Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
Alarmist claims: inference from incomplete, inadequate and ambiguous observations
Climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry has recently posted a number of sharply worded essays providing stinging critical rebukes of assertions of climate harm by alarmists derived from biased and highly selective reading of the UN IPCC AR5 reports.
In an April 21 posting she says the following regarding the so called ‘facts’ cited by climate alarmists to try to make a case for man made climate harm:
“With regards to climate science, the biggest concern that I have is the insistence on ‘the facts.’ This came up during my recent ‘debate’ with Kevin Trenberth. I argued that there are very few facts in all this, and that most of what passes for facts in the public debate on climate change is: inference from incomplete, inadequate and ambiguous observations; climate models that have been demonstrated not to be useful for most of the applications that they are used for; and theories and hypotheses that are competing with alternative theories and hypotheses.
I particularly like Dyson’s clarification on facts vs theories:
Facts and theories are born in different ways and are judged by different standards. Facts are supposed to be true or false. They are discovered by observers or experimenters. A scientist who claims to have discovered a fact that turns out to be wrong is judged harshly.
Theories have an entirely different status. Since our understanding is incomplete, theories are provisional. Theories are tools of understanding, and a tool does not need to be precisely true in order to be useful. A scientist who invents a theory that turns out to be wrong is judged leniently. Mistakes are tolerated, so long as the culprit is willing to correct them when nature proves them wrong.
The loose use of ‘the facts’ in the public discussion of climate change (scientists, the media, politicians) is enormously misleading, damaging to science, and misleading to policy deliberations.
I would also like to comment on the ‘good loser’ issue. I wholeheartedly agree with Dyson. In the annals of climate science, how would you characterize Mann’s defense of the hockey stick? Other good or bad losers that you can think of in climate science? The biggest problem is premature declaration of ‘winners’ by consensus to suit political and policy maker objectives.”
Dr. Curry’s entire essay on climate science significant limitations and inadequacies is here:
( http://judithcurry.com/2014/04/21/the-case-for-blunders/)
In an April 19 posting she addresses the increasing trend of climate alarmists and their supporters in the media to try to suffocate and eliminate free speech by attacking those who offer opposing viewpoints, scientific analysis and alternative theories to unproven claims of man made global warming theories. She notes the following regarding this attach by alarmists on free speech:
“I am broadly concerned about the slow death of free speech, but particularly in universities and also with regards to the climate change debate.”
“With regards to climate change, I agree with George Brandis who is shocked by the “authoritarianism” with which some proponents of climate change exclude alternative viewpoints.
While the skeptical climate blogosphere is alive and well in terms of discussing alternative viewpoints, this caters primarily to an older population. I am particularly pleased to see the apparent birth of resistance to climate change authoritarianism by younger people, as reflected by the young Austrian rapper.
Climate change ideology, and attempts to enforce it in the media, by politicians and by the cultural practices of academia, leads us down a slippery slope:
Because the more topics you rule out of discussion — immigration, Islam, ‘gender fluidity’ — the more you delegitimise the political system. . . A culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast. – Mark Steyn”
The complete essay dealing with attacks on free speech by climate alarmists is here: ( http://judithcurry.com/2014/04/19/in-defense-of-free-speech/)
In a January 6 posting Dr. Curry performs an analysis of the UN IPCC AR5 WGI report addressing the hiatus in surface warming and discrepancies that outcome creates with climate models, the WGI evidence of lowering equilibrium sensitivity of climate to doubling CO2 concentrations, lack of WGI evidence for increasing rates of sea level rise, lack of WGI evidence explaining increasing Antarctic sea ice levels and reduced WGI confidence in connections between atmospheric CO2 levels and the occurrence of extreme weather events.
She addresses in detail the failure of the climate models to project the global temperature hiatus of the past 15+ years and the need to instead use “expert judgment” to create an estimate for future temperatures to year 2035 as noted in her essay material below.
Dr. Curry also addresses the WGI reports treatment of equilibrium climate sensitivity which clearly trends toward lowering the expected value of this variable noting as follows:
She summarizes her analysis of the WGI report by noting:
The entire assay addressing the AR5 WGI report analysis can be found here:
( http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/06/ipcc-ar5-weakens-the-case-for-agw/)
In these remarkable essay’s Dr. Curry demonstrates and documents the huge limitations and inadequacies of climate alarm science and the attempts of alarmists, media propagandists and ideologically driven politicians to ignore extensive contrary scientific evidence challenging man made climate harm claims, falsely condemn and demonize qualified and competent scientists peer reviewed work which exposes the huge shortcomings of alarmist climate science claims and alarmists ever increasing efforts to eliminate free speech concerning the climate science debate.
David Ball says: April 22, 2014 at 8:39 pm
[ Dr. Curry, glad you have acknowledged the limitations in the science. One question; what the hell took you so long? ]
Not that I’m religious, BUT they do have some great quotes, this seems appropriate –
…there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.” Luke 15:7
Sometime in the near future all this will be swept under the carpet like the Y2k fiasco. Those who curse the skeptics today will shrug their shoulders and say “well, what could we do except trust the experts, and at least we cleaned up some of the pollution, so stop accusing us of being stupid. If your position was so wonderful, then what did you do for pollution.” And they’ll find something else to worry everyone about – maybe a statistic about stray asteroids or an imminent inter-galactic invasion. I hope no-one here expects to stand tall with “I told you so” statements. They won’t be interested.
Gary in Erko says:
April 23, 2014 at 12:43 am
“They won’t be interested.”
————————————–
They won’t have a choice. Do not measure this debate against others in the past. The Internet is a game changer.
The lame stream media used to be the gate keepers of opinion and record. This is no longer the case. When it comes to those who would bring the AGW fellow travellers to task it is a mistake to think it would be just those happy few of us who fought on St. Crispins day.
There is an elephant in the room. That elephant is the general public.
When Mr. Stampy finds out that the whole of the AGW hoax depended on claiming that –
“Adding radiative gases to the atmosphere will reduce the atmosphere’s radiative cooling ability.”
Or –
“The net effect of the atmosphere over the oceans is warming of the oceans.”
– then Mr. Stampy is likely to get very angry. The reddened eyes. The crazed trumpeting. The stomping frenzy. Indeed, the whole farrago.
The sorry players in this tedious season of “The great Global Warming Caper” will not be slinking off to new productions like “BioCrisis! BioCrisis!” or “Sense and Sustainability”.
The thing about the Internet is that it remembers all. The AGW fellow travellers can scrub like Lady Macbeth, they can even use the Scotchbrite, but the filthy stain of global warming advocacy wilt not out.
Dr. Curry has called it. The Rubenesque diva is practising her scales and the buses are warming up…
Build a school. I dare ya… lol
I would add to Ms. Curry’s complaint that much of the “data” in climate science has been massively tampered with or “adjusted”. Why do the government “scientists” go back into the 1930’s and lower historical temperatures while increasing current temperatures? Why? Because they are frauds and charlatans. Even with the data tampering we still see no warming for darn near two decades yet these rent-seekers continue to whine that we are all going to fry/drown. They are despicable.
Gary in Erko says: “Sometime in the near future all this will be swept under the carpet like the Y2k fiasco. Those who curse the skeptics today will shrug their shoulders and say … ”
No! that is not what will happen. As I explain above, the internet has fundamentally changed the balance of power between the individual citizen and the institutions.
To give an example, I was speaking to a journalist only yesterday and we were discussing the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth games in Glasgow. The organisers had decided to include in the ceremony the demolishing of a number of flats. But very quickly the former residents got onto social media and started a campaign and petition and almost before many people had heard about it, the idea was dropped.
In former times, if anyone had bothered to write to a paper – it would have gone to a paper that had already run the story about “how marvellous an idea it was” … they would only reluctantly have printed an odd letter, often selecting those that did not criticise the paper. As such, the same number of angry former residents could largely be ignored. The internet has fundamentally changed the ability of ordinary people to force change in hitherto arrogant and self-serving institutions. And people are only just realising this power!
This is the power of the internet … and with it is coming new politics.
So, we skeptics are just part of a mass change in society which is not only affecting climate or even science but the very fundamental basis of our society and politics.
In the UK we’ve seen a series of new parties grow over the last decade from the greens to UKIP. To a large part, the global warming madness can be attributed to the early dominance of the internet by green-academics.
But whilst the greens had strong journalistic support, UKIP appeared to “come from nowhere”. However, the reality, given the way most UKIP activists seem to start off blogging or on facebook, would appear to be that UKIP became a mass social movement through the internet. And the same has happened in other places because e.g. the internet placed a key role in the “Arab spring”.
So, the internet is quite literally a revolution in the political sense as well as in the scientific sense that blogs like this allow views to be heard which in former times were repressed. Now those views cannot be held back not by repressive governments, nor by repressive political systems nor by “establishment” journalists, nor be “establishment” academics.
The “establishment” is losing control. Climategate was the UK establishment trying to regain control and asserting “the establishment is vindicated”. That would have worked a decade ago before the internet and yes, a decade ago it would have been swept under the carpet, but not now!
The best historical president for what we are about to see is the change in society from monarchical church and kings to one of oligarchical (institutional rule) by parliaments, press and institutions like Universities.
That led to the massive decline in the power of the Catholic church and a new balance was only obtained after the emergence of many new churches. In other words, we went from “the one institution” to “the many institutions”.
The internet however, is a community of individuals and not institutions. The old press was an “institution releasing press statements to institutional journalists”. This was an institution-to-institution communication network that disempowered the individual. The new internet is a peer-to-peer network which by undermining the commercial viability of the “dinosaur news media” is disempowering the institutions (i.e. establishment)
The new internet is now vastly increasing the power of individuals outwith institutions and that will cause a fundamental change in society.
Or perhaps the best way I can put it is this … they say “history is written by the victors”.
In the past, history was written by academia. But in the future, it will be written on the internet, because the internet will be the victor.
Excellent discussions here. When Science is declared settled, as advocated by politicians and echoed by scientists, it becomes propaganda.
Here’s the light-hearted payback I envisage: A dinosaur mini-park, with Fred Jetson aboard, on the campus of every university with an advanced degree in climatology, as a token of repentance–and a reminder not to sin again.
pat says: April 22, 2014 at 8:36 pm
Great link. Thanks.
It is a pity that Dr Curry did not voice these concerns when she was in a position to have made a difference. Now as a retired person she will be ignored as past it or senile like others.
“Sometime in the near future all this will be swept under the carpet”
Konrad, Scottish Skeptic, rogerknights
Yes – the internet is a great catalyst for a new way of social relations, and in this case for group work of critical analysis. We’re strangers somewhere loose around the world having a conversation. This didn’t happen when I was advancing from 7 figure log tables to a grown-up’s slide rule before the calculator with lit-up green readouts. But I don’t believe that people (us) taking part in this new world conversation pit have changed. Think back over all the errors that were laid aside in the past and whether the perpetuators and their supporters expressed a real sorrow and apology. Witches. The Inquisition. Genocides – eg, Armenian, Nazi, 1930s Ukraine. The cold war nuclear holocaust. Did anyone apologise for teaching the world is flat, or that tectonic plates don’t drift. If we can’t figure why those fetishes were believed and just as easily dropped then our best basis for predicting the outcome of AGW mass hysteria being dumped is that it will be like the past. Remember – it’s the contemporary expression of some sort of mass apocalyptic hysteria. Don’t assume AGW faith is a logical or scientific thingumy that entails a logical end point.
Sorry but there won’t be any revenge for dragging us through this AGW insanity. Don’t expect to feel any satisfaction when it’s all over. Just be glad we’ll get a break before we move on to the next one whatever it will be. Gee – what a depressing thought. It’s worse than all the AGW predictions.
By using quotes contained on the blog of Dr. Judith Curry (mainly – among other things), I “constructed” such a comment on one (rather alarmist) blog … :
James Lovelock:
“It is far better to think about how we can protect ourselves. This is something we should be looking at carefully, not just applying guesswork and hoping for the best.”
Lennart Bengtsson :
He was the Director of Research at ECMWF and Director of the Max Planck Insitute for Meteorology.
“The complex and only partially understood relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming leads to a political dilemma.”
“… the forecasts [here] are more a matter of faith than a fact.” “… produce a false impression of reliability.”
Hans von Storch, Armineh Barkhordarian, Klaus Hasselmann and Eduardo Zorita:
“… warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.”
Mojib Latif: “This raises questions about the average climate sensitivity of the IPCC models.”
Once again James Lovelock:
“ A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned.”
… and once more Lennart Bengtsson:
“… before radical and hasty changes to the current energy system are implemented, there must be robust evidence that climate change is significantly detrimental.”
I hope that this “forcing” into thinking …
johnmarshall says: “It is a pity that Dr Curry did not voice these concerns when she was in a position to have made a difference.”
For years, I sent off press releases to the “mainstream media” trying to get skeptic views into the “mainstream”. But eventually, it twigged that the “mainstream” on climate was WattsUpWithThat, etc.
I know it is difficult for us old fogey skeptics who have had a career in an institutionalised establishment and institutional news-media to understand that these institutions are fast becoming quiet back streams, and the back streams like WUWT are becoming the mainstream, but the simple fact is that Judith has expressed her concern where she will make “a difference”.
The problem is not that she is expressing her views in the wrong place (or wrong time), but that you (and obviously many in the establishment and institutions) are failing to recognise the growing power and influence of WUWT and other on line information communities.
Now that many of the “dinosaur” news media have given up serious commentary on issues like climate science, Judith Curry has come to what is probably the most read and authoritative source of public information on climate.
What better place could their be to put her views?
Karim D. Ghantous says:
April 22, 2014 at 7:37 pm
(…) you cannot define the square root of -2.
j × 1.414 ?
Tell me, Martin, what is j exactly? 😉
@Karim D. Ghantous – it is eye, not jay (lower case). It represents the square root of -1.
HL Mencken–warmist-related quotes:
http://motls.blogspot.ca/2010/08/why-complex-numbers-are-fundamental-in.html
🙂
Gary, there is an additional element that doesn’t make the Y2K bug a good analogy. A whole generation or two of students have now been fully indoctrinated that energy generation is destroying instead of greening the planet. As the temperature falls in a likely repeat of a natural cycle, the backlash will be youthful and possibly quite intense exactly because it has been so emotionalized by teachers. I remember how terribly angry I was after reading Born Lomborg’s early book The Skeptical Environmentalist when he destroyed the halo of mainstream environmentalism.
Martin, I am tempted to refer to the quote above, posted by Roger Knights:
“Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed”
But you’ve been a good sport, and I thank you!
(I also need to confess that I am largely ignorant in mathematics – a situation I aim to remedy).
NikFromNYC
Is that vastly different than, for instance, the youth imbued with Nazi doctrine against Gypsies, Jews, and others when they discovered they’d been fooled? If they’re youth in high school (Australian terms for school ages 11 to 18) now, they’ll be young adults when it all falls apart. And is it their age you’re referring to or the different extend of global effect between Y2K and AGW? I pity the teachers though when they realise the damage they’ve done.
Sooner or later, alarmist politicians and scientists HAVE to take notice of these objectons that Dr. Curry raises. It will not be possible for climate science to go on as before, and still remain a part of the scientific community.
The scary part is the obvious trend towards silencing opposition, even attacking democracy itself. Dr. Schellnhuber, the chief alarmist climate scientist in Germany, said it very clearly in an interview with Spiegel back in 2010;
“SPIEGEL: Which countries do you believe are best suited to bringing about a total rebuilding of industrial society?
Schellnhuber: Ultimately only democratic societies will be able to master this challenge, notwithstanding their torturous decision-marking processes. But to get there perhaps we’ll need innovative refinement of our democratic institutions. I could imagine assigning 10 percent of all seats in parliament to ombudsmen who represent only the interests of future generations.”
Innovative refinement of democracy…can you think of some other persons who might have had such thoughts?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-climatologist-on-criticism-of-ipcc-we-received-a-kick-in-the-pants-a-712113-2.html
Lately I’ve been reading her posts. Many are pretty good, but hard to sift thru the replies — alot of thread-bombers there that wouldn’t be tolerated here.
Dr. Curry sure as hell ought to be bitter about the alarmism pervading her chosen discipline.
Like many other people with talents and training in the geophysical sciences, Judith Curry invested her life in an area of study tied ineluctably to the preposterous bogosity of “man-made global warming” by way of anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2.
Hers has been a career that reflects the ways in which many of her contemporaries had been drawn in directions they might well have never gone had the AGW error not been propagated in the late ’70s and then force-fed (on “other people’s money,” by way of taxation) into a concerted fraud by authoritarian “Liberal” fascist politicians, beginning in the 1980s. In February, 2010, Dr. Curry wrote:
In the years since she composed that essay on “Rebuilding Trust” in her profession, Dr. Curry has been engaged vigorously in what she calls “the blogosphere” and appears to have had her nose rubbed repeatedly in the arrogant mendacity of the vested (and government-funded) establishment in climatology, an inbred cadre of charlatans and quacks who see themselves as nothing but a publicity machine in support of political pillage being perpetrated by kleptocratic regimes all over the planet.
For the very best of regions, eh?
“Noble cause corruption,” indeed.
Reblogged this on Power To The People and commented:
Alarmists True Agenda Is Not Truth It Is: No Growth, Stagnation and Ultimately A Road Back To A Pre-Industrial Society When Life Was Short and Brutal and Everyone But the Elite in Power Were Equal Equally Poor That Is.
Would those be false facts or true facts? 😉