People send me stuff. In this case I have received an embargoed paper and press release from Nature from another member of the news media who wanted me to look at it.
The new paper is scheduled to be published in Nature and is embargoed until 10AM PDT Sunday morning, July 20th. That said, Bob Tisdale and I have been examining the paper, which oddly includes co-authors Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky and Dr. Naomi Oreskes and is on the topic of ENSO and “the pause” in global warming. I say oddly because neither Lewandowsky or Oreskes concentrates on physical science, but direct their work towards psychology and science history respectively.
Tisdale found a potentially fatal glaring oversight, which I verified, and as a professional courtesy I have notified two people who are listed as authors on the paper. It has been 24 hours, and I have no response from either. Since it is possible that they have not received these emails, I thought it would be useful to post my emails to them here.
It is also possible they are simply ignoring the email. I just don’t know. As we’ve seen previously in attempts at communication with Dr. Lewandowsky, he often turns valid criticisms into puzzles and taunts, so anything could be happening behind the scenes here if they have read my email. It would seem to me that they’d be monitoring their emails ahead of publication to field questions from the many journalists who have been given this press release, so I find it puzzling there has been no response.
Note: for those that would criticize my action as “breaking the embargo” I have not even named the paper title, its DOI, or used any language from the paper itself. If I were an author, and somebody spotted what could be a fatal blunder that made it past peer review, I’d certainly want to know about it before the paper press release occurs. It is about 24 hours to publication, so they still have time to respond, and hopefully this message on WUWT will make it to them.
Here is what I sent (email addresses have been link disabled to prevent them from being spambot harvested):
===============================================================
From: Anthony
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2014 9:01 AM
To: james.risbey at csiro.au
Subject: Fw: Questions on Risbey et al. (2014)
Hello Dr. Risbey,
At first I had trouble finding your email, which is why I sent it to Ms.Oreskes first. I dare not send it to professor Lewandowsky, since as we have seen by example, all he does is taunt people who have legitimate questions.
Can you answer the question below?
Thank you for your consideration.
Anthony Watts
—–Original Message—–
From: Anthony
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2014 8:48 AM
To: oreskes at fas.harvard.edu
Subject: Questions on Risbey et al. (2014)
Dear Dr. Oreskes,
As a climate journalist running the most viewed blog on climate, I have been graciously provided an advance copy of the press release and paper Risbey et al. (2014) that is being held under embargo until Sunday, July 20th. I am in the process of helping to co-author a rebuttal to Risbey et al. (2014) I think we’ve spotted a major blunder, but I want to check with a team member first.
One of the key points of Risbey et al. is the claim that the selected 4 “best” climate models could simulate the spatial patterns of the warming and cooling trends in sea surface temperatures during the hiatus period.
But reading and re-reading the paper we cannot determine where it actually identifies the models selected as the “best” 4 and “worst” 4 climate models.
Risbey et al. identifies the 18 originals, but not the other 8 that are “best” or “worst”.
Risbey et al. presented histograms of the modeled and observed trends for the 15-year warming period (1984-1998) before the 15-year hiatus period in cell b of their Figure 1. So, obviously, that period was important. Yet Risbey et al. did not present how well or poorly the 4 “best” models simulated the spatial trends in sea surface temperatures for the important period of 1984-1998.
Is there some identification of the “best” and “worst” referenced in the paper that we have overlooked, or is there a reason for this oversight?
Thank you for your consideration.
Anthony Watts
WUWT
============================================================
UPDATE: as of 10:15AM PDT July 20th, the paper has been published online here:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2310.html
Well-estimated global surface warming in climate projections selected for ENSO phase
Abstract
The question of how climate model projections have tracked the actual evolution of global mean surface air temperature is important in establishing the credibility of their projections. Some studies and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report suggest that the recent 15-year period (1998–2012) provides evidence that models are overestimating current temperature evolution. Such comparisons are not evidence against model trends because they represent only one realization where the decadal natural variability component of the model climate is generally not in phase with observations. We present a more appropriate test of models where only those models with natural variability (represented by El Niño/Southern Oscillation) largely in phase with observations are selected from multi-model ensembles for comparison with observations. These tests show that climate models have provided good estimates of 15-year trends, including for recent periods and for Pacific spatial trend patterns.
of interest is this:
UPDATE2: rebuttal has been posted
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Read the news story Sidney Morning Herald and because it does not mention any specific model the story sounds lame…
http://m.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-models-on-the-mark-australianled-research-finds-20140720-zuuoe.html
If we have models with large decadal oscillations, and if some of those models have their down oscillations synced with the current flat trend, then those models will look like the “best” models. And if we then claim that those particular models are the ones that are best at modeling ENSO, we can claim that they are the most skilled models and that the most skilled models both agree with the surface temperature trend and future warming predictions.
But since we do not know which models are being called the best, we can’t know if their oscillations are just coincidentally in sync or if they actually seem to know how to model ENSO correctly. It’s possible that the four best models were not named because closer inspection could show that their having a better approximation of the current flat trend has more to do with initial conditions and built in oscillations than with any real ability to make ENSO predictions.
Finally, the idea that an average of many models is better than any single model based on current performance is an irrational approach. Without a good physical explanation of why this should be the case, we are only talking about a coincidence.
This discussion is a good example of the house of cards metaphor. You all presume you can pull one card out and the whole AGW premise crashes down. You really underestimate the intelligence of a lot of smart people and overestimate your own. I look forward to the actual article to see how relevant this one card you all are obsessing on is to your anti AGW premise.
Your tactics are right out of the political playbook where one tries to define ones’ opponent negatively before they get to define themselves. Regarding Naomi Oreskes, I would put her resume up against anyone on this site as being qualified to talk climate science.
“Naomi Oreskes is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, Adjunct Professor of Geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and an internationally renowned historian of science and author. Having started her career as a geologist, received her B.S. (1st class Honours) from the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London, and then worked for three years as an exploration geologist in the Australian outback.
She returned to the United States to receive an inter-disciplinary Ph.D. in geological research and history of science from Stanford University, in 1990. Professor Oreskes has lectured widely in diverse venues ranging from the Madison, Wisconsin Civics Club to the Air Force Research Laboratory, and has won numerous prizes, including, most recently the 2011 Climate Change Communicator of the Year.
Professor Oreskes has a long-standing interest in understanding the establishment of scientific consensus and the role and character of scientific dissent. Her early work examined the 20th century transformation of earth science, in The Rejection Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (Oxford, 1999) and Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth (Westview, 2001). She has also written on the under-acknowledged role of women in science, discussed in the prize-winning paper “Objectivity or heroism? On the invisibility of women in science” (OSIRIS 11 (1996): 87-113); and on the role of numerical simulation models in establishing knowledge about inaccessible natural phenomena (“Verification, validation, and confirmation of numerical models in the earth sciences,” Science 263 (1994): 641-646).
For the past decade, Professor Oreskes has primarily been interested in the problem of anthropogenic climate change. Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (Science 306: 1686) has been widely cited, both in the United States and abroad, including in the Royal Society’s publication, “A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change,” in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, and in Ian McEwan’s novel, Solar. Her opinion pieces have appeared in The Times (London), The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Nature, Science, The New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and elsewhere. Her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming, co-authored with Erik M. Conway, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Time Book Prize and won the 2011 Watson-Davis Prize of the History of Science Society.
Her current research projects include completion of a book on the history of Cold War Oceanography, Science on a Mission: American Oceanography in the Cold War and Beyond (Chicago, forthcoming), and Assessing Assessments: A Historical and Philosophical Study of Scientific Assessments for Environmental Policy in the Late 20th Century, funded by the National Science Foundation. Professor Oreskes has joined the faculty at Harvard University as Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.”
I think I will wait to judge her paper when I have actually seen it and not let the pundits tell me what to think before I have seen it. Thanks for publicizing it to ensure an even wider reading than what Nature would provide. We will certainly see what a “courteous” gentlemen you all are if the potential “fatal flaw” fails to materialize and you apologize for all the slander here. But you all will probably have dusted yourselves off by then and moved on to your next straw man.
Bill Illis says:
July 19, 2014 at 12:55 pm
…”, the accurate global warming models are the ones that project no global warming.
Yes Bill, it seems their “worst” models have become their “best” models.
The worm turns.
davidmhoffer says:
July 20, 2014 at 10:13 am
==============
Yes, in other words, Mr. Mosher has no reasonable explanation or hypothesis for why averaging the models works. “It just does” (or, perhaps, more correctly “it did” for the current observations, and a set of models selected by unknown criteria).
I can see no reason whatsoever to believe that the new model (the average of a fixed selection of other models) could be expected to yield a useful prediction beyond the last measurement. In particular, this whole average-of-the-models procedure has a whiff of overfitting about it. Time, of course, will tell, but I don’t think the smart money is on the average-of-the-models.
Avery,
If Naomi was only defined by her CV, she could be a saint of science history.
Unfortunately, she is alse defined by her actions.
But you are correct to thisextgent: the averge of averages/ensemble issue is a dubious card.
As to the smarts of AGW promoters: career success and winning can sharpen the mind. The question is, to what end?
Avery Harden, the only reason Oreske’s name is on that paper is so that media can claim she is a climate expert because she has published papers on climate change.
Thats what this is about, promoting political pawns to climate queens.
It is irrelevant what the paper is about, only that it gets published and it somehow is about climate change.
you mean to say the models are so bad…when you average them you get a better answer!
…well of course you do!………ROTFL
Bob, waiting on what you have to say…………
So is this a “game changer”? And speaking of which, when does Watts 201X get published?
Monckton of Brenchley says:
July 20, 2014 at 10:53 am
Published, serious science must be replicable. Unless we are told which models were used, and which were good, and which were poor, there can be no replication. So there is no science in the latest Lew paper.
———————————-
Nothing new from Lew.
Avery Harden says:
July 20, 2014 at 11:13 am
I have no idea what contribution Naomi Oreskes has given in the upcoming work, but I have seen what she has written in earlier work. That was not really impressive.
Take e.g. “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”, where she has read a lot of abstracts based on a the words ‘climate change’ and concluded that a large number of these abstracts endorsed the “consensus”. But while a few of these abstracts did do what she said, most of the abstracts were simply neutral and didn’t endorse or refute the “consensus”. And I have read a few which endorsed the “consensus” in the abstract, but which main article did give serious doubt about the real impact of more CO2…
See also the letter of Benny Peiser on the work of Oreskes:
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/ep38peiser.pdf
Certainly nothing wrong with everyone keeping an open mind and staying skeptical. That is what scientist do. But if that lack of absolute certainty is purposed to ensure perpetual delay of action from policy makers, then it is a fools errand. Just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot. We can move on from what we know and focus on what we don’t know while taking action now based on what we know.
Shipping companies, resource developers and their insurers are making plans for exploiting the warming Arctic. While you are arguing if the temperature data has been tampered with or the scientist dealing with are dumb, ships are beginning to move in the the newly opening Arctic. The Pentagon sees the security threats of a warming world and is planning for it. CEO’s revise their business plans to account for it. Insurance companies are reformulating for dealing with increased risk. The rate of investments in renewable energy is rapidly increasing. Some states are already ahead of the EPA in reducing reliance on coal and many others were already in the process and are ahead of the curve.
We can have our little distracting discussion about the flaws of AGW science, but policy makers around the world are already concluding and are voting with their hands and feet. The Australia aberration won’t stand for long.
Avery Harden
July 20, 2014 at 11:13 am
says:
‘This discussion is a good example of the house of cards metaphor. You all presume you can pull one card out and the whole AGW premise crashes down.’
A bridge instructor I learned from, and who is a retired physicist, is also an avid poker player but he considers bridge to be the superior game. I will concede that your house of cards metaphor is correct. Just not quite in the way you think so. It was Deng Xiaopeng, who modernized China after Chairman Mao did the world a favor by traveling on to another one. Deng Xiaopeng was an avid bridge player. Could that be because it was a useful game through which to discover the turns of both fate and strategy in life? It’s an interesting experience to have your opponent destroy your King of Spades with their Two of Clubs and therefore take that Trick in a No Trump contract. You consider the card presented here to be nothing but a lowly Two of Clubs. And it very well may be. But, if this were bridge, and I were you I’d be wary of it since it’s already had help from the other cards in the hand, same suite or otherwise. And I suspect you’ve failed to count those cards. If this were poker, I know how I’d place my bet.
‘Your tactics are right out of the political playbook where one tries to define ones’ opponent negatively before they get to define themselves. Regarding Naomi Oreskes, I would put her resume up against anyone on this site as being qualified to talk climate science.’
Now, concerning your very first sentence in the comment immediately above may I kindly advise you and your’s to take at least a brief glance in the mirror first thing in the morning, difficult though that may be, so you can properly tidy yourselves up prior to writing sentences such as your very first sentence in the comment immediately above. And be prepared if the mirror not only reflects, but also somehow echoes quite a bit. And, as far as Naomi Oreskes is concerned, may I opine that she may very well be the reason that employers, throughout the centuries, while they may wish to initially see a resume, will not hire an employee in the absence of a face to face interview, impressive though that resume may be.
Tom J, first regarding Ms. Oreskes, her resume mentioned her various prestigious employers so her resume was not just a delusional self impression; she has worked for some of the best. I took a class from her and my opinion is based on that.
Regarding house of cards vs bridge, I recall my dear grandmother played bridge with the same group of friends for over 60 years. They paired up and faced off against each other even after obvious dementia had set in. An amusing site. Rather than like a house of cards that crashes down when one card is removed, AGW science is more like a deck of cards where you may remove one card and it has little effect on the overall deck.
Avery taunts: “This discussion is a good example of the house of cards metaphor. You all presume you can pull one card out and the whole AGW premise crashes down.”
That’s how science works which is why in normal sciences like physics billions are spent desperately looking for even tiny cracks in the standard model and various cosmological theories, whereas in climate “science” this isn’t done at all, whatsoever, except by a few skeptics. Therefore climate claims are indeed a house of cards. It has no rigorously tested and contested foundation. They aren’t even pretending to do normal science and since Oreskes of all people is most aware of this that will make her a notorious figure in the future history of science. She has already been responsible for the biggest fraud of all in the public climate debate by using extremely soft survey questions to create a false 97% consensus claim that also 97% of skeptics would fit into has she bothered to ask them too since they too mostly agree with the perfectly mild warming caused by the greenhouse effect minus the hidden amplification of it tucked into supercomputer models. Merely spotting ahead of time yet another irreproducible claim isn’t some nefarious strategy but just another exasperated whistleblowing act. This paper is in top journal Nature. Last year in top journal Science, the latest hockey stick sensation appeared by Marcott. Hours afterwards skeptics alone exposed that there was no damn blade in any of the input data of this “super hockey stick.” Yet you come here accusing skeptics instead of alarmists of bad science?! How can anybody be so righteous about being so nakedly wrong? Just where *are* those cards that stand up in even a mild skeptical breeze?
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” – Albert Einstein
NikFromNYC, I was reminded of Rush Limbaugh reading your piece. Rush is good at listening to liberals make their case, and then taking the framework of the liberal case and apply the dialectic to it. He then throws his mirrored reconstruction back at them, along will little poop.
I responded to several others in this thread that addresses some of yours points so I won’t repeat myself.
From Avery Harden on July 20, 2014 at 11:13 am:
Did you post that on the right blog? That obviously should be something for SkepSci or ReputedlyClimate, as it’s pretty hard to find people here who are “anti AGW”. All of it that has potentially happened has been remarkably unremarkable, far less severe than prophesied by the High Elders of Climate Science, and actually beneficial on the whole. It’s far easier to suffer and die when cold and hungry than warm and surrounded by bountiful CO2-fed crops.
We have two major groupings here, those who have studied the evidence and are ready to welcome and adapt to whatever small amount of AGW may yet come, and those still studying.
Perhaps in your obsession you have overestimated the “No AGW!” sentiment among educated intelligent people. Here at WUWT we are far from “anti AGW”. Indeed, by an overwhelming consensus we are AGW inclusive.
Why you want to hate?
Don’t discriminate!
When the warming is real,
We love the way it feels.
Greet the warmth that we create,
‘Cause we know it will be great!
Peace out, man.
No hate here, I appreciate and enjoy the good discussion we have been having. It is natural to be a little defensive here because I am so conditioned to personal attack from “skeptic” sites, notably not this one; so far.
If the climate changes we were having were natural I would be like you and not be concerned. But if humans are causing it, then I’m worried. I already see massive specie extinction, deforestation, seas being raked clean of fish, toxic dumps and a lot more. Do you have any concern with the quality of the environment you are leaving your grandchildren? We see 7 billion people today on the planet voraciously consuming resources, your grandchildren will see 9 billion competing for the same declining resources. Seafood won’t come from the ocean but poop filled ponds. What about today, you don’t see what is happening around the Arctic? You just look away from the facts on the ground and say the papers with numbers and stuff is all fraud?
kadaka, I am well aware of his Linkedin profile and he has never been professionally employed as a software developer. You apparently are unable to interpret self-appointed titles from real ones. Try reading my article, you might learn something. Unlike you I have extensive experience hiring IT personnel and cannot spot BS on resumes immediately. Mr. Mosher is not an R software developer and the code he has worked on demonstrates a lack of professional training in software development. Only someone absolutely incompetent in computer science would hire an amateur like him for software development.
hunter, name one fact about his CV that I posted that is not true. Mr. Mosher refuses to engage in tough questions about his background and instead has to rely on his mom (Judith Curry) and dad (Steve McIntyre) to protect him by censoring my comments at their sites. Why is that? If what I was saying was not true then you could prove me wrong but he can’t. He runs and hides on all the websites I can respond without be censored.
Correction:
kadaka, I am well aware of his Linkedin profile (I linked to it!) and he has never been professionally employed as a software developer. You apparently are unable to interpret self-appointed titles from real ones. Try reading my article, you might learn something. Unlike you I have extensive experience hiring IT personnel and can spot BS on resumes immediately. Mr. Mosher is not an R software developer and the code he has worked on demonstrates a lack of professional training in software development. Only someone absolutely incompetent in computer science would hire an amateur like him for software development.
hunter, name one fact about his CV that I posted that is not true. Mr. Mosher refuses to engage in tough questions about his background and instead has to rely on his mom (Judith Curry) and dad (Steve McIntyre) to protect him by censoring my comments at their sites. Why is that? If what I was saying was not true then you could prove me wrong but he can’t. He runs and hides on all the websites I can respond without be censored.
Hunter, I see you tried to post a rant to my website falsely claiming I inaccurately posted his resume. Sorry but you failed to provide a single piece of evidence about what I posted that is inaccurate. Instead of being emotional, lets try stating a fact you can verify is inaccurate.
[Calm down, tone it down. .mod]
If CO2 has a negligible effect on warming, yes, that one card brings it all down.
Correction: Oreskes did an early version of the recent Cook 97% consensus claim based on a literature survey rather than a soft category questionnaire survey which was actually done by others. And here’s the shocker I wasn’t aware of that makes Cook’s claim more brazenly deceptive: when Richard Tol early on via a Twitter storm tore Cook’s result apart by pointing out use of the bizarre boutique search term “global climate change,” it turns out that phrase was an innovation of the original Oreskes 97% claim too, one she failed to reveal until Benny Peiser discovered how it pulled in only affect papers into the survey but left out most core “global warming” or “climate change” papers that would actually address attribution, because it’s such a weird phrase. So she prearranged to include only papers from the likes of economists, psychologists, and ecologists who are all expected to include boilerplate homage to the big emergency they are jumping onto the bandwagon of. Just as skeptics found a tiny percent of real climate science papers promoting the IPCC category of half of recent warming being anthropogenic, so too earlier did Peiser debunk Oreskes, meaning Cook was just cooking up leftovers.
Avery….”This discussion is a good example of the house of cards metaphor.”
Not at all….the article is so over the top ludicrous….no one can help making fun of it
Anonymous internet arrogant bullies are so cute when they’re left sputtering after the ones who slapped them down have already moved on. Besides, loudly proclaiming “I’m not done yet! You haven’t beaten me!” to a deserted room is a well-respected sign of emotional maturity. Or not.
Firstly, my understanding is that Mosher is referring to his particular BEST result, not not to more generalised statistical theory when he claims that averaging the models produces a “better” outcome. As pointed out by prior posts there is no statistical basis for Mosher’s claim.
However, that statement doesn’t exactly mean that the average of the ensemble is any ‘better’ than any individual model. What you have, basically, is an ensemble of models that, while supposedly based on the same physical theory, are so flawed that their individual hindcasting errors are all over the place and just happen to average out. While you may produce a ‘better’ hindcast result from this procedure, you will not produce a better forecast as the underlying physical mechanism is not being modeled.
In other words, it is a meaningless fluke. The forecast remains the average of a bunch of poor models that do not accord with the underlying physical processes.
Regarding the paper, should we find the identity of the 4 ‘good’ models I expect that we will see that outside of the period of study their hindcasts are quite poor, and there is no reason to expect any kind of predictive power from them. Much like any other climate model. If there was a single model that could hindcast and forecast with any kind of accuracy then they would use that single mode. Of course layered on top of this is that the climatologists are trying to forecast a temperature model with a physics model, given that the global temperature is a statistical construct and not a physical quantity.
This paper will end up being a serious own-goal for the Team (SMH and other badge-wearing alarmists notwithstanding), and will provide endless amusement given that Lewandovsky and Oreskes are listed authors.
Avery Harden says:
July 20, 2014 at 11:13 am
Please get back to us with your thoughts once you have read the subject paper.
You can tell us if the comments were too harsh, whether they were substantiated, etc..
hunter says:
July 19, 2014 at 10:13 pm
Thanks for the links, Hunter. The Wikipedia article states:
Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with what is called “ensemble forecasting” in climate science. Instead of using one model and “slightly different initial conditions”, climate ensembles use big groups of untested models using whatever initial conditions and forcings and internal parameters their authors prefer …
Also, unless you can provide us with an un-paywalled version of the Cambridge paper, their abstract is nothing but claims which may or may not be true, and which may or may not be relevant to taking the average of a bunch of crummy Tinkertoy models …
Best regards,
w.