Peer Review and Faking Data

Fist off: Peer Review, for all it’s warts, seems to be the best system we have for proofing papers against the various errors that can creep in. It’s subject to issues ranging from missed errors to “pal-review” to fraud, but what’s the alternative?

But it does need to be “cleaned up.”

From WUWT:

An article in the New York Times chronicles the descent of a sociologist into wholesale fraud. It is worth reading the whole article, because I believe it offers insight into some of the pressures, temptations, and self-rationalizations that many scientists struggle with.

And the full story: from the NT Times

Resources

• Most Published Medical Research Findings are False?
• http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/
  
• http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/investigators-discover-50th-fake-study-disgraced-dutch-psychologist

The Psychology of Expertise, or How we Think

This is a really interesting piece from NoFrakkingConsensus on why predictions, in any field, tend to be so bad and yet we keep making them. And we make them with confidence. A great example is the climate and all the broken predictions (er, um… “projections.”)

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has spent his life studying human judgment and decision-making. At 79, he is the author of the 2011 award-winning, best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Since we hear so much about the 2007 Peace Prize that recognized the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it’s worth mentioning that Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.

When his book first appeared, Kahneman wrote a long essay (3,400 words) for the New York Times magazine. Subtitled The Hazards of Confidence, it’s a fascinating read that doesn’t mention climate change, global warming, or scientists even once. But its insights are highly relevant to the climate debate.

Here’s the rest.

Time to Vote on the #1 Blogs

It’s time for the Bloggies Awards.

Go here for all the info and instructions and how to be counted.

Sea Ice Panics, Liberalism, Politics, History, Alarmism, Smurphy’s Law

The post was back in October, but what the heck.

It’s a wonderful read by Caleb Shaw which wanderers over a variety of topics.

Guest post by Caleb Shaw

During hot spells in the summer I often find it refreshing to click onto Anthony’s “Sea Ice Page,” and to sit back and simply watch ice melt. It is an escape from my busy, sweaty routine, as long as I avoid the “Sea Ice Posts” where people become anxious, political, and somewhat insulting, about the serene topic of ice melting. However by September there is no way to avoid the furor generated by melting ice. It reaches a crescendo.

I used to like the September Panic because I often could hijack a thread by bringing up the subject of Vikings. I’d rather talk about Vikings floating around during the MWP, than a bunch of bergs floating around and melting today.
The September Panic also entertained me because I used to learn about all sorts of things I didn’t know about. The debate always involved people clobbering each other with facts, and hitting each other over the head with links. In the process you’d learn all sorts of fascinating trivia about Norwegian fishermen in the 1920’s, and arctic explorers in the 1800’s, and even some science.

For example, fresh water floats on top of saltier water, unless it is the Gulf Stream, which is saltier water floating on top of fresher water because it is warmer, until it gets colder.

This science crosses your eyes, in a pleasant manner, and leads inevitably to discussions about thermohaline circulation, which is fascinating, because so little is known about it.

It also leads to discussions about how the freezing of salt water creates floating ice that is turned into fresh water by extracting brine, which forms “brincicles” as it dribbles down through the ice at temperatures far below zero and enters the warmer sea beneath. This in turn leads to discussions involving the fact that, with such large amounts of brine sinking, surface water must come from someplace to replace it, and in some cases this surface water is cold, while in other cases it is warm.

The fact the replacing waters can be warmer leads to discussions about the northernmost branches of the Gulf Stream, and how these branches meander north and south. This in turn leads to talk of the unpredictable nature of meandering, the further downstream you move from the original point where the meandering starts, and this, (if you are lucky,) will lead you to Chaos Theory and Strange Attractors.

(In the case of the Mississippi River, the subject of meandering leads you to the Delta, plus the topics of Engineers, New Orleans, and Murphy’s Law.) (In the case of psychology, the meanderings of the human mind leads to the conclusion humans are utterly unpredictable, unless they are psychologists, in which case they obey Smurphy’s Law, which states a psychologist will succumb to whatever ailment he is expert in.)

In conclusion, the September Panic can be a source of fascinating thought, providing you are willing to drift like a berg and wind up miles off topic.

I’ve been through this all before, during the Great Meltdown of 2007, and its September Panic. Those were great times, for in the period 2006-2007 the so-called “consensus” put forward a great propaganda effort, including the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” and won Oscars, Peace Prizes, and a sound thrashing from Skeptics.

Lots more here: September Panics and Smurphy’s Law

Highly recommended.

Al Gore’s (un)Reality Show

Update 8/6:

Mr. Gore expresses his frustrations with trying to push his fantasies against reality. Defeated Gore unleashes: ‘It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company

The Hockey Schtick pokes some holes in Gore’s “argument”

More on the Failure of Al Gore

Original post:

Al Gore is preparing an event, for Sept 14, to show the world his delusion of climate change.

Well, I don’t think it’ll amount to much, but WUWT has a post on how Al’s delusions might be challenged.

Plenty of comments and plenty of suggestions appear there. Most of the comments are suggestion arguing with the facts to counter the delusions, but I think that’s a poor idea.

There are no facts supporting CAGW, and a lot that counter CAGW, but still the hysteria goes on. There’s too much emotion, money (taxes, investments, fraud,) power (control,) and greed wrapped up in it for it to go away.

So here’s a better suggestion, I think. A commenter says:

I am reading Ann Coulter’s new book, “Demonic” and it has good lessons about dealing with a mob and the warmists do fit that description. This post recommends reasoned arguments. Mobs do not respond to reasoned arguments. You need to provide them with mental pictures based on good arguments such as:

• Headline: “Electricity prices to double.” followed by a picture of the sweltering poor unable to afford air conditioning.
• Headline: “Greens stop coal plant in Africa.” followed by a picture of a hut where burning dung has to be used to cook food.
• Video of some idiot saying, “Energy prices will necessarily skyrocket.”
• Video of the unemployed in Montana where an aluminum plant was shut down because the greens in California will not allow power plants to be built.

Get the picture? Every time the warmists show a picture of a polar bear, show a picture from Detroit.

I think this is one of the very best suggestions in the whole thread. It’s not Gore’s beliefs which are destructive, it’s the policy changes that he and his ilk wish to inflict upon us.

So let’s show the consequences of those policies.

How about a video of people trying to manage with their 6 hour a day eletrical alotment, then the camera pulls back to show that it’s us, under Gore’s policies.

People freezing in the UK because the windmills are frozen/broken and not generating anything. The video can open with the green elites (eg: Gore) living high in their heated mansions with all the lights on.

Show the relatively clean industries that are being shut down, for green reasons, and then being moved to China (and elsewhere,) where there are no restrictions on pollution. A big net loss, but the greens feel happy as long as they don’t think too deeply about it.

Show the Gov types adding up their new tax revenues while the sidebar to the video show unemployment climbing.

Show the toxic chemicals and manufacturing that goes into making electric vehicles and some types of wind and solar devices.

Show a video with a guy in coveralls making remarks about CO2 pollution and how it’s bad for everything, then opening up his greenhouse, which is at 1500 ppm CO2, and showing the lush growth.

Make it sexy enough and you might get some media outlet to run with it, since they do love scandals and scare stories.

CAGW isn’t about facts, it’s about emotion, power, and money. So we need to show who’s profiting from the policies, who’s paying for the policies, and who’s dying from those policies.

Another comment that provides a good starting point:

Rather than tackle gore on science, how about on behavior. how a person acts tells you much more about what they truly believe, as compared to what they say.

For example:

1. gore lives in a big house and creates lots more co2 than the average person. does he want us all to live like he does? if not, then why does he live like this?

2. gore has 4 children yet is going around telling women to have less children. apparently at the same time he was going around trying to spread his own seed, if events with tipper are any indication.

3. gore in the past made his money selling tobacco. an addictive substance that causes great harm. reportedly his sister died of lung cancer. gore is a rich man. he says he regrets selling tobacco. has he set up a substantial trust fund with his wealth to pay victims of tobacco?

4. gore was heavily invested in co2 tracing before ccx was sold. has he simply moved his investments into another co2 vehicle such as redd? has he filed a conflict of interest statement?

5. gore says sea levels are rising dangerously but bought a property vulnerable to sea level rise. does this make sense if sea levels are rising dangerously?

6. gore in his movie misrepresented the connection between temperature and co2 in the ice cores. he used a clever wording to overcome the causation problem with temperature leading co2, to imply that temperature was caused by co2.

7. etc. etc.

These points would seem to be the sorts of things that the average person would use to evaluate whether gore can be trusted. most people would skip the science because it isn’t their specialty. what most people look at is behavior to judge if the person is truthful or not. most people recognize that folks don’t always tell the truth, even to themselves.

New Study Proves Climate Change Happens At Low CO2 Levels

From C3 headlines, via Climate Depot:

Read here. One of the major stuck-on-stupid positions that global warming alarmists claim is that only human CO2 increases cause climate change. This idiotic stance eventually resulted in the bogus hockey-stick study that the world’s preeminent statisticians found to be so….well….really bogus. The hockey-stick of course purported to show that no climate changes had occurred over the last 1,000 years until the late 20th century. This idiocy became so apparent that even the IPCC retired the hockey-stick to barely a footnote in its last report.

In spite of the bogus hockey-stick, researchers across the world kept working to better understand past climate change. Another study just released has found that the arid central Asia (ACA) region has had significant climate change over the last 1,000 years during periods of low, unchanging CO2 levels.

The rest: Global Warming Alarmists Take Another Hit: New Study Proves Climate Change Happens At Low CO2 Levels

I think the assumption that CO2 levels has remained unchanged over the last 1,000 years is likely incorrect, but measuring it over those longer periods is tough. Chemical measurements of CO2 levels have shown large variations in more recent times (since 1800) so it seems reasonable to assume such variations over longer periods.

Still, it’s another nail in the CAGW coffin.

Damn Lies, Statistics, Perspective, Graphs, and Background Pics

Background pics?

It’s  generally accepted, though still debatable, that global temps have gone up about .6C over the last 100 some odd years. This is averaged over the whole year and some months will show a higher rate, others a lower one.

But .6C isn’t particularly alarming. It’s interesting only because we’re living through it, it’s by no means unique to this period in time. Given data manipulation and heat island effects it can be argued that there has been close to zero warming, on average, but let’s go with the .6 number.

How do you make it into a scarier picture? After all, there’s all that grant money to think about, not to mention Al Gore’s fortunes, incredible tax revenues, increasing government power, massiive boosts to the bottom line of any corporation that can play in the carbon market (Big Oil, Brokerage firms, UN IPCC Chief Pachauuri’s firms, etc.)  Showing a warming picture that’s just  interesting won’t do.

So let’s grab a particularly terrifying pic from WUWT:

US Annual Temperatures by Month

What’s shown here is the average monthy temperature for many different years, each year being a separate line. The red line is 2009 and it seems to be pretty average. So where’s the catastrophic warming? Think the background pic does anything to add to the alarm? I don’t either.

Then compare that pic to this one, also  from the same post:

US Temps Rising Rapidly?

Nice background pic, hmmm?

Squish 120 years of temps into a short space and widen the vertical graph, both of  which exaggerate that upward sloping red line. Make the scale in degrees Fahrenheit, instead of Celsius, since .6C becomes just over 1F, so looks bigger (scarier.)

So the two graphs display the same data, but which one do you think will be more likely to be on the cover of any report by any of the above listed warming beneficiaries?

Here’s the WUWT post with the graphs, more discussion, and the usual bazillion comments: Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics … and Graphs

More stuff:

• A comparison of Central England’s daily temp variation to the global “rise” in temps over the last 100+  years: A Different Perspective Of The Rise In Global Temperature
• Some interesting remarks on ocean temps and heat capacity: The Real Measure of Global Warming
• Global Temperatures: How Fast Will Temps Have To Grow To Reach The Alarmist Hyped Predictions?
• Atmospheric CO2 content as a % of the total
• Mauna Loa CO2 record. note the extreme rise in CO2.
• Annual CO2 Vs US Temps. Pretty good for  about 20 years.
• Mauna Loa Vs Global Temps. Again, pretty good for about 20 years. Amazing how the current period looks just like the ’57 through ’77 period.
• Another Temp Vs CO2 chart
• Global Warming is a Disease and is Spreading out of Africa at 100 miles per year.

About those Statistics

From Watt’sUpWithThat -

The quote in the headline is direct from this article in Science News for which I’ve posted an excerpt below. I found this article interesting for two reasons. 1- It challenges use of statistical methods that have come into question in climate science recently, such as Mann’s tree ring proxy hockey stick and the Steig et al statistical assertion that Antarctica is warming. 2- It pulls no punches in pointing out an over-reliance on statistical methods can produce competing results from the same base data. Skeptics might ponder this famous quote:

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – Lord Ernest Rutherford

Also in the article is part of the Science News article and a link to The Reference Frame Defending statistical methods

Leif Svalgaard comments:

It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation
Clearly not written by a scientist. We validate a hypothesis by its predictions or explanatory power or even ‘usefulness’ [even if actually not the correct one - e.g. the Bohr atom]. Statistics is only used as a rough guide to whether the result is worth looking into further. Now, if a prediction has been made, statistics can be used as a rough gauge of how close to the observations the prediction came, but the ultimate test is if the predictions hold up time after time again. This is understood by scientists, but often not by Joe Public [his dirtiest secret perhaps ].

One of the issues in climate “science” and all the arguments that go back and forth is about the meaning of short term trends. Bascially, do they mean anything other than, “nice weather this year (and in Spokane, it is) …?”

So statistics can be used to tease all sorts of trends and numbers out of the data (regardless of the quality of the data.) So here’s a comment from the same thread that, I think, really illustrates the whole point:

steveta_uk (04:31:35) :

After reading some of the “random walk” posts recently, I thought I’d try a little experiment, which consisted of writing a bit of C code which generated pseudo-temperature records, based on a random +- 0.1 annual deviation from the previous year, centered around 15C, and with a bias factor that made the temperature drift towards 15C if it starts drifting away.

So this 15-minute job produced 10,000 years of temperature records which I imported into a spreadsheet and drew some pictures.

There’s basically with a boring average close to 15, and lots of apparent noise between 13 and 17C. But zoom in a bit, and you see features like little ice ages, medieval warm periods, “hockey stick” features, and all sorts.

And apply some of the trend analysis functions to selected parts of the “noise” and it finds all sorts of things.

And it’s all random.

From another comment. Take a busy street, with traffic moving nicely. Consider crossing the street (J walking) and ask yourself some questions. Can you get a definite answer?

1. Is it dangerous to cross that street? Most of us might say something like, “hell yes.”
2. Will I be killed if I cross the street (make some assumptions about how, when, speed of crossing, etc.?) The answer isn’t yes or no, it’s only something like, “Possibly, yes.”
3. Change the previous to Will I be killed or injured… Then the answer still can’t be yes or no, but is still, “possibly, yes” though it’s more likely than the previous.
4. You are now across the street. Are you dead, yes or no?

So really, 2 & 3 are statistical answers while 1 & 4 aren’t. While the answers to 2 & 3 aren’t certain (ie: yes or no) they are correct. The point, obviously, is that the answer really depends on the question and all the assumptions around that question.

Here’s a great example, from another comment.

Smokey (07:01:15) :

• Here’s a good example: click
• Another: click
• John Daly’s chart: click
• And the original alarming CO2 chart: click

So yeah, while we need the statistics and while they can provide useful info, they aren’t the only thing and can certainly be used to excess. It’s put very nicely in that old quote, “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

The Snowball Earth Could Make for Permanent Ski Conditions

If you Google (or Bing or Y!) Snowball Earth (or go here) you’ll find something akin to the following idea. Some 700+ million year ago the Earth was covered in ice. That ice extended all the way to the equator. Some say it’s happened at least twice. Around 715 million year back and again at around 600 million years.

WUWT has a post in the subject: “sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago” Fascinating stuff, i think. It’s also likely that CO2 was far higher in those days, so why did it the world freeze over? There have been a few other ice ages since then, long before the current set, despite higher CO2.The article doesn’t actually say anything about CO2, though the graphic does.

I’ve seen some remarks by Geologists who suggest that land-masses at the poles are necessary for ice ages, along with certain formations of the continents. Circulation is cut off and the world cools. Enough ice forms, albedo increases, the cooling accelerates, and you have an ice age (I’m way over simplifying here.)

Questions…

The article and the commenters raise some questions:

1. Are there any papers which contradict the idea? One commenter said a paper has already debunked it.
2. Are there any other hypotheses that would explain the scientists’ observations? Axial tilt? Weaker sun combined with…? Asteroid hit causing massive planet-wide volcanic activity, combined with the correct placement of the land masses?
3. The article admits that they don’t know the triggering causes for the Earth becoming a snowball, or for leaving that phase, though there is a vast igneous province that suspiciously dates to about the same time. Super volcano?
4. A commenter says that while Geologists generally believe that CAGW is complete bunk, biologists are believers. Why? I have a biology degree (ancient, moldy, but still there.) I’d think that biologists would be the first group to be hollering that more CO2 is a good thing and that life shows remarkable adaptability.
5. Another commenter states that when the current series of ice ages ends (in a few million years) CO2 will bounce back to a more normal 1200ppm to 2500 ppm. Why? Outgassing from the oceans?

googleef821db7c2042d82.html