Physicists don't believe in global warming anymore?

Great Debates
201

[QUOTE=intention]
Wouldn’t be able to get published? I have not said a word about being unable to get published, not one, nor did Ross McKitrick in the piece I quoted. Why are you talking about a survey? What do I care? That has nothing to do with the subject.
[/quote]

Alright then, find me a survey showing that a significant percentage of a decent sized number of climate scientists feel that anyone could get their paper published, sloppy workmanship or not, if they were friendly with a significant portion of the peer review panel. Then show me what percentage of the 1,000,000* climate scientists worldwide have enough friends on peer review boards to significantly lopside the process. Becoming friends with a significant percentage of 1,000,000 people seems to me take a lot more effort than the “small inbred group” that you seem to think exists. You think that somehow a MILLION people missed that their system for confirmation is screwed up?

All of the rest of what you wrote about the Hockey Stick is pointless. If you don’t like any study that Michael Mann contributed to on temperature reconstructions, throw them away. All of them. It doesn’t change the results. There are 8 or 10 or however many independently created temperature reconstructions, and all of them are hockey sticks. So, keep bringing up Mann and how evil he is but if that’s your greatest argument and you’d prefer to ignore 80-90% of all the data there is in the world, then frankly I don’t know on what basis you’re arguing anything.

Sure, perhaps Mann’s work is egregiously flawed. Only a small minority of climatologists seem to think so, but certainly they might be right. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter two diddly squats. Any number of respected reconstructions could be swapped in to replace it and the position of the science world wouldn’t change.

  • The number of climate scientists in the United States is approximately 24,300 atmospheric scientists, 230,000 environmental scientists and hydrologists, 194,000 geoscientists, and something like 30,000 astronomers and physicists. The last group is of course mostly not concerned with climate science, but some percentage are, so our total number of American climate scientists is somewhere between 448,300 and 478,300. Presuming that there are at least as many spread out through the rest of the world, 800,000 to 1,100,000 climate scientists is a decent minimum.

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos051.htm
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos050.htm
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos288.htm
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm

202

jshore, you have twisted my words in a very interesting direction:

[QUOTE=jshore]

[QUOTE=intention]
So, I await your list. This would be a list of McIntyre’s statements, along with a reference to where in the NAS or Wegman reports they say each one of them is wrong. I’m sure it won’t take long to make a list, as you wouldn’t make such sweeping statements without evidence in hand.
[/QUOTE]

Well, let me point out some of the statements that the NAS report makes and see if you and McIntyre would agree with them. If you agree with these statements, then I don’t think we have much to argue about:

[/QUOTE]
No. Answer the challenge, or don’t, but I never said that Steve M or I would agree with everything the NAS said. Why are you on about that? It has nothing to do with what I asked.

I made a very specific challenge:

[QUOTE=intention]
jshore, I challenge you to find a single statement of McIntyres that was found to be incorrect in either the NAS report or the Wegman report. You appear to not know what it was that McIntyre said, if you think the executive summary disagrees with McIntyre’s statements.

[/QUOTE]
and, as is far too often your wont, you have pretended that I have asked something else. I knew you were going to try some of your usual evasion tactics, THAT’S WHY I MADE THE QUESTION AND EVEN THE FORM OF THE ANSWER VERY SPECIFIC.

But you have dodged it anyhow, and gone off on a totally extraneous tangent. It’s getting boring. Answer the question, or don’t answer the question, I’m getting so tired of your continual evasions that I don’t really give a shit at this point … but don’t pretend to answer it while actually evading the question entirely.

So, as before, I still await your list. To make sure you understand, I repeat:

[QUOTE=intention]
This would be a list of McIntyre’s statements, along with a reference to where in the NAS or Wegman reports they say each one of them is wrong. I’m sure it won’t take long to make a list, as you wouldn’t make such sweeping statements without evidence in hand.
[/QUOTE]

w.

203

intention: Frankly, I don’t find your question to be very interesting. As I explained previously (in different words), it is all about spin. And, McIntyre spins things in a certain way. E.g., he tends to make mountains out of molehills and to exaggerate issues of uncertainty or quality problems with proxies or a mathematical method possibly breaking down in some circumstances and so forth.

That is why it is better to look at an objective source like the NAS report rather than to rely on McIntyre. You seem to want to say, “Well, the NAS didn’t explicitly say that McIntyre was wrong here, so therefore we should just take McIntyre’s word as the gospel.” I.e., you use the NAS as an authority to then say we should trust everything that McIntyre says. And yet, if you read the NAS report, you will see that their conclusions are significantly different than McIntyre’s and yours. I don’t see any reason why I should then believe McIntyre’s conclusions over the NAS’s.

Again, it just seems like a desperate attempt to use a respected authority (the NAS) to lend credence to the authority that you want us to believe even when that authority is reaching conclusions very different from the NAS seems to be reaching. Please tell me why we should believe McIntyre to be a better, more trustworthy authority than the NAS.

The fact is that the NAS report didn’t completely vindicate or repudiate either McIntyre or Mann. They came down somewhere in the middle. E.g., they said that Mann’s mathematical method could potentially lead to biases in the shape of the reconstructions but that it seems that it hasn’t actually done this in this case. They agreed that there are concerns about the results relying heavily on some particular proxies (as Mann et al had themselves pointed out in the GRL paper) and that this should be taken into account in estimating the uncertainty but they did not conclude that the Mann et al. reconstruction therefore is useless and tells us nothing. They were not as confident as Mann et al regarding the conclusion that the late 20th century temperatures were the warmest in the last millenium but, given the results of Mann and the subsequent results of many other groups, they noted that there is considerable evidence pointing in this direction and a lack of evidence suggesting otherwise.

204

jshore, this is no fun. You say that the NAS panel has shown McIntyre to be wrong. I challenge you to show me exactly where the NAS showed that McIntyre had made even a single mistake, viz:

[QUOTE=intention]
jshore, I challenge you to find a single statement of McIntyres that was found to be incorrect in either the NAS report or the Wegman report. You appear to not know what it was that McIntyre said, if you think the executive summary disagrees with McIntyre’s statements.
[/QUOTE]
After trying unsuccessfully to change the subject, you reply:

That is just more of your usual evasion. What you are trying to say is that no, you haven’t found a single instance. If you had, you would have gladly trotted it out.

So why not just say you can’t find any? Why go through this charade, as though suddenly the question were beneath your lofty position? The answer is no, you haven’t found ONE SINGLE PLACE where the NAS said that McIntyre was wrong.

But you don’t have the [snip] to come out and say that, so you cover it up by weaving and bobbing … you are simply trying to hide the fact that you have found nothing in the NAS report that says that M&M were wrong. Haven’t you learned from Mann and from Wahl and Amman that hiding your results doesn’t work?

So, I guess you win. Your tactics of not answering the question, and then ducking and dodging, and then claiming that the question is not “very interesting”, have gotten me to the point where frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn whether you find it interesting. You don’t have the [snip] to answer a simple question?

Sorry, jshore, but I don’t find that very interesting.

w.

PS Sage Rat, you say:

[QUOTE=Sage Rat]
Sure, perhaps Mann’s work is egregiously flawed. Only a small minority of climatologists seem to think so, but certainly they might be right. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter two diddly squats. Any number of respected reconstructions could be swapped in to replace it and the position of the science world wouldn’t change.
[/QUOTE]
Are you truly not following the story, or are you just pretending not to follow it, or what? I have said many times, and provided many citation to show that if you include the bristlecone pines, you can get a hockeystick in a wide variety of ways. You can even get one by simple averaging. These are the “respected reconstructions” you speak about above … wevets was going to discuss the effect of Linah Abaneh’s thesis on this bristlecone data used in all the reconstructions, but I guess he must have gotten delayed along the way. Good thing he did, too, because if he did his research, he would have found out that Linah Abaneh showed that Graybills original bristlecone data was either cooked or just plain wrong … so maybe he didn’t get stuck in traffic. Perhaps, like jshore, he simply no longer finds the question interesting.

jshore just ducks and bobs and weaves when the questions get hard. You ignore repeated referrals and citations that show clearly that your “respected reconstructions” are all fatally flawed by the problem the NAS pointedly referred to, that of depending on the bristlecones. And wevets has gotten stuck in traffic or something … like I said, this is no longer any fun.

So, gents, I’m outta this discussion. You can’t come up with citations, you are unwilling to answer questions, you don’t read my citations, you don’t show up to discuss what you said you would discuss … what’s the point?

My thanks to everyone for the part they have played, the actors and the lurkers as well. In parting from this thread, I encourage everyone to be very, very cautious about believing anything that anyone says about the climate, whether they are scientists or amateur scientists or the NAS or interested parties. Don’t trust anyone. Do the math yourself, investigate the data yourself, make up your own mind who is just blowing smoke. Get out there and do the shovel work yourselves. Ask the tough questions, the ones that jshore finds uninteresting.

And remember that if a man is hiding something, if he is refusing to show you his data or his methods, if he suddenly decides that your question doesn’t deserve an answer, it’s probably for a very good reason …

Climate is an unusual subject. It is one of the very few fields of science whose subject of study is not a thing, it is a mathematical average. Since climate is generally defined as the >30 year average of weather, then we are not studying a thing, an object, a physical phenomenon – we are studying an average.

And as such, understandably, mathematics and mathematical questions pervade the field, and a huge majority of the work done in the field is statistical in nature. Nowhere in climate science is this more true than in paleoclimatic reconstructions, which are nothing more than mathematical transformations of proxy data into putative temperature data.

However, even the NAS doesn’t seem to have grasped this nettle. Care to guess how many statisticians were on the NAS panel charged with looking into Mann’s statistical paleoclimate reconstruction?

That’s right … none. This is how low climate science has fallen, how political it has become that the best NAS climate science brains put together a blue-ribbon panel to study statistical reconstructions … and don’t include a statistician. Pathetic.

But even more pathetic is the fact that, despite that huge oversight on the part of the NAS, jshore still thinks that we should blindly believe what the NAS panel had to say about statistics … except, of course, when it comes to the part where they didn’t find any mistakes in McIntyre and McKitricks work. At that point, jshore gets bored and doesn’t find the question “very interesting” … sorry, folks, too much for me. So long, and thanks for all the fish, catch you on the next thread.

205

[QUOTE=intention]
wevets was going to discuss the effect of Linah Abaneh’s thesis on this bristlecone data used in all the reconstructions, but I guess he must have gotten delayed along the way.
[/quote]

Well, we are busy people. You didn’t reply to my post #163 (8/6/08) until 13 days later in post #190 (8/19/08.) Yet rather than assume that I was busy, you thought it might be a good idea to declare yourself the victor of the debate.

Were I less outrageously humble, it would tempt me to proclaim
Wevets’ Law of Internet Debate
If you think it’s time to declare yourself the victor, you probably haven’t won.
:wink:
First, it helps to cite someone by spelling their name correctly, it’s Linah Ababneh. No one named Abaneh has anything published in the field of climatology that I can find.

{bolding mine}

Now, this is from the abstract of Ababneh’s PhD thesis (for those who are interested, the PDF is available online [here](” http://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/Theses/AbabnehDissertation.pdf “) – warning, approx 7 MB PDF.)
What I’m puzzled about is that you have repeatedly referred to Ababneh’s “hypothesis” – but I’m not sure at all that you mean what she means when she states her hypotheses.

Here are the hypotheses Ababneh investigates in her thesis:

{bolding in original}
What do I think of these hypotheses? I can definitely see the interest, but I don’t see the purported significance for changing the entire field of paleoclimatology. Why should a study using only trees from the Patriarch Grove and Sheep Mountain sites contain more information about past climates than studies that use dozens of sites? It’s generally accepted in all fields of science and mathematics that a larger sample size conveys more information (and more accurate information) about a large population than a smaller sample size. Indeed, her sample is even confined to just one location on the globe: the White Mountains of California.
In fact, looking further at her summary of her findings:

I’m really not seeing how this changes lots of paleoclimatic reconstructions.

I’m really hoping the point of all this is not that a reconstruction of precipitation is possible from whole-bark trees. It should be obvious that just because a reconstruction of precipitation is possible, that does not mean that a reconstruction of temperature is impossible.

As you can tell from the 1974 reference, the fact that tree rings retain more information about past environments than just temperature has been known for a long time.

This doesn’t look like a promising result in overturning global temperature reconstructions.

So perhaps I’ve spent too much time building hamster tubes for my pet llama, Martinizing my lawn, or trying to understand the philosophical implications of the catflap, but I’m just not seeing in Ababneh’s thesis what you see in it. Could you tell me exactly how you think Ababneh’s thesis indicates that most paleoclimatic reconstructions are horribly wrong?

I have a sneaking suspicion that it involves Appendix II, p. 79-102, but I’m really not sure that section is as relevant to global paleoclimatology as some would like it to be.

Again, I’m not seeing it. Perhaps you could be more specific - it is 147 pages long after all. It’s polite to point to which page you are referring to.

Don’t be silly! We all get stuck in traffic. As a note for the future, I will be stuck in traffic in Kansas until Sept. 2nd, so if you’d like to declare victory again between now and then, feel free to do so. :smiley:

206

[QUOTE=intention]

So, I guess you win. Your tactics of not answering the question, and then ducking and dodging, and then claiming that the question is not “very interesting”, have gotten me to the point where frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn whether you find it interesting. You don’t have the [snip] to answer a simple question?
[/QUOTE]

You are the one who is ducking and dodging. Look, when the NAS report came out, M&M claimed to be vindicated and so did Mann et al. And, in fact, Nature magazine’s headline read, “Academy affirms hockey-stick graph” with a subheadline that read, “But it criticizes the way the controversial climate result was used.”

You can try to spin this as much as possible, but the fact is that the Academy said neither that the original work of Mann et al. was perfect nor that M&M were completely correct. And, now for good measure, you are attacking who they chose to serve on the NAS committee.

This is the sort of double-dealing we see with you “skeptics”, trying to have your cake and eat it too…I.e., you use the the NAS report to make the simplistic claim that they didn’t find any errors in M&M (which obviously hinges on how you define “errors”). But then, since you don’t want us to actually accept the conclusions of that report, you attack it and thus try to fashion an argument that says, “Since the NAS report didn’t by my standards find any error in M&M, then we can believe everything that M&M have concluded…and, of course, we shouldn’t accept the actual conclusions of the NAS report…We must only accept M&M.”

207

intention,

Just to summarize, I repeat my statement from a previous post (which you ignored) that summarizes, in my view, where the NAS report came down with respect to the correctness of Mann et al. and M&M’s criticisms: “E.g., they said that Mann’s mathematical method could potentially lead to biases in the shape of the reconstructions but that it seems that it hasn’t actually done this in this case. They agreed that there are concerns about the results relying heavily on some particular proxies (as Mann et al had themselves pointed out in the GRL paper) and that this should be taken into account in estimating the uncertainty but they did not conclude that the Mann et al. reconstruction therefore is useless and tells us nothing. They were not as confident as Mann et al regarding the conclusion that the late 20th century temperatures were the warmest in the last millenium but, given the results of Mann and the subsequent results of many other groups, they noted that there is considerable evidence pointing in this direction and a lack of evidence suggesting otherwise.”

208

I’m a little saddened that intention has decided not to participate in this conversation anymore. However, I am still curious about his line of reasoning, so if anyone can make sense of the following, I would appreciate it.

It turns out that Ababneh’s thesis has been discussed on Steve McIntyre’s global warming skeptic site “Climate Audit.” I don’t know if the views described below also describe intention’s beliefs or not. And, if you’re still reading this, intention, I’m curious about your reasoning behind this.

So it seems that the major problem McIntyre has is that Ababneh’s data don’t show the ‘hockey stick’ (I assume HS=hockey stick) that Hughes shows. What are the potential reasons for this?

  1. Hughes draws from other sites, only one of which was also sampled by Ababneh: the Sheep Mountain site. The other four were not included in Ababneh’s reconstruction.
  2. Hughes’ data is older while Ababneh’s is newer.
  3. Hi, Opal!
  4. Hughes sampled differently from Ababneh.
  5. Ababneh feels her data should not be used in that reconstruction by Hughes.
  6. Graybill falsified or otherwise misrepresented his data.
  7. Different numbers of trees were sampled by Graybill and Ababneh (it seems that Ababneh did a better job of getting a larger sample size at this site.)

A. It doesn’t really matter because the “blade” in the hockey stick is in the thermometer record – tree rings are less accurate than thermometers. (Not really to address the above question, more to wonder why people outside dendrochronology would perceive the question as an important one.)

I don’t see the attractiveness of possibility #6, fraud, over consideration of the other possibilities.

I am especially interested in possibility #5, because it is implied in Ababneh’s thesis:

{emphasis mine}

This passage suggests to me that Ababneh does not trust the Sheep Mountain cores to produce an accurate temperature record from 1850 to the present. In fact, that explains why the graph (Figure 5, p. 121) that McIntyre uses from Ababneh does not attribute anything after 1850 to warm, cold, or variable periods.
It is with a strongly suspicious mindset that McIntyre jumps to conclusion #6, fraud, instead of any of the other options. I haven’t read the entire thread comments, but someone over at Climate Audit tried to contact Ababneh and was rebuffed. Frankly, if they’re willing to jump straight to accusations of fraud when there are other possibilities, I wouldn’t want to talk to them either.

An analogy would be that if there were some people playing a pick-up game of basketball, and one of them frequently accuses others of cheating. Other players, even if they have not been accused of cheating, will tend not to accept the frequent accuser into their ball game.
Michael Mann and some other authors have had another study published that is designed to rely less upon bristlecone pines, which McIntyre and others have frequently criticized.
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/MannetalPNAS08.pdf

I’m guessing that just because the reliance on the tree-ring studies is reduced will not be sufficient reason for McIntyre or those like him to prefer this study over ones that are more dependent on tree-rings.