Will Hutton
“Compared with what is happening in some drug and cancer research, climate change science is remarkably honest, reproducible and subject to open criticism: the IPCC insists on the best methodology”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/climate-change-scientific-truth-collective
To summarize,
We are a bunch of knights errant ready to ride to the defense of Dame Judith, but due to our circular and biased reasoning we misunderstand you and misrepresent you. For you are but an honest monk in quest of the true skeptic, be it here or at “realist” sites.
And you are a good dancer. RE the part about you not knowing Curry, which somehow proves you couldn’t possibly question her integrity.
All in a quarter of the 400+ words you needed.
man, that’s too short for a cut and paste.
I saw this at WUWT, by richardscortney. I like the definitions very much.
“Science is an attempt to obtain the closest possible approximation to ‘truth’ by seeking information which contradicts existing understanding(s) and amending or rejecting existing understanding(s) in the light of obtained information.
Pseudoscience accepts an existing understanding as being ‘true’ then seeking information which supports the understanding while ignoring and/or rejecting information which contradicts existing understanding.”
Swing away Josh. Giving up the long ball is a fact of life in the big leagues. Just be careful not to grandstand. The next time up it won’t be a hanging curve, but a fastball to the head.
tim -
RE the part about you not knowing Curry, which somehow proves you couldn’t possibly question her integrity.
You see?
That isn’t what I said. I didn’t say that it “proves” that I couldn’t possibly question my integrity. Of course not.
There are many folks here that judge my integrity even though they don’t know me. Not knowing someone, in no way, prevents people from making that judgement.
But just like how people who don’t know me have no basis to judge my integrity, so do I have no basis to judge Judith’s integrity. This is something that I know as well as I know anything. I consider it to be an established fact. When I feel inclined to judge Judith’s integrity, I have to catch myself and be more introspective. When I feel so inclined, my more objective self tells my more “motivated’ (in the sense of reasoning) self, that he is wrong. When I catch myself inclined to judge Judith’s integrity, I realize that it is a sign of how I, just like everyone else, is prone to biased reasoning. When I read someone who doesn’t know Judith judging her integrity, I know the same. When I see someone who doesn’t know me judging my integrity, I know the same.
See how you thought that you could say the same as I said with fewer words? Well, you were wrong. You missed a very key point.
Maybe you should consider thinking things through more clearly. Sometimes that means that you need more words to thoroughly explain the concepts.
Dude -
You already missed it. I already flipped my bat and gave the choke sign to my dugout. You were too busy looking at the ground in despair to see it.
Josh,
pay attention to the good dancer part.
You said your not knowing Dr Curry means you have no basis to judge her integrity, but you do have a basis for judging her arguments. That others might see your negative judgments of said arguments as an attack on her integrity is their fault, as you know what you mean better than anyone.
It’s called dancing Josh. You waltz around the dance floor with beautiful verbiage, thinking no one notices your fly is open and your breath stinks.
You tell us you go into introspective mode whenever you feel you may be close to the line of an integrity attack. Consider staying there longer, as it appears to many that it isn’t stopping you from questioning her integrity.
angech,
You really don’t understand the statistics behind fluctuations do you?
Here are two versions of a log CO2 versus temperature anomaly record
http://imageshack.us/a/img843/6951/vukd.gif
http://imageshack.us/a/img546/637/gvx.gif
In each, the record extends for about 150 years. The top plots show the slope of the curves corresponding to a given number of years backwards from the current year. Go far enough back and the slopes converge to about 3C per doubling of CO2, which is the modeled ECS for land temperature.
In recent years, going back 20 to 30 years, notice how much the slopes can change — this is due to the limitations of counting statistics, a category of systemic uncertainty.
One of the records is a completely random signal (white noise) on top of a rising trend and the other is the real hadcrut land temperature record.
Can you tell which is which?
This is purportedly an academically-oriented science blog with a focus on uncertainty, so I figured you could learn something.
Maybe you didn’t learn something from your trip to nutterland after all.
No need to rate yourself Howard. I’ll give you a +1!
David Appell: So many tacit implications in your short reply. Quite impressive, if unresponsive.
Your side, the side that says human emitted CO2 is the primary driver of climate change, and which (hubristically) says that natural variation cannot explain all the warming we’ve seen, cannot explain why the warming has apparently stopped for almost two decades. This discredits your hypothesis. I’m talking about one possible hypothesis about a mechanism that COULD explain natural variation in solar insolation (and the climate it drives). Again I ask you, have you (has anyone) falsified Svensmark?
I’m not talking about data or proof or convincing evidence. I’m quite comfortable with ambiguity. I’m willing to wait for the correct answer. I’m not worried about impending disaster. You, on the other hand, appear to need a story, even a flawed, incomplete, or totally false one, to take the place of the correct answer, until (if?) the correct answer eventually arrives.
R. Gates
For many years, covering several IPCC summary reports, IPCC has used the “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomaly” (HadCRUT3 at the time) as its “proxy for global warming”.
Now that this indicator no longer shows warming (but slight cooling instead), you would like to move the goalposts to “ocean heat content”, a proxy that has no long-term record of meaningful data, but shows infinitesimally slight warming since ARGO started in 2003.
Fuggidaboudit, Gates. That’s silly.
No one in his right mind (least of all the ocean dwellers) cares a whit whether or not the ocean is warming by a few thousandths of a degree over the next several decades. It’s the surface air temperature that counts (and that’s not warming, but cooling).
Max
Just as a Nota Bene – I don’t believe people are ‘convinced’ about what they are saying, but they may have a strong reason for saying it. Ie, I don’t believe in ‘conviction’, ‘belief’, as such, except as some kind of wilful blindness. Most people, as it where, gravitate to a particular set of hypotheses, working models, that suit there world, their particularity. But this is, for the most part, Undecided. These hypothesis are liable to change, they do change. People are much more open, alive than is realised.
Hey, Webby, do you disagree with Archibald that the sun has entered a quiet period?
Data?
Max
Sparrow,
Yes to technology and innovation.
No to irrational winner-picking attempts for ideological purposes.
Governments and ideoleogues are hopeless at picking winners.
”
Climate researchers, Marotzke adds, have an obligation not to environmental policy but to the truth. “That obligates us to clearly state the uncertainties in our predictions as well,” he says.
”
Us? Sounds like a consensus to me.
If only the IPCC stated their conclusions in the form of confidence intervals…
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch1s1-6.html
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/tssts-3.html#ts-3-1
etc.
[…] dive destinations. But I think I’ll hang here rather than panic and move away. Not worried about ice sheet collapse. Not worried about the reef. Not worried about CAGW increasing hurricanes. Worried about MSM and […]
One+one, is two! Joshua, will not be long… Remember what Steven said.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/164591/americans-belief-gov-powerful-record-level.aspx
Holy One Is
uniquely-prime
Lewis -
That trust is belied by your projection of so called ‘biases’. To assume bias is to assume mistrust, surely?
I don’t think that an assumption if biases, and trust, are mutually exclusive. My partner has biases. I trust her with my life. I trust her with the most intimate details of my life. I trust her to care for my family. I trust her with my finances. But I don’t think that she is always bias-free.
In fact, when someone tells me that they are bias-free, my trust level drops. It doesn’t disappear, as it is theoretically possible that someone is bias-free, and certainly some are closer to that state than others. I think that it is important to not presume a degree of bias, but to exchange openly with an open acknowledgement that we are all prone to biases – in particular confirmation bias, identity protection bias, and biases that result from inherent attributes of our cognitive processes, such as pattern recognition (which leads us to sometimes seeing patterns where they don’t exist).
