The Subterranean War on Science? A comment.

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128 responses to “The Subterranean War on Science? A comment.”

1. 

   Martin Lack

   November 3, 2013

   Hi Warren. Interesting comments indeed. Here are my thoughts.
   1. Vexatious and/or trivial requests for data should be very easily identifiable where/when, for example, the data is already in the public domain or where the same person makes multiple requests for information. The fact that organisations like the Heartland Institute and Tea Party encourage and/or train people how to do this is also in the public domain (so please don’t ask me to provide the data).
   2. Third-party re-analysis of data should be welcomed, except where the request is driven by a prejudicial need to arrive at an alternative conclusion. This is not scepticism; it is ideological blindness. I am not sure what recent history you refer to but, for the sake of your credibility, I hope it is not ‘Climategate’. Just in case it is, however, please note: Climate change is not a Communist conspiracy to stall Western development. It is an natural consequence of human waste production (i.e. adding fossilised carbon to the biosphere thousands of times faster than it can be returned to the geosphere).
   3. You seem to be in severe danger of pandering to the fallacy of ‘the marketplace of ideas’, with which our post-modern World is afflicted. Whether it be vox pop ‘talking heads’ on the news – or the endless repetition of non-expert in the pursuit of ‘balanced reporting’ – not all opinions have equal merit. As the government’s chief scientific adviser has recently pointed out, the question as to whether or not humans are adversely affecting the Earth’s climate is not a subject upon which opinions matter; there is a right and a wrong answer.

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2. 

   Richard Drake

   November 3, 2013

   Martin Lack:

   Climate change is not a Communist conspiracy to stall Western development.

   I’d have to agree with this. Climate change has been going on since the planet Earth formed about four billion years ago. Communism most people would date from Marx and the Communist Manifesto in 1848, less than two hundred years ago, though I think Restiv coined the term during the French revolutionary era. So let’s make it 250 years. It still isn’t going to fly.

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   1. 

      Martin Lack

      November 3, 2013

      As I am sure you appreciate, Richard, I was attempting to ridicule the ‘Watermelon’ hypothesis of James Delingpole (i.e. all environmentalists are communists in disguise). So as not to repeat myself unnecessarily, I would refer you to my initial response to Paul below.

      However, I really do think that both you and he should do some research to ascertain what level of knowledge someone has before trotting-out your facile and easily falsifiable talking points. Yes, the Earth’s climate has changed before but, there is now a great deal of palaeoclimatic evidence telling us that, 20th Century warming and current warmth; ocean warmth and lowering pH; and current rates of ice melting on land and sea are all unprecedented in the last million years.

      As such, humanity has brought to an end the very climate and sea level stability that made agriculture, urbanisation, civilisation and modernity possible. We humans did not evolve in a Permian environment and, just as back then, most life of Earth will not survive if we allow a return to such conditions to become inevitable (as the current business-funded policy paralysis is making increasingly likely).

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3. 

   Jonathan Jones

   November 3, 2013

   Warren & Martin,

   Vexatious has a technical meaning in FOI matters, which is important as there is a specific exemption from the need to answer vexatious requests. This is all discussed in great detail at the ICO website: see for example http://www.ico.org.uk/foikb/FOIPolicyVexatiousrequests.htm

   Interestingly “vexatious” is one of the very few grounds which UEA did not try to use in opposing my FOI request (they relied instead on the bizarre claim that the data was simultaneously (a) public domain, (b) commercially confidential, and (c) diplomatically sensitive). Since UEA did not try to use this ground we don’t have a formal ruling on whether or not my claim was vexatious, but given the manner in which the ICO completely dismissed all UEA’s other claims it seems very unlikely that they thought my request was vexatious. Full details are at http://climateaudit.org/2011/06/27/ico-orders-uea-to-produce-crutem-station-data/ for those who are interested.

   Third-party re-analysis of data should always be welcomed, even where the request is driven by a “prejudicial need to arrive at an alternative conclusion”; any “ideological blindness” will betray itself in the subsequent analysis and conclusions, and the problems can be tackled then.

   The strength of science lies precisely in its ability to defend itself from ideological attack through the application of facts and reason, and attempts to avoid attack by political means just make scientists (and thus science) look weak. The famous quote from Phil Jones “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it” is one of the most spectacularly stupid statements I have read anywhere in the climate debate: he should have given out his data precisely because their aim was to find something wrong with it.

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   1. 

      Martin Lack

      November 3, 2013

      Thanks Jonathan. Upon reflection, I would say you are right about point #2.

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4. 

   Paul Dennis

   November 3, 2013

   Martin Lack –

   “Third-party re-analysis of data should be welcomed, except where the request is driven by a prejudicial need to arrive at an alternative conclusion. This is not scepticism; it is ideological blindness. ”

   Who decides where a request is driven by ideological blindness? Is it those scientists who use ‘home brew’ statistics that have not been validated, those that try to shoe horn every observation of the natural world, modern and palaeo, into the current paradigm of a CO2 driven climate. This is of itself simply another form of ideological blindness. This is evident in those scientists that top and tail every paper and grant application with a description of how climate is changing in an unprecedented way because of CO2 even when their research and results have little or nothing to add to the debate?

   In short all data that has been collected as part of publicly funded research should be open and accessible to everyone without caveat. Their analysis of the data will stand or fall on its merits.

   Any scientist or citizen should not fear open access

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   1. 

      Martin Lack

      November 3, 2013

      With regret, Paul, climate scientists are not trying to “shoe-horn every observation… into the current paradigm” of anything. We would not be well on the way to a Eocene-like World if CO2 were not the main driver of change. At 40% more CO2 than any time in the last 800 thousand years, we are not just coming out of the last Ice Age (which ended 12k years ago) or the Little Ice Age (which was not a global event and did not step outside the envelope of that same 800k years). Tyndall and Arrhenius predicted increased CO2 would warm the planet and it has. Atmospheric Physics predicted a warmer atmosphere with more moisture in it more of the time would lead to a wider range of more frequent extreme weather events and it has. This is not confirmation bias, it is validation of a hypothesis that can explain multi-decadal warming; whereas natural (random and/or short-term) climate forcings cannot.

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5. 

   Paul Dennis

   November 3, 2013

   Martin, having reviewed many papers and grant applications I have to tell you that shoe horning is de rigeur. We are very far from an Eocene like world. We’re not even at an Eemian like world which had 100ppm lower CO2 than the present day. Then one might consider the Hirnantian world in which CO2 levels were some 16 to 20x the present day with continental ice volumes greater than the Pleistocene maxima. And contra your suggestion recent data show that perhaps the Little Ice age was a much more global event than you suggest. It’s hard to see how such observations fit readily with a simplistic model of climate in which CO2 is the sole thermostat.

   I think you have hit on the crux of the debate. I agree with you. CO2 is a radiatively active gas in the atmosphere. Increasing CO2 levels leads to a theoretical climate sensitivity of ca. 1 degree C per CO2 doubling. Any estimates of a higher climate sensitivity are rooted in the outputs of GCM’s. Unfortunately observations on a range of time scales including the modern period, the Holocene, LGM to present day and deeper geologic time all indicate a low climate sensitivity that is broadly consistent with a near zero feedback. This has to raise serious questions about the GCM’s and their usefulness as a tool to project possible future climate change.

   However, we are now stepping outside the topic of debate here which is Warren’s commentary on the Lewandoski et al. paper and your gratuitous comment:

   “However, I really do think that both you and he (Paul Dennis) should do some research to ascertain what level of knowledge someone has before trotting-out your facile and easily falsifiable talking points.”

   As someone who is actively researching palaeoclimate proxies on timescales from the modern through to Archaean, who has actively published in this area in a range of journals including Nature, GRL, GCA etc., someone who was intimately involved in the fallout from climate gate and who has knowledge of what happened then perhaps I might ask you to perhaps do a little more research yourself.

   Paul Dennis, Head of Stable Isotope and Noble Gas Geochemistry Laboratories, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia.

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   1. 

      Martin Lack

      November 4, 2013

      Well, I must say, this is embarrassing! In the circumstances, Paul, I must also thank you for being polite. I had feared I had been overly-aggressive and freely admit that I was off-loading some frustration regarding non-expert climate change deniers on my blog (who do not take on board anything I say to them). Given the academic nature of this blog, I should have been more careful.

      Having said that, Paul, are you really trying to tell me that you have uncovered evidence that falsifies the IPCC’s confidence that ongoing change is primarily human caused? Similarly, are you saying that your own research falsifies the consensus that equilibrium sensitivity to CO2 – combined with the unfolding consequences of constructive interference between positive feedback mechanisms – represents a very significant threat to a large proportion of life on Earth?

      I am aware that evidence has been found of (very short) warmer than present periods in recent geological past (e.g.sediments beneath Lake El’gygytgyn in Siberia) but not aware of any suggestion that this could falsify the concern that failure to reduce GHG emissions to zero by 2050 will result in Eocene to Permian temperatures by the end of this Century. However, if you think you know better, please let me know where you have seen or published the evidence.

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6. 

   Richard Drake

   November 3, 2013

   Martin Lack:

   I was attempting to ridicule the ‘Watermelon’ hypothesis of James Delingpole

   Well done you. I’ve not read the book. What do you think is the best argument in it? This would be just as relevant to this thread as your original sentence. I love the idea of climate change over four billion years as a talking point though. It seems we agree both that the communists didn’t start it and that we should talk more about it. I can’t see this going anywhere but up.

   Talking of which, ‘unprecedented’. You’ve got me there. What a scary word. And I say ‘temperature standstill’ back. That’s even more scary. Because that hidden heat is going to burst out of the ocean any moment now and we’re toast. Why bother with all that intermediate stuff where the IPCC says projected temperature rise is going to be good for us till 2080? Only charlatans like Matt Ridley mention that. It’s not in the IPCC report to be quoted and reasoned about, for goodness sake.

   I’m dropping a hint that I think Ridley is a better bet than Delingpole if you really want to know. I don’t have time for the rest of it. I respect you for the change of heart on openness of all climate data, especially for those trying to find something wrong with the latest interpretation of it. And I imagine you’re going to have a hard time pulling rank on Dr Dennis but it should be fun to watch.

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   1. 

      Martin Lack

      November 4, 2013

      Richard, I think my response to Paul Dennis speaks for itself, and I remain genuinely interested to see what he says next.

      With regard to Ridley vs Delingpole, they are both almost certainly guilty of allowing their political views (which I mainly share) to determine which science they accept and which they reject (which I do not). This is not being open-minded and sceptical; it is tantamount to being willfully-blinded and ideologically-prejudiced. As Lewondowsky et al have observed, the reality that most climate change ‘sceptics’ are libertarian and/or free market ideologues is indicative of the fact that contrarianism is driven by the enormous policy implications not any residual scientific uncertainty. If this were not true, people would be far more vociferous in challenging the implausible pronouncements of cosmologists and particle physicists.

      In reality, the scientific consensus regarding climate science is no more the subject of legitimate debate than the consensus views that: the Universe and the Earth were not created in six days little more than 6000 years ago; the Sun does not orbit the Earth; humans did not co-exist with dinosaurs; and the Earth is not flat.

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7. 

   KNRT

   November 3, 2013

   A strong case with good quality data needs no use of ‘smoke and mirrors’ to defend itself.
   These are only required for ‘weak cases and poor data ‘ upon which great claims are made.

   So ask yourself this , does climate science use lots of smoke and mirrors or is it willing to allow the facts to speak for themselves by proudly putting them out there for all to see?

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8. 

   JasonB

   November 4, 2013

   Paul Dennis
   Increasing CO2 levels leads to a theoretical climate sensitivity of ca. 1 degree C per CO2 doubling. Any estimates of a higher climate sensitivity are rooted in the outputs of GCM’s.

   Plus observations — including observations of stratospheric water vapour as well, now — showing the increase in water vapour in recent decades in response to warming, as you would expect. And what effect do you think disappearing Arctic ice has on albedo? Think that might be a feedback? (Unfortunately not counterbalanced by increased ice in the Antarctic because one is missing when the sun is shining while the other is growing when it isn’t…)

   Unfortunately observations on a range of time scales including the modern period, the Holocene, LGM to present day and deeper geologic time all indicate a low climate sensitivity that is broadly consistent with a near zero feedback.

   All of them?

   “Over the past 65 million years, this reveals a climate sensitivity (in K W21 m2) of 0.3–1.9 or 0.6–1.3 at 95% or 68% probability, respectively. The latter implies a warming of 2.2–4.8 K per doubling of atmospheric CO2, which agrees with IPCC estimates.” PALAEOSENS

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9. 

   Michael J. McFadden

   November 4, 2013

   Warren, good entry and comment. I’ve sometimes had similar problems with blog moderation issues (heh, and my response to such things is similar to yours! They’ve made their pie, let them eat it!)

   KNRT, you asked,

   does climate science use lots of smoke and mirrors or is it willing to allow the facts to speak for themselves by proudly putting them out there for all to see?

   KNRT, climate science is simply following the same path that was blazed by antismoking science over the last 30 years and accepted as legitimate. I’ve had requests for writings or secondary level data (Note: secondary level… nothing touching confidential patient data) rudely rebuffed with statements like “It’s all in the study.” (when, obviously, it wasn’t, or I wouldn’t have been asking for it), or “I have no interest in assisting you or your group.” (after I responded honestly about my full identity and background upon a researcher’s request), or simple refusals to answer inquiries.

   When the data don’t really support the arguments made and the conclusions reached in research papers, researchers who are defending their abilities to pull down future mega-million dollar grants will do everything possible to keep that data away from analysis by anyone who might want to question those arguments and conclusions. “Peer-Review” is a joke: authors tell the journal editors who they would like to have as reviewers, and of course they pick their supportive friends — who know that when it’s their turn they can expect nice reviews in return.

   And if a journal doesn’t want to accept a paper the editors know they can pick from their stable of reviewers who are firmly on “the other side” of an issue and be almost guaranteed of hostile reviews that will justify rejection. The hostile reviewers operate behind cloaks of anonymity, so they’re never called to defend their attacks, and with some journals, the specific reviews aren’t even shared: the journal will simply pluck an anonymous sentence or two from the anonymous reviewer and use it as grounds for refusal. See: “Helena: A Study Delayed” at http://acsh.org/2007/07/a-study-delayed-helena-mts-smoking-ban-and-the-heart-attack-study/ for examples of some of the above.

   In summary: this approach to science has been going on for the better part of 30 years or so as part of “science for a good cause” in promoting smoking bans. The climate science debacle isn’t something new… it’s just an extension. There is NO justifiable excuse for hiding basic data sources or even the data itself as long as it is not compromising basic rights of privacy or security. The entire foundation of science rests upon free examination and attempts at replication. The vandals who attack that foundation may feel they’re doing it “for a good cause,” but the harm that they cause to the structure is much, much worse.

   Michael J. McFadden
   Author of “TobakkoNacht — The Antismoking Endgame”

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10. 

    Steve McIntyre

    November 4, 2013

    The timestamp information was relevant to Lewandowsky’s untrue claim in a peer reviewed article to have had priority in outing skeptic bloggers, who had not realized that a 2010 email from a Charles Hanich was connected to Lewandowsky’s survey. See discussion at CA http://climateaudit.org/2013/08/01/lewandowskys-backdating/

    Lewandowsky’s first statements were that he himself had contacted bloggers but searches for his name were unsuccessful. I was the first to make the connection to Hanich and referred to him in a blogpost on Sep 8, 2012. Soon afterwards, Pielke Jr, Roy Spencer and Marc Morano had also located emails and all had self-identified by noon Eastern time on Sep 10, 2012.

    Later in the afternoon of Sep 10, 2012, around 16:30 Eastern time, Lewandowsky posted up his “outing” blogpost on his Australian blog. By then, it was already Sep 11 in Australia. However, Lewandowsky manually entered a timestamp of Sep 10, 2012 11:50 a.m. (Australian time), a time which on its face supported Lewandowsky’s time priority over the self-identification by Spencer and Morano.

    The FOI request showed that the timestamp on the blogpost was not generated by the blog software, but had been manually entered (and backdated) by Lewandowsky.

    This showed that Lewandowsky’s claim to this small “priority” was not only unfounded, but that Lewandowsky had backdated blog documents. Perhaps that’s why Lewandowsky is touchy about it.

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    1. 

       Martin Lack

       November 4, 2013

       That sounds like conclusive evidence of academic misconduct, Steve. Why have you failed to get UWA to reprimand Lewandowsky? Is it the same reason that Truthers cannot get the US Government to reprimand the CIA for bringing the WTC down?

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11. 

    Steve McIntyre

    November 4, 2013

    The Climategate dossier showed a clearcut example of bullying of the journal Climate Research by Mann and associates at University of East Anglia and elsewhere, in which various scientists considered an organized campaign to boycott the journal, which had published an article criticizing Mann. Lewandowsky and coauthors should surely begin with a condemnation of this conduct.

    As to FOI requests, Mann and associates had no compunction about Greenpeace and USA Today issuing FOI requests against Soon and Wegman.

    FOI requests for data should never have been necessary. To my knowledge, every FOI request for climate data has ultimately resulted in the data being made public. There is no public support for scientists withholding data if they also expect their articles to influence public policy. Efforts by climate scientists to oppose or delay deserve no support.

    Nor has Mann had any compunction about academic misconduct complaints being filed against Wegman – complaints that were intended to silence his criticism of Mann’s statistics. Nor have Mann and associates had any reluctance to file complaints under UK press regulations, Mann himself filing a complaint against Booker, UEA against Delingpole.

    The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

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    1. 

       Martin Lack

       November 4, 2013

       If so, why have numerous investigations concluded that understanding of climate science is unaffected by a few scientists having got frustrated by vexatious FOIA requests?

       Is it because the failure of investigations to reach the conclusion you wanted is evidence that they are helping to perpetuate the research funding of the scientists? Given the success of government-appointed reviewers of IPCC reports over the years, who have succeeded in making all IPCC reports overly-optimistic, you certainly cannot claim that our governments have been trying to foist environmental alarmism on a credulous World.

       If you do not believe in a scientific or political conspiracy, do you think the vast majority of climate scientists are just stupid or simply mistaken? Or is it all perhaps a peculiarly misanthropic case of collective hypnosis?

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       1. 

          Jonathan Jones

          November 4, 2013

          You mention vexatious FOI requests: do you have any evidence that any requests were actually vexatious? Note that the mere fact that the recipients (or third parties such as yourself) find the requests vexing does not in itself make them vexatious.

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       2. 

          Martin Lack

          November 5, 2013

          With respect, Jonathan, I think this is a very silly question:
          1. It is a matter of public record that a small number of individuals were responsible for the vast majority of FOIA requests for UEA data (and that much of what they asked for was in fact already in the public domain).
          2. There is prima facie evidence that the outgoing Attorney General (and failed Gubernational candidate) in Virginia, Ken Cuccinnelli, engaged in a protracted campaign of submitting FOIA request to UVA for access to Michael Mann’s emails.
          3. There is also evidence from the USA that the Tea Party Movement and Libertarian think tanks like the Heartland Institute actively train people in how to make FOIA request and harass people.
          4. The fact that a second tranche of UEA emails were leaked two years later, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the release of the emails was a deliberate attempt to discredit climate science and scientists.

          Given all of the above, I think it is perfectly legitimate of Lewandowsky (et al) to conclude there is a subterranean war being waged here. Therefore, my question regarding why this does not happen to cosmologists and particle physicist also remains pertinent.

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       3. 

          Jonathan Jones

          November 6, 2013

          I note with interest that you haven’t actually answered my question. Allegations are not facts, and your personal feelings don’t make a request vexatious.

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12. 

    wottsupwiththatblog

    November 4, 2013

    Richard Drake, are you actually being serious? Do you really think we should put climate change today into the context of the past 4 billion years? Do you somehow think that because the climate has changed in the past somehow is evidence that today’s changes are not anthropogenic? You do appreciate that noone is suggesting that the planet is at risk from AGW. It’s going to be fine. It’s us (humans) that are at risk from AGW.

    As far as the oceans are concerned, noone’s suggesting that the “missing heat” will burst out of the oceans . The significance of the oceans are two-fold really. One is that the rising ocean heat content tells us that overall warming continues, despite the slowdown in surface warming. Hence, confirming that the fundamentals of AGW are robust. The other significance is that it illustrates that internal variability can influence how the excess energy is distributed through the climate system. At the moment a larger fraction is going into the oceans. This can’t be maintained (as the ocean heats, it will absorb less and less of the excess) and so surface warming will have to accelerate at some point in the future. You may ask how I can be so sure. So, always some uncertainty but we have a radiative imbalance and so to reduce this imbalance will require an increase in surface temperatures unless some aspect of fundamental physics is wrong (and there isn’t any evidence for this).

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13. 

    JasonB

    November 4, 2013

    A strong case with good quality data needs no use of ‘smoke and mirrors’ to defend itself.
    These are only required for ‘weak cases and poor data ‘ upon which great claims are made.

    I agree. It is truly remarkable how much smoke and mirrors one can find on the Blogosphere, and I reach exactly the same conclusion as you. If their claims had merit, their proponents wouldn’t need to resort to cherry picking, ignoring statistical significance in their attempts to use short-term data to try and disprove long-term trends, misrepresentations of basic laws of physics, etc., etc., etc.

    So ask yourself this , does climate science use lots of smoke and mirrors or is it willing to allow the facts to speak for themselves by proudly putting them out there for all to see?

    That one’s easy. See, for example, RealClimate’s collection of links to climate data (both raw and processed), Paleo-data, Paleo Reconstructions (including code), GCM output, GCM source code, etc. There are plenty of others. GISS’ source code and data has been available for what, six years now? That explains why those who wish to question the science always use GISTEMP for their calculations rather than reconstructions like HadCRUT and UAH where the source code and data hasn’t been so readily available. Oh, wait…

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14. 

    Michael J. McFadden

    November 4, 2013

    Martin Lack
    As the government’s chief scientific adviser has recently pointed out, the question as to whether or not humans are adversely affecting the Earth’s climate is not a subject upon which opinions matter; there is a right and a wrong answer.

    Actually, I’d say it’s fairly indisputable that humans affect the Erth’s climate. Everything affects the Earth’s climate. But the only two IMPORTANT questions are:

    1) Do human’s affect the climate in any significant fashion as to have a meaningful impact?

    and

    2) If the answer to (1) is yes, then is that impact favorable or unfavorable for humanity in the shorter and longer runs.

    By asking questions or making statements in purely absolutist terms, alarmists are able to defend themselves against accusations of lying by saying, “Well, there’s SOME effect!” … and then simply go back to speaking about it as though the effect were both significant and adverse. The trick lies in stopping them right at the start by admitting that there’s some effect and then challenging them to prove its significance or adversity.

    MJM

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    1. 

       Martin Lack

       November 4, 2013

       A 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 following the Industrial Revolution confirms that humans can affect the Earth’s biosphere. Given the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events observed over the last 50 years in response to less than 1C increase in global average temperatures, humans have absolutely no reason to be complacent about the consequences of allowing that increase to continue (which it will until we eliminate the radiative energy imbalance causing it). If you want to cling to the belief that global warming has stopped you must come up with a plausible explanation for the totality of post-Industrial change; and why many other changes (apart from GST increase) continue to accelerate.

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15. 

    Richard Drake

    November 4, 2013

    Richard Drake, are you actually being serious?

    As it happens, I took one of the most ridiculous statements I’d read for a while in the mouth of a mocker – about the communists starting climate change – and mocked it right back, at least until my final paragraph. You already know the serious questions. When did the climate models predict that increased heat would no longer be found in surface temperature and satellite records from the mid 90s, only in the oceans? And where unequivocally in the measurements we now have, and at what depth, is that additional heat, giving proper consideration to the limits of our instruments?

    IPCC AR4 model predictions of surface and atmospheric warming are all starting to fail at the 95/5% confidence level. All the posited climate disruption we were advised to avoid at that time, through the very blunt instrument of punitive CO2 emission reduction which China in any case was never going to agree to, was predicated not on ocean heat but on surface and atmospheric temperatures increasing as the models said. And even if we still believe the models the increased temperatures forecast are assessed to be a net benefit for humanity till at least 2080.

    This means we have time to assess the situation further without withholding loans to India, say, to build coal-fired power stations to provide the cheapest possible electricity to its poorest. This, as Willis Eschenbach wrote in the second comment on the original piece by Mann and Lewandowski, is the key humanitarian issue, because more expensive energy kills the poor.

    As Willis puts it, that last statement is a matter of basic science that is often denied. Science doesn’t tell just one thing in this area, in other words, it tells us many. But only our basic humanity can tell us that making energy more expensive than it needs to be in India, Africa and other such places is completely unacceptable, given the very shaky foundations on which predictions of climate danger for all are now seen to be resting.

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    1. 

       wottsupwiththatblog

       November 4, 2013

       So you weren’t being serious. That’s good to know. As far as I’m concerned the “expensive energy kills the poor” theme is as alarmist as any AGW alarmism. Noone’s proposing that we instantly turn off any fossil fuel powered systems. People are proposing that we develop alternatives. Also the expense issue it a bit of a red-herring. There is reasonable agreement that the future cost of carbon is about $55 per tonne. Roughly speaking 1 MWhour produces 1 tonne of carbon. One of the most expensive renewable technologies at the moment is offshore wind at about $200 per MWh. One of the cheapest fossil fuel sources is natural gas at about $70 per MWh. Add $55 to that and you get around $120 per MWh. So, the difference between the cheapest and most expensive is less than a factor of 2. So, I agree that we shouldn’t impose expensive technologies on those living in poor countries. However, there is every expectation that fossil fuels will become more expensive and renewables will become cheaper. So, we also shouldn’t be preventing the development of alternatives that will both reduce our carbon emissions and allow for cheap power in developing nations.

       To be honest, quoting Will Eschenbach doesn’t give me much confidence that you’re putting much effort into researching this particular topic.

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16. 

    Richard Drake

    November 4, 2013

    As far as I’m concerned the “expensive energy kills the poor” theme is as alarmist as any AGW alarmism. Noone’s proposing that we instantly turn off any fossil fuel powered systems.

    The point Willis makes though is that loans are already being withheld by the World Bank for new coal-fired power stations in India. If what you write here is a repudiation of that, great. Is it?

    We can agree that alternative sources of energy should always be explored and developed. Shale is a good example for me. If windmills one day overtake shale in cost-effectiveness, great. But we owe it to the poor to live in the real world. The World Bank decision will kill the poor – and there are many NGOs involved in dispensing funds in Africa that I fear are tacitly doing the same. The same can be said for the disaster for world food prices that are biofuels.

    Your kind of alarmism has actually already killed millions of the poor in other words. Mine and that of Willis says that this is horribly wrong.

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    1. 

       wottsupwiththatblog

       November 4, 2013

       I have no idea if some policies being made by the World Bank and other organisations are harming poor people in the developing world. It may well be. I have two issues with that kind of argument. Firstly, is it really true that what they’re doing is entirely related to an attempt to prevent the release of carbon? I’m not aware that the world bank has that as an explicit goal. It often seems to me that people blame stupid policies on climate change when, really, they’re just stupid policies.

       The other issue I have is related but relates only to the science. There is a fundamental difference between the science and the policies. Firstly, the science doesn’t tell us what to do. It simply tells us what is happening and what might happen. Yes, some scientists have become activists (James Hansen, for example) but that doesn’t tell us the science is wrong. So, there is a big difference between considering the scientific evidence and deciding what to do. If there are indeed policies that are harming the poor, that doesn’t imply the scientific evidence is wrong. It simply means that the policies are wrong. Bear in mind that Willis Eschenbach thinks that the the climate responds to emergent thermostatic phenomena which is more an appeal to magic than to science. If you want to base your views on what he says, that’s your right. Bear in mind, though, that he really doesn’t know very much about climate science.

       I’ll finish with a response to your final comment about my kind of alarmism. As far as I can tell, the only person in this discussion who has introduced an element of alarm is yourself.

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       1. 

          John

          November 8, 2013

          “I have no idea if some policies being made by the World Bank and other organisations are harming poor people in the develo…”

          Policies developed by the British government pushing up the costs of energy will be killing British pensioners and the poor this winter and may well be replicated across Europe. The choice for all too many of the poor is food or fuel. You may consider me wrong but I lay the blame for this squarely on the combination of climate change alarmists, allied with environmental activists and rent-seeking businessmen and their political friends.

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17. 

    Richard Drake

    November 4, 2013

    Bear in mind that Willis Eschenbach thinks that the the climate responds to emergent thermostatic phenomena which is more an appeal to magic than to science.

    One thing you people are very bad at is separating concerns. I haven’t said a word about Willis mooting a kind of thermostat mechanism for the Earth. I know he does so to try to explain the remarkable stability of temperatures over four billion years – one of the most important facts that science in my view has yet to explain. But my agreement with what Willis said on expensive energy killing the poor cannot be taken as agreement on the other thing. I’m completely agnostic on such a mechanism.

    As far as I can tell, the only person in this discussion who has introduced an element of alarm is yourself.

    Alarm about unnecessary death of the poorest today is something we should all have. It’s the fact that alarm about something completely hypothetical way in the future trumps such concerns that is the key moral issue here. Let’s not play with the words but deal with the reality.

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    1. 

       Martin Lack

       November 4, 2013

       I think the reality you need to deal with, Richard, is that anthropogenic climate disruption is already happening; and the longer we fail to mitigate it effectively the less time it will take to get beyond our capacity to adapt to it. This is the key message of the ‘climate departure’ research of Mora et al (2013).
       http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/a-summary-of-the-climate-departure-research-of-mora-et-al/

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    2. 

       wottsupwiththatblog

       November 4, 2013

       Richard, I’m not you people, I’m just me.

       The reason for mentioning Willis’s scientific pronouncements is that he clearly thinks the Earth’s climate is some kind of naturally regulated system. Therefore he clearly does not believe there is a future cost to using carbon and hence no need for a carbon tax. Presumably he, therefore, doesn’t see any point in alternatives. If he were right about the climate system, maybe he’d have a point. Given that he isn’t, might make one consider that the rest of his views might be flawed too.

       Alarm about unnecessary death of the poorest today is something we should all have. It’s the fact that alarm about something completely hypothetical way in the future trumps such concerns that is the key moral issue here. Let’s not play with the words but deal with the reality.

       Indeed, I’m not trying to underplay the problems that we face or suggesting that we shouldn’t do something about them. If anything, the opposite I just find it ironic that someone can say

       Your kind of alarmism has actually already killed millions of the poor in other words

       and then says deal with the reality. There are many problems in the world some of which we could have avoided had we chosen to do so. Some may actually relate to poorly thought out environmental policies. Some almost certainly relate to industries taking advantage of poor regulation in parts of the world. Some relate to corruption and bad government. Suggesting that it’s all because if climate alarmism is, in my opinion, absurd.

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18. 

    Richard Drake

    November 4, 2013

    anthropogenic climate disruption is already happening

    Agreed and the disruption is currently positive. Increased CO2 is an immediate benefit for plant growth – another aspect of science that is so often ‘denied’ by ignoring it. Any warming more atmospheric CO2 is predicted to cause by the IPCC (albeit on the basis of models that are called into question by the current temperature standstill) is assessed by the same IPCC as a net benefit at least until 2080. Therefore we have time (and the obvious moral imperative) not to kill the poor this decade by limiting the availability of power from what is currently the cheapest source, fossil fuels. We may have a problem later but it’s rational, with the satellite, ARGO and other records so young, to keep looking at the science to find out if we really do. And weed out the truth-reversers like Michael Mann in the process, for the reasons Steve McIntyre has given.

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19. 

    @ReinerGrundmann

    November 4, 2013

    As so often, the comments – while interesting- have drifted from the topic of the thread. Looking back at them it seems to me that there is agreement on Warren’s original post. If this is so, it is all the more surprising that it was not allowed to appear in the comments of the Association of Psychological Science’s Observer magazine.

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20. 

    Latimer Alder

    November 4, 2013

    The old model of papers being written, having some limited review by ‘peers’, published in journals and then discussed once more in those journals was fundamentally based in the paper, print and post (mail) technologies available from the mid-Victorian times.

    Today’s academics are very familiar with these ideas..their reward and career structures are based upon it. It is a cosy little world where the barriers to entry are pretty high, the pace leisurely to glacial and the challenges to authority few. No wonder senior ‘scientists’ like it.

    But the world is changing. The internet has removed nearly all the technological imperatives in the model. In particular the timing problems associated with geographical distance and the need for a long process of typesetting, printing and distribution have gone. The barriers to publishing some ideas about anything at all have come down to almost nothing. There are plenty of savvy people with real-world experience who have not truck with academic niceties and are no great respecters of persons. No wonder senior ‘scientists’ hate it and them.

    If they can come to terms with the idea that their publicly-funded work is no longer in their exclusive ownership, ‘their data’ is our data – to be scrutinised by Tom Dick and Harriet at TDH’s pleasure, and that a really robust science should be able to fully withstand such scrutiny and come out better and stronger..so much the better for them and for us.

    But if not….and I fear that the whingefest Warren notes suggests that they can’t – then they will just fade away into the sunset of a one-time academic climate love-in. Unheard, unknown and rightly forgotten

    How ironic that a Mann should become one of the last of the dinosaurs.

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21. 

    Paul Matthews

    November 4, 2013

    I also posted a comment under the article, which I suspect is unlikely to appear:

    It is delightfully ironic that the author of papers labelling other people as conspiracy theorists should write this paranoid piece claiming that there is a “subterranean war on science”.
    Lewandowsky’s paper was criticised because it was junk. Briefly, in order to find evidence to support his preconceived notion that climate sceptics were conspiracy theorists, Lewandowsky concocted a survey with such a transparent agenda (a sequence of questions on absurd conspiracy theories followed by questions on climate change) that any results coming out of it would have been meaningless. Worse still, the survey was only posted at activist blogs (referred to by Lewandowsky as “pro-science”). One of the blogs named did not post the survey at all, a basic factual error in the paper that has been drawn to the attention of authors and editors, to no avail. A link to the survey could easily have been placed in a comment on sceptic blogs, but this was not done, showing that the authors were not seriously interested in getting sceptics to take the survey.
    When the errors were pointed out, the authors wrote a second paper, labelling those individuals who had dared to point out the flaws as conspiracy theorists – a gross violation of the ethical principles of the field. When this was pointed out to the editors of that journal, they pulled the paper.
    Similarly with Mann’s work – it was criticised by many of his own colleagues, as we know from the leaked emails. They described it as “sloppy”, “dodgy”, “suspect”, and worse. It was Mann, not his critics, who violated statistical conventions (the so-called decentered PCA), and it was Mann and his colleagues who engaged in bullying and intimidation of journal editors who dared to publish any dissenting papers.

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    1. 

       Paul Matthews

       November 4, 2013

       Well, I was wrong. They have posted my comment, and quite a few others. I wonder what happened to Warren’s – maybe it was too polite and balanced?

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       1. 

          Jonathan Jones

          November 4, 2013

          My comment hasn’t appeared yet – but this may just reflect their astonishingly inefficient moderation processes.

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       2. 

          Warren Pearce

          November 4, 2013

          Possibly too long, although only if they have entirely automated process – which seems unlikely.

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       3. 

          Jonathan Jones

          November 5, 2013

          I suspect it is the presence of hyperlinks which has triggered their filters

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22. 

    Richard Drake

    November 4, 2013

    The reason for mentioning Willis’s scientific pronouncements is that he clearly thinks the Earth’s climate is some kind of naturally regulated system. Therefore he clearly does not believe there is a future cost to using carbon and hence no need for a carbon tax.

    You’d have to ask Willis if this accurately reflects his view. But I already mentioned the key fact the theory you ridicule seeks to explain: the extraordinary stability of the earth’s climate and temperature, even under the early faint sun, vastly different concentrations of CO2 and other gases, a sequence of ice ages and the rest, allowing the evolution of life, not least sentient beings who wish to do science. Any comprehensive science of climate has to explain this wonder. How such stability and resilience will prove consistent with a once-in-a-species tipping point due to man’s greenhouse gas emissions, in the next hundred years, I find hard to conceive. It’s something alarmist science has to show, and show convincingly, not Willis or myself.

    The latest real-world data suggest this will be a tough call and are close to invalidating many of the computer models that were once said to prove the point. The next 5-10 years will prove fascinating in this regard. Meantime simple logic as well as basic humanity says that no brakes at all should be applied to provision of the cheapest possible electricity for the poor of the earth until the picture is much clearer. Rolling back green subsidies, feed-in tariffs and the rest in the UK would be a very welcome part of this.

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23. 

    Barry Woods

    November 4, 2013

    I made 2 comments in reply to this APS article, they have both yet to appear
    interestingly, a copy of this comment has been allowed to appear, at Shaping Tomorrows World (Prof Lewandowsky’s own blog)
    http://shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyAPS.html#3118

    APS missing comment 1:

    The nature of the error in LOG12 and it’s implications is linked below, in a comment I made on Prof Lewandowky’s website (he had not responded)

    http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyFAQPLoS1.html

    I also reported the substantial factual error in the methodology of LOG12 to Psychological Science and asked the Chief Editor of Psychological Science to investigate it, and if he would ask Professor Lewandowsky to supply the proof of posting timestamps and the raw data to me, if Prof Lewandowsky failed to respond..

    and to quote, the Chief Editor said this:

    From: Eric Eich
    Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 7:33 PM

    “Dear Barry–
    Sorry to disappoint, but no.
    Best, Eric”

    this was in response to my email request below:

    On 27/08/2013 10:20 AM, barry.woods wrote:

    “Dear Professor Eich

    Ok.

    I will try to contact Professor Lewandowsky (& UWA) and ask him again. If he fails to respond to my requests, will the journal consider asking on my behalf?
    Best Regards

    Barry Woods”

    Hard to make a comment about a paper, if a data request is refused, and the journal will not help get it.

    If the journal will provide the requested data, I will put a comment to the journal about this paper.

    However, given the Chief Editor’s email to me refusing to help me to obtain the requested data, how confident can I be that I am not wasting my time?

    I am a member of the public, who now finds this article (and the authors & APS response to my concerns) quite intimidating. ”

    ..end of missing comment at APS

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24. 

    chris

    November 4, 2013

    Warren’s conclusions are appalling in my opinion. In referring to the repellent behaviour of some bloggers and the rabble they cultivate he says:

    This may be an inconvenient truth, but it is also a fact of modern life. With better systems for dealing with this, we can hopefully focus more on transparent and robust methods of managing conflicts – both legitimate and otherwise – between science and society, rather than seeking to devise new laws to protect the former from the latter.

    The dismal illogic of the last sentence is astonishing. Putative “new laws” would not be “devised” to protect science (“the former”) from society (“the latter”). They would be devised to protect scientists from thugs and bullies. It’s not “society” that is harrassing scientists. It’s harrassers, who are individuals, even if some of their efforts may be collective. Any putative laws (in fact there are already laws that relate to illegal behaviour) that address this nasty problem would not only be protecting “science” against bullies but would be protecting “society” against bullies. I think you need to think this through again Warren. This isn’t about “society” vs “science”.

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    1. 

       Jonathan Jones

       November 5, 2013

       As you say, there are plenty of existing laws against harassment, threats, and so on, and nobody here has objected to those laws being applied. But it is clear that attempts by climate scientists to use those laws to silence their opponents have had, to be generous, very limited success. This suggests to me a prima facie case that the behaviour in question does not, in fact, for the most part, constitute threats, harassment, etc.

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       1. 

          Martin Lack

          November 5, 2013

          “…attempts by climate scientists to use those laws to silence their opponents…” – Jonathan Jones

          Who is it that labels these people “opponents”? I do not think it is the scientists. This kind of language implies recognition of the reality of scientists are in an ideologically-driven battle. Indeed, those doing the harassing clearly perceive science and scientists to be the enemy. However, the scientists like Michael Mann (MM) who bother fight back, do not see anyone as the enemy. I think all they see is a misguided bunch of ideologically-blinded people making their lives a misery. Nevertheless, I do think more should do as MM has done; and say ‘enough is enough’.

          Litigation has been necessary – and is now succeeding – because the integrity of individuals and climate science have both been damaged by an entirely unreasonable, business-funded, campaign to ‘dispute, downplay and dismiss’ the reality of anthropogenic climate disruption. What baffles me is how and why so many intelligent people have been fooled twice by the same trick (i.e. the first time having been by the tobacco industry denying the link between smoking an cancer for decades simply in order to maximise profits made by selling something that is intrinsically bad for you).

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    2. 

       Warren Pearce

       November 6, 2013

       I’m not clear about your argument. Are you saying that there should be science-specific laws, because science faces particular problems? Or that there should be a broader tightening up of bullying/harassment laws? You are right, of course, to point out the weakness of my science/society binary. Science is a part of society.

       To reiterate, I don’t wish to downplay the issue of bullying. However, the balance which the authors refer to in their final paragraph is crucial. Any perceived gains in protection from harassment may come at the cost of public access, as they point out. My own experiences suggest that where to draw the line between harassment and public questioning is rather blurred. I hope to write something more on this in the future.

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       1. 

          chris

          November 6, 2013

          Warren, my argument is that we shouldn’t tolerate harassment and bullying. We shouldn’t pretend that the sort of harassment and bullying described in the Observer article is part of some “conflict between science and society”. It isn’t. It’s bullying and harassment by individuals (collectively in some instances) against individual scientists.

          As for “new laws”, I think that was your idea (”With better systems for dealing with this, we can hopefully focus more on transparent and robust methods of managing conflicts – both legitimate and otherwise – between science and society, rather than seeking to devise new laws to protect the former from the latter.” ). That’s why I referred to them as “putative”. I don’t know whether we need new laws or not, partly because I simply don’t know at what point bullying and harassment of the sort described in the Observer article becomes unlawful.

          The Observer article seems fundamentally to be based on an imperative to transparency. I agree with the authors that the harassment and bullying should be publicised. I don’t agree with your interpretation that the authors statement “This information is also essential to enable lawmakers to improve the balance between academic freedom and confidentiality of peer review on the one hand, and the public’s right to access information on the other.” necessarily implies that improving academic freedom and confidentiality may involve a “cost of public access”. After all one could imagine a system whereby public access to scientific information is enhanced while protecting scientists against bullying and harassment, and this might be achieved within existing legislature.

          My experience is that things are developing in this direction anyway. Research funded by Medical Charities in the UK must be made publicly accessible through Open Access publication and the Research Councils have recently headed in this direction too. Any US government funded research must be open access although I believe the current requirement is that it must be so within 1 year (NIH research immediately Open Access, I think). The results of any clinical trials funded by the NIH must be made public upon publication. Any UK research council grant application must now incorporate a description of how the research results will be publicly disseminated. In the electronic era primary data deposition is increasingly a requirement of good quality journals… and so on.

          As usual the devil is in the detail. Do we want a system where anyone can demand at any time the primary research data of any scientist? I don’t think so, and we have rather explicit FOI rules for addressing this issue in the specific instance. Do we want scientists to be bullied and harassed because their research and its outcomes happens to disagree with someone’s economic or political interests or their precious world views? I don’t think so.

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25. 

    chris

    November 5, 2013

    Yes, that’s true Jonathan…scientists have been reluctant to use the law to address the sort of harassment and bullying we’re discussing, although that’s changing to some extent. To my mind this is due on the one hand to the (naïve!?) expectation that scientific evidence speaks for itself and so scientists shouldn’t have to engage in argy-bargy, and on the other that laws and other structures will protect scientists from harassment. The latter has proven to be the case for example in some of the “high level” harassment of Dr. Mann (e.g. in the Cuccinelli “affair” in which the courts have repeatedly ruled in Dr. Mann’s favour). Obviously scientists absolutely prefer not to go down that route and I would say “society” at large cheapens itself to the extent that it allows bullying and harassment to go unchecked, and declines to intervene on behalf of those that are not trained/accustomed to litigation and such like.

    Of course there are less direct means in which harassment and bullying are kept in check and this relates to the extent to which harrassers simply go too far and are rather brought to account by their own petard! Dr. Wegman is possibly the most prominent example – his attempts to join in the harassment of Dr. Mann by presenting a dreary misrepresentation of the latter’s work at a Senate enquiry and preparing a rather scurrilous anti-Mann “scientific paper” seem to have rebounded very badly on him. That’s always a problem for those that consider it expedient to align with bullies!

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    1. 

       wottsupwiththatblog

       November 5, 2013

       Chris, I think you’re being rather generous to Jonathan there. Unless I misunderstand his comment, I don’t think he was suggesting a reluctance on the part of scientists. What I think he is suggesting is that the limited success that scientists have had in attempting to use the legal system to silence those who they think are harassing them, implies that it wasn’t actually harassment. I wonder, could this be true?

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26. 

    chris

    November 5, 2013

    O.K. wottsupwiththatblog, I think you’re right but I wasn’t so interested in extending tedious set-piece “debates”! There are obviously many levels of harrassment.

    So the major bullying of Dr Mann through the courts and the Wegman thing have been themselves countered using the courts and (in the case of Wegman) by a sort of natural justice!

    Some of the nasty routine harrassment is dealt with by the recipients passing on emails etc. to the police and by their institutions taking various levels of evasive action (changing email addresses and phone numbers). It’s pretty despicable, but perhaps there is some level of acceptable lawful harrassment (??). I actually don’t know how far you’re allowed to harrass someone before craven immorality turns into law-breaking… Unfortunately a combination of that, plus some reluctance of scientists to take recourse to the law allows for some deeply unpleasant behaviour to be dismissed as just “a fact of modern life”.

    Interestingly, having been a scientist for more than a couple of decades now, I have never received an FOI request for data or emails, nor any harrassing emails/phone calls. I’ve also never come across the extraordinary obsessing over a 15 year old paper, shown in the intervening years to have been repeatedly broadly reproduced, as if the very psychological equilibrium of a group (mob?!) of individuals requires that it be repeatedly struck at like some disturbing totem!

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    1. 

       wottsupwiththatblog

       November 5, 2013

       Chris, what you say in your last paragraph is exactly my experience. I’ve never received an FOI request nor have I received any harassing emails/phone calls. I think what I find difficult to understand is how any academic/scientist can condone what seems to be behaviour that goes beyond what would seem reasonable. Firstly, I’m not trained or even really expected to deal with difficult lay-people. I have no problem communicating with anyone who’s interested but, as far as I’m aware, I’m not contractually obliged to jump when some random member of the public asks for some of my data or codes. If this is becoming expected, then presumably we should be arguing for some support for academics. Hopefully those who think it’s important won’t object to the extra cost.

       Also, if someone contacted me about a paper published 10 years ago I may no longer have the data or the codes. Firstly, I – like most academics – have no administrative support so any data management I do myself. Secondly, everything is reproducible (codes and data). So, I would simply assume that anyone who was interested could do it again, especially given that it probably wouldn’t take very long today. However, would everyone realise this or agree with this? Could it be used against me by those who want to pretend that it’s a big deal that I no longer have the data, when in fact it really isn’t?

       I think my main issue, however, is that lack of charity and understanding some seem to show. Judging people on the basis of how they respond to something that I think most academics do not expect to have to deal with, is unfortunate. I certainly think that we should be willing to share what we have with those who are interested, but it seems that some people can never be satisfied. Either scientists didn’t provide it fast enough, or claimed they were being harassed when really they weren’t. This is clearly a complex situation and there is probably no single right or wrong. I, however, have very little time for those who think that the fault lies primarily with the climate scientists who really should just have behaved differently.

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       1. 

          Shub Niggurath

          November 6, 2013

          wotts, There is no evidence you have any understanding on the specifics about the matter in discussion. How exactly do you see it fit to insert yourself into the debate and offer your pontifications?

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       2. 

          wottsupwiththatblog

          November 6, 2013

          Shub, my apologies but I don’t know the answer to your question. I thought this was an open forum in which we could exchange ideas related to Warren’s post. If I’m wrong about that, someone is free to correct me.

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       3. 

          Shub Niggurath

          November 6, 2013

          It is an open forum, but what if the specifics don’t match your generalized characterizations? This Lewandowsky ‘Recursive Fury’ has been taking place since well over a year. It is inaccurate, to put it mildly, to characterize data requests as ‘uncharitable’ when you are the very object of study.

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       4. 

          wottsupwiththatblog

          November 6, 2013

          Shub, I wasn’t referring to the data requests as “uncharitable”.

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    2. 

       Ben Pile

       November 6, 2013

       “Yes, that’s true Jonathan…scientists have been reluctant to use the law to address the sort of harassment and bullying we’re discussing”.

       “I have never received an FOI request for data or emails, nor any harrassing emails/phone calls.”

       — I’m not Brian, and so isn’t my wife —

       So at best, we’re talking about Nth-hand accounts of ‘bullying’ and ‘harassment’. If we’re to take these claims at all seriously, we ought to note that the authors of the letter neither have the monopoly on being victims of such.

       These shrinking violets perhaps find themselves on the receiving end of behaviour that you’re not a victim of because your work isn’t of any consequence.

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       1. 

          chris

          November 6, 2013

          O.K. so you find bullying and harrassment acceptable Ben. That’s quite useful to know I suppose.

          You suggest that I’m not “on the receiving end” of despicable behaviour “because (my) work isn’t of any consequence”. That’s an astonishing worldview (that “work of consequence” should necessarily invite despicable behaviour by bullies). I’m not going to make any particular claims to the importance of my work, but I suspect that like the huge majority of scientists the reason I’m not subject to harrassment is because my work doesn’t impinge on a subject that affects powerful economic interests and sensitive political psyches.

          Surely Ben, most scientific “work of consequence” escapes the ruthless sneer of bullies. The “work of consequence” leading to the 2013 Nobel Prizes to Higgs, Karplus, Levitt, Warshal, Englert, Rothman, Scheckman, Sudhof was not accompanied by the bullying of a snarling mob induced to descpicable behaviour by craven bloggers.

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       2. 

          Ben Pile

          November 6, 2013

          “O.K. so you find bullying and harrassment acceptable Ben.”

          I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that ‘bullying’ and ‘harassment’ are ‘acceptable’. What I did say was that nobody had the monopoly on either.

          “That’s an astonishing worldview (that “work of consequence” should necessarily invite despicable behaviour by bullies)”

          Perhaps what’s going on here is some wilful misinterpreting on your part – it’s to be expected from anyone trying to milk moral capital in a political debate, out of a confused situation they are not party to.

          “most scientific “work of consequence” escapes the ruthless sneer of bullies. … Higgs, Karplus, Levit…”

          That depends. Nowhere is as bitchy as Academe. Even Nobel Prize-winners turn out to have, occasionally, not been the nicest people in the world. But by ‘consequence’, I mean outside of the university campus. To put it crudely, perhaps nobody has made as big a deal out of your work as was made by the Hockey Stick Graph, which was, after all, the symbol of climate change alarmism. Nobody tried to turn the mathematics that won Nobel Prizes into public policy as directly as they have with environmental science.

          Anyone seeking to influence the direction of policy needs thick skin, whether scientist or politician. Mann and Lewandowsky are not known for their quiet views about What Is To Be Done. Indeed, I would call them bullies, and the attempt to use science to induce political change they seem to be involved in, bullying. To that extent, I’m against bullying. But my response is not to plead for victim status.

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       3. 

          Jonathan Jones

          November 6, 2013

          Many years ago I pointed out to group of scientists including Karplus that a paper they were about to submit was absolute junk, built on a complete misunderstanding of an elementary topic. They had the good sense to take my correction as helpful, saving them from making idiots of themselves: fortunately they hadn’t learnt modern techniques of bluster and blame the messenger.

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       4. 

          chris

          November 7, 2013

          It sounds like you don’t have a problem with the sort of despicable harassment and bullying described in the Observer piece, Ben. You describe their article, the purpose of which is explicitly to make transparent some of the unpleasant behaviour of a very small selection of thugs (some in rather senior positions!) as “pleading victim status”. No…they are pointing out real and despicable behavior. Is it equivalent to your parody of “Academe” as “bitchy”? No it’s despicable thuggery, some of it carried out at a high political level.

          Not too impressed with your transparent attempt at double-speak with semantics. There has been considerable policy enacted in response to the science on climate change and our understanding of the effects of anthropogenic enhancement of the greenhouse effect. The fact that Germany, for example is already approaching 25% of electricity generation through renewable sources isn’t due to some malign influence from your demonized “hockey stick”. It’s a result of a hard-headed assessment of science, of which Dr. Mann’s contribution is but one part. When Richard Doll “attempted to use science to induce political change” (over the scientific evidence for smoking-cancer association) he wasn’t being a “bully” any more than Dr. Mann and other scientists that present scientific evidence are being “bullies” for doing so. You’re an individual with a poor interest in science and very strong political views (I hope that’s a fair assessment; I’m basing it on quite a bit of reading of your stuff). However on sociopolitical matters with important scientific contributions serious policymakers obviously take the views of scientists and the scientific evidence strongly into consideration – your attempt to diminish the latter by labeling scientists whose science you don’t like as “bullies” is unlikely to gain much traction with serious policymakers.

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       5. 

          Ben Pile

          November 7, 2013

          And repeat…

          “It sounds like you don’t have a problem with the sort of despicable harassment and bullying described in the Observer piece, Ben. ”

          Your attempt to moralise about attitudes stinks. I said, already, nobody has the monopoly on being a victim of ‘bullying’ or ‘harassment’ in the climate debate. It really is like complaining about satire after going into politics. It’s a fact of life, and a fact of the internet, and of the public sphere.

          Similarly, sharks only attach you when you’re wet.

          If you didn’t know that public life — especially in Academe — is rough-and-tumble, you were hopelessly naive.

          None of which is to say ‘hurrah, bullying and harassment’, of course. But it seems fairly plain that Mann and Lewandowsky especially, have not been injured by their experiences, yet they are seeking to set themselves up as moral victims, to control the debate. That’s pretty obnoxious.

          Neither of these two are above bullying or harassment. In fact, really what they are responding to is their own bad faith. Lew, for example, aimed to alienate a section of the debate — some even named as individuals — to diminish them by associating a conservative tendency with ‘conspiracy ideation’, and ‘anti-science’ attitudes, in spite of what his own data was able to support. This attempt back-fired, and drew yet more criticism towards his work instead, which he’s now trying to explain away as people being nasty to him.

          The debate has for a long time been presented in polar terms: virtuous, unimpeachable scientists, versus crazy, X-motivated deniers. But that image was always fragile, and it belied a vast middle ground which is now being occupied by people who are capable of seeing the problems with the climate debate, from multiple perspectives, and with nuanced arguments. It is this middle ground — not ‘deniers’ — which is frustrating to Mann and Lewandowsky. Hence, we can see, for instance, when scientists venture into this middle ground, Mann calls Judith Curry a denier, and Lewandowsky calls Richard Betts a conspiracy theorist. This leaves M&L as crazy, shouty, abusive outliers, the territory once occupied by putative ‘deniers’. It’s a situation they have made for themselves.

          “Not too impressed with your transparent attempt at double-speak with semantics”

          ‘Double speak with semantics’? Is that like ‘Listen with Mother’? Or ‘Learn French With Ease’? At least I can construct a meaningful sentence — ‘single speak with semantics’, if you will.

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       6. 

          chris

          November 7, 2013

          Jonathan, it’s difficult to know how to take your anecdote! Are you suggesting that scientists, about to present something that is hopelessly and objectively wrong, would ignore someone (“the messenger”) that highlights fatally objective flaws in the work, and would go ahead and publish it anyway?

          I don’t think so, and it’s not obvious what that has to do with present circumstances. Scientists are no more likely to do so now than at the time your anecdote refers to.[*]

          In any case I’m curious about the “elementary topic” that you refer to in which you saved their bacon! Can you give a little more detail?

          [*] There is a very odd habit on the sort of “anti-science” rump of “science” (if one can define such a thing!), in which a very small number of individuals choose to present analyses/interpretations that they must know to be objectively wrong, and one presumes that this is done in support of political or personal agendas. We could discuss examples!

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       7. 

          Jonathan Jones

          November 7, 2013

          Not only am I suggesting that they might do it, I am stating that certain well known climate scientists have regularly published material that they know to be nonsense. I struggle to imagine how you could fail to be aware of this simple and well known state of affairs: McIntyre has described several cases in exhaustive detail. (In the interests of fairness I should add the only possible alternative explanation: that the scientists in question are ignorant and stupid.)

          My Karplus bacon-saving story concerns a manuscript in which they claimed that a bi-exponential decay in a precursor concentration stemmed from two parallel first order reactions A->B and A->C. I pointed out that such parallel reactions gave a first order decay in A at the combined rate, and what they needed was A1->B and A2->C with A1 and A2 otherwise indistinguishable and non-interconverting. Once they understood my point they had to pull the paper; fortunately it hadn’t actually been submitted yet.

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       8. 

          chris

          November 7, 2013

          Example(s) Jonathan? Your suggestion “certain well known climate scientists have regularly published material that they know to be nonsense”) seems unlikely to me. I’m talking about objectively flawed analysis, the flaws of which it would be difficult to accept the authors were unaware of. These should be examples where straightforward rebuttals have been published in the scientific literature, rather than, for example, papers that bloggers have attempted to trash on blogs. After all people can say what they like on blogs, and saying a paper is horribly flawed on a blog obviously doesn’t make it so!

          There’s no question that a small and rather curious cohort of individuals that publish occasional papers seemingly in support of non-scientific views on climate change, have produced papers the flaws of which seem too obvious to accept ignorance on the side of the authors. But I’m not aware of any examples of the sort you refer to. Can you clarify with examples?

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       9. 

          Jonathan Jones

          November 7, 2013

          [Note that replies are now too deeply nested so I am replying to my own post]

          What an extraordinary attitude Chris. I was brought up my scientific mentors with a traditional scientific world view: what matters is fact and argument, what a statement says not where it is published. If you really can’t understand that an utterly devastating critique by McIntyre remains an utterly devastating critique even if it is published on a blog, then I’m afraid there is no hope for you.

          You want some examples? Well let’s start with a simple one: the use of lake sediments known to be contaminated by bridge building in paleo-climate reconstructions is objectively wrong. Everybody knows this.

          Would you care to defend this practice? Note that I really mean defend this practice. Not argue that Mann is a nice man unfairly put upon. Not argue that he got the right result by wrong methods. Not argue that it doesn’t matter that he got this wrong. Not argue that it’s not your field and you can’t really comment. But actually defend the indefensible. Feeling up to it?

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       10. 

           chris

           November 8, 2013

           Sorry Jonathan, that won’t do. And I have to say it seems odd that you can’t come up with an example of research by the group of people you refer to (“certain well known climate scientists have regularly published material that they know to be nonsense”) in which work is sufficiently flawed that it is retracted or shown by subsequent research published in the scientific literature to be fundamentally flawed in a manner that it’s authors would have been expected to be aware of. After all it is your claim!

           I wonder whether you can see the problem. And it’s particularly pertinent for a blog like this one about the relationship between Science and the Public. Policymakers (and some other citizens like journalists ) act in some respects as intermediaries between science and the public and to do their jobs they need access to rather well-founded scientific information. They don’t scour the Internet for stuff people say on blogs (however convincing it may sound). if they are diligent they will assess the scientific literature and its compilations (e.g. by the IPCC) to assess those analyses and interpretations that have held up in the face of focussed scrutiny and show good evidence of reproducibility after publication.

           If policymakers were to do so they might find themselves rather disappointed and bemused by the McIntyre/McKitrick style of “science”. They would wonder at the odd dichotomy between the avalanche of stuff written on their blog and the rather appalling efforts at actually forming a convincing and competent argument in a scientific paper where this can be assessed on its true merits. The might notice that McIntyre and McKitricks attempt to trash the original “hockey stick” analysis was shown itself to be flawed and subsequently to be based on a piece of subterfuge involving inter alia the elimination of the 99% of their analysis that least supported their thesis. They might notice that McKitrick, in an effort to trash research on attribution of contemporary warming made an analysis that assessed latitude (dependence of warming) in degrees but a software package with an input in radians, effectively trashing their own attempt at trashing! They might notice that despite the astonishing vitriol on the McIntyre blog concerning Mann’s 2008 PNAS paper, McIntyre was unable to raise more than a dismal peep in his pathetic published response….and so on.

           Clearly policymakers need to understand the science and its level of reproducibility in a given instance. In the case of Mann-style paleoreconstruction they now have a couple of dozen seperate analyses. These yield broadly similar interpretations. No doubt every one of these analyses were deficient at one level or another. I doubt I’ve every managed to publish a perfect paper either. But we’re not talking about perfection. You were supposed to be providing substantiated evidence (i.e. apparent by recourse to the scientific literature) of research that was fatally flawed to the extent one would expect that the authors knew about it (the McIntyre/McKitrick one would be an example I think, since its unimaginable that authors writing a program that includes a scree to eliminate 99% of the data that least fits one’s “thesis”, could be done “by mistake”.

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       11. 

           Jonathan Jones

           November 8, 2013

           Chris, this is utterly bizarre.

           I note that you are not prepared to defend “the use of lake sediments known to be contaminated by bridge building in paleo-climate reconstructions”. Instead, in traditional apologist style, you bluster and obfuscate.

           It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.

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       12. 

           chris

           November 8, 2013

           That’s silly Jonathan. I’ve never heard of the bridge building thing until this morning. So how can I defend something I don’t know about.

           You’ve highlighted the nub of the problem though…yes? We need to know whether the particular contamination you refer to is significant with respect to particular reconstructions. So is it or isn’t it? If it were I would expect that someone might have addressed this in the scientific literature. After all, as scientists we often have to deal with samples that are contaminated to various degrees. Contamination per se obviously doesn’t mean an analysis and it’s conclusions aren’t sound.

           So why not point me to the relevant scientific literature. It’s silly to think we could come to a useful conclusion by having to trawl through someone’s blog, especially when that individual has demonstrated that his (and his associates) “analyses” can be extremely suspect. Imagine I’m a policymaker Jonathan, who wishes to know what interpretations that the wealth of published paleotemperature analysis support.

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       13. 

           Paul Matthews

           November 8, 2013

           ‘how can I defend something I know nothing about’. Indeed, you can’t. Why don’t you learn something about the topic before giving your opinion on it? You can find literature on the topic Jonathan has raised very easily with a quick google search.

           On the more general question of scientists publishing material they know to be nonsense, there are examples showing this in the climategate emails, which those of us like Jonathan and I who have spent time investigating know about. Here is not the appropriate place, but if you contact me directly I will give you examples.

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       14. 

           Jonathan Jones

           November 8, 2013

           Chris, I have been labouring under the illusion that you were some sort of scientists who actually knew something about the issues underlying the Mann/McIntyre debate. If you haven’t heard about the Tiljander fiasco, then clearly you know nothing relevant to speak of. This isn’t the place to educate you in such elementary matters, and I have no interest in the attempt.

           If you’re interested in matters of truth, then I strongly suggest you go away and read up on these topics: they’re not difficult to understand, and if you have any significant mathematical training the many errors in Mann’s work will swiftly become obvious to you. Alternatively if you’re just interested in policy questions then feel free to remain ignorant.

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       15. 

           chris

           November 9, 2013

           O.K. Jonathan, you’re talking about the Tiljander sediment proxy series and its use in Mann’s paleotemperature reconstruction (PNAS 2008) yes?.

           That was a storm in a teacup wasn’t it? In their paleoproxy temperature reconstruction using a large compilation of proxies from ice cores, tree rings, speleotherms, varved sediments etc, Mann et al included lake sediment series (Tiljander series) in which the top part of the sediment is contaminated obscuring any true relationship between the varve proxy and temperature in this part of the cores. However Mann et al. point out explicitly in their paper that they recognise the problems with the Tiljander series and present additional reconstructions in which these proxies (and a few others that they consider have a priori reasons to be potentially suspect) are removed from the proxy set used to reconstruct past temperatures.

           That seems an entirely appropriate approach and certainly not deserving of the astonishing over-the-top blogospheric vitriol. If bloggers like McIntyre considered that this analysis was suspect to the point that the interpretations of the entire article were wrong why didn’t they publish a paper in the scientific literature describing this? McIntyre and McKitrick’s response in PNAS was appalling – a list of unsupported assertions. This seems to be a fundamental problem with the McIntyre/McKitrick approach in which they encourage astonishing levels of vitriol on the blogosphere with virtual avalanches of claims of misanalyses and yet seem fundamentally unable to demonstrate anything seriously wrong with the work of the scientists they attack, by publishing their analyses in the scientific literature.

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       16. 

           chris

           November 11, 2013

           Although you haven’t come up with any examples in support of your claim, Jonathan, it is worth thinking about the value of publishing in the scientific literature when one has what one considers to be an objective argument that casts serious doubt on the analyses and interpretation of a scientific paper.

           A very good example relates to the Steig analysis of pentadecadal Antarctic warming (Nature 2009). This provoked an astonishing level of vitriol on the McIntyre blog, but at least in this case McIntyre et al did publish a paper with their own interpretations. Rather surprisingly, despite the vitriol, the McIntyre conclusions were broadly similar to the one’s upon which they heaped so much fury (i.e. that Antarctic warming had spread beyond the Antarctic peninsula to encompass much of West Antarctica).

           That’s fine wouldn’t you say? Anyone (scientist, public, policymaker) wishing to know what might be happening in Anarctcia in terms of a warming response during the period of very large scale global anthropogenic warming now has two independent analyses, the second of which from an astonishingly vitriolic group that in essence arrive at broadly the same conclusion as the one they trashed so vigorously on their blogs. Of course there are quantitative differences in the analyses, but the fact that McIntyre on this occasion braved it into the scientific literature means that further analysis can start from a rather well-defined level of agreement/disagreement (there are indications from independent temperature series in West Antarctica that McIntyre et al got their analysis a little wrong, but that’s fine and can be taken into account by interested parties).

           Clearly something abominable went on there though. The level of unjustified accusation and presumption of misdoing spewed forth on the blogs was completely out of proportion to the scientific realities. That’s the sort of stuff that induces the appalling bullying and harrassment of scientists that the Observer article describes. It illustrates why it’s important to address what’s published in the scientific literature rather than rely on stuff on blogs even if the latter supports your particular view.

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27. 

    tlitb1

    November 6, 2013

    I think it should be noticed that nothing of the Lewandowsky et al piece contains the slightest outreach to laypeople. It is literally an appeal by publicly funded scientists asking for legal and institutional barricades to made higher against the alleged “motivated” or insane lay public.

    What choice have the lay public but to wait and see what new laws or journal editorial policies get enforced?

    Meanwhile here is my lay distillation of what this piece is all about 😉

    “The Subterranean War on Science
    By Stephan Lewandowsky”

    “…allegations of defamation have led to the re-examination of one of [Stephan Lewandowsky’s] papers …”

    “How should the scientific community respond …?”

    “…particularly important for journal editors and professional organizations to muster the required resilience against illegitimate insertions into the scientific process.”

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    Reply
28. 

    Jeff Condon

    November 6, 2013

    Warren,

    In my particular case, I did demand that their article be corrected as it made libelous remarks specifically identifying me by name and implied some form of cognitive defect based on the fabricated opinions. Specifically, they claimed that I wrote temperature records were illegitimately adjusted to make the records appear warmer. In fact, what they were reacting to was their own ignorance that the US record HAD been adjusted just as I stated – whether the adjustment is done, is not controversial in the field. They inserted “illegitimately” all by themselves which I have never said or written. In effect, Lewandowsky was claiming that a named individual, myself, suffered from some kind of psychological problem, because I discussed these adjustments.

    I sent simple email requests to Lewandowsky and found him intractable on the matter and so went to the editors who had clearer heads. Lewandowsky’s response, rather than being an adult, was to repeat the offense in a different article having a tweaked claim, using my name again.

    I was pleased to learn that the intentionally false information (personal attack) he is attempting to publish as though it were data, is being held from print. It is the height of arrogance that he would publish a third paper claiming being harassed.

    Of particular note, I am a businessman with Libertarian style thinking that I often blog about. My belief is that had more to do with his false information campaign than anything scientific.

    Reacting to this article as though it needs a slightly improved balance to make it reasonable, doesn’t sufficiently address the actual history of the authors blatantly false claims. Nor will it help slow the publication of political attacks from the halls of the soft sciences.

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29. 

    Barry Woods

    November 6, 2013

    The Recursive Fury paper had disappeared on a couple of occasions thanks to Jeff:

    After I rang Frontiers, it disappeared for a thirdd time (still missing from Frontiers website):
    I telephoned Zurich and asked do you really want to be associated with these ethics violations (taken down 30 minutes later) Followed up in writing, my email complaint to UWA/Frontiers below,
    with reference to the Australian National Statement on ethics in research

    (I dashed it off, as I was on holiday with my family, so not brilliant, but I do stand by it)

    The Purpose

    The purpose of this National Statement is to promote ethically good human research. Fulfilment of this purpose requires that participants be accorded the respect and protection that is due to them. It also involves the fostering of research that is of benefit to the community.

    This complaint is to the authors (and their accredited employers) of the ‘Fury’ paper and ‘Moon’ paper and to the University of Western Australia and it demonstrates I believe multiple breaches of the ethical requirements for research on human participants, as such the papers should be withdrawn and any identifiable data (including unattributed comments, as these can be googled) of all unwilling participant destroyed.

    I will list the reasons below:

    1) The authors of the paper have been shown to active protagonists in the climate debate – championing the work of LOG 12 and attacking its critics, throughout the research timeframe at the publically funded blog Shaping Tomorrows World (Lewandowsky) – Watching the Deniers – (Marriott) – Skeptical Science (John Cook – & Lewandowsky is regular author there and co-author of the SKS debunking handbook)

    2) Conduct: One of more of the authors is openly hostile towards me on his blog Watching The Deniers (M Marriott) (A Watts and others), publically labelling me DENIER, DISINFORMATION, DUNNING-KRUGER, bullshit aND verified bullshit (his caps). This I feel alone is grounds for the ‘Fury’ paper to be withdrawn on ethical grounds lone (tainted, by the authors behaviour on his private blog) and all named individual data collected for this research to be made known to ( Ihave provided detail directly to the authors on their blogs (and to the journal already, but I will collate – referenced to this complaint, to follow as background material to my complaint.)

    Here we go again: “Watts up with that?” pushing the no consensus myth

    3) Respect: One or more of authors have failed to show respect or behave professional to the people named in the paper or the ‘sceptical’ community. Prof Lewadowsky’s blog posts as one example (more to follow) taunting the 5 sceptical blog owner he had ‘contacted’ on his blog and giving interviews about it – at places like Desmogblog (a website, that has a number of those sceptic blog owners photographed, named and shamed tagged denier, misinformed, disinformation, denial industry, amongst other derogatory labels, in it’s Denier Disinformation Database online –

    http://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database

    How is it possible that Prof Lewandowsky did not see that this was totally inappropriate. A professional, would have JUST emailed the 5 blog owners straight away and said it was you, here is copy of the email my assistant Hanich sent you. THIS behaviour alone, I think demonstrates the hostility of Prof Lewandowsky to his research subject matter (so called ‘sceptics’ or just members of the public that resent being labelled) and should preclude him (in my opinion) from this research and any research in this area.

    4) Conflict/Vested Interests: Lewandowsky and Cook are the authors of a number of Skeptical Science (SkS) accredited books, these books are a credited with UWA and Queensland Logos (is this official?) Lewandowsky is a regular author at the Skeptical Science website. What is Prof Lewandowsky role at SkS, is it purely a private interest (but why the University accreditation, and the debunking handbook, is promoted on the UWA – Shaping Tomorrows World blog. Skeptical Science would be considered in direct antagonistic opposition to Watts Up With That, Climate Audit and all the other sceptic blogs.

    5) Conflict/Vested Interest: Skeptical Science and its authors have a vested interest (it looks like commercial relationship) providing material for Al Gore’s – Climate Reality Project – Reality Drop. As such they have a direct interest in opposing and countering sceptical blog material.

    One example, my

    Watts Up With That article entitled – What Else did the 97% of scientists say,

    What else did the '97% of scientists' say?

    which author Marriott, claims to have debunked labelled, stamped Verified Bullshit, over an adulterated WUWT graphic, .

    Here we go again: “Watts up with that?” pushing the no consensus myth

    this was then endorsed by Skeptical Science

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/consensusforbes.html

    For example, see a recent article debunked by the blog Watching the Deniers, where somebody had cherry-picked skeptical quotes from a few scientists who responded to the Doran and Zimmerman study (Eos, January 20, 2009). This only reveals that some people confuse consensus with unanimity. – Skeptical Science (SkS)

    6) Harm:Respect: Further concerns are the authors and UWA have caused me harm, have failed to treat me with respect, not sort or obtained my consent and have not been able to show any justification for deceiving in my questions Prof Lewandowsky about LOG12 and by concealing from there research and following this particular named human participant whose comments (what else) have been collected

    7) Complaint: In light of the summary above, My complaint is that the authors and UWA and any other associations of the authors, have failed to comply to the National Statement of Ethical Conduct in the Field of Human Research

    The Purpose

    The purpose of this National Statement is to promote ethically good human research. Fulfilment of this purpose requires that participants be accorded the respect and protection that is due to them. It also involves the fostering of research that is of benefit to the community.

    Click to access e72.pdf

    The National statement is a actually further 111 pages long, but this is merely, I believe, the technical detail for those that perhaps do not realise that all that follows automatically from the 3 sentences above. The onus I believe is on UWA to demonstrate that they complied to the National Statement for this research, (‘Fury’ & ‘Moon’) not for the unwitting/unwilling participants to show where they UWA failed to comply to the National Statement.

    Please demonstrate that the authors Lewandowsky, Cook and Marriott in particular and the further co-authors of ‘Fury’ and ‘Moon’ authors are fit, unconflicted and appropriate persons to study human participants. The paper is littered with activist rhetoric like ‘climate denials’ and references to the Exxon/fossil fuel denial industry funding sceptics, conspiracy theory. How on earth did the peer reviewers not pick this up! and not say that it was inappropriate for psychologists of all people to talk this way.

    8) RESPECT: Please demonstrate the research justification for the LOG12 and Recursive Fury papers is beneficial and cause no harm.

    Because harm has been done, I was initially amused to find myself named in the data alongside Richard Betts, where the researchers of sceptics were so unaware of the debate and the people they research, that this was in fact Professor Richard Betts of the UK Met Office,Head Of Climate Impacts and IPCC lead author, he asked if he was a conspiracy theorist and was met with a response from the an author. I asked the author, I was ignored, I asked another author (Watching the deniers) I was ignored. I asked all the authors by posting my concerns and asking for a response on the Skeptical Science blog, and Shaping Tomorrows World blog I was ignored. I asked the UWA to contact the authors and respond to me, I have received no response from any of the authors.

    Both Richard and I were named in the data for Fury and when we enquired why, we were we not treated equally.

    My expectation of the journals and University and the whole field of psychology, that as an unwilling/unwitting participant in psychology research that finds my name in a paper, that my questions would be acknowledged and answered as a courtesy at the horror I felt of the ethical conduct, when I realised how many breaches of the Ethical Conduct had been brought to UWA and the journals attention

    I expected that as soon as the authors public hostility towards me, and named others in the paper was shown, that the paper would be retracted, apologies given and an ethics and misconduct investigation would be undertaken. Sadly not

    9)HARM and RESPECT

    I approached UWA and the journals as concerned member of the public, not as a label like a denier concerned that without my consent identifiable data about me had been collected, in Marriotts words that well know sceptics were tracked – WHY, WHAT FOR, what possible justification, have I committed a crime, please explain yourself here., labelled a disinformer, or Marriotts ever so eloquent Bullshit or Verified Bullshit, I was shocked to find that he had labelled me – Dunning-Kruger (and I should not have to explain to anybody, least of all a psychologist why) I was rather less surprised to find John Cook endorsed it

    I now feel unable to express myself freely publically [no blog posts since], whilst I have a thick skin and can explain to my young children rude abusive people on the internet are to be ignored, I do not want to risk them finding me labelled by psychologist in any way shape or form for official research. So I can NOT I feel express myself feely under my name anymore. The fact that I was perceived as of specific concern to be followed by psychology researcher, and perhaps my words twisted quoted out of context, as I have described in the ’Fury’ case (my comment cherry picked, partially quoted)

    10) ETHICS and GOOD FAITH

    perhaps just an anecdote to take into account: When Lewandosky was championing Peter Gleick as a hero (despite behaving unethical (and criminally?) to ’sceptics’ – Heartland incident) , I was writing to Marc Morano and Heartland to ask them to tone it down, not to publish Peter’ Gleick’s email address because I was concerned about whether his professional tragedy (Revkin – NYT) might turn into a personal tragedy, this was private correspondence but Prof Richard Betts, Dr Tamsin Edwards and I believe Dr Katie Hayhoe was copied ) can verify, my Good Faith not that I feel my conduct has in anyway demonstrated that I have ever communicated with anybody without behaving like a civil adult. I have also worked hard to try to depolarise a hostile debate, and tried to engage with the supposed ‘other side’ (including M MArriot) and persuade everybody to behave as adults.

    I was not exactly a fan of Peter Gleick see why here:

    Clarifications and How Better To Communicate Science

    11) My Request of UWA (given the circumstancces of demonstrably hostile / conflicted researchers)

    I ask UWA identify any comments or data collated about me and held in any databank, or in other form, and present it to me.

    I ask UWA to destroy any information collected in breach of the National Statement

    I ask UWA as a courtesy to me, to provide, the grant funding, the research justification and ethical clearance for this research

    I ask as a courtesy that UWA shows the benefit that this research project will bring to the community

    I expect that UWA undertake (or any of the authors) seek to obtain my consent to perform further research on me, and that any any research justified as being allowed to deceive the participants fully complies with the National Statement.

    The whole area of the ‘blogospheres’ surrounding climate change blog wars is no doubt a fascinating subject and I would think benefit from research to understand not least how psychologists and other climate scientists started using the language and rhetoric of political activists, and seemingly believe in an exxon/fossil fueled climate change denier industry? My only gain in the last 3 years would have been getting paid expenses to visit the Met Office to appear in a video with Prof Richard Betts, for their My Climate and Me project, so my only linkage to anything would be ‘big climate’ itself

    Best Regards

    Barry Woods

    not my best complaint, could have done with a good edit, but I still stand by it

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    1. 

       Martin Lack

       November 7, 2013

       As someone once said, I think you are “intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity”, Barry. You may well have been treated harshly but, I think you invite dismissal by posting the same comments in numerous places. If your claims have merit, they should be taken seriously (unless of course you are the victim of a conspiracy).

       SkS remains consistent with the vast majority of relevant peer-reviewed science; and your disputation of that science remains consistent only with assertions of widespread stupidity, mendacity, or collective hypnosis. I am not a gambling man but, if I was, I know which option I would put my money on.

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       1. 

          Ben Pile

          November 7, 2013

          “SkS remains consistent with the vast majority of relevant peer-reviewed science;”

          Even if it were true, your wager on SKS being in general a better interpretation of the ‘relevant peer-reviewed science’, misses the specifics of Barry’s criticism. You might be asking us to stick our own money on something which is, say, 46% accurate, versus something with is, say, only 45% accurate. But the hazard created by that form of wager is that it precludes a dialogue producing something which is 50%, 60%, or more, accurate.

          In other words, your wager is not just unscientific, it’s actively anti science.

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       2. 

          Martin Lack

          November 8, 2013

          That is some weird convoluted argument you have put together there, Ben. My money would be on the 97% of peer-reviewed scientific literature that does not dispute primary human causation of ongoing climate disruption. Whereas yours appears to be on those whose research rarely makes it into the peer-reviewed literature. Oh but, of course, the peer-review process is just a confirmation bias filter guaranteeing the perpetuation of the consensus. No doubt, you will be telling me next that you are not a conspiracy theorist.
          http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/sep/16/climate-change-contrarians-5-stages-denial

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30. 

    Barry Woods

    November 10, 2013

    Michael Wood – the initial Frontiers reviewer of ‘Recursive Fury’ – Lewandowsky, Cook Marriott et al, that pulled out of reviewing the paper, has a paper citing Recursive Fury at Frontiers!!!

    I have added this comment underneath the abstract:

    http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00409/abstract

    There is a problem here, one of the papers that is cited is not currently available from Frontiers.

    Additionally the same paper (Lew 2013b) was unavailable over 3 months prior to the publication of this paper.. (and is still unavailable) if the hyperlink in this paper is clicked for LEW 2013b, it returns to the abstract of this paper (truly recursive?!)

    The paper in question – Recursive Fury, Lewandowsky (2013b) et al.. has this statement on the Frontiers website:

    “This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. ” – Frontiers

    As this paper was subject to multiple ethics complaints and factual errors (I made one of them) and has been unavailable for over 7 months, ‘pending investigation’ it seems perhaps unwise to cite it, until this issue has been resolved.

    It also seems very odd, to cite a paper, when the authors presumably knew
    (ie it is another Frontiers paper, and the lead author of the LEW 2013b, was a reviewer of THIS paper, and the lead author of THIS paper, pulled out of being reviewer for ‘Recursive Fury’ Lew et al 2013b)).

    I have heard nothing from Frontiers about my complaint for months, yet authors are now citing this still unavailable paper. This seems very inappropriate.

    I hope Frontiers will be contacting me soon to explain.

    there are currently 2 Retraction Watch articles about Lew 2013b:
    http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/why-publishers-should-explain-why-papers-disappear-the-complicated-lewandowsky-study-saga/

    perhaps the authors of this paper should read the comments, and the comments under the abstract of Recursive Fury.
    http://www.frontiersin.org/personality_science_and_individual_differences/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073/abstract

    (especially as the lead author of this paper (Michael Wood), PULLED OUT from being a reviewer of Recursive Fury, Lewandowsky et al)

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31. 

    Michael J. McFadden

    November 11, 2013

    Martin Lack, you wrote, ” My money would be on the 97% of peer-reviewed scientific literature that does not dispute primary human causation of ongoing climate disruption.”

    Really? That 97% figure is the figure for the literature claiming “PRIMARY human causation of ongoing climate disruption”?

    Odd. I hadn’t thought that to be the case. I thought the 97% figure simply applied to scientists who thought human activity CONTRIBUTED in some form, perhaps only down at the 1/10th of 1% level, to climate change.

    Martin please cite your verification for that claim or admit that you’re indulging in the same sort of word/statistics games I’ve been fighting in the antismoking movement for the last 30 years. From where I sit they’re looking rather similar.

    MJM

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32. 

    JasonB

    November 11, 2013

    Michael J. McFadden
    Martin Lack, you wrote, ” My money would be on the 97% of peer-reviewed scientific literature that does not dispute primary human causation of ongoing climate disruption.”

    Really? That 97% figure is the figure for the literature claiming “PRIMARY human causation of ongoing climate disruption”?

    Odd. I hadn’t thought that to be the case. I thought the 97% figure simply applied to scientists who thought human activity CONTRIBUTED in some form, perhaps only down at the 1/10th of 1% level, to climate change.

    Since he specifically mentioned “97% of peer-reviewed scientific literature” (there are other papers referring to scientists, not papers, that arrive at a similar figure) Martin is probably referring to this paper, which found that 97.1% of the abstracts of papers published between 1991 and 2011 matching the topics “global climate change” or “global warming” that took a position on AGW endorsed the position that “humans are causing global warming”. Papers that explicitly stated that humans are causing less than half, or suggested either explicitly or implicitly that humans were not the dominant cause, were all counted as rejecting that position and accounted for 3%.

    Therefore a paper that suggested that humans were responsible for 1/10th of 1% would most definitely have been counted as a rejection of AGW and would be part of that 3%.

    In addition, 97.2% of the papers whose authors responded to the survey and who claimed that their papers took a position on AGW were rated by their authors as endorsing the proposition that “human activity (i.e. anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming”. The authors of a paper that claimed human activity contributed 1/10th of 1% would be required to categorise their paper as “7. Explicit Rejection with Quantification: paper explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming”.

    Given the high bar that Cook et al set for what counts as “endorsing AGW”, I think it is only fair to reflect that in discussing the results. If they had been content to accept any paper that says human activity CONTRIBUTED in some form, then the level of “consensus” would be very close to 100%. But that statement is a much weaker one than the one that the authors of 97% of the papers endorsed.

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    1. 

       Michael J. McFadden

       November 12, 2013

       Jason, you wrote, “Papers that explicitly stated that humans are causing less than half, or suggested either explicitly or implicitly that humans were not the dominant cause, were all counted as rejecting that position and accounted for 3%.”

       Jason, thank you for the clarification. I was not aware of that. I must admit that I am deeply surprised however that, given the complexity of the factors affecting climate, 97% of climate researchers all agreed that MORE THAN 50% of any change in worldwide climate in the last (?was the number of years specified?) has been caused specifically by human activity.

       I do note however that they seem to be referring to an analysis of positions as stated in Abstracts, and that the “bar” may not be as high as you infer. You noted ” Papers that explicitly stated that humans are causing less than half, or suggested either explicitly or implicitly that humans were not the dominant cause, were all counted as rejecting that position ”

       However… what about papers that did NOT explicitly note in those abstracts that humans are causing MORE than half? Are you claiming that ONLY the papers that explicitly so stated are included in the 97%?

       Hmm… ok… I decided to check further on your claim. Upon my reading of the entire study just now it would appear you are mistaken: If you examine Table 4 you will find this is what counted in that 97%:

       “Self-rated papers that endorse AGW have an average endorsement rating less than 4 ”

       An endorsement rating of less than 4 includes such abstracts as those that “Impl(y)ies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gas emissions cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause”

       That is a FAR cry from your characterization. I’m glad that I checked the paper rather than accepted your description. Can you expand/defend your position given what I found?

       MJM

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33. 

    Dodgy Geezer

    November 11, 2013

    1) How does one differentiate between ‘vexatious’ or ‘trivial’ requests for data and those which are merited?

    Simple. All supportive comments are meritorious. By definition, because the science is settled. So any unsupportive comments are, ipso facto, bad science.

    3rd party re-analysis of data is surely a staple of science.

    No one is stopping 3rd party analysis. It’s just that if they come to the wrong conclusion (see 1) above) they should not be given any publicity. No journal should publish them and if they are caught ‘glorifying denialism’ they should be given behaviour modification treatment under the terrorism acts

    However, the arrival of online fora has demonstrated that the public are not always a passive group waiting for the latest scientific knowledge to be visited upon them.

    Then they should be! Don’t they realise that the only people qualified to decide how they live their lives are climate specialists who have been through an intensive training process? People who disagree with this are a threat to society, criminals, and should be treated as such…

    Signed,

    University of East Anglia, The Royal Society, the Met Office, Greenpeace and the Association of Wind Farmers…

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34. 

    JasonB

    November 12, 2013

    People who disagree with this are a threat to society, criminals, and should be treated as such…

    Sorry, isn’t it the scientists who have been vilified? Who have received emails telling them to shoot themselves in the head, that someone some where will hunt them down, that they will kick the shit out of them? That their children and family should expect people at their door because they “know where they live”?

    Aren’t they the ones who “deserve to be publicly flogged”?

    And it’s not just idle threats, either — “One anonymous scientist had a dead animal dumped on his doorstep and now travels with bodyguards. A young Australian woman who gave a speech at a library about carbon footprints had the words “Climate Turd” written in feces on her car.” (Source) (She was only there to talk about the little things people can do to cut their carbon footprint and the climate books available at the library. That was enough to make her a target.)

    “The other young scientist was asked by a small, regional newspaper to pose with her young children in a photo promoting a community an upcoming tree-planting event. In the caption, she was briefly quoted as saying planting trees could help mitigate climate change. Two days after the article appeared, she received emails containing threats of sexual assault and violence against her children.” (Source)

    Have you ever seen climate scientists say anything like that about so-called “skeptics”? Have you ever seen climate scientists write messages in shit on so-called “skeptics”‘ cars after they spoke publicly? How can you invert reality so completely?

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35. 

    JasonB

    November 12, 2013

    Michael J. McFadden
    I must admit that I am deeply surprised however that, given the complexity of the factors affecting climate, 97% of climate researchers all agreed that MORE THAN 50% of any change in worldwide climate in the last (?was the number of years specified?) has been caused specifically by human activity.

    That’s not what I wrote. I said that 97% of papers meeting the specified criteria agreed that humans were causing global warming. There have been other studies of climate scientists that happen to come up with similar numbers but we were talking about this study.

    I do note however that they seem to be referring to an analysis of positions as stated in Abstracts, and that the “bar” may not be as high as you infer.

    The author ratings were based on the whole papers, not just the abstracts. A lot of the papers that Cook et al rated as “4 – Neutral” were rated by their own authors as actually taking a position on AGW because the author’s didn’t feel the need to state the cause of AGW in the abstract but did so in the paper itself.

    For example, one paper that Cook et al rated as neutral has, as its very first sentence: “The anticipated increases in greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere are predicted to raise temperatures by about 2.1 to 5.0 C globally within the next 100 years (Wigley and Raper, 1992; IPCC, 2001).”

    I “inferred” the bar from both examining how they rated individual papers and how I would have rated those same papers, from seeing the rating criteria, and from examining how the authors rated their own papers. It’s useful that they have provided all of the data for us to do that. It’s also important to view the various ratings in the context of the other ratings that are available.

    For example, any of the “skeptical” scientists who participated are, I’m sure you agree, pretty much guaranteed to ensure that any paper they wrote that challenges the consensus would definitely be characterised by them as doing so, whether they can claim it’s a “7” or, in the worst case, have to fall back on a “5”. It beggars belief that they would miss an opportunity to highlight one of their papers in this way having gone to the trouble of getting it published.

    You noted ” Papers that explicitly stated that humans are causing less than half, or suggested either explicitly or implicitly that humans were not the dominant cause, were all counted as rejecting that position ”

    However… what about papers that did NOT explicitly note in those abstracts that humans are causing MORE than half? Are you claiming that ONLY the papers that explicitly so stated are included in the 97%?

    I claimed precisely what I said. Papers that explicitly stated that humans are causing less than half, or suggested either explicitly or implicitly that humans were not the dominant cause, were all counted as rejecting that position. I stated that because you said “I thought the 97% figure simply applied to scientists who thought human activity CONTRIBUTED in some form, perhaps only down at the 1/10th of 1% level, to climate change.” and it directly addresses your misconception because that would have definitely put the paper in the 3%.

    The 97% consisted of papers that explicitly stated that humans are causing more than half, or suggested either explicitly or implicitly that humans were the dominant cause. The categories are, naturally, symmetric.

    Papers that did not take a position either way were counted as “neutral”; they were “false positives” in the search for papers on the causes (or existence of) GW that were accidentally picked up by the search terms designed to hone in on relevant papers.

    Hmm… ok… I decided to check further on your claim. Upon my reading of the entire study just now it would appear you are mistaken: If you examine Table 4 you will find this is what counted in that 97%:

    “Self-rated papers that endorse AGW have an average endorsement rating less than 4 ”

    An endorsement rating of less than 4 includes such abstracts as those that “Impl(y)ies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gas emissions cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause”

    That is a FAR cry from your characterization. I’m glad that I checked the paper rather than accepted your description. Can you expand/defend your position given what I found?

    Given that I gave you the link to the open-access paper precisely so you could read it for yourself, and quoted the exact proposition they were addressing, I don’t appreciate the suggestion that I tried to mischaracterise the results.

    To expand, however:

    If we exclude all papers that do not explicitly state that humans are causing more than or less than 50% of GW (i.e. exclude everything except 1 and 7), we get 96.14% rated by their own authors as explicitly stating that humans are causing most of global warming and the rest rated by their own authors as explicitly stating that humans are causing less than half of global warming. (This means, for example, that a paper that stated humans were causing 49% of global warming would be counted as category 7; this is actually quite a high bar, as I said, so it’s important not to “water down” the results.)

    If we expand it to include papers that explicitly endorse or explicitly reject the proposition that human activity (i.e., anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming, but do not state the quantity, we get 98.10% rated by their own authors as supporting that proposition. Remembering what I said before (about “skeptical” scientists wanting to ensure their papers were not accidentally classified as endorsing the suggestion that humans are causing global warming) I think it’s safe to say that the bar still remains high at this point.

    We could stop there, and if you are uneasy about drawing conclusions about papers that do not make explicit statements about causation, then those are the percentages you get.

    However, Cook et al felt that it would be good to include papers that are based on the assumption that humans are causing global warming (e.g. a paper that explicitly states that “The advent of global warming, as attested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has serious ramifications for various facets of the human endeavour” is an example of an actual Level 3 paper) as well as papers that implicitly minimise AGW by pointing out the role of the sun or claiming that AGW is actually beneficial (these make up 63% of the “rejection” papers, so it’s good that they made an effort to include those as well).

    It doesn’t make much difference to the actual percentage that you get, but it’s more comprehensive. Likewise, rating abstracts alone gives very similar results. I’d say the main reason for this is that the paper is actually a fair reflection on what the literature says; sampling from different subsets gives slightly different results but they don’t change the bottom line.

    I think it’s also worth pointing out that given the overwhelming numbers on the endorsement side of the ledger, any errors in rating papers would have to be truly astronomical to make a meaningful difference to the outcome. And given the small numbers of “contrarian” papers in the literature, it’s actually not that hard to make sure they were all rated correctly.

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36. 

    Michael J. McFadden

    November 13, 2013

    Jason, thank you for the detailed response, and I did not mean to imply that you deliberately mischaracterised the results: just that I felt you had mischaracterised them. You did quite clearly point to your source, which I obviously appreciated and examined, although coming to a different conclusion about what it showed.

    I do however think the conclusions were based upon the abstracts rather than the entire papers: after all, we’re talking about 10,000 studies — a bit much even for a team of five people to have thoroughly read. Plus, if you simply look at the headings of the tables themselves you’ll note that they speak of “% of all abstracts” and not “% of all papers.”

    Can we look at Table 3 for a moment? The important breakdown in question seems to be between the 97% of those “with an AGW position” who “endorsed AGW” and the 2% who rejected it.

    Are you saying that those 97% ALL endorsed the view that “more than 50%” of GW is being caused by human activity and that the 2% represent those who felt there was either no contribution OR a contribution of less than 50%?

    And if you are not saying that, then where exactly is the figure for those scientists who said “Well, yes, I think humans make a contribution, but not necessarily an important or significant one”? I think my discomfort with the analysis is coming from not seeing that figure.

    MJM

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37. 

    JasonB

    November 13, 2013

    Michael J. McFadden
    I do however think the conclusions were based upon the abstracts rather than the entire papers: after all, we’re talking about 10,000 studies — a bit much even for a team of five people to have thoroughly read. Plus, if you simply look at the headings of the tables themselves you’ll note that they speak of “% of all abstracts” and not “% of all papers.”

    Michael, this is all spelt out quite clearly in the paper (even in the abstract). There were two phases to the study. The first phase, the rating by Cook’s team of 24 (not five) raters, was of 11,944 abstracts, where each abstract was rated independently by two anonymised raters who rated the abstract based on the title and abstract alone; author names and affiliations, journal, and publishing date were all hidden. The 97.1% endorsement figure comes from this phase.

    The second phase consisted of rating of papers by their own authors. It is the figures relating to this phase that I gave above. This gives an endorsement figure of 98.4% when all categories are included, but if you want to limit it to explicit statements about causation then you get the 98.1% figure I gave before.

    Can we look at Table 3 for a moment? The important breakdown in question seems to be between the 97% of those “with an AGW position” who “endorsed AGW” and the 2% who rejected it.

    Are you saying that those 97% *ALL* endorsed the view that “more than 50%” of GW is being caused by human activity and that the 2% represent those who felt there was either no contribution OR a contribution of less than 50%?

    Essentially, but I think it’s worth taking a step back for a second. The rating scheme does not go from “most endorsement” to “least endorsement”, or “most alarming” to “least alarming” via “lukewarm”. (For this reason, I think the label “level of endorsement” was a mistake, from the context it should have been something like “category” instead.) The rating itself merely categorises how the agreement or disagreement with the proposition that “human activity is causing global warming” was expressed. A level 3 paper on the impacts of a 2C rise in temperature, for example, could easily be more alarming than a rather dry level 1 paper on attribution. Now, since level 1 and level 7 papers explicitly state the percentage of human causation, they are easy to categorise correctly. Level 2 and level 6 papers are harder, and level 3 and level 5 papers are harder still because, by definition, they are making no explicit statement on the subject.

    So, if you have qualms about including papers that implicitly endorse or reject the consensus, then ignore them, and only count the 1, 2, 6, and 7 papers. Self-rated by their authors gives 98.1%, rated by Cook et al based on their abstracts gives you 97.6%. As you can see, it really doesn’t make any real difference, and the reason that I think that it doesn’t make any real difference is because the sample size is large enough to effectively estimate the underlying level of agreement in the literature.

    The second phase was a great idea, in my view. It gave any scientist who wanted to highlight the fact that their paper did not support that proposition an opportunity to do so, and clearly, the authors of some (2-3%) papers chose to do that. Anybody who thinks that this study does not reflect the actual level of endorsement in the scientific literature of that proposition needs to explain why so few papers were rated by their own authors as rejecting it.

    And if you are *not* saying that, then where exactly is the figure for those scientists who said “Well, yes, I think humans make a contribution, but not necessarily an important or significant one”? I think my discomfort with the analysis is coming from not seeing that figure.

    Again, we’re talking papers, not scientists, but as I have already explained, a scientist who wrote a paper that says “humans make a contribution, but not necessarily an important or significant one” would have to rate it as a 5, 6, or 7, depending on exactly how that sentiment was expressed in the paper, and if it appeared in the abstract, Cook et al would have had to rate it similarly. For example, Table 2 describes level 5 as “Implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly E.g., proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming”, and level 6 as “Explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming”. Anything that explicitly states that “humans are causing less than half of global warming” must be a level 7. There is simply no way to argue that a paper that says what you describe could legitimately end up in the “Endorses” camp based on those descriptions.

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38. 

    Michael J. McFadden

    November 13, 2013

    “Table 2 describes level 5 as “Implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly E.g., proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming” ”

    Thank you Jason. That had slipped by me and it does largely address my concern. While I’ve seen this issue (the Cook paper, not AGW) discussed before, this is the first time I actually read the paper. and I must confess that since it’s not really my primary sphere of interest I probably didn’t give it the careful reading it deserved.

    MJM

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39. 

    tlitb1

    November 13, 2013

    @Michael J. McFadden
    @JasonB

    Sorry to interrupt but when I see discussions on matters Cook et al 2013 going like yours is I have to butt in 🙂

    It is interesting JasonB uses such precision when proposing hypothetical papers that would be rejected e.g.

    “…a paper that stated humans were causing 49% of global warming would be counted as category 7; this is actually quite a high bar…”

    Can you imagine that number being actually used in any science paper outside mathematics?

    I can’t but ignore my incredulity, there are no papers saying this. Let’s cut to the chase – no real numerical “bar” was used by their methodology outside of an implied half or 50%. That’s it. If you want to call it bar then I suggest not calling it high or low it’s in the middle 😉

    For an abstract to get into the 97% it had only to meet a minimum subjective textual “Level of endorsment 3”. The suggested example that could match this is

    “…carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change’

    That’s it. So if, for example, those exact words appeared in an abstract, the rater (and 12 people at SKS did most of the rating) would be justified as putting that paper in the “consensus”

    However any error in this would be corrected when this paper came to self rated by the actual author right?

    Well what are the chances of a paper being self rated by an author?

    Well to get the papers self ratings Cook et al “emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate).”

    There were 23 061 authors in the original abstracts group. Whatever the selection process to narrow down to 8547, whether they were alive or available whatever, we start with just over a third of authors, and then of them only 1200 (14%) decided to respond.

    Now add in the concept of volunteer bias. How are these self selecting responders to be considered? Remember JasonB has introduced the idea that with climate scientists with a predisposed ideological position it

    “…beggars belief that they would miss an opportunity to highlight one of their papers in this way having gone to the trouble of getting it published”

    So what you have in the end with Cook et al is a “no” bar weakly defined consensus, with possible validation over a small range from volunteer authors, a large proportion of which could contain ideological motivated people concerned about the fact they went to the “trouble of getting [their papers] published” 😉

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40. 

    JasonB

    November 14, 2013

    tlitb1
    It is interesting JasonB uses such precision when proposing hypothetical papers that would be rejected

    Why is that “interesting”? I merely applied the rules that were used. It makes no difference whether or not there were actual papers that stated that percentage.

    I’d also like to highlight what I’ve mentioned before: The question that they were addressing was whether or there was agreement in the literature over the proposition that “human activity (i.e. anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming”, and indeed this is how the results are promoted. That is the actual proposition being tested (as opposed to, for example, “global warming is happening”, or “human activity, including deforestation, etc., is causing global warming”, or indeed, “human activity is contributing to global warming”).

    The question then arises, in cases where the contribution is stated numerically, how should “is causing” be mapped to a numerical value? The answer they chose was “more than 50%” — i.e. they felt that the average person would expect that the phrase “is causing” means it must be responsible for most of the effect.

    Likewise, any attempt by a paper to suggest that human activity wasn’t causing it — e.g. by emphasising the role of the sun — would automatically cause that paper to be categorised as rejecting that proposition.

    Furthermore, given the current research suggests that GHG emissions are responsible for over 100% of the observed warming (because other factors are working in the opposite direction, making the observed warming less than it would have been if all else had remained equal) I wouldn’t expect 49% to appear, but it’s hardly relevant. They had to draw a line, and that was where the line was drawn. If it turns out that no papers were close to 50% then that’s good, because I generally feel uncomfortable when something very close to a boundary gets categorised one way or the other and the outcome would have been different with a tiny change either way. I don’t see how the fact that, in reality, all of the “consensus” papers addressing this issue show the actual human contribution to be much larger than that bar in any way hurts the argument.

    For an abstract to get into the 97% it had only to meet a minimum subjective textual “Level of endorsment 3”. The suggested example that could match this is

    “…carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change’

    That’s it. So if, for example, those exact words appeared in an abstract, the rater (and 12 people at SKS did most of the rating) would be justified as putting that paper in the “consensus”

    Then ignore the 97% of papers that were classified as endorsing the consensus position based on a rating of 1, 2, or 3, and instead just take the 98% of papers that were classified as endorsing the consensus position because they made an explicit statement to the effect that human GHG emissions are causing global warming (ratings 1 and 2).

    Personally, I tend to think that if you are highlighting the level of agreement in the literature on that proposition then accounting for papers that assume it is correct is a good way to do that. Indeed, the point has been made that as something becomes more widely accepted, fewer papers are going to be addressing it directly — everyone else will be working “downstream”, on the consequences of the accepted proposition. The fact that so many papers do so is further evidence that it is widely accepted in the scientific community — i.e. that there is a consensus.

    But it is harder to be certain whether the author intended the paper to be an endorsement by definition, because the endorsement is implicit — so ignore them if you prefer. It doesn’t materially affect the bottom line.

    However any error in this would be corrected when this paper came to self rated by the actual author right?

    Well what are the chances of a paper being self rated by an author?

    Well to get the papers self ratings Cook et al “emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate).”

    There were 23 061 authors in the original abstracts group. Whatever the selection process to narrow down to 8547, whether they were alive or available whatever, we start with just over a third of authors, and then of them only 1200 (14%) decided to respond.

    That’s like saying statistical surveys can’t possibly work because not everyone is asked.

    The question is whether there is any bias in the selection of authors or those who chose to respond, and whether the sample size was large enough.

    And there was a bias. The older a paper was, the more likely the author has retired, died, or simply become unreachable, so the response rate for the oldest papers was less than half the response rate for the newest. Couple that with a clear increase in consensus over time and you find that older papers, where there is likely to be more disagreement, are under-represented in the author self-ratings.

    For this reason it’s probably better to view the reviewer ratings as more “accurate” and the author self-ratings as a useful sanity check to ensure that the reviewers themselves weren’t biased. When you check the differences between Cook et al’s rating and the author ratings you find only 12% were rated as having a lower level of their endorsement by their authors than by Cook et al but 50% were rated by their authors as having a higher level of endorsement. This, to me, is a more powerful statement about the accuracy of the “97%” figure than the fact that the author self-ratings happened to come up with almost exactly the same number.

    Now add in the concept of volunteer bias. How are these self selecting responders to be considered? Remember JasonB has introduced the idea that with climate scientists with a predisposed ideological position it

    “…beggars belief that they would miss an opportunity to highlight one of their papers in this way having gone to the trouble of getting it published”

    So what you have in the end with Cook et al is a “no” bar weakly defined consensus, with possible validation over a small range from volunteer authors, a large proportion of which could contain ideological motivated people concerned about the fact they went to the “trouble of getting [their papers] published”

    That’s easy. Apart from having two independent, anonymised raters per paper, and then publishing the differences between their ratings and the authors ratings, they published all of their data. If there is a bias in their rating, all anyone has to do is check their results. I have had a go at rating enough abstracts myself to convince myself that they did a good job. Have you?

    I think it’s also worth restating the point that the numbers are so overwhelming, it would require a massive bias in the results in order to materially affect the outcome. If there were so many papers mis-categorised, then it shouldn’t be too hard to find evidence of this. Conversely, there are so few “skeptical” authors that it hardly takes any effort at all to make sure that their work was correctly categorised. As long as they were correctly categorised, then you could remove half of the endorsement papers and you’d still get 95% endorsement!

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41. 

    JasonB

    November 14, 2013

    To investigate the hypothesis that there could have been a bias introduced by Cook et al at the stage where they were selecting which authors to contact, I decided to check the figures for the period from 2009-2011, because they said email addresses were found for the authors of all papers published during that period, removing that as a source of bias. It’s also the period with the highest response rate (~22%) and a short enough period that changing opinions over time shouldn’t affect the results.

    Of the papers that Cook et al rated based on their abstracts as endorsing the proposition, they got author responses for 24.0% during that period (350 of 1,458). Of the papers that Cook et al rated based on their abstracts as rejecting the proposition, they got author responses for 23.8% (5 of 21). That’s as close as the two numbers can possibly be given the small number of “rejecting” papers and therefore this provides no evidence of bias in either the choice of authors to contact or the authors’ decisions to respond (unless a bias in one just happens to cancel out an opposite bias in the other).

    Of all the abstracts Cook et al rated for that period, 98.58% of the papers that took a position on the proposition were classified as endorsing the proposition (1458 vs 21).

    Of all the papers that Cool et al got author responses for during that period, Cook et al classified 98.59% of the papers that took a position on the proposition as endorsing the proposition (350 vs 5).

    The authors of those papers rated 97.78% as endorsing the proposition (482 vs 11).

    The slight difference in author rating vs Cook et al rating is not evidence of bias, either, because nearly half of the papers that Cook et al rated as “neutral” based on their abstracts were rated by their authors as taking a position based on the paper as a whole (which is why the 350 increased to 482 and the 5 increased to 11). It might indicate that “rejection” papers are slightly more likely to not make their rejection clear in the abstract, although the numbers are so small it’s hard to say.

    In any case, there’s no evidence that the true level of endorsement in the scientific literature is different to that produced by this survey.

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42. 

    tlitb1

    November 14, 2013

    @JasonB
    ”

    In any case, there’s no evidence that the true level of endorsement in the scientific literature is different to that produced by this survey.”

    OK then, let’s accept that there is no difference in the validation of the approx 98% figure for Endorsement- even though it was you introduced the idea of volunteer bias by saying that with some climate scientists it:

    “…beggars belief that they would miss an opportunity to highlight one of their papers in this way having gone to the trouble of getting it published”

    But forget that then. 😉

    Let’s accept then that the percentage split of scientists who put themselves outside the neutral category (I don’t think ‘who expressed a preference’ should be used), matches the percentage split outside the neutral category shown by the abstract raters. Say both agree at around approx: 98% Endorse to 2% reject?

    What does that mean? Is that really a validation of anything useful? Is that the definition of “consensus”?

    Below is what I think a fair summation of the information provided, and what the scientist were asked to do, when making this key “Endorsement” decision on their own paper(s). Asterisk *lines are my addition:

    The survey should take around 6 minutes. You may elect to discontinue the survey at any point; your ratings will only be recorded if the survey is completed. The rating must be done in one uninterrupted session, and cannot be revised after closing the session. Your ratings are confidential and all data will be de-individuated in the final results so no individual ratings will be published. You may sign up to receive the final results of the de-individuated survey.

    Endorsement: The second drop down indicates the level of endorsement for the proposition that human activity (i.e., anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming (e.g., the increase in temperature). Note: we are not asking about your personal opinion but whether each specific paper endorses or rejects (whether explicitly or implicitly) that humans cause global warming:

    1. Explicit Endorsement with Quantification:paper explicitly states that humans are causing most of global warming.
    2. Explicit Endorsement without Quantification:paper explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.
    3. Implicit Endorsement:paper implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.

    tlitb1 says: ANYTHING ABOVE THIS LINE ENDORSES THE CONSENSUS AND IS IN THE 98%

    4. Neutral:paper doesn’t address or mention issue of what’s causing global warming.

    tlitb1 says: ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE REJECTS THE CONSENSUS AND IS IN THE 2%

    5. Implicit Rejection:paper implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly. E.g., proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming.
    6. Explicit Rejection without Quantification:paper explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming.
    7. Explicit Rejection with Quantification: paper explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming

    You say:

    ” i.e. they felt that the average person would expect that the phrase “is causing” means it must be responsible for most of the effect.”

    Cook et al might have felt that; but they don’t explicitly statethat to the scientists do they? And I think we could agree that the scientists are not average people. Especially in this context.

    For example: Perhaps a scientist thinks his paper says that humans cause 49% of global warming; why should this scientist assume Cook et al expect him to not put his paper in category 3 or higher?

    Remember this scientist has this to go on:

    Endorsement: The second drop down indicates the level of endorsement for the proposition that human activity (i.e., anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming (e.g., the increase in temperature). Note: we are not asking about your personal opinion but whether each specific paper endorses or rejects (whether explicitly or implicitly) that humans cause global warming

    Wouldn’t you want make the “expectation” of their thoughts less vague?

    At the end of the day the concept this paper has a “high bar” constraint, or clinical accuracy, on any possible interpretations is totally missing when you present what the paper actually did rather add up a lot of detailed, but essentially circular post analysis.

    “I think it’s also worth restating the point that the numbers are so overwhelming, it would require a massive bias in the results in order to materially affect the outcome. ”

    I really don’t think “overwhelming” numbers add to the weight of the outcome of the paper, but maybe you give a clue to Cook et al’s expectations? 😉

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43. 

    tlitb1

    November 15, 2013

    @JasonB

    I take this back

    For example: Perhaps a scientist thinks his paper says that humans cause 49% of global warming; why should this scientist assume Cook et al expect him to not put his paper in category 3 or higher?

    as you say this hypothetical scientists is offering a quantification of 49% and should be included in category 7.

    My point is blunted now, I should have stuck with my dislike of the idea that the majority of papers are quantifying left and right with precision (let alone written by actual climate scientists!) and not decided to use that value as an example! 😉

    However the issue of papers that are not offering quantification remains, and is where I believe the majority effect of the vagueness of the definitions comes in.

    A non-quantifier author could look down to the description of of level 7 and think that means something to them, but I think more likely they would think that Cook et al are saying something different to a quantifier author than to themselves.

    A non-quantifier sees those quantifier guys get told that if they say less than 50% then they have to put it in Level 7.

    But since the the non-quantifier author may have no opinion or skill to judge the quantity of human effect then they can happily place their paper in 3 or 2 using the allowed definitions.

    To better state my summary of my criticism: the concept this paper has a consistent “high bar” constraint, or consistent clinical accuracy over the whole 98% range that makes the headline value is unjustified when you present what the paper’s method actually did .

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44. 

    JasonB

    November 15, 2013

    tlitb1
    @JasonB
    “

    In any case, there’s no evidence that the true level of endorsement in the scientific literature is different to that produced by this survey.”

    OK then, let’s accept that there is no difference in the validation of the approx 98% figure for Endorsement- even though it was you introduced the idea of volunteer bias by saying that with some climate scientists it:

    “…beggars belief that they would miss an opportunity to highlight one of their papers in this way having gone to the trouble of getting it published”

    But forget that then.

    Sorry, I should have picked up on your misunderstanding of what I said before but I didn’t until reading this.

    What you have quoted me saying there was not in relation to volunteer bias. It was in relation to how a scientist, having chosen to respond, would rate their own paper.

    In my last post I addressed the issue of volunteer bias. There is no evidence that there was any, as I said in that post.

    My earlier point, which you quoted, was on how those volunteers would rate their own papers. I’m not talking about bias — I’m saying that the author of a paper that rejects the proposition that human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing global warming is going to (correctly) discover that there is a category that can be used to classify the paper as rejecting that proposition. In other words, there is no way that the author of such a paper will be forced into choosing a neutral or an endorsement rating for that paper. All of the possible ways that they could express their paper’s rejection of that proposition are covered. Given their incentive to do so, it beggars belief that they would then incorrectly rate their own paper. That was my point, and it’s important because it means that there really are very few actual “rejection” papers in the literature, even when “rejection” includes papers that propose anything else as the “main cause”, or that human causation is anything less than 50%. That’s the “high bar” I was referring to earlier.

    Say both agree at around approx: 98% Endorse to 2% reject?

    What does that mean? Is that really a validation of anything useful? Is that the definition of “consensus”?

    Basically, yes. It shows that there is general or widespread agreement about the issue in the scientific literature.

    Cook et al address why that matters in their paper: “An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy (Ding et al 2011). […] Despite numerous indicators of a consensus, there is wide public perception that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of global warming (GW; Leiserowitz et al 2012, Pew 2012).”

    In other words, there is a massive discrepancy between the public perception of the level of scientific agreement on this topic, and the actual level of scientific agreement. This discrepancy is hindering efforts to tackle the problem. The paper attempts to demonstrate to the public in a transparent way just how much scientific agreement there is, and given the level of media coverage of this paper and the fact that it is now the most downloaded paper in all of the IoP journals, they seem to have got people’s attention.

    And this is important. In a democracy, it is important that the people know the truth. You are free to try to convince people that it doesn’t matter that the overwhelming majority of experts in a field have come to accept something as true, but it doesn’t mean that the people don’t have a right to know that the overwhelming majority of experts in a field have come to accept something as true. At the moment, studies show that people don’t know that, and based on the response to this paper, there are a lot of people who would prefer they didn’t.

    Below is what I think a fair summation of the information provided, and what the scientist were asked to do, when making this key “Endorsement” decision on their own paper(s).

    The exact contents of the email are included in the supplementary material, but the only difference is the first paragraph.

    You say:

    ” i.e. they felt that the average person would expect that the phrase “is causing” means it must be responsible for most of the effect.”

    Cook et al might have felt that; but they don’t explicitly statethat to the scientists do they? And I think we could agree that the scientists are not average people. Especially in this context.

    Scientists would read the titles of the categories and realise, for example, that any paper that states humans are causing less than half of global warming goes into the “Explicit Rejection” category, and any paper that proposes that a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming is an “Implicit Rejection”.

    Given that you didn’t even realise when you wrote this post that a scientist whose paper says that humans cause 49% of global warming cannot put his paper into category 3 or higher — something spelt out explicitly in the instructions — I would suggest that some of your confusion is from not reading it carefully enough yourself.

    Just to be clear once again: Scientists were asked to rate their paper on the question of whether anthropogenic greenhouse gases is causing global warming. The three levels that were counted by Cook et al as endorsing that proposition all had “Endorsement” clearly spelt out in the title. The three levels that were counted as rejecting that proposition all had “Rejection” clearly spelt out in the title. The three endorsement levels used the phrases “humans are causing most of global warming” or “humans are causing global warming”. The three rejection levels used the phrase “humans are causing less than half of global warming”, “minimises or rejects that humans are causing global warming”, “minimal impact […] e.g. proposing a natural mechanism as the main cause”.

    I don’t see how it can be considered “vague”. Either a paper does not mention what’s causing global warming (which was most of them) and is therefore irrelevant, or it fits into one of those categories. If you can come up with a paper (real or imagined) where a paper fails to meet the “high bar” and yet would be incorrectly classified under this scheme as endorsing the proposition, I’d be interested in seeing it. Then you just need to show that this was a real problem by checking the data.

    At the end of the day the concept this paper has a “high bar” constraint, or clinical accuracy, on any possible interpretations is totally missing when you present what the paper actually did rather add up a lot of detailed, but essentially circular post analysis.

    I’m afraid I don’t follow. If you are suggesting that the paper incorrectly classified papers as endorsing the proposition that should not have, or not rejecting the proposition that should have, I’m happy to look at examples. Without concrete evidence, all we have at the moment is the idea that you find the rules a bit “vague” while at the same time not even realising that one of the rules explicitly states that a 49% paper would be classified as a Rejection. It makes it look like your perception of vagueness is due to not looking very carefully rather than an inherent problem in the rules themselves.

    I really don’t think “overwhelming” numbers add to the weight of the outcome of the paper, but maybe you give a clue to Cook et al’s expectations?

    Given that you have presented no actual evidence of any bias (and, indeed, made one pretty basic mistake in interpreting the rules yourself) I’m afraid I don’t find your argument compelling.

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45. 

    JasonB

    November 15, 2013

    tlitb1
    A *non-quantifier* author could look down to the description of of level 7 and think that means something to them, but I think more likely they would think that Cook et al are saying something different to a *quantifier* author than to themselves.

    A *non-quantifier* sees those *quantifier* guys get told that if they say less than 50% then they have to put it in Level 7.

    But since the the *non-quantifier* author may have no opinion or skill to judge the quantity of human effect then they can happily place their paper in 3 or 2 using the allowed definitions.

    I’m sorry, but it really looks to me like you’re clutching at straws. Now you are trying to imagine that scientists — who moments earlier you were reminding us are “not average people” — are going to only look at some of the levels (because you did when you missed level 7?) when trying to categorise their papers?

    But anyway, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just use author self-ratings of 1 and 7. These are “quantifier” authors looking at cold, hard, quantities, rating their own papers. We get 224 to 9. That’s 96%. Wow.

    What about authors who feel qualified to make a statement on the cause of global warming? We’re not talking about “downstream” authors who are simply assuming the science is correct (although that, quite rightly, is a measure of scientific consensus in its own right), we’re talking about papers that explicitly endorse or reject the proposition that anthropogenic GHG emissions are causing global warming (which is, after all, the statement that is “advertised”). That adds 549 to the “endorsement” ledger and 5 to the “rejection” ledger. Now the total level of endorsement is 98%. Heck, the discrepancy is so large, let’s add in all the rejection levels of any type, but ignore the level 3 endorsements. That adds a whopping 24 papers to the “rejection” pile and drops the level of endorsement to just over 95.3%.

    So, assuming that every author of a paper rejecting the proposition that human GHG emissions are causing global warming rated their paper as a rejection, and comparing all of those to just the papers whose authors claimed explicitly endorsed that proposition — ignoring all of those whose work was based on the assumption it was true — and we still get an overwhelming majority.

    In fact, if we only compare “quantifier” authors’ papers with all the rejection papers in total we still get 85.5%. That’s still an overwhelming majority, and that’s after unfairly excluding papers that made the mistake of not putting a number in.

    To better state my summary of my criticism: the concept this paper has a consistent “high bar” constraint, or consistent clinical accuracy over the whole 98% range that makes the headline value is unjustified when you present what the paper’s method actually did .

    I disagree, but rather than arguing the point, I’m happy to simply show that addressing that concern by ignoring papers potentially subjected to it doesn’t change the bottom line. My view is that the reason it doesn’t is because the concern was unfounded to begin with but simply showing that it doesn’t matter anyway is easier.

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46. 

    tlitb1

    November 15, 2013

    @JasonB

    I’m sorry, but it really looks to me like you’re clutching at straws. Now you are trying to imagine that scientists — who moments earlier you were reminding us are “not average people” — are going to only look at some of the levels (because you did when you missed level 7?) when trying to categorise their papers?

    By “not average people” I meant the surveyed scientists are clearly not average people in this context when involved in the task of rating their own papers. They are not average “citizen scientists” asked to rate an unknown abstract. I certainly didn’t mean the scientists should be assumed to be above average at eliciting what the designers of this survey felt. 😉

    Remember the direction to the scientist? The specific directions I found was for a scientist to rate 4 papers:

    The survey should take around 6 minutes You may elect to discontinue the survey at any point; your ratings will only be recorded if the survey is completed. The rating must be done in one uninterrupted session, and cannot be revised after closing the session.

    You said the survey designers (my emphasis)…:

    ” … felt that the average person would expect that the phrase “is causing” means it must be responsible for most of the effect.”

    Why should this scientist when asked to recall the details of his papers, and then assess them against the categories in a drop down list, be expected to work around the deficiencies of the question design?

    It really doesn’t take too much imagination to think of a paper that acknowledges the greenhouse affect and accepts some human component in late 20th C warming which easily match this description:

    3. Implicit Endorsement:paper implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.

    (In fact this became a point of contention with Roy Spencer who claimed this very point about his own sceptical work.)

    And remember this weak category 3 level makes up the bulk of the Endorsement proportion in both abstract and self rated results.

    To my summary concern that when you look at what this paper did rather than indulged in numerical post analysis one can see the idea that this paper has a consistent “high bar” constraint, or consistent clinical accuracy over the whole 98% range is flawed, you reply with some numerical analysis of an ever smaller subgroup!

    I’m happy to simply show that addressing that concern by ignoring papers potentially subjected to it doesn’t change the bottom line.

    But you had said:

    I think it’s also worth restating the point that the numbers are so overwhelming, it would require a massive bias in the results in order to materially affect the outcome.

    The fact that the “overwhelming” scale can become unimportant to you and effectively ditched like this makes me suspect you are clutching at straws rather then acknowledge the clear problems of the Cook et al papers’ design.

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47. 

    JasonB

    November 15, 2013

    Note: There is an earlier reply than the one you are replying to that has not made it through moderation yet.

    @JasonB

    You said the survey designers (my emphasis)…:

    ” … felt that the average person would expect that the phrase “is causing” means it must be responsible for most of the effect.”

    Why should this scientist when asked to recall the details of his papers, and then assess them against the categories in a drop down list, be expected to work around the deficiencies of the question design?

    Why say “recall the details of his papers”? Why wouldn’t the author actually read the paper carefully keeping the survey questions in mind and then answer the questions? That’s what I would have done. (It’s not like an estimate of how long it will take to fill in a survey should be regarded as a time limit for the authors to assess their papers. Is that what you are trying to suggest???) And I’m afraid I still don’t see these deficiencies you are talking about.
    I’m also unclear why you’ve gone out of your way to emphasise my use of the word “felt”, as if that has some deep significance. It was just a figure of speech.

    It really doesn’t take too much imagination to think of a paper that acknowledges the greenhouse affect and accepts some human component in late 20th C warming which easily match this description:

    3. Implicit Endorsement:paper implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.

    Only if the author of that paper stops reading half-way down the list.
    What you are proposing is that the list of categories would be read by this author as not mutually exclusive and that said author would be “confused” because he would find that his paper both implies that humans are causing global warming and implies humans have had a minimal impact; that in spite of the “endorsement” ratings using the phrase “humans are causing global warming” and the rejection ratings using the phrase “minimal impact”, “less than 50%”, etc., he would think it’s possible for a paper to be in both categories at once.
    While I can’t rule out the possibility that there are authors who made such mistakes, it would still be a mistake to not make the straightforward assumption that the ratings are meant to be mutually exclusive (you can only pick one number, after all) and that if that assumption is made, there is no longer any ambiguity.
    But it’s possible. So take this hypothetical scenario and actually check if this occurred. It should be easy enough, especially since you only care about papers that should have been categorised as rejecting the proposition accidentally being rated as accepting the proposition. I’d suggest you start with any papers by known “skeptical” scientists to see where they ended up. (Of course, the correct way to do it would be to re-asses a random selection of papers yourself and then see if there is a bias and quantify the magnitude of it.)

    (In fact this became a point of contention with Roy Spencer who claimed this very point about his own sceptical work.)

    OK, that’s a starting point. Did Roy claim that some of his rejection papers were incorrectly classified as not rejecting the proposition? I can’t check his personal ratings (if there were any) because they were anonymised, but Cook et al rated four of his papers as “4 – Neutral” and one as “5 – Implicitly minimises/rejects AGW”. Which did they get wrong?

    And remember this weak category 3 level makes up the bulk of the Endorsement proportion in both abstract and self rated results.

    Only if you let it. Why not ignore them as I said? Is it because it makes no real difference to the outcome, as I’ve already shown?

    To my summary concern that when you look at what this paper did rather than indulged in numerical post analysis one can see the idea that this paper has a consistent “high bar” constraint, or consistent clinical accuracy over the whole 98% range is flawed, you reply with some numerical analysis of an ever smaller subgroup!

    There’s a reason for that. Your concerns are entirely hypothetical. You have not presented any evidence that any papers were miscategorised because of a rating system that you find confusing — so confusing that your first attempt at an example had to be retracted because it clearly fell into the most obvious category there was.
    So failing any actual evidence of a problem, I set about setting upper limits on the impact that it might have on the outcome of the study.
    Now I do not think that there are large numbers of papers that were mis-classified. All of this information is in the public domain, and the supposed hoards of mis-classified scientists have had ample opportunity to check how Cook et al rated their papers and object, yet have failed to do so. In fact, the only attempt to rebut it that I am aware of was rejected by the journal on the basis that it was a speculative opinion piece that didn’t identify any clear errors that would call the paper’s conclusions into question (sounds familiar). If you think you have spotted something, however, feel free to submit.

    I’m happy to simply show that addressing that concern by ignoring papers potentially subjected to it doesn’t change the bottom line.

    But you had said:

    I think it’s also worth restating the point that the numbers are so overwhelming, it would require a massive bias in the results in order to materially affect the outcome.

    The fact that the “overwhelming” scale can become unimportant to you and effectively ditched like this makes me suspect you are clutching at straws rather then acknowledge the clear problems of the Cook et al papers’ design.

    Given that I am in the unique position of knowing precisely what I meant and then having to struggle to understand how you’re reading it, I think I can see why you might be having so much trouble understanding the paper.
    The two quotes above are directly related. Because the numbers are so overwhelming, you would need to show a massive bias in the ratings to materially affect the outcome (which, I note, you have not). Because the numbers are so overwhelming, we can even afford to throw out the very papers that you have doubts about and it still does not materially affect the outcome.
    The fact that I find it stupid to waste time on hypothetical problems for which no evidence exists and which numerically cannot affect the outcome anyway without making ridiculous assumptions should in no way be interpreted as me thinking those papers are unimportant. (In fact, the opposite is the case, as I mentioned already — the existence of a large number of category 3 papers emphasises how strongly the consensus has become because people working on those papers are taking it for granted. Eventually we would expect to see no category 1 or 2 papers at all if the theory is correct!)
    If you really want to address the points I have made, then feel free to show actual evidence rather than repeat how confusing you find the rating system. All the data is available. Devise your own rating system if you like. My point was, essentially, “Good luck with that”.

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48. 

    JasonB

    November 15, 2013

    Sorry, one too many blockquotes on that previous post. A preview option would be nice!

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    1. 

       Warren Pearce

       November 15, 2013

       Fixed it hopefully

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49. 

    tlitb1

    November 15, 2013

    @JasonB

    Wow! Shed loads there. Think this may be a two parter then 😉

    Sorry, I should have picked up on your misunderstanding of what I said before but I didn’t until reading this.

    What you have quoted me saying there was not in relation to volunteer bias. It was in relation to how a scientist, having chosen to respond, would rate their own paper.

    The “It beggars belief…” onward I quoted you saying was in this context:

    For example, any of the “skeptical” scientists who participated are, I’m sure you agree, pretty much guaranteed to ensure that any paper they wrote that challenges the consensus would definitely be characterised by them as doing so, whether they can claim it’s a “7″ or, in the worst case, have to fall back on a “5″. It beggars belief that they would miss an opportunity to highlight one of their papers in this way having gone to the trouble of getting it published.

    This statement implies you have special opinion about a certain cohort of scare quoted “skeptical” scientists. You clearly imply their latent purpose is something other than unbiased scientific work, their purpose has an additional desire, a bias to “challenges the consensus”.

    “challenges the consensus” is a rather meta concept don’t you think? I.e implying “skeptics” operate with some degree of bias as if they know there is meta “consensus” that needs challenging. If so, then I say that it is reasonable that the same can go for its opposite then.

    Certainly made me think of volunteer bias. That is why I quoted only the last part back to you saying that. Because, to be fair, if I agree with you that this latent motivation exists in “skeptical” scientists – to “challenge the consensus” – it seems reasonable to assume there also exists a similar latent bias to “support the consensus”, and this must be in the larger cohort of “consensus” scientists, mustn’t it?

    And if, for arguments sake, the consensus exists in a 97/3 % ratio then how much more desire is out there to “support” the consensus than there is to “challenge” it? 😉

    That is why I said you introduced the idea of volunteer bias.

    Given that you didn’t even realise when you wrote this post that a scientist whose paper says that humans cause 49% of global warming cannot put his paper into category 3 or higher — something spelt out explicitly in the instructions — I would suggest that some of your confusion is from not reading it carefully enough yourself.

    Lol! Given, and thanks for taking the opportunity to make my self-admitted piece of sloppiness into something else 😉 See what I highlighted above? This is not true. The instructions are not explicit. There are no explicit instructions on how to parse the drop down menu of options!

    At best there can only possibly exist your claim of that an above average person should be able to interpret some implicit instruction.

    The three endorsement levels used the phrases “humans are causing most of global warming” or “humans are causing global warming”.

    Oh that is a nice summary of the wording of all the Endorsement categories. I like that summary 😉 Thanks for that summary! Let’s unpack that summary:

    Only the top quantifying Level 1 says “most of global warming”.

    Now that you mention it, don’t you think if the primary concern of the paper is to ascertain some opinion on majority warming it would have been better, simpler, clearer, less ambiguous then if Cook et al had just said?:

    2. Explicit Endorsement without Quantification:paper explicitly states humans are causing most global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.
    3. Implicit Endorsement:paper implies humans are causing most global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.

    Why, or how, could that new wording be incorrect in your opinion? If so, could you explain why or how?

    Why instead should we be left to assume that, with scientific certainty, the wordings of category 1 and 7 will percolate down and up into all these other categories and be perfectly, unerringly interpreted?

    Given that you have presented no actual evidence of any bias (and, indeed, made one pretty basic mistake in interpreting the rules yourself) I’m afraid I don’t find your argument compelling.

    This is my problem about the claims of a “high bar” or any accuracy. I say we start with prima facie evidence that the categories are poorly worded. You seem to keep insisting I am talking about “evidence of any bias” instead, and avoid this criticism. Sometimes, even, seemingly obliquely acknowledging it by effectively saying: well let’s analyse some sub set as if that will percolate back up and make the paper better again.

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50. 

    JasonB

    November 15, 2013

    tlitb1
    @JasonB

    This statement implies you have special opinion about a certain cohort of scare quoted “skeptical” scientists.

    No, it implies that I’m responding to the suggestion that those scientists would have incorrectly rated their papers as endorsing the consensus due to the belief that level 3 is this magical catch-all category gobbling up unwary travellers. The point I’m making is that such scientists, if they made the same mistake as you in interpreting how the levels ought to be applied and found themselves with an ambiguous choice, would naturally make the choice that allowed them to categorise their papers correctly as not endorsing the consensus.

    Certainly made me think of volunteer bias.

    Which is what I (eventually) realised and corrected as soon as I did. And now you are trying to tell me that I’m wrong about what I meant?

    See what I highlighted above? This is not true. The instructions are *not* explicit.

    Seriously?

    “7 Explicit Rejection with Quantification: paper explicitly states that humans are causing less
    than half of global warming.”

    Even you acknowledged just a few posts back that a paper that attributed 49% to humans should have been classified under this category and now you are claiming that “a scientist whose paper says that humans cause 49% of global warming cannot put his paper into category 3 or higher” is not true???

    I hope you’ll forgive me for finding your objections to these instructions a little hard to swallow. Now direct instructions apparently leave wriggle room. It’s not surprising that you feel the same way about the rest.

    Thanks for that summary! Let’s unpack that summary:

    Only the top *quantifying* Level 1 says “most of global warming”.

    Correct. Now why do you think that is? Here’s a hint: Saying “most” is a quantification, just as saying “less than half” is a quantification. The title of Level 1 is “Explicit Endorsement with Quantification”. Level 2 and Level 3 are “Explicit/Implicit Endorsement without Quantification”. How confusing would it have been if all three levels used the word “most”? Levels 2 and 3 rely on the definitions of Levels 5 and 6 to weed out rejection papers. All seven definitions must be considered together.

    I repeat the point I made earlier: The results are advertised as endorsing of the proposition that “human activity is causing global warming”. Where quantification is present in the paper, “is causing” is spelt out to mean “more than half”. Where quantification is not present in the paper, “is causing” is contrasted with implications that humans have had a minimal impact e.g. by proposing something else “is causing” global warming, or explicit statements that humans are not causing global warming.

    Now that you mention it, don’t you think if the primary concern of the paper is to ascertain some opinion on majority warming it would have been better, simpler, clearer, less ambiguous then if Cook et al had just said?:

    2. Explicit Endorsement without Quantification:paper explicitly states humans are causing most global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.
    3. Implicit Endorsement:paper implies humans are causing most global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.

    Why, or how, could that new wording be incorrect in your opinion? If so, could you explain why or how?

    Because “most” is a quantification. Your new level 2 is indistinguishable from level 1, with a description that directly contradicts the level’s name.

    Under Cook et al’s ratings, if a paper says “Human activity is causing global warming”, it would be a level 2, and obviously it is consistent with them advertising it as a paper that supports the claim that “Human activity is causing global warming” (which is how they are advertised). It cannot be level 1 because it doesn’t say how much, but that’s OK, because that’s not how it’s advertised.

    If a paper is predicated on humans causing global warming — i.e. the subject of the research makes no sense unless greenhouse gases are responsible — then it’s a level 3. It’s not making an explicit statement to that effect, but without that assumption the paper wouldn’t exist.

    If there is no explicit statement to that effect and the research is not predicated on GHG’s being responsible, then it’s a level 4. Level 4 is the true catch-all clause, and that’s where most of the papers ended up. Reading your comments make it seem like you think level 3 is illegitimately filling that role, but it’s not.

    Why instead should we be left to assume that, with scientific certainty, the wordings of category 1 and 7 will percolate down and up into all these other categories and be perfectly, unerringly interpreted?

    Because if the rules can be interpreted in a way that makes sense, they ought to be. If you insist that the results are suspect because they might have been interpreted in a way that doesn’t make sense, then you need to demonstrate that by providing actual data.

    Given that you have presented no actual evidence of any bias (and, indeed, made one pretty basic mistake in interpreting the rules yourself) I’m afraid I don’t find your argument compelling.

    This is my problem about the claims of a “high bar” or any accuracy. I say we *start* with prima facie evidence that the categories are poorly worded. You seem to keep insisting I am talking about “evidence of any bias” instead, and avoid this criticism.

    The problem is that I reject what you claim is prima facie evidence. I do not agree with your claims about the rules. Given my own experience with you misinterpreting what I have written, I have some idea why you might be having the same problem with what Cook et al wrote. The fact that even a paper trivially caught by level 7’s definition is causing you problems helps me put your claims about ambiguity into perspective.

    Therefore I need actual evidence that what you claim really is an issue for others (namely, the authors responding to the survey). I need examples where authors (or even Cook’s raters) incorrectly rated papers.

    Sometimes, even, seemingly obliquely acknowledging it by effectively saying: well let’s analyse some sub set as if that will percolate back up and make the paper better again.

    No, not “acknowledging” it at all; this being a perfect example of a failure to comprehend what I wrote. I was analysing subsets — especially the explicit categories 1 and 7 where I contend there is no possibility of misapplication, your own efforts notwithstanding — for evidence of an inconsistency with the results as a whole in an attempt to see if your claims can be supported. If, for example, it turned out that the 1:7 ratio was 50:50 instead of 96:4, I would have said “You seem to be correct; even though I find the rules unambiguous, the evidence shows an unexpected difference in ratios when we narrow down the field to the clearest and most unambiguous categories”. The fact that doing that test did not show a difference in results suggests that any problem in interpretation that might have existed was not widespread enough to make a difference.

    In all of this I am assuming that sampling a smaller subset will still give you the same result as long as that subset unbiasedly represents the set as a whole. This is the principle that opinion polls, for example, rely on. Even though the subset seems small in comparison to the whole numerically, it can still be accurate enough. It will have some error bars associated with it — as the size gets smaller, so the result becomes noisier and the error bars become larger — and, if the set is small enough, the error bars become so large that it becomes useless for distinguishing one hypothesis from another.

    In this case the subsets still seem to be large enough and the results each gave were remarkably consistent. Is your contention that this was just a coincidence?

    Rather than insist that the questions were flawed — something that I do not accept — why not just do your own survey using whatever questions you like? That’s exactly what Oreskes did a decade ago (and her results, incidentally, were confirmed by Cook et al, as were the results of another previous survey). Why don’t Heartland, or others? If Cook et al, like the other papers before it that arrived at very similar results, are fundamentally flawed and failing to accurately represent the actual level of support in the literature for a question that has huge policy implications — namely, are we causing it? — then surely that’s a ripe opportunity to make a name for yourself.

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