The problem is Steve, that in ‘climate science’, one needs to use an agreed definition of what words actually means; things like equilibrium, robust, confidence interval, statistically significant and global all have meanings that appear, to me at least, in ‘climate science’ that are not in general usage.
People state, with authority, that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the ocean surface are in ‘equilibrium’ or that the Earth global temperature comes to an ‘equilibrium’. Now if one were not examining the thermodynamics and kinetics of the system it wouldn’t make any difference, but when you are it does.
Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by DocMartyn
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by Steven Mosher
Rud.
Please note that I said crappy organization, rather than crappy company. So, your retort is really off point. There is no doubt that companies with crappy organizations can be successful, including motorola.
So lets get to her claims and I’ll relate my experience which is all I have.
“Unfortunately, having little real knowledge or competence in an area where they need to make a high return/loss decision, they receive conflicting input from the “knowledge folk”. They are forced to assess, not the result/data/science, but the perceived competence of the specific individuals. Additionally, a PHB needs to have CYA to keep their own, well paid, positions, in the case of failure, yet they need to project that they are “right”:”
1. having little real knowledge
2. They need to make high return loss decisions.
3. They receive conflicting input
4. They judge on the perceived competence of their people rather than the “data” or science.
I can’t think of a single boss or manager I’ve worked for who exhibited #4. Not ivory tower stuff. Hmm Northrop, and technology companies.
So like I said maybe you worked in crappy organizations. Good companies, nice profits, but otherwise crappy. I’ve got zero experience with guys who exhibit #4. Maybe you have a bad boss picker. dunno.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by Steven Mosher
FOIs were to CRU not mann.
Hide the decline related to the WMO cover and Briffa’s work.
durrr.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by Harold
Or not.
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Comment on 10 signs of intellectual honesty by manacker
Max_OK
You write:
the models predicted rising temperatures, and temperatures rose, so the models got the direction of change right.
and base it on one indicator (UAH), while the others show either no statistically significant change or slight cooling.
Is that a case of “cherry-picking”?
Oh, horrors!
Face it – the average of all indicators cited by WoodForTrees shows a net cooling since 2001.
Max_feeling OK but not from there
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by Harold
I’ve worked in some crappy organizations and some great organizations, and many in between, and the best of them are about like Susan describes, and it only goes downhill from there. Tell me about your pet unicorn.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by stevepostrel
Lots of organizations (e.g. Intel, Samsung, P&G) profess, and even practice, the idea that there should be widespread and vigorous debate until a decision is made, after which everybody is supposed to go along and make it work without going back and relitigating the original points. (Even the Bolshevik party had that idea–it was part of what they called “democratic centralism.”) That approach is actually adaptive in many circumstances, because without decision closure no effective implementation can take place. In time-pressured competitive settings, effective implementation in a finite time frame is a necessary condition for success; a sub-optimal decision vigorously executed will often be more profitable than an optimal decision implemented too late.
But without that vigorous and well-informed debate on the front end, whatever is decided is likely to be right only by chance. I don’t think we’re nearly to that point with climate issues. It seems to me that the situation with climate change is not at all like that of, say, a semiconductor firm that has to make a choice in the next six months about which alternative process technology to commit to for its next generation of multibillion dollar fabs. Rather, to the extent there were any urgency, it would be to start on a path of making small incremental changes over a long period of time. And the evidence even for that, both physically and economically, still seems to me far short of what we should require to close off the discussion and go into implementation mode. The day of the pointy-haired climate boss has not yet arrived.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by John Carpenter
I had a Dilbert moment today with a very frustrated design Engineer of a leading Aerospace manufacturer. He found a solution to a problem using a material the company I work for can provide. He called me to ask if there was any way of obtaining the material in the form he needs using any other process than the one we use. I had to tell him ‘not at this time’. The current process has been considered environmentally ‘bad’ for quite some time (not the material, but the process by which the material is obtained). Because of this, some pointy haired boss decreed to the engineering department years ago ‘thou shalt not use any material that requires the use of this process on new hardware design… forever’. There is no other way to obtain the material that works for this engineer in the form we can provide using environmentally ‘friendly’ processes. None of the ‘alternative’ materials we have developed will work either, because they do not have the properties the desired material possesses. No other material can as effectively ‘fix’ the engineering problem as the material we can provide wrt to repeatability and cost. His testing of available and similar materials has demonstrated this. The engineer has demonstrated a working solution to a problem that needs to be fixed using our material, but he can’t use it because a pointy haired boss somewhere way up the chain made a decree that the process used to obtain the material was ‘bad’. Oh well, it’s not the first time I have had such a conversation.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by stevepostrel
No two “mainstream” climate scientists actually agree 100% either. (Some of that popped up in Climategate.) What they do is paper over their differences to present a united front. The skeptics are a more cantankerous lot and less prone to such effective collective action, but that kind of faux-solidarity is common in scientific disputes that have nothing to do with policy. Read David Hull’s Science as a Process for some eye-opening examples from the field of systematic taxonomy–allies joined at the hip in savage methodological battles turned out to be unable to collaborate on textbooks because their views were too different from one another.
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Comment on 10 signs of intellectual honesty by manacker
Myrrh
Excellent summary of “what Arrhenius proved”
+1
Max
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by Bill
But the IPCC and most of the CAGW pushing scientists also did not bother to correct the record regarding either the 97% meme or admitting when others work had been shown to have problems.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by kim
Guaiac X 3 per annum p 40-50 y/o.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by Peter Davies
There certainly seems to be a general majority of scientists who believe that there is some element of global warming that is driven by human activity and I accept this. It remains moot whether CO2 is the main driver of anthropogenic climate change but it is accepted that humans footprint on the environment is unacceptably large.
What I don’t accept is some of the predictions made by members of the climate science orthodoxy, on the grounds that insufficient information is being used in support of these conclusions, particularly in respect of any catastropheric rise in sea levels.
As mentioned in the OP, the issue of management spin being applied to the science of climate change has IMO reduced the overall validity of climate science and increased the level of distrust in the lay community.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by Beth Cooper
Coupla ‘Thoughts fer Today’ … (do I still have a franchise)
concerning consensus and certainty from Einstein hisself.
‘If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called
research, would it?’
(The famous one.)’No amount of experimentation can ever
prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong.’
jest-a-serf.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by A fan of *MORE* discourse
<blockquote><b>Steven Mosher</b> declares "Fan, you are cherry picking one aspect ( c02 ) of the agw story and ignoring other areas, can you say aerosols and clouds?"</blockquote>Lol … "aerosols and clouds" … "aerosols … and … clouds" …<blockquote><a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.1140" rel="nofollow"><b>Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications</b></a>
James Hansen, Makiko Sato,
Pushker Kharecha, and Karina von Schuckmann
The two dominant causes [of Earth's energy imbalance] are changes of greenhouse gases, which are measured very precisely, and changes of atmospheric <b>aerosol</b>s. It is remarkable and untenable that the second largest forcing that drives global climate change remains unmeasured; we refer to the direct and indirect effects of human-made <b>aerosol</b>s.
<b>Aerosol</b> climate forcing today is inferred to be
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Comment on What are the factors contributing to the reduction in U.S. carbon emissions? by rogercaiazza
I agree with Peter. With all due respect this study looks to me like something that had a specific result in mind and found the data to prove the point. Consider the graph Peter mentions – US 2007 – 2012 reduced CO2 emission factors. The description notes “Following the very significant carbon emission reduction impacts of ‘added wind power’ capacity over the past five years, the impacts of other Government policies such as ‘RFS2 biofuels’, ‘added hydro/bio/geo’ and ‘added solar power’, appear to be relatively small.”
I frankly could not figure out how those numbers were calculated but I did go the EIA monthly energy review (http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/index.cfm) and downloaded Table 1.2. Primary Energy Production by Source. If you compare 2007 to 2012 Quadrillion Btu data, that is to say what energy was actually produced, then I am uncomfortable with the relative size of the wind CO2 reduction. The total energy production of wind increased from 0.5% of the total to 1.7% of the total whereas coal dropped from 32.9% of the total to 26.1% and natural gas (dry) increased from 27.7% to 31%. If however you calculate the carbon emission reduction impacts by looking at capacity as mentioned in the text, then the relative size of the bars in the graph makes sense.
However, capacity is not the real test of an energy source. The ultimate requirement for any electrical energy source is the capability to provide dispatchable (i.e., electric energy generating units that provide power when requested as opposed to intermittent power like wind and solar that only provides power when the wind is blowing or sun is shining) energy and there is a current need to invest in new electric generation facilities that must be evaluated against that criterion.
If you want to repower a coal-fired power plant you must compare the total energy produced. The equivalent energy from a 440 MW combined cycle turbine (90% capacity factor) compared to wind turbines with 30% capacity factor is 1320 MW of wind turbine capacity. If the wind turbines are in the same region you also need storage because the wind correlates well over at least 100 miles. Consider that when you repower an existing power plant the transmission infrastructure is already in place but the wind turbine transmission lines have to be built. Wind turbine life expectancy is less than a combined cycle turbine. Wind energy as a replacement is a loser.
As a result I think that this analysis was an attempt to justify wind against the alternatives and the only way to do that is to ignore expected energy production.
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Comment on Do scientific assessments need to be consensual to be authoritative? by A fan of *MORE* discourse
[continued]
Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be
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Comment on Congressional Hearing on Policy-Relevant Climate Issues in Context by Chief Hydrologist
Where have I heard that before?
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Comment on Congressional Hearing on Policy-Relevant Climate Issues in Context by WebHubTelescope (@WHUT)
” Even a slight warming of the oceans can cause them to be less efficient in absorbing CO2. At present they absorb about half of all human produced CO2 emissions. The worst case would be that they start to become net emitters.”
Interesting.
If outgassing of CO2 has a 0.3 eV activation energy, a 0.2 degree increase per decade in SST will lead to an outgassing equivalent of 4 PPM per decade to add to the anthropogenic component.
That makes it appear as if the net absorption of CO2 is decreasing.
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Comment on Congressional Hearing on Policy-Relevant Climate Issues in Context by DocMartyn
Why do you use the term:-
‘the strong negative feedback of the Planck response’
What do you mean by negative feedback? You think Planck or Thermodynamic process described by plank is affecting the properties of radiation, absorbance of motion of matter?
Words are important and using a term like ‘feedback’ to describe something which has no feedback pathway is not only misleading it is wrong.
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