Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
There are many parallels between the Jonathan Gruber story and what has occurred in climate science. Gruber used a computer model to produce justification for a US national healthcare system. This parallels the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) use of computer models produced to justify the need for international climate control. They both claim their models are accurate and solid as the basis for draconian policy changes. They both fail to understand that playing with models in a university requires they satisfy research and scientific standards. We don’t know if they do, because so much of what they produce that is critical to proper analysis, such as computer codes, is proprietary. Gruber’s models are proprietary, even if the taxpayer pays him and they are the basis for public policy. They both fail to understand that a different set of standards and responsibilities are applied when you take your lab work in to the public forum.
From The University To the Real World
There are social consequences, as Gruber discovered when he appeared before Congress on December 9, 2014. Paul Driessen has written on the consequences often on WUWT. Gruber’s appearance underscored the distance between academia and the real world. It is a distance I have experienced and confronted during my 25-year academic career. A distance demonstrated by Gruber and throughout the 6000 emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and countless other horror stories that never reach the public.
I was aware of this distance as a mature student going back to university after military service. I experienced the distance as a faculty member and did many things to bring the world into the university for students. It is a gap academia wants to exist, because if people knew how little they do and what is actually going on, funding would be mostly withdrawn. Faculty does very little teaching. They produce very little research, most of which is to further their career. Other faculty members judge their performance, in a truly incestuous, backbiting system. I could fill a book with my personal knowledge of faculty and academic horror stories.
A colleague (?) at the university where I taught said, in a discussion about teaching, that he was a professor, not a teacher. If the students didn’t understand what he professed, that was their problem, not his. Faculty is hired on the basis of university qualifications, which is usually a doctorate in a very specialized area of research. They are not required to have any training in teaching and may only have a smattering of experience after being graduate students. It appears politicians are the only group in society less qualified for a major part of their job, than university professors. The Department chair told me I was an entertainer, to which I replied, if the students don’t attend or fall asleep, the lecture is a waste of time. Gruber implies he was forced to deceive because the public is stupid and wouldn’t understand. No Sir, the failure is your ability to communicate the truth. Worse, your argument is designed to cover a deliberate deception and that you did well. The IPCC achieved the same deceptions with their Summary for Policymakers (SPM).
Universities abhor the demand for relevance and accountability. Look at the cover-ups they participated in with regard to information exposed by the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). What they fear is exposure to the real world of how little is actually going on. Most of what they do is perpetuate the secrecy and thus maintain their unique and bizarre world.
I fought this darkness through my time in the university. I hung a picture frame with no picture on my office window with a label that said, The Real World”. I never gave a lecture without starting with a news item that related to what we were studying in the course. I gave all my own lectures and set and marked all my own exams and papers. I served on many committees at all levels of government for real world experience. I apologized to one class about not having as many office hours as I would like because of these commitments. The students said they appreciated that their professor had credibility in the real world. Besides, they appreciated the real world examples I brought into the classroom. For example, in a water resources class, the class project involved participation in a commission of inquiry over conflict about a real lake. The students were divided into small groups representing different segments of those affected. In the last week of the course they made presentations to me as the Commission. I also organized a Toastmasters group on campus because most students would need these skills in their careers in the real world. I visited schools and invited high school classes to sit in on my university classes. My department told me that all these activities were a waste of my time, yet I produced more research most years than for the entire department.
Universities Are Self–created, Self-perpetuating, Anachronistic Systems.
The reality is that university education is not for everybody. Despite that society makes the assumption that every child entering kindergarten will end up in university. This, by default, makes failures of a majority of society. Even for those who get in, most students just passing with a C average, are simply getting grades 13, 14, and 15, in what is really only a socially acceptable form of unemployment. Meanwhile the majority, with a multitude of other talents needed in society, is denigrated and made to feel inferior by the academic community. Consider Gruber’s arrogance. Besides, most faculty members only tolerate students in order to maintain funding to protect their jobs. Using graduate students to do their teaching is an abrogation of their teaching responsibility, but they get away with it. I heard one faculty member say, if we could just get rid of the students this would be a great place to work. But it is academics who set up and maintain the system. They decide on what is a valuable type of intelligence and impose that on society. To my knowledge there is no university or college that offers a course in common sense. If they did they would have to bring a person from outside to teach it.
There are few better examples of academic arrogance and their belief that the end justifies the means than in a series of recorded presentations featuring Jonathan Gruber. In one of the academic presentations, the audience laughed in sympathy with Gruber’s portrayal of the people as stupid. The end was establishment of the Affordable Health Care (Obamacare) plan. He was recorded on many occasions referring to the deceptions taken to fool a stupid public, who were incapable of understanding economics that were simple for his superior brain and abilities. In Congressional testimony, forced by public and political reaction, he apologized for his remarks, but insisted the end was still worth it. No it isn’t! If it were, it wouldn’t need the deception.
In his article “Give Gruber a Break”, Charles Battig describes Economist Gruber’s views and statements as being normal in the academic world. After 25 years of grappling with that world, I agree, but know that most people don’t know what is “normal” in the so – called Ivory Tower. Remember, the communications within the leaked emails was defined as normal scientific banter. As Clive Crook explained,
The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker said, this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu. It goes to the core of that process.
This and my experiences support the Wikipedia definition of the Ivory Tower.
From the 19th century, it has been used to designate a world or atmosphere where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. It usually carries pejorative connotations of a willful disconnect from the everyday world: esoteric, over-specialized, or even useless research, and academic elitism.
It fits my experience as a student, graduate student and faculty member. The phrase that an idea is, “purely academic” means it is irrelevant to the real world. I can make these judgments because of work experience in government, private business, industry, and the military. I joked about retiring from academia because there was so much scar tissue on my back, there was no place left to put a knife. Academics want the scars they inflict to remain visible. Many have written for centuries about the vicious and nasty politics of universities as Battig identified.
Overall universities are a fraud. How much longer before a student at Harvard sues for false advertising? They go, expecting courses from professors, but end up with graduate students giving the class. These graduate students are indentured servants working for very low wages and little different from serfs, which is appropriate, because universities are mediaeval institutions being dragged kicking and screaming into the 18th century. If you want to see vestiges of the medieval, witness the Elizabethan gowns and hats they wear at convocations. I am no fan of Prince Philip, but maybe as a vestige of medievalism himself, he recognizes what is going on when he said universities are the only true incestuous system in our society. Almost everybody who is working there is a product. Most executives, presidents, vice presidents and Deans and middle management positions, such as department chairs, are academics. How many are given the welcoming lecture that this is not job training, other than in professional schools like law and medicine, but then never told what it is doing.
Economist John Maynard Keynes said,
Education: The inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
He should know because he is the economist who convinced politicians that you get out of debt by going further in to debt. Gruber says people are too stupid to understand economics. Maybe, but they know better than Gruber or Keynes, that economics is purely and simply the balance between money coming in and going out – nothing more. What is even more galling about Gruber is, he knows the public understand this. It is why he admitted hiding the truth that with Obamacare generally more goes out than comes in for individuals and for government.
Failed Predictions; A Measure Of Disconnect.
There is a basic reason why economic predictions fail and it relates to Gruber’s assumption that people are stupid. He thinks they will react in a certain way because he, in his brilliance, has designed a system that forces their reaction. A scientific prediction is either right or wrong. When an economic prediction is made, people, especially the influential, react and modify their behavior, almost always invalidating the prediction. Welcome to the real world, Mr. Gruber. IPCC has done the same. They assumed nature and people would function and react in a certain way. Increased CO2 would result in increasing temperatures. Both were assuming ceteris paribus, but it never is because of feedbacks in nature and human behavior.
Gruber accused people of not understanding economics. He should consider that it has long been known as “the dismal science”, so-named by Thomas Carlyle, because of the failed predictions of Thomas Malthus. This provides a connection to the current failed climate predictions of the IPCC, which are neo-Malthusian. The Club of Rome expanded the idea that overpopulation would exhaust food resources and all resources. Maurice Strong, in Agenda 21, at the 1992 Rio Conference, narrowed the focus to the industrial nations. Reducing their impact was achieved by “scientifically” identifying CO2 as their exhaust and falsely claiming it was causing run away global warming.
This identification of a single variable, as almost the sole cause, also aligns climate science with economics. It is said that economic predictions fail because they try to predict the tide by measuring one wave. The IPCC have done the same thing by using the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) to oversimplify, exaggerate and misrepresent what the science actually shows.
My presentations at three Heartland Climate Conferences all spoke to the failure to communicate the skeptical side of global warming. At the first Heartland in New York, only a few in the audience came up after and acknowledged what I actually said. They were all non-scientists, but also communicators. One in particular, Marita Noon, was also in attendance at the 2014 Heartland in Las Vegas; we spent considerable time discussing the issue of helping the public understand. Marita has focused on and done a very good job with the energy sector, who often know the science is bad, but is in no position to voice or act on that. In New York, I pointed out that Al Gore’s movie was a superb piece of propaganda that would likely make Leni Riefenstahl proud. Gore employed Hollywood to produce, because they know how to manipulate people’s emotions. Gore’s Oscar was justified, based on Hollywood values.
The Enemy Within
Judith Curry wrote a revealing summary of reflections on the fifth anniversary of Climategate. It references an early Curry commentary on Steve Mcintyre’s site titled, “On the credibility of climate research.” In that article Curry provides examples of Ivory Tower thinking.
Climate tribalism. Tribalism is defined here as a strong identity that separates one’s group from members of another group, characterized by strong in-group loyalty and regarding other groups differing from the tribe’s defining characteristics as inferior. In the context of scientific research, tribes differ from groups of colleagues that collaborate and otherwise associate with each other professionally.
After becoming more knowledgeable about the politics of climate change (both the external politics and the internal politics within the climate field), I became concerned about some of the tribes pointing their guns inward at other climate researchers who question their research or don’t pass various loyalty tests.
I am grateful for Judith Curry’s experience and explanation of them. It illustrates the Ivory Tower situation well, and how those within can’t or don’t want to see what is going on. It all seems “normal”. It is another carry over of the medieval situation in universities, when they effectively won the “town and gown” battle and generally, only go to town if funding is threatened. Curry appears to have stumbled on the realities of academia and what was going on in the outside world in climate science. In the true spirit of open debate Curry commendably welcomed Steve McIntyre to her university, Georgia Tech, in 2008. Ms. Curry knew the debate wasn’t over and the science wasn’t settled. It appears the reactions Ms. Curry experienced were a surprise and a revelation. As McIntyre explained,
Readers of this blog should realize that Judy Curry has been (undeservedly) criticized within the climate science community for inviting me to Georgia Tech.
Until you push back against the tribe, you have no idea how hard and nasty they react. Often the worst reactions come from within academia. The false information on the web about me came from a former colleague. Another wrote a three-page letter, that a lawyer said was libelous, saying I had no right to be on radio, television or speaking in public.
Beyond that, it appears that I am a challenge for alarmists because they couldn’t say I wasn’t qualified, although they tried, and I was able to explain complex climate science in ways the public understood. The latter ability was honed by teaching a science credit for arts students, making a multitude of public presentations, co-authoring a climate textbook, publishing peer-reviewed articles, and teaching climatology to large (300+) classes for 25 years. I knew my colleagues saw my teaching ability as a handicap. They assume teaching and research are mutually exclusive.
I am not surprised by the inability of climate skeptics to communicate with the real world. They are, for the most part, products of the Ivory Tower. They have all the problems associated, further complicated by an inability to compete, because the climate claims of the IPCC are political, not scientific.
It is time to close most universities, or better still convert them to trade training. If society really wants more equity and an education that meets its needs, then society must consider a tradesperson of more value than an economist or most other university graduates. Most societies, that the academics would call “primitive”, prepare their children for the real world. For the most part, we don’t.
A professor is a man whose job is to tell students how to solve problems of life, which he himself has tried to avoid by becoming a professor.
Anonymous.
A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
W.H.Auden.
Education: that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce
You can always tell a Harvard man – but you can’t tell him much.
Elbert Hubbard.
The reason universities are so full of knowledge is that students come with so much and leave with so little.
Marshall McLuhan
Dr. Ball, very astute observations, thank you, as an engineer with many decades making things that “actually work” I have a hard time envisioning myself in an academic environment.
The fastest way to silence an argument in the engineering world is; “see for yourself, it works”, of course the corollary is; “holy cr-p it does not do what you claimed”. I have a few more in the “win” column than the “loss” column, but I freely admit I have come up with a few “stinkers” in my engineering career. The wisdom comes when you admit to yourself that you have created a “stinker”. Of course in engineering it’s a whole lot easier because the “laws of physics” are always the referee, and no how much I might protest, the “laws” are always wiser than me, but I am gaining ground steadily, I figure in another century or so I will have mastered all of them….
Best of luck, Cheers, Kevin
Very well said, Tim. As a fellow refugee from academia, I agree wholeheartedly.
Give Gruber a break? Start with compound fractures of all four limbs and his skull.
[Now, now. Not needed. .mod]
Why this comment? Gruber openly admitted to what Obama himself was the leader in; being deceptive about what the ACA really did in order to pass it. Grubber simply articulated what Obama engendered with all his lies regarding Obamacare. (This is what the republicans should be articulating every day)
Clearly Obama believed it necessary to lie to the public in order to pass this bill. Clearly he was following not just Grubbers architectural input into the Bill, and also following Grubber’s recommendation on the likely success of KNOWN lies to allow the bill to pass. Clearly Obama considers the general public easily mislead.
The only difference between Grubber approach to this bill and the President’s, is that Obama never got caught in public articulating the reasons he lied about the ACA.
Ball’s situation is common to many professors who don’t ever realize what a professor’s function is: that of a questioner of students beliefs. If he would have done that successfully, his students would d have learned discrimination, which is the best you can hope for.
Luckily for me, I realized that when I had teachers like Ball, I only needed to play the game, because that all they thought about.
trafammy,
Another apologist for Gruber I see. Too bad you’re one of the ‘teachers’ who have had the CAGW scare colonize your mind. Given your projection, there’s no doubt that what you accuse Dr Ball of doing is exactly what you do.
If I was your student, no doubt you would flunk me. Because from reading your comments, it looks like I’ve forgotten more than you ever learned about the climate debate, and you could not stand having someone like me in your class. The other students would learn the truth — that you’re just whistlin’ Dixie.
So project away. We know you’re really writing about yourself.
dbstealey, well maybe the man has a point.
What about all of the credit hours spent answering “hypotheticals” by professors to show that you – yes you! Y-O-U – would throw one person in the boat out to the sharks, in order to save the other three. You see, there really is no right or wrong. Add alcohol and Schedule 1 substances for four years, and you have what some would term “brain damage.”
A questioner of student beliefs? When I attended a class, I was there to learn, and the belief I had was that the professor had something to teach me. If all he had was questions about my beliefs, I would have realized that the professor didn’t know a damned thing and was wasting my time. Beliefs are wonderful if you want to believe in something that can’t be demonstrated factually and rationality, like religion and anthropogenic climate change. Beliefs? We don’t need no stinking beliefs.
trafamadore
A student is there to LEARN. “Question his belief’s”????? Yeah. If the “student” is there for a “education” in “womyn’s studies” or “gender education” or “arts” …
But for something valuable?
So, you suggest that the student should be the teacher? A blank slate educational system seems like an expensive proposition, but would explain the progressive expense of the American education system which produces a product that lags behind other first-world nations.
I actually agree with “question beliefs”, which can have both positive and negative implications. A teacher’s role is to orient a student. Whether it is a “religious” or “secular” education, the teacher inculcates his preferred faith (i.e. universal or extra-universal knowledge) and religion (i.e. moral philosophy), as well as transfer basic knowledge and skills.
Yup, maybe correct for a student attending a mickey mouse university, studying a mickey mouse course, whose only prospects for a future purpose lie in abandoning all critical thinking in favour of desperately needed social acceptance, noisily propagandising one woolly, baseless cause or another in order to drown out their own feelings of impotence and hypocrisy :-).
And you would immediately disabuse the students of their belief that you were there to teach them wouldn’t you. You would just point them at the library and let them pick up what they can?
A good professor may not teach in the way a middle-school teacher has to teach – but is expected to fan the flames of the students’ innate curiosity so that they start to search for knowledge and understanding – with guidance on where to look from the professor.
….as long as they don’t question the professor’s beliefs.
(I wonder what it’s like in Mann’s classroom?)
Dr. Tim Ball, thank you for a blast of fresh air to clear out the cobwebs. Pity we cannot do anything about the spiders.
Perhaps the problem with the progressive education system is that students hesitate to question the established orthodoxy. They have faith that the progressive orthodoxy is superior to the traditional orthodoxy. They would rather improve their self-esteem, than their capacity for critical thought.
For example, they don’t consider why science is a philosophy that is necessarily constrained to a limited frame of reference in time and space. Or how the scientific method is designed to enforce that constraint, but is routinely violated as teachers, scientists, politicians, celebrities, etc. make claims in the universal and even extra-universal domains. They do not discern between cause and effects, and elevate correlation to divine revelation. They defer to argument by authority, and accept expert judgement on faith.
Marx was wrong. The opiate of the masses is not religion or moral philosophy, but dissociation of risk promised by mortal gods and experts.
Here is a little essay on Education. by Dorothy L Sayers http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html When dismissing mediaevaL universities remember that these subjects were what were required.
On another tack. Is Dr Tim Ball referring to a University as a teaching institution. The kind of Universities I have had contact with were institutions for research and the teaching came by lecturers who researched topics themselves. Graduate students who knew all the latest material, having just graduated themselves and so could teach the first years who were doing one year on that subject. for part of the time
Professors were heads of Department and were august individuals who researched, were experts in their field and wrote the books, set the curricula and taught the undergraduates in the third year in tutorials when they were nearing the end of their study courses…
These universities were not set up as teaching institutions like Teachers Colleges and Polytechnics. Things may have changed in the England and Scotland since then but that is what I think of as a University -So are we all talking about different things here. ?
What are U.S Universities usually like?
It puzzles me too – I often read diatribes here against the arts/humanities, presenting them as a fatuous waste of time and their academics as a bunch of disconnected losers, which bear no relationship to my experience across several faculties of a few universities on my way to a PhD in Greek tragedy (yes, diatribists, I feel your scorn). My studies were about as medieval as you could get – Greek, Latin, ancient and medieval history, old and middle English, literature, philosophy, philosophical logic and a couple of years of pure mathematics, topped off with a graduate diploma in computer science (one does have to get a job at some point).
The university you describe is the one I attended – the professor was top dog, always internationally renowned in the field and often took classes, even first year ones to get a feel for who was coming through the ranks. I was employed for a while as a casual tutor, but graduate students were never let anywhere near a lecture hall – the tenured staff kept that well and truly to themselves because they enjoyed their subjects, enjoyed communicating, and relished the tussle when challenged. There was no overt ideology – the only mentions of Marxism and feminism and their ilk were as critical perspectives.
Without continual re-evaluation of the past, we would soon lose all sense of ourselves as an evolved and evolving society, to our great detriment. The modern university has ruined itself by trying to be practical and relevant. The medievalists had it more right than the modernists.
Emotion when not balanced with reason
Interesting movie. It uses fear, pride and demonization to assert USA superiority to try to defeat the fear, pride, and demonization of Nazi Germany. However, one cannot blame Hollywood for stepping up the rhetoric to help protect the world from Fascism. It is just ironic that the movie uses what it condemns.
In the end, reason triumphed, in that the bigger guy won, as he usually does. Hitler should have known that.
In the CAGW field, a newcomer trying to use reason will quickly get trashed as being a denier of ‘facts’, and the ‘scientific consensus’. Now who is now the bigger guy in this debate? I would say the Internet is, as used by Anthony Watts to educate, not subjugate the masses. The Internet facilitates a two way conversation, not a one way conversation. The newcomer trying to use reason eventually figures it out that the CAGW alarmist Internet sites conduct one way conversations. They come to WUWT to read stimulating essays and analysis, which are then debated by all comers.
Thank you Tim. I must confess that I sat in an audience listening to you on climate change way back in 1995, and I was mad as heck about your views. You used data from the Hudsons Bay archives in Winnipeg, over 400 years long if I recall. Of course, I ‘knew’ you were wrong, as I trusted ‘scientists’ then.
After discovering Steve McIntyre’s evisceration of CAGW ‘statistics’ on the Internet, and then the Climategate emails, and now yourself again, I have learned a hard lesson. I must listen to the debates, look at the data, then think about what it says to me. It is a relief to be a witness of the use of reason over emotion. I get each morning with a smile on my face, and after checking the hockey results, I get a cup of coffee and go to WUWT to read the latest. Tim, I really appreciate the hard work you have done over the years, and i apologize for trashing your views way back then. My Ignorance is not an excuse, but it is all I have to explain it.
In the U.S. we accept many students into Universities who are not qualified.
We graduate many students who are not educated for any available job and we saddle them with crushing student loan debt.
When we need skilled laborers or technical specialists we often need to find immigrants who were trained elsewhere.
The trend toward universal academic college education supports the abuse described by Dr. Ball but badly serves our nation and our young.
The problem isn’t funding sources – Harvard is largely privately funded and Oxford is largely State funded.
The problem is the lack of accountability of academics. They are judged by their peers who they judge back. It’s a back-scratching club.
In Medieval times the “Academics” were very much in the real world – they were directly accountable. Literacy was lower and so “Academics” were used as diplomats and agricultural experts. Kings and Princes on Procession would stop at Universities and Monasteries and discuss their issues directly. No-one else had buildings fit for a King.
How often do Presidents and Prime Ministers socialise with academics now?
And how often do academics take full responsibility for their own funding now?
Medieval institutions worked. Don’t disparage them.
“The problem isn’t funding sources – Harvard is largely privately funded ”
This is deeply misguided, most of the current social elite are tied to debt, government funding or contracted through government sources. The Ivy League, as just one enclave….are deeply tied to statist incomes and agenda. That’s why they leftist, Keynesians, Climate Central planners and advocates.
Thanks to Dr. Ball for this wonderful essay. In my opinion (worth every bit of what you paid for it) I think this may be one of the top ten essays at WUWT ever. No, really, I think it very timely, informative, and relevant to the topic of science in general and “university science” in particular.
As one involved in education, I believe that the entirety of the American education system (at all levels) has degenerated into near futility over these last 50 or more years. It is very telling that most of the superstars of innovation and business (think the founders of some of our largest corporations) were college dropouts. It is also very telling that universities today have speech codes. My god, really? The university is all about conforming to a herd mentality — not the pursuit of knowledge no matter where that takes you.
I suppose there was never any hope after the university became mostly a government funded bureaucracy.
Great article but I think the comment ‘you can tell a ….. man anywhere but you can’t tell him much’ was originally aimed at Balliol College, Oxford (founded 1263). In additon, Asquith described Balliol men as possessing “the tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority”. I’ll get back to my pipe and slippers now.
Well as an engineer I would argue that not everyone who goes to University or teaches in one fits the mould as described here. However a great many do and they re mostly in the higher echelons of the faculty. There is no doubt that in the faculties I attended those of us doing practical subjects were denigrated as mere tin bashers (mechanical engineers) sparkies (electrical engineers) or smellies (chemical engineers)
Let’s look at some real data instead of model results. And let me, unlike the nuts, place my one assumption first: If there is indeed global warming, it must be manifest in melting of polar ice caps and thus sea-level rise.
Given that it is obvious that with increasing world population, and thus increased burning of hydrocarbons over the past, say 150 years warming must be occurring at an increasing rate.
One of the longest data records for seal level rise is from Battery Park at the south tip of Manhattan. Here is the link:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8518750
This chart clearly shows the change in sea level elevation is a **straight line** increase. Those data not only do not support Anthropogenic Global Warming, the completely invalidate the idea. Earth population has increased from about 1 billion to 7 billion over the time period covered by the chart. If global warming was induced by man those data should show a clear trend of increasing temperature. The strict linear increase in seal level refutes any conclusions that global warming is man-made.
Debate over.
Technical comments?
how about this station?
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.htm?stnid=970-141
There could be a connected effect, but with continually diminishing returns (like CO2).
The sin is no longer that a scientist was wrong, because that was always a forgivable mistake and a risk you took, but that they now lie through their teeth to us while at the same time giving us the good old steady eye contact of truth. It’s deliberate, premeditated and totally without any guilt for ruthlessly exploiting the implicit trust in them. We will be punished for that.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/is-it-now-considered-okay-for-science-to-be-corrupt/
Pointman
The dreadful impact of CO2 alarmism on lives, landscapes, economies, politics, education, and international relations may not yet have passed the worst, and so it behoves us to try to account for the astonishing success of this particular piece of millenarial scaremongering. I think Tim Ball’s work in this area is outstanding, and the above post makes another excellent contribution. The more insight we can obtain into this ‘Greatest Scare Ever’, the greater the chance of postponing or defusing the next one.
EXCELLENT column!! It explains so much and hits the nail on the head.
Thank you Dr. Ball, the article is essential as it addresses a key structure of Green authoritarianism. Without the corrupted academic enclave a traditional leftist claim to intellectual authority (Gruberism) falls away.
What Gruber said about democratic voters (being stupid) about Obamacare applies exactly to climate change.
I liked that barb, Dr. Ball. However, those with common sense couldn’t be bothered teaching it to those incapable of learning it. After all, they have common sense ;o)
Should still be Quote of the Week.
I don’t know about a course in common sense, but maybe one on critical thinking. But, that would be heresy, as it would mean questioning the professors themselves. The whole system seems to be more one of rote learning rather than thinking for oneself.
Here is a concise video with legal analysis
http://dailybail.com/home/obamacare-chief-architect-is-a-sneaky-lying-bastard.html
Having billed taxpayers untold millions for his alleged work, and then calling his clients stupid, Professor Jonathan Gruber now appears before the clients’ representatives to answer some simple questions, starting with proof of his alleged work (aside from invoices, also undisclosed).
Gruber refuses to disclose his work. Any of it. The client-taxpayers won’t see one document.
Thing is, Gruber doesn’t have any earthly idea as to why he’s refusing such a reasonable client request. He gives a 3 year-old’s answer: just because.
It’s downhill from there…
Q. Do you have documents?
A. Do I own documents?
Q. Do you HAVE documents?
A. Yeah, I have documents.
Q. And you’re not willing to give them to us?
A. I have all sorts of documents. I have a piece of paper in front of me. I don’t understand–
Q. Documents that relate to the questions I just asked you, Mr. Gruber.
A. I have—
Q. Do you not understand the question?
Q. Who owns those documents? Who paid for them?
A. I’m not sure.
[4.2 million in state and federal money was paid Gruber for his national health care support. .mod]
Ah, but Gruber’s own economic model of his own health care projections (er, predictions) model is failing within 18 months of its start date: Now vermont is getting screwed by the same program that (democrats) in Colorado paid for!
By Bruce Parker | Vermont Watchdog
http://watchdog.org/186963/gruber-model-errs/
Jonathan Gruber’s health care forecasting is failing in Colorado as Vermont’s Gov. Peter Shumlin prepares to use the economist’s math for single-payer health care.
As Vermonters anxiously await a Gruber-modeled financing plan for Green Mountain Care, modeling done for Colorado’s health exchange by Jonathan Gruber Associates has proven wildly erroneous.
In 2011, following Colorado’s decision to set up a state health exchange for Obamacare, the state hired Gruber to forecast enrollment trends from which the state and federal government could estimate costs.
According to a presentation delivered to the Colorado Health Benefit Exchange Board on Sept. 16, 2011, and provided to Watchdog.org, Gruber predicted Medicaid enrollment in Colorado would grow from 440,000 enrollees in 2011 to 710,000 enrollees in 2016.
Actual 2014 data reported by the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing shows the number of people enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program has grown to more than 1.1 million — a miscalculation of about 400,000 enrollees.
The miscalculation is growing rapidly, as the state reported 12,533 new Medicaid sign-ups in the two-week period between Nov. 15 and Nov. 30.
“Medicaid and CHP+ enrollments over the last few weeks show that we are still finding and enrolling low-income Coloradans into coverage,” Susan Birch, executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, said in a Dec. 2 news release.
The errors are significant for Vermont. While Shumlin has denounced Gruber for video statements disparaging American voters and rejecting government transparency, he has continued to defend Gruber’s math.
In November, Shumlin said Gruber would continue to serve as “a calculator” for single-payer financing options, despite not receiving additional pay. State health officials assert Gruber is one of only a few people in the nation capable of providing customized health care forecasting data for states. Importantly, the Gruber Microsimulation Model (GMSIM) used for Colorado also is being used to create financing scenarios for Green Mountain Care.
“His models can’t be relied on for policy. They’re not ready for prime time,” Linda Gorman, director of the Health Care Policy Center at the Independence Institute in Colorado, told Vermont Watchdog.
Gorman, an economist who serves as a member of Colorado’s Blue Ribbon Commission for Health Care Reform, recalled that the Gruber Microsimulation Model was hailed as a breakthrough methodology for forecasting health care data, despite its use of surveys and small samples to predict Coloradans’ health insurance choices.
“They said the great thing about using the Gruber model instead of the standard econometric model is that we’re going to use a lot of survey data. They basically set up a representative population and said this is how people behave based on surveys. That kind of thing works really badly for a small state like Colorado,” Gorman said.
According to Gorman, a miscalculation of 400,000 people is a costly error since each Medicaid enrollee costs taxpayers about $2,000. Gruber’s Medicaid enrollment error means Colorado’s cost estimates for Medicaid expansion are presently off by about $800 million.
“Remember, they were trying to make the law come in as saving money — so they’ve way underestimated the cost of insuring these additional Medicaid people,” she said.
Medicaid enrollment wasn’t the only error in Gruber’s presentation. Gruber also wrongly estimated sign-ups for the state’s subsidized and unsubsidized commercial plans under the Affordable Care Act.
According to Gruber’s simulations, Colorado could expect to have 470,000 people enrolled in the subsidized plan and 150,000 in the unsubsidized plan by 2016. However, actual data for 2014 shows 75,067 individuals are enrolled in the exchange subsidized plan and 52,165 in the exchange unsubsidized plan — a underestimate that indicates paying customers aren’t signing up through the state exchange.
“So far, the data suggest that the exchange is a lot less popular than predicted,” Gorman said.
“What that is showing is the model has not so far done a very good job of predicting enrollment in these health benefit exchanges that were supposed to be the centerpiece of Obamacare.”
The Gruber Microsimulation Model also provided flawed predictions to the federal government. A 2012 article in Forbes notes that Gruber erred in predicting that insurance premiums would go down once the Affordable Care Act became law:
Before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, Gruber published a widely-cited analysis, using his Gruber Microsimulation Model, in which he asserted that in 2016, young people would save 13 percent, and older people 31 percent, on their insurance premiums. Gruber’s numbers were used to rebut an October 2009 analysis from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which projected that non-group (a.k.a. individual-market) premiums would increase by 47 percent over the same period.
By 2012, however, Gruber reversed course and began informing Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado that the law would increase non-group premiums by 19 percent to 30 percent, according to the Forbes article.
Since early November, when a series of Jonathan Gruber videos revealed the economist crafted policy in a “tortured way” to conceal costs, several Vermont lawmakers have attacked the credibility of Gruber as a calculator for Vermont’s new single-payer health program.
This week, Gruber was called to Capitol Hill to explain his comments to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While the MIT professor apologized for making “glib” and “demeaning” comments, he did not suggest his work was compromised.
Gruber’s continued defense of his consulting work didn’t escape Darcie Johnston, founder of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, a group that opposes single-payer health care.
“Jonathan Gruber’s answers to the Oversight Committee should give Vermonters pause. Governor Shumlin should fully terminate Prof. Gruber from his Vermont contract. Now that Gov. Shumlin and Vermonters have seen how deceitful and calculating he is, there is no way to trust his professional judgment or his economic modeling,” Johnston said in an email to Vermont Watchdog.
Contact Bruce Parker at bparker@watchdog.org
and we don’t even have recreational marijuana to help us through this nightmare! /sarc
But I’m looking forward to the New Year when Shumlin and his PSB appointees will return here to the Northeast Kingdom to identify more ridgelines to doze for more whirligig failures, infrasound broadcasts, radioactive waste pits in Mongolia all in the name of saving us from CO2 pollution. Green Mountain State? Nope, Steel Mountain State. Coming soon to all our neighborhoods.
It really depends on which university and faculty folk are talking about. In mine teaching is the majority of our work and research less so (much to the chagrin of our VP, as research brings in big bucks). Oh, and before anyone gets on their high horse I was a field engineer for a couple of decades in the petrochemical industry, starting out as an apprentice craftsman prior to going into academia. There is always a balance in any faculty between teaching, research and management. Different faculties have differing balances depending upon their field. We should be careful not to generalise about higher education and thus seem anti-academic, because that just makes one sound like an ill informed, ideologically driven, conspiracy nuts.
Interestingly universities and academics are also the first thing fascists, communists, religious zealots and other assorted unpleasant dictators and tyrants go after.
Not surprising, because universities are always uber-left wing.
In the UK, the Unite Against F*scism (UAF) political pressure and demonstrations group is organised and run by the university lecrurers union, NAFTHE. And what is wrong with that, you ask?
Only that UAF are the biggest bunch of f*scist thugs you have ever seen. They are completely liberal a free-thinking, as long as you supplicate yourself before them, and do exactly as they say. There is nothing quite as f*scist as a liberal on his or her soapbox.
Ralph
Tim Ball,
Your post is a cry out for debate everywhere whether in either private or public colleges/universities or in private enterprise or in gov’t and its related bureaucratic bodies and institutes/labs or in NGOs of any kind.
You seem to call for a free marketplace of ideas.
We have both of those things in abundance. The world of free societies is a very argumentative place right now and has been since the renaissance. The situation remains.
I think your post just confirms that the free market place of ideas exists and it does work whether in climate focused science or not.
The context of your post extends your frequent focus and storyline about some kind of implication of a nefarious and ubiquitous movement lead by a handful of intellectuals leading an attack on the free maketplace of ideas in the western modern culture. I think that context of yours is erroneous and is an extremely bad strategy intellectually. That kind of context of yours, which is focused on climate change movement/cause, is as false and inane as the context held by Mann, Oreskes and Lewandowsky that climate focused skeptics are a nefarious and ubiquitous movement/cause led by hidden greedy selffish intellects. With that context, which I think is held by you, then my view is that you are an intellectual mirror image of Mann, Oreskes and Lewandowsky. Dead-ended with mirror images.
John
The free marketplace of ideas with regard to climate exists here, on WUWT, and on various other Skeptic sites, and thank god. Because its been pretty thoroughly trashed elsewhere, especially in academia. There is no level playing field, and hasn’t been for quite some time. It has nothing to do with your straw man “handful of intellectuals leading an attack”, which is absurd. The closest description I have seen of the Climatist movement is that it is a memeplex. The things driving it are numerous, but its sheer size means that it barrels along under its own weight.
Bruce Cobb on December 13, 2014 at 10:02 am
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Bruce Cobb,
I disagree with your inference that a level playing field is relevant or important in any significant intellectual engagement / discourse / debate on climate focused science. Freedom to speak and freedom to freely associate is the marketplace of ideas and it required nothing else to succeed like it has in skeptical reasoning on climate focused science. It will require nothing else to continue its success. No rules of intellectual engagement apply. It is silly to paint as underdogs the intellectuals who are substantially critical (skeptical) of the observationally invalidated theory of significant climate change by CO2 from fossil fuel. It is likewise silly to paint as intellectually dominant all those scientists supporting the observationally invalidated theory of significant climate change by CO2 from fossil fuel.
The marketplace of ideas includes the institutions of higher learning. It is messy and partly fossilized there but it is there.
John
Your observation hits the mark. My wife has no interest in natural climate change, but her questions often inspire insights into concepts that, upon analysis, make more sense than the “experts”.
majormike1 on December 16, 2014 at 3:57 pm
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majormike1,
Yes, as you pointed out, questions from those outside of a study area can be quite penetrating to those involved in the study area.
John