Compare and contrast Stephen Schneider’s apologia for noble cause corruption, which claims that scientists must balance honesty against effectiveness, with the real scientific point of view:
w.
I recall reading somewhere that Bohr regularly sought out to talk science with Feynman because Feynman wasn’t afraid to contradict him.
It’s a pity that Feynman isn’t around to comment about this whole AGW mess.
Here’s another Feynman quote:
I think this is absolutely correct, and it’s one of the reasons I have a problem with all the climate modeling that’s been going on. There’s no way to verify that climate scientists are not quietly discarding model runs that don’t come out the way they like.
I find it interesting that, while having never responded to what I quoted from Schneider in post #78, you continue to make ever more libelous claims about Schneider, while at the same time decrying as “ad hominem” attacks when I link to a blog that actually has the gall to investigate the credentials and industry / political organization connections of the 60 “climate scientists” who signed a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister. (And, I will note that if you actually look at those credentials, you would realize that calling most of them “climate scientists” is really stretching the term, to put it mildly.)
At least Schneider’s journal gets ranked decently by these sort of citation measures, unlike Energy and Environment, the journal that Castles published his work in (and which, I believe, you have also published in), which doesn’t even seem to be ranked at all in these studies. In fact, here is an article about that journal
jshore, do you agree that PPP is the consensus method when GDP forecasting is involved?
If so, it seems a little odd that the IPCC (of all organizations) would deviate from the consensus approach.
Well, I don’t claim to be able to determine the consensus method in a field of economics that is far outside my own field. But, from what I see, I do not think that such a consensus exists. I can do no better than to recommend that you read this paper that I linked to before. You will notice that, in contrast to what intention is posting, this paper has a decidely different tone in that it is not trying to advocate for one side or another but is actually trying to explore the issues involved. You can see this, for example, in the fact that they have some criticism for everyone when they summarize how the debate has proceeded so far:
As for what this National System of Accounting recommends, as I understand it, these are recommendations to nations on how to do their accounting. The problem is, however, that not all nations follow them and thus not all nations produce the necessary data. By contrast, MER data is readily available. I can pontificate all I want about the virtues of nations producing certain data sets; however, if they don’t actually produce them and I am then trying to do a study where I need hard numbers, I may well need to use the best data available even though it may not be what I think is the best data that ought to be available if we lived in an ideal world.
As I understand it, this is one of the issues involved here although there are others. I think there are legitimate questions about which is the best measure to use in this particular real-world application given what data is actually available. However, I can see no evidence that one choice is so far superior to the other that the other is indefensible; the only people who seem to be making this claim are clearly ones with an axe to grind. And, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence that in this particular application, the difference made in the emissions scenarios is small, especially in comparison to the other uncertainties that enter in this kind of projections of future emissions.
It would appear to me that intention listed a bunch of organizations that use PPP in a similar way to your listing of organizations that you claim to endorse AGW.
Here’s a quote from that paper:
If I can find a paper that takes a similar tone with respect to AGW, will you concede that there is no consensus about AGW?
I just wanted to follow up with a note on autocorrelation, because this, from intention is on track, but incomplete and possibly misleading.
It is correct to say that basic regression methods assume no structure among observations in the data set. Say, however, that you have 200 people in a data set, and you’ve followed each of them up annually over 10 years. Now, there could very well be structure among the 2000 observations within you data set that wouldn’t show up unless you accounted for the fact that they came from 200 people. That is, my score from the last year should be related to my previous 9 years in a different way than they would be to 9 other randomly drawn observations.
If the structure of my observations is such that my score from year 10 is highly related to year 9, less so to year 8, less so to year 7, and so on, then my scores are autocorrelated. They need not necessarily be so - they could have no meaningful correlation or a different structure altogether. However, if they are, and you tried to run a regular regression equation without accounting for that structure, your model would be inaccurate and your parameter estimates would be off.
(You could also have problems in cross-sectional data if you, for example, sampled across multiple families using multiple individuals within families, but didn’t account for the presumably greater correlations between individuals within families than across them.)
Here’s the misleading part. It’s all well and good to suggest that failing to account for autocorrelation within the data would be problematic, but there are suitable statistical techniques that do allow for modeling a number of correlation structures within a data set. One has to demonstrate that such analytic errors have occurred to have a meaningful critique. It is not sufficient to simply imply that they might occur, and that therefore the science is off.
However, there are some important differences between his listing and mine:
(1) I have provided cites so that people can see clearly exactly what these organizations have to say on the subject. The only thing that intention has provided is a quote from Ian Castles, who is the one pushing this claim.
(2) My cites relate directly to the issue, i.e., they are to organizations taking a direct position on AGW and the IPCC reports. Castles’ statements seems to involve some vague statement to the effect that these organizations use PPP accounting or endorse/use the System of National Accounts that says that PPP is a good thing. However, they are lacking context and thus beg the question of using it for what. Not all tools are most appropriate for all things and I haven’t seen any cites where these organizations directly criticize the IPCC for using MER.
However, my point is not that I was able to dig up this one paper that says this amid hundreds that say the opposite. My point is at this point, the only paper we know of that says the opposite is Castles’ paper published in a third-rate (to be generous) journal. And, the paper I found gives a summary of the field that is at odds with Castles’ views so we clearly need more evidence that Castles’ views represent any sort of consensus in the field.
By the way, since we have heard Ian Castles’ views through intention, it seems that we also ought to look at the response that some of the authors of the IPCC scenarios wrote (that appeared in Energy and Environment since Castles’ original paper appeared there:
To get the full debate, here is the IPCC authors second response. Here is the original Castles and Henderson paper and here is their response to the IPCC authors’ first response. (I can’t say I have waded through these yet myself…There’s a lot to read here!)
No I want you to support your claim that climate scientists have read a good proportion of the literatture WRT AGW.
Can you do that or not?
Im starting to think you don’t actually know what a climate scientist is or what she actually does. A climate scientist doesn’t read a good proportion of the literature on AGW anymore than a chemist or an economist.
But I have asked you to reference your claim. Can you do so or will yu withdraw the claim?
That’s right, and numeorus scientists in the field disagree with consensus.
So why the constant talk about listtening to thelargernumbers. Science doesn’t work that way. Science doesn’t work by scentists taking votes on the facts.
This is totally circular. You are just saying that we should trust the IPCC to give the best information because the IPCC gives the best information.
Totally illogical and as such easily dismissed.
I will leave it up to anyone. When anyone can show me a prediction (not a postdiction) based on AGW then I wil accept that. I don’t care if the person who shows me is someone on amessage broad or an author in a prestigious journal.
The fact that nobdody has ever demonstrated such a prediction in a journal tells us all we need to know, doesn’t it?
No, I don’t ignore it. If you can show me a peer reviewed article that shows a prediction (not a postdiction) based on AGW then you won’t have to retract this nonsense.
And I have already layed out fully and clearly numerous times what actual process I think should be used to decide if “the hypothesis is predictive, replicable and consistent with the observations or it is not”. And I know that you have read them every time.
So please stop asking agian, and again, and again. If you can provide such evdience then produce it, for I am growing tired of flogging dead horses in asking you.
Just a note of clarification about my post above - the correlation structure I described is specifically referred to as an autoregressive correlation structure.
Who are these “numerous scientists”? When you actually look at the actual peer-reviewed literature, you find that the percentage of papers that disagree with the consensus is very small. (Some people have tried to challenge Oreske’s study and, while one can quibble around the margins, noone has succeeded in showing that this basic conclusion is incorrect.)
Well, if you want to talk strictly about the process of science itself, then all knowledge is provisional and, in fact, there is no way to ever decide definitively what science says about anything. And, those scientists who are trying to overturn the general consensus on AGW will continue to do so as they should (although I do hope that they actually start to do it more by doing real science and less by doing PR).
However, in order to make science useful in the real world, it is necessary to set up processes to allow us to answer questions regarding what the general scientific viewpoint is in a field. Without this, we can never use science to inform any policy decisions.
No…What I am saying is that the IPCC was the result of the international process set up to evaluate the state of science in the field of climate change and to inform policymakers, the public, and fellow scientists. Likewise, the National Academy of Sciences is the the organization chartered in the U.S. to provide evaluations of science in all fields for use by the U.S. government in making policy decisions.
My question to you is why you want to dismiss both of these processes in this case and what you propose to put in their place? It seems to me that the only justification you have for dismissing them is that you don’t like their conclusions (i.e., you have a different view of the state of the science than they have).
There are plenty of predictions regarding various aspects of the theory. I have provided links before and will provide them again when I get more free time. (I talked about Hansen’s predictions in the other active thread on AGW.) Obviously, however, we are limited by the fact that it takes decades to verify the correctness of a full prediction regarding the warming.
I’m sorry…but I am not asking for Blake’s personal analysis of how science should work and whether this field satisfies that process. Personally, I care very little about your personal criterion for deciding whether or not to believe a scientific hypothesis or not. What I am asking for is the process by which you believe it should be determined what the state of the science on AGW is for the purpose of informing the public and policymakers.
And, I don’t personally find “Let Blake decide what he thinks the state of the science is and trust him” to be a very good alternative to the current processes we have set up and I doubt many others will either.
jshore, thanks for the reply. I don’t believe Schneider because he has said publicly that he is willing to lie about climate science in order to be effective.
No, we don’t. Science is not about being effective. Science is about being honest, brutally honest. It’s about telling the truth, warts and all. Spin and politics are about about being effective.
If you don’t see that saying someone can’t be believed because he has publicly said he is willing to lie in order to be effective is different from claiming that some scientist can’t be believed because he took a $5,000 grant from someone whose politics you don’t like, I don’t see that we have much to discuss.
w.
Hentor, thank you for the clarification. You are right that the mere presence of autocorrelation does not automatically mean that there will be problems using methods designed for i.i.d. statistics.
However, the lag-1 autocorrelation of climate datasets (e.g. temperature, rainfall) is typically quite large, on the order of 0.8. For example, the HadCRUT3 global annual temperature dataset lag-1 autocorrelation = 0.87. With autocorrelation of this size, i.i.d. statistics give very inaccurate answers.
The Durbin-Watson statistic is usually used to determine if the degree of autocorrelation is significant. The Durbin-Watson statistic of the HadCRUT3 dataset is 0.5.
Since the critical value for the D/W statistic with N > 100, p < 0.05 is ~ 1.6 (meaning a D/W value of less than 1.6 means the database has significant autocorrelation), a D/W statistic of 0.5 is hugely significant, indicating real problems with trying to use i.i.d statistics.
Unfortunately, many climate scientists are totally unaware of this problem.
w.
intention: Thanks for the reply. So, you take one sentence by Schneider out-of-context, refuse to listen to anything he says subsequently, and then use it it propose that anything he says or anything that is associated with him in any way (like a paper appearing in a journal that he is editor of) can be dismissed.
Sounds logical. :rolleyes:
I never have said that a scientist can’t be believed because of his political affiliations. What I have said is that one can never put all one’s faith in an individual scientist rather than the larger scientific process. And, in particular, that it is easier to believe that the biases of a few individual scientists might affect their science rather than believing that biases so pervade the scientific community that essentially all major institutional reports and statements have been corrupted, including those of the IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and even the U.S. Climate Change Science Program started by the administration of the current President Bush. This is especially true when it is so easy to identify these potential biases by the affiliations of these scientists to various political think-tanks and what-not. In other words, it is a question of trying to understand why there continue to be large controversies in the public arena associated with fields such as climate change and evolution even though the scientific societies have been quite clear in their conclusions on these topics.
Individual papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature can be evaluated on their own merits. Most such papers by “skeptics”, in my experience, fair pretty poorly in that regard. There are, of course, a few exceptions, like Spencer and Christy and Richard Lindzen, whose work may still turn out to be largely incorrect, but who at least have made serious contributions to the field.
Below are some quick links. Because it takes decades to verify actual forecasts of AGW warming, only the first is a direct prediction of that. However, the rest verify various aspects of the climate sensitivity issue which, since we know with good accuracy the radiative forcing due to various greenhouse gases, is a good test of the basic physics embodied in the predictions of AGW.
Hansen’s projections made in 1988.
The penetration of the warming into the earth’s oceans.
Then there are the many ways in which the current warming is compatible with AGW and not compatible with any known natural forcing. For this, see the IPCC report Chapter 9 on the understanding and attributing climate change.
You haven’t done anything here to demonstrate that this is a significant problem in the climate literature. It’s a bit like you’ve tried to call attention to a problem that has been solved for decades, and raised your eyebrows in order to imply some failing. It seems akin to the last discussion on statistics that we had.
It’s a bit like you saying “There’s a serious problem with the methodology of cooking. Cooks can burn their hands getting hot items out of the oven!” I come along to say “But this isn’t a problem. They’ve invented oven mitts.”
Your response is “Many cooks don’t know about oven mitts.”
Can you demonstrate that a meaningful number of cooks are still burning their hands?
As I mentioned in post #106, I’m not trying to say that any given climate scientist has read the majority of peer-reviewed literature out there on AGW. Rather than post this same explanation 3 or 4 more times, I’ll just withdraw my earlier claim and replace it with this one:
“Climate scientists have read more peer-reviewed articles discussing AGW than your general lay person.”
Keep in mind that this entire tangent originated from my attempt to explain why the comments of climate scientists (and people who study things like this for a living) are held in higher regard than those of your average person.
I can assure you that I have a pretty good idea.
Now I’m starting to wonder the same thing you were. Climate scientists study climate; economists study economics; chemists study chemistry - obviously, these three fields overlap in many ways. They do so to varying degrees, though. (no pun intended)
I withdraw it, and replace it with a less ambiguous one.
LilShieste
What’s the deal with this claim that a British court found at least eleven material falsehoods in An Inconvenient Truth? Is it really as damaging as the reporting site (obviously biased) claims?
Do you deny that, generally speaking, the UN uses PPP for economic forecasting?