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.
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:
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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!
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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?