From the “It’s science Jim – but not as we know it” department. (h/t Foxgoose) Sheesh. Another shedload of 97% consensus, spun to fit Paris COP21. The hubris here is astounding, but not unexpected from these egotistical scientists activists.
Learning from mistakes in climate research
Rasmus E. Benestad, Dana Nuccitelli, Stephan Lewandowsky, Katharine Hayhoe, Hans Olav Hygen, Rob van Dorland, John Cook
Abstract
Among papers stating a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), 97 % endorse AGW. What is happening with the 2 % of papers that reject AGW? We examine a selection of papers rejecting AGW. An analytical tool has been developed to replicate and test the results and methods used in these studies; our replication reveals a number of methodological flaws, and a pattern of common mistakes emerges that is not visible when looking at single isolated cases. Thus, real-life scientific disputes in some cases can be resolved, and we can learn from mistakes. A common denominator seems to be missing contextual information or ignoring information that does not fit the conclusions, be it other relevant work or related geophysical data. In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup. Other typical weaknesses include false dichotomies, inappropriate statistical methods, or basing conclusions on misconceived or incomplete physics. We also argue that science is never settled and that both mainstream and contrarian papers must be subject to sustained scrutiny. The merit of replication is highlighted and we discuss how the quality of the scientific literature may benefit from replication.
The article is open access if you want to bother reading it, but it basically says “we are right, you are wrong, and you have the capacity to learn from your mistakes, we don’t make any”.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-015-1597-5/fulltext.html
here’s the methodology in the SI
Click to access 704_2015_1597_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
(h/t to Barry Woods)
UPDATE: a review of some of the papers in the SI show they are targeting some of the cyclomania we’ve seen displayed, which even I reject here at WUWT after intitially examining it. It looks to me like they’ve picked the low hanging fruit.
UPDATE2: At RealClimate, Rasmus Benestad bemoans the fact that this paper was rejected by the first journal they submitted it to.
We first submitted our work to a journal called ‘Climate Research’.
The opinion of one of the reviewers on our manuscript was “profoundly negative”, with a recommendation to reject it (29 June 2012):
“The manuscript is not a scientific study. It is just a summary of purported errors in collection of papers, arbitrarily selected by the authors.”
Ouch!
Reportedly, from comments by Paul Matthews here, it was rejected a total of five times. He writes:
This is a revised version of the drivel they tried to publish two years ago
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/451/2013/esdd-4-451-2013.html
It was clobbered in the comments (click on the discussion tab) and rejected by editor Matthew Huber.
They’ve been sending it to various journals (see RC post) and it was rejected by 5 journals before they eventually found one prepared to publish it.
(Added: )
The five journals who rejected this paper:
- Climate Research
- Climatic Change
- Earth System Dynamics Discussion
- Nature Climate Change
- Environmental Research Letters.
UPDATE 3: Common mental/logic errors made by climate zealots:
Click to access BehaviouralEconomics.pdf
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Insane left-wing drivel. I won’t be reading this because it starts with flawed research and extends further into idiocy.
Flawed indeed! “random” and “weather event” should always raise a red flag. Weather events should be assumed to be dependent events unless proven otherwise. Throw all your instincts on streaks.
Idiocy? I love that expression – in this case! 😉
It’s amazing that they START the abstract by quoting their own “97%” figure, which has been proved to be an utterly fantastical statistical fever-dream, and then expect anybody to take the rest of it seriously.
Seriously. Why OPEN a paper with a proved falsehood? They’re living in their own weird version of reality.
And I’m being generous… assuming those are merely errors, not even deliberate. But astounding errors they are, if so.
“and a pattern of common mistakes emerges that is not visible when looking at single isolated cases.”
Just like AGW, it’s impossible to see unless you ignore observations and just believe us.
What makes it left wing? Drivel is right wing just as much as left wing.
Yes, easier to ridicule the work than put in some effort to prove them wrong 😉
Without reading more than the abstract, surely they should also have tested the 97% of papers supporting AGW in order to show how many of them also contain methodological errors? Without doing that test how can you rule out the possibility that all climate papers are flawed, whether pro- or anti-AGW
My thoughts exactly ThinkingScientist
That makes no sense. Why would you test results when you already know they are correct?
Yeah. Why would a judge want evidence from an independent source before aquitting? He’s already got the testimony of the defendant that he’s innocent.
That’s how they did the UEA uni investigation. They asked everybody if they had done anything wrong and they all said NO. They even got the guys to write the press release telling us how honest and hard working they were.
Steig et al (Nature 2009) came to mind when I started reading the abstract.
In his paper, which made it to the cover of Nature, Steig uses the data of the weather station called Harry, built in 1995 and collecting data since, I kid you not, 1987. (sarc) Finally, a weather station that can record not only present temperatures but also past temperatures. (/sarc)
You can read the story at climate audit. http://climateaudit.org/2009/02/02/when-harry-met-gill/
And, surprise surprise, the paper has not been withdrawn, which tells a lot about the state of climate science.
That’s what is called A Big Ol’ Bias where I come from. The more papers they publish, the more completely incompetent they prove they are! I celebrate each one!
Good point thinking Scientist. Such a study should have included a cherry picked set of papers from the 97% to serve as a control group.
Analysis from Robin Guenier on Doran, Anderegg, Cook, Bray&vonStorch. http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidenceHtml/4191
It’s funny how these warmists pile into a paper like clowns in a VW. Similar to the recent Hansen scare paper that had 16 co-authors, they seem to be puffing up their resumes by tagging their friends. And it doesn’t matter if a person is even a scientist.
A large number of authors on a paper is often a sign of pal-publishing so that on each of a series of papers they rotate first authors and after a while their citation index is growing. Now the next step is to have more papers citing the previously published pal-publications and the citation index skyrockets. Keeps the promotions, grants, and travel to exotic places going and the taxpayers fund all of this.
Like this paper? Find the big name hiding in there.
COSMOS: Hubble Space Telescope Observations
Scoville, N.; Abraham, R. G.; Aussel, H.; Barnes, J. E.; Benson, A.; Blain, A. W.; Calzetti, D.; Comastri, A.; Capak, P.; Carilli, C.; Carlstrom, J. E.; Carollo, C. M.; Colbert, J.; Daddi, E.; Ellis, R. S.; Elvis, M.; Ewald, S. P.; Fall, M.; Franceschini, A.; Giavalisco, M.; Green, W.; Griffiths, R. E.; Guzzo, L.; Hasinger, G.; Impey, C.; Kneib, J.-P.; Koda, J.; Koekemoer, A.; Lefevre, O.; Lilly, S.; Liu, C. T.; McCracken, H. J.; Massey, R.; Mellier, Y.; Miyazaki, S.; Mobasher, B.; Mould, J.; Norman, C.; Refregier, A.; Renzini, A.; Rhodes, J.; Rich, M.; Sanders, D. B.; Schiminovich, D.; Schinnerer, E.; Scodeggio, M.; Sheth, K.; Shopbell, P. L.; Taniguchi, Y.; Tyson, N. D.; Urry, C. M.; Van Waerbeke, L.; Vettolani, P.; White, S. D. M.; Yan, L.
2007, Astrophysical Journal Supplement, v.172, p.38
This is all about power and money. We are mistaken if we think that the reason for this is poor science and that we can change their minds by showing them what they are doing wrong – they do not care.
Bingo!
Another Bingo !!!!!
I have a question for you, Walt D. Why is it always They who are consumed by power – and filthy lucre? How is it that you’ve managed to escape the curse? Is it because you’re genetically programmed to be wonderful?
Because there are bad people in this world, Virginia. They have a very sensitive nose for BS and join whatever most lucrative fad is sloshed around by the rich and powerful. While decent, hard-working people are forced to pay for the Green Marxist destruction of our civilization.
Why are you a fly on that cow pie, RW?
Notice how the troll attempts to deflect attention from the failings of it’s idols. In his mind, only those who are perfect are permitted to question the climate gods.
rw,
Gresham’s Law* applies to more than circulating money. In climate science, bad scientists drive the good ones out.
You can see it throughout the Climategate emails. People like Michael Mann conspired to have scientists who merely had a different scientific point of view barred from publishing — and in a couple of cases, he actually got them fired from their jobs.
Those honest scientists were in shock, because they never expected their field to be cutthroat and political like this. So they just walked away, instead of fighting it.
That emboldened the Michael Manns of the climate world, so they keep attacking anyone who doesn’t toe their alarmist line. It’s all there in the Climategate email dump, if you want to read it.
—
*Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives good money out of circulation. This happened constantly in the 1800’s when local banks printed their own currency. They said it was backed by gold, and at first it was. But human nature being the same then as now, more currency was printed than there was gold backing it. So gold was hoarded — driven out, and the only thing left was fast-devaluing paper money. There were even booklets printed monthly, giving the banknote/gold exchange rate for each bank. And it was always less than par.
(Also, rw is no troll. He asked a question. He was just being a little snarky, that’s all.)
Triple bingo!
The Iraqi Information Minister….I loved that guy!
Didn’t we hang him?
No, he was questioned and released. Move to UAE with his family. Was reported alive as of Nov, 2014.
No way. We all were grateful for the entertainment.
Pathway August 25, 2015 at 7:25 am
I thought I heard NBC was interviewing Baghdad Bob to replace Brian Williams just after Williams was suspended. If I recall correctly, President Obama and Hillary Clinton were on his resume` as character references.
It was Chemical Ali that was hung, the guy in the picture was referred to as Comical Ali.
In any case, any hangings were done by the Iraqi government, as per Hussein. He was tried and convicted by Iraqi people. So unless you’re from Iraq and speaking on behalf of the Iraq people, ‘we’ didn’t hang anyone.
Well, they don’t seem to have learned from the mistakes found by Dixon & Jones 14. Excerpts from the latter’s abstract and conclusions (regarding the execrable LOG 2013 papers) bear repeating: “….Reanalysis of the survey data sets of Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013) and Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) indicates that the conclusions of those articles—that conspiracist ideation predicts skepticism regarding the reality of anthropogenic climate change—are not supported by the data…….”, and “……. This analysis highlights the fact that a skewed sample can easily mask a nonlinear relationship and lead to serious misinterpretation of modeled relationships ….”.
“…real-life scientific disputes in some cases can be resolved, and we can learn from mistakes. A common denominator seems to be missing contextual information or ignoring information that does not fit the conclusions, be it other relevant work or related geophysical data. In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup. Other typical weaknesses include false dichotomies, inappropriate statistical methods, or basing conclusions on misconceived or incomplete physics. We also argue that science is never settled and that both mainstream and contrarian papers must be subject to sustained scrutiny.“
Seems like a partial description of the problems with the Alarmists’ position, except for that last bolded part which is an admission by these folks that the “Science” is never settled.
Did I actually read the SI correctly? Nucci and his merry band of SkepScibots seemed to be saying that MBH 98/99 were correct and MM05 was wrong…
This is as idiotic as the claim that “Mike’s Nature Trick” is a common way of merging two spectrally dissimilar data sets.
Only it was not standard PCA was it?
It was de-centered PCA, which is a “novel” method (i.e. there is no published support for this method)
It was the weighting of hockey stick shapes with the ‘right’ uptick that was the bigger flaw. Oh yeah, and removal of contradicting data sets. The ‘red noise’ comment is not correct. If red noise is fed into Mann’s process it always produces a hockey stick because it rewards such randomly produced shapes with double counting (or worse). That is different from the issue of centering.
What about the missing 1%?
This is a revised version of the drivel they tried to publish two years ago
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/451/2013/esdd-4-451-2013.html
It was clobbered in the comments (click on the discussion tab) and rejected by editor Matthew Huber.
They’ve been sending it to various journals (see RC post) and it was rejected by 5 journals before they eventually found one prepared to publish it.
Excellent investigative initiative.
Same paper is being discussed at RealClimate. I self-identified as a referee. Cue vitriol.
I see Rasmus is indignant that economists are invited to review “climate science” papers – but silent on the fact that ex-cartoonists, oil services industry waste specialists & eccentric psychology profs are all allowed to help write them 🙂
Indeed. But Ross and I were not asked to review these papers as economists (there is no economics in this paper) but rather as statisticians (there is a lot of, rather bad, statistics in the paper).
Hypocrisy indeed.
You’re brave and forward Richard, for letting yourself get pies thrown at you like that. I’m so glad to have you in the fight.
In my field, reviewers are not to reveal their identities, per journal policy. I suspect the same is true in Tol’s journals. Knowing this, I would not send Tol a paper to review. He is not to be trusted.
What field is that? And, you “suspect”??
You are impugning someone with no evidence of wrongdoing. And I know why:
It’s because character assassination is all you’ve got. Your side sure lacks scientific evidence for what you’re trying to sell.
Now, in the climatology field, they’re not supposed to disclose those identities. But they routinely do — see the Climategate email dump, or read here about a professor who submitted a Comment correcting someone’s paper (see #59 for evidence).
Pls show me a journal where reviewers are not anonymous. Put up or shut up.
As I said, you are impugning someone with no evidence. In professional circles that’s [called] being reprehensible. It’s what lowlifes do. And like every alarmist, you tried to re-frame the question believing you could try to make us prove a negative. Logic isn’t your strong suit.
If you had read the link I posted, you would know that climate journal reviewers routinely break confidentiality. It’s also evident throughout the Climategate email dump — another source you obviously never read.
So as usual, I put up. You’re not nearly smart enough to win any debate with me, traffy. And you never answered: what’s your “field”, and where? Gonna ‘put up’?
db, you have to use small words and over explain apparently. The fact that some journals do not reveal the identity of reviewers is not the case for ALL journals, for example the British Medical Journal requires all reviewers to be identified. And, just because a journal has a policy of not revealing the names of reviewers to authors does not mean that the reviewer cannot reveal him/herself to the authors or public or anyone else they choose to.
Until trafamadore produces a policy from every scientific journal in the industry stating that their reviewers cannot ever reveal themselves to the authors whose papers they review, his argument is clearly just bluster.
Well argued dbstealy!
“We also argue that science is never settled and that both mainstream and contrarian papers must be subject to sustained scrutiny.”
Friend of mine attempted to share her honest scrutiny of this “mainstream” paper at RealClimate and her post never appeared. Apparently they don’t take that last sentence seriously…but we knew that right?
I think we can safely say springer will publish just about anything and sort out the consequences after the event:
http://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/17/64-more-papers-retracted-for-fake-reviews-this-time-from-springer-journals/
I can’t see how they can survive too long as a scientific journals unless they smarten their ideas up.
ps: I wonder if anyone at springer read Huber’s takedown.
Everyone should read the book, “Future Babble” by Dan Gardner. Not only will it help you understand why climate hucksters push their future catastrophic scenarios, but it will help you see thru politicians, opinion writiers and authors who simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They believe what they say and the more strongly they believe it the less likely they are to ever modify their views. No matter what the evidence shows. This scam will go on forever. Not only because it pays well and brings fame and glory to these imbeciles but because it is psychologically impossible for them to admit they’re wrong. Future predictions are never any better than a random coin toss.
Excellent book and easy to read.
But given this basic situation, the wonderful thing is that this CAGW business can’t go on forever, especially if (as I believe) it’s now cooling. The emperor really is dancing around with no clothes on in this case – and sooner or later the chill will freeze his nuts off. And after that there’s no backing out – they’re in too deep – they’ve left a trail of foolishness that’s six miles wide. What remains is to learn how to leverage the situation to their maximum disadvantage.
That dix mile wide river of stink is called foolishness?
I know a few other words for it.
But no matter the name, you do not want to get any on your shoes.
The warmistas are swimming in it, and think it is a soul-nourishing mud bath.
They are depending on the Gruber Effect. “People are stupid.” They’ve already switched from Man’s CO2 causing “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”. Some still believe them. They’ll just replace the locomentary “An Inconvenient Truth” with “The Day After Tomorrow”.
Would have to disagree with you that the Future climate related predictions made by the CAGW types are comparable to a random coin toss. Their future predictions are much WORSE than a random coin toss because the analysis of the data they use to make the prediction is horrendously bad. One would expect half of their predictions to be right if done by coin toss. Their failed prediction rate when it comes to severe or potentially catastrophic climate related events is near or at 100%.
Exactly. They are never correct. My cat has a better record of scientific accuracy.
” ignoring information that does not fit the conclusions”
A clear case of the Projection defence mechanism. Blaming others for having thoughts and motives that really belong in us.
Exactly. They look in the mirror and see somebody else. And they’re too dense to realize they’re even looking in the mirror. It’s as absurd as a Monty Python sketch.
“A common denominator seems to be missing contextual information or ignoring information that does not fit the conclusions, be it other relevant work or related geophysical data. In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup.”
Are they saying that skeptics do this or that this is what skeptics are saying about the 97%ers?
Elmer, they’re saying
‘we’re 97 per cent right’
but 2 per cent sceptics
stumble over OUR rightness shortcoming to withhold them from understanding
____
A common denominator
seems to be missing
contextual information or
ignoring information that
does not fit the conclusions,
be it other relevant work or
related geophysical data. In
many cases, shortcomings are
due to insufficient model
evaluation.
____
in short:
they persist to sell this scrap but WE ai’nt enlighted.
enough.
Hans
I looked through the names in the references. It’s a who’s who of GW alarmists.
‘Among papers stating a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), 97 % endorse AGW. ‘
Firstly notice there is information on the nature of this ‘position ‘ secondly it is of course , and no surprise given the authors an outright lie for no one knows how many papers their are let lone reviewed 97% that state ‘ a position on anthropogenic global warming’
If you do not know the whole number you cannot say what percentage any sub-group is of the whole , really really basic maths .
Of course when you dig further you see they attack these ‘sceptic’ papers for taking the very same approaches which are common and acceptable in climate ‘science’, including being used by the authors .
Which explains why they simply did not look at any papers from there own side .
It is a classic pile of BS and poor science from those that when it comes to producing BS and poor science have few equals .
It really is pathetic in ways too many to mention, but yet, it’s out there, published, being shared around Twitter, often by ‘respected’ climate scientists, pushing the boundaries of ‘inane’ over into ‘insane’ in the frantic effort to completely delegitimise legitimate science.
A particular example of the ridiculous bias in this paper masquerading as ‘scientific research’:
Rather than refer to solar influences upon climate, they choose to refer to ‘celestial influences’, making it sound like the challenge to consensus global warming ‘science’ is coming from astrologers! When they make it clear what their main target is – solar cycle length – they refer to an ancient 1991 paper by Friis-Christensen and Lassen which an SkS article written by Cook ‘debunked’ in 2010. But they conveniently neglect to reference other scientific studies which have linked solar cycle length more definitively with climate change; in particular http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612000417.
Perhaps these oh-so-esteemed authors aspire to mediocrity forever. And in this, they may well succeed – if they haven’t already;-)
If I were to ignore the headline and the first three sentences in the abstract, I would be tempted to say the CAGW crowd is describing their own work.
/snark
The 5 journals that rejected it, according to Rasmus himself at RC, were
Climate Research
Climatic Change
Earth System Dynamics Discussion
Nature Climate Change
Environmental Research Letters.
So five rejections didn’t faze them. They certainly are a stalwart crew.
This proves the peer review process is “robust”, eh?
You can just keep submitting until you find someone with sufficiently compromised scruples, and …viola! Peer reviewed!
It also shows that this process has nothing to do with confirming veracity.
We should thank them for “outing” the peer review process for it’s utter meaninglessness.
They have the known truth. Just because 5 journals rejected it doesn’t mean it isn’t true (as evidenced by it getting published).
Yea, the peer review by any one of 2600 journals or an open journal, is a useless metric.
Menicholas, you were doing well with the French (‘dix’) and then struck the wrong chord with ‘viola’. C’est dommage. 🙁
Among papers stating a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), 97 % endorse AGW.
(Summoning warrenlb… ☺)
This narrative keeps chugging on because of its vague premise. Most skeptics of man-made global warming (MMGW) would agree that human activity has some small contribution, even if it’s only the UHI effect. But as we know, that’s not the question at all.
The question is whether there is any dangerous MMGW. If the warming is on the order of a few hundredths to a few tenths of a degree, as the chart below indicates, then there is no problem:
Use the chart to extrapolate how much global warming could be expected from a 20%, or a 50% rise, or even a doubling of CO2 from current levels. Any warming would be too small to measure using current instrumentation.
So the question and answer should be something like this:
“Among scientists responding, those who think that a rise in human-emitted CO2 is likely to cause dangerous global warming is _____%.”
They’re constantly trying to frame the debate in ways that give the answer they want. That isn’t science, it’s self-serving propaganda.
This strikes me as an interesting graph. Do you have a citation?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
Re: ‘cyclomania’
If climate contains cycles, even Dr. Mann agrees there is a cycle, in particular the N. Atlantic SST (apparently he named it himself ‘the AMO’, not forgetting the NAO -atmospheric oscillation, Pacific oscillation, QBO, elNino-laNina, etc) then this the most prominent (AMO) cycle in first instance appears to be of the terrestrial origin, i.e. generated by the
post-glacial isostatic uplift oscillations.
The major unknown is why the oscillations are synchronous in their periodicity and the phase with the solar magnetic oscillations.
Benestad regards himself as a great “scientist”. He therefore likes to mock other scientists that he regards as inferior compared to him. Here is an example:
“It is not every day that I come across a scientific publication that so totally goes against my perception of what science is all about. Humlum et al., 2011 present a study in the journal Global and Planetary Change, claiming that most of the temperature changes that we have seen so far are due to natural cycles.”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/12/curve-fitting-and-natural-cycles-the-best-part/
Regarding circular reasoning – I wonder what they would think about the following approach in the IPCC report:
“Observed GMST anomalies relative to 1880–1919 in recent years lie well outside the range of GMST anomalies in CMIP5 simulations with natural forcing only, but are consistent with the ensemble of CMIP5 simulations including both anthropogenic and natural forcing (Figure TS.9) even though some individual models overestimate the warming trend, while others underestimate it. Simulations with WMGHG changes only, and no aerosol changes, generally exhibit stronger warming than has been observed (Figure TS.9). Observed temperature trends over the period 1951–2010, which are characterized by warming over most of the globe with the most intense warming over the NH continents, are, at most observed locations, consistent with the temperature trends in CMIP5 simulations including anthropogenic and natural forcings and inconsistent with the temperature trends in CMIP5 simulations including natural forcings only.”
To put the language straight: The model output match the observations best when the model is fed with the theory. Hence both theory and the models must be correct.
(Ref: Working group I; On the scientific basis; contribution to the fifth assessment report by IPCC;
TS.4 Understanding the Climate System and Its Recent Changes.) – Well worth a read.
97 + 2 = 99
And this is the first sentence of the abstract.
I wonder where this paper has been reviewed, in the local pub, maybe?
Because in Cooked et al 2013, 1% of abstracts were scored by them as “didn’t know” or ” didn’t agree but didn’t disagree”.
What is hilarious is that only a very tiny fraction of the 20,000 papers they reviewed took actually STATED a position of ANY kind on AGW. (They “INTERPRETED” that 33% of 12,000 papers took a position on AGW) So why are they SO concerned about 2% of papers in a group that only made up 33% of the total papers examined in 2013, while completely ignoring the FACT that 66% of published climate papers took NO position at all?
And why they did not revise that 1 % as well?
Because their goal is not science, and their target is not the “undecided”. Their goal is to paint those who “reject” AGW theory as mistaken, flawed, irrational, incompetent.
Where is Nick Stokes. He told us the other day that in the climate sphere shorty papers do not get published and that only in the bio-med field do scientists game the system to get published.
Social sciences and psychology are terrible, too.