Comments on naked capitalism: "When Coral Reefs Turn Brown"

Yves,Did you read the McKitrick paper? Or Wegman's...

2007-12-17T20:43:00.000-05:00

Yves,

Did you read the McKitrick paper? Or Wegman's original report? Or do you only read stuff written by authorities who agree with you? If you applied this methodology to finance, you'd get results that made Patrick Byrne and Jim Cramer look sane.

The problem is very simple. It has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats or whatever. McIntyre is a liberal. Wegman voted for Gore. He is not some kind of crazy AEI activist, he is the former chair of the NAS panel on statistics, who had never heard of any of this crap before Barton called him. Look at his CV - this is normal diligence for a statistician. Checking that people are using stats correctly is what a guy like Wegman does.

No. The problem is money and power and fraud, pure and simple. I know you can't believe your friends at the Explorers Club are mixed up in this kind of thing, but you have two eyes and a brain.

Trillions of dollars are being reallocated on the basis of statistical work that would flunk a sophomore. And you're not interested? What kind of skeptical antennae do you have?

I don't use the word fraud lightly. It is very clear that the people doing this work are aware of its dodginess. Mann ran all his calculations without the bristlecones and accidentally left them in a directory marked "CENSORED" on his FTP site. The man is a physicist. He knows what he's doing.

MBH99 is like a bad audit finding. When you find that Bear Stearns or Enron or Citicorp or whoever has fabricated some nonexistent asset on its books, you don't give it a slap on the wrist and tell it to cross the line out. You unleash the forensic guys. You don't find just one cockroach in a kitchen. And you don't tell the health inspector, "sorry, we'll kill it."

MBH99 is not an ancient, irrelevant result. It is the single most publicized piece of research in the history of IPCC climatology. It singlehandedly put Mann in Scientific American's list of America's 100 top young scientists. And it really is not a stretch to compare it to an ape jaw glued to a human skull. The thing reeks. It is data laundering of the worst kind.

Sure, the "hockey team" has "moved on." Despite the fact that the NAS panel chaired by North and the Wegman report, both of which concurred in all substantive opinions, both stated that further paleoclimate proxy studies should not use bristlecones or foxtails, we continue to see paleoclimate reconstructions full of them.

And when IPCC climatologists are actually willing to use phrases like "if you want to make cherry pies, you have to be willing to pick cherries" (d'Arrigo) to committees investigating their work, we really have no reason to believe that their results are generated from their data and not the other way around. Actually, we have considerable reason to believe the opposite. "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" (Phil Jones.)

(Unfortunately Climate Audit seems to be down at the moment. Google produced this source for the D'Arrigo quote.)

The trouble is that the entire evidentiary case for AGW is nonreplicable and unfalsifiable. If you do not personally trust the researchers, you have no reason to trust the "science."

The first arm of the AGW case is paleoclimatology, which is trivially distorted by selection bias, ie, "good" results are published and not "bad" ones. The second is general circulation models or GCMs, which simulate the Earth's atmosphere. GCMs are the product of tuning - they are certainly not derived directly from the laws of physics. See Nir Shaviv on the fine art of fitting elephants.

If the IPCC community wanted my trust, they would have taken their own trash out, and censured Mann without the need to involve some freakin' Republican from freakin' Texas. Instead, they stonewalled and played defense. Well, if you want to live by bureaucratic hardball, you've got to be prepared to die by it.

Because of this episode I judge the IPCC "consensus" the way I might judge the collective views of, say, the IMF. As a bunch of very smart people who nonetheless have a very clear institutional agenda. If you insist on taking them at face value, perhaps I could interest you in an Argentine bond or two.

Mencius,From Mr Wegman’s printed testimony in his ...

2007-12-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

Mencius,

From Mr Wegman’s printed testimony in his 2006 presentation to Congress:

“Because of this apparent isolation, we decided to attempt to understand the paleoclimate community by exploring the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction.”

“Because of these close connections, independent studies may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. Although we have no direct data on the functioning of peer review within the paleoclimate community, but with 35 years of experience with peer review in both journals as well as evaluation of research proposals, peer review may not have been as independent as would generally be desirable.”

“The MBH98/99 work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”

–Now here, we have genuine exhibits of bad methodology and unsupported conjecture.

Where did these non sequiturs come from, and who ordered them to be in there? In a report that begins by “circumscribing the substance” to “an independent verification by statisticians of the critiques of the statistical methodology…”?

Anyway, as it was foretold, here it is: Our lobbied House Representatives are going after an old study that is already superseded, and they are ignoring all the other data. You scientists are being slandered, dissed, and dismissed.

–Report by Lee A. Arnold, Society for the Long-Term Modeling of the Anti-Science Crooks in Congress, and Their “Social Network”

The Explorers' Club? Ah, the circles of power. I...

2007-12-17T13:10:00.000-05:00

The Explorers' Club? Ah, the circles of power. I too notice that their opinions are remarkably accurate. At least, whenever they all agree. This magisterium is known as a "consensus," and we regard it as pretty much infallible, like the Pope.

(What puzzles me is that you don't seem to attribute the same kind of omniscience, which must be simply just so right that it's not even worth clicking a link to check, to econ departments. Or to the Fed.)

I guess Edward Wegman doesn't spend enough time over at the Explorers Club. Perhaps you were doing computational statistics, to quote the Beastie Boys, "when he was suckin' his mutha's dick." In this case, there's certainly no need to bother with his report!

Anon of 1:17 AM,I don't know what your information...

2007-12-17T01:50:00.000-05:00

Anon of 1:17 AM,

I don't know what your information sources are, but conferences of world experts on coral reefs disagree with opinions like yours and regard them as "delusionist". It's been known for some time that rising ocean temperatures and COS levels are major culprits in coral reef death (one of many illustrations). If you disagree once you have read the research, I suggest you take your argument up with the scientists.

Similarly, I don't know what your sources for your assertion "temperature increases are moderating" is either. The models prepared by the IPCC were out of date by the time their reports were prepared in the direction of understating, rather than overstating, temperature increases (here and here). The reports also failled to allow for the number of coal-fired electrical plants coming on line.. Arctic and Newfoundland ice is melting at a faster rate than anyone forecast in their models, another humbling surprise.

I also happen to know people at the Explorers Club, which is chock a block with world class scientists, and non-partisan. Many of them spend a considerable amount of their time at locations where climate change can be seen, and many are either involved in or personally know scientists who are doing climate change related research. You don't find climate change skeptics there.

It is interesting how the Global Warming debate is...

2007-12-17T01:17:00.000-05:00

It is interesting how the Global Warming debate is moving. It was at one time clear that the problem was warming, and that it was caused by the polluting emission CO2, and that is why we should stop emitting it.

Now, as the warming trend seems to be slowing, the ground station measurements appear dubious, and the satellite measurements show no trend, we are finding people refuse to talk about warming, instead they talk about climate change. CO2 is producing change, and that must be bad.

Gradually, now, this is metamorphosing into a subtly different position, which is that CO2 is bad for reasons other than its effect on climate.

It all reminds me of the man in Monty Python who was determined to give urine, in a blood donor clinic. We know that CO2 must be diminished. Now, lets, as Russell put it, find bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.

I do not believe increased CO2 levels are the cause of the coral issue, and in fact, do not believe coral generally is crashing, though some reefs are and some are not. I am not convinced there is any very remarkable warming either. I am convinced there is warming, on about the scale of the Medieval warming. We need to get used to it, as there will be either more warming or cooling, whatever we do.

Here is a a complete list of things caused by glob...

2007-12-16T16:44:00.000-05:00

Here is a a complete list of things caused by global warming. My favorite is definitely the smaller brains.

Here is an explanation of the "hockey stick" debate. No, it's not relevant to direct CO2 effects such as ocean acidity. But it remains interesting as a forensic case study of the information system that produces these kinds of press reports.

dearieme,By happenstance, I went to Dubrovnik this...

2007-12-16T15:43:00.000-05:00

dearieme,

By happenstance, I went to Dubrovnik this summer. It's lovely and you should go if you have a chance. The locals have restored the city , although there are places where you can still see some shrapnel damage.

They had big fires in the surrounding area this summer, so they really need the tourist dollars, and it isn't as costly as other parts of Europe, which is an issue now with the Euro so high.

But your general point well taken.

We once had a choice of going on holiday to Venice...

2007-12-16T09:03:00.000-05:00

We once had a choice of going on holiday to Venice or Dubrovnik (ancient Rugosa). We chose to see Venice "before it sank". Venice is still there, Dubrovnik was devastated by Serbian artillery.