Archive
Here’s Why Mann Is So Bothered About His “Enemies”
“Much of the contents of [Mann’s] book is old news“, according to Peter Gleick. In fact, an entire day spent at a website owned by somebody who interviewed the Man, has turned out nothing more than statements accompanied by “that’s nothing new” and “for those buried in the intellectual wastes of the Murdoch media – it will be brand new territory“.
IOW the general consensus appears to be that there is nothing in Mann’s book that has not already been mentioned, described or referred to somewhere on the web (and, I suspect, in the Climategate emails). Somebody tried to make the point that, according to agiographers, Mann’s book contains enough “to spark a dozen Master’s theses“. But that is not the point.
The point is, what would one find in Mann’s book that is nowhere else? Who knows…an insight, a revealing detail, whatever, anything as long as it is new. There has to be a reason to buy and then read the book, right?
According to Mann’s own supporters, the answers to those questions are still “nothing” and “none”. Well, no wonder Mann is ever so bothered about his enemies…with friends like Mann’s, no one needs enemies!
Terrible Ski World Cup Images Confirm Dangers Of Global Warming
Is Thickness of Mind Mandatory To Become A Distinguished Climate Scientist?
My answer is of course “not”. However, there are some worrying signs. A guy in East Anglia is unable to use Excel, a bunch of guys from the US and elsewhere don’t know how to use Acrobat.
No wonder they haven’t got a clue where their missing heat has gone to. And no wonder they are foreign to the scientific method.
Lights Off Upstairs At Skeptical Science
That’s the only explanation for SkS to tweet about “Doonesbury cartoon on climate deniers http://bit.ly/xNSUsx“.
Here’s the strip:
Obviously, John Cook and friends are completely unaware of a few things about their own site:
- It’s built to reach out to climate newbies
- It’s where believers in (catastrophic) anthropogenic climate change go in desperate search of “evidence” to “support their position”
- It’s the one site sporting the belief “everyone is entitled” to read a single set of “facts” as determined by John Cook and friends
- It sports thousands of “facts”
It all looks like a heroic case of irony failure. Unless Doonesbury is so clever as to subtly indicate where the denial of science actually is…at Skeptical Science, of course.
John Cook: Skeptical Science Is Unsuccessful and Counterproductive
You know things are going down the drain when an English Major interviews a Cartoonist to talk about psychology and the identification of scientific “myths”.
The level of absolute idiocy is reached of course when the owner of a website purportedly debunking 173 climate change “myths” and well-known for its unethical treatment of non-compliant commenters writes:
Debunks that offered three arguments, for example, are more successful in reducing the influence of misinformation, compared to debunks that offered twelve arguments which ended up reinforcing the myth.
and
Avoid dramatic language and derogatory comments that alienate people. Stick to the facts.
Who knows, John Cook might one day read his “Debunking Handbook” and ditch Skeptical Science completely.
I Am Somebody!! Got A Mention In Climategate 2.0!! – 0701.txt
This has been quite a night and I’ll conclude it with two bangs. First of all, I’ve been blocked on Twitter by @MichaelEMann. T-shirts and celebratory jacket to follow.
I was wondering though, why would somebody like Mann go through the trouble of blocking an unimportant minion like me? Well, I wonder no more. I am somebody in climate circles. Finally!!
Why? Because my name appears in Climategate 2.0. From 0701.txt:
Cc: Maurizio Morabito
I shall soon start collecting cheques in exchange of autographs.
By the way…much of 0701.txt is Phil Jones arguing that, even if it is possible to relate temperature changes to changes in climate indices better than to climate models, still that means nothing:
“It is quite easy to take any temperature series and show that it can be related to circulation indices. Just because the circulation explains more variability than the climate models doesn’t mean that anthropogenic climate change isn’t happening. What is causing the circulation to change!”
Lucky us, the Good Prof showed his usual irony.
For the record, the paper mentioned in 0701.txt was recommended publication by the reviewers, and then binned at the last moment by the Nature Geoscience editors.
2639: Phil Jones’ Comedy Hour!
Some more vintage Jones nastiness, an admission that scientists aren’t distracted by FOI requests, and a comedy gem (my emphasis) :
date: Fri Sep 25 10:53:32 2009
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: [Fwd: CCNet: The Sun Could Be Heading Into A Period of
to: santer1, Tom Wigley
[…] I have stopped sending data out to anybody after the stupid comment on Climate Audit by Peter Webster. We’ve had over 60 FOI requests for data. They are varied – many can be answered by telling people to read the literature. We’re refusing those for the data. We’re going to send an email to all NMSs thru MOHC and then release those where countries are happy for us to do so.
It is just a pain having to respond to them – someone else at UEA does this though.
I did send one of the requests to Myles as it was from one of his fellow profs in Physics at Oxford! Myles knows him well and he has never talked about climate with Myles – or expressed any views. Myles can’t understand why he’s getting his climate education from Climate Audit and not from colleagues in his own dept!
This annoys me too. I’d read up and talk to people if I were to ever attempt moving to another field! It is just common sense. Neil Adger has taken over the running of First Year course here in ENV. He asked Alan Kendall for the ppt for 2 lectures he gives. He sent them and 40 slides are taken from Climate Audit! A student asked Neil why Alan was saying things opposite to what Neil and Tim Osborn were saying!!!Alan is retiring at the end of this year….thankfully.
Phil
Henry Hamilton-Smythe Sings To Cynthia Jane De Blaise-William – The Climate Version
It’s already two years since the extraordinary success (?) of The Climate Hacking Song and Skeptical Band Aid, so here’s a new contribution to the annals of songwriting, as a “mandated” comment in reply to the Bishop’s “Nursery Cryme“:
Play me old King Climate
That I may splice the lot
All my proxies now seem so far from temps
It hardly seems to matter now
And Sir Paul will tell you lies
Of a FOI request beyond the skies
But I am lost within this non-warming world
It hardly seems to matter now
Cool the old temps
Here they come again
Warm the new temps
Here they come again
Just a little bit
Just a little bit more high
Temps ought to go up in my life
Cool the old temps
Here they come again
Warm the new temps
Here they come again
Old King Climate was a merry warming climate
And a merry warming climate was he
So he called for his hockey stick
And he called for his bristlecones
And he called for his fudgers three
The clock, tick-tock
On the way to Durban
And I want and I feel
And I know and I touch the warmth
CO2’s the enemy, CO2’s stays up all the time
Brush back your chimneys
And let me get to make you poor
CO2’s the enemy, CO2’s won’t be emitted
Brush back your chimneys
And let me get to make you suffer
I’ve been waiting here for so long
And all this time that passed me by
It doesn’t seem to matter now
Deniers stand there with their fixed questions
Casting doubt on all I have to say
Why don’t you trust me, trust me?
Why don’t you trust me, trust me?
Socialism now,
Now, now, now
(here the original text by Genesis, “The Musical Box” in Nursery Crime, 1971)
If Freud Had Met Climate Catastrophists…
Some quick rewording on an old statement by Sigmund Freud, referred to by Gordon Marino on the NYT:
The climatology of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (cAGW) is not opposed to science, it behaves itself as if it were a science, and to a certain extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts company with science, in that it clings to the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the future of the Earth’s climate. Its methodological error lies in the fact that it over-estimates the epistemological value of its computer-based operations… But cAGW has no immediate influence on the great majority of mankind; it interests only a small number even of the thin upper stratum of intellectuals, while all the rest find it beyond them.
“As usual with your scientific men they’ve more brass than brains”
From Jules Verne’s “Around the Moon“, published in 1870. It’s Chapter 5 and the heroes have just discovered the scientists at the Cambridge Observatory (now Harvard College Observatory) had given them too low a value for their initial speed:
“Ha! ha! ha!” [Ardan] laughed bitterly. “Precious scientific men! Villainous old hombogues! The whole set not worth a straw! I hope to gracious, since we must fall, that we shall drop down plumb on Cambridge Observatory, and not leave a single one of the miserable old women, called professors, alive in the premises!”
Note: the translation is from 1876. I have found another, just as harsh…here‘s from the book available at Amazon.com:
“Hang our Cambridge friends and their calculations!” cried Ardan, with some asperity; “as usual with your scientific men they’ve more brass than brains! If we’re not now bed-fellows with the oysters in the Gulf of Mexico, no thanks to our kind Cambridge friends. But talking of oysters, let me remind you again that breakfast is ready.”
THAT “Skeptical Science” Joke
Skeptical Science is like a collection of Aristotelian commentaries at the times of Galileo: for all intents and purposes, a sad and stale joke.
Therefore recently, inspired by its longstanding and approved abbreviation (SS) plus puerile antics against Roger Pielke Sr, I couldn’t help venturing into parallels with Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi organization (the “Protection Squadron“, just like Cook et al feel it their duty to protect science from evil skeptics).
Of course, those were and still are jokes. As I said elsewhere, if your website is abbreviated CCCP don’t get upset if Stalin gets a few mentions…
—- As an aside, there is an unnerving possibility. The site name is “Skeptical Science” and is apparently meaningless as not directly related to its content (in Cook’s world, there is no such a thing as skeptical science – imagine a pro-Tibet site named “List of the Chinese Government’s Human Rights Defence Efforts“). It the name has been chosen for sarcastic effect, little or no sarcasm is actually present in the site. So it might as well be that SS was originally devised so that one could have later labelled all skeptics and skeptical scientists as “SS members”, with the underlying Nazi joke in full force… —-
Anyway, irony pervades our lives and I just experienced it in a sublime way. There I was tonight commenting at Bishop Hill’s blog post about Skeptical Science’s thwarted attempt at rewriting history:
I do not think Rattus or Mark S have dared to open the Wayback Machine link, showing how the SS team didn’t just “update” a blog post.
Having rewritten the “argument”, SS could have removed the old comments; or leave them with a note saying they had become out-of-date; or a different note specifying that the new version of the page addressed the issue highlighted by the commenter, eg AnthonySG1’s.
Instead, the SS team decided to rewrite history (the Ahnenerbe would have been proud). SS opted for tampering with the contribution of commenters such as AnthonySG1 and PaulM (members of us skeptical and therefore inferior race), transforming them into total trolls in a way that that shows not a jot of attempt of respecting fellow human beings.
Why would the SS do that? Total disregard for skeptical visitors of course means SS is completely focused on indoctrinating the believing masses, and especially the scientifically-illiterate journalists visiting the site. Therefore the SS “narrative” has to be linear, clean to the point of being spotless, with not a single error or omission, and not a meaningful point by any skeptic in a million years.
All together now…Wenn alle untreu werden, so bleiben wir doch treu…
Where is the German-language bit from? I thought, let’s conclude the comment along the Himmler joke, perhaps by quoting the SS (Nazi) anthem. And an amazing finding ensued:
Wenn alle untreu werden, so bleiben wir doch treu…
If all become untrue, true we remain..
Wow!
Couldn’t have been more appropriate. If all of catastrophic AGW will become untrue and rejected by most scientists, SS (Climate) will remain there unchanged, I am sure.
ps please refrain from mentioning Godwin’s Law. The Nazi reference is appropriate…
Supermodels Against Climate Change
Incomparable to previous anti-global-warming videos, of course
I say, hurray for 350.org and let’s stay unconvinced so they’ll get to work to produce more of these videos.
The Dismantling Of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wagner
This being a blog of “unusual takes”, there won’t be much discussion about the self-immolation of a journal’s Editor for a paper that couldn’t be retracted. I also presume the average reader won’t need links to WUWT or Real-Science or the Bish’s blog to know about the aforementioned self-immolation.
The irony of History being impossible to exhaust, however, some public details about Prof Dr Wolfgang Wagner (“Wolfgang” in the rest of this post) 
do leave mouths open in bewilderment and amusement. For example clean-shaven Wolfgang declared in July 2010 that he was trying to get “a Lead role in the European Space Agency’s Climate Change initiative” in order to “see how soil moisture changes over a long time“. The declaration came during a Living Planet Symposium organized by ESA in Bergen, Norway, five days with “over 1,000 scientists” discussing the “latest findings”. Focus of the Symposium? Environment and climate. And among the members of the Scientific Committee of the Symposium? Wolfgang!
So he mustn’t have been your average climate-change-debate-unaware Editor, our Wolfgang, really.
A few months earlier in 2009 the same Wolfgang was also happily celebrating his being the “Editor-in-Chief of the new Open Access Journal “Remote Sensing”“. Why? Oh, the irony!!!:
Remote Sensing journal is an Open Access journal and an online journal, with the Editorial Office located in Basel. It maintains a rapid editorial procedure and a rigorous peer-review system. Because it is an open access journal, papers published will receive very high publicity. The Remote Sensing Editorial team consists of trained scientists (Publisher: Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, PhD in Organic Chemistry from the ETH Zürich, and the Production Editor: Dr. Derek McPhee, California, USA)
Yes, that’s what he wrote: PAPERS PUBLISHED [ON “REMOTE SENSING”] WILL RECEIVE H-I-G-H P-U-B-L-I-C-I-T-Y. Well it sounds silly to protest against that same publicity in your resignation letter, doesn’t it Wolfgang?
Of course it doesn’t stop there. On 3 April 2011, Wolfgang was busy welcoming people to a workshop “WACMOS feedback to science community and water cycle roadmap in a changing climate“. Theme number 2 of 4? “Clouds“. Yeah, right…meanwhile in Feb 2010, the very Institute directed by Wolfgang since 2006 announced the establishment of the “International Soil Moisture Network“. With a key weak point, unfortunately:
The success of the International Soil Moisture Network will be based on the voluntary contributions of scientists and networks from around the world. With this announcement we call upon the scientific community to support this worthwhile initiative. We hope that many more networks are willing to contribute.
One has to wonder if there was any hint of reduction in voluntary contributions, or just a sudden lack of willingness to contribute, unless Wolfgang killed his Remote Sensing position? After all, the news appeared alongside the announcement of a new Chairman of the GEWEX Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment Scientific Steering Group (some Kevin E. Trenberth).
Some “Kevin”, indeed..no wonder there’s been apologies. Alas, they weren’t enough to stop Remote Sensing from getting trivialized by the same Kevin, as noted by Pielke Sr.
Sic transit gloria Wolfgangi. And good luck with whomever will ever publish a singe paper with Wolfgang as editor.
ps yes, it is much easier to respect somebody when they don’t throw to the wolves a good chunk of their work, in this case, a whole new Journal.
350.org: Explained
350.org is thus called because 350 is the cumulative IQ of the members of that organization.
A motion has been tabled last year to change the name to 352.org as lifelong member Mrs Rogers of Bluff, AZ remembered to lock the front door of the house after letting the cat in, thereby single-handedly increasing the IQ of McKibben’s group by two points.
However, the motion’s text has since been misplaced, and unless they get to 355 at least, nobody will have a clue where to find it.
Let’s forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
Proof That Venice Is Sinking And Not Sinking Due To Climate Change
- Venice is sinking (the city in Italy, that is)
- It is apparently sinking due to human activities (buildings, gas and water extraction, etc)
- However, were Venice not be where it is, it would not be sinking
- Venice is where it is because it was founded by escaping populations around 421AD
- The populations were escaping from invading Germans and Huns
- Germans and Huns were invading due to climate change
QED: Venice is sinking…due to climate change.
- Venice is not sinking
- It is not sinking because storm surges are expected to happen less often
- Such expectations are due to climate change.
QED: Venice is not sinking…due to climate change.
Next: why it is legal for the UK Government to collect VAT on fuel duties; how President Obama has started decreasing the Afghanistan war effort by sending in more troops; why banks too big to fail must be encouraged to get even bigger.
See: the world starts making some sense!
Will CO2 Cause Bieber Fever In Fish Worldwide?
No, I am not talking about this Fish. Or that Phish. I am talking about fish of the swimming variety, recently in the news as under multiple lines of attack by (you guessed it right) increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
Poor little ocean inhabitants will run out of breath, or go deaf. Or maybe not, as both papers compensate with novelty what they lack in robustness.
In the meanwhile, though, there are some indications that, at least for now, great white sharks are into AC/DC. That could be useful news (if under threat of attack, just convince a fellow diver to burst into a watery version of “Back in Black” and you’ll be fine. You, that is, not the fellow diver).
Why stop there, though? We can combine all these pieces of evidence to come up with a realistic scenario (as realistic as anything ever written by the likes of David Suzuki or Paul R. Ehrlich, that is): with human-caused CO2 emissions apparently unstoppable, fish the world over will experience irregular heartbeats, and hearing difficulties causing a decline in musical taste.
That is, they will all suffer “Bieber Fever“.
Please help prevent such a tragedy, by reducing your CO2 emissions.
Andy @Revkin Points To The End of The Line For The IPCC And Its Lot
Thanks Andy!
Beginning in the 1980s, [University of Pennsylvania Professor Philip] Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps. […] The least accurate forecasters, [Tetlock] found, were hedgehogs: “thinkers who ‘know one big thing,’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains” and “display bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it,’ ” he wrote. Better experts “look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things,” “are skeptical of grand schemes” and are “diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”
So there we have it…experts of the “big thing” called “climate change”, aggressive (to the point of hiding declines, preventing publication of competing ideas, inserting unsubstantiated critiques in the IPCC report, etc etc) and definitely “impatient” with us little humans wondering aloud about their certitudes (any post at RC, Connolley, Deltoid, Romm, etc etc keeps confirming this point).
Note how none of the above can be defined as “gross negligence” or “conspiracy”, and yet despite all the whitewashing by the Climategate inquiries, there is a scientific consensus, and the best of our scientific knowledge demonstrates, that all that bunch, and pretty much all the bigwigs around the IPCC, they ARE “least accurate forecasters”. QED.
For more discussion about “wrongology”: here and here. Read also here a critique-essay by Tetlock himself, listing a set of criteria suggested by David Freedman, author of Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them as signs of claims we should be “especially wary of”
- dramatic (“claiming to have invented the psychological equivalent of the telescope qualifies”)
- a tad too clear-cut (“devoid of qualifications about when propositions do and do not hold”)
- doubt free (“portraying findings as beyond reasonable doubt and one’s measure as 100 percent pure”)
- universal (“implying that one is tapping into powerful unconscious forces that, hitherto unbeknownst to us, drive all human behavior”)
- palatable (“likely to appeal to one’s favorite ideological constituencies”)
- receiving “a lot of positive” media attention (“widely covered in the mass media and millions have visited the website”)
- actionable implications (“claims about what employers now need to do to guarantee true equality of opportunity in workplaces”)
Let me now make a statement that is dramatic, very clear-cut, doubt-free, universal, palatable (to most of my readers), yet likely media-ignored and hardly actionable: the “scientific consensus” on climate-change (rather, the unscientific stuff that constitutes the IPCC–led propaganda bandied about as “scientific consensus”), scores 7 out of 7 on the Freedman scale and therefore should lie at the bottom of anybody’s trust level:
- dramatic (having reached the computational power needed to project future climate just as CO2 emissions got to a previously-unknown “dangerous” level)
- a tad too clear-cut (with climate change almost completely due to a “thermostat” called CO2)
- doubt free (the IAC spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about the absurd IPCC policy of underplaying uncertainties)
- universal (everybody will feel the (bad) consequences of climate change, and everybody is guilty of it)
- palatable (as it happens, the usual evils of capitalism and freedoms are the underling cause of climate change)
- receiving “a lot of positive” media attention (shall I really comment this?)
- actionable implications (every ha’penny worth of a politician understands how many things can be pinned upon the bandwagon called “climate change”)
And I find one sentence by Tetlock as especially relevant to the climate debate:
Whatever may be the merits of the underlying science in the peer-reviewed literature, in the public forum, the ratio of pseudoexpertise to genuine expertise is distressingly high.
ps Yes, I might be wrong. On the other hand, I am not asking for billions of dollars for dubious research, have never attempted to restrict anybody’s liberty, don’t use the ‘net to show off my superiority complex, do let almost every comment free on this website, etc etc)
Perfectly Accurate UK Spring 2011 Weather Forecast
Maurizio’s Office Initial Assessment of Risk for Spring 2011
This covers the months of March, April and May 2011, this will not be updated monthly through the spring given the nature of the computations.
Temperature
3 in 10 chance of a mild start
4 in 10 chance of an average start
3 in 10 chance of a cold start
Precipitation
3 in 10 chance of a wet start
4 in 10 chance of an average start
3 in 10 chance of a dry start
Build-Your-Own “Anthropogenic Global Something”
Commenter Alvaro of “After Mein Kampf, Mein Klima” Splattergate-era fame has just published another gem in Italian non-warmist site “Climate Monitor“. Its edited and expanded translation is published below as a way to help budding entrepreneurs to identify a niche “Anthropogenic Global Something” where to build their fortunes from.
(Please DO send 10% of the profits).
========
Having learned the lessons of AGW, I wonder if we could emulate the process, starting from scratch though with the aim of finding (and funding) my own place in the sun.
- First of all, we need a juicy topic, similar to Electrosmog, but not as easy to debunk
- It also needs to be catchy whilst sounding good in news bites
How about something “magnetic …” – it sounds right and is already well received by the general public, as shown by the never-ending popularity of “magnetic bracelets“.
So, what interesting and “magnetic”? Two minutes spent on Google lead to this (by NASA, no less!), that can be summarily distorted as:
Red alert! The Earth’s magnetic field is no longer constant, indeed it seems that is weakening – and very few percent per century, much more than the changes induced by AGW! And if that field goes, the magnetosphere goes, ending life on earth …
CreatedIdentified the problem, there’s still two important details to care about:
- We must figure out some “anthropogenic” cause, possibly associated to some kind of “guilt”. Otherwise, there goes the business opportunity
- Some evil giant corporation has to be the at the root of the problem. This will increase the guilt factor and greatly help in the recruitment of unpaid volunteers
Consider now an old CRT computer monitor. It needs degaussing when it starts being troubled by nearby loudspeakers. That involves the use of of a bit of AC – just as in deleting old music and video tapes. Best of all, there is lots of man-made ACs around. Can you feel the Eureka moment too?
Over the last hundred years, ever since Westinghouse (the evil giant corporation) opted for AC (Tesla’s idea) instead of DC (Edison’s), we have built and then – alas – even synced a giant electricity grid all around our planet, based on AC at 50-60 Hz: a formidable “degaussing grid” of planetary scale!
Of course, this is not enough. Where’s the catastrophe?
- A sobering message is in order, followed by suitably-placed apocalyptic predictions for decades in the future, in case of inaction
Here comes the message!
We are now painfully aware that we have been unwittingly tampering with Earth’s already-weak magnetic field, risking the wearing out of the magnetosphere. Compared to that, the ozone hole looks like child’s play. So if we do not act now, jetzt, ora, pronto, to stop Anthropogenic Global Degaussing (AGD) we will all fry in a radioactive holocaust, like microwaved mice, in a veritable ELE – Extinction Level Event, We’ll be following in the footsteps of the dinosaurs, in about thirty years’ time, according to accurate peer-reviewed computations.
For the AGD PERP (Precautionary Emergency Response Program) the plan is the following:
- Take three TRIPs – Temporarily Redundant Important Politicians – and put them in charge of a sky-blue-badged global initiative to coordinate (a) an immediate and massive effort to communicate the seriousness of the AGD emergency, (b) the subsequent coercive-yet-negotiable mitigation initiatives of the impact of the world AC grid and (c) the final big effort to restore Earth’s magnetic field
- Provide the motives, I mean, encourage large research institutions to align themselves with mainstream AGD in order to harmonize the overall funding for a massive research effort that will confirm the overriding urgency of the TRIPs’ plans
- Prepare draft Wikipedia article to lay the foundation for a Nobel Prize
And here are a few ideas on what to tell people:
Global Degaussing is the most significant issue of our times, and too important for us to delay it any further. People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global degaussing becomes something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.
All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous degaussing patterns and devastating electric storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not magnetic change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.
The warnings about global degaussing have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global magnetic crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences. Etc etc
Only remaining issue is how to deal with AGD deniers, those unable to listen to reason, and able instead mostly to sacrifice truth on the altar of profits yada yada yada…
Suggestions?
Addendum to Skeptic’s Dictionary: Hidden Persuaders Of Anthropogenic Global Warming
(original here of course, with plenty of links to explore each dictionary entry below in depth)
(the text outside < blockquote > is (mostly) mine)
hidden persuaders: A term used by Geoffrey Dean and Ivan Kelly (2003) to describe affective, perceptual, and cognitive biases or illusions that lead to erroneous beliefs.
A NOTE TO THOSE OF AGW-BELIEVING ATTITUDE:
The hidden persuaders sometimes seem to affect people in proportion to their intelligence: the smarter one is the easier it is to develop false beliefs. There are several reasons for this: (1) the hidden persuaders affect everybody to some degree; (2) the smarter one is the easier it is to see patterns, fit data to a hypothesis, and draw inferences; (3) the smarter one is the easier it is to rationalize, i.e., explain away strong evidence contrary to one’s belief; and (4) smart people are often arrogant and incorrectly think that they cannot be deceived by others, the data, or themselves
And now for some examples:
ad hoc hypothesis: An ad hoc hypothesis is one created to explain away facts that seem to refute one’s belief or theory. Ad hoc hypotheses are common in paranormal research and in the work of pseudoscientists. It is always more reasonable to apply Occam’s razor than to offer speculative ad hoc hypotheses.
AGW example: The discovery that aerosols have cooled the Earth just when the Earth was cooling, miraculously declining their action exactly when the Earth was warming due to CO2 emissions.
AGW example: The discovery that heavy (winter) snow and cold temperatures are exactly caused by temperature increases
affect bias: Our judgment regarding the costs and benefits of items is often significantly influenced by a feeling evoked by pictures or words not directly relevant to the actual cost or benefit
AGW example: Justifying reduction in CO2 emissions by way of how “green” things could become, and civilization “sustainable” in “harmony” with nature.
apophenia: Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin”. In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist.
AGW example: The propensity to see Anthropogenic Global Warming at work in each and every (bad) thing that happens anywhere on Earth, including in earthquakes
autokinetic effect: The autokinetic effect refers to perceiving a stationary point of light in the dark as moving
AGW example: The incredible inability of past and present temperature measures to record the actual values, leading to contemporary researchers having to continuously adjust the figures (lowering the old ones, increasing the new ones)
availability error: availability heuristic, determining probability “by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind” (Groopman 2007: p. 64) or “by the first thing that comes to mind” (Sutherland 1992: p. 11)
AGW example: The IPCC declaring in 2007 that tens of thousands of indicators were all compatible to global warming, even if the overwhelming majority of those indicators was about Europe alone
backfire effect: The “backfire effect” is a term coined by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler to describe how some individuals when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs come to hold their original position even more strongly
AGW example: AGWers patting each other in the back about climate science remaining totally unscathed by the Climategate e-mails
change blindness: Change blindness is the failure to detect non-trivial changes in the visual field.
AGW example: The obsession with computing linear trends, making it impossible even to fathom the step-function behaviors (=”tipping points”) the very same AGWers like to talk about
Clever Hans phenomenon: A form of involuntary and unconscious cuing
AGW example: Journalist AGWers crowding RealClimate to know how long to count for
Clever Linda phenomenon: A form of involuntary and unconscious cuing
AGW example: Climate scientists writing to journalists making sure they conform, because fortunately, the prestige press doesn’t fall for this sort of stuff, right?
clustering illusion: The clustering illusion is the intuition that random events which occur in clusters are not really random events
AGW example: All the global village idiots that will tell the world how climate change is upon us, as shown by the year’s news, rather than by relying on properly conducted scientific research capable to isolate climate-change effects from others such as poverty
cognitive dissonance: Cognitive dissonance is a theory of human motivation that asserts that it is psychologically uncomfortable to hold contradictory cognitions. The theory is that dissonance, being unpleasant, motivates a person to change his cognition, attitude, or behavior. What distinguishes the chiropractor’s rationalization from the cult member’s is that the latter is based on pure faith and devotion to a guru or prophet, whereas the former is based on evidence from experience. Neither belief can be falsified because the believers won’t let them be falsified: Nothing can count against them. Those who base their beliefs on experience and what they take to be empirical or scientific evidence (e.g., astrologers, palm readers, mediums, psychics, the intelligent design folks, and the chiropractor) make a pretense of being willing to test their beliefs. They only bother to submit to a test of their ideas to get proof for others. That is why we refer to their beliefs as pseudosciences. We do not refer to the beliefs of cult members as pseudoscientific, but as faith-based irrationality. The chiropractors’ misguided belief is probably not due to worrying about their self-image or removing discomfort. It is more likely due to their being arrogant and incompetent thinkers, convinced by their experience that they “know” what’s going on, and probably assisted by communal reinforcement from the like-minded arrogant and incompetent thinkers they work with and are trained by. They’ve seen how AK works with their own eyes. They’ve demonstrated it many times. If anything makes them uncomfortable it might be that they can’t understand how the world can be so full of idiots who can’t see with their own eyes what they see!
AGW example: Thousands and thousands of words written by journalists, scientists and activists about anthropogenic global warming, and not one of them indicating what if anything could falsify…anthropogenic global warming
law of truly large numbers (coincidence): The law of truly large numbers says that with a large enough sample many odd coincidences are likely to happen.
AGW example: Romm scouring the planet’s press agencies to list all sorts of disasters that might somehow be connected to anthropogenic global warming
cold reading: Cold reading refers to a set of techniques used by professional manipulators to get a subject to behave in a certain way or to think that the cold reader has some sort of special ability that allows him to “mysteriously” know things about the subject
AGW example: The popularity of climate models’ ensembles among politicians looking for something to confirm they need to be voted for, and in the process getting convinced science can really tell us something about the climate of 2100
communal reinforcement: Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community
AGW example: The tendency of warmist websites to censor dissenting comments away, leaving readers (believers) with the impression there is really a huge huge number of them, and just a handful of nasty skeptics
confabulation: A confabulation is a fantasy that has unconsciously emerged as a factual account in memory. A confabulation may be based partly on fact or be a complete construction of the imagination
AGW example: The decade-long fight to remove from collective memory the substantial agreement among scientists about global cooling (potentially, an ice age), a consensus that lasted at least between 1972 and 1975.
confirmation bias: Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one’s beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one’s beliefs
AGW example: Briffa’s uncanny ability to avoid for years any mention of the misbehaving trees he had himself published a paper about, in the Yamal saga
file-drawer effect: The file-drawer effect refers to the practice of researchers filing away studies with negative outcomes. Negative outcome refers to finding nothing of statistical significance or causal consequence, not to finding that something affects us negatively. Negative outcome may also refer to finding something that is contrary to one’s earlier research or to what one expects
AGW example: Extreme lack of interest among prominent climate scientists to publish anything (not even an Op-Ed) about the “travesty” that was (is) their inability to explain why temperatures (actually, the averages of the global temperature anomaly) have not risen since 1998
Forer effect: The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people
AGW example: The worldwide phenomenon that sees most Ministers and Prime Ministers announce that their own particular country is being affected by climate change at twice or more the planetary average
gambler’s fallacy: The gambler’s fallacy is the mistaken notion that the odds for something with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending upon recent occurrences
AGW example: Tamino’s (?) absurdist blog about the probability of having consecutive hot periods being astronomically low
hindsight bias: Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one’s memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something said in the past) according to currently known facts and one’s current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was.
AGW example: The Met Office discovering in January how it had forecasted a cold December in October, as shown by a statement nobody did read, and nobody has read
AGW example: The silly notion that Anthropogenic Global Warming has been consensually recognized in the 1970’s or even earlier
inattentional blindness: Inattentional blindness is an inability to perceive something that is within one’s direct perceptual field because one is attending to something else
AGW example: Lancet publishing an incredibly misleading Climate Change report with little mention of the huge difference in the number and type of deaths of people during cold and warm snaps
AGW example: The complete lack of interest about linking the generalized Northern Hemispheric cold and the silent Sun
magical thinking: According to anthropologist Dr. Phillips Stevens Jr., magical thinking involves several elements, including a belief in the interconnectedness of all things through forces and powers that transcend both physical and spiritual connections. Magical thinking invests special powers and forces in many things that are seen as symbol. One of the driving principles of magical thinking is the notion that things that resemble each other are causally connected in some way that defies scientific testing (the law of similarity)
AGW example: CO2’s mysterious ability to free the Arctic from the ice, and to increase the amount of ice in Antarctica, plus its long hand into anything and everything that ever happens and has bad consequences.
motivated reasoning: Motivated reasoning is confirmation bias taken to the next level. Motivated reasoning leads people to confirm what they already believe, while ignoring contrary data. But it also drives people to develop elaborate rationalizations to justify holding beliefs that logic and evidence have shown to be wrong
AGW example: The Anthropogenic Global Warming’s crowd supernatural swiftness in explaining every (bad) phenomenon as a consequence of human CO2 emissions
nonfalsifiability: Scientific theories not only explain empirical phenomena, they also predict empirical phenomena. One way we know a scientific theory is no good is that its predictions keep failing. Predictions can’t fail unless a theory is falsifiable. Some pseudoscientific [theories] can’t be falsified because they are consistent with every imaginable empirical state of affairs. Karl Popper noted that psychoanalytic theory, including Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, is pseudoscientific because they seem to explain everything and do not leave open the possibility of error. Even contradictory behaviors are appealed to in support of the theory.
AGW example: Thousands and thousands of words written by journalists, scientists and activists about anthropogenic global warming, and not one of them indicating what if anything could falsify…anthropogenic global warming
positive-outcome (publication) bias: Positive-outcome (or “publication”) bias is the tendency to publish research with a positive outcome more frequently than research with a negative outcome. Negative outcome refers to finding nothing of statistical significance or causal consequence, not to finding that something affects us negatively. Positive-outcome bias also refers to the tendency of the media to publish medical study stories with positive outcomes much more frequently than such stories with negative outcomes
AGW example: The amount of time some highly-functioning minds have spent to justify scientifically the reasons for the “hide the decline”
post hoc fallacy: The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event. Post hoc reasoning is the basis for many superstitions and erroneous beliefs
AGW example: The Anthropogenic Global Warming’s crowd supernatural completeness in explaining every (bad) phenomenon as a consequence of human CO2 emissions
pragmatic fallacy: The pragmatic fallacy is committed when one argues that something is true because it works and where ‘works’ means something like “I’m satisfied with it,” “I feel better,” “I find it beneficial, meaningful, or significant,” or “It explains things for me
AGW example: The inane request to publish via peer-review a scientific alternative to mainstream Anthropogenic Global Warming theory because “it works”. One doesn’t need to be a leader or a tailor to see if the Emperor is naked.
regressive fallacy: The regressive fallacy is the failure to take into account natural and inevitable fluctuations of things when ascribing causes to them
AGW example: The general agreement that natural variability doesn’t count much for Anthropogenic Global Warming, even if the very same people go on to claim temperatures have not increased in a decade because of natural variability
representativeness error: In judging items, we compare them to a prototype or representative idea and tend to see them as typical or atypical according to how they match up with our model. The problem with the representativeness heuristic is that what appears typical sometimes blinds you to possibilities that contradict the prototype
AGW example: The sterile obsession with studying climate science by climate models alone
retrospective falsification: D. H. Rawcliffe coined this term to refer to the process of telling a story that is factual to some extent, but which gets distorted and falsified over time by retelling it with embellishments
AGW example: The abuse of Arrhenius’ “greenhouse gas” works, with the first one continuously mentioned exactly as the second one gets forgotten, being a more sober rethinking of the original ideas
selection bias: Selection bias comes in two flavors: (1) self-selection of individuals to participate in an activity or survey, or as a subject in an experimental study; (2) selection of samples or studies by researchers to support a particular hypothesis
AGW example: Mann’s obviously irrelevant pick-and-choose of which series to use for the Hockey Stick
selective thinking: Selective thinking is the process whereby one selects out favorable evidence for remembrance and focus, while ignoring unfavorable evidence for a belief
AGW example: Any post at Skeptical Science, with its incredible list of peer-reviewed all-mutually-consistent scientific papers
self-deception: Self-deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs to ourselves
AGW example: Connolley et al publishing an article about a “Myth” of global cooling consensus in the 1970’s despite providing themselves ample evidence to support the same “myth”
shoehorning: Shoehorning is the process of force-fitting some current affair into one’s personal, political, or religious agenda
AGW example: Also known as “decorating the Christmas tree”…at every climate negotiation for the UN, thousands of people try to add their pet project to the cause, including “forest protection, poverty alleviation, water equity, women’s and indigenous rights”
subjective validation: Subjective validation is the process of validating words, initials, statements, or signs as accurate because one is able to find them personally meaningful and significant
AGW example: Anthropogenic Global Warming causing a (temporary?) shutdown in critical thinking among those worried about getting the world “greener”
sunk-cost fallacy: When one makes a hopeless investment, one sometimes reasons: I can’t stop now, otherwise what I’ve invested so far will be lost. This is true, of course, but irrelevant to whether one should continue to invest in the project. Everything one has invested is lost regardless. If there is no hope for success in the future from the investment, then the fact that one has already lost a bundle should lead one to the conclusion that the rational thing to do is to withdraw from the project
AGW example: The UN’s COP bandwagon, moving a lot of people a lot of times in a lot of different locations (but never in Moldova or North Korea, for some reason) even if everybody agrees it will never mean anything substantial
anecdotal (testimonial) evidence: Testimonials and vivid anecdotes are one of the most popular and convincing forms of evidence presented for beliefs in the supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific
AGW example: Monbiot’s famous February floral musings brought to the world as evidence of anthropogenic global warmings, back when Februarys were still warm
Texas-sharpshooter fallacy: The Texas-sharpshooter fallacy is the name epidemiologists give to the clustering illusion. Politicians, lawyers and some scientists tend to isolate clusters of diseases from their context, thereby giving the illusion of a causal connection between some environmental factor and the disease. What appears to be statistically significant (i.e., not due to chance) is actually expected by the laws of chance
AGW example:Pretty much any Al Gore speech
wishful thinking: Wishful thinking is interpreting facts, reports, events, perceptions, etc., according to what one would like to be the case rather than according to the actual evidence
AGW example:Pretty much any warmist blog or statement
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Obviously there’s much better examples out there, so do send them across if you see any…
The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE 