We’ve seen the “If 99 doctors said…” argument, or facsimiles, used often by global warming enthusiasts in recent months. George Clooney used it when interviewed at the Britannia Awards. (See the Open Letter to Lewis Black and George Clooney.) James Cameron used it in the trailer for the upcoming ShowTime series “Years of Living Dangerously”. (Refer to the open letter to Mr. Cameron and the other executive producers of that show.) And on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart included a clip of Dan Weiss of the Center for American Progress using it (See the Open Letter to Jon Stewart.)
I responded to those arguments and discussed many other topics in the posts linked above, with links to more-detailed explanations and examples…and, of course, with links to my ebooks.
The following is something I wrote for my upcoming book with the working title The Oceans Ate My Global Warming (or another possible title CO2 is Not a Control Knob). I thought you might use for it when you see the “If 99 doctors said…” argument again.
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Imagine you’re running a persistent slight fever. You visit a new clinic. The nurse takes your vitals and enters them into a computer program. A short time after the computer model completes its simulations, the doctor arrives, advises you of the computer-diagnosed ailment, and prescribes controversial high-cost medications and treatment.
You’re not comfortable with the service, diagnosis, prescription or treatment, so you check out online the computer model used by the clinic. It is proclaimed to be wonderful by its programmers. But, the more you research, the more you discover the model’s defects. It can’t simulate circulation, respiration, digestion, and other basic bodily functions. There are numerous research papers exposing the flaws in the model, but they are hard to find because of all of the other papers written by the model programmers extolling its virtues.
Of course, you would not accept the computer-based medical diagnosis from a model that cannot simulate basic bodily functions and processes. But that’s the position we’re faced with climate science.
We need a second opinion for the slight warming the Earth had experienced. Unfortunately, it is not likely to be coming anytime soon, not until there are changes to the political agendas that drive climate science funding.
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Enjoy your Super Bowl Sunday…for those celebrating. For everyone else, enjoy your day.
“Nature can, selectively, buffer human-caused global warming, say scientists”
What?! You dont say… who knew…
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140202111055.htm
for irritable climate syndrome, climate doctors prescribe economic thalidomide because they are thinking of the children
Bob,
I loved your 99 doctors on the wall analogy. How apt; the patient’s bodily function aren’t being modeled.
Well, I checked up on their model and there ARE some bodily functioned being modeled quite accurately. The excretion functions are very realistic, in their emulation of the real thing.
The reason you are seeing the “99 doctors” line is because they are using the same tactics used to attack the tobacco industry since it is progressives only real victory over their opponents. Read their blogs and comments on HUffPo and you will see the back discussions.
I remember having a conversation in 1996 with a doctor at our university hospital were I had to inform Him about the real causes of ulcers. He was still stuck with type A personality as an explanation. The fact that I knew about the real cause since the early 1980s was stunning for Him and horrifying for me. Transfer this argument to issues around global warming and I am almost apoplectic at the ignorance people display. I am only 60 years old and have zero confidence the global warming meme will be put to bed before I pass.
hunter says:
February 2, 2014 at 6:10 am
@ur momisugly Hunter. Gareth, I would not want to be your patient. You would likely have bled patients to death with leeches back in the day in the name of your consensus. You would have rejected Lister and all of that antiseptic clap trap, like the leading consensus in America did for many years.
Hunter, patients were never bled to death with Leeches, they could not drink that much. You are confusing things with bloodletting. And yes, If I had lived in mediaeval times I would have believed those things, as would have most people, and believed the earth was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. Thats the way it goes, they were not bad or good people, they were just ignorant. Treatment changes by observing patient treatment outcomes, this can be through blind trials or mortality rates as well as many other more qualitative issues. Unfortunately we can’t do that in climate science. We can’t observe our world and see what would happen in the long term if we did this or that. However, in a medical trial, if a patient was deteriorating before the end of the trial, or if there was a strong correlation between a certain drug and a patients temperature rising we would stop the trial. The correlation may be false, but to continue would be highly unwise.
Exactly the propaganda ploy used by Alcoa, Monsanto and the Mellons to get people to accept a dangerous neurotoxin (fluoride) in their water for the false promise of no cavities. Let’s see if anyone wakes up to the fact that it is 60 years of fluoridation that is creating all the new conditions for children, the ADD’s and the rest. Fluoride opportunistically combines with aluminum to cross the brain-blood barrier. A legacy of our Manhattan project, which also injected people with Plutonium, mostly blacks and poor whites. See The Plutonium Papers, which won a Pulitzer. The same people ran the fluoride project. See the Great Fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson.
Chad Wozniak- Great posting.
per Mark Stoval.
“””””…..But if there is not anything left in the 15 micron band by the time the sunlight gets to earth then let us put up massive light sources overhead that emit in that band to compensate. (real world experiments can get complicated I was once told) …..”””””
Well there’s not a hell of a lot left in the 15 micron band by the time the “sunlight” as you call it, gets from the sun to this planet.
My favorite black body radiation graph, says that less than 1% of the sun’s radiant energy is longer than 4 microns wavelength, at which point the solar spectral irradiance (at earth orbit) is about 0.3% of its vale at the peak (0.5 micron). At 15 microns the spectral irradiance is 0.003%.
And I suppose that the atmospheric CO2 is going to eat all of that before it reaches the surface.
The sun is not a good source of 15 micron radiant energy. Some people still claim we can feel it, as “heat”.
I’ll take the 1 micron solar irradiance, if I need a little warmth, any day, over the 15 micron.
Gareth Phillips:
At February 2, 2014 at 12:26 pm you explain to hunter things you say you would have “believed” in the past and why.
However, at February 2, 2014 at 8:37 am I requested a clarification of what you say you “believe” now. The thread is long so you may have overlooked my genuine request which is here.
Richard
Me personally, I’d go with the one doctor who removed the pump handle myself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak
As a surgeon, let me point out a few things. . . just for the sake of accuracy.
“You would likely have bled patients to death with leeches back in the day in the name of your consensus. You would have rejected Lister and all of that antiseptic clap trap, like the leading consensus in America did for many years.”
1) As previously mentioned, patients weren’t bled to death with leeches. As a matter of fact. . . .leeches are still used in medicine by surgeons doing finger reattachment; in fact, there are FDA approved leeches available for that particular use.
2) “Blood letting”, which is what the “surgeon-barbers” of antiquity did and is where the “barber’s pole” has it’s origins, is not completely useless. It is the treatment of choice for certain blood conditions, and can also be used in emergency situations for patients with congestive heart failure.
3. As far as Lister is concerned. . . he was an English surgeon, and published his treatise in Nature in 1867, well before radio and TV. much less the internet. By 1875 his precepts were widely accepted in Europe; in 1877 he was appointed Professor of Surgery at the King’s College Hospital in London, and by 1879 his theory — and practice — was universally accepted.
So we’re talking about 12 years for surgical antisepsis to be universally accepted. . . .somewhat less than the 17 years and counting for the “pause” that we all know about. . . .
“If 99 doctors said… That means that money is involved.
More like unicorn farts.
@gareth Phillips
“the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction’
I recently found out that I have been ignoring this overwhelming body of evidence. Could you please tell me where it is so that I can stop ignoring it?
I found Gareth Phillips’ post interesting.
He teased us tantalizingly with; “”.. but from what I can see, the overwhelming body of evidence points in one direction and that is what I will believe until substantial studies show any different conclusions….””
But he never does tell us what it is ; that direction we are pointed in.
Well I believe that climate changes; I also believe that what we call “green house gases”; H2O, O3, and CO2, do absorb long wave (>5 micron) infra-red radiation (both coming and going). I also believe that absorption helps warm the atmosphere; along with conduction and convection.
But other than that; and I have been around for several “climate significant intervals”, and so far I haven’t seen anything untoward happening. It warms, it cools, and it stays the same, and on, and on.
And so far, I have seen, not even one credible climate model. What is a credible climate model ?
Well I don’t need a model, that goes all the way back to the Cambrian era. I’m quite happy to see a model, that can only replicate the climate, as it happened right before my eyes, since the day I was born. Now izzat too much to ask ??
We can discuss my future climate experiential evidence; after they replicate what is already in my data set.
Phillip Tetlock of UC Berkeley examines the performances of people in forecasting the
outcomes of political events in the book “Expert Political Judgement” (2005). He finds virtually no correlation between a forecaster’s “calibration” and whether he or she has a doctoral degree. “Calibration” is a measure of the agreement between the forecasted and the observed relative frequences of the outcomes of events. A theory that lacks a high calibration score is falsified by the evidence. These and other findings of Tetlock’s study suggest that preferential trust in the forecasts of “doctors” is misplaced. Statistical models perform much better than humans of all stripes.
I’m sure 99 out of 100 doctors would have told a 21 year old Stephen Hawking to give up, that he only had months to live.
I should add, that I consider my experiential climate data set, to include anything that happens inside a 1,000 km radius circle of anomaly correlation, around my location; and I have spent those years, in a good number of climatically distinct experimental locations.
No I’ve never been to Vostok Station, or the new yuppie low Temperature site; nor the mid Sahara tropical desert; but I have been bloody cold in my time, and also goodly warm. I have spent a lot of time outside the anomaly limits for my local climate.
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That is a good retort. But who came up with it? Trial lawyers?
Gareth in your top comment you said
Would you (if you were / are a doctor) prescribe a drug to a patient that was not clinically trialled but tested / trialled using a computer model? The model failed, the drug was administered anyway and the patient got worse. What drug company would be allowed to market THAT drug???? NONE is the answer, yet this is what is being asked of us.
Your patient is now stable (no surface temperature rise for 16+ years), a small minority of doctors predict his temperature will fall during the next decade or longer. What if they are right?
Gareth Phillips: Perhaps you may want to take a short peek at the Wiki re scurvy: “It was a Scottish surgeon in the Royal Navy, James Lind, who first proved it could be treated with citrus fruit in experiments he described in his 1753 book A Treatise of the Scurvy,[1] though his advice was not implemented by the Royal Navy for several decades[when?]. The consensus of the Royal Navy could not possibly accept anything from a “non-navy” doctor. As late as the Nares polar expedition in 1875, more than 120 years later, people were still dying of scurvy. Because the consensus of “all” the major polar explorers was that fresh air, cleanliness and personal propriety were sufficient to ward off this disease. Oddly, some seaman did not listen to “the consensus” so that while others suffered and died, they came home. You may call those independent souls the 3 percenters.
Jimbo says:
February 2, 2014 at 8:52 am
What if this chap had decided that the consensus was overwhelming and gave up? Science would be worse off. This is where we are with the IPCC and the related Climastrologists and consensus. They want everyone to give up and go with the flow. Not me Sir.
Guardian – 5 October 2011
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for dogged work on ‘impossible’ quasicrystals
Daniel Shechtman, who has won the chemistry Nobel for discovering quasicrystals, was initially lambasted for ‘bringing disgrace’ on his research group
Jimbo,
Thanks for that reference! If others are interested, I found a .pdf file of his 1984 paper.
VOLUME 53, NUMBER 20 PHYSICAL REVIE%’ LETTERS 12 NOVEMBER 1984
Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry
http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v53/i20/p1951_1
Mac
Hi, in view of many requests I’ll summarise my beliefs regarding climate etc. I believe that our climate is warming faster than would be expected, and we are likely to be the cause of that due to our trashing of the environment through the excessive production of greenhouse gasses. I also am a big fan of renewables in all sorts of forms, like Anthony I have solar generated energy, and I like growing my own food etc. I’m a left wing hippy who really enjoys Glastonbury and other festivals and would love to join Willis at the burning man. I must admit I did have skeptic opinions till a couple of years ago, till I really looked at some of the things Lord Monckton was saying which led me to reconsider those beliefs and become more convinced that the mainstream climate science was probably pretty accurate. However I never, ever believe science is 100% correct, or wrong in any field, it’s generally a concept which trends to one conclusion or another along a spectrum. I’m sure many people will be outraged and choke on their breakfast cornflakes as a result of this post, but hey ho, I have broad shoulders. By the way, I also question how valid the idea of a ‘pause’ in the rate of warming is. If the temp has not gone down it has still warmed so the trend is still up and I believe, a tad subjectively I’ll agree, that we are starting to see the results of that climate shift in the appalling weather affecting the UK at present. I’ll just go and get my crash helmet, I have incoming Exocets on the radar.
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They might also want to check out the “Freezer Bowl”. it was a playoff game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the San Diego Chargers in 1982.
Wind chills on the field were between -50 and -60 below zero Fahrenheit.