quote:

Originally posted by Mike RR:
Today the layman's lack of understanding of the complex science lays him open to persuasion - rightly or wrongly - that Global Warming is the great demon.

There is slight flaw in the argument that GW could lead to global peace. If we are talking about "anthropogenic" global warming, then those that are either deemed to have caused it, or refuse to do anything about it, could be seen as "the enemy". Since there seems to be quite a lot of taking sides on this, I can't see how conflict can be avoided, especially with all the shortages and disasters that are likely to ensue...

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:
Some other sciences are also highly complex and dependent on statistical analysis of data but no one is arguing about them to anything like the same degree despite the fact that their application affects our lives every day.

The reason is that the practicioners seem to have a good understanding of statistics. I have argued on numerous occasions that one of the problems with AGW is that the practicioners do not seem to understand statistics, and nor do they seem to have many dealings with statisticians. Consequently they seem unable to come up with the evidence which would convince moderate sceptics such as myself (I tend to be a moderate sceptic on all subjects, and nothing in AGW has persuaded me to drop that position).

I have asked many times for such things as goodness-of-fit statistics, and nobody ever seems able to give me any.

quote:

Originally posted by JL(SFC58,AFCB):
The reason is that the practicioners seem to have a good understanding of statistics. I have argued on numerous occasions that one of the problems with AGW is that the practicioners do not seem to understand statistics, and nor do they seem to have many dealings with statisticians. Consequently they seem unable to come up with the evidence which would convince moderate sceptics such as myself (I tend to be a moderate sceptic on all subjects, and nothing in AGW has persuaded me to drop that position).

I have asked many times for such things as goodness-of-fit statistics, and nobody ever seems able to give me any.

Do you ask for goodness of fit for economic or epidemiological models?

I find it unlikely in the extreme that climate scientists are able to use dubious statistics that survive repeated peer review.

In any case, your idea doesn't explain why so many who know little about statistics and very little about science prefer to believe the few "sceptics" rather than the mainstream.

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:

quote:

Originally posted by John_M:
..
This is not so different from other sciences.

Thanks. I'm aware of those. I think climate science is different, though. ...

Some other sciences are also highly complex and dependent on statistical analysis of data but no one is arguing about them to anything like the same degree despite the fact that their application affects our lives every day. Take economics and epidemiology as just 2 examples.

Sorry, lack of precision. I said "not so different", not "same", so we're really talking about degrees of sameness of difference.

I would call planes different from cars, whereas I would say trucks are "not so different" from cars, although some are less different (SUVs that are supposedly trucks), and some are more different (large trailer trucks). Arguing the meaning of "different" is not very fruitful, compared to enumerating some relevant characteristics seeing the similarities and differences.

Sorry, this got long and twisty, but after I do smoking/cancer, then compare AGW, I think I can claim there are some similarities, and the former has had (and still has) many intense arguments.

====
I'll ignore scientific arguments of minimal interest to anyone else.
Following 2 easy examples, plus 2 long ones:
smoking/cancer and AGW.

A. ASTROLOGY, 2-sided: People assert the existence of a testable phenomenon, and either scientific tests repeatedly prove it's non-existence of the phenomenon, or bound its existence to at best a tiny effect. But people who believe continue to believe, and the topic is one that doesn't seem worth researching.

http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/02/what_do_you_mea.html
Nevertheless: Google: sports astrology gets 3M hits.

B. CREATIONIS, 2-sided: People's belief is threatened by scientific evidence that continues to pile up, but people maintain their belief, and generate and propagate continually-changing theories to counter the science. (Remember that for D.)

Intelligent Design is one attempt to save creationism, and then there's
"Young Earth Creationism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism and then:
http://www.creationists.org/, which says (in first pointer):
"The evolutionism myth is used to promote the erroneous belief that humans and dinosaurs lived millions of years apart from each other. Children and adults are indoctrinated with this 'belief'"

C. SMOKING. 3-sided, epidemiology, with a good reference being the recent book by Allan Brandt:
"The Rise, fall, and Deadly Persistence of the product that defined America." (2007)[p.#] give pages #s.

Smoking has many parallels with AGW, although there are differences also. There are also some peculiar *direct* connections between the two

In some quarters, there is *vituperative* debate to this day. For instance, some people still insist that there's no problem with secondhand smoke, and that in any case, government should not interfere with adults' rights to do what they want. Airplane smoke alarms still go off.

The 3 sides:
C1: Smoking is bad because it is immoral.
In USA, temperance movements, social reformers, etc of late 1800s. [45-51]
In some cases, constant moralizing turned some people off.
There were some unfounded claims and exaggerations.

C2: Smoking is good, or at least OK
Tobacco companies (economic interests);
Also believed by many people in the 1900s in USA, with big boost via WW I.
China National Tobacco Co (the #1 ... a state monopoly

C3: Smoking is bad, because a) It's bad for your health and b) it's bad for others.
Some believed this early, but it took a while for data to pile up,
convince more people, and slog through the disinformation of C2.

Characteristics:

CC1: LONG-TERM NEGATIVES: for an individual, most of the negatives take decades to develop, in the face of immediate gratification.

Most (~90%)smokers start before 18 (~14-15 is average starting age), when nicotine can "wire" a developing brain to create addiction. Many teens are not good at making long-term tradeoffs, so this works for tobacco companies. Telling teenagers that smoking may kill them in 30 years is less effective than telling them to expect shortness of breath real soon.

CC2: TIME TO ACCUMULATE SCIENCE: it took a while for science to accumulate the data and prove the problems convincingly enough for he broad population. In particular, it needed an epidemiology-based approach, because:
- effects are complex; not everyone who smokes dies of it.
- they take a long time, and you can't just do them in a lab.
- in any case, experimenting with human subjects has ethical limits.
- it doesn't have a strong physics base to make predictions about what should happen.
[For instance, for some people, secondhand smoke causes serious health problems,
but wood-burning or gas-cooking don't, which is not obvious.]

CC3: IRRITATION BY ONE SIDE: Early, some got irritated with moralizing from C1, or in general, disliked "nanny-government" interference with personal liberties, and hence might argue against cigarette limitations on political or ideological grounds.

CC4: ECONOMIC INTERESTS. There were/are very powerful economic interests opposing any recognition of a problem, and very good at maintaining addictions ... 40 years after "The Surgeon general has determined". Tobacco companies have been very good at coopting the states as well. They also set up front organizations and paid others to obfuscate the science.

CC5: EARLY SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. In the 1950s, scientists (internationally) were becoming much surer that smoking caused problems, but there were serious political problems in getting laws passed.

Brandt [p216]: "Between 1957 and 1962, the medical Research Council of Great Britain, the Royal College of Physicians, the World Health Organization, and public officials in the Netherlands and Norway publicly acknowledged that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer."

CC6: SKEPTICISM (or really, denialism) In the USA, the Congress was heavily-lobbied by the tobacco companies, and each pronouncement by doctors was countered by denials by the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) ... whose real job, of course, was to obfuscate any real research.

Some scientists (usually labeled "skeptics") strongly doubted the tobacco-cancer link, and put forth their views, often, including:
- geneticist Clarence Cook Little, who later worked for TIRC
- physicist/statistician Joseph Berkson (at Mayo Clinic)
- the legendary British biometrician/statistician Sir Ronald Fisher
From Wikipedia:
'Fisher was opposed to the conclusions of Richard Doll that smoking caused lung cancer. To quote Yates and Mather again, "It has been suggested that the fact that Fisher was employed as consultant by the tobacco firms in this controversy casts doubt on the value of his arguments. This is to misjudge the man. He was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps also the personal solace he had always found in tobacco."'

Some of Berkson/Fisher's issues started out as plausible, early, but got overpowered by the accumulating data, but they remained skeptics, i.e., som,etiems, even top scientists can lock into a position.

Later on, in the 1980s/1990s, there was continued skepticism (denialism) on secondhand smoke, from physicists (that's *physicists*, not physicians) Frederick Seitz and Fred Singer, via the George C. Marshall Institute, Singer's SEPP and other entities, in some cases with funding from RJ Reynolds.
-> www.sepp.org, enter tobacco into its search box, and you can find Fred's opinions.
Or do the same at:
www.cei.org (Competitive Enterprise Institute).

CC7: POLITICAL BLOCKAGE, caused mostly by CC4. In the USA, Congress was heavily lobbied by tobacco companies [and still is].

CC8. THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED. [p.219-] In 1962, the US Surgeon General Luther Terry (a cigarette smoker!) was quitey savvy politically in selecting an expert advisory committee, despite allowing vetoes by various health-related organizations ...and TIRC. The committee was made up of 5 smokers and 5 non-smokers, and produced a "political document that was scientifically unimpeachable." [p.221]. The smokers on the committee generally quit pretty fast when the report was completed.

The tobacco industry continued to promote "controversy".

'Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the "body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public." [p.210]

"Irresolution was crucial to the industry's interest; uncertainty the basis of its future livelihood." [p218].

=======
So, now, let us switch to AGW, but one caveat first. Although some fossil-fuel companies act in some ways like the tobacco companies in obfuscating science, I am not equating the two. The use of fossil fuels enabled our current civilization (for better or worse), they aren't going away overnight, and many such companies provide useful products that people want to buy for rational reasons. I even think energy companies can and will contribute to the shift that will happen ... but it would be nice if those who are obfuscating science would stop.

The structure is exactly parallel to that of C.

D. AGW 3-sided [see earlier post in this thread]

The 3 sides:
D1: Alarmists - CO2-emitting lifestyle is bad, and AGW is a good reason to cut back.
Some extreme-environmentalists, some press & movies
In some cases, constant moralizing turned some people off.
There were unfounded claims and exaggerations.

D2: Denialists - CO2 is good! It's not pollution, it's life.
Fossil fuel interests, especially ExxonMobil & Western Fuels Associaiton
various think-tanks and front organizations (many more than in tobacco fights)

D3: Rational skpetics (scientists)

Characteristics:

DD1: LONG-TERM NEGATIVES: AGW effects are long-term, not short-tem.

DD2: TIME TO ACCUMULATE SCIENCE:

As usual in science, ther is a lot of data, not every study is perfect, but good hypotheses becoem very strongtheories as data comes in, and condradictions et resolved.

In some ways, climate science is more complex than the smoking research, in that:
- there's only one case to study
- many disciplines get involved
- in some cases, some forms of data are relatively recent (like satellites)

However, cigarette/health research was a lot more complicated than is obvious (read Brandt), physics is not as useful to it, and quite often, they could measure effects and correlations, but didn't know the mechanisms for sure, and of course, some kinds of experiments on humans just won't happen.

DD3: IRRITATION BY ONE SIDE

Many people got irritated by alarmists, especially early ones.

DD4: ECONOMIC INTERESTS. ExxonMobil, Amoco, Texaco, Western Fuels Association (coal), etc quite rationally have no interest in restrictions on the use of fossil fuels, or for any development pattern in which the price of such actually goes *down* due to substitution of something better.

DD5: EARLY SCIENTIFIC BELIEF. Hansen gave that talk in 1988, and certainly, people wre starting to get worried in the 1990s, and the idea was around much earlier.

DD6: SKEPTICISM (or really, denialism)
in some cases, theories are generated not too much different from those in B, although lacking dinosaurs.

Some scientists (usually labeled "skeptics") strongly profess doubt in AGW, and put forth their views, often.

There is continued skepticism(denialism) on AGW, from physicists Frederick Seitz and Fred Singer, via the George C. Marshall Institute, Singer's SEPP and other entities, in some cases with funding from ExxonMobil. [That was an easy edit, although I left out the similar efforts to avoid restricting CFCs.]

There are, of course, a fairly small number of others ... and it is really worth reading Brandt's book for comparisons and insight on how a few scientists end 8up doing this. Richard Lindzen : Berkson or Fisher? Pat Michaels : C. C. Little?

DD7: POLITICAL BLOCKAGE, caused mostly by DD4. In the USA, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), and Representative Joe Barton (R-TX), denialism is well-represented.

DD8. THE IPCC HAS DETERMINED (2007)..., despite all of the inevitable wrangling amongst a large group of experts.

The fossil-fuel industry continued to promote "controversy".

=================
Bottom line: climate science is complicated, but so was smoking-regulation, as both combined science, economics, and politics/ideology, and there have been intense arguments on smoking. Given that 60+% of Chinese men smoke, and that the WHO estimates 10M deaths/year from smoking by 2030, there will be more.
http://www.wpro.who.int/information_sources/databases/r...stat_tobacco_use.htm

quote:

Originally posted by Seskinreay:
...
Its interesting your experience of having grown up on a farm and have no desire to go back and do it again. I was a city boy that moved to the country, initially within a strong farming community and latterly within a "suburbanised" country community. Guess which one was the happier, tighter, mutually supportive - the first by a long way. The dumbest thing I ever did was move on (for work reasons). I recently spent a week on a Swiss alpine farm with no TV, computers and other mod-cons. It reinforced the view !

It worries me that the more high tech we go the less we relate not only to the land but each other. I worry for my son rather than myself I should add.

It also appears that to go full on for the high tech approach is a very high risk strategy where we "hope" that so many pitfalls are avoided.

James Lovelock proposes a controlled retreat from where we are today with, I think, an eventual population of 1bn, living off synthesised food - though what Gordon Ramsay will say about that, I dread to think.
...

1) Be careful of confounding factors and variability. There are can be pretty strong communities in farm areas, suburbs, or cities. I'd speculate they are more likely at some sizes, ages, and turnover rates. In particular, anonymous places with too-high turnover rates can be difficult, although the other extreme can be awkward, i.e., where you move into one of those towns where you don't get accepted until your grandparents have lived there 50 years.

2) Some farm communities are certainly supportive. If somebody's combine broke down in the middle of harvest, we'd drive ours over and help. And for what it's worth, real working farms, in many ways, are good places to grow up. Because everybody works, they see their parents and see them working every day, can understand what they do, and necessarily take on responsibilities as soon as they can handle them. Farm kids rarely got in trouble around where I lived: who had the time? Of course, I was lucky in that we were right at the edge of suburbia and had top-notch suburban schools.

3) BUT: you said you were living in a farm community. Were you actually farming as a full-time job?

4) A week on a Swiss Alpine farm: that is about as nice a farm vacation as I can imagine ... BUT:

On our family farm, my father [who had a BS Agronomy] was the last generation to farm it, for about 25 years before he sold it. For at least a decade, EVERY DAY, he got up before 6AM to milk the cows. Thank goodness, I only did that in the evenings.

Once a year, we'd get 4-7 days at the lake with cousins, and maybe we'd take a couple 2-3-day car trips, that's all, because it's really hard to arrange for help and get away.

And of course, every year, you have to deal with the vagaries of weather, on which your livelihood depends if you actually grow crops rather than just raise livestock.

There is a lot better technology now (like robotic stalls where cows can just wander in and laser-controlled thingies that milk them), and tractors with GPS, and Bt corn ... and there are all sorts of other improvements for increasing the scale of farm that a family can manage ... and most of them depend heavily on being embedded in a high-tech society.

Otherwise, one goes back to something much closer to subsistence farming. I've visited farm communities in China, and they are definitely tight-knit, but I really don't need to live there. Certainly, if we had to head in that direction, studying the Amish lifestyles would be instructive, and the Yorkshire Dales are nice.

There are still plenty of people who love farming, and it's a good thing, but I'd always recommend to people who didn't grow up that way to go try it for a good while before committing to full-time farming as a livelihood.

5) It would have been nice if we didn't already have 6.5B people, and a controlled retreat to 1B would be nice, but I certainly don't know how to get there from here in a nice way. Lovelock is certainly interesting.

One good thing about urbanization is that it does tend to lower birthrates. On farms, extra kids are actually economically positive.

quote:

Originally posted by John_M:
3) BUT: you said you were living in a farm community. Were you actually farming as a full-time job?

4) A week on a Swiss Alpine farm: that is about as nice a farm vacation as I can imagine ... BUT:

John_M, no I've never been a farmer, my son has ambitions to be a small holder however. He has grown up in a rurual setting and finds the idea of city living abhorent!

The Swiss farm was beautiful. Kurly and Sarah worked so hard without the technology you speak of (I actually helped give birth to a calf - nearly fainted when it popped out !). But they possessed so much energy and appeared to be blissfully happy. Their 3 children were fantastic also, engaged in various constructive pastimes rather than slaves to the computer and TV !

I realise I'm guilty of possessing a romantic view of the simple life but surely there is a compromise position where we can utilise what has been learnt within a reduced population. How can an exploding population continue to consume more and more of less and less?

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:
Do you ask for goodness of fit for economic or epidemiological models?

I certainly do for economic models. Epidemiological studies generally provide statistics of an excellent standard - indeed, most such studies have statisticians in the study team right from the start.

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:
I find it unlikely in the extreme that climate scientists are able to use dubious statistics that survive repeated peer review.

Really? The peer review is undertaken by other "climate scientists" who are equally un-versed in statistics.

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:
In any case, your idea doesn't explain why so many who know little about statistics and very little about science prefer to believe the few "sceptics" rather than the mainstream.

I cannot usefully comment on why others are sceptical of AGW theorists. I have certainly heard some silly arguments used on both sides.

quote:

Originally posted by JL(SFC58,AFCB):

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:
I find it unlikely in the extreme that climate scientists are able to use dubious statistics that survive repeated peer review.

Really? The peer review is undertaken by other "climate scientists" who are equally un-versed in statistics.

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:
In any case, your idea doesn't explain why so many who know little about statistics and very little about science prefer to believe the few "sceptics" rather than the mainstream.

I cannot usefully comment on why others are sceptical of AGW theorists. I have certainly heard some silly arguments used on both sides.

WHY SKEPTICS BECOME (EFFECTIVELY) AGW-DENIALISTS, STILL THINKING THEY'RE SKEPTICS:
One more time (as in that long post from a few days ago):
1) There are 3 sides, not 2.

2) Normal skeptics are more vulnerable than many people to getting irritated by the real alarmists, that they naturally look for "rational analysios", and the denialist camp gives them that.

The problem is: when world-class scientists start saying there may be serious problems, it *sounds* like what alarmist doom-sayers have said for a while, and the denialist industry (far stronger here in the USA) churns out disinformation, as always to keep skeptics.

3) Michael Shermer is a well-known skeptic, also writes a column for Scientific American.
He describes why he originally got driven to being an AGW-skeptic, and then why he flipped back:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=13&...46C-ADB783414B7F0000

4) The Skeptical Inquirer magazine just had a cover story on global warming, a good one by a NASA Scientist, but I'd guess it will get a lot of negative letters.

======
CLIMATE SCIENTISTS AND STATISTICS

1) Actually, lots of climate scientists have reasonable statistics backgrounds, although more is always useful.

2) It's real easy for some kinds of statistics errors to get through peer review, even though, in fact, many climate scientists have good statistics backgrounds, and some of these teams certainly have access to good statistics resources. At Bell Labs, we kept a whole department of people, such as John Tukey, Joe Kruskal, Paul Tukey, John Chambers, etc, for just this reason, and they were serious internal reviewers of papers destined for outside. in some ways, it's a lot easier these days, with the Web, to be able to at least post the data sets online, and sometimes the analysis code, when that makes sense, especially if it's in something like R, rather than FORTRAN or C. Statisticians are always complaining about researchers that make stat mistakes, unsurprisingly.

3) However, errors do eventually get flushed out, although it's no so much from formal review, as from publishing/replication processes.

I've done peer review, it takes a lot of time, and there's no way in the world I could check out in gory detail everything that could be wrong in the math, although I have occasionally found fundamental flaws. What you expect is that as others do similiar studies, either the results will tend to confirm or disconfirm, and specific errors will be found, or else the evidence weighs so heavily that it is clear that there was something wrong, and the study gets discounted thereafter.

4) This seems flakey, but actually, it's pretty cost-effective, even if it means that incorrect results get published often.

Formal peer review establishes a bar. Making it a lot higher would be really expensive, so expensive it won't happen. Researchers don't get huge brownie points if all they do is review other people's work. Over the long term, scientists' reputations depend on whether they get it right or not, mostly. I've known world-class scientists and engineers (i.e., like NAS members) with long, strong track-records ... and everybody goofs sometime.

John_M,

Thank you again for your interesting and well constructed posts. They have gone a long way in answering the main question I had on joining this forum, namely "why the controversy?".

Would you have any objection to your posts being used elsewhere, whole or in part, and if so, would you like any attribution to be included?

quote:

Originally posted by TrueSceptic:
John_M,

Thank you again for your interesting and well constructed posts. They have gone a long way in answering the main question I had on joining this forum, namely "why the controversy?".

Would you have any objection to your posts being used elsewhere, whole or in part, and if so, would you like any attribution to be included?

Thanks for the kind words. Feel free to use as you wish, no particular attribution needed, although perhaps pointign back at this forum might sometimes make sense, for context.

quote:

Originally posted by John_M:
WHY SKEPTICS BECOME (EFFECTIVELY) AGW-DENIALISTS, STILL THINKING THEY'RE SKEPTICS:
One more time (as in that long post from a few days ago):
1) There are 3 sides, not 2.

Agreed. I would very much count myself as a sceptic, not a denier. Actually, I think there are probably more than three sides. I would accept that there has been SOME AGW - I just don't think 0.8 degrees in 150 years in total is worth panicing about.

quote:

CLIMATE SCIENTISTS AND STATISTICS

1) Actually, lots of climate scientists have reasonable statistics backgrounds, although more is always useful.

2) It's real easy for some kinds of statistics errors to get through peer review, even though, in fact, many climate scientists have good statistics backgrounds, and some of these teams certainly have access to good statistics resources. At Bell Labs, we kept a whole department of people, such as John Tukey, Joe Kruskal, Paul Tukey, John Chambers, etc, for just this reason, and they were serious internal reviewers of papers destined for outside. in some ways, it's a lot easier these days, with the Web, to be able to at least post the data sets online, and sometimes the analysis code, when that makes sense, especially if it's in something like R, rather than FORTRAN or C. Statisticians are always complaining about researchers that make stat mistakes, unsurprisingly.

3) However, errors do eventually get flushed out, although it's no so much from formal review, as from publishing/replication processes.

I've done peer review, it takes a lot of time, and there's no way in the world I could check out in gory detail everything that could be wrong in the math, although I have occasionally found fundamental flaws. What you expect is that as others do similiar studies, either the results will tend to confirm or disconfirm, and specific errors will be found, or else the evidence weighs so heavily that it is clear that there was something wrong, and the study gets discounted thereafter.

4) This seems flakey, but actually, it's pretty cost-effective, even if it means that incorrect results get published often.

Formal peer review establishes a bar. Making it a lot higher would be really expensive, so expensive it won't happen. Researchers don't get huge brownie points if all they do is review other people's work. Over the long term, scientists' reputations depend on whether they get it right or not, mostly. I've known world-class scientists and engineers (i.e., like NAS members) with long, strong track-records ... and everybody goofs sometime.

All I can judge on is what I see in published papers; now it may be that the statistics I want to see get edited out, but if that is the case I would like to know why.

quote:

Originally posted by JL(SFC58,AFCB):All I can judge on is what I see in published papers; now it may be that the statistics I want to see get edited out, but if that is the case I would like to know why.

Did you read the Wegman Report JL? A lot of your issues were addressed by Professor Wegman (a hardcore statistician with over 200 papers...).

Wegman PDF

quote:

Originally posted by Lost in Kate Winslet:

quote:

Originally posted by JL(SFC58,AFCB):All I can judge on is what I see in published papers; now it may be that the statistics I want to see get edited out, but if that is the case I would like to know why.

Did you read the Wegman Report JL? A lot of your issues were addressed by Professor Wegman (a hardcore statistician with over 200 papers...).

Wegman PDF

Wow, that seems to cover a lot of the ground I've been banging on about.

No doubt he'll be accused of being funded by Exxon unless they can find anything substantive to disagree with.

quote:

Originally posted by JL(SFC58,AFCB):
Wow, that seems to cover a lot of the ground I've been banging on about.

No doubt he'll be accused of being funded by Exxon unless they can find anything substantive to disagree with.

I'm surprised you didn't know about the Wegman report. Story here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy You need to compare Wegman with the NRC's report on the same topic.

quote:

Originally posted by JL(SFC58,AFCB):

quote:

Originally posted by Lost in Kate Winslet:

quote:

Originally posted by JL(SFC58,AFCB):All I can judge on is what I see in published papers; now it may be that the statistics I want to see get edited out, but if that is the case I would like to know why.

Did you read the Wegman Report JL? A lot of your issues were addressed by Professor Wegman (a hardcore statistician with over 200 papers...).

Wegman PDF

Wow, that seems to cover a lot of the ground I've been banging on about.

No doubt he'll be accused of being funded by Exxon unless they can find anything substantive to disagree with.

Well, actually not...

Wegman and Scott are indeed serious statisticians.
Wegman said in:
energycommerce.house.gov/reparchives/108/Hearings/07272006hearing2001/Wegman.pdf

'As we said in our report, "In a real sense the paleoclimate results of MBH98/99 are essentially irrelevant to the consensus on climate change. The instrumented temperature record since 1850 clearly indicates an increase in temperature." We certainly agree that modern global warming is real. We have never disputed this point. We think it is time to put the "hockey stick" controversy behind us and move on.'

IS THAT CLEAR ENOUGH, OR NOT? HOW EXPLICIT DOES WEGMAN HAVE TO BE?

1) I always thought the original MBH98/99 papers [which I read] were decent attempts to reconstruct temperatures going further back, with appropriate caveats and error bars. As an old computer scientist/software engineer (with some exposure to some of the world's best statisticians, at Bell Labs, i.e., like John Tukey, Joe Kruskal, etc), it would never surprise me to find errors in statistics.

2) Personally, I thought that the pre-1400AD reconstructions needed bigger error bars, and I posted all this in sci.environment in mid-2003. Having already read the large IPCC report, it was absolutely clear that different reconstructions got different results within some envelope, which is exactly what one would expect.

3) When all the summarization happened, that one chart got reproduced often, with a gray background for error bars. I never thought it mattered much whether we were currently:
- the same as the MWP
- a little warmer than the MWP
- a little cooler then the MWP
because (as Wegman says) the instrumental evidence is OBVIOUS.

Hence, if we're not already warmer, we will be soon, in an era when it should be cooler (lower insolation via usual Milankovitch cycles), and we have 20X more people on the planet than in 1000AD.

4) Denialists use Wegman to claim there is no AGW, but that is NOT what the report said, and Wegman is quite explicit in saying so ... but that part somehow doesn't get quoted. Mann & co weren't perfect on their statistics, but the errors make relatively little difference in the their results, and in any case, those results are right in the envelope, which is about as good as I'd expect. All of this ought to be long over, especially given the number of more recent results.

5) This whole thing was a silly waste of time, in which the science-as-usual methodology tussles got inflated by Rep. Joe Barton, a denialists' denialist who wouldn't recognize a Principal Component if it bit him in the leg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton, as he said in 2001:
"as long as I am chairman, (regulating global warming pollution) is off the table indefinitely. I don't want there to be any uncertainty about that."

6) I agree with Wegman 100%: it just doesn't matter.

John_M whilst your handwaving is impressive, it doesn't address the issues that JL has raised.

The issue for JL isn't the MBH papers (with all their flaws), its the usage of statistics generally. Wegman highlights certain problematic practices which need to be addressed across the wide range of scientific studies into climatic changes.

For example, Wegman notes the shortcomings of the peer-review process of journals and recommends that an additional layer of analysis is provided by pure statisticians. This is about providing a more rigorous practice to climate science. Had such a process existed when MBH98 was submitted for peer-review then it wouldn't have been published in the form it was as the near-zero correlation would have seen the paper rejected.

quote:

Originally posted by Lost in Kate Winslet:
John_M whilst your handwaving is impressive, it doesn't address the issues that JL has raised.

The issue for JL isn't the MBH papers (with all their flaws), its the usage of statistics generally. Wegman highlights certain problematic practices which need to be addressed across the wide range of scientific studies into climatic changes.

For example, Wegman notes the shortcomings of the peer-review process of journals and recommends that an additional layer of analysis is provided by pure statisticians. This is about providing a more rigorous practice to climate science. Had such a process existed when MBH98 was submitted for peer-review then it wouldn't have been published in the form it was as the near-zero correlation would have seen the paper rejected.

While your careful evasion of Wegman's bottom-line quote is impressive, to make this discussion worth continuing, I ask:

a) Do you agree with Wegman's summation that I quoted?

b) Can you describe your own involvement with the technical peer review process? (so I know where to start.)