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.
garymount says:
April 23, 2014 at 4:09 am
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Vaughan Pratt says:
April 22, 2014 at 5:21 pm
“Of the thousands of department chairmen in the US, which of them have expressed an even lower opinion of their colleagues’ understanding of their field?”
My guess is that there’s plenty of Department of Economics Chairmen in the US with a similar opinion of their field. Especially so after the financial crises. The Dismal Science shares a defining characteristic with Climate Science. The individual parts might be explainable, but trying to model the whole is fraught with propagating uncertainties. In Economics, it is customary for quantitative analyses to be accompanied by several qualifications. Should we expect any different in Climate Science?
Did Dr. Curry retire? I thought she still had an administrative post and maybe did some other work.
At 8:27 AM on 23 April, AJ had written:
Not so much in those Departments of Economics where the implacable praxeological honesty of the Austrian School prevails over the economeretricious prestidigitory putzelry of the Keynesians and the Monetarists and suchlike quacks.
Austrian School economists don’t give a good goddam about “trying to model the whole” as a mechanistic cosmos-in-a-bottle but seek instead to analyze the motivations and effects of purposeful voluntary individual human action (praxis), considering econometrics and aggregate macroeconomic analyses so fraught with the errors of arrogant scientism as to be perniciously worse than useless, offering armed government thugs various excuses for aggressively normative interference in market economies to violate the rights of participant individuals on the idiot premise that the ruling class is somehow superior in knowledge, wisdom, and responsibility.
All because of those “quantitative analyses […] accompanied by several qualifications” – which invariably turn out to have sweet Fanny Adams to do with objective reality.
Vaughan Pratt says:
April 22, 2014 at 5:21 pm
“Of the thousands of department chairmen in the US, which of them have expressed an even lower opinion of their colleagues’ understanding of their field?”
Correction: “some of their colleagues.”
Jeff Alberts says:
April 23, 2014 at 7:10 am
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I think you’ve made your point, I agree it was poorly written.
Can we move on now ?
The Dyson quote about
can be found in this recent book review by F. Dyson: The Case for Blunders, March 6, 2014 Issue (NYBooks)
Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein—Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe
by Mario Livio
Simon and Schuster, 341 pp., $26.00
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/06/darwin-einstein-case-for-blunders/
I like the dichotomy of Facts vs. Theories, in that Facts need to be more trustworthy than theories. But I am not at all certain that “Facts are supposed to be true or false” is itself a fact, but a more theory with many weaknesses.
“The Earth is Flat”, certainly a statement that is not true. But it was fact for some a couple thousand years ago. But even today, a Flat Earth is a useful simplifying assumption for small scale construction projects.
“The Earths’ surface is concave upwards.” Certainly this is false in general. But there are places where it is true: Barringer Crater, AZ; Crater Lake, OR; the Great Salt Lake Basin, UT. So it is not totally false, either. If measured in cross section, every river valley expresses a concave upward dimension.
“The Earth’s surface is a sphere.” This isn’t quite true either. In a sphere the radius is constant in all directions. The Earth radius at the poles is less than the radius at the equator. So while the statement is not true, it is certainly more true than the statement that the “Earth is flat.”
So I am forced to conclude that Some facts are more true than other facts.
Gary in Erko said:
>> 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.<> The thing about the Internet is that it remembers all.<<
I sincerely hope you are right, but I think you are wrong. Too many important people have bought into this farce for there to ever be any dire consequences. There will never be any public apologies or admissions of failure., and you will never see a Showtime documentary on the “Great CAGW Fraud”. It will be largely forgotten, as the next farce takes its place. People like Judith Curry and Anthony Watts will not get the proper, just benefit from their work, and might actually get hurt, even if they are proven 100% correct. The general public will never readily understand the true enormous costs to humanity of this farce – that stuff will be hard to accurately measure – and will subsequently not care all that much.
Again –I really, really hope I am wrong.
Oops, I made a few mistakes in prior post with stray HTML tags – sorry about that – My response was mainly to Konrad, not Gary. Just, once again (I keep going back to him, don’t I?) going back to Ehrlich – after 40+ years of failure, look at where he is now. All that failure has been extensively documented and is on the ‘net – it does not matter. It will actually be worse than you think – people like Mann, I am afraid, will have exulted places in academia. There will be rewards for all the deception and waste. Too many powerful people (President Obama, as just one example) do not want to be embarrassed in the future.
I read them all on her blog. I sense a lot of frustration on her part. She sees her chosen profession being destroyed in the name of expediency. And even then, the alarmists are trying to parrot Mann and tar [her] for the simple reason she is for good science. She remains a warmist. But more than that, she is an ethical scientist, and that goes against the grain of “the team”.
, that is, one run of 50 flips in a quadrillion. The thing is, one has to ask how many coins out of the order quadrillion coins on Earth are unfair coins, designed by the unscrupulous to only flip heads. Joe thinks that’s a whole lot more likely than him seeing a fair coin producing the run. I think Joe is (literally more likely to be) right.
“Remains a warmist”? What does that even mean? An ethical scientist (which she is, as you note) cannot be labelled as a warmist or a denier. Those terms would never have arisen at all if the science and scientific process remained uncorrupted. The only branch of endeavor that I’m familiar with where a debate exists that is even remotely similar (without the politics) is the argument between the “frequentists” and the “Bayesians” of probability theory (where the debate is over what the “best” formal definition for probability should be — a term that obtains precise meaning only in an inaccessible limit or in the defensibly optimal way that information-theoretic estimates of that probability approach the limit. Even there both sides recognize that most computable results cannot and do not depend on one’s stance regarding this subtlety, it is more a matter of practical utility, especially in the realm of scientific logic a la Jaynes and fuzzy reasoning in general.
Am I a warmist? Or a denier? I’ve been called both. To PSI-level deniers I’m a warmist. To catastrophic warmists I’m a denier. To myself I’m neither one — simply someone who understands at this point a fair bit of the science and evidence, enough to form a Bayesian estimate of the probable truth of various assertions in climate science (frequentist estimates being essentially impossible in non-independent sampling from a single planet). Catastrophe seems improbable. So does a complete lack of CO_2-driven warming compared to whatever mean temperature the planet might have or have had without the industrial increase. Those are not religious statements, they are based on direct consideration of observational evidence and the physical arguments themselves. As Dr. Curry might say, as a theorist performing a meta-analysis of theories and their correspondence to (itself uncertain) data, I might well be mistaken, but my mistakes are both forgiveable as being the best I can do given the existing models and physics and data and in the long run self-correcting because I continue to pay attention to data as it comes in, and to the changes in the theories.
Real science cannot be warmist, coolist, denierist, or any of the rest of the possible derogatory semi-religious labellings one might think up. Real science only cares about what is true, not expected or believed to eventually be true but what our best system of models, theories, beliefs predicts that turns out to actually be true. That’s the thing that the real “warmists” seem impervious to — the idea that they might turn out to be wrong, and that at the moment the data suggest that they are, in fact, wrong. It is by no means a slam dunk fact that they are wrong, but Bayesian reasoning is their worst enemy at the moment given the trends in the data over the last 16 years. However strongly they might have believed in their priors 25 years ago, the data is gradually forcing reassessment to bring posterior probabilities in line with observation.
Or to put it in the language of Nicholas Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan, a frequentist, presented with a run of 50 coin flips that all turned up heads, still thinks that the probability of the 51st flip being heads is 0.5, because it is a two sided coin and theoretically both sides should land equally likely. Baysian Joe the Cab Driver, on the other hand, says “It’s a mug’s game. The coin is fixed. The 51st flip will be heads.” At the moment, the evidence suggests that the hypothesis of catastrophic warming is a mug’s game, although sure, there is always a chance that the climate will suddenly change its behavior (just as sure, the run of 50 heads can occur naturally in an honest coin — with a probability of
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Robert Brown says:
April 23, 2014 at 11:54 am
“It is by no means a slam dunk fact that they are wrong…”
It is a slam dunk that they are not right. An OR gate produces a 1, but the AND operation produces a 0.
Well, at least we can say that they are not right yet.
Now stop, or I’ll tell the black sheep in scotland joke.
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Now stop, or I’ll tell the black sheep in scotland joke.
LOL
This is the “thinking” global warmist scientist that will probably bring them all down.
The others have turned on her like a pack of rabid dogs.
why am I not suprised?
Jeff Alberts says:
April 23, 2014 at 7:10 am
HL Mencken–warmist-related quotes:
The business of a man of science in this world is not to speculate and dogmatize, but to demonstrate. To be sure, he sometimes needs the aid of hypothesis, but hypothesis, at best, is only a pragmatic stop-gap, made use of transiently because all the necessary facts are not yet known.
Would those be false facts or true facts? 😉
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Surely I’m not the only one other than Judith Curry who realizes that there is an alternate usage for the word “fact”. The more common usage is to mean something that is true. The alternate usage is to mean something that is asserted to be true, or believed to be true, but may or may not actually be true. Thus she was completely correct in using the word as she did. Check the usage note in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
http://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=fact
I learned this usage in the 7th grade from my excellent English teacher, Mrs. Thompson.
I also should have mentioned that in this usage what makes it a fact is that it is something that is either true or false, and is asserted or under discussion.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
Getting tired with demonstrating the IPCC alarmists and supporters unsupportable “science”. It falls on deaf ears, blind eyes and dysfunctional brain receptors.
Nevertheless here is another try.
The Usage Note doesn’t really convey the statement that Dr. Curry quoted from Dyson. I fully agree that facts are what we believe to be true based on what we know, or think we know. Once we determine that those facts aren’t in fact true, they’re no longer facts. I just think the kind of sloppy language, “facts are supposed to be true or false”, has no place in science or logic.
None of my English teachers were any good. I could spell better than most of them. I learned more from reading on my own, thanks to my dad. He introduced me to classical music and literature in the 60s and 70s.
Surely I’m not the only one other than Judith Curry who realizes that there is an alternate usage for the word “fact”. The more common usage is to mean something that is true. The alternate usage is to mean something that is asserted to be true, or believed to be true, but may or may not actually be true.
To be really picky, to a true philosopher or scientist, the word has only the latter meaning, because well, k’know, we could all be living in The Matrix and almost everything we think we know could be mistaken. We would only be able to tell — provisionally — if we are able to detect “a glitch”. I’m not kidding, though — there are people at MIT who have proposed experiments that are supposed to determine of the world is a massive simulation by pushing some theoretical limits of a hypothetical game supercomputer managing it. More pragmatically, science has undergone a number of revolutions — real paradigm shifts — where our previous knowledge turned out to be either completely wrong or at best approximately right in certain limits. I’m not just referring to classical vs quantum, or non-relativistic vs relativistic, or the still unresolved question of gravity — we have gone from the conceptual description of forces as being generated by contact between objects — which anyone sane would have claimed is a simple fact pre-Newton — through Newton’s tentative invention of action at a distance, through to where modern field theory holds that all forces and interactions are simultaneously “at a distance” so that one never actually touches two pieces of matter together and yet are mediated by the exchange of massive or massless particles, so that it is at the same time all contact (and with the concept of force itself still inconsistently viewable as a distortion of spacetime itself rather than either one).
We have gotten to where we cannot even interpret data and try to make sense of it in much of our observational universe without models, and the most successful models and the theoretical framework in which they are successful form Bayesian priors (strongly held beliefs) in terms of which all other provisional knowledge is assessed. In the end, Nature determines what is fact, what is fantasy, what is (perhaps) exact, what is an approximation that works up to thus and such a point but no further, but Nature is perfectly happy to dish out surprises that force us to rearrange the entire underlying Bayesian framework and make many “truths” within the previous best framework false.
This is not irrelevant to climate science. I’m a theorist, and we get a bye to use our imagination to construct exotic scenarios just so that we can also imagine how we might test them. We have evidence that in the past ice ages have occurred that are very difficult to explain with any existing model for the Sun, for the Earth, for the Atmosphere. The Ordovician-Silurian transition is a perfect example. It occurred when the Sun was almost as bright as it is today (and more than bright enough to keep the Earth much, much hotter than it is now in geological time on either side of the glacial period). Glaciation began at a time when atmospheric CO_2 was supposed 7000 ppm — almost 20 time its CURRENT level — and peaked, with substantial planetary glaciation far below the Arctic Circle of the time, with CO_2 at 4000 ppm, ten times today’s level.
As far as I know, no “sane” perturbation of the GCM-type model will ever be able to explain this. The only kinds of things that can explain it are the Sun itself going into a sort of hibernation where TOA insolation dropped by a percent or three for 2.5 million years, or a pathological rearrangement of oceanic circulation, or a vast, persistent aerosol dump from massive volcanic traps, or…
Or, we have comparatively recently come to realize that there is long range observational cosmological data that gravitation alone seems unable to act as the sufficient cause that it should be in the old four-force model. Theorists have invented “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” to explain the two distinct phenomena that are inconsistent — Dark Matter to explain a mass deficit inside galaxies relative to observed orbital speeds, Dark Energy to explain an apparent temporal acceleration of the Universe’s expansion. Both theories are so far “invisible fairy” theories — that is the “dark” bit, as the matter/energy in question does not, apparently, couple to the electromagnetic field and hence is literally invisible.
But, if real, it has effects. It is also very likely not uniformly distributed, although lacking a knowledge of how it interacts with itself and other charged/visible matter, it is very difficult to know how it might coalesce into or with the galaxies — infalling dark matter cannot radiate away its energy and may or may not be slowed/trapped by ordinary matter (consider neutrinos, that simply zip through entire planets as if they are not even there because of their lack of EM coupling).
If we hypothesize Dark Matter exists in structured clouds in the galaxy, cooled and semistabilized by means of e.g. radiating away gravity waves or through some weak interaction with nuclear matter, then the solar system might well slide through clumps of it. Since it will (like neutrinos) penetrate ordinary matter almost as if it isn’t there, its sole effect would be to locally increase the effective gravitational constant by just a bit. This, in turn, would cause the Sun to compress just a bit, and would in fact cause all of the planetary orbits to decrease in radius just a bit. However, a compressed Sun would heat — the efficiency of fusion at the center would marginally increase, and the whole solar body would experience compression heating. The brightness of the sun would increase, quite possibly by quite a lot. Exactly the opposite would happen if the Solar system entered a “rift” in a nearly homogeneous cloud of dark matter — part of what we interpret as G, the gravitational constant, is associated with the density and homogeneity of dark matter, and as it decreased by even a tiny amount the Sun would expand, fusion in the core would become a tiny bit less efficient, and the entire photosphere would cool.
Similar things “could” occur if the Sun entered bands of intergalactic “dust” — ordinary matter — of the sort we can see in star-forming nebulae, but mostly the light pressure of the Sun would keep its immediate vicinity swept clean — it is very difficult for matter below a certain size to fall into the Sun at this point, or even to make it into the region between the Sun and the Earth to partially occlude sunlight (one implausible explanation for the O-S transition that I’ve read about that seems to ignore solar wind and light pressure). Dark matter, however, does not experience light pressure and can infall and even get trapped by the Sun if it can interact enough with solar matter to exchange energy without electromagnetism.
Note that this explanation — however much science fiction it is — would have enormous implications. Our climate would always depend on a variable we cannot currently measure — the local galactic density of dark matter — and a varying effective gravitational constant. This might be one of the principle causes of ice ages — the entire Pliestocene could be a record of the sun crossing a massive rift in the galaxy’s dark matter cloud, modulated by Milankovitch orbital mechanics. The changes on a decadal or century scale could well be so small that they are in the noise of our ability to measure G (but consistent with the inconsistency and spatial dependency of “G” in galactic orbital mechanics) but still more than large enough to profoundly modulate the sun’s intensity. Our base of civilized technological measurement of this sort of thing is decades old at this point; we might well not have enough of a baseline to be able to detect the phenomena.
The point is, physics research into very real stuff could completely alter the baseline physics that critically contributes to climate models. It could do so “tomorrow”. It could do so half a century from now. Physicists tend to be aware of this, so no matter how much they believe that gravitation is well described and a proven theory, even in the case of gravitation if someone offered evidence of a fifth force, or put salt on the tail of a Darkon, or came up with a plausible alternative explanation for the orbital data, no physicist would do more than shrug and go on with life and try to figure out where and how this matters in the entire collective structure of “facts” that are the fundamental basis for ALL of our beliefs about the Universe.
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While Judith Curry is right to criticize the non-science of global warming alarmists, I for one am wondering why she has still not apparently grasped, in the face of so much modern-day chemical/physical as well as historical and geological evidence, the simple truth that neither man’s activities nor carbon dioxide play a measurable, let alone significant, role in evolution of the climate. How she can hold on to her own apparent conviction that man is making the world warm, in the face of the evidence that this is not true which she clearly sees, seems a non sequitur to me. She seems to be hoping that science will still support the global warming hypothesis, even as it has become so obvious that it does not and cannot.
Surely Dr. Curry can see that CO2 is a tiny component of greenhouse gases, that man’s share of CO2 activity is tiny, and that GHGs in general are a factor in climate change compared to solar activity and the cycles of ocean currents, so tiny as to be indistinguishable from the noise in other factors. I will never quite understand why she cannot acknowledge this, and get off the fence and support those scientists who have provided this real and irrefutable evidence of the falsity of AGW.
After her debate with Trenberth in Boulder two weeks ago, Judith described his presentation as “propaganda”
Jeff Alberts says:
April 24, 2014 at 7:13 am
“…Once we determine that those facts aren’t in fact true, they’re no longer facts. I just think the kind of sloppy language, “facts are supposed to be true or false”, has no place in science or logic.”
I would just say it is not sloppy language, but rather an alternate usage of the word “fact”. I pointed out the usage note from the American Heritage Dictionary. I should have also pointed out one of the definitions (2c):
“Something believed to be true or real: a document laced with mistaken facts.”
So, by that definition, a “fact” can be mistaken. If a fact can be mistaken, then certainly a fact can be false. It is simply an alternate usage (alternate definition actually). It is not the most common definition, but is nevertheless correct.
I also want to add my thanks to Judith Curry for choosing the more difficult, principled path (a sincere quest for truth) rather than taking the easy road (going along with “the cause”).