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.
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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.