Why Climate Change is Unbearably Naked

What do I find so impossibly sloppy to bear, about Climate Change in its contemporary definition, as the result of human activities (also known as “Anthopogenic Global Warming” or AGW, and usually associated to CO2 emissions caused by humans)?

Yesterday’s incredible (counter-)discovery by Anthony Watts on CO2 measurements getting corrected upwards after having gone downwards “for the first time in history” provides an opportunity for a non-exhaustive list (I may add links to each point next week) of all that depaupers Climate Change of actual meaning:

• Climate models are all based on forcings, something that cannot be measured. The tool has become the cause.
• Those same models are demonstrably “right” whatever happens, either warming or cooling (once again, as all they show is that forcings are supposed to do)
• Proponents are fixated on negativities (not just the newsmedia and the Stern Report…I have some interesting findings about a recent book on Climate Change, and I will publish them this week or next)
• Climate change is improbably comprehensive in its effects, and yet “Attribution”, the ability to pinpoint a particular change as having something to do with Climate Change, is still up in the air
• The IPCC itself cannot see much evidence for change in 2/3 (two-thirds!) of the planet
• The “truth” is that temperatures are going up but if one looks at actual measurements, they are continuously adapted and adjusted. Measurement stations are not increasing in the number, and locations are far from perfect.
• And now of course, on-the-fly upward adjustments of CO2 data appear just as values begin to go “the wrong way”.

I personally agree with Watts when he writes: “While nefarious motives may not be there, its just damn sloppy IMHO, and given this is the crown jewel for CO2 data I expect far better“.

And please don’t get me wrong…I am perfectly aware that such generalized sloppiness is part-and-parcel of modern Science, with genetists looking for Mendelian transmission of what is not Mendelian and a whole generation of Cosmologists trained on calling 96% of the Universe as “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy”, two names for the same thing (”Total Ignorance”).

“Institutionalized Science” is of course 80% rubbish, as per the famous 80/20 rule.

But the whole Climate debate is much more than Science. And for that, there is still so much it needs to be dressed with, before it can be shown as properly thought of, and ready for being a solid basis for a revolution in societal mores.

If I read about “scientists demonstrating that train travel is impossible” I may get a laugh, as people at the time surely did. But when I see all the massive propaganda machine put in place to convince people to turn carbon-free by way of guilt, there isn’t much to be amused of.

If the keys to absolute gullibility are ever found, we may as well all turn back to live up the trees.

Sex and Global Warming: the Underrated Issue

What’s wrong with the AGWers, globalwarmers, climatechangers? Why oh why there are girls stripping for peak oil, and famous actresses producing green porno, whilst for climate change it’s always Gore, Hansen and Polar Bears?

The doom-and-gloom is always greener…

GLOBAL WARMING: IT’S ALL MY FAULT!!!

TierneyLab mentions a Lancet study according to which “obesity promotes global warming”.

Oops!! I should have done that diet last year!!!

Hopefully though, the paunch police won’t throw me in jail any time soon (you know, we Large People are usually easy to catch…)

A Real Climate of Misunderstanding

What Climate Science?
Are AGW climate scientists and science-prone skeptics talking about the same subject? I thought so, but am not sure of that any longer.

Having read Real Climate (RC)’s “Butterfly” blog and engaged in some commentary about it at that site, and having followed the AGW debate for the last five years, my impression is that:

• the AGW climate scientists are just doing what they can, after heavily restricting their area of research
• I and some other fellow science-minded skeptics are simply pointing out to the vast, unexplored regions outside of your average climate modeller’s understanding and computational ability.

Imagine if paleontologists had decided to concentrate on the skulls of Rift Valley hominids, treating with disdain (aka as “noise”) all of a find’s context, including other human bones, remains of other animals, local geography (and climate). And deliberatingly ignoring every other hominid find, anywhere else in the world.

That’d still be science, but within such a very focused line of research quite unlikely to add much knowledge or understanding, apart than about itself.

There Must Be Some…
If such a colossal misunderstanding is indeed in place, that would go a long way in explaining the extraordinary ill feelings surrounding the whole of climate science at the moment (and I am deliberately keeping politics outside of this), with one side treating skepticism itself as a dishonest scandal that should be stamped out of existence once and for all, and the other side dismissing years and years of research as pretty much irrelevant gibberish written by incompetent liars.

No wonder they (we) can’t see each other eye-to-eye…how could two judges agree at a canine show contest, if one of them were only interested in (and had built a whole theory of canine beauty about) the shape of the tails?

Climatology: An Abridged History
The story of how contemporary climatology has ended up like this is illuminating.

At first, basic laboratory experiments gave some indications on how atmospheric constituents could interact with one another, and with the incoming solar radiation. Notable among them, the study of CO2’s “greenhouse effect” by Arrhenius in 1896. But the real world of meteorology (including climate) is somewhat more complex than a lab’s setting.

For example, vast energy exchanges manifest in atmospheric cell circulation, oceanic heat exchanges, and whole climate-affecting cycles currently known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, el Nino/la Nina, etc etc.

With no way of replicating that in controlled laboratory conditions, climatologists opted at one point to computational models of the atmosphere. This was of course possible only and after a minimum of computational power became available.

Computers of course understand only numbers and formulas/commands. In order to get to that, a momentous assumption was made: in an approach curiously reminiscent of the science of aeronautics, climate was taken as the response of the atmosphere to “forcings”, i.e. discernible components pushing and pulling the atmosphere in one or the other direction.

“Climate” is then the resulting overall effect of the action of each forcing, averaged over a certain lentgh of time.

In that context, “forcings” were purely operational, “digitizational” tools, providing some basis for computing the climate. By definition, in fact, forcings cannot be measured: all observations of the actual atmosphere will (obviously!) include the effect of them all. If “forcings” exist or not is therefore irrelevant. For all they were worth, forcings could have been substituted by Fourier analysis, or Principal Component Analysis, or whatever other technical tool that can transform a set of signals (and formulas) of any sort into computer-friendly figures (and procedures).

However, alongside a steady increase in available computational power, there came the a shift in focus, from real (observable) climate to forcings: in a first dichotomy with the real world, models became ways of investigating the (possible) effect of each forcing, instead of forcings being ways of investigating the (possible) evolution of the planet’s climate.

This change is less subtle than it appears. It entails throwing one’s hands up in the air about trying to understand the actual atmosphere, choosing instead to concentrate on known (pre-set) effects of known causes. Models in fact are far from independent from assumptions about forcings: they are made out of them. The effect of each forcing is already written in the code of each model, and model runs will show that effect at work. Even if results could vary for example modifying a model’s representation of geography, there is no way that model will be able to run contrary to its pre-assumed behaviour, for example in the case of increased CO2 concentration.

If I write a computer program that just adds one every time a white objects traverses a camera’s field of view, there is no way my program will ever count down, say to minus 20. And the fact that the counter always increases says nothing about how many white objects there are in the real world. It just shows how the counter works.

Nothing But Parameters
What can you do when all you have are models only useful to investigate what a particular forcing’s effect might be? You are left with playing with the parameters, modifying them to “fit” observations and “plausibility”. This is manifest for example in Hansen et al’s 2007 article, “Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE“, literally saddled with innumerable “estimations”, six of them explicitly “subjective” (little more than guesses, that is) but still able somehow to get published in a peer-reviewed scientific article.

Note that comparison to the real world is but a side issue in that paper. “Observations” (25+ years of averages) are useful to evaluate what the parameters are likely to be, i.e. the relative importance of each forcing. There is nothing important outside of them. In a second dichotomy with the real world, in such a vision of the world everything that is not included in the modelling is “noise”, in other words “irrelevant”.

There is no “going back to the lab” in contemporary mainstream forcings-based climate science, eg to learn anything new after finding unexpected observations, because those are “noise” (sometimes called, “weather”) and thus have to be ignored. And there is no meaningful effort to measure what if anything is going wrong: for example, comparisons between model results and observations are simply visual.

The good thing about this is that there are enormous avenues of research left open to future generations. The downside is that the reality of climate models is, at present, literally set in stone, whatever the real climate is out there.

Can climate models predict anything?
Skeptics and non-skeptics alike seem to agree that models cannot predict (i.e. make predictions that can be falsified, or confirmed, by observations) for timeframes shorter than around 25 years from the time of computation.

In fact, RealClimate seems to be willing to take a quarter of a century, more or less, as the minimum amount of time needed to get “averages” that can be called “climate” rather than mere “weather”. That is a second example of AGW climate scientists pigeonholing themselves: just as anything that cannot be modelled by forcings is “noise”, so anything that doesn’t cancel itself over 25 years is “noise” too.

So we started with “climate science” only to get stuck into “multi-decadal averaging to evaluate parameters to use in estimating the effect of forcings”.

Can anything ever disprove a forcings-based model?
No. Nothing at all ever will. Some AGWers are answering that with improbable claims about Popper being long dead, an eery reply one would expect only from inventors of perpetual-motion machines.

Actually, the prove/disprove question may simply be the wrong question. Models are only tools to investigate the possible effect of each forcing. Hansen et al talk about “using the model for simulations of future climate change”.

The key word there is of course “simulations”.

Models are not a weather-predicting tool (remember, they are about “climate”, not “weather”). And they are not a climate-predicting tool either, even if they are often abused as if they were. In its 2001 report the IPCC itself stated as much, in no uncertain terms: “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (from the IPCC TAR-WG1, 2001).

What models can do is simulate the effect of individual forcings in isolation, something that can never be observed anyway. They also simulate the cumulative effect of forcings, with added uncertainty as interactions must be modelled too. Such a cumulative effect is not necessarily expected to be observable either.

It must be stated that as far as I can remember RC has never claimed anything more. Good for them. Perhaps they could have been clearer before more clear and more often, but things are starting to move in the right direction, of late. As already quoted in a previous blog: “[...] The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world. [...]“

And Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the IPCC-TAR report, recently wrote: “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios.”

Compounded Weaknesses
Don’t get me wrong: on its own, doing an estimation is part-and-parcel of conducting scientific research; computer modelling is a great tool for very complex situation; forcings are a good way to translate a system into a manageable model; and scenarios are the standard way to evaluate risk.

But with regards to forcings-based climate science, all of those combine together compounding their weaknesses rather than their strenghts: estimations are often subjective, computer models are used to study forcings rather than climate, forcings are taken as “real” even if they cannot be measured, and scenarios are interrogated not for current sensitivities but as forecasts.

They have become the basis for a large Intergovernmental organization, tens of international meetings, the collective action of thousands of people, one Oscar and one Nobel Peace Prize, all in the name of what every knowledgeable person knows it is impossible to predict.

What Kind of Science is Climate Science?
Restricted to “the computation of scenarios (the ‘what-ifs’ projections)”, climate modelling is a science (the “science of climate forcings”, in fact). And RealClimate is as good as it gets. The same applies to much of contemporary AGW scientific journalism and publications, including Scientific American, American Scientist, New Scientist, Nature, Science. And the BBC.

Just try, next time you read their reports, to imagine a world view (a “climate narrative“) where climatology, the most uncertain of exact sciences, is applied science, a policy-making tool where only forcings count and, among the forcings, only those of anthropogenic origin are relevant (as there is little to make policies about, for non-anthropogenic forcings).

That is too narrow a view to be useful for risk management, let alone to bring science forward. It may lead to worries wasting time worrying about possible future stronger hurricanes, rather than about certain concentrating on preventi present-day catastrophical levee failure for present-day storms.

Time to Expand the “Climate Narrative”
Models have been the cradle of climatology, Tsiolkovsky would have said, but we cannot live in the cradle forever. It is time to expand the “climate narrative”, by getting climate science of the models-forcings-scenarios hole.

Because “real” climate is much, much more than RealClimate.

The Eskimo Word for Robin

Contrary to what reported by the BBC World Service and Sen John McCain by way of Andrew Revkin on The New York Times, there is a word for “robin” in several Eskimo (Inuit) languages.

For the record:

Alaskan Eskimo: Shab’wak
Mackenzie Eskimo: Kre-ku-ak’tu-yok
Nunamiut Eskimo: Koyapigaktoruk

You can read more about how another cute (and ill-founded) global warming scare story bites the dust on the World Climate Report.

XIX Century’s AGW Believers

Again from “Indian Summer: A Myth And A Fact, Too; What The Weather Men Have To Say About The Mild Period Of The Autumn“, by Charles Fitzhugh Talman, The New York Times Magazine, November 5, 1933

[...] Other writers of a few generations ago sought to explain the discordance between the Indian Summer tradition and the Autumn weather actually observed in their own times as one of the manifestations of a changing climate. Belief in the decadence of the “old-fashioned Winter” was then entertained even more widely than it is today, and it was natural to assume that there had been an equally conspicuous change in the character of the Autumns. Both of the supposed changes were usually attributed to the clearing and settlement of the country [...]

Pseudoscientific Elements in Climate Change Research

“Pseudoscientific elements in climate change research” by Arthur Rosch - published by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Feb 16, 2008

Abstract

Alarming statements from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning global warming are being challenged by a considerable number of scientists from different disciplines with a variety of arguments. The disputes comprise the collection and interpretation of data, the validation of hypotheses and climate models, the use of those models for scientific decision making, and the quality of the scientific discourse on these matters.

Many of the critical scientists are not directly involved in climate research. This brings into focus the weight to be given to views of experts relative to that of non-experts when the use of the scientific method is discussed in general, and a critique on the use of the peer review system in scientific journals that is supposed to safeguard the quality of science.

The concern of some climatologists and scientists from other disciplines is that the supposed dangerous warming seems to be exaggerated.

The possible causes of exaggerated conclusions are investigated. It is concluded that the general practice of parameterization of computer models in climate change research shows an element of pseudo science because it leads to self-confirmation of input hypotheses (dogmas) and insufficient challenge of theories.

The theory of the enhanced greenhouse effect of increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere – the very basis for alarming messages concerning future climate change – is itself largely a modelling concept. It is suggested, that for the sake of the progress of science, this theory requires reinvestigation.

Aristotle’s Climate Model

Greek philosopher Aristotle may have written the first treatise on Meteorology, around 350BC. He postulated the existence of five geographical zones: Frigid (one North, one South) by the poles, Torrid (North and South of the Equator) and Temperate (one North, one South) in-between the relative Frigid and Torrid zones.

Remarkably, that subdivision still holds. One of Aristotle’s ideas has not survived the test of time though: contrary to his thoughts, the Torrid Zone is not devoid of life and especially of human life due to excessive warmth.

And so we can say that Aristotle was totally wrong. Or was he?

Let’s perform some quick computations using modern readings and the world as known by ancient Greeks.

=================

Consider Alexandria and Aswan, in Egypt, the cities used by Eratosthenes of Cyrene to measure the accurately measure the size of the Earth (around a century after Aristotle’s time).

From the BBC Weather website, temperature statistics for both cities can be computed

Alexandria (31 degrees North):
Average monthly Min: 17.3C
Average monthly Max: 24.9C
Average yearly: 21.1C

Aswan (24 deg N):
Average monthly Min: 19.1C
Average monthly Max: 34.25C
Average yearly: 26.7C

Now, since we know there are 7 degrees of latitude between the two cities, we can compute at what rates temperatures increase going south from Alexandria to Aswan:

Temperature increase by degree of Latitude:
Average monthly Min: 0.26C/deg
Average monthly Max: 1.33C/deg
Average yearly: 0.798C/deg

What is the expected temperature at the Equator (Latitude: zero, thus 24 degrees south of Aswan), assuming those rates don’t vary (i.e. temperature trends can be modelled in linearly)?

Equator (zero deg):
Expected Average monthly Min: 25.5C
Expected Average monthly Max: 66.3C
Expected Average yearly: 45.85C

Look at those temperatures…if those were true, truly the Equator would be more or less uninhabitable.

Therefore: Aristotle’s idea of a “Torrid Zone” was not a philosophical fantasy, but a reasonably estimation compatible with what was known during ancient times.

=================

Of course we know the actual values are different. For example:

Kinshasa (4 deg N):
Average monthly Min: 20.7C
Average monthly Max: 30.4C
Average yearly: 25.5C

That makes Aristotle’s Climate Model wrong of an amount between 5C and 36C.

=================

So what are the lessons to take home?

(1) Climate models that appear perfectly reasonable today can be shown to be very, very wrong tomorrow

(2) Extending a trend means just making an estimation that can be way off reality, especially if the trend is presumed linear

(3) Temperature is NOT everything. Actual climate depends on a lot of other things.

At the Equator, like everywhere else on the planet.

Global Warming and the Apollo Moon Hoax

(these are my responses to a blog first published on LiveScience by Robert Roy Britt about a year ago, and that I have “rediscovered” today. RRB clumsily tried to put all global warming skeptics together with the Apollo-is-a-hoax people: sort of the lowest of the low in scientific circles. I have put out a series of challenges at the time, all of them still unmet.)

February 2nd, 2007 at 8:26 am

How about this for logical fallacy: the Apollo mission are historical events, global warming is a forecast (i.e.: it is about the future).

Shame to the scientific mind that is not skeptical of the future!

I am also aghast at your sudden penchant to follow “governments”. From a scientific point of view, who cares what governments have to say about astronomy or particle physics or biology or chemistry or or or?

One wonders what you had to say about Kansas politics deciding the scientific merits of Evolution and intelligent design

So unless you are going to rename this website “LivePolitics”, please do try again at making an intelligent point on climate change

February 6th, 2007 at 5:32 am

I am satistied to see that nobody has picked up the challenge of explaining why, if the evidence of climate change is so unquestionable, we had to get 113 governments approve the first IPCC report after 4 days behind closed doors.

Too bad we have to wait now several months to get to see such “evidence”. One of the few things we have for certain is that, whilst a large number of hurricane experts signed a statement saying there is no definite link between climate change and hurricanes, the IPCC did not think that worthwhile of consideration

Also, nobody has explicitly defended the absurd comparison of climate change skeptics to Moon hoaxers.

What would IPCC supporters say about the lack of difference between Intelligent Design (”there is a God as there are things we cannot explain in biology”) with Anthropogenic Climate Change (”there is human-induced climate change as we cannot explain our data with known mechanisms”)?

Here’s a more serious challenge: find a weather pattern that has changed IN_THE_RECENT_PAST anywhere in the world due to climate change. Rain bands, prevailing winds, weather fronts’ paths, anything would do really.

Now, that would finally give climate change some historical evidence…

Happy hunting!

March 5th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Just to report that when the evidence did come out (IPCC Fourth Assessment Report - Working Group 2 (AR4-WG2), Chapter 1), we’ve learnt that 96% of the reported changes concern just the continent of Europe.

Actually, there are twice as many European changes incompatible with warming, than worldwide changes compatible with it.

Europe, by the way, occupies just 2% of the Earth’s surface.

The “whole picture” on global warming is unbelievably far from complete. Why don’t the IPCC and climate and environmental scientists push for a truly planet-wide assessment?

ps no, the results of a model cannot be used as “evidence”.

The Meaning of “Unprecedented”

More evidence that things may change, but human nature doesn’t…at least on the centennial timescale:

Astronomer Giovanni Battista Donati writes in 1872:

It is true that everything undergoes transformation; but yet everything also repeats itself, and is reproduced in the eternal, universal, and cyclical course of nature. The rains, the heats, the frosts, the storms, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, comets, falling stars, auroras, sicknesses, etc., etc., have in our days been on such a scale as has never before been remembered. Man easily forgets the past, exaggerates the present, and fancifully speculates on the future. Hence the greater part of vain fears, and of hopes that are not less vain.

Leopardi (1832) on…Climate Change

Wholly convinced that civilizations make climate milder as they progress, Italian poet and essayist extraordinaire Giacomo Leopardi wrote about Anthropogenic Climate Change around 1832 (from “Thoughts”, “Pensieri”):

(39) [...] I think everybody will remember having heard from his parents several times, just as I remember hearing from mines, that years have become colder than they were, and winters longer; and that when they were younger, already around Easter they would leave the winter clothes for the summer ones; whilst such a change today, or so they say, is only bearable in May, and sometimes in June.

And not many years ago, some physicists seriously searched for a cause to this alleged cooling of the seasons. Some said it was the fault of the deforestation of the mountains, and some others said something else I don’t remember: all to explain a fact that is not happening: because actually, on the contrary, it has been noted, for example, in quotes from ancient writers, that Italy at the time of the Romans must have been cooler than today.

That is wholly believable as experience makes apparent that as the men’s civilization progresses, so the air, in the lands inhabited by them, gets progressively milder: and such an effect has been evident in America where, so to speak, according to memory, a fully-fledged civilization has replaced in part a barbarian state, and in part empty deserts. [...]

[One and a half centuries ago Magalotti wrote] in the Family Letters: “It is certain that seasons’ natural order is worsening. Here in Italy it is common saying and lamentation that the half-seasons have disappeared; and in this confusion, it’s without doubt that the cold is advancing. I have heard my father that in his youth, in Rome, on the morning of Easter Sunday, everybody would change into summer clothes. Nowadays whoever can afford not to sell his shirt, I can tell you he’s very careful not to abandon any winter piece of clothing”. This is what Magalotti wrote in 1683.

Italy would be cooler than Greenland, if between then and now, it would have cooled as much as they were saying at the time.

It goes almost without saying that the continuous cooling that is said to be occurring due to intrinsic reasons in the Earth mass, is of no interest whatsoever with the present thoughts, as it is so slow to be impossible to appreciate in tens of centuries, let alone a few years.

Hitler on…Climate Change

An interesting window on how people justified changes in climatic conditions when there was no much talk about CO2:

From page 111 (155 of 790 in the Hitler Table Talks file):

We owe the present fertility of our soil to the deforestation of Italy. If it weren’t for that, the warm winds of the South would not reach as far as here. Two thousand years ago Italy was still wooded, and one can imagine how our untilled countries must have looked.

Well, that is a description of Anthropogenic Climate Change: only, of a different sort.

Given Mussolini’s ideas on planting million of trees to cool down and strengthen up the Italians, one wonders if anybody was getting worried about an upcoming climate war, already at the time…

Monbiot, Stern and…Schadenfreude

It appears that George Monbiot himself is finally starting to grasp the issue of unintended consequences…

An Exchange of Souls - As government documents show, Sir Nicholas Stern accidentally launched a trade in human lives. by George Monbiot

Will this herald a new era in which things won’t be separated by using the idiotic climate-change-is-bad reference stick?

Me “Denier”? You “Goebbelite”!

From a comment by “Aaron” on Accuweather Global Warming’s blog:

[...] the AGW proponents have resorted to name calling and personal smears. They subscribe to the Bushism “if you’re not with us, you’re against us“. This is somewhat ironic as nearly all of them hate the president with every fiber of their beings.

They have also taken to using the term “denier” to describe anyone in disagreement with their beliefs in a not so subtle attempt to compare those who don’t agree with those who deny the fact that Nazi Germany was responsible for the extermination of six million Jews, ethnic minorities, intellectuals, and political adversaries.

It’s an ugly term, and personally I find it’s use to be quite offensive. In response, about the best the skeptics and AGW opponents can respond with is “Global Warming Alarmist” which isn’t a comparison to anything, but entirely accurate.

So, in the spirit of fairness, I’m proposing that a new term be adopted to describe AGW proponents: Goebbelites. I’ve seen the term goebbelsian used in another context, but I prefer Goebbelites. It will be used to describe anyone who can be described as adhering to the following quotation from Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.“

[...] Civil discourse is essential to the solution of any problem, and the use of derogatory and offensive terms to describe those who disagree with you isn’t civil.

Ocean Circulation May or May Not Weaken with Global Warming

Ocean circulation in a warming climate - J. R. Toggweiler & Joellen Russell
Nature 451, 286-288 (17 January 200 | doi:10.1038/nature06590; Published online 16 January 2008
Abstract: Climate models predict that the ocean’s circulation will weaken in response to global warming, but the warming at the end of the last ice age suggests a different outcome.

And so AGW studies start resembling dieting advice. Whatever you like to eat, just wait long enough and some paper will say it’s good for you.

ps a more serious note: how much more exciting would climatology be, were it not poisoned by all the save-the-planet agitation!!

Skeptics Society: How Broadcast Journalism Is Flawed

I have already exposed in the recent past the obvious bias in global warming reporting by publicly-funded BBC.

Around very similar notes, but with a much much wider outlook, the Skeptics Society has now published a very interesting essay by investigative and feature journalist Steve Salerno, titled

Journalist-Bites-Reality!
How broadcast journalism is flawed
in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil..

It exposes broadcast journalism as reporter-of-nothing, when not creating panic out of that same nothingness. And it is especially critical of “campaign journalism”.

A couple of quotes:

“In truth, today’s system of news delivery is an enterprise whose procedures, protocols, and underlying assumptions all but guarantee that it cannot succeed at its self described mission. Broadcast journalism in particular is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for illuminating life, let alone interpreting it, is almost nil. “

“You’re in Pulitzer territory for writing about something that — essentially — never happens.“

In upcoming blogs I will return to parts of this essay that may be used to explain pretty much all the Climate Change scares that have ever (not) happened.

For now I strongly recommend reading it in full.

The Killer Consensus Called “Public Health”

How many remember that in revolutionary France, the very unsafe Reign of Terror was unleashed by a self-styled “Committe of Public Safety“?

Times have changed, but “Public” concerns have only become slightly less obnoxious. And so, we have now several examples of “public health” decisions that end up making public health worse than necessary.

The rule looks like the following: when science becomes a matter of public health, politics steps in, kills off the scientific debate, stifles independent research and opts for the (politically) safest option, that is (a) likely to be an oversimplification (effects taken as causes), (b) unlikely to be the best choice by a long shot, and (c) likely to be centered around people having to change their behaviors and just lead a more saintly life (eat bland food against cholesterol, avoid stress against stomach ulcer, burn less coal against climate change, stop using DDT against malaria-carrying mosquitos, or whatever else).

The end result is millions of people feeling the guilt of having brought ill health to themselves (or left almost powerless against diseases, in the case of DDT and ulcers), despite there being no actual good reason whatsoever.

Their underlying problems may or many not be managed but are never solved, and their lives are un-necessarily ruined.

It’s all for the good of Public Health, you know!

When Public Health Trumps Science…

…solutions could be far from optimal, because “right” but for the wrong reasons.

This lesson that could be applied to AGW can be learnt from the story of the “war on cholesterol”, as described (and denounced) by Gary Taubes in the pages of The New York Times:

Because medical authorities have always approached the cholesterol hypothesis as a public health issue, rather than as a scientific one, we’re repeatedly reminded that it shouldn’t be questioned. Heart attacks kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, statin therapy can save lives, and skepticism might be perceived as a reason to delay action. So let’s just trust our assumptions, get people to change their diets and put high-risk people on statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Science, however, suggests a different approach: test the hypothesis rigorously and see if it survives. If the evidence continues to challenge the role of cholesterol, then rethink it, without preconceptions, and consider what these other pathways in cardiovascular disease are implying about cause and prevention. A different hypothesis may turn out to fit the facts better, and one day help prevent considerably more deaths.

Well, at least we can state now: AGW is not a matter of science, but of public health. And the whole fixation on declaring that “the science is settled” makes a little bit more sense…

Gould (and Lewontin) on Skepticism

Quotes from Richard Lewontin’s “The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould“, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008:

About the necessity of taking scientific findings with a pinch of salt:

What is important about [Gould's "Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology"] essay is not that it reveals what we already know to be true about the existence of racism and sexism, but that it shows how any claim that something is “scientifically demonstrated” should be treated with the same skepticism that we invoke when there is any reason to think that the investigator has something to gain, either ideologically or professionally, as we do when financial gain is involved.

About the instinctive abhorrence we should all have against “just-so stories” masquerading lack of predictive powers with retroactive explanations with no basis in reality:

The important point is that it is easy to make up adaptive stories out of one’s imagination for any feature of any organism, but that there are concrete realities of growth and physiology that need to be taken account of before lapsing into unchecked fictions.

AGW Countermeasures the Perfect Brew for “Unintended Consequences”

Is the fixation on regulating CO2 and in general all “greenhouse gases” a wise path to follow? Apparently not: as it falls exactly within what Alex Tabarrok via Freakonomics considers the domain of the law of unintended consequences:

“The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple, it operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences [...]

The fact that unintended consequences of government regulation are usually (but not always or necessarily) negative is not an accident [...]

Does the law of unintended consequences mean that the government should never try to regulate complex systems? No, of course not, but it does mean that regulators should be humble (no trying to remake man and society) and the hurdle for regulation should be high.“

Repeat with me: no trying to remake man and society

no trying to remake man and society
no trying to remake man and society
no trying to remake man and society
no trying to remake man and society
no trying to remake man and society
no trying to remake man and society
…