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the.bricoleur
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Our Greatest Challenge
« on: 2005-06-09 12:04:15 » |
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Our Greatest Challenge
Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton
May 2005
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people – the best people, the most enlightened people – do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century re-mapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday – these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80 percent, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The Dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man’s invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does indeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk – and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven’t the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can’t conceive the real power of what we blithely call “the force of nature.” They have seen the ocean. But they haven’t been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be Tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn’t give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it – and if you don’t, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn’t deep – maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it’d still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I’d probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let’s return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it’s interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there – though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately, it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5 percent. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology – like nuclear fusion – was necessary. Otherwise, nothing could be done, and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigious science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth – that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won’t. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all – what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past. So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
© 2003 Michael Crichton. This speech was given at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, America’s “oldest and largest public affairs forum.” It can also be found online at
http://www.crichton-official.com/whatsnew/index.html
After graduating from the Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton embarked on a career as a writer and filmmaker. Called “the father of the techno-thriller,” his novels include State of Fear (a nonfiction tutorial in the science and mythology of global climate change, within an action and suspense novel), The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Jurassic Park, and Timeline. He has also written four books of non-fiction, including Five Patients, Travels, and Jasper Johns. He has sold over 100 million books in English and thirty other languages, and twelve of his books have been made into films. Dr. Crichton is also the creator of the television series ER.
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the.bricoleur
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making sense of change
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #2 on: 2005-06-10 07:32:09 » |
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Greetings bullsign,
Quote:| Most of these people get there info from the scientific community that has been sneeked out of the labs of big business or that hasn't been lied about by the goverment. (to keep this short) The scientific community isn't always to be belived especially when there in big business pockets and the government is almost always in there pockets(i.e tabacco, hemp, oil) so who do you believe? |
The nature of funding in science has been discussed before – relevant quote below:
From the thread – Goodbye. Kind world
Quote from: Iolo Morganwg on 2004-08-16 16:38:22 Greetings rhino,
Quote:| Not a happy condition, since I am not a climatologist and I rely much on peer review and mainstream popular publications. It is perfectly rational to be suspicious when you are aware of something like this: |
<snip>
Quote:| Well, what I found may sound like an ad hominem objection, but looking up "who is who" is a standard procedure on scientific issues for which one cannot have a hands-on opinion. |
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The individuals, like yourself, who probe and track for any hint of industry funding ought to ask themselves if they really think peoples' beliefs are so easily bought and sold. The implication is that the Idsos (etc.) only say the things they do because they get money now and then from corporate sponsors. If that's so, and if they're so easily bought, does that mean that if the greens offered them a few thousand, they'd adopt a pro-IPCC viewpoint? If the environmentalists who so continually fret over their work really believe that, they could quickly scrounge up a pot of money from Pew, Heinz, Sierra and others, cut a cheque to the Idsos, and in exchange get a news conference in which they renounce their opposition to Kyoto and embrace the IPCC position. Imagine the PR victory for the greens! But of course it won't happen. The unstated issue in all this is integrity. Peoples' views are not so easily bought and sold. The greens believe this of themselves, and if they, you rhino(?), were fair-minded they would assume it of others as well, so they could focus instead on the substance of the arguments, which is of course something they prefer to avoid if possible (see for e.g. the Scientific American response to Lomborg’s book, and the projectile pie throwing at his book signing in Oxford).
Not long ago my cousin got a research proposal from some international consortium led by a UK university (Cambridge). I keep it as an example of a disturbing trend. It pre-supposes that stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the right policy approach and only wants research on how this will be done, under assumptions about "innovation", which in the context is code for ignoring known technological and economic constraints to get the cost estimates down. It talks about the problem of other projects "not geared up to produce literature that would be directly useful to the Fourth Assessment" and proposes a timescale geared to get published in time for the IPCC to use the papers: "The results would then be collated and published as a Special Issue of a leading journal (see Umbrella Programme), in time for the results to be incorporated in the IPCC AR4." Further down they promise: "Arrangements for publication of a Journal special issue including full peer-review, within four months of the submission of final papers from authors" and "Other communication and outreach activities as appropriate (this is proposed to include a review paper on the technology and innovation potentials for stabilisation submitted to Science early in the process)."
If an industry-funded group had proposed a research program that pre-supposed that CO2 does not cause climate change and sought participants for projects that would explain the weaknesses in the IPCC position, with guarantees for an expedited review and publication process in a (bought and paid-for) special issue of a leading journal in time to be used in the AR4, there would be (justified) howls of outrage about the corruption of science and the compromised integrity of the IPCC if they then used this sort of tendentious material. In this case it's government and university money at work, but the situation is just as disturbing. Chris Essex and Ross McKitrick give some other examples (in Taken By Storm) of government research programs supporting pre-determined results, and I've heard even worse examples from people in the field.
There's no getting around the influence of vested interests, but if you keep an open, sceptical mind, focus on the papers and not the personalities behind them and read the original research as much as possible you'll find the contradictory summaries less of a bother.
I know my cousin for one would welcome any funding from industry, but he gets none. There is very little of it, and it mostly consists of commissions to make videos and to provide information for 'handouts'. Indeed, Since the Brent Spar incident energy industries have been spending much, much more on trying to appear to support GW (e.g. funding solar panels and having 'green' policy statements, etc.) than on support of anti-GW matters.
This contrasts starkly with the funding for research and other activities to support the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. This is ‘big money’ business. Total expenditure on this large and growing industry is probably more than $5 billion per year; the US government alone is spending $2 billion per year on it. So why do you not give it a single mention rhino?
Those who have tried to report all the evidence concerning the hypothesis – and not the propaganda – have been subjected to every kind of attack, but have obtained no significant funding and have had publication of their scientific papers suppressed. Meanwhile rubbish that supports GW (e.g. 'The hockeystick' of Mann et al., and the piece by Murphy et al. in the most recent edition of Nature) get published 'on the nod'. These anti-science activities in support of the Kyoto Protocol are starting to be noticed by others. For example, Andrei Iliaranov, Chief Economic Advisor to President Putin, recently said (9 July 2004);
“The next point brings us directly to the Kyoto Protocol, or more specifically, to the ideological and philosophical basis on which it is built. That ideological base can be juxtaposed and compared, as Professor Reiter has done just now, with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories – misinformation , falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda – because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity.”
The assertions of significant funding for work that disagrees with GW and the mentions of "the tobacco industry" are examples of what Iliaranov accurately calls "misinformation , falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda".
Anyway, why would it be wrong to accept funding from industry if such funding were to exist? Work funded by industry (i.e. businessmen wanting to make a profit) is no more tainted than work funded by governments (i.e. politically motivated politicians).
Speculate, as you have, for a moment and consider the views of a colleague of my cousin. He is a paleoclimatologist and GW critic from the left who perceives global warming to be scare mongering created by assorted research lobbies, nuclear and renewables interests (seeking subsidies) and now bureaucracies seeking a handle over energy policy - but the whole onslaught is in the end against 'the people' who have more urgent problems that need addressing. As far as developing countries are concerned, the real poor need many other things more than renewable energy, unless of course it is the cheapest and most convenient source. This is his view anyway, and I add it for interest and to bring a perspective few outside the industry would otherwise encounter.
Perhaps there are two explanations for 'scientists ' appearing to be in the pay of oil companies etc..
1. They really are in their pay, just as all scientists are. Government funded scientists - those working on specific research programmes and projects set by government, many are not independent either. Are they too not engaged to prove or show what governments want them to show, often as specified by research contracts? Our modern research funding methods make independence increasingly difficult. Note that Greenpeace believes government scientists if Greenpeace agrees, but does not when government funds research for policies Greenpeace disagree with.
Research can also be directed to specific answers, half answers: You are funded to study warming and to ignore cooling, or you study the damage done by warming and ignore the benefits. This could be called selective research - questions that are funded by the public purse. Loads of it about.... and perhaps we need both, for in one sense both types of research are the same: neither is independent, and serve 'policy' or other institutional aims.
2. The scientists that speak for 'corporations' as you suggest are independent, i.e. not in 'their' pay but rather use these corporation because they listen to them, it is in their (perfectly correct) interest to listen to evidence that does not attack or undermine or weaken them. Many contrarian scientists - and many I know are anything but capitalist 'stooges', can’t get their views / evidence / theories in to the heavily censors media and even scientific publications. I think this is more likely an explanation for the people you mention, especially if you want to start facing humanity from a position of trust. By all means take his or her sources of income into account, but do it for everybody.
In my cousins research he has noted that many scientists change their views on retirement, he assumes that they become more honest and in this case (GW) less trusting of the IPCC and its negotiated consensus (by governments committed to 'relevant' energy policies, etc.) and climate computer models (the latest tool borrowed from the military). Global warming is now the expression of the world's greatest recent research effort, with huge monies flowing towards it: on both the problem and solution side. Does it not promise finding replacements for fossil fuels, create huge markets for new technologies? But all this needs large investments... (if only a few more 'sceptics' (about the costs of nuclear generation) at the time had dared to warn of these costs in 1940/50/60, this technology might have fared better). Nuclear physics was the big research agenda for the hard sciences then, today there are several, but global warming has something for everybody, and Greenpeace does the persuasion of the public, for free. Almost every science and even social science is now benefiting from the global warming scare, which makes trust in what they write even harder. They speak in two voices usually: public and private.
Which to believe? The underlying issue is our 'competitive' research funding system. I have only one answer, listen to both and then decide who to trust, if you can, but it is not easy. I’ll reiterate a point I made earlier:
There's no getting around the influence of vested interests, but if you keep an open, sceptical mind, focus on the papers and not the personalities behind them and read the original research as much as possible you'll find the contradictory summaries less of a bother.
- Iolo
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rhinoceros
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #3 on: 2005-06-11 20:21:43 » |
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[rhinoceros] Since my involvement in that discussion was brough up, I'll try to give my short version.
The people mentioned here are not OK in my book:
Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/exxon_chart.html
"ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe. Herewith, a representative overview. "
Same here.
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentid=3804&CFID=24781975&CFTOKEN=23251343
In the above, unlike Crichton, I see at least one valuable service that the "environment freaks" offer me.
This whole picture also makes me extra cautious, because I realize that they play with real money. On the other hand, I am puzzled by the allegations about the funding of the climatologists by governments or international organizations: What is the motive for a government to promote a theory which will result in having to spend more money or soothe their people's fears? I would expect that a government would rather underfund them.
Better sources:
For:
The names involved here, incl. Michael Mann, the father of the "hockey stick" graph, who argue for global warming, are working climatologists subject to peer review.
http://www.realclimate.org/
Against:
Steve McIntyre, who debates the "hockey stick" and global warming is also a working climatologists subject to peer review.
http://www.climateaudit.org/
Peer review means that someone first brings his arguments in front of people who know what he is talking about. Many questions of what, how, when, to what degree, are always open.
The question of scientific conensus: You will encounter many arguments that there is no such thing as scientific consensus on global warming among climatologists, because one can see all kinds of arguments. Actually there is such a consensus, and it appears whenever they come together to inform the policy makers. Why else would the Kyoto treaty happen. Did the governments feel like putting an unnecesry burden on themselves, or what?
I left for last Michael Crichton and his "Environmentalism as Religion" article which was posted here. He makes several very good points about religious attachments and the nostalgy for a "paradise lost" which never was. But he seems to use them to raise strawmen. Is he talking to people who believe in paradise lost? Or, does any initiative to save a rainforest fall into that category? He somehow accuses his very audience that they are afflicted with these fallacies and are unable to "get it" whatever he says -- it is not clear to me why. Also notice how he declares what "he can tell them" based on a published paper that he found and then talks about how incredible complex these issues are. Climatologists do know that they are working with a chaotic system and what their tools and their limitations are.
<quote Michael Crichton>
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5 percent. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology – like nuclear fusion – was necessary. Otherwise, nothing could be done, and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigious science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
<snip>
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.
<end quote>
[rhinoceros] In 2003, Crichton delivered a lecture in Caltech which, despite some errors which were pointed out by others and disagrements of mine, was a much more interesting reading to me -- more tangible, better food for thought.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html
And of course there was his controversial book, "State of Fear", which has been criticized here:
Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=76
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the.bricoleur
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making sense of change
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #4 on: 2005-06-13 09:45:55 » |
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Quote from: rhinoceros on 2005-06-11 20:21:43
I will challenge its value.
Quote:Better sources:
For:
The names involved here, incl. Michael Mann, the father of the "hockey stick" graph, who argue for global warming, are working climatologists subject to peer review.
http://www.realclimate.org/
Against:
Steve McIntyre, who debates the "hockey stick" and global warming is also a working climatologists subject to peer review.
http://www.climateaudit.org/
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Steve McIntyre appears on the Environmental Defence list.
How useful is this to you now rhino?
But let us have a closer look into Michael Mann. Michael Mann, et al, gave us the following study, Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. & Hughes, M.K. (1998) Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries, Nature, 392, 779-787, 1998, which serves as the backbone to the anthropogenic global warming theory. It has been used to support the assertion that 20th Century warming is “unprecedented,” it has fuelled global media scare stories with such headlines as, “Not just warmer: It’s the hottest for 2000 years,” “Global Warming Time Bomb,” etc. It is heavily referenced in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC – established by the UN and WMO) Assessment Reports (most noticeably the Third Assessment Report of which Michael Mann is a leading author).
So what is the problem?
The above graph is from the Mann et. al., study and can be found on the final page of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. It shows Northern Hemisphere temperature from 1400 – 1998.
“Variations of the earth’s surface temperature: years 1000 to 2100” (this graph was originally produced 3 years ago amide such sensational headlines as “1998 – Warmest Year of the Millenium”) – we see that the IPCC have totally abolished the ‘Medieval Warm Epoch’ (1100-1200 AD and warmer than today by as much as 2°C) and have made the ‘Little Ice Age’ (17th Century lasting until 1900) barely distinguishable from any other century although global temperatures were as much as 1°C cooler than today. How curious, especially when the evidence for such a revision is tenuous and comes mostly from tree ring studies.
July 1st 2004.
In Nature (July 1st), Mann, Bradley, and Hughes published a corrigendum to their paper, Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley & Malcolm K. Hughes. Nature 392, 779–787 (1998). Now, according to Nature, a corrigendum is only published when "the scientific accuracy or reproducibility of the original paper is compromised".
The corrigendum can be found here - http://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/shared....m04.pdf
You will notice the authors continued defiance, “(N)one of these errors affect our previously published results”. Hmm now what were Nature’s guidelines for publishing a corrigendum again? Oh yes, "the scientific accuracy or reproducibility of the original paper is compromised". This, together with the fact that the corrigendum was not published with a comparison between the original and corrected reconstruction, should be more than enough to raise suspicion.
The authors who initially raised concern about the Mann et. al. study have this to say:
“The Corrigendum in Nature today (July 1, 2004) by Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes is a clear admission that the disclosure of data and methods behind MBH98 was materially inaccurate. The text acknowledges extensive errors in the description of the data set. Even more important is the new online Supplementary Information (SI) site, which concedes for the first time that key steps in the computations behind MBH98 were left out of (and indeed conflict with) the description of methods in the original paper.
These items were published on the instruction of the Editorial Board of Nature in response to a Materials Complaint that we filed in November 2003. That our complaint was upheld and the Corrigendum was ordered represents a vindication of our view that, prior to our analysis, there had been no independent attempt to verify or replicate this influential but deeply flawed study, something which was forestalled, at least in part, by inadequate and inaccurate disclosure of data and methods.
This is only the first step in resolving the dispute we initiated last fall. The Corrigendum and the SI contain the gratuitous claim that the errors, omissions and misrepresentations in MBH98 do not affect their results. If this were true, then a simple constructive proof could have been provided, showing before and after calculations. This is conspicuously missing from the Corrigendum and the new SI. We have done the calculations and can assert categorically that the claim is false. We have made a journal submission to this effect and will explain the matter fully when that paper is published.”
-- McIntyre & McKitrick
I’ll cut to the conclusion.
“The top diagram is from the Mann et. al. study (with the error bars removed). The vertical axis measures “anomalies” or departures from a notional hemispheric “average temperature” in tenths of a degree C. The bottom diagram is based on the corrected data. Applying the Mann et. al “multiproxy” procedure on their own data, when updated and correctly collated, contradicts the claim that the late 20th century climate is unusually warm or variable.”
Taken from Corrections to the Mann et al (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series
-----
Further to this, what about the secrecy surrounding the data set used by Mann? Mann initially, for many years, refused to make his data and methods public despite being paid for his work by tax dollars. This is a crime against science. Well, Mann explains e.g.
" Mr. McIntyre thinks there are more errors but says his audit is limited because he still doesn't know the exact computer code Dr. Mann used to generate the graph. Dr. Mann refuses to release it. "Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in," he says." (from Wall Street Journal Feb 14).
Mann violates the following rule:
"CHAPTER FOUR
Sharing Materials Integral to Published Findings
Sharing of materials integral to a published work is a responsibility of authorship. For consistency with the spirit of the uniform principle for sharing integral data and materials expeditiously (UPSIDE), materials described in a scientific paper should be shared in a way that permits other investigators to replicate the work described in the paper and to build on its findings."
But Mann is not the only lone rider in breaching this rule and in making the normal validation process impossible.
This is from private conversation from Warwick Hughes (http://www.warwickhughes.com/ - “…free lance earth scientist from Australia.”) the "Jewell in the IPCC Crown", the Jones et al global temperature trends are similarly now protected by secrecy. Phil Jones will not release his station by station data. He says this was suggested to him. Says I should try the WMO. They do not answer emails. Another case, chickenfeed compared to the above. You may recall the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), near Manilla, published a few years ago on their local temperature trends, the usual warming paean. I asked for the data and at first was promised it "later". Perseverance did not pay off for me, I tried again after a year or so, was fobbed off with excuses even going to cancer in a staff member, was eventually sent picture files but never got the numbers.”
Rhino, where is your evidence that funding skewers research or has resulted in scientific dishonesty?
Quote:| The question of scientific conensus: You will encounter many arguments that there is no such thing as scientific consensus on global warming among climatologists, because one can see all kinds of arguments. Actually there is such a consensus, and it appears whenever they come together to inform the policy makers. Why else would the Kyoto treaty happen. Did the governments feel like putting an unnecesry burden on themselves, or what? |
Governments are being informed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Governments, and global media, are predicated on its assertion that "the science" is clearly represented by the IPCC Reports. But this is simply not true. The IPCC only exists to supply scientific information to support the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). And the IPCC would be failing in its duty if it were to provide information that did not support the FCCC. Thus, all IPCC Reports are (and are intended to be) presentations of the scientific information, interpretations and opinions that support the FCCC. And the IPCC Reports deliberately ignore all other scientific information, opinions and interpretations. Please note that this selection of one-sided scientific data is the explicit purpose of the IPCC. The FCCC is a political objective and selective presentation of any information (of any kind) to support the FCCC is political propaganda.
You proclaim biased political propaganda as being scientific consensus.
Quote:
Yes, Real Climate. One of the 9 contributors, you guessed it, Michael Mann author of the discredited ‘Hockey Stick”.
This is propaganda.
Real Climate’s take on the Hockey Stick begins:
“False claims of the existence of errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction can also be traced to spurious allegations made by two individuals, McIntyre and McKitrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist).”
The commission of the genetic fallacy is obvious, but we are supposed to conclude that because McIntyre does the work of the devil, anything he says is false. This is pure politics. Not only is it not 'science', it commits a basic, obvious and simple logical fallacy.
The account also ignores not only Von Storch, but also Muller's essay in MIT's Technology Review in October, where he (against his wishes to the contrary) admitted the Hockey Stick was broken. It also claims an M&M piece 'argues for anomalous 15th century warmth'. Quite a revealing insight: my understanding is that M&M didn't actually 'argue' for anything, but suggested that Mann et al's methodology and data produced the anomaly when corrected. M&M, after all, were only auditing MBH '98, not 'arguing' anything, and it’s a pretty pass we've come to when people who place themselves on the high ground of pure 'science' can't tell the difference.
Their take on the Hockey Stick continues:
{begin quote}
“Spurious criticisms of the Mann et al (1998) study were first made by these individuals in an article (McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003) published in a non-scientific (social science) journal "Energy and Environment" and later, in a separate comment that was rejected by Nature based on negative appraisals by reviewers and editor. The latter criticism has nonetheless been posted on the internet by the authors, and promoted in certain other non-peer-reviewed venues (see this nice discussion by science journalist David Appell). The claims of the authors, which hold that the "Hockey-Stick" shape of the MBH98 reconstruction is an artifact of the use of series with infilled data and the convention by which certain networks of proxy data were represented in a Principal Components Analysis ("PCA"), are readily seen to be false , as detailed in a response by Mann and colleagues to their rejected Nature criticism demonstrating that (1) the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction is robust with respect to the elimination of any data that were infilled in the original analysis, (2) the main features of the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely insensitive to whether or not proxy data networks are represented by PCA, (3) the putative 'correction' by McIntyre and McKitrick, which argues for anomalous 15th century warmth (in contradiction to all other known reconstructions), is an artifact of the censoring by the authors of key proxy data in the original Mann et al (1998) dataset, and finally, (4) Unlike the original Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, the so-called 'correction' by McIntyre and McKitrick fails statistical verification exercises, rendering it statistically meaningless and unworthy of discussion in the legitimate scientific literature.
The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick have now been further discredited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, in a paper to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, "Journal of Climate" by Rutherford and colleagues (2004) [and by yet another paper by an independent set of authors that is currently "under review" and thus cannot yet be cited-more on this soon!]. Rutherford et al (2004) demonstrate nearly identical results to those of MBH98, using the same proxy dataset as Mann et al (1998) but addressing the issues of infilled/missing data raised by Mcintyre and McKitrick, and using an alternative climate field reconstruction (CFR) methodology that does not represent any proxy data networks by PCA at all.”
{end quote}
I bring to your attention that the 'hockey stick analysis' by Mann at al has been shown so far to be an irreproducible result. Consequently no reference to the paper should be made.
Real Climate write: Unlike the original Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, the so-called 'correction' by McIntyre and McKitrick fails statistical verification exercises, rendering it statistically meaningless and unworthy of discussion in the legitimate scientific literature.
This is untrue. The M&M exercises are sustained e.g., by Storch in Science, etc – Real Climate are selective quoting from the literature, by not giving this reference, and also by not providing to their readers references to the M&M articles. With respect to the reliability of proxies they also fail to mention other critique, e.g., Esper, and the people who originally set up the tree ring-temperature relationship, Pollack and Huang.
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003/mann2003.html
http://www.wsl.ch/staff/holger.gaertner/SZF_Esper_et_al_2004.pdf
"Die Zusammenfassung von lokalen Jahrringchronologien, die aufgrund der Standardisierungsverfahren keine mehrhundertjahrigen Trends enthalten, um niederfrequente Klimaphanomene wie Mittelalterliches Optimum oder Kleine Eiszeit zu studieren (CROWLEY & LOWERY 2000; MANN et al. 1999), sollte vermieden werden."
Mann defended himself but his arguments were refuted in:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jsmerdon/papers/Pollack_and_Smerdon_Journal.pdf
Real Climate now announces articles in preparation that should sustain the Mann interpretations. That may be interesting if the authors involved are prepared to open their secrets about the algorithms used, which Mann failed to do until now. Here is the reason why…
McIntyre has posted on his website a graph with 8 hockey sticks using Mann`s programming, one with original data from Mann, the others with quite different random data with no trend.
And what a miracle: All with nearly the same hockey stick-shape!!
http://www.climate2003.com/
"Jan. 5, 2005 Postscript Graphic
Here is a postscript version of the graphic showing simulated PC1s with a hockeystick shape and the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere reconstruction. Can you find the "real" MBH98 hockeystick? "
Thank you.
- Iolo.
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David Lucifer
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #5 on: 2005-06-13 22:38:16 » |
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Quote from: Iolo Morganwg on 2005-06-13 09:45:55 | I bring to your attention that the 'hockey stick analysis' by Mann at al has been shown so far to be an irreproducible result. |
I'd be interested to know whether teh rhino agrees with this assertion. The fact that M&M have been unable to reproduce it could mean a number of things. Does anyone have access to the algorithms and data of the original authors? If it turns out to be in fact irreproducible what would that mean for the anthropogenic climate change theory?
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #6 on: 2005-06-14 03:01:24 » |
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[Iolo] I bring to your attention that the 'hockey stick analysis' by Mann at al has been shown so far to be an irreproducible result.
[Lucifer] I'd be interested to know whether teh rhino agrees with this assertion. The fact that M&M have been unable to reproduce it could mean a number of things. Does anyone have access to the algorithms and data of the original authors? If it turns out to be in fact irreproducible what would that mean for the anthropogenic climate change theory?
[rhinoceros]
I have a lot to say, things specific to the issue and things about reasoning in general, as soon as I find the time.
If the hockey stick graph turned out to be irreproducible then several arguments for anthropogenic climate change would lose some steam. Many options would remain open (irrelevance of human activity, countering of a coming ice age by human activity... go figure).
By the way, here is a reproduction of the hockey stick:
Media Advisory: The Hockey Stick Controversy
New Analysis Reproduces Graph of Late 20th Century Temperature Rise
May 11, 2005
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/ammann.shtml
<quote>
Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change. The authors invite researchers and others to use the code for their own evaluation of the method.
Ammann and Wahl’s findings contradict an assertion by McIntyre and McKitrick that 15th century global temperatures rival those of the late 20th century and therefore make the hockey stick-shaped graph inaccurate. They also dispute McIntyre and McKitrick’s alleged identification of a fundamental flaw that would significantly bias the MBH climate reconstruction toward a hockey stick shape. Ammann and Wahl conclude that the highly publicized criticisms of the MBH graph are unfounded. They first presented their detailed analyses at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco last December and at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Denver this year.
<end quote>
Generally, Mann et.al. argue that McIntyre's method is actually an elaborate way to discard a good chunk of North American data, and that McIntyre's "no-hockey-stick" results can be reproduced in many ways by discarding this data.
How hard could it be to reproduce Mann's results? Didn't McIntyre's say he reproduced 8 hockey sticks using irrelevant data with Mann's method? That was a fun touch. A seemingly unrelated but delightful story by a mathematician could help understand how this is possible but not so compelling:
Fibonacci Forgeries
http://members.fortunecity.com/templarser/forgeries.html
What's the next number in the sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21?"
"Nineteen," I grunted automatically, while battling with a bread roll seemingly baked with cement.
"You're not supposed to answer," he said. "Anyway, you're wrong - it's 34. What made you think it was 19?"
I drained my glass. "According to Carl E Linderholms great classic "Mathematics Made Difficult", the next term is always 19, whatever the sequence: 1,2,3,4,5 - 19 and 1,2,4,8,16,32 - 19. Even 2,3,5,7,11,13,17 - 19."
"That's ridiculous.
"No,it's simple and general and universally applicable and thus superior to any other solution. The Laplace interpolation formula can fit a polynomial to any sequence whatsoever, so you can choose whichever number you want to come next, having a perfectly valid reason.
<snip>
Before finishing, here is an article from BBC News, so that those of us who were blinded with science can get the picture of this debate over the hockey stick graph.
Row over climate 'hockey stick'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4349133.stm
Hopefully I'll come back soon with more about peer-review, blinding laymen with science, corporate payrols, the logic of political motives, what is propaganda and more.
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the.bricoleur
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #7 on: 2005-06-14 07:04:20 » |
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Quote:
Quote from: David Lucifer on 2005-06-13 22:38:16
Quote from: Iolo Morganwg on 2005-06-13 09:45:55 | I bring to your attention that the 'hockey stick analysis' by Mann at al has been shown so far to be an irreproducible result. |
I'd be interested to know whether teh rhino agrees with this assertion. The fact that M&M have been unable to reproduce it could mean a number of things. Does anyone have access to the algorithms and data of the original authors? If it turns out to be in fact irreproducible what would that mean for the anthropogenic climate change theory?
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I should remind you that it was the work of M&M that lead Mann, Bradley, and Hughes to publish a corrigendum to their paper in the Nature (July 1st).
Below is a list of the claims made by M&M that have been confirmed by the corrigendum:
Taken from A Scorecard on MM03
Quote: Data Set Defects
MM03 provided a listing of 9 specific defects in MBH98:
a) unjustified truncation of 3 series;
Confirmed. The unreported truncation of the Central England and Central Europe series was acknowledged in the Corrigendum (Nature, July 1 2004). Duplicate versions of these series can be observed at Mann’s UVA web site. It contains, for each of these three series, the full records and the truncated versions in separate files. The rostering file multiproxy.inf at UVA confirms the use of the truncated versions. The use of truncated data is thereby confirmed as being intentional and not accidental. Although the 3rd series was not mentioned in the Corrigendum, it also exists in duplicate versions at Mann’s website. The truncation was supposedly justified by an attribution of the truncated version to Bradley and Jones [1993], but this is hardly a valid justification since the truncation was not annotated in that article either. Given that Bradley and Jones [1993] was an influential critique of the concept of the LIA, its unannotated deletion of the very cold late 17th century period in England would seem to be very problematic in its own right. Questions about the quality of the earliest portions of these series do not justify their arbitrary truncation, since they are being used in MBH98 not as instrumental records but as proxies, and as such surely have as much plausibility, even in their earliest portions, as many of the tree ring chronologies.
d) unjustified extrapolations or interpolations to cover missing entries
Confirmed. The Corrigendum reported the extrapolation of the Gaspé series, the start date of which was misrepresented in MBH98 (thereby not disclosing the unique extrapolation.) We disagree with the unsubstantiated claim that this extrapolation does not “matter” (see demonstration of the effects in our E&E05 paper).
Although the extrapolation of closing values of many series had been reported in the original SI, it appeared to us that these extrapolations were statistically unnecessary. This position has been adopted by Mann et al., who have done subsequent calculations without these extrapolations. We agree that not much turns on this aspect of the issue.
f) inconsistent use of seasonal temperature data where annual data is available;
Confirmed. This was acknowledged in the Corrigendum. See explanation in (a).
h) listing of unused proxies;
Confirmed and more pervasive than indicated in MM03. When the Mann FTP site became public, this observation turned out to be much more pervasive than indicated in MM03. MM03 reported 5 listed proxies as not being used, but the FTP site showed that over 35 listed proxies had not been used (and that 2 unlisted proxies had been used). These errors are acknowledged in the Corrigendum. The explanation of the errors in the Corrigendum is false (which I’ll discuss some time). The 2 unlisted proxies appear to be errors of some sort, as their first 120-125 years are identical with other listed versions. |
I have only listed those instances that were addressed in the corrigendum – there are others.
The hockey stick does not stand whether reproducible or not.
[rhinoceros]
I have a lot to say, things specific to the issue and things about reasoning in general, as soon as I find the time.
If the hockey stick graph turned out to be irreproducible then several arguments for anthropogenic climate change would lose some steam. Many options would remain open (irrelevance of human activity, countering of a coming ice age by human activity... go figure).
[Iolo]
Let us also not get blinded by the maths here, basically the hockey stick is an attempt to demonstrate that 20th century warming is unprecedented. It does this only by ignoring physical evidence for a medieval warm period, which was followed by a little ice age (beginning late 18th century). Man et al claim that these phenomena were not global, yet strange how they appeared at similar times globally.
The existence of a medieval warm period would, in my understanding, refute the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.
[rhinoceros]
By the way, here is a reproduction of the hockey stick:
Media Advisory: The Hockey Stick Controversy
New Analysis Reproduces Graph of Late 20th Century Temperature Rise
May 11, 2005
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/ammann.shtml
<quote>
Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change. The authors invite researchers and others to use the code for their own evaluation of the method.
Ammann and Wahl’s findings contradict an assertion by McIntyre and McKitrick that 15th century global temperatures rival those of the late 20th century and therefore make the hockey stick-shaped graph inaccurate. They also dispute McIntyre and McKitrick’s alleged identification of a fundamental flaw that would significantly bias the MBH climate reconstruction toward a hockey stick shape. Ammann and Wahl conclude that the highly publicized criticisms of the MBH graph are unfounded. They first presented their detailed analyses at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco last December and at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Denver this year.
<end quote>
[Iolo]
Interesting to not that Dr Ammann was one of the authors, together with Mann, of On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late-20th Century Warmth. Eos, Vol. 84, No. 27, page 256, July 8, 2003.
I think this must be one of the reasons he is willing to risk damaging his reputation. I laud his open-source, open-method, open-data approach to the reconstruction of the past climate, but I find it curious that no comment is made on the reason that such a reconstruction is so important.
The reason, of course, is that a disturbing number of climate "scientists" have proven that they are not scientists at all, because scientists do not hide their work. For him to attempt this reconstruction without taking a clear stand on this scientific dishonesty by some of the biggest names in the field can only damage his own reputation.
Dr. Ammann has posted R-code, for example, that is labelled as "R-Code for Mann-Bradley-Hughes Temperature Reconstruction." However, since Mann, Bradley, and Hughes have deliberately hidden both their code and their data from scientific inspection, his R-Code can only be a guess at what they have done. This situation is intolerable, and needs to be pointed out as such.
Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." I fear that in this case he is doing worse than nothing -- he is actively promoting the erroneous view that Mann, Bradley, and Hughes are scientists. They clearly are not -- scientists do not hide their data and methods.
[rhinoceros]
Generally, Mann et.al. argue that McIntyre's method is actually an elaborate way to discard a good chunk of North American data, and that McIntyre's "no-hockey-stick" results can be reproduced in many ways by discarding this data.
[Iolo]
Putting this aside for a moment, M&M’s critisicm is not the only one levelled at the hockey stick.
See for e.g. Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data Hans von Storch,1* Eduardo Zorita,1 Julie M. Jones,1 Yegor Dimitriev,1 Fidel González-Rouco,2 Simon F. B. Tett3
Empirical reconstructions of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature in the past millennium based on multiproxy records depict small-amplitude variations followed by a clear warming trend in the past two centuries. We use a coupled atmosphere-ocean model simulation of the past 1000 years as a surrogate climate to test the skill of these methods, particularly at multidecadal and centennial time scales. Idealized proxy records are represented by simulated grid-point temperature, degraded with statistical noise. The centennial variability of the NH temperature is underestimated by the regression-based methods applied here, suggesting that past variations may have been at least a factor of 2 larger than indicated by empirical reconstructions.
1 Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS Research Centre, Geesthacht 21502, Germany.
2 Department of Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics, Universidad Complutense, Madrid 28040, Spain.
3 UK Meteorological Office, Hadley Centre (Reading Unit), Meteorology Building, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6BB, UK.
Science Online
[rhinoceros]
How hard could it be to reproduce Mann's results? Didn't McIntyre's say he reproduced 8 hockey sticks using irrelevant data with Mann's method? That was a fun touch. A seemingly unrelated but delightful story by a mathematician could help understand how this is possible but not so compelling:
[Iolo]
No. Using Mann’s programming. One graph used Mann’s data, the other graphs had random data fed into them – the random data was generated using the Monte Carlo method.
For more see – Global Warming Bombshell – Technology Review
[rhinoceros]
Hopefully I'll come back soon with more about peer-review, blinding laymen with science, corporate payrols, the logic of political motives, what is propaganda and more.
[Iolo]
I look forward to it.
- Iolo
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rhinoceros
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #8 on: 2005-06-27 14:03:28 » |
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I wrote:
[rhinoceros]
Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/exxon_chart.html
"ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe. Herewith, a representative overview. "
Same here.
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentid=3804&CFID=24781975&CFTOKEN=23251343
In the above, unlike Crichton, I see at least one valuable service that the "environment freaks" offer me.
This whole picture also makes me extra cautious, because I realize that they play with real money. On the other hand, I am puzzled by the allegations about the funding of the climatologists by governments or international organizations: What is the motive for a government to promote a theory which will result in having to spend more money or soothe their people's fears? I would expect that a government would rather underfund them.
Better sources:
For:
The names involved here, incl. Michael Mann, the father of the "hockey stick" graph, who argue for global warming, are working climatologists subject to peer review.
http://www.realclimate.org/
Against:
Steve McIntyre, who debates the "hockey stick" and global warming is also a working climatologists subject to peer review.
http://www.climateaudit.org/
[Iolo Morganwg]
Steve McIntyre appears on the Environmental Defence list.
How useful is this to you now rhino?
[rhinoceros]
More useful than I thought, actually. Your pointer was most helpful for clearing a misconception of mine.
I hadn't noticed that McIntyre was in the list, so I had to look him up. Of course I don't assume that anyone who is included in such a list is a paid propagandist -- we must always check. One may just happen to do something which the oil industry likes, so they drop in some pennies. This would give rise to some subtle issues as well, but what I found in our case in not subtle at all. Here is my latest learning:
I wrote that McIntyre is a working climatologists subject to peer review. I found that I was wrong on all accounts, a false impression which I had because I often saw his claims discussed by climatologists in public. First, McIntyre is not a climatologist at all. He has been working for the mining industry for 35 years -- all his professional life -- and he is still payed by Exxon-Mobil, for obvious reasons. His objections submitted for publication in peer reviewed magazines such as Nature have been repeatedly rejected. He has publised them in a geophysics journal -- one of his own field, which unlike other journals does have an "official" position against anthropogenic climate change.
McIntyre's career and livelihood is intimately associated with the oil industry. If he does not make an argument that there is no anthropogenic climate change, then he gets no revenue. Of course, this does not automatically invalidate any particular argument of his. Logically, he may be a paid propagandist and yet be right. The question is if he can make a case good enough to convince people who understand what he is talking about -- climate scientists.
Something more general, which does not refer specifically to McIntyre but to the environment in which he operates. On the open Web, anyone's comments are as good as any other's, and any scientific analysis can be countered with flapdoodle, provided you can handle big english words.
[Iolo Morganwg] Rhino, where is your evidence that funding skewers research or has resulted in scientific dishonesty?
[rhinoceros] It has happened with the cigarette industry. Generally, not all industrial funding falls under the same category. In the case of climate research, funding by the oil industry distorts reasearch, because they seek a specific answer, while funding by the agriculture industry does not, because they need the truth.
Apparently not everyone gets this kind of funding. Corporations have to do their budget allocation. Your nephew, who seeks such funding and has already made up his mind about the answers, should realize that if he makes it and settles with his life and arrives at a situation where he has to pay home loans and family bills, he will need exceptional strength to ever change his mind based on evidence.
More later.
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the.bricoleur
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making sense of change
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #9 on: 2005-06-29 13:19:48 » |
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Quote:
A DNS lookup for realclimate.org reveals:
Domain Name:REALCLIMATE.ORG
Created On:19-Nov-2004 16:39:03 UTC
Last Updated On:19-Jan-2005 04:05:33 UTC
Expiration Date:19-Nov-2005 16:39:03 UTC
Registrant Name:Betsy Ensley
Registrant Organization:Environmental Media Services
Registrant Street1:1320 18th St, NW
Registrant Street2:5th Floor
Registrant City:Washington
Registrant State/Province: DC
Registrant Postal Code:20036
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.2024636670
Registrant Email:betsy@ems.org
Funded by an environmental group??
"Better source" rhino? How is that?
Quote:[rhinoceros]
More useful than I thought, actually. Your pointer was most helpful for clearing a misconception of mine.
I hadn't noticed that McIntyre was in the list, so I had to look him up. Of course I don't assume that anyone who is included in such a list is a paid propagandist -- we must always check. One may just happen to do something which the oil industry likes, so they drop in some pennies. This would give rise to some subtle issues as well, but what I found in our case in not subtle at all. Here is my latest learning:
I wrote that McIntyre is a working climatologists subject to peer review. I found that I was wrong on all accounts, a false impression which I had because I often saw his claims discussed by climatologists in public. First, McIntyre is not a climatologist at all. He has been working for the mining industry for 35 years -- all his professional life -- and he is still payed by Exxon-Mobil, for obvious reasons. His objections submitted for publication in peer reviewed magazines such as Nature have been repeatedly rejected. He has publised them in a geophysics journal -- one of his own field, which unlike other journals does have an "official" position against anthropogenic climate change.
McIntyre's career and livelihood is intimately associated with the oil industry. If he does not make an argument that there is no anthropogenic climate change, then he gets no revenue. Of course, this does not automatically invalidate any particular argument of his. Logically, he may be a paid propagandist and yet be right. The question is if he can make a case good enough to convince people who understand what he is talking about -- climate scientists.
Something more general, which does not refer specifically to McIntyre but to the environment in which he operates. On the open Web, anyone's comments are as good as any other's, and any scientific analysis can be countered with flapdoodle, provided you can handle big english words.
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Your opinion on McIntyre is completely immaterial.
What is not immaterial is the fact that it was the direct result of his, with McKitrick, work that Mann et al were forced to publish a corrigendum in Nature and now face a US federal investigation. At least now they will be forced to hand over their data / code. They will now be forced to hand over their data/code – makes you wonder why, if they are correct, that it has come to this before they actually hand it over!
[Iolo Morganwg 1] Rhino, where is your evidence that funding skewers research or has resulted in scientific dishonesty?
[rhinoceros 1] It has happened with the cigarette industry. Generally, not all industrial funding falls under the same category. In the case of climate research, funding by the oil industry distorts reasearch, because they seek a specific answer, while funding by the agriculture industry does not, because they need the truth.
Apparently not everyone gets this kind of funding. Corporations have to do their budget allocation. Your nephew, who seeks such funding and has already made up his mind about the answers, should realize that if he makes it and settles with his life and arrives at a situation where he has to pay home loans and family bills, he will need exceptional strength to ever change his mind based on evidence.
[Iolo Morganwg 2]Just give me the evidence rhino. (edit - to remove my unnecessarily condescending tone – apologies rhino)
But we could ping pong back and forth over funding, but you seem to imply that the AGW theorists have no vested interests.
Scripps Institute of Oceanography. This institute, together with other similar institutes in USA and around the world, has a massive conflict of interest in making comments on climate change. This is because a significant portion of the annual budget for such institutions comes from grants for investigating climate change: for next year, no problem then no grant. The result, inevitably, is the generation of pseudo-environmental-problems, and endless self-serving frisbee-science.
Even more serious is that organisations such as the AAAS, national academies, Chief Government Scientists (at least in the UK and Australia), and journals such as Science and Nature, are entirely complicit in the alarm mongering. I don't like sounding like a shrill conspiracist, but that this is the case has now been self evident to impartial observers for at least several years.
The result is that western science is now going through a crisis. The credibility of science has already been damaged by incidents such as the handling of the mad-cow episode in the UK, the inability of any country to placate anti-GM food hysteria, and the ruthless politicisation of science exercised by e.g. Blair (to placate his left wing), Cain-Liebermann (to capture political advantage in the US system), Putin (signing Kyoto to gain WTO entry for Russia) and successive Australian governments (establishing for political gain a plethora of overlapping, self-reinforcing and self-interested environmental and greenhouse agencies at both state and federal level). The usefulness of science as a values-free, evidence-based, rational means of analysis has been weakened further by doubts cast by some of our scholarly colleagues in the social sciences.
As part of which, and on top of which, we now have the complete dominance of "Hansenism" as the credo of the alarmist climate-change propaganda which we all experience daily through the media, political and even business sources.
History has judged that Lysenkoism damaged mainly the USSR. History, with hindsight, will in due course judge that Hansenism damaged the very basis of western scientific culture, inflicting at the same time enormous economic and social damage.
The question is not IF Hansenism will be rumbled by the power structures in our societies, but WHEN, and WHAT will the reaction be? The list of distinguished persons and institutions that will be shown to have made fools of themselves will be formidable in both its length and "quality". As, therefore, will be their butt-covering defence.
I guess the key question might be: "how do we hasten the day"?
-- Iolo.
Green movement is big business
Source: http://www.rsnz.org/news/news_item.php?view=55525
Johannesburg, Nov 16 Reuters
Funding statistics released prior to the annual meeting of the World Conservation Union
Some environmentalists slam big business for its polluting or tree-cutting ways but a growing number of "greens" resemble and even act like Wall Street types themselves.
Reflecting growing public concern about the environment, the green movement has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry and its activists are more likely to wear a suit than sandals as they take their message to the streets.
And like corporations, they compete fiercely for "market share" - the cash they get from donors ranging from the Canadian secretary worried about the fate of pandas to big companies seeking to bolster their "compassionate credentials".
Many well-dressed greens will gather in the Thai capital from Wednesday for a nine-day meeting of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), which will offer assessments on a range of issues from the state of coral reefs to the majestic Himalayan range.
"There is an increase in public perceptions about the environment, and in the NGO movement we rely on the public for support," said Jason Bell-Leask, southern African director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
This means that hair is cut short, ties are draped around necks, and the annual reports of many green groups read like those of publicly listed companies, complete with income statements, balance sheets - and some very big figures.
"It is all about openness and transparency because we are using money raised from the public and so financial records need to be made available," said Bell-Leask.
Conservation group WWF's 2003 annual review shows an income of $382 ($NZ552) million for its network.
In its breakdown, it says that 46 percent came from individuals, 12 percent from legacies and 20 percent from governments and aid agencies. Six percent came from corporations.
In 2002, Greenpeace's income was around $213 million - the vast majority from grants and donations.
IFAW'S "total public support and revenue" was over $64 million during the 2002-2003 financial year, up from almost $57 million in the previous year.
And the IUCN - which counts governments and NGOs among its members - said that its total external operating income in 2003 was just over $87 million.
These are just a few examples from some of the biggest groups, but there are countless national green NGOs or animal welfare groups out there - the IUCN counts 730 national NGOs and 77 international NGOs among its members.
All go cap in hand to the public to fund their research and activism.
Just who you give cash to often depends on your political leanings or what you regard as important.
Mainstream groups such as the WWF raise awareness about a range of issues such as climate change and criticise governments for their failure to take action.
But they are not opposed to the "sustainable use" of wildlife – through recreational hunting, for example - provided that it does not endanger a species.
There are entire non-profit groups dedicated to hunting, such as "Ducks Unlimited," which raises funds to preserve wetlands - a vital habitat for a range of creatures including the ducks that "wing-shooters" love to blast from the sky.
Other groups such as IFAW or the more radical People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) oppose activities such as hunting on grounds of cruelty.
Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have roots going back to the 19th century, although critics contend that their urban, middle-class obsession with animals often takes precedence over the needs of poor Third World people.
Many of these groups, for example, oppose the culling of African elephants - which some wildlife officials and scientists say is needed in places like South Africa to contain swelling numbers of the world's largest land mammal.
"It is easy to preach animal rights and oppose elephant culling when you live in New York," snorts one senior official from South African National Parks.
Other critics take broader exception with the green movement and accuse it of grossly exaggerating the threats to the planet to scare the public into filling its pockets.
"We are all familiar with the litany: the environment is in poor shape here on Earth. Our resources are running out... the air and the water are becoming ever more polluted," writes Bjorn Lomborg in his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
"There is just one problem: it (the litany) does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence," he says.
Green groups are also accused of latching on to cuddly "poster animals" such as pandas that humans seem to relate to in a bid to push their cause.
In retort, most of the conservationists gathering in Bangkok this week would reply that a growing number of respected scientists are sounding alarm bells on everything from global warming to depleted fish stocks.
And judging from their income statements, they have clearly convinced a lot of people.
Reutersco 16/11/04 19-54NZ
-- Iolo (of course this ‘proves’ nothing, so can we all just move on??
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rhinoceros
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Re:Our Greatest Challenge
« Reply #10 on: 2005-07-03 22:58:56 » |
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[Iolo Morganwg]
Domain Name:REALCLIMATE.ORG
Registrant Organization:Environmental Media Services
Funded by an environmental group??
"Better source" rhino? How is that?
[rhinoceros] I forgot to mention that I am sort of an environmentalist myself, so I can hardly be taken aback by the truth. I like trees and stuff (although not in my room), I like clean air, and I don't experience any adrenaline rush with SUV's passing by.
It is true that this evidence could be bad or not. What else do we have about EMS? Do they have funds? Normally Web hosting should cost $100 a year or so, but maybe they pay for other things too? Anyone?
[Iolo Morganwg] Your opinion on McIntyre is completely immaterial.
[rhinoceros] I already knew that.
[Iolo Morganwg] What is not immaterial is the fact that it was the direct result of his, with McKitrick, work that Mann et al were forced to publish a corrigendum in Nature
[rhinoceros] I don't think so. Mann et al ignored Mc&Mc exactly like they would ignore me if I demanded the data. The corrigendum (which provides supplementary material and does not change much) was an indirect result, when their peers asked questions after all the publicity, and it was published.
[Iolo Morganwg] and now face a US federal investigation. At least now they will be forced to hand over their data / code. They will now be forced to hand over their data/code – makes you wonder why, if they are correct, that it has come to this before they actually hand it over!
[rhinoceros] I find this view very distatestful. Who is going to "judge" the data/code. Not the climate scientists, I assume. But probably it won't happen. Neocons may want a place in peer review, but from what I read in the politics columns it seems that they are on they way down. Good riddance.
The data have been posted online by Mann et al months ago -- both those that they used and those that they didn't use according to their reasoning. I have downloaded them myself, although I have no idea what to do with them.
McIntyre had been protesting for the delay. He also did some funny whining, saying that he couldn't download them for a while because Mann had banned his IP address. Lame. Aren't there Internet Cafes?
[Iolo Morganwg] Just give me the evidence rhino. (edit - to remove my unnecessarily condescending tone – apologies rhino)
[rhinoceros] You mean instances where industry funding has distorted research? I said "the tobacco industry". I didn't want to open another topic here.
I also gave you examples of industry funding which seeks the truth about climate change (agriculture) and of industry funding which only funds a particular answer no matter how it is derived (oil industry).
[Iolo Morganwg] But we could ping pong back and forth over funding, but you seem to imply that the AGW theorists have no vested interests.
Scripps Institute of Oceanography. This institute, together with other similar institutes in USA and around the world, has a massive conflict of interest in making comments on climate change. This is because a significant portion of the annual budget for such institutions comes from grants for investigating climate change: for next year, no problem then no grant. The result, inevitably, is the generation of pseudo-environmental-problems, and endless self-serving frisbee-science.
[rhinoceros] I agree that a lot of sentationalist research is going on these days, as researchers from all fields compete for funds. It's due to a combination of human nature and current economic views.
I find environmental research a legitimate field. There have been real envoronmental problems, not only fake ones. I don't share a view of environmental apathy.
Your counter argument is not about foreign interests. It is about the motivation of the scientists themselves; essentially you protest against human nature as manifested in the current economic environment. These scientists still have to do their work. One question is if their findings are verbatim or fake. I don't know much about Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Has any significant part of their research been found fake? Have they often pointed at "pseudo-environmental-problems"?
[Iolo Morganwg] Even more serious is that organisations such as the AAAS, national academies, Chief Government Scientists (at least in the UK and Australia), and journals such as Science and Nature, are entirely complicit in the alarm mongering. I don't like sounding like a shrill conspiracist, but that this is the case has now been self evident to impartial observers for at least several years.
[rhinoceros] It would be a really weak conspiracy theory anyway. The G8 industrial countries, with the exception of Bush, would have to be either part of the conspiracy or victims of the conspiracy, against their countries' industrial interests.
[Iolo Morganwg] The result is that western science is now going through a crisis. The credibility of science has already been damaged by incidents such as the handling of the mad-cow episode in the UK,
[rhinoceros] In Greece, the meat market collapsed for weeks when 1 instance of mad cow disease was diagnosed. Imports changed direction completely. Irrational or not, it is the job of the politicians to keep things rolling even if extreme measures have to be taken.
[Iolo Morganwg] the inability of any country to placate anti-GM food hysteria,
[rhinoceros] I'll take non-GM food if doesn't cost much more and if it is not much uglier. You can't argue with people's tastes. Labeling of GM foods is the honest way to go, if buyers want this information; not manupulation.
[Iolo Morganwg] and the ruthless politicisation of science exercised by e.g. Blair (to placate his left wing), Cain-Liebermann (to capture political advantage in the US system), Putin (signing Kyoto to gain WTO entry for Russia) and successive Australian governments (establishing for political gain a plethora of overlapping, self-reinforcing and self-interested environmental and greenhouse agencies at both state and federal level). The usefulness of science as a values-free, evidence-based, rational means of analysis has been weakened further by doubts cast by some of our scholarly colleagues in the social sciences.
[rhinoceros] Think of it differently. When pursuing a Kyoto agenda, Blair and Putin act against their industry's interests, and what they do is in straight accord to the scientific community. Taking the opposite position based on what they read on a website would be an anomaly. Putin may do it for the sake of his industry.
[Iolo Morganwg] History has judged that Lysenkoism damaged mainly the USSR. History, with hindsight, will in due course judge that Hansenism damaged the very basis of western scientific culture, inflicting at the same time enormous economic and social damage.
[rhinoceros] Lysenkoism? Stalin chose Lysenko, a "pioneer" crackpot biologist who had a crazy idea about inheritance of acquired traits, and put him in charge of the agriculture. He chose him because Lysenko's ideas appealed to him. Bush has been accused of doing something similar. In the process, Stalin sent many proper Darwinian biologists who protested into exile and silenced the rest. He considered them a self-interested clique. The disastrous results are known.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
[Iolo Morganwg] The question is not IF Hansenism will be rumbled by the power structures in our societies, but WHEN, and WHAT will the reaction be? The list of distinguished persons and institutions that will be shown to have made fools of themselves will be formidable in both its length and "quality". As, therefore, will be their butt-covering defence.
[rhinoceros] Slower... What is Hansenism? Remember that I come from another tribe.
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