In a post about “Climategate” back in December, I drew an analogy between people who are convinced anthropogenic climate change isn’t happening and people who don’t believe in evolution. Like all analogies, that one is imperfect, although I think the main point I was trying to make with the analogy is valid: both evolution and anthropogenic climate change have been adequately proven, to the extent that problems with some data or the work of individual scientists are not enough to call them into question, but some people refuse to accept these phenomena for ideological or religious reasons. (In a later post I explained one of the reasons I’m so convinced about climate change.)
I later came to regret focusing on that analogy, though, since of course people who believe in evolution but not climate change don’t agree that the analogy is a good one. But here’s one way in which it is better than I thought: a recent item in the New York Times says “Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.”
I find it amusing (but a little sad).
This is well known – Orac (of Respectful Insolence fame) calls is crank magnetism. The crowd that surround Bill Dembski are also climate denialists, for example.
Why is it that we have politicians who want to assure that the United States becomes the dumbest modernized country on the planet?
That's not surprising. Like you, anti-evolutionists lunged onto formal analogy. You used it to help to illustrate your beliefs, they use it to their ends. All is good – everyone's trying to win an argument.
But the truth remains that the analogy is very poor. Between the two theories (evolution and AGW), the strength of evidence and the predictive power are totally incomparable. Unsurprisingly, one has acquired a status of established fact while the other remains a reasonable-sounding hypothesis with very little firmly established support. And it does not help the latter's case when physicists start assuming spherical chickens by pretending that the entire planet should be viewed merely as a bigger version of one's backyard greenhouse.
Actually the analogy works great. For the crackpots. Which doesn't mean it is a good analogy. I stand by my previous comment that the analogy is terrible, if for nothing else by the fact that one is a scientifically testable hypothesis. And notice that I "believe" in evolution and I "believe" in AGW ("belief" is a poor choice of words: I _know_ evolution and I _trust_who_knows_ AGW). At that time I commented that creationists were longing for this connection.
And in your previous post you discussed the effect of CO2 on climate change, not the "disbelief that the climate is changing". I understand people use the terms interchangeably, but I felt the need to clarify – I would hate if my questioning of the projections, for instance, were spinned as if I thought the temperatures never changed ;) The post was great since we could objectively address what a skeptic or a denier would look like. And my impression is that people were tending to skepticism, but not to denialism.
The analogy between skepticism towards AGW and disbelief of evolution on religious grounds is not only false, it's downright slanderous. In my opinion, many of the people who assert this analogy seek to cut off debate by using ridicule and intimidation. At this point, AGW is hardly "proven." To prove something you need reliable data, and we don't have that yet.
When the disgraced former head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglica, Phil Jones, appeared before the British Parliament's Science and Technology Committee, Lord Lawson of Blaby asked him why he refused to provide data and codes to a requester. Jones was immediately evasive, but the tenacious Balby was not about to be put off. Finally Jones said that he refused because "…because we had a lot of work and resources invested in it." This statement is tantamount to an admission that he was afraid someone would find a flaw in the work. This is science? Jones said he only wanted to furnish the "finished product," meaning the extrapolation from the scattered data to a regular grid. I worked on this problem myself about 15 years ago with global temperature data. We used an approach using radial basis functions and it worked pretty well. I don't know what they did at CRU, and I guess I'm not allowed to find out. Not only that, Jones claims he lost the original data, so the CRU itself can't repeat their own calculations unless they can retrieve the data from somewhere else.
The usual retort we get from the global warming advocates says that AGW still rests on a firm foundation of evidence despite the shenanigans at the CRU. Go get the data from NASA they tell us. But Michael Mann had to be ordered by Congress to turn over his data and codes. Before that he stonewalled it. No wonder. Steve McIntyre demonstrated that you can drive his algorithm with red noise and get a hockey stick like output. Funny thing, Mann rolled his own (defective) principal components analysis, and programmed everything in Fortran. Why wouldn't he use Matlab, Splus, R or Mathematica, all which provide high quality routines and a language to compute most of what he tediously hand coded? Perhaps he was trying to hide behind a wall of opaque spaghetti code. Why did he want to keep everything secret? This is science?
We can't accept the AGW claims until the entire enterprise is audited and replicated by competent, independent, honest and disinterested physicists, statisticians, and computer scientists. We need a Feynmann to help us before we start changing the world's economy on what might be a fraud.
Finally, let me say that I believe in evolution, but I'm skeptical about AGW. I really don't like anyone comparing me a some religious wacko. It's insulting.
This seems relevant:
http://is.gd/9Nb12
Phil, I'm amazed that you really don't seem to understand why this analogy is inappropriate.
It is inappropriate because the evidence for evolution is vastly more convincing than the evidence that human emissions of CO2 will cause seriously-worrying amounts of global warming.
This isn't a close thing. If you deny evolution, enormous numbers of biological facts make no sense whatever. These include the traditional observations of Darwin, of course, but nowadays also the very detailed data on the genomes of related organisms. Of course, you could accept most of evolution, to avoid a lot of outright conflict with observation, while denying crucial little bits (eg, claiming divine intervention to be necessary to put apes on the path to humanity), but then you're very explicitly substituting special pleading for science.
In contrast, the case for serious effects of human CO2 emissions relies crucially on computer simulations of feedback effects – the direct effect of CO2 is not enough to be greatly worrying. These simulations are not conducted on a fine enough grid to model crucial processes by applying well-established physical laws. Instead, these effects are crudely approximated. There is a very real possibility that the simulations are seriously flawed. There is no vast body of data that would eliminate this possibility.
Now, maybe you've phrased your comparison cleverly – of people "convinced anthropogenic climate change isn't happening" versus "people who don't believe in evolution". But if you're really talking about people who are certain that there is no effect at all of human CO2 emissions on climate, then you're not talking about anybody but a few idiots spouting off in a bar somewhere. That isn't what the debate is about. You ought to know that.
Based on that NYT article, I imagine we'll see some future articles: Mafia bosses vote Republican, Violent criminals prefer Pepsi, and Wall Street con men inspired by Gelman's blog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
Phil,
I am most interested to know upon what data you rely for your claim that temperature is increasing. Please provide me with such data so that I can analyze it.
Regards,
Bruce
PS — hint: Goddard, Anglia and NOAA are hopelessly corrupted. choose a different dataset. if you disagree with the first sentence of this postscript, then let us debate the proposition, "Resolved: that the [Phil fills in the blank] dataset is of sufficiently high quality that it can be used to show increasing temperature."
Analogies are not appropriate reasoning tool in the sciences. With that said, the two topics, AGW and Evolution are similar in that their is debate. They differ on the substantive facts being debated. AGW is being contested on basis that the facts do not align with the theory.
AGW is a vastly more technical question than the theory of natural selection.
Many of the commenters seem to be taking the position that evolution is essentially noncontroversial whereas the latest line on climate change is much more debatable. In one way, this makes a lot of sense: the theory of evolution has been around for 150 years, so people have had a long time to get used to it.
On the other hand, as noted in the linked newspaper article, evolution isn't so uncontroversial either–at least in the United States. For example, it's notoriously difficult to get politicians and political commentators to state that they believe in the theory of evolution.
The Carbon Dioxide Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory provides another outlet for global temperature anomalies. They currently have the Hadley Centre data on-line from 1850 to 2008. This should correspond to what Hadley calls "HadCRUT3gl," except Hadley has added 2009. Here are the links:
ORNL: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/climate/temp/temp_table.htm…
Hadley: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/had…
In their faq CRU explains that the updated file should differ "slightly" from prior months and years going back two years. The variance adjusted data might change going back four years. Read that faq at the the following link:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
Now perhaps I'm not comparing the appropriate files, but the changes between ORNL for 1850-2008 and Hadley 1850-2008 (dropping the last year) are certainly not "slight" in my book.
ORNL confirmed to me that the updating to a new year or month will change past values. I suspect the baseline for calculating the anomalies got shifted.
Let's take the ratio of yearly the average global temperature from both data sets for the period 1850-2008 and see how much past values have been affected.
Results: I found three years with negative ratios, in 1878, 1939 and 1963. Over all the mean of the ratios (dropping the minus sign) is 1.09. The max is 9.0, the min is .22, and the median is 0.99. Altogether 14% of the ration exceed 1.1, and 7% are less than .9, so 21% of the values have changed by more than 10%. All this from adding an extra.
It would be nice if Hadley had an archive and a revision list, but I can't find it easily. This is science?
Andrew,
It's not a matter of whether people have "had a long time to get used to" evolution. People have had a similar time to get used to the theory behind homeopathy. It's a matter of actual strength of scientific evidence. The evidence for evolution is immense. The evidence for homeopathy is slight to non-existent, while the evidence against it is overwhelming.
When I see someone equate climateaudit.org to a creationist web site, it indicates to me that they are not actually engaging in scientific debate at all, but rather in a culture war. This is unsurprising for the large number of people who say they "believe" in evolution, but who actually don't know what the theory of evolution by natural selection is, much less what the evidence for it is. They've just chosen to follow one segment of what they see as elite opinion, because they find it emotionally appealing, or because that's what all their friends say they believe. When their preferred elite commentators tell them that CO2 emissions are going to cause serious warming, they "believe" them for the same reasons, and see no difference with why they "believe" evolution.
I would expect more from someone with a scientific background, but perhaps Phil just doesn't know enough biology to understand how completely absurd the comparison is, and how, far from advancing his argument, it instead undermines his credibility with scientifically literate readers.
I don't really think that I'm in a sufficiently informed scientific position to judge if analogies between global warming and evolution are warranted on that level.
I think I'm more qualified to look at this as a social scientist and there I think are important parallels. The movements against both theories began outside of science, they originated (and are still by far most prominent) within the United States, they were initially (and in some cases continue to) receive massive funding by organizations and individuals associated with the conservative movement – one could go further here, pointing to specific rhetorical strategies employed etc.
Those observations alone leave open the possibility that one of the theories is wrong and the other one (mostly) right – there is no a priori reason why said individuals and organizations couldn't be right about one thing and wrong about something else. They also don't imply that everyone convinced that one of the theories is wrong shares those motives or agrees with all the strategies of the relevant actors.
But I think if we're interested in the strategies employed (and I personally think we should be) the parallels are striking and the analogy is quite useful – as demonstrate among other things by the NYTs article linked to by Phil.
1. What Radford Neal wrote on March 7, 2010 at 3:17 PM. Exactly. Well put. Just one minor point:
2. Andrew Gelman wrote: evolution isn't so uncontroversial either–it's notoriously difficult to get politicians and political commentators to state that they believe in the theory of evolution.
Umm, since when what politicians say or do not say carries any weight in evaluating scientific theories???
I didn't mean to set off this firestorm again, I was just amused to find the anti-evolution crowd making the same analogy I had made and I thought others might also find it amusing. Perhaps this is what DK means in his first paragraph. (I'm not sure that I actually 'lunged onto formal analogy' because I have no idea what that means.)
But as long as people have gone to the effort to post comments, I'll respond to a few of these.
Neal says "the direct effect of CO2 is not enough to be greatly worrying." That's not true, the "direct effect" is something like 1.5C for a doubling of pre-industrial CO2, unless I'm not understanding what you mean by "direct effect." And we're going to go way past a doubling. (I'm interpreting "direct effect" to mean "if nothing changed except the CO2 concentration".)
Zarkov and McCollough suggest that the whole "global warming" thing is a hoax or at least might be a hoax: there is no warming, the seas aren't rising, sea ice isn't melting, you can't actually take a ship through the Arctic Ocean, birds aren't migrating towards the equator later in the autumn and away from it earlier in the spring, minimum yearly temperatures aren't rising and maximum yearly temperatures aren't falling, date of first freeze and date of first thaw aren't shifting towards the winter solstice…all of these are illusions based on data distorted by scientists at NASA and East Anglia and NOAA and, presumably, their counterparts in Asia and Europe (plus university researchers and a bunch of others not associated with any particular institution). You guys are crazy.
McCollough, the most convincing data on climate change are sea level measurements from the past 100 years. For any single location, there are complications related to weather, and land subsidence or uplift, and other issues. But with a large database from around the world, you can get a good estimate of sea level rise, and sea level rise means either warmer oceans or melting land ice or both. I'm not going to suggest a specific source of the data, though, because you'll just say "oh, those guys are in on the conspiracy too."
Sailer, I dunno about the claim that "AGW is a vastly more technical question than the theory of natural selection." The details of both are extremely complicated, but the basic principles of both are extremely simple. Flip a coin as far as which is "more technical."
Neal again, you say "Now, maybe you've phrased your comparison cleverly – of people "convinced anthropogenic climate change isn't happening" versus "people who don't believe in evolution". But if you're really talking about people who are certain that there is no effect at all of human CO2 emissions on climate, then you're not talking about anybody but a few idiots spouting off in a bar somewhere. " I dunno if that's "clever" phrasing. It's true that I think that people who are convinced that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening are wackos, or, as you put it, "idiots spouting off in a bar somewhere." But those idiots in the bar include people like Senator Inhofe and there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-goes-the-Vice-President Sarah Palin, and lots of other highly influential people. There are lots of idiots out there, and unfortunately they leave the bar sometime.
As for people who aren't sure one way or the other, those people aren't necessarily wackos. I had a whole post about this back in December, I'm sure you recall.
As I said above, I didn't want to restart this debate, in which some of us say "the data and models are really convincing" while others say "the data and models aren't convincing at all." I'll post again when there's something new to comment on.
All I was trying to do was say "isn't it funny that evolution deniers are comparing themselves to climate change skeptics." Sheesh.
"Zarkov and McCollough suggest that the whole "global warming" … be a hoax: there is no warming, the seas aren't rising, sea ice isn't melting, you can't actually take a ship through the Arctic Ocean,…"
I did not say I was skeptical of warming. I said I was skeptical about AGW. We can have warming from a variety of natural causes, along with a minor amount of warming from industrial activities. We have not proved that a massive change in carbon emissions is going to have a significant affect on future temperature.
As for sea ice why don't we have a look at the data which is on-line.
Global sea ice area anomalies as measured by satellites since 1979. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/gl…
Do you see a significant downward trend in the red graph? There is a downward trend in NH sea ice area, as you can see here. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/gl…
But in the SH sea ice area we have an upward trend.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/gl…
The real action is in Antarctica where 90% of the world's fresh water is locked up. This year a satellite will go into orbit that can measure ice thickness by radar in Antarctica to an accuracy of 1 inch. Then we should to see if Antarctic ice is thinning.
" … the most convincing data on climate change are sea level measurements from the past 100 years."
The sea level has been rising about about a constant rate of 1.7mm per year since 1850 as the world came out of the Little Ice Age. How does this prove AGW? Why don't we see a much higher rate after 1950?
I recommend you look at Nicola Scafetta's 2009 paper in the Journal of Solar and Terrestrial Physics. You can download it from his website.
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/Scafetta-JA…
He says a change in the Total Solar Irradiance is responsible for as much as 65% of the observed warming trend.
"You guys are crazy."
We obviously have a lot of contradictory assertions by various parties and scientists. AGW as presented by alarmists is far from proved as you dogmatically assert. Shall we stop the name calling and act like adults?
Zarkov,
you say "We need a Feynmann to help us before we start changing the world's economy on what might be a fraud." And what you suggested is fraudulent is data showing that the earth is warming.
Now, you say "I did not say I was skeptical of warming, I said I was skeptical about AGW." But your previous ramble was entirely about the warming, not the anthropogenic part. Admittedly I have a hard time understanding exactly what you are claiming. What am I to make of this, for example: "But Michael Mann had to be ordered by Congress to turn over his data and codes. Before that he stonewalled it. No wonder. Steve McIntyre demonstrated that you can drive his algorithm with red noise and get a hockey stick like output. Funny thing, Mann rolled his own (defective) principal components analysis, and programmed everything in Fortran." Admittedly it has a nice sort of rollicking rhythm to it, but I can't figure out what, if anything, you are saying about global temperatures.
As I have mentioned before, I am a big fan of the simple declarative sentence. I wish others were, too.
The fact that solar irradiance varies, and that this is one of several factors that influences global temperatures, is not new or controversial. The estimate of Scafetta and his colleagues is substantially larger than that of most researchers and is somewhat controversial (see here for one opinion on the subject. They'll get this stuff figured out eventually. But it's worth pointing out that Scafetta's conclusion is "the solar contribution to climate change ranges from a slight cooling to a significant warming, which can be as large as 65% of the total observed global warming." This is far from a claim that solar irradiation is _likely_ to have caused most of the warming trend.
As for ice, Arctic sea ice extent is important because it is an indication of the temperature of the Arctic Ocean. Decreasing ice extent is an indication that the ocean is warming. In contrast, Antarctica is a continent; Antarctic ice depth on land is controlled largely by how much precipitation there is there, it doesn't directly tell you anything about sea temperature. It definitely tells you something and I'm sure there are people trying to figure out how to interpret Antarctic ice depth data, but it doesn't have the simple interpretation that Arctic ice depth has. For instance, I could imagine that a warmer ocean would mean more water vapor in the air, and thus more precipitation over Antarctica, leading to deeper ice. I'm not asserting it, just pointing out that, unlike the situation in the Arctic, it's not necessarily trivial in Antarctica.
But I'm not sure why you're bringing this stuff up, because I thought you just said that you don't dispute that the earth is warming.
DK: You write:
I'm not weighing the statements of politicians and pundits in evaluating the status of evolution. Rather, I'm pointing out the well-known reluctance of politicos to endorse evolution as an indication of how that theory is perceived by a large segment of the public. My impression is that many leading politicians believe evolution to be true (in the sense that we generally evaluate scientific models as "true") but think it politically expedient to hide their views on the issue.
I'm a statistician who believed in AGW until I started working in climate science. The validation of GCMs and RCMs is just non-existent. I would probably summarize my position as: I still believe it's happening, but the work supposedly "proving" it is unbelievably shoddy.
darlington,
I don't put much stock in the global climate models either. And in fact, judging from the stated uncertainties in climate sensitivity, even the modelers don't put much stock in them. A lot of people are working on them, and they're making progress, so I think it's possible that those models will be a lot better in the near future. But there are lots of tough problems there, like how to handle clouds and aerosols and such, so it might take a long time before the models are unquestionably good.
But you don't need any of that stuff. Simple radiation balance dictates that AGW will occur unless the earth's albedo increases (or solar irradiance decreases). See an earlier post for a brief discussion of this. The albedo is measured by satellites; solar irradiance is also measured; sea level gives a very trustworthy thermometer for measuring global-average temperature (because it averages over pretty much the whole earth, so you don't have to worry about spatial coverage or the "heat island" effect). The earth is warming, and it's because the atmosphere is absorbing and re-radiating infrared radiation, not because of increased irradiance or decreased albedo. You don't need global climate models to believe it or understand it, and indeed, I think such models shouldn't get a lot of weight (which isn't the same as saying they shouldn't get any at all).
" All I was trying to do was say "isn't it funny that evolution deniers are comparing themselves to climate change skeptics." Sheesh. " (–Phil)
_____________
…..well, no.
Your original post is primarily a strong endorsement of AGW, expressing (in its opening paragraph) surprise that ClimateGate would prompt:
"any doubt about the threat of global warming, at least among educated, intelligent people….. questioning the occurrence of anthropogenic global warming seems crazy ".
The evolution analogy was merely a side-thought, not the primary thrust… and stated rather seriously… not in "funny" amusement.
Not surprising then… that you got many strong comments in response. You directly imply that those who disagree with you are 'uneducated' & 'unintelligent' … and probably mentally unstable ("crazy").
Now you are back-pedaling on your original comments. Not to worry — you will have lots of company this year with fellow AGW back-pedalers.
AGW is the biggest scientific hoax in world history.
It is already publicly and rapidly disintegrating in Europe. However, the dominant American media are hardcore AGW-believers — effectively downplaying ClimateGate and and the stark absence of AGW scientific validity.
The lid will blow dramatically this year.
Phil,
You wrote:
"Zarkov and McCollough suggest that the whole "global warming" thing is a hoax or at least might be a hoax: there is no warming, the seas aren't rising, …."
Please reread my post and give me a direct quote to support your deliberate misinterpretation of what I wrote. High school debate tactics (accuse the other guy of something he didn't say and then refute it) don't become a scholar such as yourself.
But you do categorize as nonsense the idea that "there is no warming" and that "minimum yearly temperatures aren't rising and maximum yearly temperatures aren't falling".
So i repeat my request: please provide me with the source of the data by which you can substantiate your claims. [N.B. Asserting that sea levels are rising does not provide data to show that temperatures are rising!]
Regards,
Bruce
To clarify slightly: I know Phil extremely well, I know Radford pretty well, and I've met Bruce. I don't think anyone is deliberately misinterpreting anything. My impression is that Phil has the best sense of the physics of the situation; as I wrote in an earlier blog entry, he's my go-to guy in physics situations. My impression also is that Radford and Bruce (separately) have spent a bit of time looking at climate data, and I think that they'd look seriously at whatever data Phil pointed them too (even if it's unlikely that anyone's opinion would be changed, at least in the short run).
Also, as I noted, everyone here seems to feel that evolution is uncontroversial–but U.S. politicians (and pundits) disagree.
Lawrence, you're quoting from a different post, not this one!
McCollough, you only make one assertion in your comment: "Goddard, Anglia and NOAA are hopelessly corrupted." So obviously I can't give a "direct quote to support [my] deliberate misrepresentation…" I assure you, if I have mischaracterized your views, it was not deliberate. I jumped to the conclusion, perhaps incorrect, that you don't believe the climate is warming substantially. I encourage you, like everyone else, to use declarative sentences! It really helps the rest of us figure out what you are saying.
Sea level data are available at http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/datainfo/
There is a substantial difference between Evolution and AGW. Most important, is the physical evidence for evolution. What is the fossil record of extinct species if not a confirmation of evolution ? As someone else, commented what about DNA similarities ? What about evolution actually being observed in action(if evolution doesn't exist then where are all the anti-biotic resistent microbes coming from) ? The only people who really question evolution are religious wackos. This of course is the attraction of the analogy between Evolution and AGW to the AGW crowd.
Ultimately, the creationists and the AGW crowd are two sides of the same coin making the same mistake. Creationists are now trying to prove their side, which totally negates the essence of religion: belief. Meanwhile, the AGW crowd castigates "non-believers" in the name of science.
In the end, AGW is a theory, and you can't prove a theory with a computer model. For examples of where hubris and computer models can lead us, take a look at Wall Street.
I think it's interesting, perhaps revealing, that the Creationists would seize in that analogy, but not the AGW skeptics.
The irony is rich, Creationists looking to science to prove their "beliefs", while the AGW crowd seizes on the lack of belief of the AGW skeptics.
"The earth is warming, and it's because the atmosphere is absorbing and re-radiating infrared radiation, not because of increased irradiance or decreased albedo."
I agree, which is why I stated that I believe in AGW. I also agree with the post that you linked to, that the real question is one of effect.
My point is that I have seen enough of climate science up close to come to realize that people aren't genuinely interested in solving a question. They just aren't. (Is that declarative enough for you?) It's a horrifying thing to witness: massive amounts of money spent not on trying to work past ego and cooperate to find an answer, but to mindlessly churn out a few more models to get a few more papers to get tenure/prestige/funding.
Like a prominent blogger says, I'll believe it's a crisis when the people telling me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.
Tbw: To echo Phil, I don't want to be arguing this too much, but . . . no, it's not true that "The only people who really question evolution are religious wackos." Take a look at these polls, for example.
I concede in advance that this is unprovable and as such I don't expect it to be convincing, but those polls just don't pass the smell test to me. I am suspicious of any poll that starts to delve into intensely personal topics. It's like the polls that ask teenagers if they use drugs, alcohol or have had sex. I don't care how anonymous the poll is, I doubt more than 25% of the answers are true. Similarly, I think anyone with any kind of religious upbringing would have a tendency to toe the Church line on these sorts of questions. There's a difference between saying what you think you are supposed to say vs actively agitating against teaching evolution or for teaching creationism.
darlington, you say "My point is that I have seen enough of climate science up close to come to realize that people aren't genuinely interested in solving a question. They just aren't."
Yes, that's declarative enough for me. Thank you! But, if "people" is intended to mean "all people" then I think your statement is not true and is borderline ridiculous. If you mean that some people aren't interested in getting the right answer, or even that most people aren't interested in getting the right answer, well, I think you're wrong but I guess it's possible; certainly there are plenty of entrenched interests, plenty of people who would have egg on their face if they are proved wrong, and so on. But if you're saying that NOBODY is trying to get the right answers, I'm sure you're wrong!
A. Zarkov,
"Funny thing, Mann rolled his own (defective) principal components analysis, and programmed everything in Fortran."
You've stated this before as if Mann misimplemented PCA. Mann made an intentional modeling choice to use non-centered rather than centered PCA. It's not like he was trying to code centered PCA and somehow messed up the implementation because he was writing it himself.
Now, you can argue that non-centered PCA is inappropriate for this application, but that's different from what you appear to be implying. Non-centered PCA in R would still be non-centered PCA, regardless of what the R default is.
"Why wouldn't he use Matlab, Splus, R or Mathematica, all which provide high quality routines and a language to compute most of what he tediously hand coded? Perhaps he was trying to hide behind a wall of opaque spaghetti code."
Yeah, sure. Jump straight to the conspiracy theory.
The more plausible but sadly boring hypothesis is that he didn't know any of those other languages, or simply was most familiar with Fortran.
It's not rare for scientists to "roll their own" code; in my experience, physicists do this commonly. Whether they should do this is a separate question.
Andre Gelman wrote: I'm not weighing the statements of politicians and pundits in evaluating the status of evolution. Rather, I'm pointing out the well-known reluctance of politicos to endorse evolution as an indication of how that theory is perceived by a large segment of the public.
In which case this observation is completely irrelevant in the context of the discussed purportedly good analogy between anti-evolutionists and AGW "deniers". Pretty much the same as your
no, it's not true that "The only people who really question evolution are religious wackos." Take a look at these polls, for example.
Why would anyone care what these polls say? You might as well run a poll "Do you believe in Central Limit Theorem?" and find out that some people say that they don't and that a lot of other people have no clue what it is. So what? Although, going back to the OP, it seems to me that Phil might say based on this: "See? A lot of people don't believe in CLT – and this is amusingly similar (but a little sad) to the way a lot of other people do not believe in acupuncture." As Zarkov outlined, such an analogy would be pretty insulting to anyone who is questioning the claims of acupuncture efficiency.
DK:
You ask, "Why would anyone care what these polls say? You might as well run a poll 'Do you believe in Central Limit Theorem?' . . ."
These polls are interesting for a few of reasons.
1. They refute the claim that a previous commenter made that "The only people who really question evolution are religious wackos." I don't think it makes sense to characterize something like half of Americans as "religious wackos."
2. They reflect that, in the forum of public discussion, evolution is not a settled question, whatever the expert scientists (and participants on this blog) might believe or what to believe on the issue.
3. Most importantly, public opinion is connected to policy. With evolution, the main policy question appears to be what is taught in the schools–not a completely trivial issue, perhaps. With climate change, the policy implications are huge. For both issues, I think it is useful to study public opinion and understand its connection to the relevant scientific debates.
Beyond this, I agree with you that it is useful to perform clinical trials on the efficacy of acupuncture. I don't think polling is stopping anyone from doing this!
Phil:
You have conflated a number of issues, so I will spell things out carefully.
1. What might be fraudulent.
Some global warming alarmists assert that unless the industrial world significantly curtails its emission of CO2, global temperature will rise by an amount sufficient to cause dire consequences. Who makes assertions like this? Scientists such as Hans Schellnhuber who is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and top adviser to German Chancellor Merkel on climate protection. He argues that drastic measures must be taken to avoid a catastrophe. He proposes a “carbon budget” where every person in the world gets an equal share. In effect his proposals call for a massive transfer of wealth to the Third World because the First World has “used up” its rights to emit carbon. You can read this 2009 interview with Spiegel Online International for details. As a physicist, Merkel should know better, but I guess she’s busy. Who else? Our very own John Holdren, Science Adviser U.S. President Obama. In my opinion, Holdren qualifies as a long-term crackpot with a history of panic mongering with hysterical assertions. He’s gone from population growth catastrophes to his latest fetish, Climate Change. To get a taste, read his 1971 Science Magazine article with co-author and full-time crackpot Paul Ehrlich. Incidentally, Ehrlich along with Stephen Schneider from Stanford University have recently called for a jihad against global warming skeptics. In an email reported here, Ehrlich wrote, “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.” For a kinder and gentler treatment of Ehrlich you can read this New York Times article. By the way, Schneider had guards forcefully remove a reporter who asked him an embarrassing question at the Denmark Conference in December.
In summary, I have not argued that the whole global warming enterprise might be a fraud, and that no warming has occurred. This is a straw man tactic on your part. I’m arguing against the credibility of the predictions of dire consequences. I thought that was obvious, but I guess not.
2. Most of the Alarmist predictions come from models.
Average future global temperature increases and the associated dire consequences come mainly from computer models. These models don’t make predictions based solely on fundamental physical constants. They rely on empirical data such as temperature. I know you don’t put much stock in these models either, but they form the basis for most of the scary predictions.
3. Can we trust the Hadley Centre temperature data?
Former CRU director Phil Jones admits that he’s disorganized in this recent BBC interview. Moreover he also concedes that Medieval Warm Period (MWP) controversy remains unsettled, and if the MWP was global in extent, then the 20th Century might not have experienced unprecedented high temperatures. So here we have one of the main actors on the global warming stage virtually admitting the temperature issue is not fully settled.
The Climategate emails and source code show what looks like disorganization and possible incompetence. Moreover, my own quick look shows HadCRUT3 is unstable. Small updates seem to cause significant non-local changes throughout the database. We don’t have a paper trail. We can’t find out the details of gridding calculations. Jones refuses to release original data and codes. He gives evasive answers. If we cannot fully trust the temperature data, then how do we know the world is on a path to catastrophic warming?
Now my skeptical attitude towards the quality of the data in HadCRUT3 does not mean that I assert the world has not experienced any warming. The world has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, but we don’t know for sure how much to ascribe to natural causes. This is an important question; one that is hardly “settled.”
4. The question of sea-ice area.
The NH sea-ice area anomalies have diminished since the early 1990s. The SH sea-ice area anomalies have increased. These effects seem to cancel out because the global sea-ice area has remained nearly constant. If sea-ice area tells us something about water temperature, then the average global water temperature has not been affected. Now I realize that global warming increases with latitude, and there is no sea ice at the South Pole. Therefore Arctic sea-ice area might be providing more information about the global sea temperature, but its hardly definitive.
5. The question of Antarctic ice.
As I said Antarctic ice is where the action is. If Antarctic ice keeps getting thicker for whatever reason, then we don’t have to worry about that ice melting and causing a sea level rise. Even if all the world’s sea ice melts, that alone won’t raise the sea level. That pretty much leaves thermal expansion which will add about 200-300mm to the average sea level by 2100 if the current temperature trends continue. Is that a catastrophe?
6. Total Solar Irradiance.
Your link does not point the right place. Try again. Scafetta’s calculations show that the TSI issue is far from “settled.” Has anyone conclusively refuted him? If he’s right, then we don’t need to decrease carbon emissions as much alarmists say, if at all.
7. Scientists behaving badly.
We know that Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, and others have become staunch advocates for their global warming cause. Feynman warned us against this kind of agenda-driven science when he told us,
“I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.”
That’s why I say we need a modern day Feynman, someone with unquestioned integrity to lead a through audit of the whole global warming enterprise. Is this too much to ask?
8. Energy balance models.
EBMs ignore vertical variations and as such scientists use them to predict surface temperature. However cloud coverage is only weakly determined by surface temperature. That’s why you have to put in some kind parameterization for the water-vapor cloud feedback just like you do for GCMs. It’s true that you can look down with satellites to determine the earth’s albedo, but our satellite data only goes back to 1979. How do we know what will happen in the future at higher surface temperatures? With another 50 years of satellite data we might understand the feedbacks better, but people want to know now what will happen in the future.
(Sorry the links didn't come through, will supply if asked)
Zarkov,
I can't figure out what you're getting at with the vast majority of item 1, but at least I understand the end, where you say "I have not argued that the whole global warming enterprise might be a fraud, and that no warming has occurred. This is a straw man tactic on your part. I’m arguing against the credibility of the predictions of dire consequences. I thought that was obvious, but I guess not." No, that wasn't obvious to me at all! You keep on bringing up the Hockey Stick, and the fact that Mann didn't release his code until Congress told him to, and that you don't trust the calibrations used for historical temperature data, and so on. I thought you were saying you don't believe temperatures have increased substantially.
2. You say "most of the Alarmist predictions come from models."
Of course. ALL predictions come from models.
I agree that you need temperature data both as direct inputs to models and to estimate parameters in the models.
3. You say "So here we have one of the main actors on the global warming stage virtually admitting the temperature issue is not fully settled."
Well, duh. I don't know why people are so fixated on the temperature during the Medieval Warm Period, but yeah, of course it's not "fully settled," nobody has ever said it was. We're never going to know the global-average surface temperature hundreds of years ago; it's hard enough to figure it out NOW.
4. Decreasing sea ice is one way of proving that the arctic seas are warming. For people who don't trust the spatial coverage, accuracy, or analysis of global temperature data — for people who say things like "NOAA and Hadley are hopelessly biased" and things of that nature — diminishing sea ice should at least help convince them that there is warming at high latitudes.
5. If the global average temperature increases several C, there will be very large effects even if the sea level doesn't rise a lot (e.g. if increased precipitation on Antarctica and other places somehow makes up for the loss of ice elsewhere, so all that's left is thermal expansion of the oceans).
I don't think we know whether total Antarctic ice volume is growing or shrinking or staying the same; until fairly recently there wasn't enough high-quality elevation data.
6. You ask, "Has anyone conclusively refuted [Scafetta's claims that changes in solar irradiance may account for up to 65% of recent warming]?" I don't think so. People have been unable to reproduce Scafetta's results. Scafetta says they're not correctly implementing his techniques. But Scafetta has refused to release his computer code so no one can check. See this article for instance.
But I'm not sure why you say "If he’s right, then we don’t need to decrease carbon emissions as much alarmists say, if at all." That's quite a leap.
7. You say "I say we need a modern day Feynman, someone with unquestioned integrity to lead a through audit of the whole global warming enterprise. Is this too much to ask?"
Yeah, it probably is. Feynman-level physicists (and other scientists) don't grow on trees, and ones with "unquestioned integrity" are even rarer. Suggest a name.
8. "How do we know what will happen in the future at higher surface temperatures? With another 50 years of satellite data we might understand the feedbacks better, but people want to know now what will happen in the future."
Right. And I agree, with the current level of understanding it is very hard to predict. Based on my informed but very very far from definitive evaluation, I think the "climate sensitivity" — the change in global-average temperature in response to a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 — could plausibly be as low as about 1C or as high as 5C. I think it's reasonable to have very wide bounds like that. In fact, I think it is unreasonable to have very narrow bounds, or to put very little probability above, say, 3C.
Phil
1. Let’s try again. The extreme alarmists such as Schellnhuber, Holdren, and Hansen have convinced most of the world’s politicians that global warming presents a dire threat to humanity. About the only real exception in Europe is Václav Klaus. The leaders believe in the extreme form of global warming because these scientists show them things like Hockey Stick graph. They are told that 1998 was the hottest year in human history. They are told that the warming is caused by fossil fuel combustion and the science is “settled.” As a result of these representations, the House passed the Waxman-Markey bill for cap-and-trade. The EPA has classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. And so on. They are not told that the Hockey Stick graph (which appeared on the cover of AR3) is wrong. They are not told temperatures during the MWP might have been even higher than 1998. They believe that Phil Jones is an honest and competent scientist. They are not told the ground station temperature data is a mess. When politicians hear that the science is “settled” they think that means the dire scenarios are certain. It also doesn’t help to stigmatize, ridicule, and smear the skeptics. Comparing the skeptics to creationists is part of the jihad against the critics. It’s a little like Lysenkoism.
I’m not sure why you are having so much trouble understanding my position, right or wrong.
2. Ok General Circulation Models. This is nitpicking.
3. See 1.
4. The Antarctic seas are cooling. Total world sea ice is about constant. This is all part f the NH and SH disconnect in the data. We know very little about the SH temperature record. But go read Jones’s paper, and you will see he gives the SH equal weight in the global average if I’m reading him correctly. That might be fixed in HadCRUT3v which makes a variance adjustment.
5. Rising sea levels is one of the big scare stories. Gore says 20 feet sea level rise, not 200mm. His movie shows Florida going underwater. If it turns out that Antarctica is rapidly melting I will change my mind. But so far we don’t know and this fact is not getting communicated.
6. It was Gavin Schmidt who couldn’t reproduce Scafetta’s calculations, and that’s because Schmidt does not understand wavelets even at an elementary level. But I agree completely, Scafetta needs to release his calculations. But let’s hold everyone to that standard.
7. A good question. This is getting biblical.
8. We had that uncertainty range 30 years ago. It really doesn’t tell us a whole lot. Not enough to change the economy of the world.
Zarkov,
I've had trouble understanding your position because you've never stated it as clearly as you are now…and you're still not stating it all that clearly. Are you saying you are sure that anthropogenic global warming will not occur at all? Or you're saying it will, or might occur but won't have large negative consequences? Or just that people who are claiming that it will definitely occur are understating the uncertainties? No need to answer these questions, I'm just saying that I still don't understand your position.
You say "[Leaders] are not told that the Hockey Stick graph … is wrong." They are not told that the hockey stick plot is wrong because the hockey stick plot is not wrong; correct analysis leads to a plot that is very much like the initial hockey stick plot.
You say policymakers "are not told temperatures during the MWP might have been even higher than 1998." That's just not true. The very first page of the IPCC 2007 "Summary for Policymakers" says "Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years." See that word "likely"? No certainty is intended or implied.
I don't think we disagree that global-average ocean temperatures are increasing; every few meters of ocean depth has more heat capacity than the entire atmosphere, so this means the oceans are absorbing enormous amounts of heat. As for the spatial distribution of this heat, yeah, some places are getting a lot more than others. Antarctic researchers think they know why Antarctica is showing regions of warming and regions of cooling (it involves increased UV due to the "ozone hole", plus changes in ocean currents related to climate change), but I'm not sure how much to trust the details of those models.
I've tried to keep my discussion of these issues focused on the likely magnitude of climate change, rather than policy implications of climate change, so I'm not going to respond to your point 8.
Oops, just reread some Antarctic research summaries; in the penultimate paragraph above, I should have said "increased radiative cooling due to the 'ozone hole', plus changes…"
Phil,
'You say "[Leaders] are not told that the Hockey Stick graph … is wrong." They are not told that the hockey stick plot is wrong because the hockey stick plot is not wrong; correct analysis leads to a plot that is very much like the initial hockey stick plot." '
This sounds like it's a talking point from Gavin Schmidt at the blog site realclimate.org, which is an advocacy group for AGW. He claims that the error(s) in the algorithms and coding that produced the Hockey Stick graph are trivial, and make little difference in the final result. We now know that the problems with temperature reconstructions go way beyond the coding error in the PCA calculation, and include cherry picking and the withholding adverse data. IPCC reviewer Stephen McIntyre gives the details in his Feb. 10, 2010 submission to UK Science and Technology Committee. You can read his submission augmented by figues and graphs at http://www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre-scitech…
Mann and Briffa have been stonewalling for years over the data used in Hockey Stick. If the Hockey Stick graph is mostly correct, then why did McIntyre have to resort to litigation to get the data? Why did Briffa express regret that the data he tried to withhold got released? We know lot from the climategate emails and codes that calculation was fudged as in "apply very artificial corrections."
'The very first page of the IPCC 2007 "Summary for Policymakers" says "Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years." '
Qualifications such as "likely" frequently get ignored by the media and the policy makers. The MWP is no exception. I have heard over and over that 1998 was the warmest year in more than 1,000 years without qualification. This is why the recent Jones interview with BBC was such big news.
You can see the Hockey Stick Graph used in IPCC AR3 here http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?…
Do you see any MWP in the smooth? According to this graph, Greenland should have been pretty cold when the Vikings settled there in about 1000 A.D. Even today, in the warmest decade ever, Greenland does not look very green. One can only wonder how it ever got to be called "Greenland."
"I've tried to keep my discussion of these issues focused on the likely magnitude of climate change, rather than policy implications of climate change, so I'm not going to respond to your point 8."
We can't divorce the two. Otherwise the whole AGW argument becomes somewhat recondite like finding the Higgs Boson.
Zarkov,
You and I are the only ones still reading this thread. Seems pointless.
I'm really sick of the Michael Moore style of argument, as epitomized by things like "If the Hockey Stick graph is mostly correct, then why did McIntyre have to resort to litigation to get the data? Why did Briffa express regret that the data he tried to withhold got released?" Well, gee, I don't know. I could just as well say "if Scafetta's solar irradiance analysis is correct, then why won't he release his code?" But I wouldn't do that; if I think Scafetta's code is wrong and he knows it, I will say "I think Scafetta's code is wrong and he knows it." I don't like argument by innuendo. Say what you mean; how hard is it, for cryin' out loud?
You say "Qualifications such as "likely" frequently get ignored by the media and the policy makers." OK, but what you said before is that policymakers "are not told temperatures during the MWP might have been even higher than 1998," and that's not true. If what you mean is "policymakers ignore the fact that temperatures during the MWP might have been even higher than 1998," then you should say that instead. But that's not true either; just ask Senator Inhofe.
The publication you cite for IPCC is almost nine years old! There's lots of more recent stuff.
I'm tired of this, and everyone else has long abandoned this thread.
As far as I know, Scafetta does not work off public money. Hansen, Mann, and Jones, and others do. As such I think they are obligated to make their work public, so your comparison is invidious. So we are left in a position of trying to decide whose calculations are correct without getting to see enough details in either case.
In any case I agree we have gone far enough so let's stop.