Quote of the Week: ego driven science

I think Phil Jones is 97% full of chocolate.

speaking of EGOS: Al Gore on the latest doomsday book by Kolbert, whose previously brought us the cheery “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change”:
10 Feb: NYT: Al Gore: Without a Trace
‘The Sixth Extinction,’ by Elizabeth Kolbert
Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers…
In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century…
If trends continue, the global temperature will keep rising, triggering “world-altering events,” Kolbert writes. According to a conservative and unchallenged calculation by the climatologist James Hansen, the man-made pollution already in the atmosphere traps as much extra heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. The resulting rapid warming of both the atmosphere and the ocean, which Kolbert notes has absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide we have produced, is wreaking havoc on earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems. It threatens both the web of living species with which we share the planet and the future viability of civilization. “By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”…
This is the world we’ve made. And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us…
A version of this review appears in print on February 16, 2014, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/the-sixth-extinction-by-elizabeth-kolbert.html?hpw&rref=books&_r=0
10 Feb: NYT: Chasing the Biggest Story on Earth
‘The Sixth Extinction’ Looks at Human Impact on the Environment
When Elizabeth Kolbert joined The New Yorker in 1999, after more than a decade covering New York politics as a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, she began gravitating to environmental issues.
“The magazine has a history in this area,” she told me in one of two recent conversations. “They’d published Rachel Carson. It was unoccupied territory at the time.”…
Q. How does a journalist take on a topic this big — mass extinction?
A. I wrote a book almost 10 years ago on climate change, and I was looking for the next project. And my thought was, “Climate change is a huge story — there can’t be a bigger one.” As I looked for a new book, what I kept bumping into was the reality that climate change was actually part of an even bigger phenomenon: the many ways humans are changing the planet…
Q You posit that if there is a sixth extinction, it won’t be cockroaches who inherit the planet, as many New Yorkers predict, but rats. Why rats?…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/science/the-sixth-extinction-looks-at-human-impact-on-the-environment.html
13 Sept 1995: ABC: Quantum: A Chat with Tim Flannery on Population Control
Tim Flannery, Senior Research Scientist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, is an outspoken advocate for informed and vigorous control of populations. His best selling book, The Future Eaters suggests that we’re eating ourselves out of house and home…an appetite that’s lasted for thousands of years.
The first of Quantum’s tenth birthday profiles on leading scientists.
Q: Why is it that you believe Australia, which has an area the same size as the United States, can’t support a similar sort of population – hundreds of millions ?
Flannery: Really because the ecology of Australia is so different and so unique. Land size really has very little to do with the number of people you can support on it. Witness the Antarctic which is larger than Australia, and no one’s suggesting in could even support a million people. The tiny island of Java which is very, very rich and fertile can support a hundred million. But Australia’s ecology is very, very limiting…
Q: What do you think the ideal population of Australia should be ?
Flannery: Well, my personal estimate is that’s probably going to lie somewhere between six and 12 million. But the great tragedy for the nation is that we don’t know the answer to that question. We’ve never asked it sensibly. I may be proven to be wrong, but I don’t think I’m going to be greatly wrong. The answer may be 20 million, but it’s certainly not going to be 200 million.
Q: How would we control our population?
Flannery: Well, the main and easiest thing to control really is immigration levels because that is what’s contributing to the major population growth at the moment…
But really, in the long term, it’s going to be immigration which will cause the big change.
Q: Your strong stand on population has earned you the criticism of being a racist. How do you respond to that?
Flannery: All I can say is that I think there’s a place for immigration and always will be in Australia’s population policy. I don’t care in the least where anyone comes from – it’s just total numbers that really worry me. My concern as a scientist is simply to ensure that we have a sustainable future in Australia…
http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/info/q95-19-5.htm

Additionally one has to consider the psychology (honesty) of a supposedly intelligent and educated person who declares in all seriousness that he is “not political.”

Hi Gail, couple of things and sort me out if I lose it (thanks) You mentioned the UN policies in 1992 (Frame Work Convention on CC 20 years ago) , I think it goes further back, to the early 50’s ( J Kozak : “and not a shot was fired”) and although that has, on the surface , nothing to do with CC it has everything to do with an overall system of Bureaucratic control..BTW, I loved your Real Estate assessment , Live in just the right place as far as I can tell and it ain’t Siberia, Northern Canada or Mongolia (although there is a great bit of fishing for a week or 3 in the Yukon), Hang in there in Texas it will soon be fine. As a weather observer and a (ex) farmer where I have lived for the last 43 years I see, noted and after talking with the neighbours nothing out of the ordinary, nothing!

It is when Hansen, Jones, Mann and the rest of them became obsessed with an outcome, climate catastrophe, and lost their obsession with discovering the climate, that started us on this path. So we can go back to the 1988 Wirth(less) hearing in all of its stage managed deception as a decent starting point. From their climate science grew from a minor enterprise into the major industry it is today. And the spinoffs have been so lucrative for insiders: windmills, ethanol, carbon credits, carbon trading, solar panels, tax credits, feed in mandates, etc. etc. etc.

asybot says:
February 11, 2014 at 1:14 am
“Hi Gail, couple of things and sort me out if I lose it (thanks) You mentioned the UN policies in 1992 (Frame Work Convention on CC 20 years ago) , I think it goes further back, to the early 50′s ( J Kozak : “and not a shot was fired”) ”
Thanks. Amazon page contains some reader comments giving context.
http://www.amazon.com/And-Not-Shot-Is-Fired/dp/189264701X
But, I’d like to add, until 1961 the UN still planned on becoming the world government by means of force; the US/JFK backed plan was that only the UN would have nukes. This strategy collapsed with the UN-perpetrated massacre in Katanga. It took the UN a decade to roll out their new strategy, based on deception, 1971 at the Stockholm conference on the environment, using enviro issue as “common enemy” as documented by the Club Of Rome.

I just want them to come and stay for a month. I have more fence posts to set (If the weather ever clears) and sheep shearing is coming up soon.
Not happening anytime soon, Gail. Maybe snow today (probably, I think, from the weight of the clouds and the fact that it is 30F outside). Definitely snow and freezing temperatures all day tomorrow, although they are still only calling for 1-3 inches accumulation (which rises every day as the event approaches), with freezing rain or sleet and more snow the next day. I’m guessing Wednesday and Thursday and possibly Friday are going to be (patented) North Carolina Snow Holidays(tm) with schools and businesses closed tomorrow, Universities closed Thursday (Duke never closes with less than apocalyptic weather as many faculty and all students live close enough to walk and it screws up everybody’s schedule and curriculum). The next time the weather spends any time any substantial amount above freezing and wet will be Friday, maybe.
Which is all weather, and as noted doesn’t have anything substantive to do with the climate as a single anecdote on a large planet. However, “The Hiatus” (as it is called in AR5 where Box 9.2 explicitly acknowledges it as a serious problem and engages in some serious hermeneutics to try to explain it away and preserve the central message of threat) is not an anecdote. That’s why it gets its own box. People who are claiming that “the warming is continuing” — no, it’s not. It might start up again if ENSO ever heats up, but no, warming in the primary metric of global warming, the only metric we can really claim to know to some precision for decadal time scales with decreasing precision into the comparatively recent past as “defined” by the global average surface temperature anomaly (in any of its measured forms — GISS, HADCRUT4, RSS, UAH — is not continuing.
The observation that given 36 distinct models in CMIP5, given tens to hundreds of runs per model, some models some of the time produce runs as long as 13, 15, 17 years with no warming is not quantitatively useful. Indeed it obscures the single metric that would be quantitatively useful.
How many times (out of all N model runs completed to date) does this model produce runs not only of 17 years with no warming somewhere in its future output but in the 17 year stretch we are currently continuing?
This question has 36 independent answers. And if the answer for any given model is “less than 5%” then that model should be rejected as having failed a simple hypothesis validation test. If there are too few perturbed parameter model runs for that model for the number to be known with any degree of assurance — less than 30, say — then the model should not be rejected (unless the actual real world data is much more than two standard deviations away) but neither should it be included with equal weight of models where their internal variability and statistics are well sampled and that survive the hypothesis test.
Only the criterion for inclusion/survival of the CMIP5 models really needs to be much more stringent than 0.05, because there are so many of them, there are so many perturbed parameter runs per model to choose from, there is so much overlap of code and method parentage, and of course there is the fact that almost all of the models share the same bias compared to the climate that data dredging considerations come into play.
So the observation that “some models produce some runs” as long as 17 years (out of how many “independent” trials — are we talking about somewhere across the entire 21st century, so that we have to dilute probabilities still further?) really does not help. If all the models put together produce runs as long as 17 years 2% of the time, that is useful information. It is information that any Bayesian statistician would use to conclude that the models are rather likely to be broken, that the model priors need badly to be turned into model posteriors on the basis of the data and modified to fit reality instead of asserting that it is reality that is unlikely and the models are right.
As I pointed out on three different threads yesterday (and now one today) as well as another half dozen threads subsequent to the release of AR5, the statistical analysis of CMIP5 models as presented in the summary for policy makers stands out as a shameful blot on the integrity of science. Chapter 9 openly acknowledges that the statistical presentation they use is without merit or foundation — they list three (out of a rather long list) of the primary reasons why it is without foundation but only in one single paragraph where nobody who is not rather versed in statistics will either find it or understand it (where policy makers, we can assume, are neither one). They present figure 9.8a where one can see at a single glance that it is without merit, that indeed the “MultiModel Ensemble” (MME) mean that they present clearly and badly fails a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for the equality of two distributions by spending only 1/6 of its time above and 5/6 of its time below HADCRUT4 over all 155 or so years of the record. It fails completely in its forecast post the reference period, and isn’t even symmetric compared HADCRUT4 in the reference period! If it weren’t for the 1997-1998 Super ENSO — which barely pushed HADCRUT4 back up to its MME mean prediction at its peak before falling back down and flattening up to the present — it would have quite literally never been correct outside of the training set used to “validate” the model parameterization. Its hindcast completely eliminates the natural variability of half of the twentieth century.
None of which prevents them from making grandiose assertions in the AR5 SPM with high confidence, or medium confidence or whatever.
Clearly the term “confidence” is being used in the sense of “high confidence” racket, because it is absolutely indefensible by use of statistics as their own chapter on the statistical analysis openly, if very, very quietly, acknowledges.
No wonder they felt compelled to add Box 9.2. No wonder Phil Jones has prayed for the moral equivalent of a Super ENSO to come to the rescue. What if “The Hiatus” extends through 2014? Solar forcing (weak variation as it is) is peaking now and will only go downhill from here as we enter what can reasonably be expected to be a protracted solar minimum tailing out cycle 24 and into a cycle 25 projected to be even weaker than 24. If there is any merit at all to claims of causal links between solar state and climate, we are in a position to make accurate measurements for the first time in the satellite era that might actually confirm or falsify both claimed correlation and hypothetical causality. The ENSO-meter on this page is solidly in La Nina territory, and has been neutral to descending for some time. We could conceivably have a “Super La Nina” that might actually counteract global warming and reset equilibrium lower that the current neutral trend — something that I personally rather hope for because I do not relish the idea of a catastrophic climate shift whether or not it is caused by humans and whether or not it proves any number of scientists wrong.
Box 9.2 is simply a mandatory CYA addition to an otherwise literally incredible chapter of AR5. And it is literally the only chapter that matters, except possibly for the sections associated with ocean acidification (which is really a completely independent issue from global warming or “climate change”). If the CMIP5 models can all or mostly be clearly rejected as failed models on the basis of simple statistical tests applied per model (and more sophisticated one that might be applied to reject entire model families) then we are literally back to the drawing board, forced to try try again to build models that actually work to hindcast the 20th century and forecast the 21st. That’s what science is all about, and I daresay that pretty much all of the modellers are working frenetically on doing just that because they are not idiots and they know a failed model when they see one, prayers for a career-salvaging non-anthropogenic assist from a Super-ENSO leading to disaster aside.
But AR6 could well be the last IPCC activity before a very serious backlash if The Hiatus continues to (say) 2016 with no sign of abating, or worse, if a strong La Nina actually increases the interval with no statistically observable warming to 1990, the epoch year of the GCMs post their reference/training data, or earilier!
I don’t think Box 9.2 will save them, at that point. Too many people like myself, like Roy Spencer, like Judith Curry are going to be there pointing out the discrepancy between section 9.2.2.2 and 9.2.2.3 — which basically say that the MME mean is statistically meaningless — figure 9.8a — which basically shows that meaningless or not it is wrong — and the assertions of confidence and disaster in the SPM. They at some point will be called on to justify the “confidence” they asserted while advising the world to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of lives to avoid a disaster that they knew perfectly well could not be reliably predicted from their own data.
On that day, what will they do? The axioms and theorems of statistics will be of no use to them because they have violated them! How, exactly, can they reply?
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Do you think that the “climate scientists” & bureaucrats most responsible for perpetuating this expensive & murderous, catastrophic, man-made scam should be tried for fraud, or would that have a chilling effect (so to speak) on the practice of real science?
For the most part, no. Specific cases where there was specific evidence that people had a vested interest and went beyond good faith science might, but that seriously is almost all the exception, not the rule. I think most climate scientists do, actually, drink their own grape-ade. They might be wrong, but they are wrong in good faith.
If they are wrong. Their hypothesis is not disproven. It just isn’t particularly strongly supported by the evidence.
The interesting question will be whether or not some future congressional investigation turns up any actual evidence of collusion or conspiracy to falsify any of the science. Most of what I’ve seen can be explained by simple grant-induced confirmation bias (similar to what has happened with the “dangers” of marijuana) without any real need for malice.
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And they actively employ dirty tricks to suppress skeptic views, because they genuinely believe that efforts to cast doubt on their theories endanger humanity.
SOME of them employ dirty tricks. The others simply try to rewrite their perception of the past climate history of the planet to eliminate any doubt that the present is “the hottest ever”. Which is patently absurd. They somehow take temperature estimates with an uncertainty on the order of degrees kelvin and transform it into knowledge with a perceptual precision of tenths of a degree to make the claim, since there has only been order of 1 C total warming from the LIA — maybe.
But either way, they seriously believe and think they are saving mankind.
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