Rob's Blog

Eric Raymond kicks ass by writing basically what I’ve been thinking for a long time without ever quite straightening it out enough to write about it myself.

In his post he explains what he means by error cascade, zombie, Gaianist and green-shirt, but if you’re short on time you can guess and you’ll be about right. Here’s the good bit:

My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.

Overall, is this conspiracy? No. Mostly it’s just people responding to short-term incentives, unaware that they’re caught up in an error cascade and/or being politically fucked around.

He also explains why it will all just happen again unless people are properly punished.

Pa Annoyed has what I think is a very important explanation of the problems with doing statistics on the kinds of signals found in climate science. It’s important because it makes available to the layman a level of understanding about the nature of the science. And understanding helps us come up with good arguments.

The article starts off about an email from dendrochronologist Ed Cook’s in which he complains that he has to review a paper that contains too much maths. Pa Annoyed points out that it’s exactly the kind of maths he should be intimately familiar with.

Pa Annoyed then proceeds to explain the kind of maths we are talking about. It is about how to tell the difference between signal and noise. The problem is there are different kinds of forms that the signal and the noise can take, and climatologists seem very keen to assume that the signal is a straight line and the wobbles up and down are noise. The straight line goes steadily up and is global warming; the noise wobbles up and down and is weather.

Pa Annoyed explains that there is no physical reason for that to be the signal to be a straight line, and every reason for it to be what the graphs actually look like: a random walk. In other words, there can be other hypotheses that fit the data.

Read the whole thing. Really. Read it now. You’ll learn something.

I don’t see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report

So says Dr van Ypersele. I can see how. If you say all the Himalayan Glaciers will disappear by 2035 in the IPCC’s 4th annual report and the IPCC has no idea where the figure came from, it makes people wonder just how much other made up stuff is in there. The date is wildly inaccurate:

“You just can’t accomplish it,” Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona told BBC News at the time.

“If you think about the thicknesses of the ice – 200-300m thicknesses, in some cases up to 400m thick – and if you’re losing ice at the rate of a metre a year, or let’s say double it to two metres a year, you’re not going to get rid of 200m of ice in a quarter of a century.”

The row continues in India, with Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh calling this week for the IPCC to explain “how it reached the 2035 figure, which created such a scare”.

Lots of blog posts seem to start this way, lately. The really great thing about the cold weather, though, is that it forces those who say the planet is warming to explain themselves. This inevitably illustrates that measuring the climate is complicated, which means that just maybe it is possible that it can be done wrong. The CO2-causes-warming-and-look-how-warm-it-is narrative is no more.

Just imagine how different things would be if the weather was warm. It would be obvious that global warming is happening, so there would be no need for the man in the street to question it.

You can judge a man by the company he keeps. Mugabe spoke at Copenhagen.

Climate change, the latest and by far the most encompassing and insistent crisis spawned by this hegemonic development paradigm, yet again reveals the interconnectedness issues of global imbalances by way of uneven development, by way of unfair trade, by way of unclean politics, by way of hegemonic values and by way of arbitrary power and governance systems.

Yep, nobody could accuse Mugabe of wielding arbitrary power. Let’s listen to his ideas about governance systems.

Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing question of climate change? Where is its commitment to retributive justice which we see it applying on other issues? Where is sanctions for climate change offenders?

Never mind Mugabe is up to in Zimbabwe, the weather is getting warmer.

By the way, all the rubbish about lungs of the planet and “we who tend the forest so badly needed to heal the ecosystem” that Mugabe witters on about is dealt with by Pa Annoyed. The rainforest is only the lungs of the rainforest.

You’d think Ian Hislop would be all over climategate. Government pays scientists and they say things that are very convenient to government. But on Have I Got News For You this evening he sneered at the blogosphere for being bonkers and mentioning Hitler all the time, and went on about how there are actually real scientists who know all about climate change and it’s only Sarah Palin and the Daily Mail who say otherwise.

James May didn’t agree, and got accused of getting his opinions from Jeremy Clarkson and hissed at by the audience for saying he didn’t care about the planet. Reginald D Hunter seemed somewhat skeptical too, but he was being funny (he *is* funny) so it’s hard to say what he really thinks.

Still, it’s another sign in the mainstream media that there is a debate going on.

Update: Via Brian Micklethwait: James Delingpole on Private Eye’s uselessness on this issue.

Have I Got News for You: Season 38 Episode 8

Skeptical Science examines the science of climate skepticism. From what I’ve seen of it they avoid the tendency of warmists to argue from authority.

The point of the Hockey Team’s research is to show that recent warming is unprecedented. Skeptics argue that tree ring proxies are unreliable and that the medieval warm period was warmer, or about as warm as, current temperatures. Skeptical Science argues that you can get a hockey stick without tree rings. It’s a good, honest looking article.

The first three graphs show temperatures determined from boreholes, stalagmites and glaciers respectively. But these series only go back as far as 1500, not to the medieval warm period. But:

When you combine all the various proxies, including ice cores, coral, lake sediments, glaciers, boreholes & stalagmites, it’s possible to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures without tree-ring proxies going back 1,300 years

The source? Mann 2008 (and a broken link at the time of writing, unfortunately).

The graph that accompanies this is interesting. It’s a little too small, but the steep red line is the CRU land based temperature record, which is subject to climategate. The steep grey line is another land based temperature record called HAD. I think this refers to the Hadley Centre which is the Met Office’s climate research centre. I’m not sure what the connection is but there are data sets referred to as HADCRU. In any case all land temperature measurements are suspicious because of urbanisation.

None of the other lines look particularly impressive regarding current warmth compared to medieval warmth. The dark blue line is “CPS land+ocn with uncertainties”, whatever that is. The pink line (Moberg et al) doesn’t look alarming at all.

There is another worry about all these proxies, described by Bod in response to Michael Jennings’ post about peer review:

My understanding is that the CRU’s (and GISS’ for that matter) numbers – I hesitate to call it data – are used for calibration purposes, thereby tainting any other research that uses it. This double-damns CRU’s whole research department, right the way back to HADCRU1 and beyond, and should render these people persona non grata across the entire scientific community if what’s been uncovered is true. This is the equivalent of cutting 25.4 mm off the end of the standard metre. (Yeah, I know they don’t use the metre now)