not without its problems as has been mentioned many, many times.
True also is the fact that blogs can to easily descend into chaos with wild, unsupported (and unsupportable) rants becoming front and centre.
Welcome to the internet age.
Scientists do not “believe” – that is a term of religion. Scientists doubt.
Question everything.
By design peer review leads to consensus science. Otherwise scientists would have to accept for publication theories they did not necessarily agree with but had a faint hope the author could be right.
Steven Mosher says:
December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am
“3. You realize that some of the models perform better than others. Which performs the best?
and on what tests? Of the 2 or three models that cannot be rejected by statistical tests
how did you “falsify” them?!
Ahh…. Mosher appears.
I will see if I can get him to address this point as he has always run away in the past. I think the Las La La switch gets triggered in his head.
The Models are wrong. This is a fact not an opinion and it is a fact that can be proven rather easily.
Of course you cannot falsify them yet by just checking their forecasts against the real world as not enough time has passed to be definite. Also you cannot run an experiment with the Earth to falsify them.
However, there is another way to disprove any hypothesis. All you need to do is show that it produces an impossible result.
So what would be an impossible result for an accurate and correct model?
Well what does it output? It outputs a climate signal quantified by the Earths global temperature. This output is compared and graphed to past actual temperature data and is then taken forward to predict the future.
All the current climate models do very well on the back cast against data. Remarkably so really, over the 20th century as the temperature data shows rises and falls so do the models track it with little variation except for the shortest periods. Is that good?…….. NO!
You see the models average out a lot of the natural variation factors, mainly ENSO. The designers original argument for this was that it made the models simpler (true) and that anyway natural variation was so small it did not affect the main signal significantly. (false)
Now they say that ‘of course natural variation is strong enough to mask the true signal and for quite long periods, way longer than a decade’. They have to say that now of course because if they maintained their previous line, that it was too weak to have any significant effect, they would have had to ditch their models already.
So now both sceptics and warmists agree that natural variation (mainly ENSO) can completely alter the underlying modelled climate signal. Indeed the modelled climate signal, of a greatly accelerated warming rate, as compared to the 20th century, has been masked completely since 2001. Indeed it has cooled very slightly over this period. However, the warmists say ‘hey trust our models this is just natural variation doing its obvious thing’.
So we can see that the models and the temperature records are outputting different signals. One, a climate signal plus averaged variation and the other, the climate signal plus actual variation. It is now accepted that actual variation causes the models to drift well away from reality for quite lengthy periods. Therefore the fact that the models are currently drifting well away from reality does not prove they are wrong. Indeed it is a behaviour that only an accurate model would display in anything other than neutral variation. It doesn’t prove it is correct but it certainly doesn’t prove it is incorrect
So what would be impossible result for an accurate and correct model to output. Well clearly that would be a signal that does closely match the actual temperature data over the short to medium term. An apple doesn’t equal an orange no matter how you cut it. Only in the long run would the signals align. In the short to medium term an accurate model must run either hot or cold
So, given that ENSO has been doing its thing over the 20th century, the fact that on the back cast run the models track the temperature record very closely in all its up and down movements proves that these models are in fact false. That is an impossible result for an accurate model. QED.
In their hubris, the warmists when fiddling with their free parameters to make a great fit with the historical data, overlooked that they were trying to fit an apple to an orange! Or perhaps they didn’t think anyone would take much notice of them if they couldn’t even match the past.
So Mosher and Climateace You have the proof that the current models are false so what say you?
Alan
Mosher says: “They also have physics that is less well known.”
What physics is in the models that is “less well known”?
So far, two rousing defenses of climate models in this thread:
“Personally, I hope all the climate models are completely and utterly wrong. I hope that the oceans and deep oceans are not warming at all. I hope that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are completely irrelevant to climate. I hope that the chemical changes in the oceans….” by climateace (December 29, 2013 at 8:10 pm)
“7. The models are found on known physcial laws ( gravity for example) and radiative physics.
They also have physics that is less well known. When you reject the science in the models do you reject it all or only a part? how did you decide which parts? or do you reject it all?” by Steven Mosher (December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am)
OTOH several commenters have pointed out that models have failed and why (e.g. missing positive feedback). Perhaps climateace can justify his strawman by pointing to other replies where someone claims that “CO2 concentrations are completely irrelevant to climate” I didn’t find one in this thread but I have read that in other threads. But it doesn’t elevate the conversation here.
Mosher OTOH legitimately points to some of the complexities in climate models like how they use “less well known” physics other than widely agreed-upon radiative physics. One example is cloud microphysics explained here: ftp://texmex.mit.edu/ftp/ftp/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/ezr99.pdf One conclusion of the paper is that regardless of one’s choices from a “disturbing” number of parameters, all the models had too much warmth and moisture in the upper troposphere (aka missing hotspot) and that was due, in the author’s view, to inadequate vertical resolution. The elephant they do not mention is inadequate horizontal resolution, specifically the use of large grid cell buoyancy parameters as one of the inputs to the cloud simulations.
Essentially the entire premise of water vapor feedback cannot be tested in such models regardless of the correctness of their radiative physics.
A second failing of the climate models is their prediction of a shift of mid-latitude storm tracks to higher latitudes (along with a stronger polar jet). Nowadays we hear much from promoters of CAGW about increases in mid-latitude storms, seemingly unaware that that is a negative feedback. Either there will be more storminess (which we can easily mitigate) or there will be amplified warming. But CAGW cannot include both.
Climatace provides the perfect case for why he is wrong about peer review vs blog review.
The ability for him to come here and publicly blog review any of the posts is in itself demonstrative of the superiority of blog review.
Imagine where climate science would be taking our political machinery today were it not for the scrutiny provided by ClimateAudit, WUWT and alike? Imagine
What would the IPCC be getting away with? They would be peddling a grotesque array of advocacy papers containing fabricated data that was never subjected to any critiquing at all.
The commingling of the legitimate with the concocted has rendered climate science and the IPCC disabled.
In stark contrast to other sciences climate science has sought to smother the scrutiny peer review is intended to provide. The ease at which this field can do so is the real catastrophe.
Who’s to be blamed or credited with exposing the institution? Not the institution.
Climateace tries to equate the role of medicine, air travel and weather forecasting peer review to that which has occurred in Climate Journals.
His own effort to elevate the low brow path of climate science is getting the scrutiny it deserves.
Scrutiny is everything.
Climate science peer review has been so vulnerable to the influences of political agendas that it no longer resembles honest scrutiny at all.
Any pretense of reliability survival is delusional at best and purposefully mendacious at worst.
Everyone knows the blogosphere is also chock full of the open ended and limitless accusations of conspiracies gone wild.
But Climateace IS being purposefully mendacious by comparing the best of peer review to the worst of the blogosphere.
In doing so he is contributing to the devaluing, or smothering, of honest scrutiny.
Climateace says “give me the peer-reviewed stuff any time” because “they are more likely to be right more of the time than the bloggers”.
Then he puts his foot on the scales by listing some blogging offenses with an implied assertion that the “make stuff up and then move right along when logical heat is applied” problem
exists only on the blogging side of scrutiny.
People can decide for themselves where to place confidence.
Peer review is private, controlled and influenced.
Blog review is open, fully exposed and welcoming of all unfiltered scrutiny.
I’ll take the honesty of the later because we are far more likely to discover that what was “right” is terribly wrong.
Pal Review, Censorship and worse.
Thank you for a very interesting article.
Many young people have been very poorly instructed in the art of critical thinking, and have tremendous difficulty differentiating between politics and science.
An acquaintance of mine, a young college student and warmist, insisted to me that her professors taught only the facts and let the students make up their own minds, and from this factual presentation, she concluded that there was a climate “crisis” caused by carbon dioxide.
I engaged her in conversation in a non-confrontational way, and, in essence, asked her what particular facts convinced her of this claim, what the counter-arguments were, and why she rejected them. In the ensuing discussion, it became apparent that she knew nothing about even the existence of the so-called climate models, much less anything about why they might be right or wrong. Instead, her version of the “facts” on which she based her opinion was that “scientists” said it was so, and that the way she knew even that is that her professors had so instructed. Yet she stood by her claim that her professors let the students decide for themselves based on “facts”. I politely changed the topic, as I usually do when my interlocutor fails to recognize that their argument fails even basic logical sanity checks.
It seems to me that this little vignette captures the essence of not only the perplexing persistence of AGW nonsense in the public consciousness, but also many other troubling phenomena such as the otherwise inexplicable faith that central planning of a modern economy and Keynesian economics can actually work.
Perhaps a new term might apply to some peer reviews.
After the Kansas turnpike K-tag (electronic pass system)
Pal-tag. Past tense Pal-tagged.
An easy pass system for those with certain connections….
Pe
How much has the earth warmed since humans have burnt fossil fuels?
Is it 0.8c?
What is it exactly?
Can anyone tell me what the problem is?
….I’ve yet to see it.
What is the problem with such a slight temp increase?
Kate Forney says:
December 30, 2013 at 8:44 am
“Many … people have been very poorly instructed in the art of critical thinking, and have tremendous difficulty differentiating between politics and science.”
I agree totally with the above with only exception being that I would leave out the ‘young’ bit.
This is an excellent post. Whether or not all the details in the historic overview are accurate, the purpose of that overview here is simply to illustrate that the scientific authorities of the day can get it profoundly wrong, and hold on to their mistaken beliefs in the face of falsifying evidence. On this general point, there is so much evidence that we don’t need to get hung up on the details of one or the the other historical episode.
The author also does not purport that peer review is fundamentally useless. He simply implies that it cannot eliminate error, and that approval of a hypothesis by peer review becomes meaningless in the face of contradicting empirical evidence. It is not the proper use of peer review that he criticizes, but its abuse to support prerogatives of superior authority, which is widely practiced to fool the gullible. You can see the effect of this propaganda on half-educated members of the public clearly in newspaper articles and message boards, and even here on this thread, with poor souls like “climateace” making an exhibition of their confusion.
In my job, I’m regularly on both the giving and receiving ends of peer review. My field is far less politicized than climate science; still, I would say that at least 50%
of all peer reviews I get to read are clearly distorted by perceived competitive interests, and/or by plain ignorance. (My favorite remains a reviewer who criticized some of our chemistry but got fluorine and sulfur mixed up in the process; and the editor did not catch it and proceeded with rejection. Very funny in retrospect, but intensely frustrating in the fresh situation.) Whenever I see someone extolling the High Virtue of Peer Review, I conclude that they are either cynical or clueless.
Barry Marshall and his research on peptic ulcer disease is a much better example because it is modern and is a case-in-point example of how resistant the cronyistic world of modern science is to consider alternate theories and how defiant to the nonconformist it truly is. The man literally had to infect himself with the disease in order to get the establishment to realize what they knew to be true was actually wrong! Just like in this case, I expect it to take the arrival of a “Little Ice Age” for the cult to even accept the possibility of being wrong.
climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 7:10 pm
Aphan
‘It has become a favorite tactic amongst trolls to declare their belief in peer reviewed science.”
There is no definition made by the author as to what constitutes a “troll” to him.’
I have just read the first two lines of your post and that was enough, methinks.
D Hoffer defines a troll as ‘someone who declares their belief in peer reviewed science’.
=======================
Ohh, boy. Trolls declare “belief” in peer-review. Therefore anyone who believes in peer review is a troll.
Bank robbers eat lunch, therefore anyone who eats lunch is a bank robber?
Please see my previous post in which I lament the utter lack of ability in many people to think critically.
re: climateace says: December 29, 2013 at 8:10 pm
Except, climateace, there is no 97% consensus – far from it, and those skeptical of AGW or who don’t believe in any significant AGW at all include some of the most eminent scientists of our times, quite a few Nobel Prize winners in the hard sciences, and even IPCC authors, along with tens of thousands of other scientists who are perfectly capable of telling when the scientific method is being violated and/or the actual body of science fails utterly to support a new hypothesis such as AGW. See a partial listing below. Yet people like you keep trying to pass it off as if there’s some big consensus of the knowledgeable scientists and the only skeptics are bloggers of questionable ethics. It’s an absurd position on your part at this point.
**1000+ peer reviewed research papers supporting skeptical arguments http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
**100 eminent scientists including Nobel winners and IPCC lead authors contesting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW-e.g., human caused) who wrote the U.N. http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=d4b5fd23-802a-23ad-4565-3dce4095c360
**31,000+ scientists disavowing AGW, including over 9,000 Ph.D’s
http://www.petitionproject.org
**Over 1000 scientists worldwide disavowing AGW signed onto USA Senate report http://hatch.senate.gov/public/_files/USSenateEPWMinorityReport.pdf
or
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/9035/SPECIAL-REPORT-More-Than-1000-International-Scientists-Dissent-Over-ManMade-Global-Warming-Claims–Challenge-UN-IPCC–Gore
**100 plus scientists rebuke Obama as ‘simply incorrect’ on global warming, March 30, 2009
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9764
[ Note: Many of the scientists are current and former UN IPCC reviewers and some have reversed their views on man-made warming and are now skeptical. Also note Nobel Laureate for Physics Dr. Ivar Giaever signed. Giaever endorsed Obama for President in an October 29, 2008 letter. See: Portfolio.com]
**Sixteen Concerned Scientists: No Need to Panic About Global Warming There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html
**Professor Lindzen has systematically destroyed every CAGW argument:
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
**Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”
**”Prof. Hal Lewis resigns from the American Physical Society, writing:
“The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.”
from: NoTricksZone by Pierre Gosselin http://notrickszone.com/
**One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”
Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Well-connected to Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne [The Cold Sun] cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.
Conclusion: Climate catastrophe is called off. The science was hyped.
**Dr. Lawrence Solomon, once a believer in AGW, realized belatedly, that he was wrong, because he found out that there were too many eminent Professors, who were skeptics and he decided to write a book, titled: “The Deniers” and he explained that he was sad about the enormous corruption among the doomsday “scientists”, especially when they were in the management of institutions like universities and weather-departments. http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/06/23/lawrence-solomon-supreme-skeptics/
**Like Professor Emeritus Robert Tennekens, a Dutch professor in meteorology, who after a 10-year stint lecturing in the U.S. was asked to lead the Dutch meteorological department in the Bilt, Holland. After he found out about the corrupt way his staff was following the I.P.C.C.’s computer-modeling, he tried to stamp this habit out, but because too many of his staff and colleagues had powerful friends in the then Dutch government, he was sacked from his job.
**Professor Bellamy the British botanist also received the sack, when he decided to speak out against the AGW corruption on B.B.C. That is not science, that is corruption, when honest people dare to speak out for the truth and then get sacked from their job/career.
**Professor Tim Flannery who was appointed by the Australian Prime Minister and who is paid Audlrs. 180,000 in tax-payers’ money to advise her on climate change, predicted over and over again for the last 5 years, that Australia by 2009 would be a total arid and barren place, with all the dams in the major cities totally empty. Well, since last year a number of states saw huge floods destroying their properties and crops as dams in Queensland overflowed and the same now is happening there and we in Sydney, New South Wales experienced the coldest days in our summer since 1916! [text from last three items copied from another commentator]
I can not argue your main point, because there is little to argue.
The models as presented by the IPCC are useless and wrong.
Simple test is the black box approach.
Ignoring the internal mechanism, know the inputs, access the output.
Compare output to real world.
These models are junk.
Unless you can redefine reality.
The choice by the IPCC to start hiding behind the average of the models, has now come to bite them,the average of diverging models is information?
Now Mr Mosher claims we must allow that some of these models might be more accurate than others, yes of course. But the promoters of these constructs had a choice, to select the most accurate or do what they did, projectile vomit a choice of probabilities, then average those.
If the IPCC had put forward those models it now claims are most accurate/likely, they might get some credit now, by claiming everything, they can prove nothing .
As useful as,”I predict the answer will be a number between 0 and 10, my esteemed computer models answer will be 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.”
No matter what answer comes in, I am right.as long as the answer is in the range.
But my projection was completely valueless.
.
Peer review, like democracy, is a terrible system, except in comparison with the alternatives.
The problem nowadays is that there are many who claim to be scientists, but who practice “Post-Normal Science”, which is science subverted by politics. Peer review by Post-normalists, similar to review by the church hierarchy in the medieval period, is in serviced to Orthodoxy rather than truth, and must identified as such and rejected.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people,[1] by posting inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a forum, chat room, or blog), either accidentally[3][4] or with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[5] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[6]
This sense of the word troll and its associated verb trolling are associated with Internet discourse, but have been used more widely. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment.
TROLL
Bad choice of words for this, the reason I like WUWT is that ALL are allowed to share their points of view on the topic. I hate when either side of this debate resorts to name calling and/or fallacies to promote their side. In essence they don’t do anything for their argument. The problem with the entire GW/CC is that people fall for the appeal to authority fallacy. A they 1ST don’t investigate/question the authority. 2nd they believe what is being told to them even if reality doesn’t match. 3rd is they don’t investigate the actual data, 4th they don’t investigate if the conclusion matches the data.
There is NO superior climatologist anywhere on this planet.
I am fortunate to live in an extreme climate, a large temperature normal temperature range, from -40°C to +40°C. Over my life time and that of my parents (1930-present) there has not been a climate change outside of the cyclical weather of the Canadian prairies. This is what first started my BS meter on what was being “sold” to me by the media. The arctic has not been changing outside of recorded history. Where I live has bee covered in “recent” geological times by miles of ice. I am fortunate enough to see the results of ice ages every single day. Common sense (not misread data) shows sea levels have not changed for thousands of years. Ancient ports are still ancient ports with relatively near the same levels. History shows that the North West Passage has been both Ice bound and Ice Free in the past. That Green land has been both Ice bound and green and fertile in the past. History shows that great multiyear heatwaves have existed in the past that completely changed the normal agriculture of the people. 17 years of cooling are now on the books. models cannot predict 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, now 17 years out. When looked at it both mathematically and computationally it is physically impossible to model climate for a time frame as small as 5 years. The BILLIONS of dollars wasted on both sides of this debate are a crime against humanity. The only winners are those that are able to profit from “hysteria” Yes climate should be studied, yes the effect of pollution on the planet should be studied, but jumping both feet into the IPCC continuing ever changing political tax on wealth and carbon is absolutely ludicrous. We are killing off our children’s ability to live and thrive comfortably in the future. In essence we are punishing them with politically created falsehood created to hold them in a tight energy grasp.
Model building is a science unto itself. Something as complex as a climate model could be easily wrong even though most of the science is correct. I was on an ERDA (DOE’s predecessor) review panel looking at the early climate models over 30 years ago. My conclusion was that the models were hopelessly complex and unreliable. All the environmental groups cheered because their position then was that global warming was a hoax cooked up by pro nuke types. R C Carlson co-author Solar Energy in Americas Future
It is wrong because it started out wrong with Hansen’s 1988 lecture to the Senate. He showed a temperature graph that went up and up until it peaked in 1988. That was the warmest point within the last 100 years he said. There was only a one percent chance that it could happen by chance. Hence it was 99 percent certain that it was caused by the greenhouse effect. To him it was the warming, not any physics or theory, that proved it was greenhouse warming. Then he gave figures. The 1987 temperature, he said, was 0.4 degrees higher than the 1950 to 1980 base line he used. But on May 25th 1975 The New York Times could still say that it was “well established” that “Northern Hemisphere climate has been getting cooler since about 1950.” Hansen continues to push warming and follows up with this claim: “The four warmest years, as the Senator mentioned, have all been in the 1980s. And 1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” This is factually incorrect. Satellite records show that 1987 and 1988 had exactly the same peak temperature, for the simple reason that they happen to be the two peak years of the 1987/88 El Nino. As to that improbable cooling, it did arrive by the year’s end when a La Nina moved in. As it happens, his El Nino is part of a group of five El Ninos separated by La Nina valleys in the eighties and nineties recorded by satellites. The 1987/88 El Nino is the middle one of this group. In case somene has forgotten, the ENSO oscillation consists of a periodic alternation of El Nino peaks with La Nina valleys separating them. What Hansen is claiming is that the existence of one particular El Nino peak of five that are part of an ENSO oscillation lasting from 1979 to 1997 proves that the greenhouse effect is warming up the world. Fact is, the global mean temperature during these eighteen years did not change at all because the center line of the oscillation remained the same. To elect part of such an oscillation as proof of greenhouse warming is complete stupidity. But obviously everybody has taken him at face value and never tried to question his work. You could try to excuse him because of his poor quality temperature records but as far as I go that is not an excuse. If you are a scientist you should know enough not to extrapolate noise and base a grandiose theory on that.
climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 8:10 pm
Wow that was well done you hit every talking point from the team and try to sound like you hope it’s wrong to be balanced what a joke you are TROLL, troll on young man, troll on. ;>)
This might be a modern version of a letter sent a couple hundred years ago from a courtesan to a far away friend… Like they say, it’s the same tune, just slightly different words…
Dear Thadeus,
I’m writing regarding recent events here in the New World. As you are aware, Professor James Hansen was the first Pope of the Church of Climate Change. But in 2006, our esteemed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held important meetings, peer reviewed all the candidates, and then nominated Al Gore for the next Pope of Climate Change. Finally, after months of deliberation, the esteemed academy released three puffs of white smoke (some say purple haze), and anointed Al Gore the Second (Jr.) as the new Pope of the Church of Climate Change. It was quite a spectacle, replete with all the grandeur befitting a Hollywood celebrity! But the glitz, champagne, and easy hollywood money will entertain the Pope of Climate Change only for so long…
For starters, our new pope appears to be far better at extracting the tithe than the previous Pope of Climate Change. Using a variety of newly appointed apostles (Saint Jones, Saint Briffa, Saint Lovelock, et al), the Church of Climate Change has beseeched the US Congress for Billions in tithing — and got it. And the Church is putting it to good use. His Green-ness has developed a symbol of the faith, much like the Cross the Christians use: the Windmill. The Church is making sure to install these symbols of 17th century Green-ness atop every hill in the nation, as a calling for all the sheeple, er, people.
After the procurement of the tithes, and the fostering of the Churches new symbol, the new Pope of Climate Change took to other important tasks fairly quickly. While Pope Gore the Second knew the Catholics would never allow him to co-opt the word “sin” or “sinners”, the Church carefully calculated they could steal the word “Deniers” from the children of Judea, who were politically weak. Pope Gore also knew that co-opting this word would bolster his credibility with the mullahs in the middle east, and worked toward building a church propaganda media outlet / beachhead he could sell to his new found friends from overseas.
And now as we approach today, in keeping with green orthodoxy, his Green-ness Al Gore the Second has accelerated the pace of the renouncement and persecution of scientists who disagree with the Churches dogma. The Church of Climate Change does not do this arbitrarily or cavalierly, nay. Many Church fellows, expert in the subject of the Church, have carefully peer reviewed the letters and writings of these heretics around the globe, carefully compared them with Church Orthodoxy, and all came to the same consensus. Deniers, one and all.
There was talk of burning the deniers at the stake, but alas, the carbon footprint would have been a sin (woops, not supposed to say that word out loud).
I’ll write again soon (if they don’t ban paper over here).
Sincerely,
Cain Abel
tonyb;
You have made a key point. Those who matter in deciding our future is as a high cost, intermittent energy society, paying reparations to those who now emit more co2 than we do, will not read blogs and rely on their science to make decisions, no matter how good they might be.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Tony, I’d encourage you to continue on with your work and to get it published in peer reviewed journals because I think very highly of your research and I think it has value. But on the statement above, I must disagree.
Blogs are having a major effect on the political discourse. Just examine the before and after graphics in the blog post I linked to above (I’ll repeat it here):
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/04/no-matter-how-the-cmip5-ipcc-ar5-models-are-presented-they-still-look-bad/
The version that appeared in the SOD was essentially built in an echo chamber. Had it not been leaked, and subsequently ridiculed far and wide in the blogosphere, would the second version have been created in a blatant attempt to obscure the obvious conclusions of the first one? I cannot prove that one way or the other of course, but one can certainly surmise that the cause and effect exists, and is supported by other changes that were made to the final draft to deal with valid criticism of the SOD (more on that at some later date when time and inspiration coincide).
Point being that the world is changing. Just as newspapers, radio, TV and the blogosphere have forced the political discussion to evolve, they are forcing the intersection of the politics and science to similarly evolve.
Rational Db8,
That was an excellent synopsis. Good info there. In fact, this thread is packed with good commentary.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Steve R W says:
“How much has the earth warmed since humans have burnt fossil fuels? Is it 0.8c?… Can anyone tell me what the problem is? ….I’ve yet to see it.”
I can’t see any problem either: click
What say you, climateace? Where is the problem?
Steven Mosher says:
December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well I have provoked a response from Mosher. Better than that, a multiple paragraph response!
Of course Mr Mosher, the models are based in part on known physics. It would be silly to suggest that they were completely wrong on all aspects of the science that is incorporated into them. The point of all models however is to figure out what they have right, and what they have wrong, and then refine them to the point where they are accurate enough (which will never be 100%) to make decisions on.
In that regard, the models fail. You asked which of them I analyzed, and to show my work. The answer is that I analyzed none of them. I simply looked at the model results as presented by the IPCC, and no more analysis than that is required to see that they are not accurate enough to make decisions upon.
I don’t need to go through 2000 years of medical journals to falsify each and every one of the articles on bloodletting to conclude that bloodletting is simply harmful in the vast majority of cases. (Amusingly, I am one of those exceptions to the rule myself).
Similarly, I need not analyze each model. The IPCC already did. Trenberth and Meehl (sp?) and Cowtan and Way have done it for us. The mainstream peer review literature shows that the models are wrong.
It is not up to me to prove that any given model is wrong. It is up to the proponents of the models to show that any of them, just one, demonstrates the accuracy required to make decisions on.
David
I don’t disagree at all with you. Blogs should become a short cut for peer reviewed quality work.
However that is not the general route at present by which those making decisions on our behalf will gather the data on which to make those decisions. Sceptics will have a much stronger hand if those things we point out contrary to ‘proven science’ are backed up by material that has been itself ‘proven’ to a standard that will mean something.
Tonyb
re: Steve from Rockwood says: December 30, 2013 at 8:03 am
It was pounded into my head time and again by many different professors in both grad school and undergraduate that peer review should NEVER attempt to “decide” if a paper’s conclusions are or are not correct. That’s not the purpose of peer review. Peer review is solely to determine if the scientific method was followed reasonably, and to only take issue where it clearly was not. And to catch typo’s as an aside.
So for example, where it would be a misuse of peer review to decide if a paper’s conclusions are correct or not, it’s totally proper to note where a paper’s conclusions goes beyond what the data in the experiment actually supports. Peer review should NEVER be about rejecting a paper ;for publication simply because it’s conclusions run contrary to one’s own beliefs. Any who use it simply to reject paper(s) counter to one’s own theories is abusing the system, and this ought to be easily recognized by editors and that peer reviewer no longer used.
In other words, peer review was specifically designed to avoid any false groupthink consensus, and only to detect errors in the application of the scientific method, contrary to your claim.
Excellent post, David Hoffer. Most do not realize that a good portion of inputs in the models are WAGs anyway. Then the output is used as data. How quaint.
Would also like to thank Stephen Mosher who once again unwittingly provides the best arguments against the use of models. Does he even read what he writes? You just have to laugh.
Steven Mosher says:
December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am
“3. You realize that some of the models perform better than others. Which performs the best?
and on what tests? Of the 2 or three models that cannot be rejected by statistical tests
how did you “falsify” them?”
Any claim that the models which fit are more likely true is basically an assertion of the Texas Sharpshooter’s Fallacy, drawing the target around the cluster of holes after the shots have been fired. Rationalization after the fact is often a trivial exercise in self-delusion.
Had Sir Isaac Newton put the following proposal before a commission of astronomers familiar with the system of Copernicus with Kepler’s modifications they would have sent him packing with a lot of instructions as to how orbits are interpreted and modeled –
“That the fixed stars being at rest, the periodic times of the five primary planets, and (whether of the sun about the earth, or) of the earth about the sun, are in the sesquiplicate proportion of their mean distances from the sun” Newton
This is supposed to be the observation that connects modeling of objects on a celestial scale with modeling on a experimental or human scale (,the apple and the moon notion ) or the ‘theory of gravity’ as it is more commonly known. I have never encountered a person from Newton’s strain of empiricism that understood the nuts and bolts of Sir Isaac’s modeling even though they are not shy in attaching significance to Kepler’s work as an extension of the original insights of Copernicus. Newton’s statement is not so much a pale imitation of Kepler’s approach,it would be laughable were he to present it to Kepler ,Galileo or any of the great astronomers familiar with the work of Copernicus.
“The proportion existing between the periodic times of any two planets is exactly the sesquiplicate proportion of the mean distances of the orbits, or as generally given,the squares of the periodic times are proportional to the cubes of the mean distances.” Kepler
All that statement of Kepler’s refers to tracking orbital periods from a moving Earth and then correlating time for each orbital period with distance from the Sun,it has nothing to do with explaining planetary orbits so it is quite a stretch to associate the fall or trajectory of an apple with the motions of the moon and planets.
“And so if any one take the period, say, of the Earth, which is 1 year, and the period of Saturn, which is 30 years, and extract the cube roots of this ratio and then square the ensuing ratio by squaring the cube roots, he will have as his numerical products the most just ratio of the distances of the Earth and Saturn from the sun. 1 For the cube root of 1 is 1, and the square of it is 1; and the cube root of 30 is greater than 3, and therefore the square of it is greater than 9. And Saturn, at its mean distance from the sun, is slightly higher than nine times the mean distance of the Earth from the sun.” Kepler
What Newton tried to do was interesting if one wishes to appreciate why speculative/predictive modeling took off the way it did in the late 17th century at the expense of interpretative sciences. It was then that ‘laws’ began to appear like ‘Hooke’s law’ or ‘Boyle’s law’ so Sir Isaac went for the big one and the world ended up with a clockwork solar system without his followers actually knowing how he did it. They only really cared that they could draw conclusions out of assertions without waiting to take into account physical considerations but rather could distort any reasoning to make it appear that it was a natural extension of the works of the great astronomers and they still do.
The most spectacular example of Newton’s distortion was his tragic version of retrograde resolution which defy the astronomical affirmation that the Earth moves –
“For to the earth planetary motions appear sometimes direct, sometimes stationary, nay, and sometimes retrograde. But from the sun they are always seen direct,…” Newton
That forms Newton’s notions of absolute/relative time,space and motion where observations (relative space and motion) are modeled on the basis of a hypothetical observer on the Sun (absolute space and motion) but such a drastic use of observed motions and their translation into the orbital motion of the Earth never required such an ideology of absolute/relative space or motion.The only person I have ever encountered who recognized this was Leibniz –
“I don’t find in the eighth definition of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Nature,or in the note attached to it,anything that proves or could prove the reality of space in itself. I do agree that an absolute genuine motion of a body is different from a mere change of its location in relation to another body. When the immediate cause of the change is in body x,that body is truly in
motion, and in that case the locations of other bodies in relation to x will be changed as a result, though the cause of that change is not in them” Leibniz
The guys in the early 20th century were desperate to escape Sir Isaac’s clockwork solar system but were in so deep that they were forced to cobble together a ridiculous story to keep the scheme going and they have been doing it ever since.That is why peer review is a vicious circle – if it does anything it assures continuity from generation to generation ever when common sense should intervene.
This is the outlines of a fascinating and compelling story should anyone wish to take in the wider view where the older and more stable interpretative approach was overtaken by a more aggressive speculative modeling or the ‘scientific method’ as it became known.
.
The best rejoinder I have ever heard to the supposed infallibility of peer review was a title to an obscure satire by Sherman and Larsen published in about 1960: “Fifty Million Commies Can’t Be Wrong.”
Re: Michael Palmer says: December 30, 2013 at 9:09 am
and
Rob says: December 30, 2013 at 9:58 am
Well said!
I’m also increasing bothered by the use of the word “troll” imply to describe those who we disagree with, or those who are simply wrong. It’s not the meaning of the world, and describing those as trolls encourages demonization and censorship – even tho I fully recognize it’s an awfully convenient shorthand for those we disagree with or who are pretty clearly wrong. I hope some pushback will help avoid that trap, however.
Re: dbstealey says: December 30, 2013 at 10:47 am
Thanks for the compliment!
Re: kwinterkorn says: December 30, 2013 at 9:51 am
BINGO!
I’ll only add the minor note that I have read some proposals for modified peer review systems that sound as if they might be an improvement over the conventional peer review system which certainly has been better than any prior alternatives at least… and which has clearly become more and more perverted over time by things such as “scientists” who adhere to “post normal science” rather than actual science. And unfortunately that apparently applies not only to researchers, but peer reviewers and editors also.
toxmin: If you had any real experience with academic/scientific journals, you would know that most of the published material is trash.
There is evidence that as many as 40% of the results reported in medical journals are non-reproducible, and even most of those are good studies (analogous to the high failure rate of new drugs in human clinical trials.) There is no evidence that “most of the published material” in academic/scientific journals is “trash”.
What do you count as real experience? I get updates every week from research gate on the papers of mine that have been cited, and one of them has been cited more than 800 times.
davidmhoffer: Now would you care to comment on the article?
The author, David M. Hoffer, is wrong: most of the peer-reviewed literature, including ironically the peer-reviewed papers that he considered good, represents good scientific research.
davidmhoffer says:
December 29, 2013 at 10:13 pm
. . . Was hoping for a rollicking debate with one or more of them on that point. I’m now conflicted. I’m not sure if I should feel disappointed or vindicated.
Not that it wasn’t obvious, but the irony of your confessing that you were trolling for a response with this article is moderately humorous in context.
Matthew R Marler says:
December 30, 2013 at 12:30 pm
davidmhoffer: Now would you care to comment on the article?
The author, David M. Hoffer, is wrong: most of the peer-reviewed literature, including ironically the peer-reviewed papers that he considered good, represents good scientific research.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I never commented on the validity of the research. I commented on the fact that current peer reviewed literature has abandoned proving the models right, and is now instead focused on explaining why they are wrong, contrary to the assertions of “trolls” who cannot discuss the science itself and instead cite their belief in peer review literature which, as it turns out, doesn’t say what they think it says.
How about Lister and sepsis from unsterile medical practices — especially surgery? American doctors, who often performed surgery in their street clothes, scoffed at the idea of antiseptic surgery.
That’s not “to the point.” In the discipline of logic, there are eternally true statements. And, in logic, a false statement can imply true conclusions (IIRC), but a true statement will not imply a false conclusion. Therefore, a false conclusion means that the statement that implied it is false. (Things get quite a bit fuzzier and relativistic in informal logic.) That is the “root,” as Eiting said, of Popper’s test. Popper went further, but Eiting was correct as far as he went.
There have been several suggestions posted on WUWT over the years on ways to create a better “knowledge filter,” as Henry Bauer called it, One of them is the institution of a Science Court, to adjudicate, or at least clarify, disputes like the one over AGW. Another is the greater use of an online structured dialog format, with invited main participants, and a roped-off section for uninvited participants to make comments from the sidelines. The Dutch Climate Dialog site works this way, and if it had been adopted 20 years ago, it would have done a better job of filtering and clarifying than peer review in climatology.
Another is the adoption of online “pre-review, as proposed by Hoffer. There are others I could mention, but I’m not trying to write a review-paper on the topic, just to prove that improvements are not unthinkable.
@Steven Mosher says, December 30, 2013 at 1:01 am
The modelers need to show their work and show their models are correct, not the other way around. You don’t just show an output and say “prove this is wrong.” That’s completely backwards and contra-scientific.
climateace says:
December 29, 2013 at 11:30 pm
I see that the personal abusers have come out from under their rocks.
Yes, you have… but I’d rather you went back under it…
really.
Look, your “style” is 100% Troll. (Looking to thread hyjack by injecting spurious and disjoint points that deflect from the actual topic at hand with the intent to cause emotional responses. Working to disrupt, not to enlighten. Casting snark and insult.)
You regularly post comments devoid of any technical content, but rich in inuendo, snark, and “baiting”. Your use of non-logic is profound, but wasted on a largely logic centric audience. Frankly, I wonder why you waste your time here. You can recrute empty headed numpties anywhere; folks here are generally bright and informed enough to not fall for your tripe and nonsense.
Then you run around insulting people and doing personal abuse. Oh Well… at least you can serve as a bad example for others to see and a stellar example of the typical AGW Troll Class. May you continue to enlighten others as to what not to be / do… by example.
Per the article main point: I found it quite useful. The rush to “peer review” as a stamp of truth is a clear badge of failure of reason. It is only a stamp of minimal Q/A and political acceptance.
And yes, the failure of the models demonstraites the failure of the “science” under them. An excellent point.
Rational Db8
What a lovely collection of information. Hopefully climateace will will read and understand it and
even be a convert.
I have been a skeptic ever since Michael Mann’s Hockeystick was first published by the Media.
No Holocene, Roman Warming, Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age etc.The Media picked it up and ran with it, because it is bad news.
EM Smith says, “Yes, you have… but I’d rather you went back under it…really.
Look, your “style” is 100% Troll. (Looking to thread hyjack by injecting spurious and disjoint points that deflect from the actual topic at hand with the intent to cause emotional responses. Working to disrupt, not to enlighten. Casting snark and insult.)”
150 mentions of that moniker on one thread alone, recently.
Other threads have been completely destroyed by one hobby horse yahoo, like the moon landing denier on Christmas.
At one point I wrote and, I thought, saved, a fully documented rebuttal of the claim that “believe” is exclusively a term of religion. But I can’t find it in my files. So here’s the short version, from The Cassell Concise Dictionary (others are similar):
EM Smith says, “Yes, you have… but I’d rather you went back under it…really.
Look, your “style” is 100% Troll. (Looking to thread hyjack by injecting spurious and disjoint points that deflect from the actual topic at hand with the intent to cause emotional responses. Working to disrupt, not to enlighten. Casting snark and insult.)”
150 mentions of that moniker on one thread alone, recently.
Other threads have been completely destroyed by one hobby horse yahoo, like the moon landing accuser on Christmas.
@Allan J:
I’ve pondered that. Best I could come up with was “Peer Commenting”. Have a site (blog) where a paper is published to a limited audience. Only folks “in the field” can see it (perhaps even just a subset – but a broad one- such as folks with Ph.D. after their name). They can comment. After a review period (6 months?) with the author ineracting with the comments, the resultant (changed and hopefully improved) “paper” gets re-posted to the broader audience of “anyone with a degree” for another round of comments (prior Peer Review comments now hidden, or anonymised if desired). Then after another 6 months, that posting and comments are opened to public view.
Nothing gets hidden except some of the early Peer Names (if needed) and some of their comments if they or the author finds them too painful (i.e. the present rough comment chopping block can still happen). Things have a chance to be “beaten up” by a selected group prior to going more public. Anything reaching the end (public) is pretty well vetted OR has a string of scathing attacks showing where it is broken and the author is seen as a bit slow to realize they are wrong… or least likely but possible, it’s clearly a radical idea that the attacks can’t quite defeat.
Seems to me like this still preserves the value of peer review, while breaking some of the pal review and rejection of new ideas for political reasons.
re: MarkB says: December 30, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Again, hoping to launch a good debate or discussion is NOT trolling. In fact, it can easily be far removed from anything approaching trolling. Trolling is when someone posts something they don’t even necessarily believe, in purposefully inflammatory fashion, hoping to irritate and provoke multiple responses – quite often ones that are entirely off topic.
Hoping to generate robust debate of a solid issue isn’t anything like trolling.
re: OneStone says: December 30, 2013 at 1:57 pm
Thanks OneStone! I hope it might have some positive impact on climateace also, but regardless, I put it together some time ago (with occasional updates) and post it every now and then when it seems particularly appropriate hoping that even if it has no impact on the person I’m responding to, perhaps other readers will find it informative and useful. All too often it seemed that many folks just literally had no idea that there were so very very many hard core excellent scientists who are skeptics. I think over time more have come to realize that there isn’t any actual “consensus” in favor of AGW, but still far too many just never see proof of it what with the media constantly beating the AGW drums.
I think what is happening is that real Peer Review is escaping the Pals’ Network onto blogs like WUWT. It is redefining both Peer and Review in what is essentially a healthy way. What we need now is an adaptation/development of the well known data-searching algorithms to filter the gold from the dross in the comment streams and provide digests and more – a nice challenge for the computer engineers.
SAB @3;31, I agree, the sense of loss has academia frantic, power is slipping away.
Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit seems like one approach to reviewing material.
Like the host here, he avoids name calling and sarcasm as much as possible, encourages a focus on the topic at hand.
But who pays? It would be unfair to expect volunteers to devote endless hours, so the next best is open posting and those who want chose to may critique these speculations.
E.M Smiths suggestion of closed group review first, probably already happens, surely these scientists bounce their ideas off of their peers, before they rush to publish?
But however (pre-publish) preview is done, publishing articles without all the required information to duplicate the speculation there in, is about as anti-science as one can get.
Why would any scientist do this?
Your hopes have been realised.
Lewis P Buckingham
Thanks for your delightful post on water divining. it certainly made a pleasant break from being called an uninformed troll, a troll, a wanker and an idiot – just because people are having difficulty coping with someone who disagrees with them.
Anyway, one good story deserves another.
During one particularly bad drought (cows skeletal and/or dying) our dams dried up. Dad decided to drill a bore. The question was where? A mate of a mate of a mate knew a bloke who was a dab hand with the eight gauge fencing wire. Out he came and wandered over the paddocks… drawn mysteriously first one way and then another way by the pull of the wires. I thought it was bullsh*t, but no-one much listened to kids in those days.
Finally he announced ‘x’ marked the spot. We repaired to the kitchen table where the Diviner One was shouted a few beers by way of thanks. We drilled and we drilled and we drilled: dry as a bone.
If ever there was a waste of good beer during a drought, that was it.
Lewis:
http://www.skeptics.com.au/publications/articles/australian-skeptics-divining-test/
climateace says:
“it certainly made a pleasant break from being called an uninformed troll, a troll, a wanker and an idiot – just because people are having difficulty coping with someone who disagrees with them.”
It’s not reasonable disagreement. It is the total refusal to accept reality; the incredibly hard-headed insistence that despite all empirical evidence falsifying your belief system, you go on and on as if you were a religious fanatic.
Try to use logic for once: if there is absolutely NO scientific evidence to support your belief in runaway global warming [and there isn’t any, or you would have posted it by now], try for once to understand that you’re undoubtedly wrong: catastrophic AGW has been thoroughly debunked. There is no testable, measurable scientific evidence that it exists. None at all.
You come ascross as someone whose On/Off switch has been wired around. There is no “Off” for you. No matter how many times it is pointed out that there is no measurable, testable evidence supporting your True Belief, you continue on as if you’ve had a divine revelation.
This is a science site, not a witch doctor’s blog. Try to remember that. If you have measurable evidence, post it. That is the bottom line.
EMSmith
You make the claim that I raise extraneous points. This is largely untrue. A good peer reviewer would have picked this up and not supported publication without substantial review.
(1) I have posted extensively on three blogs recently. Monckon discussed the links between christianity and science and I stuck to that for around 100% of the time. Basically my position was that religion and science should not be mixed.
(2) Forbes argued that the Australian economy was uncompetitive for a number of reasons including a ‘weak currency’ and too much regulation. About half my posts were about why that was bizarre: Australia’s economy has been moving up the ranks of world economy by size, we have achieved a triple AAA credit rating from all the world’s credit rating and we have had around 80 consecutive months of economic growth. How could an uncompetitive economy do that? Plus, we have had a terribly strong currency. I also paired this with the view that the regulations were there to achieve something useful including halting our mass extinction event in its tracks.
(3) Apart from water-divining (not initiated by me) I have responded specifically to points made by the author. I did not raise Galileo – he did. I did not raise the subject of trolls – he did. Other posters raised Copernicus, Anaxagoras, Bertrand Russell, etc, etc. Where they do so, I should be able to respond, should I not?
climateace says:
Basically my position was that religion and science should not be mixed.
And of course, you do not mix them. One hundred percent of your CAGW belief is religious. If I am wrong, then please post any testable, measurable evidence you may have that supports your belief.
Empirical [real world] observations and evidence, please. Keep in mind that computer models and peer reviewed papers are not scientific evidence.
Climat A @6:13
So that was what you thought to accomplish.
3 tight paragraphs and you could have saved us all the endless verbiage.
Amazed by how poorly you communicate.
As the difference between your endless empty commenting and your stated intent above is probably several thousand words.
What is your first language? Bureaucratize?
See the difference? This is personal abuse, highlight it the next time you go whining and crying to the site moderators.
So you are not trolling, you just can never get to the point?
This is Climateace’s beloved peer review:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”
Cheers
Phil
(Phil Jones to Michael Mann, July, 2004: http://www.di2.nu/foia/1089318616.txt)
Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty knows that in climate science, the peer review process (as well as science as done by the Scientific Method) has been utter corrupted by the Lysenkoists of the IPCC. As so comprehensively documented by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit, by Andrew Montford at Bishop Hill (and in his superb book, “The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science”) and of course here at WUWT by Anthony Watts. Anyone who still bleats about “peer review” when it comes to climate is just revealing themselves to be (at best) monumentally and willfully ignorant.
One wonders: if Climateace were put in sensory-deprivation chamber with a copy of Montford’s book, would he refuse to read it?
climateace you answer to my quest went unanswered instead you got snarky because I figured you did not have enough brain to get out of the wind. So you commented so:
” I was about to respond to your post when I came upon the last line. You lost your cedibility there, buddy.”
Son you have no credibility with me I sign my post with my full name you have to use so POS of “climateace” if you cannot respond to a post and use you own name you do no have any credibility to begin with. Until you reveal who you are and are will to stand face to face and post not hiding under an post name like “climateace” you are a troll and you options are not worth the energy it takes to bring them to my desk.
‘AndrewSanDiego says:
December 30, 2013 at 9:32 pm
This is Climateace’s beloved peer review’
Where does it say I ‘love’ peer review? What I did say was that, given a choice between peer-reviewed science and blog posts, I would choose the former. I noted that there were mistakes in peer-reviewed science and that it was not perfect.
Here is a test: name one main stream medicine created by bloggers. And no, I am not talking about aromatherapy, crystal therapy or magic stones.
ML
Here is a handy hint for proper discussions on WUWT: if you want someone to take you seriously, do not call them an idiot.
jr
‘Three tight paras…’
Thank you. Compliments are thin on the ground around here. You might have noted that the guest posters all used hundreds of words and that I used far fewer than they did.
I do note that you focuss on the style rather than the substance, though.
I suppose there was nothing bizarre, for example, about Forbes stating that we have a ‘weak currency’ at a time when Treasurer Hockey and the Governor of the Reserve Bank are busy trying to talk the dollar down?
dbstealey
Instead of ranting on about witchdoctors and religious fanatics you could always look at what I have actually written and address that.
I think this blog post has an unfortunate title; I’m not even sure I know 100% what it is talking about.
That’s a shame, because it the world of climate discourse, you see a lot of bickering back and forth between people who are looking at the metaphorical trees, while ignoring the forest. This post deals with the FOREST, and does it in a simple, straightforward, “Emperor’s New Clothes” kind of way. Really, it cuts to the heart of the matter in a way that’s beyond refreshing.
** If somebody wanted to know what’s going on with AGW that’s REALLY important, and only wanted to read ONE article – ALL YEAR – THIS WOULD BE THE ONE TO READ. **
It’s also a shame, and kind of silly, to see people focus on the minutia regarding Galileo (WHO CARES!?!), and ignore the real point, which is profound. I guess everybody has to show how smart THEY are, when somebody else does something great.
All I would suggest by way of improvement would be to invoke some Feynman. There’s a 10 minute video of Richard Feynman, called “Richard Feynman on Scientific Method” that explains the basic principles being violated, that the author here is calling the AGW alarmists on. What he says is so basic, you would think it would be obvious to everybody, but this is the real world, and people don’t think in as disciplined, rational, and logical way as they should:
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=richard+feynman&qpvt=richard+feynman&FORM=VDRE#view=detail&mid=925177A3D4EC7C4587C8925177A3D4EC7C4587C8
climatedeuce says:
“Instead of ranting on about witchdoctors and religious fanatics you could always look at what I have actually written and address that.”
Oh, but I have looked! The problem is that you have never posted any testable, measurable scientific evidence showing either a human ‘fingerprint’ on global warming, or for that matter, any measurable evidence of an acceleration in global warming. With steadily rising CO2, your beliefs don’t make any sense. Global warming should be accelerating. But it isn’t. It isn’t even happening.
Thus, all of your comments amount to the unscientific ranting of a witch doctor’s acolyte. A true Believer in catastrophic AGW, nothing more.
If you have any testable evidence of runaway global warming, post it here and now. If not, then you are just making up baseless assertions. You’re trying to fabricate a scare.
Prove me wrong; the ball is in your court. Post your evidence.
By way of extending the point of the blog post, it had occurred to me during the year that what we really need is a DATE. Allow me to explain what I mean.
Back in April there was a AGW-sympathetic article in The Economist that included a graph of temperature vs. time, where the one thing being plotted was a confidence interval for the models, while the other thing being plotted was the actual measured data. The point of the article was, basically, what to do about The Pause, especially given that the measured data was on the brink of exiting the confidence interval. In other words, how to rationalize keeping the AGW hoax going, given the lack of cooperation of our ungrateful Mother Earth.
What I was looking to do was to find the data that was presented in the article, to see where the data went in the months after the article was published. The point where the measured data exits the confidence interval is the point in time where the AGW theory is (literally) disproved!!
It turns out that there was a problem with this, however. Mostly, I couldn’t find the confidence interval data that the article used (or any other CI data, for that matter). Maybe I just need to dig deeper. The main thing is to find a place where the AGW crowd was foolish enough, at some time in the past, to bound their predictions, and to show the point in time where it fails.
There are other obvious problems, but the thing is, they don’t matter. The thing is, the argument doesn’t have to be an especially good one, because the theory being disputed has been defended with even shoddier arguments. It could be that the confidence interval is invalid, for example, but that doesn’t matter – all that would be important is that THEY, in all their hubris, put it out there, and called it a “confidence interval” (CI). If their CI is invalid, then it just shows how invalid all the nonsense they put out there is.
The important thing is to give the non-technical person a DATE they can point to that says “as of this time, AGW was proven to be wrong.” The theory is embodied by the celebrated climate models, and so if they are wrong the theory is wrong. If we’re going FINALLY to get AGW in it’s proper place (for example, as the scientific explanation given in the movie “Sharknado”), it should be immensely helpful to not only say “the theory has ABC problem and XYZ problem”, which has been going on for decades, but to also be able to say, “it was tested out, and – as of 2013 – it was proven wrong!”
On a final side note, regarding the blog post, another point to bring up is the absurdity of claiming “the science is settled”, while they STILL have 30 DIFFERENT models that they use. Obviously, if it WERE settled (imagining for a moment that there IS such a thing!) there would only be ONE!!! It has been pointed out that these models shouldn’t even be the “null hypothesis”. THEY are the extraordinary claim, and so H0 should be the hypothesis that “no man-made warming has occurred”. The thing is, and correct me if I’m wrong, but this so-called “settled science” couldn’t even draw up a confidence interval for that!
You are debating with someone who believes climate change (That’s climate change driven by emissions of CO2 from human activity alone that is not supported by ANY evidence anywhere outside a computer model) is responsible for failed cattle farms through drought and soil, plant, animal degredation due to human habitaion in Australia (Last time I read a post of his his family was procreating, kids/grandkids, and thus contributing to a threat, 30,000 years away!). Not only is Australia a drought prone country, cows are not indigenous beasts. That farming model was bound fail.
I guess I should get my worry beads out, turn off all electical devices, sit in the dark and *hope* that climate models are wrong. I think I’ll pass on that and have a beer!
Happy new year everyone!
dbstealey
“If you have any testable evidence of runaway global warming, post it here and now. ”
But he has. He has marshalled a wealth of ‘evidence’. Let me list them from his posts:
1) Learned institutions all agree that . . .
2) 97% of thousands of climate scientists agree . . .
3) Fauna and flora are on the move.
4) The ice caps are all melting.
5) The Phenology thing.
What more do you want?
(/sarc)
climateace
“Here is a test: name one main stream medicine created by bloggers.”
As far as I know it costs $m to create mainstream medicines, what with all the R&D, double blind trials etc. Probably beyond the resources of most bloggers, though there have been interesting twists.
One university (can’t remember which) enlisted the help of computer gamers to solve folding problems of complex polypeptides. They created an online 3D engine which the gamers use to try to fold the proteins. The gamers were able to crack the problem which the researchers had been unable to do.
On the subject of computer generated climate models.
The 1st problem is that most people believe that those “climate models” are as functional as are “model airplanes”.
The 2nd problem is ….. those “climate models” won’t fly. They are akin to a dog that won’t hunt.
IMHO, based on my learned knowledge and experiences, it is impossible to create a computer modeling program of a dynamic process whereby the various input data sources, …. which interact with one another, ,,,,,, and which are constantly changing on an hour-to-hour, …. day-to-day, …. month-to-month …. and year-to-year basis.
Even if one knew what all the various input data sources were that directly affect said “dynamic process” it would still be impossible for them to accurately predict what their status was going to be at some future point in time.
climateace says: December 30, 2013 at 10:31 pm
dbstealey
Instead of ranting on about witchdoctors and religious fanatics you could always look at what I have actually written and address that.
He has addressed it, as have many others. It has become obvious that trying to address a uni-dimensional intellect regarding a four dimensional hypothesis is a waste of energy.
Note well: that nether Mosher or Climateace have responded to my point, that no accurate model can track the temperature record. It MUST run or cold in the short and medium term.
The models aren’t falsified by the fact that they are running hot this century, that is a small point in their favour actually. No, they are falsified by the fact that they closely track the short and medium term temperature record throughout the 20th century something that is impossible for an accurate model. If a model or hypothesis produces an impossible result it is falsified, fact!
No warmist has ever responded to this point, they have always run away and hidden, presumably going La La La in their little heads.
Alan
Chris Monckton tells us that Mikey’s Nature paper was not peer reviewed. The movie An Inconvenient Truth was not peer reviewed, not does its maker even now have any scientific credentials. Yet both of these sources are regarded as gospel by warmists.
@John Robertson, December 30 at 3:55
Thank you for those thoughts. My early days were in Experimental Psychology, before I moved into analytical computing. I was privileged to get my degree in what was at that time very much a Laboratory rather than a department. We were heavily discouraged from using anything apart from primary sources for our essays and research. There were score upon score of different journals to refer to. Some of which it became apparent very quickly were full of dross, and a few of which became our primary references like the QJEP. There were also journals consisting of scholarly reviews – critical reviews – notably PsychRev. These served the invaluable purpose of modelling learned discussion of the primary research appearing in the ‘journals of discovery’. We could quote or refer to these, but only on condition that we demonstrated that we too had read the primary works being discussed, and could arrive at our own conclusions independently.
I think I have been all along mistaking the pre-publication review process (necessary but pedestrian sub-editing) for the rather more important function of the critical response, post-publication in journals of review. The function of the latter is to look at the context of research, its plausibility in the light of any counter-results or failures to replicate, and make constructive public suggestions for further work. This is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking, and can make significant demands on the scientific quality of the author. It was always at this stage, rather than at initial publication, that we expected work to be ‘taken apart’ ruthlessly, and where we hoped to be able to add our own small contribution by spotting holes that hadn’t been seen by others. It was only after sharpening our analytical skills in this way that we ever expected to be able to conduct research of our own.
Maybe when we are assessing the quality of those scientists who are such vociferous advocates of the CAGW theory? hypothesis? belief?, we should look at the extent of their output in learned reviews of the literature as well as their perhaps cockamamie observational/constructed modeling papers. It is interesting that critical reviews, unlike primary research papers, were generall y authored by a single indiviual, who therefore had to have the courage to nail his own reputation to the mast without sharing the blame with otheres!
Stuart B
Optimizer says:
December 31, 2013 at 1:54 am
The main thing is to find a place where the AGW crowd was foolish enough, at some time in the past, to bound their predictions, and to show the point in time where it fails.
Is this what you are looking for:
PDF document @NOAA.gov. For anyone else who wants it, the exact quote from pg 23 is:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
Here is what has happened on several data sets:
On several different data sets, there has been no statistically significant warming for between 16 and 21 years.
The details for several sets are below.
For UAH: Since January 1996: CI from -0.024 to 2.445
For RSS: Since November 1992: CI from -0.008 to 1.959
For Hadcrut4: Since August 1996: CI from -0.005 to 1.345 For Hadsst3: Since January 1994: CI from -0.029 to 1.697
For GISS: Since June 1997: CI from -0.007 to 1.298
Then there is this:
Benjamin Santer and others say the following:
“Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”
RSS now has no warming since September 1996 or 17 years and 3 months and counting.
davidmhoffer: I commented on the fact that current peer reviewed literature has abandoned proving the models right,
davidmhoffer: Peer Review; Last Refuge of the (Uninformed) Troll
Posted on December 29, 2013 by Guest Blogger
Current peer review science, by attempting to explain away model failure, in fact confirms that the science is wrong
You wrote a broadside against all “current peer review science”. What you showed subsequently was that you disagreed with some of it, agreed with others. In fact, almost all “current peer review science” is good. Everybody dislikes or barely tolerates the peer-review system, which survives mainly because another system has not replaced it.
Of course no one challenged your secondary claim that the climate models are unacceptably inaccurate. That was not the prominent text of your post.
Matthew R Marler;
Of course no one challenged your secondary claim that the climate models are unacceptably inaccurate.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No? You missed Steve Mosher, the one sentence snarc machine, delivering a broadside on just that issue?
You may want to drop in on the more current thread at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/31/climate-craziness-of-the-week-only-the-cooler-models-are-wrong-the-rest-say-4oc-of-warming-by-2100/
Where yet another peer reviewed paper has appeared, which, if taken at face value, not only says that many of the models are wrong, but that by correcting them, their results will be even worse when compared to reality than they are now.
As for what I did or didn’t say, there’s no point arguing with you about it. I said what I said and anyone who wishes to verify what I said is most likely to simply read it for themselves. You of course seem to think you can propose a model of what I actually said and get people to accept that instead, but I’m guessing you aren’t even fooling yourself on that score.
Rational Db8 says:
December 30, 2013 at 11:10 am
—————————————————–
I recall one of my profs (who I was working for during the summer) very upset after one of his manuscripts was rejected, most likely from his old nemesis at a competing university. I asked my prof what he was going to do and he just smiled. “I’ll wait a few years. He’s do to retire. Then it will be my turn”.
But anecdotal evidence from non-experts has created feedback that has led to recall of insufficiently vetted medicines. And–after the fact–it was discovered that various tribal groups were rubbing dirt that contained penicillin on their wounds. If science had been paying attention, amateurs (with-doctors, actually) could have been given credit for its discovery.
It’s not an either/or situation. Non-academic input to scientific controversies can be valuable. The Dutch Climate Dialog site is a good model.
rogerknights says:
January 1, 2014 at 8:23 am
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Roger,
Climateace is engaging in yet another red herring. New medicines are by law vetted through a strict government regulated process. Anything that came to market outside of that process would, by definition, be illegal.
Science was held in place for centuries by adherence to Aristotle and Plato. Galileo’s mistake was that he refuted Aristotle and Ptolemy, which were upheld by the Roman Church, and produced many counterarguments and observations. Wik says, “…the influence of Aristotle’s errors is considered by some to have held back science considerably. Bertrand Russell notes that “almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine”. Russell also refers to Aristotle’s ethics as “repulsive”, and calls his logic “as definitely antiquated as Ptolemaic astronomy”.
Galileo Galilei to the Most Serene Grand Duchess Mother:
Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors – as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overthrow the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts, not their diminution or destruction.
Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they sought to deny and disprove the new things, which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them. To this end they hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly, and which were ill suited to their purposes.
These men would perhaps not had fallen into such error had they but paid attention to a most useful doctrine of St. Augustine’s, relative to our making positive statements about things which are obscure and hard to understand by means of reason alone. Speaking of a certain physical conclusion about the heavenly bodies, he wrote: “Now keeping always our respect for moderation in grave piety, we ought not to believe anything inadvisedly on a dubious point, lest in favor to our error we conceive a prjudice against something that truth hereafter may reveal to be not contrary in any way to the sacred books of either the Old or the New Testament.”
He continues regarding the many academics who remain hostile to him:
“Perisiting in their original resolve to destroy me and everything mine by any means they can think of, these men are aware my views in astronomy and philosophy. They know that as to the arrangement of the parts of the universe, I hold the sun to be situated motionless in the center of the revolution of the celestial orbs while the earth rotates on its axis and revolves about the sun. The know also that I support this position not only by refuting the arguments of Ptolemy and Aristotle, but by producing many counterarguments; in particular, some which relate to physical effects whose causes can perhaps be assigned in no other way. …{These} men have resolved to fabricate a shield for their fallacies out ot the mantle of pretended religion and the authority of the Bible.”
davidmhoffer: As for what I did or didn’t say, there’s no point arguing with you about it.
I quoted it.
davidmhoffer: No? You missed Steve Mosher, the one sentence snarc machine, delivering a broadside on just that issue?
Yeh, we both missed it.
davidmhoffer: Of all the comments critical of my article, not a single one even attempted to refute my main assertion; The climate models are wrong, demonstrating that the science upon which they are founded is wrong, and the biggest proponents of the CAGW meme in the climate science community are now reduced to increasingly implausible explanations as to why.
I’ll end where you began, davidmhoffer: Peer Review; Last Refuge of the (Uninformed) Troll
Matthew R Marler;
I’ll end where you began, davidmhoffer: Peer Review; Last Refuge of the (Uninformed) Troll
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Which is exactly what the article was about. Trolls spouting peer review as the exclusive domain of Truth while clearly being uninformed as to what the peer review literature actually says.
Oh, Anthony. The ads on your site are so often a humorous touch just by being there. Today in my reading of the article, the ad promises me 20% off diapers and wipes. Apropos with regard to the points being made about the models being inadequate, inaccurate, and misleading (i.e., dung).
Zeke
Galileo is often used as an example of an individual challenge to staid authority and a springboard to attack the Christian Church but what one among you could handle the actual objections of Barberini –
“Two close friends of Galileo, Giovanni Ciampoli and Virginio Cesarini, were also named to important posts. Cesarini was appointed Lord Chamberlain, and Ciampoli Secret Chamberlain and Secretary for the Correspondence with Princes. Under these favourable auspices Galileo thought the moment had come to renew his campaign for Copernicanism, and in 1624 he set off for Rome where he had the rare privilege of being received by the Pope six times in six weeks. Although the 1616 decree of the Index against Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus was not suspended, Galileo felt that he could now argue for the motion of the Earth as long as he avoided declaring that it was the only system that fitted astronomical observations.
Here lurked the danger of serious misunderstanding. Maffeo Barberini, while he was a Cardinal, had counselled Galileo to treat Copernicanism as a hypothesis, not as a confirmed truth. But ‘hypothesis’ meant two very different things. On the one hand, astronomers were assumed to deal only with hypotheses, i.e. accounts of the observed motions of the stars and planets that were not claimed to be true. Astronomical theories were mere instruments for calculation and prediction, a view that is often called ‘instrumentalism’. On the other hand, a hypothesis could also be understood as a theory that was not yet proved but was open to eventual confirmation. This was a ‘realist’ position. Galileo thought that Copernicanism was true, and presented it as a hypothesis, i.e. as a provisional idea that was potentially physically true, and he discussed the pros and cons, leaving the issue undecided. This did not correspond to the instrumentalist view of Copernicanism that was held by Maffeo Barberini and others. They thought that Copernicus’ system was a purely instrumental device, and Maffeo Barberini was convinced that it could never be proved. This ambiguity pervaded the whole Galileo Affair.”
http://www.unav.es/cryf/english/newlightistanbul.html
The fact is that you can’t use the predictive framework of RA/Dec to prove the daily and orbital motions of the Earth so the objections were valid and remain so,I haven’t seen the actual written documents as to the Pope’s position but if they were as written in that article above then they remain unresolved,at least up until now.
Contemporary understanding is twilit at best,not just the historical trajectory of the Galileo/Church affair but specifically the technical details which really became significant when they started to model planetary dynamics using timekeeping averages based on the old predictive framework in use for many hundreds of years.
I wish there were people who could expand their historical and technical horizons instead of this fairytale of the Catholic Church requiring an Earth centered Universe before they use it as a modern day club to beat their opponents.
The Copernican System had a bombshell lurking in the weeds. As it eventually transpired, it was generalizable, with a few (Keplerian) tweaks, to cosmology in general, and was far more plausible than perforated crystal spheres etc. Once the Sun began to move, it was game over.
climateace:
You have provided a series of posts in this thread which attempt to revile the excellent article by David Hoffer. Each of your posts is wrong for a reason stated in his article; i.e. your posts use peer review as an Appeal To Authority. This is a logical fallacy and alone makes your posts plain wrong.
Importantly, you do not understand the nature of peer review.
The ONLY purpose of peer review is to protect journal Editors.
An Editor cannot be expected to know everything about the subject of every paper the journal is asked to publish. Hence, a paper which seems worthy is put to review by people with expertise in the subject (i.e. peer review) so they can discern significant faults in the paper.
If a paper has significant faults then they need to be corrected before the paper can be published. And if the faults cannot be corrected then the paper is rejected. Thus an Editor gains some (imperfect) protection from publishing unadulterated rubbish.
Thus, peer review is intended to prevent publication of papers which are plain wrong, but this does NOT imply that a published paper is right. The worth of a paper is determined by its usefulness and ability to withstand scrutiny AFTER publication.
Furthermore, peer review is open to misuse in several ways.
Cliques can favourably review the papers of each other while trashing papers which differ from the views of the clique (i.e. pal review). Established ideas can get a ‘pass’ while novelty – which is more important – can be rejected because it is novel. etc.
And peer review is a relatively recent innovation. For example, only one of the papers published by Einstein was put to peer review: this happened late in his career and he objected to it.
The worth of information is demonstrated solely by its usefulness and ability to withstand scrutiny.
When, where, how and by whom the information is published indicates NOTHING concerning the worth of information. And this is demonstrated by an illustration which you provide.
At December 29, 2013 at 6:34 pm you write
There would be no “safe aircraft travel” if your assertions were true.
The seminal work on aeronautics was published in a magazine about bee-keeping by two bicycle salesmen who had published nothing previously and could not get their paper published in scientific or engineering journals.
The worth of the work by the Wright brothers is demonstrated by the existence of the aircraft industry and NOT by where and how they published it.
Importantly, there is no reason to suppose that peer reviewed papers are more likely to be right than blog posts: much research indicates that most published peer reviewed papers are wrong; e.g. see
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
The worth of information is determined by scrutiny AFTER publication and NOT by where it is published.
But you claim information on blogs should be ignored in favour of peer reviewed rubbish merely because the rubbish is peer reviewed. Remove your cranium from your nether regions and try to think before making such silly claims.
Richard
The process of climate science has distorted the scientific process. The models are an embodiment of the consensus view that in all of the IPCC Assessment Reviews (ARs) starts with the conjecture (not a theory) that manmade greenhouse gases are unarguably the overwhelming cause of warming of the earth’s atmosphere. In the Fifth Assessment Review just released we are told that the likelihood of manmade global warming is even more certain than in the previous Assessments – extremely 95% likely. The defining objective of the consensus view of manmade global warming came from the 1993 United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention in Rio which said:
[PREAMBLE]
“1) The parties to the convention acknowledging that change in the Earth’s climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of humankind…;
2) … concerned that human activities have been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, that these increases enhance the natural greenhouse effect, and that this will result on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere…”
[OBJECTIVE:] “The objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve … stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (MAN MADE) interference with the climate system.”
[PRINCIPLES:]
1) The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future … humankind…
3) The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures …”
All of the official consensus positions e.g., IPCC held to the UNFCCC Rio convention that global warming is man made and the enemy is carbon. This was reinforced by the correlation from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s between monotonically increasing CO2 and global mean temperatures and opposing arguments gained little traction … until recent times when doubts emerged because of the 16 year hiatus running from the latter 1990s to the present which the conjecture (not a theory) and the accepted “official” models did not explain or even address. In fact, the consensus conjecture also did not explain the cooling / flat period from the mid 1940 to the mid 1970s which the conjecture (not a theory) also did not account for or explain (e.g., in “back-cast” simulations).
So in my view it is not the models that are questionable and incomplete it is basic underlying conjecture that anthropogenic causes are by far the main cause (… love the way the word “anthropogenic” just drips of “unassailable appeal to authority!). Reasonable persons with scientific backgrounds accept the greenhouse theory as accepted theory (I do).
The argument is not that the lack of fit by the models to the empirical data cannot be used to discount the “theory” (conjecture) of global warming; it’s that the “theory” does not explain the empirical data. The models are just an embodiment of a theory that does not explain the empirical data. Therefore, the “theory” (conjecture) is, I won’t say wrong, but insufficient or incomplete, which is the antithesis of what the IPCC/consensus still strongly defend. There is a whole lot more going e.g., including natural forcings, that are not well understood including the flywheel effect of positive feedbacks and effects of negative feedbacks. A large number of qualified climate scientists say that other causes – besides manmade ones – cause over half of the warming observed. To me this raises serious questions – first of all about how the self governed and a self certifying, self reinforcing science process affects intellectual integrity. How else would you justify using a Delphi polling show of hands to claim numerical probabilities of a manifestation of the pollees’ (i.e., the IPCC lead authors) own positions as a measure of certainty of knowledge..?
David: This is a keeper. Well written, and undeniably logical.