Hint: He did his homework, then took himself to the other side of the debate.
Guest essay by David Siegel
My name is David Siegel. I’m not a climate expert; I’m a writer. Early in 2015, I became interested in climate science and decided to spend the better part of this year trying to learn what I could. It didn’t take long before it was clear that there isn’t likely going to be any catastrophic warming this century. What was clear is that skeptics are losing this battle, and I want to tell you why.
For thirty years, James Hansen and Al Gore have been building their PR machine along with David Fenton, the wizard of nonprofit PR. They understand that the messenger is more important than the message. People don’t easily change their minds. People get their opinions from “experts” and brand names like NASA, MIT, Harvard, TIME, The Daily Show, etc. Fenton knows the game is about credibility and repetition, not science. As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose.
So I did my homework and wrote a 9,000-word essay aimed at liberals who have a voice, who have access to media, and who might take 30 minutes to educate themselves.
I submitted my piece to every liberal publication, from the LA Times to the Atlantic Monthly to National Geographic to Huffington Post and many more. They all turned it down. Now I’m launching it myself and hope you will read it and help spread the word.
I ask you to help get the word out through social media, links, and the press, to the liberal audience I’m going after. Links really help. If you can help reach Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, and other influential liberals, I hope to help them understand that the science is not settled. I think this is the best way to tip the scales back to reasonable, impactful environmentalism. If you can help move it on Reddit, Voat, Quora, NewsVine, etc., I would appreciate that.
I’m going to ask people to leave comments here, rather than on my page, because I can’t manage the comment spam there. I will, however, read the comments here and will respond if I can.
My work is aimed at your liberal friends; please send them to read it.
Excerpt:
What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?
If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.
More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats. I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.
Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.
1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
3 There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved.
4 New research shows that fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, at both long and short time scales.
5 CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
6 There is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today.
7 Sea level will probably continue to rise, naturally and slowly. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level.
8 The Arctic experiences natural variation as well, with some years warmer earlier than others. Polar bear numbers are up, not down. They have more to do with hunting permits than CO2*.
9 No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people who eat them.
10 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface*.
Could this possibly be right? Is it heresy, or critical thinking — or both? If I’ve upset or confused you, let me guide you through my journey
You’ll find it at: www.climatecurious.com.
The truth is, this is how most people like us start.
No time to read the whole thread. I suppose my view was influenced by the bogus campaign against nuclear energy since the 1960s, the abortive “global cooling” alarm of the 1970s, and the implausible “nuclear winter” thesis of the 1980s (an impossible thesis, once you look into the atmospheric physics of nuclear detonations). I became aware of other scientific controversies that were being swept under the rug, so began to take any mass pronouncement of science with a kg of salt.
My “tipping point” (had I needed one) probably came upon a group viewing of Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which was presented a massive panel of images of prehistoric species that supposedly became extinct from climate change…including the coelacanth, a late Cretaceous survival. How choice–to include a notoriously living example of the claimed extinct! I barked out a guffaw of recognition, before stifling further rudeness. It showed me immediately that Al Gore was an idiot, incapable of recognizing relevant facts–and that all those who endorsed his film were likewise idiots, who could not see error when it was as visible as a pig’s lipstick. About all I have learned from WUWT is that the idiocy is mingled with mendacity, megalomania, and totalitarianism…none of which surprise me much, although I am appalled by the depths to which otherwise intelligent human beings have sunk.
I agree with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that the mission of the God-fearing (or, the truth-respecting, if you prefer) is to oppose The Lie. He did so, successfully. His life is a testament in our own time to the power of truth, and an encouragement to those of us who uphold the truth, because of and despite our own personal views. And, as many people have noted here, truth in nature will always prevail and cannot be gainsaid. I do not look forward to the end of this interglacial, but if that is what we are near, and its approach brings truth to the forefront of world attention, then there would be that to be said for it.
In the header of the lead post, I guess the pic of a goldfish jumping from one limited gold fish bowl into another limited gold fish bowl is OK to enhance the topic at hand.
I am talking about this pic.
I am searching for another kind of pic to show in comments, one of a fish jumping out of a goldfish bowl (or out of a fisherman’s net) into the vast open ocean. An image like that would represent escaping confined group thought into the big unrestricted free marketplace of ideas. I will post a pic like that if I can find one.
John
Maybe this pic is OK to enhance the idea of what David Siegel attempts.
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/red-fish-escape-13073266.jpg
John
Chris at October 16, 2015 at 12:21 pm
I was obviously NOT criticizing or rejecting modeling, but rather your pretense that climate modeling equaled conclusive proof.
Unfortunately, as is always the case with alarmist like you (and Appell), you first alter what is said by the skeptic before then responding to your own distortion instead vs what was actually said.
A response that mendaciously elevates climate modeling to engineering modeling.
Again, slowwwwwly, and NOT condemning modeling as having no value, so you can perhaps focus,
The modeling you cited as………,
“Yes, there are. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-07/record-heat-virtually-impossible-without-climate-change-report/6077634”
Is NOT a study showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
I started out as the guy in highschool who tried to galvanize everyone to care about this issue. It was al gores movie that contained things I knew ere false that got me to study and realize the idea of the c in cagw is extremely unlikely at best. I have debated it with many over the years, seems very rare you can use data to get people to question what their favorite authority figure told them is true.
For me it wasn’t a jump from one goldfish bowl to the other. I didn’t pay much attention to it. But then the name of Al Gore popped up. I was not so much “skeptical” as suspicious. He is not an honest man. I started to notice a few things.
The headlines were screaming “Global Warming!”
Back then (2007 or so), The Weather Channel would say what the record high and low was for the day on their “Weather on the 8’s”.
My impression was that the record highs were not that recent.
I went to the local NWS website and downloaded the list of record highs and lows into Excel. Most of the record highs for my little spot on the globe were set before 1950. Most of the record lows were set after 1950. Something funny was going on.
A few years later I found WUWT and heard about “adjustments”.
I went to my local NWS site and repeated the process and compared. Even for my my little spot on the globe, the record highs and lows for some particular days had been “adjusted”. Later checks sowed even more. (I remember mentioning a particular day’s change of 5 degrees here on WUWT and a few months later, Lo and Behold!, the old record was back!)
If a day’s record highs and lows for one little spot on the globe had been tampered with, what about the “non-record” temperatures? The rest of the globe?
Al Gore promoted it for reasons that had to with political goals and/or personal profit.
Those promoting it now? Same reasons. Different names.
PS The Weather Channel hasn’t shown the record high and low for a particular day for my little spot on the globe for quite some time now.
PPS I don’t mean to imply that all those who …endorse it? …. vote for it? … agree with it? … are as dishonest. Many of them genuinely care. They just haven’t taken a closer look at what they’ve been told they should care about.
A close look at the motives of the promoters is also worth scrutiny.
Don’t “throw out the baby with the bathwater”. But don’t drink the bathwater because you like the baby.
There are few things more dangerous than someone who “cares” but doesn’t take the time to understand.
Most of humanities tragedies have been caused by such people.
Mr. Siegel:
You should understand that the climate models do NOT make “forecasts” aka “predictions.” They make “projections.” A prediction is a kind of proposition. A projection is not.
The kind of model that makes predictions is tied to logic because a prediction has a probability of being true. This kind of model is falsified when the predicted probability values fail to match the corresponding relative frequency values in a sample drawn without bias from the statistical population underlying the model and not used in the construction of the model. If it is not falsified in this way the model is said to be “validated.”
The kind of model that makes projections lacks this tie to logic. One of the consequences is that it cannot be validated. Public policy on CO2 emissions is based entirely on unvalidated models. As they are unvalidated they are not “scientific.”
Worse yet these models convey no information to a policy maker about the prospective outcomes from his or her policy decisions. They cannot convey this information because “information” is a statistical concept but the statistical population underlying the models does not exist. Absent this information, the climate system cannot be controlled.
If the climate cannot be controlled why do governments persist in trying to control it? If the models don’t make predictions why do people like yourself think they do? People are being duped by applications of the equivocation fallacy. I make this argument in the peer-reviewed article at http://wmbriggs.com/post/7923/ .
Siegel should educate himself further to understand that the whole environmental movement is a scam. I highly recommend he read the book, “Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse” by Ron Bailey
I enjoyed reading this very much and I will indeed follow your links and your research.
I did laugh out loud at this one statement you made that is sort of unrelated to the Climate, but supports your story.
“I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.”
Can you link any proof of ANY government venture that has been cost effective in ANY way? I bet that would take a lifetime to research and you still would not find any evidence of efficiency in ANY Government program. Not that they should all be done away with, government is necessary, but it is not efficient, ever.
The Civilian Conservation Corps was outstanding. Extremely efficient.
http://www.ccclegacy.org/CCC_Brief_History.html
A side note.
In the late ’90’s I spent some time on a forum that had to do with animal “rights”.
There “vegan” didn’t simply mean “vegetarian”. A “vegetarian” simply didn’t eat meat. Sub-groups were lacto-vegetarians (milk and cheese were OK), octo-vegetarians (egges were also OK) and maybe a group that said fish was OK.
But “vegans”. They were the ones who not only didn’t eat any meat or cheese or eggs, they were the ones who didn’t use (or said they didn’t use) any product that had been tested on animals. They wanted to empty all the zoos and ban animal testing and factory farms and pet ownership. They defended and cheered ALF on.
They were the nuts.
(No pun intended.)
(OK. Maybe it was.)
ALF?
He ate cats, didn’t he? /
I’ve been vegan since the 40’s when my parents noticed I kept up-chucking meat and dairy products. I’ll occasionally eat eggs and cheese when there’s hardly anything vegan on the menu, but so far I haven’t suffered any ill health from my diet.
I also am a pacifist, but have always voted Republican.
Going to college in the 60’s when slide-rules were king, gave me a healthy respect for decimal places and orders of magnitude. When I first heard that man was adversely impacting the weather, I didn’t even have to use the back of a napkin to do any calculations. I instinctively knew that it was nonsense. Also, writing code for NOAA in the 70’s made me very aware how small changes in boundary conditions caused all kinds of changes in convergent values – or whether or not convergence even occurred.
David wrote: “As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose.”
So why did you then cite ten facts? In my opinion, we will lose because people like you cite “facts” that can easily be proven to be wrong or misleading. For example:
1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
The IPCC’s Special Report on Extremes documents increases in extremely hot days, decreases in extremely cold days, and a likely increase in short periods of intense precipitation (flash flooding). You are correct about the absence of observed change in droughts, floods cause by persistent rain, hurricanes, tornados, blizzards.
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
Neither the IPCC nor skeptics can easily prove what constitutes natural variation, but the IPCC has inappropriately ignored the role natural variability could have played. AR5 did reduce projected warming for the next two decades because known cycles like the AMO appear to be in a cooling mode.
4 New research shows that fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, at both long and short time scales.
Read the debate at ClimateDialogue.com on this subject. IMO, the current evidence shows that solar forcing, like the Maunder minimum, is smaller in terms of W/m2 than that expected from rising GHGs. Low ECS might save us, but the sun is unlikely to do so.
5 CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
That depends on how much decarbonization we can do. If we were motivated enough, we could generate most electricity from nuclear.
7 Sea level will probably continue to rise, naturally and slowly. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level.
The amount of SLR observed during the 20th century is not “normal” – SLR for the last two millennia has been negligible compared with the 20th-century. How much is due to the end of the LIA is another issue. (Half?) Is it accelerating?
9 No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people who eat them.
Numerous coral reefs have suffered damage in recent years. How much GHG’s should be blamed for this damage is the real issue.
10 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface*.
I’d say the information communicated by the IPCC’s SPMs does not qualify as ethical science as described by Stephan Schneider: “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts”. It qualifies as policy advocacy: “getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have”. Without the protections built into the adversarial system used in politics and law (which gives equal opportunity for all sides to be heard), we are being subjected to a tyranny of the majority. That does not mean that most of the technical report is wrong. Climate models project what they project. The values of those projections isn’t properly discussed.
Fascinating how the trolls actually believe that they are entitled to their own facts.
Mark: Some references to back up my facts.
1) IPPC SPEX (Extreme weather) SPM Page 6.
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/images/uploads/SREX-SPMbrochure_FINAL.pdf
2) No one knows how big natural variability is. The clearest evidence comes from Greenland ice cores, which show the Medieval, Roman, and Minoan Warm Periods, each of which represent about 2 degC of warming above neighboring cold periods. Given arctic amplification, those events might represent 1 degC of global warming – if indeed the warming was even global. These warm periods aren’t apparent in Antarctic ice cores. Therefore I’d say that the 1 degC of warming seen so far could be entirely natural – if CO2 didn’t interfere with radiative cooling of the earth. Since it does interfere (according to our host and many other skeptics), the question is how low could climate sensitivity be and therefore how little could CO2 have contributed to 20th century warming?
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big-picture-65-million-years-of-temperature-swings/
IPCC AR5 WG1 projection for warming over the next thirty years is 0.3-0.7 degC (0.10-0.23 degC/decade) Section E1 p 20, first paragraph – obviously much lower than projections for the whole 21st century.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
4) I already provided a link the debate between prominent skeptics and backers of the consensus at ClimateDialogue.org. The largest reconstructed solar forcing associated with the Dalton minimum (and elsewhere with the Maunder minimum) is about -1 W/m2, (out of 342 W/m2) but that translates to a TSI of -4 W/m2 (out of TSI 1362 W.m2) before being distributed over a spherical earth with 4 times the surface area of a circle. The current forcing from CO2 alone is 2 W/m2 and rising.
http://www.climatedialogue.org/what-will-happen-during-a-new-maunder-minimum
5) I should have said that the amount of good decarbonization might do depends on how much decarbonization is possible and what climate sensitivity is. Even skeptics like Nic Lewis admit that ECS could be 2.0 degC, even thought their central estimate is 1.5 degC. There are reasonable prospects of doubling atmospheric CO2 by burning fossil fuel this century, producing another two degC of warming. About half of fossil fuel is burned to make electricity, which certainly can be produced by nuclear power.
7) Sea level rise over 1900-2010 was 15-19 cm or about 1.5 m/millennia. There has been essential no sea level rise over the past two millennia; perhaps 1 m at the most. SLR 4-7 millennia years ago was about 3 m or 1m/millennium, which is unambiguously different on the graph. Clearly SLR for the 20th century was not “normal” for the last two millennia.
9) it is clearly idiotic to claim that “no one has shown any damage to coral reef and marine systems”. Numerous observations of coral bleaching have been made and other changes in marine ecosystems. The real question is what role CO2 has played via acidification and warming. Coral reefs (and other marine ecosystems) clearly survived periods where CO2 was much higher and the earth much warmer. Will coral adapt, or will the vast majority die off and be replaced by more robust species of coral and other animals that we know must have existed in the past. Will the rapidity of anthropogenic changes pose additional challenges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching
MarkW, anyone can call anything you disagree with trollish. That’s easy. Let’s see some “facts” to back up your opinion. IMO, this post is weak on the facts.
I’m mildly amused when I see people change their minds like this as though it were some grand revelation.
It is, of course, good that David S. has changed his mind. But the real sadness for me is that he (and millions others) ever bought the spiel to begin with. All too often, people believe something based on the most superficial of evidence. And then they require mountains of evidence to reverse the position they took based on … almost nothing. It seems that too few people realize how poorly supported some of their beliefs are to begin with. I guess people gotta believe in something …
It’s a religion for them. You would have better luck converting an ISIS jahadist to Buddhism.
Having lived through the global cooling scare of the 70’s, and the various “we are running out of” scares put forth by those who were dedicated to lowering everyone else’s standard of living.
Having been an activist in the CFC wars.
When the same crowd started pushing the CAGW scare, I was sceptical from the get go. From nothing more than the reputation of those pushing the scare.
After doing a little bit of research it was obvious from the start that the whole thing was just the latest front in the war against humanity waged by those who are convinced that they are smart enough to rule the rest.
Jay Turberville,
Everyone is giving their story about when, or if, they realized that CAGW was bogus. Here’s the realization I went through.
When the global temperature (T) rose unusually fast back around 1997, it caused me to think that maybe there might be something to the man-made global warming (MMGW) conjecture. I’m aware of the energy necessary to raise global T by even a few tenths of a degree, so I knew that several tenths in a year was a lot.
So I began paying close attention. But what happened was not confirmed by subsequent global temperature action. And the more time that passed, the more clear it became that it was a one time anomaly. In fact, since then global T has remained flat; there has been no global warming at all.
I also paid attention to how the enviro groups, and then gov’t bureaucrats capitalized on that temporary anomaly. Although it was a false alarm, their constant use of charts and graphs showing the y-axis subdivided into tenths — and often, hundredths of a degree — were used to alarm the public. And of course Michael Mann’s bogus — but visually compelling — chart had a big effect.
It was all very effective, in that federal government grants began to funnel money into “studying global warming” (which of course became studying “climate change” once it was clear that global warming had stopped).
It was a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop: more grant money generated more peer reviewed papers, which in turn brought in more grant money. And scientists who told the truth — pointing out that there is nothing either unusual or unprecedented happening — did not get the grants. Scientists and universities everywhere quickly became aware of that particular cookie jar, and papers began adding the correct words: AGW, human fingerprint, “carbon”, etc.
Once again Michale Mann was involved, hijacking the climate peer review system. Alarming papers were hand-waved through journals, while anything skeptical had to run the gauntlet, and many of those never got published at all.
And then the scare expanded to things that had nothing to do with human CO2 emissions: Polar bears, Arctic ice, disappearing toads, and anything else that promoted the false alarm.
By 2000 I was about 97% convinced that el Nino was responsible for that one-off anomaly in ’97. But by then the battle lines had formed, and the scare became political. Now it’s all politics, all the time. The Scientific Method is completely ignored, along with its corollaries: the climate Null Hypothesis, Occam’s Razor, testability, replicability, and so on. Scientific opinions that did not toe the Party line were deliberately silenced. Because of those tactics I became convinced that the man-made global warming scare was completely bogus.
So yes, I pretty much reversed my position. I was never sure that human emissions had caused the ’97 anomaly, but I tried to keep an open mind at the time. I still do. If global T began rising fast, I would do my best to understand why. Like most skeptics, I am interested in the knowledge; what makes things happen. I can be convinced that human activity is the cause of global warming, but that requires facts, evidence, and most importantly, verifiable, testable, replicable, empirical measurements.
But measurements are what’s completely missing from the AGW scare. There are no such measurements quantifying AGW. Not a single one! So AGW is still merely a conjecture. There is indirect evidence, but it is far from being conclusive. What we need are measurements. But there are none.
To me, it is all about quantifying the thing that climate alarmists insist must be there. Science requires data. Physicists measure to twenty decimal places and more. Measurements are data. But there isn’t a single measurement quantifying MMGW, out of all global warming including the planet’s natural recovery from the LIA — one of the coldest episodes of the entire Holocene.
The claims of ‘dangerous MMGW’ are simply a giant head fake: a bluff. If the alarmist clique cannot produce a verifiable measurement of something they insist must be happening, and which they insist is causing all the alarming things they predict (but which never happen), then the conclusion is obvious: AGW is at most a very tiny effect; too minuscule to measure. Otherwise, there would be measurements quantifying AGW. But there are none.
That being the case, they have jettisoned the Scientific Method completely. Now they lie outright, claiming that global warming has never stopped. There is no longer any pretense of being objective.
Now we have entered Lysenkoism, and what comes next is cause for serious concern. Because the alarmist cult has been cornered. They have no ethics or morals. And they are filled with hatred toward scientific skeptics — the only honest kind of scientists.
Well don’t feel too sad for “them,” since you do the same thing with your beliefs. So do I. We all do. No one is exempt from the kind of cognitive errors you describe. If you took an inventory of any person’s beliefs, you’d find plenty of errors. But they are easier to see in others than in ourselves…
Your comment is too vage as written. It would be helpful if you explained what you mean. Who is “them”? What is the “same thing”? List some of the “errors”. Thanks.
dbstealey: is my reply vague because the original comment is so far away, under wordpress’s threading scheme?
So… “they” are CAGW believers. “Same thing” is believing in something based on superficial evidence and resisting having one’s mind changed. And…
Must I really list examples of erroneous beliefs humans have held?
——————————-
Question: Is there a list of words that will get a comment moderated on this site? Another of my comments on this thread is awaiting moderation and for the life of me I can’t figure out why…
[Reply: WordPress has a list, but they don’t share it with us. Anthony has some words like “fraud” and “Anthony” that put the comment in moderation hold until a mod can post it. But WordPress does things we can’t unerstand either. ~mod.]
takebackthegreen,
I understand now… I think. WordPress misplaced your comment. Happens to me occasionally, too. Sorry for the wrong assumption.
Takeback writes “No one is exempt from the kind of cognitive errors you describe.”
That is a bold statement to make! How do you know this? Is it perhaps a cognitive error? I suggest that some people are nearly exempt from cognitive error while others swim in cognitive error. Those least prone to cognitive error are probably also social misfits, autists, Aspies and so on.
The movie “Ex Machina” explores some closely related issues, namely that of a “grey box”. A person or robot (android) with no *drives* will generally do absolutely nothing because no reason exists to do something. Humans obviously have drives and essentially all behavior and cognition is ultimately provoked by those drives.
Michael 2:
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
In my experience, cognitive error is common among researchers. By their Nobel prize winning research, Kahneman and Tversky have revealed some of the ways in which people err.
A basis for avoidance of error is available in entropy minimax pattern discovery (R. Christensen, “Multivariate Statistical Modeling” 1983, ISBN 0-938-87614-7). Researchers who follow the rules that are called “entropy minimax” by the author avoid cognitive error.
In building their models global warming climatologists do not currently follow these rules. A result is for these models to convey no information to a policy maker about the outcomes from his/her policy decisions. Being prone to cognitive error, the policy makers think the climatologists have provided them with information. Being similarly prone to error, the climatologists haven’t provided them with any.
The two points Kahneman gives priority are: 1) Everyone, without exception, is prone to cognitive biases. It is extremely difficult to avoid them, requiring a great deal of energy our brains don’t want to expend. 2) It is far easier for us to recognize biases in others than in ourselves.
We show these to be true every day.
takebackthegreen:
In the construction of a model, heuristics and biases can become manifested in the content of this model when the model builder selects the inferences that will be made by this model from among the much larger set of possibilities. When these selections are made by a human, heuristics and biases are necessarily used in selection of these inferences in all but the simplest cases in view of the limited computational capacity of the unaided human brain. Heuristics and biases are eliminated when the selection is by an algorithm implementing the entropy minimax principle and running on a high speed computer. This approach has been used successfully for more than 50 years and results in the best possible model from given informational resources.
My sincere congratulations to the amazing scientists who have eliminated cognitive bias!
Thank you for making me aware of one of the greatest achievements in human history.
takebackthegreen:
Additional to eliminating biases these scientists eliminated heuristics; both were replaced by information theoretic optimization. In doing so they solved the central previously unsolved philosophical problem: the problem of induction. This is the problem of how in a logically justifiable manner one can generalize from specific instances.
The final work toward a solution was completed in the interval between 1963 and 1975 by Ronald Christensen. In 1975 I hired Christensen for the purpose of applying the algorithm he had developed in materials science. By 1980 he had published a nearly complete account of this algorithm. Applications had been made by it in fields that included materials science, medicine and meteorology. The resulting models had been statistically validated. Descriptions of this work had been published under peer review.
Then something inexplicable happened: this astoundingly important work was ignored by most philosophers and scientific researchers. Researchers continued to select the inferences that were made by their models using heuristics and biases rather than information theoretic optimization. Kahneman received a Nobel prize for uncovering heuristics and biases. Christensen received no Nobel prize for eliminating the necessity for them.
Several years ago I discovered Christensen’s great work “Multivariate Statistical Modeling” in the library of Stanford University. The check out card revealed that it had been read by very few of Stanford’s researchers. Recently a Harvard University mathematician rediscovered Christensen’s solution to the problem of induction. He was informed that he had been scooped by Christensen five decades earlier. Christensen continues to lack wide-spread recognition by his peers of the colossal magnitude of his achievement.
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
A welcome reminder that not all climate alarmists are closed-minded cultists. Worth reading.
You will not win converts by blasting their beliefs out of the water, they will perhaps smile politely and even not know how to respond, but a week a later they will return to their old ways of thinking. To change their beliefs they have to go through stages; noticing their beliefs don’t answer the questions, later finding a willingness to take on board new ideas that go against the grain and then finally changing their beliefs.
You can help the process along; you can sow information for the believers to stumble upon (perhaps telling them about the pause), after they have accepted these seeds of doubt point to other points of view as why the climate has paused, and finally, when they are ready, crush their old beliefs by showing them evidence of how the original data has been tampered and showing them how they have been misled by scare stories that have been concocted by the advocates of GW
Julian Williams in Wales on October 16, 2015 at 4:45 pm
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Julian Williams in Wales,
For current supporters of the scientifically problematic anthropogenic climate change hypothesis to change their ideas they must recognize first the possibility they are tragically wrong.
Men and women, in order to recognize the possibility they are tragically wrong, may need to wait until after their wrongness results in ironically self-inflicted tragedy.
Normal men and women have some reasoning capacity to do actual objective thinking. But, on the other hand, it only takes one or very small number of those to change everything.
John
I do not disagree with that, my point is that deep seated beliefs are not changed at one sitting, they are changed by a process that includes periods of reflection and doubt that have been seeded by events or information that challenges their beliefs. Believers find ways to dismiss crushing defeats, it is why the D word is so commonly used by the other side, it allows the other side to evade looking directly at something they are not psychologically prepared to contemplate.
You have to give them some reason to begin the process of doubting, and then let them think disowning belief was a decision they made themselves.
Julian Williams in Wales on October 17, 2015 at 3:20 am
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Julian Williams in Wales,
The process you discuss is a reasonable strategy. I am glad there are strategies like it.
My usual strategy differs. My strategies tend to involved indirectly exposing deep conflicts in the reasons people choose false premises. I love it.
NOTE: I seem to recall a ‘Julian in Wales’, but my memory isn’t the best. Did you formerly post under ‘Julian in Wales’?
John
Overall I thought it was a very good piece, but as you can see by the comments the useful idiots are not convinced. Hopefully some people who can actually understand the scientific method will be. I will forward to my friend who bet me $500 the arctic will be ice free sometime before 2024.
Who’s your friend? I want to bet with him too!
I will give 4:1 odds if your friend is interested and honest.
I would also buy your wager today for $150 if there were a way to do it.
(are there any Vegas odds yet?)
I noticed that there are no comments on David Siegel’s website, but he refers to WUWT for people to comment. I did read his whole essay on his website. I thought it was very heartfelt/sincere. After seeing the positive and negative comments here on WUWT, it would be interesting for David Siegel to comment here as to what he may have learned or if he thought there were too many negative comments. I think from what I read on this thread, that it was rather balanced. I wish David Siegel would make a comment eventually on this thread. Just hoping…
What an awful lot of crap.
Now that’s a thoughtful refutation.
Did you think it up all on your own, or did your professor write it for you?
Dear David Siegel,
Your essay is noteworthy but you are NOT YET STRONG ENOUGH to hold much sway here.
I do not intend to view your website, nor do I wish to be guided through your journey until you can show a much better grasp of realities.
Your article includes one particular sentence (in bold) …
QUOTE: “I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.” END QUOTE
I cannot dispute your political persuasion: that is for only you to say, of course, but your “bolded” sentence in the middle part of your article shows me that you are plainly IGNORANT OF THE VERY FACTS THAT THIS SITE AND ITS’ READERSHIP ARE FIGHTING AGAINST !
You will find NO ESCAPE HERE.
Write as you wish but don’t expect me to fall for such a GLARING INSULT to those who write here with honesty and truth.
I respectfully suggest that you read the rather special WUWT “article” produced by Lord Christopher Monckton concerning wind turbines.
I await your reply.
Regards,
WL
What I think we need to win is to get Donald Trump to start talking about the CAGW scam big time… and bring in a Few Climate scientists to support his talking points. He can get a significant number of people to start looking into to it and bring the topic out into the light for robust discussion. How to get Donald to take up the cause?
Donald could also pay to host a couple of televised debates between the top 5 Skeptical ones (include a Nobel Prize winner for good measure as well) and the five scientists the warmists care to nominate. Since the warmists will likely refuse, then the debate, or rather skeptical presentation will go on with the five chairs for the warmists empty.
alcheson,
I would love to see Donald Trump speak with Prof Richard Lindzen. Trump wouldn’t even need to give his opinion (that’s a big assumption!); all he needs to do is ask Lindzen if there’s a problem with man-made global warming.
A short 30-second commenrcial would be sufficient, adding Lindzen’s past position as head of M.I.T.’s atmospheric sciences department.
Lindzen is calm, rational, and has immense credibility, with more than twenty dozen published, peer reviewed papers to his name. Something like that would suck the oxygen out of a lot of the upcoming Paris hype.
Hello David,
From somewhere in the middle of your essay:
there has been no change in global sea level for the past twenty years.
I think that what you meant is that there has been no change in the rate of increase of global sea level. Needs correction, otherwise it makes you look like you are denying reality.
Assuming the obvious, that global warming will cause direct melting of polar ice caps, let’s look at the RATE of sea level increase since the mid-1800s. Google this search: Battery NOAA Sea Level. The NOAA chart will show a strict linear trend of sea level increase, quite obviously not the least bit influenced by the world population increase from 1 billion to 7 billion since the beginning of that data measurement. (This is likely a trend that began with the last melting of glaciers 12,000 years ago.) Given that burning of hydrocarbons MUST have increased at least an order of magnitude in that time, the data completely mitigate against any conclusion that there has been influence of man on sea level rise and thus global warming.
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
Yes , I agree. That is why I believe that the upcoming next 30-40 years of cooler climate which is also part of the natural climate cycle will finally convince the general public that there is something very fundamentally wrong and flawed with global warming science . It has become clear, that no amount of additional science , observable data or surveys will change the minds of these alarmists .Nature will finally demolish their settled science with dropping temperatures as the co2 levels continue to rise . This has already been happening in North America and Asia for at least 10 years and will spread over other parts of Northern Hemisphere soon.. This information is not being told to the parties in Paris . In another 5 years the change in climate will be unmistakeable to all .
According to NOAA, Climate at a Glance data base, we have currently a situation where all land areas taken together show no warming for at least the last 10 years or since 2005 . Some land areas like North America show no warming since 1998 or 18 years . Within this total global land area , North America and Asia which together represent about half of all land areas globally ( or 46%), the annual temperatures are actually cooling the last 10 years . Another 48 % of the land areas including Africa, South America and Oceania are basically flat with minor change only. Only Europe which represents just 6 % of all land area shows some warming and mostly due to the year 2014. From 2005 to 2013 European land area anomalies were basically flat. The climate data that is not being presented in Paris is that winters are cooling globally.
Added to this is the regular fluctuations( currently in warm mode) of the Ocean’s SST most notably North Atlantic and North and Central There is currently extra warming of the North Pacific due to a temporary blob and the temporary presence of an El Nino in the central Pacific. As per Bob Tisdale’s monthly reporting of global sea surface temperatures global sea surface temperatures have risen at 0.09 C/decade since 1981 . This is only up slightly from the 0.08 C/decade or 0.8 C rise in overall global temperature rise per century
So where is this imminent threat that warrants an overhaul of the entire global energy strategy costing the world trillions of extra dollars with no benefits nor does it solve any global warming threat because it does not exist? Instead of wasting money to fight a non- existing global warming threat we should help the refugees fleeing from political threats not from any climate change threats. Something is very backward with the Paris Conference
Keep up the good work, Mr Siegel.
My experience over the past several years is very similar to yours.
Yes, the warmists have won the debate (at least for now) not with the science but with their massive P R campaign and propaganda. The news media are useful idiots, lapping up all of the alarming claims because they make great headlines.
None of us will be around in 100 years when the world will have a much clearer understanding that CO2 is not the “control knob” of temperatures on earth. The glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica will still be rock-solid. The Noth Pole will still be covered with sea ice in the summer. The polar bears will be thriving. Sea level rise will be barely perceptable, as will any rise in global temperatures. But crops and trees will be growing at a faster rate thanks to more of the trace gas the warmists are trying to villainize..
I skimmed your article and will read it all later — at first glance you seem too smart to be a Democrat, so that’s puzzling. Perhaps you should consider the small government Libertarian Party?
I’m a Skeptical Denier — I think climate deniers don’t go far enough.
Seeing recent attempts by leftists to silence “deniers”, I have eMailed my US Congressman and proposed locking up all leftists for one year, allowing others to fully enjoy their lives, and the good climate, without hearing so many complaints about how awful America is, from leftists like Bernie Saunders. He hasn’t responded yet, but I’m optimistic this might happen!
Scientists and Environmental Activists have been scaremongering since Roger Revelle invented the strategy in the 1960s (prior boogeymen included DDT, acid rain, hole in the ozone layer, global cooling, etc.) … and the scaremongering is not likely to stop.
If global warming stops scaring people, leftists will invent a new “crisis” that will end life on Earth as we know it (because they need a “crisis” to get attention and government grants).
Central governments get whatever “science” they pay for, and they want scary predictions of a coming catastrophe … that never comes, so no one will ever be hurt … with the goal of having the citizens constantly frightened of something, and willing to allow government power to expand … to “fight” that something.
As a leftist, you should admire the strategy — it grows the government — and leftists love BIG GOVERNMENT.
We’ve been hearing about the coming global warming catastrophe for over 40 years — meanwhile the climate in 2015 is better than it has been in at least 500 years — slightly warmer, and green plants grow faster!
Climate history is quickly summarized as mild global warming or mild global cooling, and sometimes lots of ice.
Climate proxy studies show no correlation of CO2 and temperature — in fact, warming from natural causes seems to cause oceans to warm, and then they release some CO2.
Warming causes rising CO2 has evidence.
Rising CO2 causes warming is an unproven theory (the alleged greenhouse effect from CO2 is mainly from the first 100 ppmv of CO2 in the air — we’re at 400 ppmv now — and 500 ppmv should make little if any difference vs. 400 ppmv … except in some people’s overactive imaginations,
Humans have experience with both mild cooling and mild warming.
Their opinions are preserved with written anecdotal messages: People hated cool centuries and loved warm centuries.
So the FIRST thing to understand about mild global warming is its GOOD NEWS, given the only other “choices”.
There are also hundreds of studies showing more CO2 in the air is GOOD NEWS as a plant food.
It’s amazing how devious leftists can take good climate news, and twist it into a coming climate crisis so serious everybody must do as they say without question!
They learned that strategy from religious leaders — the do as I say without question or you will go to hell strategy to control people!
The only thing environmentalists changed was to claim Earth itself would become “hell” if people did not do as they say without question.
I don’t vote for Republicans or Democrats, so I feel I offer an unbiased opinion on this: Democrats lie much more than Republicans, so its no surprise to me that they lie about climate change!
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great comment
i will only add
you might want to start voting if you’re in the USA
Engineering science demonstrates CO2 has no effect on climate. Identification of the two factors that do cause reported average global temperature change (sunspot number is the only independent variable) are at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com (now with 5-year running-average smoothing of measured average global temperature (AGT), the near-perfect explanation of AGT since before 1900; R^2 = 0.97+).
Observation that CO2 has no effect on climate is also documented in a peer reviewed paper at Energy & Environment, Volume 26, No. 5, 2015, 841-845.