Seth Roberts, wrong about doubting Climate Disruption Risk

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Wanted to highlight Phillip Price's responses to Seth Roberts, on the existence of human caused risk of climate disruption.

Seth Roberts, wrong about doubting Climate Disruption Risk:

"
Phil Says:  May 11th, 2010 at 12:26 pm

Seth, as you might imagine I disagree with almost everything you say here. But let me give just one example. You say:

“Here’s what I would consider reasonable evidence for serious human-generated global warming:

1. Temperature higher now than in the past.
2. Temperature increasing at a higher rate now than in the past.
3. Good (= verified) model shows serious human-generated warming.”

But in fact, neither of the first two would be reasonable evidence of serious human-generated global warming if they are true, and the absence of them does not indicate absence of serious human-generated global warming if they are in fact absent.

Here’s the key fact that you seem to be unaware of (but that scientists who study this know very well): MORE THAN ONE PARAMETER AFFECTS THE TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH. It’s not all about carbon dioxide concentrations.

If high temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period were due in part to higher solar activity, then those temperatures don’t tell us much about climate sensitivity to CO2. So your point 1 doesn’t really make sense. The issue with point 2 is pretty much the same, except with regard to the derivative of temperature rather than temperature.

And for the models…you assert that the models aren’t good enough to estimate temperature sensitivity, but you’re wrong.

Yes, I know that scientists, like everybody else, tend to be overcertain. But I don’t think that means that nobody knows nuthin’.

I asked you before, more than once, to give YOUR estimate of climate sensitivity (defined as the steady-state change in global average over preindustrial levels in response to a doubling of CO2 over preindustrial levels). You still haven’t answered that question. But it seems that for some reason you put very little of your probability in the range that almost all climate researchers think is most likely. So who is being overcertain?
"

Phil Says: May 12th, 2010 at 2:55 pm

Check the IPCC report, chapter 8: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter8.pdf there is an extensive discussion of climate modeling and why it is good enough to be sure that anthropogenic climate change is real and why the key parameters are likely to be not extremely far from the (admittedly wide) range of estimates.

But what I am taking issue is with much larger than your three assertions, though I think they are all incorrect.

You are criticizing people for being “overcertain” because their estimate of climate sensitivity has an uncertainty of “only” 6C, but your own estimate has less uncertainty than that, in addition to being centered much lower than the experts think is reasonable. I do not think you have any basis for having a narrower confidence interval than the experts do, and I do not think you have any basis for having a much lower central estimate than the experts do.

[ Edit 05/13/10; Michael Tobis weighs in ]

Michael Tobis Says:  May 13th, 2010 at 12:10 pm

To your first two points, there is nothing that says that warming has to be simultaneous with greenhouse forcing. Under present circumstances we in fact expect the contrary: the thermal inertia of the oceans and the masking of industrial dust mask the committed warming. So your proposed tests simply aren’t valid.

Also, climate models make effective predictions of many things, not limited to global mean surface temperature. As a particular point, they show and have shown since the 1980s that greenhouse forced warming is a near-surface phenomenon, accompanied by stratospheric (upper atmosphere) cooling. They also show a pattern of warming that concentrates on land areas in continental interiors. These long standing predictions did in fact emerge. So your claim that climate models are without skill are without foundation.

All of this is silly; it treats “global warming” as a falsifiable theory, a claim of a causation that is either true or false. This is foolishness. The underlying phenomena, (thermal radiation, absorbtion and reradiation in gases) is two hundred year old physics that is as well established as anything in science.

What’s at issue is not “whether” but “how much”. As Phil correctly points out, those who call themselves “skeptics” are not making an argument from ignorance, they are making an argument from certainty. If we really had no idea what the sensitivity was, we should be more concerned than ever. The attitude suggested by people who claim to be “skeptics” is utterly inconsistent with a lack of confidence in the underlying science. It is a claim that the the sensitivity is certain to be much less than all prevailing evidence indicates.

(Phil’s a bit pessimistic; I’d say the consensus range is 2 C to 4.5 C per CO2 doubling. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n11/abs/ngeo337.html )

And what if it were zero? Would we be out of the woods? No, even with a global sensitivity of zero we could have huge forced climate change, say, warming the poles and cooling the tropics. There is no doubt that the amounts of CO2 and other gases we are adding to the atmosphere change the way energy flows through the system, a system which at heart is fluid and easy to change. Even in the absence of knowledge and a low global sensitivity there are huge risks.

And then there is ocean acidification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

Sorry. We have to deal with this.

[ Edit 05/13/10; my comment added ]

Seth Roberts says:

seth Says: May 12th, 2010 at 2:47 pm

[...] I’ll provide you my confidence interval in a few days.

It will not be forthcoming.  This was all a predictable exercise in the Art of Controversy.  But it is good to document how these each can be swatted down with minimal effort.

Rest In Peace, Hockey Stick

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We will start with the quote from Ian Jolliffe, and work backwards to unpack.

"http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/472646295/i-am-by-no-means-a-climate-change-denier-my"

“I am by no means a climate change denier. My strong [impression] is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick. It therefore seems crazy that the MBH hockey stick has been given such prominence and that a group of influential climate scientists have doggedly defended a piece of dubious statistics.”

- Ian Jolliffe"

My comment:

I am surprised to hear, today, that considered authoritative option thinks that the "hockey stick" is bad statistics, and that people who believe in global warming should admit this error, strive to be more rigorous, and move on with the other overwhelming facts of global warming.

I will modify my view.

Lets now work backward.

Ian Jolliffe's comment to Tamino: "http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/08/10/open-thread-5-2/#comment-21873"

Tamino blogs at "http://tamino.wordpress.com/"

Jolliffe requests an apology from Tamino, because he feels words were placed into his mouth, to give full liberty to any use of the statistical technique of "decentred PCA" when a different origin is considered to be meaningful, even though he did no such thing. "Decentred PCA" is the technique that Mann used to bring the hockey stick into clearly resolved existence.

A reasonable starting place, from a moderately skeptical point of view, for information on Michael E. Mann's "Hockey stick": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy"

Tamino apologized (also at "http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/08/10/open-thread-5-2/#comment-21873"), re-iterated that "It also seems to me (and I'm by no means the only one) that the origin in the analysis of MBH98 is meaningful" and ended by emphasizing a part Jolliffe's reply - "... the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick. It therefore seems crazy that the MBH hockey stick has been given such prominence ..." - which can be interpreted as back-tracking.

This has allowed some merchants of obscurantism to make hay: "http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/".

[Edit 04/16/10]

The above applies only to the original Mann hockey stick, for an overview of the evidence from all available sources of evidence of possible climate disruption see:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm

Complicity and Sympathy for Comforting but False & Dangerous Ideas

Image by Fergal OP via Flickr

Comment on:

http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/455387977/i-think-we-can-get-past-the-lie-and-it-was-a-lie

When dealing with someone so bugfuck crazy like RPJr or Bjorn, you practically have no choice but to abstract away these bad actors into fake-controversy-creating-automatons, and focus on those who allow these trolls to be heard.  And, practically everywhere from practically everyone, you find complicity and sympathy for these comforting but false & dangerous ideas.

There is no evidence that humanity likes science or the burden of responsibilities that pay out decades in the future.  Humanity does not mind playing with some the end products of both, like consumer electronics or the body of modern medical knowledge, but humanity really doesn't like either science or the responsibility of the very long view.

Our only tools are to consciously move the Overton Window as quickly as possible to something compatible with humanity continuing to exist, and, in the mean time, remember "[Our] basic function [is] to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable." (a quote from Milton Friedman, speaking about something other than climate change, but the idea applies).  Obviously, that means our last, best hopes will be way past their shelf life, and we will only be left crude largely ineffectual measures for cooling the globe and dumping antacid into the ocean.  It also means making the best arguments for the alleged "Conservatives" and "Libertarians" for them, because their mental failure modes mean they themselves cannot; because those bodies of thought, reasonably applied, have something to offer to guide towards sensible policy.

[Edit 3/18/10]

Consider RPJr's strange book review in Nature - he is reviewing 4 books, none less than 300 pages, and his review could fit comfortably on 2 sheets of college ruled paper, even though the books are competing for space with RPJr's opinions.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7287/full/464352a.html

It is a perfect example of concern trolling.  Quoting:

> Incremental approaches to climate mitigation that can be modified by experience offer a chance that realistic and democratically grounded actions might rise to a challenge that will be with us for decades to come.

In other words, don't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, especially if the theater is actually on fire.  Eventually, enough of the patrons will catch on fire to allow a rough consensus to take hold. Poppycock.

The piece is self-refuting, but the issue is that it was allowed to be published.  We should hold the editors of Nature up to ridicule.  If those editors wish that the issue is taken away from the facts of science and into the realm of political science and economics (as they must plainly feel), then print articles papers from publishing political scientists and economists.  Instead of concern trolls without any stake in substantive argumentation.

[Edit 03-26-10: see comment by Marion Delgado]

Andrew Gelman and Climate Change Concern Trolling

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Andrew Gelman's blog [ http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/ ] has some of the best writing on climate change when Phillip Price submits a post [ see http://manuelmoeg.blogspot.com/2009/12/talking-about-climate-change-publishing.html ] and has some of the worst writing when Andrew Gelman himself posts.

Andrew Gelman seems to be sympathetic to conspiratorial thinking about the scientific culture around climate change.  My feeling is that in his own field of statistics, Bayesian techniques have been actively suppressed and misrepresented, so Gelman is open to the idea that investigators who don't see human global warming could be actively suppressed and misrepresented too.

Which is fine, if the arguments were not so lame.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/02/stabilizing_fee.html
(Anonymous concern troll says any paper contradicting Arrhenius' 1896 climate model is likely to be self suppressed. And if this is not the point of the anonymous question, what is?)
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/12/how_do_i_form_m.html
(Before Andrew Gelman steps onto a subway train, he ponders that the civil engineers that designed the train might be laboring under thoughts so stupid that they can only come from some aspect of the civil engineering consensus in a particularly ugly undigested form. And he is paralyzed by fits of panic. And if this is not the point of Gelman's "Beyond my limited sphere of scientific compresension, I dunno", what is?)

It could be more convincingly argued that:

(1) human activity is making an ice age less likely

(2) global warming skepticism and preference for inaction plays a semi-rational role in the debate, not because of the poor quality of their arguments, but as a brake against premature solutions:

Image by Auntie P via Flickr

Al Gore holding up a mercury light bulb in "An Inconvenient Truth",
Ed Begley, Jr. installing semiconductor solar panels to all exposed surfaces of his home,
the US government giving loans to Tesla electric cars

... all of which are very likely contributing to burning *more* fossil fuels, not less, because the total costs over those product's entire lifetime (including manufacturing plants that themselves burn fossil fuels, including safe disposal of wastes) are unrepresented by the relatively small price charged to consumers.  Better to tax fossil fuels in rich countries and spend that money on research placed in the public domain so even the poorest countries can benefit.  At a gradual rate of increase, so as to have minimum harm to productivity.

But, instead, we get lame concern trolling about scientific conspiracies.  I get the tiresome feeling that the global warming skeptics need to be saved from themselves, to have the people convinced by the scientific consensus to make their best arguments for them, because they cannon help but simply echo the last thing they heard from someone with a direct financial link to oil companies.  Tiresome.

My reply to the anonymous concern troll:

> If the prediction of a climate model is very much outside the consensus predictions, it is not likely to be published.

More arguing that climate science is a nonesuch science.  Taken to the logical extreme, we can argue that Einstein's papers on Special and General Relativity are not likely to be published (and that is why we still use epicycles today).  Taken to the logical extreme, we can posit that Alex Rodriguez is not likely to swing for the fences.  The blockbuster behavior of the players in the 99.999% percentile is poorly predicted by the tentative behavior of the average player.

Secondly, science publishing is not the only market for climate modeling.  Commodities traders and the reinsurance market for hedging risk on multi-year massive construction projects have a need for accurate climate modeling, because on those time scales a long range weather report would be worthless.  Those players are willing to leave millions on the table just so their hired gun scientists can parrot safe results that are unlikely to rattle tea cups at the next faculty function?  Unlikely.

I beg your forgiveness for the following snarkiness.  Can your anonymous concern troll name a single branch of science that has remained on a strictly linear trajectory since 1896?  Besides phrenology.

[ Edit 2/15/10 ]

The goalposts have been moved in the comments is Andrew Gelman's post on February 12.  It moved to always having the models subjected to a growing set of data, never casting out past data (good, good).  It moved to meta-analysis of all available models, over time (good, good).  It moved to the variance of published models compared to the subjective guessed distributions of the individual practicing scientists (fine, fine).  But where happened to the original claim "If the prediction of a climate model is very much outside the consensus predictions, it is not likely to be published."?

My comment submitted:

Marc Levy

> They find that if you ask climate experts to characterize their subjective best guess as to the distribution of key climate change parameters, you observe far more variance ... than you observe when you look at the distribution of all the climate model outputs.

This is to be expected, because no one would represent *any* model as perfectly describing reality - if it was perfect, it would no longer be a model, anymore.  Only pure mathematics has the benefit of being able to switch the analysis to a proved isomorphism that is easier to compute.  Every model is an adequate simplification, over a domain, and it is hoped the failure modes are understood so the model is not misused.  But the option of "proving" the model a perfect representation of reality is not available.

Useful scientific models typically give sharp results - sharper results than field readings, even counting for input precision or rounding in iteration, etc.  The models are useful *because* they give sharp results - or else you would have the perverse consequence of improving the usefulness of a model by adding slop into it to increase the variance.  A bound on the error is useful to track, but no one would actually mix in slop in a model to force the variance wider, even if the model's variance doesn't match field readings.

Any expert would know very well all the possible failure modes and other limitations of a particular model, that so their subjective guessed distribution would have greater variance than the considered model because of that knowledge.  The scientist possess what humans value as knowledge, the documented model cannot (and so scientists cannot be replaced with the models of their creation).  Why else might the variance be greater?  -- perhaps the scientist is in possession of they consider to be a better model, not yet published.  Or perhaps, the scientist is simply aware of the possibility of a better model.

The relatively uncontroversial model of satellite orbits is informative.  They are tighter because they, of course, consider fewer particles than Mother Nature is able to consider.  So they can consider events in the future, because they run faster than reality, and so they can run on economically available hardware.  No one would consider their tighter variance than the variance of observatory readings to be surprising, much less consider it a failure of the model.  Only if there was misrepresentation of best knowledge of the model's error bound, or failure modes, or applicable domain, and then, it would not be a failure of the model, it would be a misapplication by a human agent.

Can I note that the goalposts have been moved?  The original issue was "stabilizing feedback" and the original question contained the assertion "If the prediction of a climate model is very much outside the consensus predictions, it is not likely to be published."  There are other interesting issues to consider, but only after the parties admit that the goalposts have been moved and the focus of the argument shifted.

Not Evil, Just Wrong (Mostly) - Moral analysis of Global Warming Denial

Michael Tobis does it again, a substantial moral analysis of global warming denial:

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Not Evil, Just Wrong (Mostly) - Michael Tobis - Only In It For The Gold: "I have no trace of a doubt that sustainability issues are ethical issues. Talking about ethical issues without mention of evil is a bit like playing hockey without looking at the puck.

[...]

Let me be clear. As the movie title (incorrectly I think) claims about President-elect Gore, it is possible to be 'not evil, just wrong' about issues of substance. I believe most of the people who are participating in the attacks on climate science are doing so more or less in good faith, having been led down a path of bizarrely twisted interpretations of who we climate scientists are, what we do, and how we got to where we are. The question is who has been doing the leading.

The confusion about climate science pretty much requires a complete ignorance of the tradition of Jule Charney, [...] and the profound and elegant depth of its achievements. People to whom the Charney tradition is invisible perceive a vastly less sophisticated science than actually exists. It's odd; you'd think the visible improvement in weather forecasting would carry some weight [...]

The Charney tradition (along with the related Stommel tradition in oceanography) is the intellectual core of climatology, but it's pretty much invisible to the outside world. It just doesn't reduce to a nutshell easily. (And at least when I learned the stuff, the pedagogy was lousy to make matters even worse.) So it's easy for people to have essentially no idea that a real and rich science exists. They will put climatology on a par with, say, ecosystem dynamics or economics in 'maturity'.

[...]

But this underestimation is not enough to account for our present dysfunction on this matter. The underestimation of the sophistication of planetary physics does not suffice to argue for 'no need to control CO2 emissions'.

Image by Geonostalgy for the future via Flickr

Consider what the evidence actually shows based on simple physics that predates Charney and Stommel. As is well-known, that evidence (based in radiative transfer and broadly confirmed in plaeoclimate observations) shows that greenhouse gases play a significant role in the energy flows through the system, so that once human perturbations on CO2 concentrations become comparable to and ultimately exceed natural CO2 concentrations, the balance would necessarily change. We also know from geological evidence that very large shifts in climate are possible in consequence of relatively small forcings. Consequently, large CO2 increases are risky. The less we stipulate that we know about the system, the less we can constrain those risks. The plausible worst case (say the 5% credibility scenario) gets more expensive the less we know. Thus the less we know, the more vigorously we ought to refrain from emissions.

[...]
[... We] are in trouble as a consequence of the success of this program of misdirection and fearmongering. The techniques being used to undermine the communication channels between legitimate science and competent governance will be with us forever. We will forever be challenged by the malicious techniques that have been developed in this trumped-up debate. We had better develop an immune system to this sort of bullshit or sooner or later some sort of spectacular disaster will result.

"

Michael puts a fine point on it in the comments below:

[...]

At issue here is a bunch of more or less innocent scientists, maybe splitting a hair wrong once in a while this way or that. It's about a scientific subculture supported in substance by every major scientific body on earth, and subjected to what amounts to the extreme libel and defamation.  [...]

[...]

If you compare this to a few dozen grumpy bearded green guys who'd love to be just as mean and nasty if they could, you are just resorting to the journalist's favorite hiding place, the middle.

Image via Wikipedia

I don't even know if the bearded guys exist, frankly. But even if they do, what importance do they have in the face of this grotesque and successful organized lying, by major media outlets, senators, governors, CEOs and even preachers?

I know balance is your stock in trade as a J-school type, but some situations just don't balance. It's not a law of nature that bad guys are equally distributed on both sides. You actually have an ethical responsibility to pick this time, and to do it right.

Please. Get real. This matters.

The only thing in the favor of those who care about the truth is that the situation is not simply going to go away.

Talking about Climate Change: Publishing your Probability Density and Reasoning

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"Phil" from "Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science" blog, I believe Phillip Price [ http://eetd.lbl.gov/ie/apt/staff/PricePN.html http://www.creekcats.com/pnprice/Job.html ].

As I say in my comments "Thank you for publishing your probability density for climate sensitivity, and the precise reasoning behind it. This is, practically, the _only_ way to communicate one's considered beliefs for this subject - if one is truly interested in communicating and not just indulging in motivated obscurantism or the art of controversy."

How helpful to have someone state their probability density and reasons behind it. It communicates so much.

Phillip Price: Say a little prior for me: more on climate change:

"Four out of the last 15 posts on this blog have been related to climate change, which is probably a higher ratio than Andrew would like. But lots of people keep responding to them, so the principle 'give the people what they want' suggests that another one won't hurt too much. So, here it is. If you haven't read the other posts, take a look at Andrew's thoughts about forming scientific attitudes, and my thoughts on Climategate and my suggestions for characterizing beliefs. And definitely read the comments on those, too, many of which are excellent.

I want to get a graphic 'above the fold', so here's the plot I'll be talking about.
...

Finally, we get to the graphic. Each of these probability distributions is supposed to summarize the belief of a different person. In blue, we have an 'anthropogenic climate change denier.' This is someone who just doesn't believe that doubling of atmospheric CO2 could have any substantial impact on the global mean temperature. I don't know if any such people think the effect could be negative, but maybe they do; if they don't, then just move all of that negative probability into the low positive range somewhere. At any rate, these people are convinced that there is just the right amount of negative feedback to cancel out the known effect of CO2 and the expected effect of water vapor.
...
But I think the hypothetical 'skeptic' curve puts way too much probability on very low values --- not as bad as the 'denier', but still, this is someone who is unjustifiably convinced that negative feedbacks will come close to counteracting the effects of CO2.

(By the way, none of the lines are supposed to go below zero, or even go to zero, at 6C, but the drawing software I used has done some funny stuff there and it doesn't seem worth fixing. Oh, and each of the curves is intended to have the same integral -- unity -- but since this is just a by-hand sketch, they probably don't).

Above, I've opened my soul, as it were, to discuss why I believe what I believe. Part of my belief, actually a substantial part, is informed by a very simple physical model that I believe is useful in spite of its simplicity, that shifts my prior well away from 0 as a reasonable estimate of climate sensitivity. What if you don't have the physics background to evaluate such a model for yourself? Then, you're more or less forced to choose who you care to believe: deniers, skeptics, 'experts,' journalists, bloggers, friends...

In a comment on Andrew's entry about forming attitudes on scientific issues I said this:

When it comes to anthropogenic climate change, if someone wants to allocate some probability to the chance that the skeptics have it right, I think that's a very reasonable thing to do. Make it 90% mainstream, 10% skeptics, or even 75% mainstream, 25% skeptics if you are are heavily inclined towards the skeptical camp. But there are people out there who are 90-10 the other way! If you are an expert climate modeler and you think your colleagues have the science wrong, that's one thing. If you're just some schmoe who only knows what he reads in the papers, and you choose to assign a 90% or 95% probability to the conclusions of the small band of skeptics...where does that come from? Do you really think the experts in a field get it wrong 90% or 95% of the time?

I think I'll leave it there.

"

My comments:

Thank you for publishing your probability density for climate sensitivity, and the precise reasoning behind it. This is, practically, the _only_ way to communicate one's considered beliefs for this subject - if one is truly interested in communicating and not just indulging in motivated obscurantism or the art of controversy.

I wish I had the chops to draw one myself. I don't, so I rely on the experts currently publishing articles. I find it hysterical to shriek about the corrupting influence of funding - I am not holding my breath waiting for the appearance of researchers comprised solely of incorruptible energy, freed of the need for money because they draw sustenance from the empty ether. Oh, please. All humans have their self-serving motivations, and reasonable people deal it with accordingly and with due measure. And, scientists never claimed to not be human.

Image via Wikipedia

I wish I had the chops to draw the _other_ curve with regards to carbon dioxide - loss of tonnage of fished protein/nutrition due to ocean acidification. Global temperature and ocean acidification both have a large expected impact on human civilization.

> The Kyoto Treaty was a large scale effort...

Surely the intervention can only earn the description of "large" if *some* authority judges it probable to effect the desired change. Otherwise, I could call the Dubai Towers a "large scale effort" to bridge the span to the surface of the moon.

It can be honestly asserted that no large scale efforts have been made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

My Nisbet Gripe, Cont'd

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Michael Tobis - Only In It For The Gold

My Nisbet Gripe, Cont'd: "I have no objection to the idea of framing messages effectively. Until this week, I had no idea why some people were complaining so bitterly about Nisbet.

But Nisbet is in the strange headspace of politics, where science is just a piece of furniture on the landscape of politics. What's more, it's a black box which emits certain very simple results. And when he describes the box, he gets it hopelessly wrong, and uses the bizarre and broken frames of the worst elements of the press.

The problem isn't the concept of framing. The problem is that the guy who has done the best job of staking out 'framing' as his personal territory has about the most toxic set of frames out there for our issues. There is no getting rid of writing to your audience, but the word 'framing' itself isn't all that valuable. If it belongs to Nisbet I don't want it.

One thing I've learned recently is that while in many ways I behave like a journalist, I simply have almost no interest in 'news' any more than I am interested in 'sports'. Events in sports fall clearly into the space of 'don't matter'. In fifty years nobody will remember who won the superbowl this season. In politics, they will remember Obama's name, but little of what he said or did.

As long as we play on the battlefield of week-to-week politics and don't actually look into the science box, we lose the war of words. Yes, the right is disposed against us and the left toward us, pretty much for arbitrary cultural reasons. But the opposition is free to twist the facts and we aren't. So they pick off people as they start to pay attention and the mythology of massive corruption in climate science gets further elaborated.

If we don't play the long game, if we don't try to revive critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, if we don't go beyond assertion and into explanation, we are playing on the opposition's turf.

Nisbet may have done a good job of describing the opposition's turf, but that is all he knows. He, specifically, is an example of a person lacking a scientific education remotely commensurate with his capacities and interests. His approach embodies the substitution of politics for knowledge.

The long game is our home turf, and we have to stop listening to people who miss that point completely. The absurdly short time scales and shallow symbolic allegiances and frantic half-crazed yuppie obsessions du jour of the beltway and the press are the problem, not the solution.

"

My comment to the post:

I am slack-jawed. You summed up Nisbet perfectly. You communicated better than I could have, exactly how Nisbet rubs me the wrong way. I am compelled to go into detail about how good a job you did.

> Yes, the right is disposed against us and the left toward us, pretty much for arbitrary cultural reasons.

Image by vodstrup via Flickr

A good thing to remember. Once the costs of excess atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches the trillions (with human cultures displaced from drought and flooding, loss of food and wood production from climate change, and loss of ocean protein and nutrition from acidification), the left cannot be counted on to spend scarce resources effectively, because of the need to reward loyal voting blocks. (Not claiming the right will be any better.)

> Nisbet may have done a good job of describing the opposition's turf, but that is all he knows. He, specifically, is an example of a person lacking a scientific education remotely commensurate with his capacities and interests. His approach embodies the substitution of politics for knowledge.

So cruel, and so true.

Discovering Science Writer John Mashey

Image by Voyageur Solitaire-mladjenovic_n via Flickr

I thought I was well versed in the science writing around climate change, but I had never heard of John Mashey. What I discovered today was science and critical thinking writing of the highest caliber. Go to "Another Silly Climate Petition Exposed", and read (or skim over) the 128(!) page analysis of the anti-science petition at the American Physical Society (APS).

http://www.desmogblog.com/another-silly-climate-petition-exposed

The American Physical Society (APS) was petitioned by 206 people, about 0.45% of the 47,000 members, to discard its climate change position and declare decades of climate research non-existent. The Petition was _overwhelmingly_ rejected, but this anti-science campaign offers a useful case study. The Petition signers? demographics are compared to those of APS in general. Then, the social network behind the petition is analyzed in detail, person by person for the first 121 signers. This might seem a grassroots groundswell of informed expert argument with the existing position, but it is not. Rather, it seems to have originated within a small network of people, not field experts, but with a long history of manufacturing such things, plausibly at the Heartland Institute‘s NYC climate conference March 8-10, 2009. APS physicists can, do, and will contribute strongly to solving the 21st century's conjoined climate+energy problem, but this petition was a silly distraction, and rightly rejected. However, its existence was widely touted to the public.

I went through the whole document, and I never encountered such a thorough dissection of "Art of Controversy" with regards to Science and Anti-Science. (Using Schopenhauer's term for denialism or creating controversy where there really is none in an attempt to frustrate rational analysis and action). These are Mashey's diagrams of the ideal of how science affects policy: ... and the anti-science alternative of "science bypass": Science Bypass - Executive Summary

Mashey: Science bypass is familiar to people involved with PR, lobbying, politics and those few scientific disciplines facing well-organized attacks, but simply alien and confusing to many scientists. This paper offers a case study to help people understand the tactics, as APS is unlikely to be the only target of such campaigns, often mounted, not to convince scientists, but to create and maintain doubt in the public.

Science Bypass - Section 1: Introduction and Definitions

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This whole section has clear eyed classifications of the recurring themes in the Art of Controversy. Or as Mashey says:

Agnotology was coined by Stanford's Robert N. Proctor to describe the deliberate production of ignorance and doubt.

I will refer to this whole section anytime I am dealing with denialists. Science Bypass - Section 3: The Petition - Commentary

Mashey: This petition is silly. One need only study the 2007 IPCC AR4 to know how meaningless or wrong is the paragraph starting “Greenhouse gases..” The unusualness of 20th and 21st century climate change is well established by multiple lines of evidence. It certainly has been warmer, and during most of those times, large parts of the current USA were under water. Any serious gardener knows Liebig?s Law - growth is limited by the most restrictive factor. No amount of extra CO2 will grow corn in the Sahara Desert. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum Extra CO2 can be helpful in greenhouses with sufficient water, sun, and other nutrients, a condition untrue for most farms. Those who grow up on farms usually learn this by the time they are 10, but apparently the signers have not. Water is the most common restriction. Higher temperatures and Hadley Cell expansion will move rain elsewhere and increase evaporation, especially in places like the US SouthWest. CA is seriously-dependent on Sierra snowpack, always has water problems, and grows half the fruit and vegetables in the USA. Oddly, at least a third of the signers live in the US SouthWest. [The petition] simply asserts ideas contrary to the large, well-tested body of peer-reviewed research in top journals, with no backup whatsoever except belief. All of this is simply anti-science, akin to brain surgeons declaring cardiologists ignorant of heart disease.

Science Bypass - Section 5: Demographics of Signers versus APS Membership Demonstration that the demographics of the signers does not (at all) match the demographics of the whole of APS Membership.

The signer list seems unrepresentative of the APS membership. As a group, the signers are certainly older, seem likely more politically conservative, and somewhat more likely to be male than the total membership.

Science Bypass - Section 6: Social Networks Behind the Petition Simply amazing work. By studying the list of names of earlier anti-climate-science petitions, John Mashey can study the social networks of each "wave" of new signers. Must be read to be believed how pains-taking Mashey was. Science Bypass - Section 7: Why?

Mashey: Why might well-educated physicists sign this silly petition? I do not know any personally, so I can only speculate. I have worked over the last year to create frameworks to help analyze issues of science and anti-science.

From Section 7: Scientist becoming Anti-Scientist Cognitive Bias Failure Modes I have never seen such an thoughtful and comprehensive listing of cognitive bias failure modes, before.

Mashey: IF anti-science THEN one or more following reasons likely to be found; not all combinations make sense.

Cognitive Bias Failure Modes - Finance

• FIN1 Huge: long-term, direct economic organizational self-interest
• FIN2 Large: long-term, direct organizational interest, via funding from above
• FIN3 Personal: direct economic interest, effectively paid for anti-science
• FIN4 Plausible Fear: personal economic impacts, less direct, employee
• FIN5 Vague fear: personal economic impacts; general public
• ---- LB suggests "reference dependency" and "non-rational risk assessment"

Cognitive Bias Failure Modes - Ideology

• IDE1 Professional (paid political advocacy; anti-regulation; extreme free-market)
• IDE2 Public (political advocacy; anti-regulation; extreme free-market, beyond usual)

Cognitive Bias Failure Modes - Politics

• POL1 Political wedge tactic: "X says it", more votes
• POL2 Against: "Cannot stand X, so anything they say is wrong"
• ---- Example: "greenie treehugger environmentalists", or "Al Gore"

Cognitive Bias Failure Modes - Psychology

• PSY1 Conflates: confuses non-science with real science, dismisses latter as former
• PSY2 Contrarian nature; even without attention
• PSY3 Contrarian attention: gets much more attention/publicity; may help career
• PSY4 Ego/pride: in skepticism in general and of scientists in particular
• PSY5 Dunning-Kruger Effect: incompetent and does not know it
• PSY6 High-bar, low-bar: real science takes work; contrarian, easy acceptance
• PSY7 Ambiguity-intolerance: all-or-none thinking; "Authoritarian personality" ??
• PSY8 Personal anchor: encounters anti-science early, accepts, sticks
• PSY9 General psychology denial: problem just too big

Cognitive Bias Failure Modes - Technical and Scientific Workers specific

• TEC1 Long Anchor: early position from TEC0, held long, ~Type II error)
• ---- Early doubts OK, but mainstream has long ago moved. TEC7, PSY2?
• TEC2 Field non-science: evidence stays weak, mild ~Type I error (solar?)
• TEC3 Field pseudo-science: wrong: strongly disproved, strong ~Type I error
• ---- Scientist has an idea, but mainstream science gets in its way. (cosmic?)
• TEC4 Intra-field (or nearby) conflict: personal, factional; discipline rivalry
• ---- Some meteorologists and TV weather people seem especially
• ---- prone to distrusting climate scientists, especially modelers.
• ---- Guess: the former have to predict noise, and get criticized when they miss.
• ---- Some may not understand the physics and methods of climate modeling.
• TEC5 "Going emeritus": (retired, or close) person starts opining beyond expertise
• ---- These are truly sad cases. Sometimes response to perceived loss of influence.
• ---- If inside field and has long done good work, then… might be TEC1, PSY3, PSY1
• TEC6 Ego: smarter than field scientists, prove them wrong
• TEC7 Inter-field conflict: many in one field dislike (sometimes newer) field
• ---- Unsurprising that some mining/petroleum engineers disbelive AGW. (FIN4)
• ---- Some a) physicists, b) engineers, c) economists, d) political scientists seem
• ---- unusually likely to distrust climate science. (Speculative) reasons complex.
• ---- DOE, nuclear, weapons folks sometimes dislike environmentalists…
• TEC8 Over-generalization: of methods from own area, models, proofs, etc

Following understandable, but at some point become real anti-science TEC1 or PSY1

• TEC0 Normal scientific argument evidence, value, uncertainty ?=>TEC1
• PSY0 Irked: exaggeration, non-science, bad journalism, moral arguments ?=>PSY1

Science Bypass - Section 8: Conclusion

Mashey: As a group, the signers have written very little findable peer-reviewed climate research. Some have written books, websites and other pieces, some of which show fervent passion to prove mainstream climate science wrong. The demographics are very different from that of APS. Without being able to prove the exact connections, it is fairly easy to find strong past associations and plausible connections to recognize an act of a dedicated social network willing to support anti-science, not as a grassroots movement by physicists. The data offers strong hints that politics and ideology may have more influence on signing than does normal science. Even those who write books and do lectures often cite outright pseudoscience of the poorest quality, which requires serious suspension of disbelief. Finally, this Petition is a direct descendant of the PR approach outlined for the cigarette companies in 1954, and long practiced by SEPP, GMI, Heartland, and CATO, entities clearly, if not so obviously, involved in this Petition.

More from Mashey - Writings on Climate-Change and Critical Thinking

• Mashey's blog comment: Reasons for Anti-Science

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/the_australians_war_on_science_28.php#comment-1272743

• Image via Wikipedia

  Mashey's: Bjorn Lomborg, Wizard of misdirection & Reincarnation of Julian Simon

http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/lomborg-long-game/

"Watch the belt-buckle, ignore the head-fakes." ... In politics, there is quite often a difference between what someone says and what they really want, and it takes a while to sort it out.

• John Mashey on how to learn about science

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/08/john_mashey_on_how_to_learn_ab.php

Critical Thinking Reading List: For general defense against disinformation of various sorts:

• Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics - Untangling numbers from the media, politicians, and activists, 2001
• Nicholas Capaldi, The Art of Deception, 1987
• Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics, 1954. Classic, indispensable, cheap.
• Gerald Everett Jones, How to Lie with Charts, 1995
• Paul Kurtz, ed, Skeptical Odysseys, 2001
• Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 1991
• John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences, 1998
• Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983. Most about doing it right, but Chapter 2 is about doing it wrong, and recognizing such. A truly wonderful and beautiful book, as are Tufte's later three, all of which are worth having for anyone who wants inspiration for good presentation of data.

Scientists can believe strange things and stick with them:

• Robert Ehrlich, Nine Crazy Ideas in Science- A few might even be true, 2001. Physicist offers advice in evaluating crazy-sounding ideas; pp 5-10 is nice summary of evaluation criteria.
• Robert Ehrlich, 8 Preposterous Propositions, 2003
• Many people can believe really strange things, some of which the originators believe, and some of which are hoaxes. Some retain belief even after the hoaxers show them how they did it.:
• Kendrick Frazier, Ed, Science Confronts the Paranormal, 1986
• Martin Gardner, Science Good, Bad and Bogus, 1981
• Martin Gardner, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels - debunking pseudoscience, 2000
• Phlip Plait, Bad Astronomy, 2002
• James Randi, Flim-Flam, 1986
• Jim Schnabel, Round in Circles, 1994. People can believe in weird things like alien crop circles, even after "Doug and Dave" explained.

Happy reading, from Mashey's book list, and from Mashey himself!

Scientific software quality and Global Warming

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Very well written response by Michael Tobis to this question from Jon Pipitone "Do likely bugs in the software of climate models cast doubt on the scientific consensus on human factors in global warming?"

jon pipitone: Scientific software quality: what would it take to convince software engineers?: "

Michael Tobis said...

regebro asks what looks like a reasonable question, but it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of a question that is roughly equivalent to what the difference between weather and climate is. We have very little skill predicting one year out, even assuming no volcanoes and such. Most of the predictability of the detailed state atmosphere vanishes in three weeks or so. But at a multidecadal time scale the problem changes character. Technically, we are no longer dealing with an initial value problem but with a boundary value problem, even though the underlying dynamics are the same. We are not in that case looking for details in any specific year, but for the statistics over an extended period. In a mathematical sense that is an 'easier' problem; it is more constrained by energy balances than by nonlinear fluid dynamics. The messy stuff basically averages out and the residual is what we try to predict. In fact, maybe I'll use that as a definition of climate. It's 'what you can say about the system after the messy unpredictable part gets averaged out'. That's the basis for climate change modeling.

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As for Jon's question, the models are wretched pieces of engineering. No commercial shop would release anything nearly as balky, hard to deploy, or prone to failure. It makes open source look good. And that has almost no bearing on whether they are suitable for the purpose. In fact, sometimes models are used well and sometimes they are used badly. This in turn is a scientific, not a software question. All this said, I desperately wish the software were better, and I think we could address many more scientifically meaningful problems much more effectively if it were. Finally, if you think the question is 'global warming, yes or no' the large models in question are much less relevant than many people would have you believe. The answer to that question is yes, to the extent of about 3 degrees per CO2 doubling. The idea that such a conclusion comes from complex models is wrong.

"

I will forgive Mr. Tobis for the dig against open source software ;) I maintain the difference in quality between the very best and the very worst engineered open source software projects makes it very difficult to say anything sensible about the totality.

Also, metrics in software development cannot predict the quality of output of any particular group working on a particular problem - too many confounding issues. For example, the developer with the highest bug count tends to be the best developer on the team - nobody else is trusted to tackle the hardest coding issues.

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Another issue is the issue of making scientific computations reproducible. Even more basic than if a particular computation is correct is making sure that computation can be reproduced by another group.

Making scientific computations reproducible

Computing in Science and Engineering archive

Volume 2 , Issue 6 (November 2000)

Pages: 61 - 67

ISSN:1521-9615

Authors

Matthias Schwab

Martin Karrenbach

Jon Claerbout

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=369555