Is Judith Curry Peddling Disinformation?
In recent days, Richard Tol, an economist and “climate polymath,” has been battling Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry. It started when Curry spotlighted some questionable research (two journal papers) on her blog, which contained statistical analysis that Tol initially called “sloppy.” He said the work was “published in minor journals, so that these papers had best been ignored.”
After Curry and some of her readers objected, Tol became more direct:
Judith: Statistics is a branch of mathematics. Right and wrong are strictly defined. These papers are wrong in the mathematical sense of the word. I think you have done a disservice by lending your credibility to these papers.
He also tweeted:
Skepticism is healthy, disinformation is not
I started following the exchanges with interest, tweeting some of the highlights. Curry challenged the “disinformation” charges here, and the back-and-forth between her and Tol (which got more specific) continued in that thread.
For example, Tol argued:
1. You do not post everything here. You make a selection. You therefore cannot claim that you are innocent. You made a conscious choice to publish that guest post.
2. If you know anything about statistics, you would have recognized that these papers are methodologically flawed. Using “detrended” fluctuation analysis to study “trends” was a dead giveaway that something is not quite right with these papers.
3. If you don’t know anything about statistics, you should not have published the guest post. The flip side of your academic freedom is your academic duty to keep your mouth shut about things you don’t know about.
4. This blog is widely read. You plucked two papers out of obscurity and put them in the limelight.
5. You have build up a reputation of someone who is willing to speak and listen to anyone. That is great. Climate research is complicated and uncertain and climate policy is polarized so we need people in the middle who talk to both sides.
6. At the same time, you should not be in the middle for the sake of being in the middle.
7. There is a substantial body of climate research that is credible “” even if it reaches opposite conclusions “” but there are also papers (left, right, and center) that are just flawed.
8. If flawed papers reach a certain prominence, they should be debunked. Prominent but flawed research does damage as it misinforms people about climate change. Publicly criticizing such research hardens the existing polarization.
9. If flawed papers linger in obscurity, they should be ignored. The papers are wrong but do no damage. Lifting a flawed paper out of obscurity only to debunk it, is no good to anybody.
10. So, by giving air time to two papers that you should have known are flawed, you deliberately spread inaccurate information.
Curry responded:
Richard, your argument is deeply flawed, but I will not accuse you of spreading “disinformation’ about me amongst the twitterati.
You give yourself away with this statement “Prominent but flawed research does damage as it misinforms people about climate change. Publicly criticizing such research hardens the existing polarization.” Yours isn’t a statement about science, but about playing politics with science, and reinforces the gatekeeping mentality in climate science that was embarassingly revealed by the CRU emails. Of course there are flawed papers that get published. Few papers are published that don’t have any flaws and stand the test of time as an authoritative and unimproved upon statement about scientific truth. I am seeing palpable frustration about not being able to control what gets published and what gets discussed. Attacking me is an interesting (but probably futile) vent for your frustration.
Most people don’t come to climate etc. to reinforce their prejudices (there are far too many echo chambers where this is much more satisfyingly accomplished). The come here to learn something by considering the various arguments.
The most interesting thing about this exchange is that I have seen little actual debunking of the Ludecke papers, mostly complaints about their EIKE affiliation. Go check what you have done these last two days against the list of 25 in the main post. You effectively hijacked the thread with the disinformation accusation, which resulted in little serious analysis of the papers.
As for me, I explore all the time things I know little about, that is why I like being a scientist.
He shot back:
Gatekeeping is a bad thing when it is used to block papers for ideological reasons. Gatekeeping is a good thing when it comes to separating methodologically flawed from methodologically sound papers.
I did not remark on the conclusions of the papers. I did not remark on the motivations of the authors.
I did remark that the papers incorrectly apply inappropriate statistical methods to uninformative data.
It is unfortunate that these papers were published. It is unfortunate that you chose to draw attention to them.
Open-minded curiosity should be tempered by critical judgement, and yours lapsed in this case.
Of course I was “playing politics with science”. Don’t pretend you are not.
Next, Curry invited Tol to submit a detailed critique of the two papers that she had highlighted. He obliged. On that thread, Steven Mosher congratulates Tol for an
…incisive demolition of these two papers. I note the absence of any credible defense of the papers and a high incidence of topic changing.. look at the sunshine.. for example.
A bad paper neatly dispatched as you did is a good teaching tool.
However, some wont learn and they use the bad paper as an occasion to thread jack
There’s just one problem with that logic. What if Tol (or someone else with his chops and reputation) had not taken the time to comment at Curry’s blog, much less followed up with a thorough critique? It’s not reasonable to expect every bad paper spotlighted on a popular climate blog to be debunked. (For instance, hardly anyone of repute bothers doing this at WUWT.) So the larger question is whether Curry, who has standing in the climate science community, should be more discriminating in the research she chooses to highlight at her blog?
Finally, there is amongst all this something Curry stated which strikes me as curious:
Most people don’t come to climate etc. to reinforce their prejudices (there are far too many echo chambers where this is much more satisfyingly accomplished). They come here to learn something by considering the various arguments.
I beg to differ. Judging by the voluminous comments, it appears that most Climate Etc. readers are very much having their prejudices reinforced.
Thank you for highlighting this Keith, and thank you for your final paragraph, which matched exactly the exclamation mark that lit up in my head as I read this.
I wonder had someone other that Richard Tol made the same critique if it would have received any attention at all. What flavour of ‘chops and reputation’ would be required for this to unfold in the way it is?
Despite his protestations about methodology, Tol is indeed playing politics, he writes:
“If flawed papers reach a certain prominence, they should be debunked. Prominent but flawed research does damage as it misinforms people about climate change. Publicly criticizing such research hardens the existing polarization.”
His concern is not simply scientific but political, having to do with public opinion and polarization. I’d welcome Tol documenting the “damage” that he sees being done to the public by the discussion of scientific papers that are in some way flawed. An alternative view is that such discussions among experts when held in public help people to understand the process of science and its complexity, and rather than doing “damage” actually helps to build trust and confidence.
Tol’s recommendation that experts should purposely and collectively ignore papers that they don’t like is the exact recipe that led to the cliquish and insular behavior reflected in the UEA emails.
Tol’s response to Curry critiquing the paper justifies her post — that is how we learn. If Tol doesn’t like the fact that experts cannot control the airwaves then he is always going to find democratic systems uncomfortable.
Roger, is Curry an ‘expert’ or an ‘airwave’ in your final sentence?
OPatrick, Yes.
Here’s another exclamation mark moment for me:
In reponse to this comment
“Non technical, but I’ve got to say this is a superb display of the blogosphere at its best. As much as I dislike Professor’s Tol’s previous statements, I give him credit for taking the podium in an attempt defend his position.”
Judith Curry writes “agreed, I am delighted the way this thread is evolving. Seems like we sometimes have to get the heat out of the way to get some light.”
Apparently the thread is being strictly moderated for relevance. Am I reading a different thread from other people?
Roger,
Tol is not saying that experts should ignore papers they don’t like. He’s saying the paper is so flawed as not worth highlighting.
I also consider his larger point legitimate–that experts with standing who have a popular platform have a responsibility in their filtering.
All media are filters. It doesn’t strike me as unreasonable to ask someone to have higher filtering standards.
It’s difficult to know where to start with this. If anyone wasn’t actually part of the (600+ comment) discussion on Climate etc, I suggest that they have a quick perusal – they will find events of an utterly different character to those portrayed by KK.
I would ask “without the response from someone who was actually involved, is it unreasonable to assume that snide misrepresentation by KK on his blog would likely go unchallenged?’ You misrepresent Judith Curry, the vast majority of her readers and in fact Richard Tol himself. You also are maliciously disingenuous in saying you merely ‘tweeted some of the highlights’. If you remember a bare 24 hours ago, the same (and justified) criticism on Climate etc was directed at you for snide, underhand re-tweeting of out of context slurs. Your self defence was laughed at, and I now wonder, whose audience has been given disinformation?
If you have no interest in Climate other than and agenda-driven need to throw mud at those you disagree with, you should call your blog ‘sneer-a-scape’. Otherwise, do you not think that even a slightly honest response would be to give a flavour of the majority reaction from the denizens of Climate etc? No? Thought not. I’ll do it for you..
Of the 1118 comments on the Ludecke papers and the follow-up open discussion about disinformation – fully engaged with by Tol, most made the same points. I think you might have missed them. Judith Curry’s blog is not pedagogical or prescriptive – it’s a personal blog the opposite of those like RealCimate, and it does not claim to TEACH. The audience all know that and are adult. Tol’s attutude was patronising and ignorant – his guest post can be seen as an apology by some. Judith Curry never endorsed the papers and said so. She held them up for intelligent people to criticise. If you remember the many posts by the Skydragon lunatics, nobody came away from Climate etc having been ‘turned’ by the seditious material. They were mercilkessly debunked, and everyone gained.
Your biggest mistake is to assume readers are empty vessels into which only selected material should be poured. Perhaps that’s the way you learned. At Climate etc, critical judgement is acquired by doing the work of thinking. Dr Curry does nobody else’s thinking for them, because it isn’t possible.
You are right about one thing – WUWT is indeed an echo chamber. People do indeed go there to have their prejudices reinforced. Until now, I considered your blog to be more like Climate etc in that it fostered open and free discussion. Sadly by indulging in snarky disonformation yourself, you have ironically descended to the WUWT level and exemplified how far below Climate etc you lurk. You’ve embarrassed yourself.
-6-Keith
Tol is welcome to his opinion. I certainly have my opinions about what he should be doing with his social media as well.
Experts and inexperts can of course criticize and rebuke others for their choices about what to emphasize (I do it all the time — I’m even doing it on this thread;-)
In this instance I simply disagree with Richard’s rebuke and his general policy of strict filtering. It is both impractical and pathological. Discourse is messy, get over it!
If Judith Curry wants to discuss the flaws in papers then Judith Curry should do the work of analysing and highlighting them.
The problem here, as Tol notes, is that she took an otherwise obscure paper and give it prominence without commentary. Elsewhere people will point to it and say “There must be something to it, Dr Curry hosted it on her blog.” just as with the “Curry says global warming is over” issue.
In the time is takes someone else to read it and write out a rebuttal the paper is already all the way around the world and presented as yet another nail in the nail stuffed coffin of AGW.
She doesn’t appear to realise she’s forcing people to choose between two viewpoints:
1. Dr Curry wouldn’t post obvious nonsense on her blog therefore when she does it’s worth taking time to read it and understand.
2. Dr Curry will post any old garbage on her blog, if you value your free time go elsewhere.
It seems likely that she has the requisite skillset to understand the flaws in the paper. That she posted it anyway favours the “disinformation” accusation.
In view of the state of climate science, I beg to disagree with Tol in this one occasion. Keeping out published papers because they are not regarded as scientifically worthy of attention is one of the worst practices that have kept uncertainties in climate science under the carpet for a long time. Airing such papers gives people an opportunity to discuss their virtues and defects.
I may concur that probably Dr Curry may have accompanied the highlighting of these papers in her blog with some comments about their contents, instead of just leaving them there for others to comment upon. But that by itself is not a sin, not even a venial sin: it took just one reading by someone like Tol to spot a problem and point it out, a problem which would probably not have escaped other commenters. And I am not saying that Tol is right: I am not qualified to assert that or the opposite. But I reckon this kind of disagreements is a legitimate part of a healthy process of scientific criticism and debate.
Roger,
“Discourse is messy, get over it!”
Twittering, for those unfamiliar with it, is very much part of the discourse.
Roger, my point is that you’ve mischaracterized Tol’s rebuke. You continue to do so. He is not, to my reading, arguing for “strict filtering.”
Anteros (7)
In fact, I spent quite a lot of time reading all the comments in all the related threads. (Not an easy thing to do with all the splintering threads on one post. I wish Judith had a different comment system.)
I believe I’ve accurately represented the main points and counterpoints.
Keith you wrote: “It doesn’t strike me as unreasonable to ask someone to have higher filtering standards.”
Is your complaint that I used the word “strict” rather than “higher”? To-mato, To-ma-to
Tol says: “If flawed papers linger in obscurity, they should be ignored.” I take this to mean that he thinks certain papers should be ignored by everyone, but especially experts.
Again, I disagree. Flawed papers can be very instructive.
KK –
I think you are wrong about Tol. He is definitely arguing for strict filtering. I recommend you go back to Climate etc and read his comments again.
I should have mentioned that the person you most misrepresented was Steve Mosher. Yoy give the impression that Mosher thinks Tol was right to criticise Curry. False – Mosher says explicitly that he thinks Tol was wrong. In case that’s not clear enough to expunge your disinformation, I’ll quote Mosher –
“I read his tweet. I think he’s wrong”
I’m astonished that a lot of you here think that ‘people might go away with the wrong impression if they read a bad paper’ unless their hands are held and they are told what to think about everything. Is that true for you? Are you all lemons? If not, assume the same is true for other adults. Grow up.
Roger,
Judith spotlighted a flawed paper without any context. As I say in my post, it shouldn’t be assumed that the Richard Tol’s of the world will take the time to bat such a paper down.
He’s arguing that she has a responsibility to be a discriminating filter. I don’t understand why you take that to the extent you do. Do you assign lousy, error-riddled textbooks for your class to read?
Anteros (14)
You are pointing to a separate Mosher comment (which I did not see–can you give me the link). So even if you are correct and he disagrees with Tol on the “disinformation” charge, that has no bearing on the comment I quoted from, where he seems to be congratulating Tol on debunking the papers. For good measure, Mosher is also castigating the commenters for ignoring Tol’s criticism.
But hey, if I’ve misinterpreted that, then I hope Steve comes over here to correct me.
KK @ 7
Now I’ve had a chance to inhale, I’d reduce the amount of emotion in my previous comments….
You say you think you represented the main points and counterpoints, having read the comments. But you didn’t – you only mentioned the worst of the exchange between Curry and Tol. What would have been useful would have been to actually mention what we, the readers, said in our 600 comment engagement with Tol, and the reason he came back with a guest post – which everybody was happy about.
It is very journalistic of you, but do you really think you gave a representation of the denizens rebuttal of Tol’s patronising tweets? (and your echoing them like a weedy egger-on at a street-fight)?
I’m a bit baffled – what’s your motive in all this. Honestly?
Tol: ” I think you have done a disservice by lending your credibility to these papers.”
That’s a common theme.
I’m with Tol 100% on this. Curry should know better and I think she does. She doesn’t have an out like Watts. Tol is calling her on that.
Curry or Pielke claiming Tol is being political is amusing. I believe what motivates Curry to peddle garbage on her blog is some combination of personal and political reasons. She enjoys the attention she gets by “challenging dogma” and doesn’t like the fact that BEST didn’t give credence to any of those “challenges”, so she’s scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for anything. Contrarians are in the business of spreading doubt, and believe the best way to do that is to promote nearly any skeptical argument, no matter how questionable. They don’t tend to be very discerning.
Keith-
“Do you assign lousy, error-riddled textbooks for your class to read?”
Yes, absolutely. The Skeptical Environmentalist was a core reading in my graduate seminar for about 4 years. Why? Because we took on the project of critically evaluating it. I have even assigned parts of IPCC WG II 😉
My job isn’t to tell students what to think, my job is to teach them how to think. I have no fear that their minds will be corrupted by being exposed to information that is flawed in some respects. In fact, I encourage students to bring in material to the class which we all read and critique together — I do not “filter” any such pieces, even the malarkey.
Arguments that the public or lay populace needs to be protected (or whatever word you want) from misleading information can make sense for governmental regulatory process, drug approval mechanisms and FCC guidelines for advertisers (to name a few). But as an approach to public conversations by individual experts via social media? No thanks. I prefer less pressure to filter, less group think, less cliquey experts, and more open discourse, debate and discussion. Give the public some credit, they are not as dumb and gullible as Tol (and maybe you) seem to think!
KK @ 16
I can’t get the link to work, but it was at 10.26. Yes I know the nesting can be infuriating, but obviously it has its advantages.
Yes you do represent two of Mosher’s points. Agreed. It’s just that as you can probably guess, as a rule he is vehemently against gatekeeping and he thinks Tol was wrong to criticise Curry. Does he think the papers should have appeared on Climate etc? No, but not for the reasons I think you’re alleging.
I’m noticing that I’ve been drawn into the kind of commenting that I usually try to avoid and probably scorn. It’s self-referential. There you go.
Apologies for an excesses.
#9
In the time is takes someone else to read it and write out a rebuttal the paper is already all the way around the world
You can choose to believe that ‘the truth eventually finds a way’ or not.
If you would like a ‘gatekeeper’ to ‘filter out the junk’ my tribe will be more then happy to appoint Senator Inhofe to such a task.
Anteros (17)
My motive is journalistic, plain and simple. Journalists also filter and the result is we choose the sources to pay attention to. So I pay attention to Tol (and RPJjr, though I disagree with him, in this instance). I also pay attention to Romm and Watts and Morano, etc, etc.
I’m not interested in representing the denizens of climate etc. I’ve made it clear that I think the vast majority of them are going there to have their biases reinforced. I’m sure Judith disagrees with that.
When she starts acting like Tol–really calling out both sides–she will no longer be Saint Judith to her denizens and they will no longer be going there to have their biases reinforced.
It’s important to recognize that the filtering being discussed here is individual. In a democracy of large scale, there is always going to be filtering, if for no other reason than nobody can read everything. We all filter our input based on quality and quantity concerns. The question really is how we should do that, not whether we should.
Taking this the next step, if you have a large megaphone, there is some responsibility as to how it is used.
Curry has a long record of posts about papers or books she disagrees with, with the claim that highlighting them will help to demonstrate their faults and weaknesses. However her experience with the Dragonslayers (authors of a book that claims that CO2 cannot possibly cause warming) demonstrates that it just doesn’t work that way. Maybe she doesn’t want to acknowledge that because it would have implications as to how her output in the last year or two have been treated.
Roger (19),
I obviously believe in a plurality of perspectives. If I didn’t, I doubt I’d have built up the diverse audience of this blog.
But there’s a difference between pluralism and neutral promotion of erroneous science.
I’m also guessing that you at least (somewhat) guide your students through their reading of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
I gotta run, but given how the debate at Curry’s has evolved, it seems that quite the opposite from a “neutral promotion of erroneous science” has actually taken place. You have a deep and robust conversation underway. That is actually pluralism at work — Kudos to Curry and also to Tol (even if he initially started down the wrong path ;-).
Roger:
Curry took two papers that almost nobody had read, and put them in the limelight.
The papers say 2+2=5.
There are a lot of people who would like to believe that. It is not true.
So now there is yet another dogfight about whether the answer is 3, 4, or 5. We can do without that.
There are plenty of real issues to argue over.
By the way, I have not changed by opinion on Curry’s original post, but I sure regret expressing it.
#21
“You can choose to believe that “˜the truth eventually finds a way’ or not.”
The truth of the vaccine-autism link (or lack of) is slowly finding its way yet in the meantime vaccination programs are being damaged. The truth of the theory of evolution has been 150 years in finding its way.
In other words, the path of truth is slow and winding. I see little need to place further obstacles on it.
“If you would like a “˜gatekeeper’ to “˜filter out the junk’ my tribe will be more then happy to appoint Senator Inhofe to such a task.”
Nobody has proposed appointing anyone to anything. Senator Inhofe can and does promote all the nonsense he likes but at the expense of his credibility with people concerned with accuracy. Dr Curry is no different, she can post what she liked on her blog. Whether people looking for accurate information will go there is another matter.
“What if Tol… had not taken the time to comment at Curry’s blog, much less followed up with a thorough critique? … So the larger question is whether Curry, who has standing in the climate science community, should be more discriminating in the research she chooses to highlight at her blog?”
Replace “Curry” with “IPCC” and you have begun to ask the real “larger question.”
Of course, the IPCC, unlike Curry, cherry picks only those ‘papers’ (including WWF press releases etc.) that support their predetermined conclusions.
But to look at that would be too inconvenient I suppose. Fortunately, there is an extremely well researched new book out – ‘The Delinquent Teenager’ – that details the IPCC’s ‘scientific’ methods which does that. Guess we won’t see that covered here. Instead I predict a post about Mooney’s convenient book any minute now.
#24 – Ah yes, The Skeptical Environmentalist. The concerted attack on that book by the Scientific American was the first big clue that that magazine (and Nature owned by the same German corp) had gone from science to politics.
And the WWF still has never been able to address the phoney way they invent ‘extinction rates’ – detailed by Lomborg – because it was and still is phoney. Just like the whole ‘Extinction Crisis’ story. But still the WWF is credible enough for the IPCC…
@19 Roger: Give the public some credit, they are not as dumb and gullible as Tol (and maybe you) seem to think!
On hard-core statistical techniques? Please. Take a few steps back, how ’bout.
“Large majorities incorrectly think that the hole in the ozone layer and aerosol spray cans contribute to global warming, leading many to incorrectly conclude that banning aerosol spray cans or stopping rockets from punching holes in the ozone layer are viable solutions.”
You have a deep and robust conversation underway. That is actually pluralism at work.
And many of her readers will walk away with the existence of those two papers and NOTHING from the robust conversation–and she knows this. Meanwhile, 521 comments and counting…
Keith Kloor @22
Fair point. And thanks for the measured response to some vitriol – I’ve learned a fair bit in the last day or so. My overriding impression of the blogosphere since I actively began to partake (not so many months ago) has been how incredibly petty, and angry everybody is. I never really had a clue why. I do now, and I’ll have to work harder to reign in my ‘internet emotions’.
I have one question of substance – do you think the readers of Climate etc go there to have their biases reinforced more than readers who go elsewhere? Or does it appear that way to you because, by and large, they don’t see the world quite the same way you do?
My view is necessarily subjective – perspective is almost everything – but at Climate etc I find dozens of people who disagree with me (though undoubtedly in the minority) with whom I can have interesting and productive discourse – and disagreement. I don’t go to places like Tamino (or WUWT for that matter) because my impression is one of drugged hypnotised zombies dully chanting ‘denier, denier’ without the slightest dissenting voice (think censoring/deleting)
Contrary to something I said upthread, I am indeed posting dissenting comments here and that says a lot (an appropriate further apology). I do indeed have criticism of Climate etc – Dr Curry barely moderates at all so sometimes the pearls are hidden deep beneath the shit. But the ‘Hey, you guys have to make your mind up about everything’ is incredibly empowering. And if the posts themselves are rarely ‘straight-and-true consensus’, there are enough voices of that persuasion to prevent the creation of an echo-chamber, even if a consensus perspective doesn’t experience that.
I wonder – can you name some blogs whose readers go there to have their biases confirmed less than Climate etc? Where the average reader is more open-minded? Or are people mostly the same?
Curry is not a neutral promoter of erroneous science, but she doesn’t occasionally promote erroneous science, which she fully admits. She does so in hopes, she says, of undermining it. She said so when she had the posts about the Dragonslayers. Did it work?
Plenty of scientists have blogs and post about things that they disagree with. I think the debate is what is the threshold. Engaging in debate or discussion with a worthy perspective that you might disagree with is different from publicizing admitted junk in hopes of undermining it’s appeal.
I think most of this discussion – here and on Judith’s blog – have missed a more important issue. Look at the contrast between Judith’s expressed desires in the “The wrong(?) conversation” thread and the discussion that ensued over the Ludeke papers. In the first thread Judith bemoans the fact that people and the climate community have not been focused on things she things of as important, and in the second set, we have Tol, the denizens, Kloor, Stoat etc. all focused on papers and issues that no-one actually thinks are important in the slightest. Regardless of how you think methodologically bad publications should be treated, there is a disconnect.
The fact is that conversational topics are driven in a large part by what the media filters decide are worthwhile topics. Bloggers and twitterers and the mainstream media are no different in that respect. Given the finite amount of time and the far larger amount of possible topics, everyone inevitably focuses in some way – which implies there are some things they don’t pay much attention to. This doesn’t make anyone some kind of secret authoritarian (regardless of Roger’s predictable insinuation).
Given then that we all decide to focus/filter, we are free to do that as we wish – and that goes for Inhofe, Curry, Roger, Tol, Keith and me. Each of these excursions into the public discourse are an attempt to steer the conversation in some way (why bother otherwise?). Of course, other people can judge how and in what ways the conversation actually ends up being steered (as is their right).
If I read Tol correctly (big if), he engaged on this issue because he percieved that Judith waas wanting to steer the conversation in one direction (which he was presumably in favor of), when in fact she steered it in another (which he wasn’t). This has very little to do with the merits (or lack thereof) of getting into the weeds of technical flaws on bad papers.
It would be more akin to chastising Obama for discussing the Kardashian’s – it is not that this is something that people should be forbidden to discuss, nor is it a claim that there are no interesting life lessons to be learned from an extensive study of their careers. But rather, a expectation that he should be steering the conversation onto more serious issues.
Of course, expectations can change.
I’m curious Keith
How do you perceive yoursrlf, a neutralish journalist obsrving and trotting an interesting story, or a partisan player in the former? I always thought the former.
The issue was ‘disinformation’, being tweeted to many followers, scientists, media, lobbyists, political, etc.ie a loaded word with many ‘politically motivated’ connotations labelling Judith Curry, very publically. Where this was pointed out to Richard. He stood by it…and emphasised it
I have seen no commentt, from Richard to support his presumed thoughts that Judith was deliberately doing this with politically motivated intent. And no apology either.
He could have said, Judy was talking about a rubbish paper, a deeply flawed paper, or just wasting her time with trash..
But he choose to use disinformation.. with all the loaded connotations of a political or partisan motive
So I would be interested in what Richard thought and still thinks? Judith’s motives were.
The papers themselves are almost irrelevant, was is enlightening is than apparent concern that they might into impact climate policies.. is the timing an issue, extra sensitivity in the run up to Durban? In a country, ironically as Fred Pearce points out is very dependant on coal.
Anteros (30)
For my money, Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth remains the best go-to blog for climate & energy related issues. It contains the least ideological bias and is explorative in an open-minded way. Of course, partisans in the climate debate don’t like it, for their own reasons.
Gavin (32)
Your analysis of the media is on target, but I’m not sure of your reading of Tol’s motivation. Where are you getting this, because I didn’t pick up on that in the exchanges between them. (I acknowledge your “big if”). To me, it just seemed he was genuinely put off by Judith’s spotlighting of the two papers, for reasons he laid out.
Gavin @ 32 –
The Kardashian’s…… what? 🙂
Barry (33),
How I perceive myself makes no difference to how others perceive me. Ultimately, people will make their own interpretations based on my published stories and now, all this blogging stuff, I suppose.
But to what I think is your legitimate question: I seek to inform, add perspective, and advance the story. Not every blog post or article meets all that criteria, obviously. With blog posts, in particular, I’m happy if I can just check off one from that list.
#34 Tol is not telling Watts, Inhofe, Morano or Steve Goddard to do something different. Why not? I imagine it is because he has different expectations for them. Since they post far more egregious stuff, it is clear that Tol is not reacting to all disinformation, just that emanating from Judith. This seems to me to indicate a difference in expectation – and he is explicit in suggesting she has a responsibility that the others do not.
#35 their anything.
Regarding disinformation, Curry posted a definition of it that basically refers to intentional efforts to misinform people, as in a spy agency feeding false information to another spy information to take them in the wrong direction.
But we don’t know if that’s what Tol meant, and I would infer from his comments that it is not. And I think that the public uses the word more loosely to mean intentionally distributing information you know to be false.
And a typo correction to my post #31: but she does occasionally . . .
Is climate chum disinformation? (I didn’t see it on her list of 25 techniques.)
Disinformation you can wash your hands of?
OPatrick (39),
Ah, be careful. There is no shortage of climate chum on the web. You can find it across the climate spectrum. Some might even say this post qualifies as chum.
Why didn’t Tol direct his ire at the journal(s) which published these papers in the first place.
A climate scientist raising awareness of two published climate science papers by publishing a post pointing them out and asking people to read them and comment on them is hardly “disinformation”.
To require people of a certain statute to “ignore” published papers which are deemed “flawed” by some random guy seems weird to me.
Tol’s complaint that Judith Curry was spreading disinformation was totally bogus and over the top.
Only if Judith had said she agreed with the conclusions of the papers, knowing them to be flawed, could she be accused of spreading disinformation.
As always, when hurling around accusations which go to issues of intent, they are a waste of time, as we cannot know a persons intent without reading their mind.
Tol would be best served by submitting his comments to the journal, for review and publication (not to say that he should not publish them on Curray’s site – that is also good).
However, the normal default position when one is critical of a paper is to comment on it to the journal, so the comment may be responded to by the author.
Not to complain about people who post links to the paper because they are so famous that people might actually “gasp!” read the paper.
Speaking of disinformation:
The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science is a summary of the global warming peer reviewed science since 2007. Produced by a team of 26 scientists led by the University of New South Wales Climate Research Centre, the Diagnosis convincingly proves that the effects of global warming have gotten worse in the last three years.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2011/11/prweb8948198.htm
Wow. Proof!
Proves?
There’s more: “The report places the blame for the century long temperature increase on human factors and says the turning point “must come soon”.”
Wow. Not even the BEST Team could come up with this kind of ‘slam dunk’ conclusion!
These ‘scientists,’ including co-author Mike “The Shtick” Mann, must be really, really good.
And the publisher, Elsevier, “is proud to release” this. What a Team Player!
But, of course, the corruption of the publishing and peer review process, as revealed by Climategate, is not as important as Curry’s blog.
EdG,
I understand it’s hard to keep those partisan reflexes from jerking, but you might want to think about what Steve Mosher said on the latest Tol/Curry thread, which I highlighted above:
“I note the absence of any credible defense of the papers and a high incidence of topic changing…”
I look forward to Judith highlighting this palaeo evidence for potentially high climate sensitivity.
#41
“Why didn’t Tol direct his ire at the journal(s) which published these papers in the first place.”
I guess because he was talking to Judith Curry on Judith Curry’s blog about a post Judith Curry had made.
Based on what Keith and Roger Pielke highlight, Tol is not a partisan. His critique appears to be reasonable.
That said, he may be expecting too much from Judy in her blog hosting capacity. I agree that Using “detrended” fluctuation analysis to study “trends” sounds very bad and it should have failed Judy’s sniff test. I don’t know why it didn’t. I think it would serve her (and the rest of us) well if she tightened up the filter.
Also I wonder if Tol applies his criteria uniformly. Is he on record for criticizing IPCC for using articles from minor publications or gray literature. Does he object when RC pulls out a lousy contrarian paper out of obscurity and just to trash it?
#43 – Keith. Partisan?
Look at the title of this blog. That was the point I was addressing. If you want to look at the problem of spreading disinformation, it might be more worthwhile to look at that on the broader scale than to cherry pick this minor Curry incident. There is so much that is far more significant to look at.
But, tis your blog. You can change the subject anytime.
Sashka – I first heard of Tol for a series of articles he did criticizing the IPCC on exactly the issues you mention. RP Jr publicized those on his blog.
I don’t think that Curry is doing disinformation as she defined it. I think that the issue is whether value is brought to a debate by publicizing content of the type that she occasionally does.
#41: “Why didn’t Tol direct his ire at the journal(s) which published these papers in the first place.”
See #45, but also because the two journals involved have a history of publishing junk climate science. In general, spending time on E&E publications does not seem to be a worthwhile use of time or bandwidth, except inasmuch as one has to debunk them because they are being cited all over the place by contrarians.
Which brings us back to Curry: as a competent scientist with popular blog, it is surprising and disappointing that she is wasting her time posting dross. I’d argue that the Salby CO2 story was a better example, because there no one stepped up to do a guest post rebuttal, so my guess is that there are a number of people out there who just had their suspicions that the CO2 rise is not anthropogenic further confirmed. I’m still not clear if Curry herself still believes that Salby might have a point.
This kind of junk science is like posting links to Moon-landing denier sites saying things like “Wow, I’d never noticed that the flag was waving” or “I’m just posting a link to a site about the shadows on the Moon, I’m not necessarily endorsing it, I thought that shining light on this subject was important” and “if the analysis showing that humans couldn’t survive the radiation in space between the Earth and the Moon holds up…” Meanwhile, rather than clearing anything up, what the Moon-linker does is create a sense that maybe the history of Moon travel is still uncertain… when there are plenty of interesting, real uncertainties: the cost and value of a permanent human presence on the Moon, the presence of water-ice in darker craters, questions about how the Moon was formed, and so on.
Is it responsible to take a manuscript you know is wrong, and throw it on the table saying here is an interesting paper?
Roger:
Curry picked two papers that almost nobody had read and put them in the limelight.
The papers argue that 2+2=5.
There are many people who like to believe that. It is not true.
So now we are having a dogfight about whether it is 3, 4, or 5.
There really are better papers to discuss.
Tol is no friend of mine, and Curry is basically a very nice person, but Tol is right and Curry is very wrong and horribly muddled.
Michael Tobis @ 49
I disagree, but because I think what you say actually doesn’t make sense. You say Judith Curry is ‘wrong’. My contention is that it doesn’t even make sense to say she is ‘wrong’ other than in the trivial sense that if it was your blog, you wouldn’t have posted the two papers – if that is what you mean. She has absolutely no obligation to anyone to post or not post anything she feels like. It is not as if there is an acknowledged responsibility she is avoiding. She does not represent climate science, scientists, her University, righteousness, nothing except herself.
And she says so on her blog. The reason so many of us enjoy the discussions there is because we are never told what to think. I am fairly certain that the only people who read the papers are those who are sufficiently informed to make a judgement. No harm was going to come to anyone – only better discernment.
In what possible way can someone be ‘wrong’ in her posting something and saying [as ever] What do you think?
All I can say is that as a result of the variety of Posts at Climate etc, many good things occur that sadly don’t at blogs where articles are oh-so-carefully selected by the purveyors of particular understandings – or prejudices.
It works. Let it be.
Richard Tol (26),
Sorry, I just plucked that comment out of spam.
#49
“I’d argue that the Salby CO2 story was a better example, because there no one stepped up to do a guest post rebuttal”
Or a worse example, depending. Salby hadn’t and still hasn’t even published a paper on the topic yet it was presented as Dr Curry as a something that could revolutionise climate science. There was basically nothing to rebut though some did elsewhere to keep the record straight.
Baron von Monckhofen summed it up well with Wobedobedoboo!
Anteros:
“In what possible way can someone be “˜wrong’ in her posting something and saying [as ever] What do you think?”
Can you really not think of possible ways in which it could be wrong?
“It works. Let it be.”
It works for you. I can’t spend any significant length of time there.
Hi Keith,
You just beat me to it, I was also preparing a condensed version of this argument. With much the same highlighted comments btw.
I find Judith’s and Roger’s critique of Tol’s statement curious, where he (Richard Tol) wrote:
“Prominent but flawed research does damage as it misinforms people about climate change.”
Of course scientists don’t want the public to be misinformed about the science!
Judith rightly says that “Of course there are flawed papers that get published.” But why shining the spotlight on them? What’s gained by doing so?
It’s true that these discussions don’t occur about science without policy relevance. Research on the mating behavior of fruit flies won’t result in argument whether a flawed paper should be promoted in the public sphere or not.
The differences are that 1) such research is not present in the public sphere, because the public ain’t interested 2) even though flawed papers exist in any field, the more its conclusions clash with ideologies, the more attempts will be made to reach opposite conclusions and thus the more deeply flawed/biased papers will be published. It’s not a coincidence that there’s no fruitflies-version of EIKE or Heartland.
Gavin (38)
Indeed. Judith Curry is a senior academic and she should be held to a higher account.
Sahska (47)
I’ve held the IPCC to account. See my posts on Pielke Jr or my recent paper in Climatic Change.
I rarely bother with pseudo-academic blogs like RealClimate or WattsUpWithThat and almost never with non-academic ones like ClimateProgress or ClimateDepot.
#51
Is it responsible to take a manuscript you know is wrong, and throw it on the table saying here is an interesting paper?
I had an entire semester of that in University, the course was called ‘critical reading for engineering majors’.
In ‘Manufacturing 101’ we were frequently given designs that ‘couldn’t be built’. Of course the students who started machining parts before they critically reviewed the designs didn’t do so well.
Important lessons. Don’t believe everything you read and don’t spend time and money on machining parts before you’ve verified a design.
So how many people have been saying exactly what Tol is saying for a year now:
“Judith Curry is a senior academic and she should be held to a higher account.”
It all shakes out in the end tho I guess.
Climate debate is bad.
Michael #49:
Tol had better get busy!
He needs to review all new climate science papers and let Curry know which ones it is ok to for her to discuss (or lift from obscurity) and which ones Tol thinks are flawed – and therefore which ones it is not ok for Curry to discuss (or lift from obscurity).
See Michael – whether or not Tol thinks a paper is flawed or not, or even whether a paper is actually flawed or not, does not give Tol any control over what Curry decides to post about, or direct attention to.
Of course Tol can complain about what Curry chooses to highlight, or direct attention to, but he cannot control what Curry chooses to highlight.
Tol – not being able to directly censor Curry, wants Curry to exercise self-censorship (based on his criteria).
OPatrick @57 –
I can very well (or pretty well) understand why you wouldn’t want to spend much time at Climate etc. I struggle, though to imagine it is as difficult as it is for me to bear going to Sks or Tamino. To me they are almost shouting the fact that they are so right that people who disagree with them must have something wrong with them [the denier thing, again]. Sks exists solely to reinforce one set of prejudices by attempting to refute the validity of another. It is blind dogmatism!
Yes I guess Climate etc could be uncomfortable, but many people who believe that CO2 is a big problem do seem to return and engage in discussion. They probably have thicker skins than I do, but….
I know I’ve been mouthing off about KK today but in comparison to the Taminos of the world this is the epitome of generous and thoughtful hosting. Well, I’ve never had a comment deleted!
Would it help at Climate etc if most of the snarky comments were deleted/moderated, or is it just the preponderance of ‘sceptics’?
#62
“He needs to review all new climate science papers and let Curry know which ones it is ok to for her to discuss (or lift from obscurity) and which ones Tol thinks are flawed ““ and therefore which ones it is not ok for Curry to discuss (or lift from obscurity).”
I believe Tol is appealing to Curry’s own judgement and expertise not asking her to rely on his. Indeed it’s often Curry herself that sets standards by which it’s ok to listen to some scientists but not others, to accept their judgement on some matters but not others. Which is which we have to rely on Curry to tell us.
RickA, I believe Tol wants Curry to exercise better judgment, not necessarily self-censorship. If she is indeed a senior scientist, why is she wasting time and space highlighting crappy papers when she could be presenting much better stuff?
Surely she realizes that many of her denizens are not capable of objectively judging the worth of such papers, partly because they do not have the education, and partly because they are not capable of approaching this topic objectively.
@63
“Sks exists solely to reinforce one set of prejudices by attempting to refute the validity of another. It is blind dogmatism!”
Yikes. They are attempting the refute the accuracy of another – isn’t that the point? Is it a prejudice that they are defending or an opinion, widely held?
It’s this kind of reaction that convinces me that almost nobody can be convinced of anything on the blogosphere.
Has anyone considered the possibility that Tol should have written a dispassionate E-mail to the authors pointing out what he thought they did wrong? Maybe they would welcome his input. Maybe they have good reasons for what they did. Starting a blog war did no one any good.
Richard Tol made a good impression on his own but he is also no friend of Tobis’. That makes him a good candidate for being a friend of mine.
If she is indeed a senior scientist, why is she wasting time and space highlighting crappy papers when she could be presenting much better stuff?
Perhaps for the same reason why she’s telling hacks like David Rose a bunch of nonsense regarding the BEST project.
Here we have 2 “credible” papers vs BEST that the evil dogmatic corrupt IPCC will surely not base its conclusions on, and Tol = politically-motivated gatekeeper persecuting valid work, supporting the warmist religion and claiming the issue is not debatable.
The soap opera continues…
#59 Richard Tol, this made me choke a bit: “I rarely bother with pseudo-academic blogs like RealClimate or WattsUpWithThat and almost never with non-academic ones like ClimateProgress or ClimateDepot.”
You consider RealClimate to be “pseudo-academic”? Upon what basis? The posts look academic to me, and the commentors include many academics as well as non-academics.
26#
You say you have not changed your ‘opinion’ – presumably meaning ‘disinformation’ quote
Perhaps you could clarify what you meant by this… as I said a ‘loaded’ word..
Anyone might interpret that as Judith Curry, is doing this for some ‘motive’. Is this your use of the word.
If so, what ‘motive’ do you think she has or why..
IF this is not your intended use of the word, your follow up tweet seemed to imply it was, but perhaps ambiguous, could you expand on your use of ‘disinformation’ in this case.
#67 Tom C; Curry publicly posted that guest post and Tol tweeted his opinion of her actions. Why should he not criticize Curry’s actions? She has argued her reasons for posting the guest post without making any comments of her own about the quality of it. I don’t think her reasons are adequate, but that’s my opinion.
Tom C: Has anyone considered the possibility that Tol should have written a dispassionate E-mail to the authors pointing out what he thought they did wrong? Maybe they would welcome his input. Maybe they have good reasons for what they did. Starting a blog war did no one any good.
But that would go against contrarian creed, which states “a skeptic shall first and foremost immediately trash a study via the blogosphere and media as soon as it is made public. Never substitute that with actually contacting the authors privately or submitting replies to a journal, which are optional actions.”
Followers of this creed include Curry, Watts, etc.
NewYorkJ
Actually, Roy Spencer provided a great model in this regard. When the First Lindzen Choi paper came out he put up a post on his blog showing why he thought their methodology was wrong. No nasty rhetoric, no name-calling; and on the other hand, no sugar-coating lest an ally have his work diminshed. Just a dispassionate scientific analysis.
But, alas, it was the warmists who jumped on this with “Spencer refutes Lindzen, etc. etc.”
Richard (wayback at #26):
You write: “There are plenty of real issues to argue over. By the way, I have not changed by opinion on Curry’s original post, but I sure regret expressing it.”
Indeed 😉
My view is that the blogosphere is full of all sorts of crap. Caveat emptor. Anyone who relies on someone’s credentials as the primary basis for evaluating what they find on a blog is not exercising any critical thinking — just look at the nonsense RC11 paper (Moscow warming) at Real Climate.
Richard, not long ago an economist said that important aspects of your work was deeply flawed:
http://realclimateeconomics.org/wp/archives/801
Were it up to Ackerman your work would not get discussed, because he says it misleads policy makers and the public. The only way to resolve such disputes is to have the discussion and debate, and let arguments air out in public.
So rather than trying to police what people choose to blog about (via nasty tweets or whatever), I’m much more interested in teaching people how to evaluate whatever they come across on the web.
#64 “I believe Tol is appealing to Curry’s own judgement”
This is exactly the issue here. Judith decided a while back that the judgement of the community on what was interesting and what was not, was not itself to be trusted. (I mostly disagree, but that isn’t the point here). However, for much of the stuff that the contrarians think is interesting, Judith either doesn’t have enough background to make her own judgements or feels that no judgements should be made at all (regardless of her own feelings on the merits).
Unfortunately, there is literally no end to the nonsense, and so anyone who refuses to make judgements about whether something is worthwhile (whether through lack of knowledge or inclination) ends up spending inordinate amounts of time discussing nonsense.
Perhaps this can be Curry’s Corollary of Grisham’s Law:
“Discussions about bad science drive out discussions about the good science. “
Gavin @76: So what’s your solution? Dr. Curry should go to the “community” for approval before each of her posts?
Her blog is not a science journal. She draws the lines differently. She is trying different things. You and Tol don’t like it? Welcome to open debate and freedom of speech, which judging by the Climategate scandal etc., is something of a problem for the “community.”
There is likewise no end to desires to control debate and thereby control people. I would prefer to err on Dr. Curry’s side than on yours. I don’t trust the judgment of your community either.
Holly Stick (70)
RealClimate is terribly biased, and they do not allow open discussion.
Roger (75)
I called for judgement and restraint. Not for censorship.
The Ackerman issue is simple: He took our code, changed it, introduced an error, and now blames it on us.
If the error were in our code, we’d be busy retracting papers. I don’t know why Ackerman’s paper is still available.
See http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/10/28/tol-responds-to-ackerman.html
As far as I can tell RealClimate is mostly interested in the science. They talk about what they are doing because that is what they are interested in. A lot of the time they bring up stuff because it’s interesting, not because they want to attack some other scientist.
WUWT is about pushing bad science. RealClimate is about talking about good science.
Re. 7 Anteros
“Judith Curry never endorsed the papers and said so. She held them up for intelligent people to criticise.”
She picked the wrong venue for that, then.
+Mary Mangan on Google Plus asks
“This discussion is interesting–not only because of the climate drama, but more generally because it gets to an issue with which I struggle: where is the line between discussing bad papers, or misinformation sites, etc vs. giving them attention? And if it is worth highlighting the poor quality stuff–what’s the best way to do so?”
This seems a good summary of the serious question being raised in this thread.
Let me ask the reader to stipulate that there is such a thing as quality in science. Then a difficulty arises because those most immersed in any particular branch of science are best qualified to make that quality judgment.
Our future requires an unprecedented amount of interdisciplinary thinking. This in turn provides us with an unprecedented problem, the problem of recognition of authority across disciplines. These discriminations are deeply consequential, and it is the job of public communicators of science to help the public make them. And here, Judith Curry sets herself up as an arbiter of science, and fails.
My problem with Tol is that he insists on calling me “authoritarian”, but in the present instance Tol is being exactly as “authoritarian” as I would. That is to say he insists that public attention be paid in the main to ideas which are not trivially refuted. Only in this way can we begin to construct a broadly informed interdisciplinary model of our circumstances that would allow of emergence of a social contract that accounts for our present and future circumstances rather than those of the past.
Coming up with new delusions to replace the old ones does no service. If Dr. Curry is unwilling or unable to make the distinction so close to her own purported expertise, she should not be attempting to lead the conversation.
Indeed, only if science approaches truth is there any point to science at all. The whole enterprise is pointless if nothing at all is known or can be known. Increasingly this emerges as equivalent Curry’s position. I find this position as ludicrous coming from Curry as I did when it came from Bruno LaTour or Sandra Harding. Without quality control emerging from principles of reason and evidence, science serves no purpose.
There are many traps for the unwary in distinguishing between sense and nonsense in disciplines with which they are unfamiliar. But someone claiming expertise and leadership in the public debate should be reliable in filtering out severe errors in their own field. Dr. Curry is proving either unwilling or unable to provide this service.
Michael (81)
You want to sent people to re-education camps for disagreeing with your political values.
I want papers with mathematical errors to be ignored.
See, Anteros, this is how a “grown-up” person practices objectivity: I objectively consider Tol’s criticisms of Curry and of those papers to be justified. I also objectively consider Tol’s claim that Tobis wants to send people to re-education camps to be without factual basis.
I also think that last claim of Tol’s to be idiotic, but that is a more subjective opinion.
“You want to sent people to re-education camps for disagreeing with your political values.”
This is complete nonsense, as I have insisted from the beginning. Apparently my use of the word “education” kicked off some Maoist vision about me in Tol’s head which he will not let go of.
I do think better information is needed, which is to say not only that papers with obvious errors should be ignored, but that papers without obvious errors should be communicated to the public, so an informed social consensus can emerge.
What this has to do with “camps” is totally baffling to me.
Dr. Tol, this idea that I ever said anything endorsing “re-education camps” is profoundly offensive to me. I would have hoped you would take the opportunity of me supporting you to stop spreading this calumny.
It’s now verging on libelous, and I insist that you stop.
#77 Judith can and should do what she likes (as if my opinion about what she should do would carry any weight!). (Remember, I’m not the one twittering about how she should or should not behave). But the way you do things sometimes has predictable consequences.
#78. Just because you are right about the worth of the Ludeke papers, doesn’t mean you are right about everything. Realclimate does not prevent ‘open discussion’, but rather exercises judgement in how comments are moderated. You evidently don’t think that exercising judgement per se is a bad thing, even if you may disagree with it. Your response to Michael Tobis (#82) might well be something that, in my judgement, would be flagged as an unconstructive insult rather than substantive comment.
“You want to sent people to re-education camps for disagreeing with your political values.”
I have now have somebody else whose posts I will immediately ignore when I see the name, irregardless of what he thinks in this case. Curry’s blog is full of them, which is why it is mostly a waste to go there.
Richard Tol: RealClimate is terribly biased, and they do not allow open discussion.
This is an interesting claim. On an RC thread, I see a fairly inflammatory comment from a Richard Tol that is indicative of bias (in response to a post that appears to be spot on in hindsight).
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/
This was followed by 2 other comments in #92 and #319 on the same thread. Must be a different economist Richard Tol. Now RC doesn’t always let this sort of ad hom stuff through, and are often remarkably tolerant of insults directed at them. They also occasionally filter out obvious nonsense, which might include the stuff Curry is peddling.
Tom C (#74),
The proper course of action, as outlined in your #67, would be for Spencer to have refrained from blog commentary and contacted Lindzen directly. Now you’re correct that Spencer’s discussion of L&C was polite. There was no allegation of fraud, “hide the decline”, or claim that anyone was being persecuted by a global warming religion. Then again, Lindzen is part of Spencer’s tribe.
#75 RPJr writes:
“So rather than trying to police what people choose to blog about (via nasty tweets or whatever), I’m much more interested in teaching people how to evaluate whatever they come across on the web.”
Thank you very much for this comment. Says it all and applies to all sides of the debate. Idealistic in this case, to put it mildly, but that should be the ultimate goal. It is the opposite of the profoundly unscientific ‘debate is over’ mentality and thus most appropriate for a science as young as global climatology – particularly given this science’s twisted childhood.
Sashka: Based on what Keith and Roger Pielke highlight, Tol is not a partisan.
Tol is in the academic advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is highly biased, partisan and political. They peddle disinformation routinely, doing this recently with the David Rose and Curry incident.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/baked-curry-the-best-way-to-hide-the-incline.html
Michael (84),
You’re the one who started personalizing this Tol with your first comment on this thread (#53), and continuing in #81 (“my problem with Tol…”)
Guess what? This post and thread is not about you. But since you went ahead and blurted out your prior gripes with Tol, then you should expect him to respond. And not get all uppity if you don’t like the answer.
He’s on Twitter. So are you. Have your issues out with him there, if you must.
Keith Kloor, I believe Michael Tobis mentioned his problem with Tol as a way of illustrating that he could agree with Tol on this issue despite past disagreements. In fact, he was illustrating that he was not merely coming here to confirm his prejudices, which is the point of your post, is it not?
This kind of objective thinking is beyond the capability of many of Curry’s denizens. Maybe they could learn by example.
Holly Stick (91)
Michael went beyond that, as I pointed out. And in doing so, he increased the chances of a fairly decent thread going off track. I’d like to try and prevent that from happening, as I think the back-and-forth has been largely civil and constructive.
Keith,
Have you actually been following the latest debate on Tol’s post? Have you in particular observed the extensive interaction between him and Brandon Shollenberger? If you had, you would see how Brandon has demonstrated he has made a criticism that is simply wrong, although he refuses to admit it.
The verdict so far seems to be that the work has some merit, and whilst it may not be the final word, is far from being rubbish. Ludecke has told Judith he is preparing a response to Tol’s criticisms. I for one am looking forward to that and am enjoying the debate. It’s something we are unlikely to find on any other climate blog. How anyone can think it a bad thing is quite beyond me.
@ 85
Realclimate does not prevent “˜open discussion’, but rather exercises judgement in how comments are moderated.
Sorry, I forgot whether the word “bullshit” is allowed here?
Climate Etc. and Energy & Environment; what’s the difference? Climate Etc. has a bigger readership and is easier to copy & paste from. Looking at the title of guest post, job done.
In my useless unimportant opinion, this is a better system working almost perfectly. Tol called out Curry for her judgment in highlighting certain views, Curry gave him an open invitation to state his case, and he did effectively. All in a very transparent open public forum. Wonderful.
People are free to review the comments and make up their own mind (god forbid!). Anyone who has perused these forums has identified commenters whose opinions command respect and whose opinions they trust more than others.
Some people would prefer a more rigid authoritarian gate keeping system, which has advantages when executed properly, and some choose to run their forums that way (ahem…RC…Tobis). Let the market sort it out.
The potential flaw with the rigid gate keeping system is who polices the gate keepers? This is arguably where the climate community and the IPCC has failed the public, and I support JC’s effort to right that wrong.
Michael (93)
I’ve been following that thread, though it’s annoying as hell with all the nests. I see Brandon being Brandon. You obviously see something different.
I see someone dissecting, as much through the precise analysis of English as science, that one of Richard Tol’s main criticisms doesn’t hold water. I am not a follower of Brandon or anything like that; I just found the interchange instructive and have formed my opinion about it.
Sashka,
Tol is absolutely on record as criticizing the IPCC (especially WGII) for the use of grey literature. There are several posts on Judith’s blog discussing Tol’s criticisms of the IPCC.
The discussion between Tol and Brandon is very much worth reading. one sample
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/08/tols-critique-of-the-ludecke-et-al-papers/#comments
Brandon Shollenberger | November 9, 2011 at 7:57 pm | Reply
What follows is a “simple” explanation of the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) controversy. Richard S.J. Tol criticized the authors of two papers for using DFA, claiming in effect, DFA “eliminated the very thing they were interested in.” I dispute this, saying DFA does not lead to the elimination of any data.
To explain, I’ll use the idea of “black boxes.” Rather than not discuss what calculations are, I’ll treat them as processes in which we can see the inputs and outputs, but not the calculations themselves. By doing this, we can analyze Tol’s position without having to worry about all the mathematical details.
Now then, there are two black boxes. The first is the DFA black box. The second is an Exceedance Probability (EP) black box. The first box takes a temperature series, which I’ll call x, as its sole input. The box does what it does to x, and when it’s done, it comes up with a single value called the Hurst coefficient (also called Hurst exponent). That’s all.
With this value, the second black box is used. It takes as its input the same series x, but it also uses the Hurst coefficient generated by the first box. It runs, and it comes up with a value, called probability. This probability is the probability of the observed warming being “natural.” With these descriptions in mind, consider what Tol said in his guest post:
What did the authors eliminate from there analysis? Both black boxes used the same series (x) as input, so DFA didn’t change anything. All it did was produce a value, the Hurst coefficient. It didn’t generate a new series as output, so it couldn’t possibly have modified anything about what was being analyzed.
For a very rough analogy, imagine you are doing an analysis on a series, y. In one stage, you take the average of that series, giving you a single value. You then do a calculation on y in which you use that average as an input. This could be as simple as finding the standard deviation of the series.
Did you throw away any data? No. The single average you calculated clearly contains less information than the full series, but since you then used it in a calculation involving the full series, nothing was discarded. This is basically the same as what the authors did with DFA. With this in mind, consider comments from Tol such as these two:
Do these comments make any sense given the explanation I provided? No. Also, that the word “detrended” is in the name of DFA does not mean DFA produces a detrended series which the authors analyzed, though this is the impression Tol gives with the latter comment. DFA does not create a new series to be used. DFA simply calculates that one value, the Hurst coefficient.
Of course, you have only my word this explanation is accurate. Others may tell you it is wrong. If you cannot verify what I’ve said by looking into what the papers did (or what DFA does), allow me to suggest an alternative. Before believing anyone who advances Tol’s position, demand they tell you which input value has data eliminated from it. If they cannot do so, don’t believe them.
Michael (84)
Indeed. You never recommended re-education camps. I apologize.
You did, however, repeatedly argue, when challenged, that (1) there is a scientific imperative in climate policy and (2) people who did not share your view were lacking in education.
@Ed
Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) detrends the data and estimates the Hurst exponent from the remaining fluctuations. DFA thus yields information about the fluctuations around the trend, but not about the trend itself. In the opening paragraph, LLE state their interest in the trend — but they do not analyze the trend.
Brandon claims that I claimed that LLE removed data. I certainly did not claim that, and LLE did not remove any data.
Perhaps we can have this discussion at Climate Etc?
Richard (102)
Agreed about best to keep that discussion over there. It’s already ongoing and we have a different set of issues already being discussed over here.
Ed (100)
My experience with Brandon as a commenter here is that he likes to argue for the sake of arguing. I’ve found it to be futile because he debates something entirely different than what is the issue at hand. It’s tiresome. Especially when he gets all testy and cocksure when you try to reason with him. All this is on ample display in that thread.
Keith, to be fair, I think you jumped the shark on this one yet again. Classic case of confirmation bias. The argument was just beginning over there, but you couldn’t wait to post. You dismiss Brandon, despite the fact that you haven’t the slightest clue as to participate in the math discussion. Brandon tiresome Keith, how about you.
Bob,
I can tell the difference between math and smoke.
Since you let my first comment stand, I assume you admit to confirmation bias. And keith, if you don’t know what math looks like, how to you know what smoke looks like.
Bob (104)
Brandon demonstrates his mathematical ability in the discussion on the covariance structure. It’s only a few posts.
Bob,
Please, no games. You can play those elsewhere.
The Brandon Shollenberger discussion is an example of what is wrong with Curry’s blog. I believe that Curry has the expertise to judge the quality and correctness of his position, but she hasn’t done so. As Keith says, it looks like smoke to me and if I worked hard I expect I would be able to make some sort of judgement on his maths, but I don’t have the time and I couldn’t be sure. There are other commenters on there who attempt to debate like Shollenberger but are far less sucessful and even I can see they are wrong. Curry doesn’t comment often on these either. I think she needs to take some responsibility for the comments and commenters on her blog. As it stands, it’s useless, to me at least.
A person who follows this blog alerted me to this post yesterday, and I’ve kind of followed it since. This is fortunate, as otherwise I’d have missed this statement by Richard S.J. Tol:
Brandon claims that I claimed that LLE removed data. I certainly did not claim that, and LLE did not remove any data.
To the best of my knowledge, I have never said Tol claimed such. To check the veracity of my memory, I went back and read all of my responses to him, but I didn’t see anything to support what he says. The closest I found were these two comments, neither of which says what he said. I did use the phrase “throw away data,” but that was in what I termed “a very rough analogy.” I don’t think that could reasonably be said to be me claiming what Tol claims I claim he claimed.
Now then, I have made a large number of comments, so it is possible I’ve simply missed an actual example of me saying this. Because of this, I’d like to be clear. I do not claim Tol claimed the authors removed data. If I have made such a claim at any point, it was inadvertent, and I apologize for it.
P.S. Keith Kloor, it’s good to see you still hold to that ridiculous view of me. As you say, I am just being me, though we obviously disagree over what that entails. In any event, “We are who we are. People don’t change.”
OK Keith, we will end it. Be assured, however, that I am not playing games. You feel qualified to post on a technical issue that you have zero competence with and you claim I am playing games. What is your real purpose with this thread Keith, if not playing games with Judith. Your confirmation bias is front and center.
Brandon (110)
Thank you for that lucid illustration.
Bob,
You’ve read what Tol and Mosher and others have said that thread. But you’re going with the horse Brandon is riding. And you don’t have confirmation bias?
Richard Tol, I’m not sure what you are calling an “illustration” (or what it is supposedly depicting), but assuming you aren’t being sarcastic, you’re welcome.
Keith
Not apples to apples but it appears you and Willis Eschenbach have more in common than I thought.
“Judith, you misunderstand what you are up to, and you totally underestimate the power that you are wielding these days. You are no longer throwing something up on the blackboard for your students to discuss. You have a much wider reach, and with that come wider responsibilities.”
………………………… and………………………………………..
“Out here in the real world, however, not taking a stand doesn’t make you look like an impartial scientist or an excellent teacher. It just makes you look weak and deceptive, because (whether you have noticed or not) when you post someone else’s claim and make no attempt to investigate it, you are implicitly backing up and supporting that claim.”
http://judithcurry.com/2011/05/25/freedom-of-information/#comment-70623
This is a good example how scientifically valuable Climate etc is. Without it, Richard Tol’s critique would be the last word and everybody would be misled, thinking that the 2 papers are of no value. That’s how we got here, suppressing anything that might dilute the message.
Good job Mr. Shollenberger!
Keith Kloor –
In a dispute over a technical issue like this, you tend to be very much influenced by the atmospherics of the debate. Because Tol is credentialled and employed a lot of harsh language at the start you seem to assume that he is therefore correct.
I don’t know who is correct and don’t have time to look into it myself. Maybe Tol is right, maybe the authors are right, maybe there are strengths and wekanesses to both positions. Maybe you should invite one of the authors to respond. But what is going on here is of little value.
Keith#103 “My experience with Brandon as a commenter here is that he likes to argue for the sake of arguing. I’ve found it to be futile because he debates something entirely different than what is the issue at hand. It’s tiresome. Especially when he gets all testy and cocksure when you try to reason with him. All this is on ample display in that thread.”
My post #100 from Brandon is about as nice an explanation on a difficult subject as I have see in some time. He seems to be quite on target with the issue at hand vs Tol. If this is an “argue for the sake of arguing”, I would think that more should engage in it.
Tom C (117)
What is being discussed here (up until now) is whether what is happening over at Climate Etc with respect to the guest post is of any value.
Ed Forbes (118)
You cherry picked one comment of his. Brandon, I have concluded, is a more annoying version of NiV (who has been notably absent from the Climate Etc threads on this). Both can mount very compelling sounding arguments for why the moon is made of green cheese.
I can’t be bothered.
A lot of the argument here comes down to how we characterize blogs.
If we want blogs to aspire to some kind of authority—to be reliable sources of information—then Tol’s criticisms are right on target and Curry calling attention to spurious analysis is akin (in a distant way) to a major newspaper giving prominent coverage to pseudoscientific studies that cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccinations. While the paper could claim, “we were not endorsing that study; just calling attention to it so it could receive scrutiny,” but the practical effect might be people interpreting the story as an endorsement that there was enough substance to be worth reporting, and thus using its claims in their personal decisions whether to vaccinate their kids.
However, if we don’t view blogs as journalism and don’t treat them as sources of authority, then Tol is barking up the wrong tree. Pielke has said that he views blogs as more like the kind of discussions people conduct over beers at the neighborhood bar, and from that perspective Richard’s criticism makes no more sense than telling the crowd at the pub to leave sports commentary to the experts.
Tol makes some valid points here, but Pielke is more persuasive. People will read these blogs or not as they choose, and when a blog repeatedly calls attention to crap, its credibility and its audience will adjust to reflect this. Climate Etc. is not The Wall Street Journal, so the greater danger in Curry’s gushing over crap is to Curry’s reputation, not to the public understanding of science.
Ed (118)
Schollenberger (100) argues as follows: “You said I said you said they removed data. Not true: I said you said they threw away data. So there.”
The whole issue about removing, throwing away, deleting, eliminating, ignoring, omitting or not using data is a red herring. LLE did not do that. No one claimed they did.
Jonathan (120)
Thanks for this really interesting, thought-provoking comment.
Jonathan Gilligan’s analogy to highlighting pseodoscientific studies on vaccine hits the mark for me. You can argue blogs are akin to converstaions in a pub, but how many of those get reported in the Daily Mail? I don’t think there’s any question that they influence the tone of the debate and ultimately this influences policy.
Jonathan (120)
Good point. With academics blogging and tweeting, and journalists, and prime ministers, and institutes, departments, agencies and companies, I don’t think there is a one-rule-fits-all.
I consider social media as an extension of my professional entity as a teacher, researcher, and policy analyst. I have another online persona that is for my friends only, and we talk beer and sports and women.
I believe that I disagree with Jonathan Gilligan regarding how public opinions are formed. What sources seem authoritative and which ones resonate?
OWS, for example, has given, in my opinion, a huge amount of traction to the concepts of a 1% in opposition to the 99% and Wall Street as the target, not just government. I think that the demonstrations have a reach that traditional journalistic sources such as the WSJ, can’t easily match or editorially counteract.
However, beers, and blogs probably are shared with others in ways that give a considerable amount of confirmation bias.
And to me, that means that Tol’s efforts to let his analysis of the statistics be better known are right on target.
OPatrick (123),
Yes, this is along the lines of what I was thinking, too. And it really works both ways. For example, Joe Romm’s blog is very influential with some opinion leaders (such as Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman) and has often been cited in news articles.
The larger point I would make–and I’m still chewing on Jonathan’s comment–is that blogs (and twitter) are part of the media ecosystem. Sussing out the degree of influence is another matter, but make no mistake: non-traditional online media play a definite role in the climate discourse and the communication of climate-related news and information.
@ Keith (119)
I don’t want to make general statements about Brandon (simply don’t know enough about him) but the argument excerpted by Ed in (100) is worthless.
That said you are completely wrong about NiV. He may get a bit too long on an argument but he is never bullshitting.
My experience with Brandon as a commenter here is that he likes to argue for the sake of arguing. I’ve found it to be futile because he debates something entirely different than what is the issue at hand.
He appears to be very lawyerish. Throw up a bunch of smoke for a jury, composed perhaps partly of a few who are looking hard for reasonable doubt who then try to convince themselves and others that the smoke is something real.
@Richard #124. “I don’t think there is a one-rule-fits-all.” Good point.
KK “I beg to differ. Judging by the voluminous comments, it appears that most Climate Etc. readers are very much having their prejudices reinforced.”
Such an observation can only be made by a person whose own prejudices blind his powers of observation. It seems that many true believers perceive that anyone who questions the projections of catastrophe have lost, or maybe never had, their ability to reason and to consider alternate explanation for observed climate and weather variations.
Science continues at JC’s
Ludecke et al. respond
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/10/ludecke-et-al-respond/#more-5803
R. Tol claims “However, the question is not yet answered which forcings cause the actual global temperature change”. Actually, this was not at all what our work was aimed for. Everyone who is familiar with persistence, HURST exponents, DFA etc. knows very well that these methods cannot give any information about the nature of trends or persistence (if trends are found). See also the appropriate remark in LL on page 5 where we denote “”¦ neither Eq. (2) nor a power law of the fluctuation of the FA or DFA says anything about its origin”. We assume that this statement is clear enough, but it was not percieved by R. Tol. Consequently, we did not eliminate anything as Tol argues in “They eliminated from their analysis the very thing in which they are interested.”
The quote presented by Ed just above strikes me as dishonest, but if it is or is not, it is a straw man. Tol’s statements are removed from the context that makes clear “the very thing in which they are interested.” refers to the trend, not the attribution question “which forcings cause the actual global temperature change” L et al start this point with.
IMO, the evidence (more than just the above) is very strong that they are actively creating and pushing disinformation. Curry may or may not be spreading it knowingly, but a profession of ignorance from her is not very encouraging. I don’t buy for a second the feigned innocence.
talk about strawmen. I think Colby needs to read Tol’s main post again. Tol is very much into “attribution”.
Tol: What caused the warming?
Colby:trend, not the attribution question
Colby: “..Tol’s statements are removed from the context that makes clear “the very thing in which they are interested.” refers to the trend, not the attribution question “which forcings cause the actual global temperature change” ..”
Tol:..”So far so good. Unfortunately, fluctuation analysis does not work on trending variables. Therefore, LLE use DETRENDED fluctuation analysis. That is, they first fit a polynomial of order two to the data, remove this trend, and study the deviations from the trend.Having removed the trend from their data, LLE cannot answer the question: What caused the warming? They eliminated from their analysis the very thing in which they are interested…”
Hi Ed,
Okay, thanks for the context. It is more muddled than I recall however I think I am still correct in my interpretation of Tol’s criticism even if I must acknowledge that L et al have a defensible reason for answering the wrong argument.
I take Tol’s question “what caused the warming” as meaning “was the warming forced or unforced natural variation” and therefore I do not think it is about attribution in the IPCC “attribution and detection” sense.
L. et al’s examination was strictly statistical in nature and Tol’s point, (un)addressed above, is that their treatment removes the trend as a first step in that analysis. The phrase “which forcings cause the actual global temperature change” does not appear anywhere close to the point that Tol expounds on that arguement.
Ed (132) Coby (133)
It’s not about me. The LLE paper is entitled: How Natural is the Recent Centennial Warming?
It acknowledges that there is a trend (“warming”) and argues that the trend is a natural phenomenon.
The IPCC definitions of detection and attribution mystify me. I would think that LLE take it for granted that climate change has been detected, and they seek to attribute this to natural causes.
If I understand the IPCC correctly, if you successfully attribute a trend to internal variability, you did not attribute but undetect.
I just saw Richard Tol’s comment @121. I am disappointed to see his so grossly misrepresent what I said in my comment @110 (not 100), especially as that indicates his comment @112 was sarcastic.
I don’t intend to follow this post closely, but I challenge anyone to show his representation of my comment is accurate.
Tol says that (IOW) It is intuitively obvious that JC is spreading disinformation
Time for a (true) story as related by my business partner J
In chem class, the prof makes the statement that from an equation he just wrote on the board that it follows that if this is true then it is “intuitively obvious” that the following is true. He stops, thinks for a second, and says “or is it?” Leaves the room for 20 min, returns, and without missing a beat..”yes”¦from this we can see that it is intuitively obvious”¦”
Richard,
The IPCC, reflecting the field of climate science, are not considering anything that is unforced natural variation to be a trend in climate attributes, rather it is a just characteristic of a stable climate. Therefore the two step process: 1) is there a trend (ie something that requires an external forcing to occur) – aka detection and 2) what is the forcing or combination of forcings that has caused this – aka attribution.
It seems intuitively obvious (Ed’s amusing story notwithstanding!) that any purely statistical treatment of temperature data alone can not say anything about attribution (in the IPCC meaning).
I think Richard Toll has a point, – and it would be a pity if these two fell out -however, as usual, in these blog-a-wars, it’s perhaps overdone. I myself, by the way, have fallen into a slight dissolusion with Judith Curry, who seems, sometimes, to much to enjoy ‘mothering’ her audience rather than sticking to her original purpose and project. “A Duchess at Clarrieges with nine boneen” as Ezra Pound once put it. By the way, I hope that doesn’t sound sexist because it was not intended to be. Just poetry.
But just on point one: what possibly, in this context, could be ‘everything’, especially in this context? The whole of climate science, perhaps?
Also, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse Judith Curry of being ‘statistically illiterate’. Her expertise surely precludes this. That she is not a statician does not imply, and we know in her case this to be true, an unfamiliarity with statistics, albeit not to the sophistication of Richard Toll (or McIntyre for that matter ).
But the essence of the question is, what is and what people think should be (and what she wishes it to be, of course) Judith Currys’ blog policy. Here, I am on her side. Is Richard holding her to a higher standard than other blogs? I think so. Perhaps somewhat utopian expectations? I think it perfectly right, and within her right, and within her project, to throw up oddball papers, with or without context, as long as the sine qua non of all such ‘throw ups’ is that people think. Richard and Judith, both, have made us do that!
Also, I wonder what Richard is trying to say at 8. How does ‘misinformation’ cause ‘damnage’ and how do ‘flawed’ papers ‘surface’? In the jostle and competition of ideas, what is ‘dangerous’ about flawed ideas? This is something I never would have expected from Richard Toll, that ‘ideas’, however ‘flawed’, are a public danger. It’s very European but I hope you Citizens of the U.S.A, are immune to this, what I would call, anti-democratic and cowardly nonsense – it seems to go along with the idea that, a) the public is stupid and easily lead and, therefore, b) ‘experts’ must be careful how clean the pearls of wisdom that they themselves cannot swallow, drop out of there mouth! Absurdities that I’m sure Richard will consider and reconsider!
OPatrick # 109
“The Brandon Shollenberger discussion is an example of what is wrong with Curry’s blog. I believe that Curry has the expertise to judge the quality and correctness of his position, but she hasn’t done so.”
That’s not what Judith does. She does something much more subtle and, it has to be said, educational, though not all seem to be able to grasp it.
She’s a facilitator. She’s not didactic (all the best adult educators are like that – education being my professional specialty). Her purpose is not to impart knowledge from a lofty point, but to act as an enabler for open discussion and the development and exercise of critical thinking. She allows anyone with a view to put it out there, and does so without fear or favour. They will stand or fall by the force of their own arguments.
Her views, and I’m sure she has them, are neither here nor there. Genuinely sceptical people do not accept arguments from authority, so what point in her attempting to influence them?
A good adjective for Judith is “humble”. Very few have the moral integrity or intellectual courage not to try to influence through applying their own authority. In the blogosphere, she’s so far above most in wisdom that many can’t perceive what she is doing without getting a crick in the neck.
Keith, I like your blog, but on this occasion, as has been pointed out by someone else, I believe your confirmation bias is showing.
Michael Larkin, I’m sorry but my only possible response to your comment at 141 is to applaud it as a moment of comedy genius.
Lewis (140)
The papers are logically flawed. The conclusion does not follow from the analysis. In fact, the analysis is so bad that no conclusion can be drawn.
“Genuinely sceptical people do not accept arguments from authority…”
And in the real world, fools ignore expert majority recommendations where real world action must be decided upon.
Apologies in advance for the long comment but there are a number of thoughts which have occurred to me as I’ve followed this story over the last few days.
From the perspective of a non-scientist ISTM that “gatekeeping” in science is both necessary and useful if we are to try to separate worthwhile ideas from those with no merit, given that there will always be many different ideas jostling for space in the scientific literature and for wider attention generally. Isn’t this after all the point of peer review? That’s not to say that flawed papers should not be published or discussed, sometimes they can still contain interesting ideas (I’m thinking Svensmark here for example) but surely it is better that downright bad papers do not see the light of day. Unfortunately sometimes they do and are on occasions siezed on and given unwarranted publicity so it may be necessary to examine them and explain why they are wrong, as Science of Doom did very well with Miskolczi and Gerlich & Tscheuschner but why is there any benefit to anyone in highlighting bad papers which would otherwise have remained obscure as Curry did? There are plenty of decent papers worthy of attention after all.
I do think that scientists have a certain responsibility when they engage with the wider public, and that includes defending those areas of science which are sound and criticising or at least not promoting ideas which are not, which means acting as a filter. This is necessary both for promoting good science and for helping the public to understand and make judgements about our current state of scientific knowledge. To suggest that this means treating the public as if they are stupid is downright nonsense – many people, me included, are not at all stupid but simply do not have the particular skills and knowledge necessary to interpret some scientific papers and reach an educated opinion on them without some expert guidance. The fact that there are some who do not want to reach an educated opinion but just want to reinforce their preexisting views makes it all the more necessary for scientists to supply some context when bringing papers to the public attention. So given the above I think it reasonable that when Curry highlights a paper without comment it is seen as implicitly saying it has some value, and when the paper is of no merit this is both irresponsible and a disavowal of her own authority as a scientist.
After all, surely if Climate etc. has any value at all it comes to a large extent from the fact that by virtue of the position she holds and her publishing record she does have a claim to some authority and to some respect for her scientific achievements. That’s what should, as Gavin points out earlier, distinguish her from the likes of Morano and Watts. If she’s just going to push any old rubbish and say “hey, look at this” as she did in this case or with the Murray Salby paper”¦. well I’m quite capable of doing that and there a number of people who already do it.
Of course the ultimate arbiter of what appears on Judith Curry’s blog is Judith Curry, but she presumably wants to attract an audience in which case she has to consider whether the stuff she posts is likely to attract or discourage the kind of audience she wants. And if her actions could potentially have wider consequences then of course it’s perfectly legitimate for others to criticise her.
J Bowers Says:
November 11th, 2011 at 4:58 am “Genuinely sceptical people do not accept arguments from authority”¦” And in the real world, fools ignore expert majority recommendations where real world action must be decided upon.
LoL…In the real world I am what’s known as the onsite “Resident Engineer” for construction projects. Engineering projects get much more “peer review” than what I see pass through the “pal review” seen in much of the “expert majority” in climate science. As I have to make sure what is on the plans can actually get on the ground, being “skeptical” of “expert majority recommendations” is part of my job description.
[…] Keith has a nice rundown of the discussion, and the ensuing thread over there contains many good comments. He’s got a knack for hosting interesting discussions. […]
-120-Jonathan Gilligan says it best:
“People will read these blogs or not as they choose, and when a blog repeatedly calls attention to crap, its credibility and its audience will adjust to reflect this. Climate Etc. is not The Wall Street Journal, so the greater danger in Curry’s gushing over crap is to Curry’s reputation, not to the public understanding of science.”
Amen.
I partly agree with Jonathan Gilligan.
Another greater danger is more delay for the debate we are supposed to have, not: Is it warming? Is it because of CO2/GHGs? Is humankind emitting those GHGs?, but: Will it be a little bit bad (in combination with other global problems) or very bad? What can/should we do about it?
Now I know EIKE is only interested in the delay because they don’t want any policy, and so they keep rehashing the arguments that have been systematically debunked in the past 20 years. But what does Curry want? Does she also want delay? Is that why she gives EIKE a platform, and then uses that for a series of more blah-blah-blah-blah BS?
Last that = the ensuing controversy
Roger quoting Jonathan (148):
That’s a good point, but something important is missing: It’s damaging both to the host’s reputation (her problem) and to to the public understanding of science (everyone’s problem, even though Curry tries to belittle that by calling it “arguing politics through science”). CE is a pretty big bar, with thousands of people listening, and often finding its way to othre media, journalists, senators, etc.
See also my rundown and perspective here: http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/to-publish-bs-or-not-thats-the-question-judith-curry-vs-richard-tol/
Let get this stright
JC’s rep is reduced because Tol fires off half cocked with statements he cannot backup
Ok……
I concur with Verheggen @151. My impression in reading through this dialog is that there are certain people who ought to know better, who treat the dispute over global climate change as if it’s some sort of game… perhaps a Forensics Society debate, wherein the particular answer reached is less important than the intellectual exercise of debating it, as if there’s nothing of any importance riding on the outcome. I might be more sympathetic to this sort of “mock science” approach in different circumstances; however, this is serious business, and ought to be treated as such.
Trolling through the literature for methodologically-flawed papers for the fun of seeing them debated, causes a huge ripple effect as the misinformation, misunderstanding, and confusion perpetuates itself through the Denialist blogosphere. Conducting this sort of exercise within the confines of a classroom may teach students a valuable lesson in scientific method, but that’s not the situation we are facing. Trotting it out on influential web sites is not a lesson in scientific method, but an exercise in social irresponsibility. Scientists have a duty to exercise their best judgment–without bias or prejudice–regarding which information is worth perpetuating. Otherwise, their greatest contribution will be in multiplying confusion and misapprehension rather than clarity.
There is a real and urgent need for political consensus to accompany the scientific consensus that has already emerged…. and we’re losing precious time.
“There is a real and urgent need for political consensus”
there is political consensus in the US on CAGW…it is to be sent to the dust bin.
Next election, no matter who wins the WH, will see even more existing CAGW policies sent off. I feel better about this this subject every month as the politics move closer and closer to my positon.
And what if your position is wrong, Ed?
-151-Bart V
To make this case you need to show that
(a) blog discussions (or media more generally) have a detectable influence on public opinion
(b) that change in public opinion has detectable political effects
(c) those political effects have an effect on policy
In The Climate Fix have summarized polling data and several empirical studies of the relationship of public opinion and political action that suggest that you cannot in fact support (a), (b) and (c).
Your argument is the well worn “linear model” which posits that if scientists speak with one voice about “the facts” then the public, politicians and eventually policy action will follow as the scientists prefer. Such a model of political action is appealing to many scientists because it posits that what we say on blogs and elsewhere has great importance. But what if we are just folks cahtting in a corner bar? 😉
The paper is uninformative.
Bart (151): Thousands of people is insignificant to US public opinion. You do ask the more important question whether Curry carries greater influence than merely visitors to her blog by affecting what and how news media cover climate. It’s a question that can be answered somewhat empirically. I don’t see that she has much influence that way, but I haven’t looked carefully or systematically and may be wrong.
Even if she does have influence at one time, reporters are generally good at spotting crap and adjust their sourcing as they learn more. Maxwell and Jules Boykoff’s “Balance as Bias” documented big problems at one time in the way prestige news media covered climate change, but Keith and other journos here have presented persuasive arguments that the news media heard the criticism and changed its practice so the biased balance is no longer prevalent. Similarly, if Curry highlights nonsense, a reporter may bite once or twice, but will generally learn to look elsewhere for tips.
Back to the role of blogs: Tol wants academics’ public blogs to follow an academic kind of code of responsible posting. Curry wants her blog to be a more informal place where she can try out half-baked ideas and get feedback. She describes herself as a few years from retirement and not terribly concerned with her professional reputation (that’s part of her soi-disant Radical Scholar shtick). Each to his/her own. One result is that thoughtful people will take Tol’s blogging much more seriously because he’s clear that he takes care what he posts. But I really don’t see any good reason why Curry should have to run her blog according to Tol’s preferences, so long as she is clear about what she’s trying to do with her blog. The Economist and the National Enquirer have very different goals and very different judgments about what constitutes newsworthiness (and contrary to prejudices, National Enquirer does a heck of a lot of careful fact-checking) and there’s room for both at the corner news stand.
Curry’s blog is, in my estimation, small and inconsequential to public opinion. Moreover, whether we like her or not, she’s open about her intentions and goals. We would do better to worry more about hidden ideological bias (the journalistic equivalent of Roger’s stealth issue advocacy) in media that have many orders of magnitude greater influence than Climate Etc., but that’s an issue that won’t fit nicely into a blog comment, so I’ll leave it for another time.
Jonathan (158)
I agree with your assessment of this current controversy regarding Toll and Curry but I found your link on hidden ideological bias somewhat ironic considering the discussion is about blogs, responsibility and influencing public opinion.
Here is why
A Web-based,(essentially a blog) not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Whose founder and Chairman recently said in an interview is conducting as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel is the source and very much the only view presented in the Guardian news article.
Neven Says:
November 12th, 2011 at 2:54 am “And what if your position is wrong, Ed?”
My position is that you forcing me into buying the most expensive power generation devised is nuts.
What makes it even more nuts is that if you figure in the entire life and maintenance cycle of the windmills, solar, backup fossil fuel generators, and all of their support, it does not do what you want…which is to lower CO2.
I will take the chance that my position is wrong as I have heard nothing out there other than atomic which might work to lower CO2, which the greens hate.
As I see it, even if you are right, the Green solution will NOT work.
Let me add a bit on the costs as this is now in the news for the Brits
Even they, the greenest of the green, are starting to step back after looking into the abyss.
UK solar companies take legal action against subsidies cuts. The legal action comes soon after the government’s announcement it will cut feed in tariffs from 43p (US $0.685) per kWh to 21p
After she highlighted the non existent Salby paper, which purported to show humans are not responsible for the increase in CO2 we are currently seeing, I have stayed away from Curry’s blog. It is a waste of time, especially given the huge volume of ignorant comments that pass for a discussion most of the time. It is little better than WUWT, despite the censorship of challenges to Watts which passes for moderation.
Given Curry’s status as a bonafide climate scientist, I find this failure totally puzzling. It seems like she is playing some kind of mind game.
“reporters are generally good at spotting crap and adjust their sourcing as they learn more”
I don’t understand this Jonathan. David Rose won’t adjust his source because it’s crap and I don’t think he is alone, or even unusual, in this. Does he not count as a reporter?
Also, is Curry really open about her intentions and goals? I was interested when she first started her blog because she talked aboaut having strict moderation for technical threads, and still does talk about this, yet she’s failed to do it. It seems to me that her blog is claiming to be something it isn’t. You say that it’s Fox News, for example, that has the hidden ideological agenda, but I’d argue the opposite. Their bias is barely camouflaged. If I really wanted to hide my agenda it would probably end up looking something like Curry’s blog, where doubt is always in the air.
I do agree with you though that one thing I’ll take from this is to pay more attention to what Richard Tol is writing.
I think I repeated, at (140) passim, what others had articulated far better than me, Judith Curry, no least. So apologies.
Richard (143),
Yes, I think I was being unfair to you, for which I apologise. But, I’m no mind reader, is there not some unacknowledged ‘feeling’ on both parts? It does seem to me, that to some extent, Judith Curry likes to highlight some dodgy ‘science’, not because she in anyway would ‘agree’ but out of sheer cussedness. But on your part, being a well respected critic of much that goes by the name of ‘climate science’ are being a little, shall we say, ‘touchy, about papers that might, shall we say, implicate such ‘critics’. Ie, in ‘opposition’, one must be as pure as snow . And in this ‘opposition’ Judith is an ally who, in this case, disappoints. Your ‘opposition’, by the way, has the badge number “(81)” (yes, that fellow!)
But there is a larger question here which I’d like to address. People often say that ‘”science is not a democracy” which, I believe, is a misunderstanding of both democracy and science. First of all, let us state, from the beginning, without ‘democracy’, ie an ‘open society’, there would be no science. Why is this so?
1) Democracy is not about voting in ‘experts’ but executive representatives. One does not vote for a plumber. It is true that a bad plumber will, in the end, see little business and, in the meantime, could persuade a lot of fools, to use him. But that is not democracy but rather the usual negotiations of society, in any system.
2) Democracy is not about equality. Or even equality of respect. That, I believe is another and utopian system. Democracy, that is to say, is not about equality except in the special and formal sense of ‘equality before the law’ . It is, therefore, not true that ‘democracy’, per se, is antithetical to hierarchy.
3) Democracy is about the ‘open society’ and, therefore debate. And, note, an ‘open society’ is always prior and foundational to any formal democracy proper. Was the society of Newton and the Royal Society democratic. Not at all, but it was open. These distinctions must be kept clearly in mind.
4) Science, itself, is, on these terms, and by definition, open, both in terms of ideas and personnel. It is impossible to have science without it being democratic, in the sense of being an open society.
Now, of course, it is obvious that a good plumber would not use a bad tool and would spot one before trying to. And, therefore, a scientist must act the same. By what method can scientist determine a ‘good tool’ from a bad one.? In many cases it is obvious but in some one tool or another needs proper testing. and how is this done? By throwing it in to the ‘open society’. This is what Judith believes she is doing. Your debate with her is how ‘open’ that society should be and whether we can trust that ‘openness’.
Anyway, I ‘throw’ out this longuer as a hopefull clarification of some the issues? Long winded, notwithstanding!
Jonathan,
I don’t share your optimism that “reporters are generally good at spotting crap”. Some are and some aren’t. Resources for mainstream media to do some minimal fact checking have declined. The situation may have improved, but is still far from ideal.
Jonathan, Roger,
On the influence of blogs: I agree that blogs mainly cater to the incrowd, let me quote our host:
“It’s hard to quantify to what degree they influence the public discourse on climate science and policy. Suffice to say: they matter.”
In the interview Keith did with me and Lucia (see previous link) I concurred that those who are immersed in the climate blogs are not representative of the general public, and that we are basically talking amongst ourselves (the tow most polarized groups in the public debate). But discussions at blogs can influence the general opinion in several ways: By the avid blog readers to act as trhe front-runners/trend setters in the societal debate. Judith specifically coined a term for that; type 1,2,3,4 or some such. Another way, which I aluded to before, is that blog posts may make their way to the MSM and politicians. This is clear for e.g. WUWT, CA, RC and CP. CE may enter that league as well. I once read an article in a Dutch (!) newspaper, in the aftermath of climategate, that was clearly based on a WUWT article. In the whole climategate reporting the blogosphere played a tremendously important role.
I think Bart Verheggen (151) illustrates nicely what I’m trying to articulate. Do we trust the hustle and bustle of an open society or do we decide to treat it with suspicion? For what Bart declined to mention is that he has a political, ie ‘policy’, perspective. Ie he would like his imagined ‘fical’ public to be only ‘informed’ in the right way, ie to his liking, rather than to be exposed to all information, whether ‘dis-‘ or not. This is the real essence of the question: are you prepared to fully give yourself to this openness, to take the courage to debate and be debate against, or do you disapprove of this openness and wish to manipulate and authoritate the ‘crowd’, of which, you have therefore, obvious contempt.. In this case, Bart is the milder version of Micheal T, who is the milder version of Romm. None of whom could be said to be quite in favour of an open society of which Richard (despite this spat), Judith, Roger et al and I are.
This is the real essence of the question: are you prepared to fully give yourself to this openness, to take the courage to debate and be debate against, or do you disapprove of this openness and wish to manipulate and authoritate the “˜crowd’, of which, you have therefore, obvious contempt..
Lewis Deane @166: Well said.
This is much of my problem with the orthodox. They are instinctively authoritarian. Democracy and open debate are all well and good as long as the debate can be controlled so the “correct” solutions emerge.
I have asked several times where the orthodox stand on democracy and have received no answer … which is the answer, if I’m not mistaken.
I’m not sure I get your point, Keith. I observe that Tol’s critique is a good lesson. I observe that some dont want to learn.
I suppose your argument is this: “what if there is no Tol”
worry wort.
I find nothing wrong with ocassionaly publishing crazy stuff. Stuff outside the canon. If your concern is that people who believe the planet is at stake will not rise up to deconstruct the craziness, then that is your problem. Don’t try to make it Judith’s problem.
Huxley,
@167,
You are creating a false issue. No one who criticizes Curry claims that she has no right to run her blog as she sees fit.
She is correctly being criticized for not using her expertise to help the less knowledgeable people who frequent her blog understand what is sound versus what is flawed science. She presents the contents of obviously flawed papers as if they were respectable. It is misleading to a lot of people who don’t know better.
There is no value to anyone in doing this. A person like Curry should be educating the public, not misleading them, or wasting their time on nonsense. I don’t think it helps the process of democracy or openness to misinform people.
Eric:”She [JC] presents the contents of obviously flawed papers as if they were respectable.”
LoL..Tol got spanked for trying to show the papers were “obviously flawed” on their face. They may be “wrong”, but it sure was not “obvious” as Tol tried to present them. And they sure have not yet been proved “wrong” by Tol.
I do not think the word “obviuous” means what he thinks it means 🙂
Of course….I do understand the position by some that “respectable” papers do not try and show up there “betters”. Any that do so are not “respectable” by definition.
Eli
“Is it responsible to take a manuscript you know is wrong, and throw it on the table saying here is an interesting paper? ”
yes.
Is it responsible to take a manuscript you know is wrong, and throw it on the table saying here is a correct paper?
no.
@Bart (#165) and Jeff Norris (#159): Nice catch on the unintentional irony, Jeff. A very palpable hit!
For both of you, I’d like to understand better what the impact of blogs is. None of us has a good grasp of it, and it’s hard to get a good sense between the out-of-hand dismissal from those who don’t get the blogosphere, and the hype from those who let their enthusiasm for a new medium outrun the facts.
It’s important to note, as Tol did above, that not all blogs are equal.
Eric Adler (169)
I believe that huxley @167 is refering to my comment (for which much thanks) so your criticism is better addressed to me. And I think you are confusing Judith with an advocate. Does she have the ‘duty’ to educate a supposed ‘unthinking public’. Of course not. What are you and others afraid of? There are people who believe in all kinds of weird things but our society seems to function nevertheless. People tend to forget that an ‘open society’ is after a prehistory of intolerance and barbarism ie lessons were learned painfully about how to accommodate differences of view. It is only those, whether of the left or right, who find this tolerance inconvenient and, in some cases, intolerable that this a problem. And, of course, because Judith does not ‘educate’, does not didact, she does educate. As this case emphatically proves!
Ed Forbes seems to partake of too much pal review — “there is political consensus in the US on CAGW”¦it is to be sent to the dust bin.”
More Americans Believe Climate is Warming, Poll Finds
“According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted from Sept. 8 to 12, 83 percent of respondents said they believe the climate is getting warmer, compared with 75 percent last year. Seventy-one percent said they believe human activities are partly or mostly to blame for climate change, while 27 percent said they believe it is the result of natural causes…. those attacks appear to have led more Americans to think about global warming and conclude that, in fact, its is real. While more Americans believe in warming, the poll found that so-called climate skeptics are becoming more entrenched in their positions, with 53 percent saying they are certain in their views, compared with 35 percent last year.”
re #166 I am not opposed to an open society. I am opposed to a society that deludes itself that there is no such thing as expertise, and thus that opinions can be weighed only such basis as sincerity and intent. This is a recipe for disaster.
Recognizing actual expertise is a difficult matter. By its nature it has two parts: a delegation by the public to trusted intermediaries, and trustworthy intermediaries. Even though the press has somewhat improved in its tendency to go to someone like Pat Michaels for a counter-opinion anytime somebody with any expertise says anything about climate, the press still systematically oversimplifies sustainability issues and avoids their ramifications.
When people who putatively have expertise duck out as well, as Curry has done, the public discourse is to an even greater extent based on misimpressions.
It is by no means obvious how to bridge this gap, especially in matters where the public consensus is especially confused and ill-advised. But there is necessarily a role for somebody to do the basic taxonomy: this is the solid information, these are the real controversies, this is the noise.
I do not think that is what Joe Romm does, by the way. Joe advocates a particular policy perspective.
My position is that the public is smart enough to think about the ethical and policy issues, except for being systematically denied a clear perspective on the facts by virtue of injection of less informed speculation and tired ideological battles.
I am trying to find a niche for somebody to not only deliver the right information but also ask the right questions. “Curation” it’s called in some circles.
To be sure, some people want to keep arguing whether carbon dioxide accumulation is a big deal or not. At this point in time, some people, myself included, believe that the question is no longer worth discussing. As such, someone like me trying to forge conversation taking that as demonstrated, will appear “closed” to those who somehow manage to believe it is an open question. They are free to go elsewhere. But it is reasonable to claim that no matter how strongly people argue for phlogiston or a ten-thousand year old universe or the luminiferous ether, they are wrong, and should at some point be treated as a historical curiosity, not as equals in a debate.
Progress is the whole point. Arguments like #166 implicitly reject the idea of scientific progress, in favor of endless sophomoric debate. The fact remains that science makes progress and bad ideas are eliminated, but this requires increasingly hard work as science gets deeper and more solidly grounded.
There’s no question that this causes serious problems when the science finds something that the body politic has to cope with. There’s no automatic answer, either; disciplines do go off the rails sometimes. But waving away the idea of expertise won’t yield a tolerable outcome.
Jonathan Gilligan,
You say in #158 that JC’s influence can be answered somewhat empirically, which you estimate as inconsequential to public opinion. I’m not sure how this question can be settled by empirical resources we actually have. If we don’t have the resources to settle this question, using this criteria as a way to evaluate what “matters” creates a condition that is not possible to satisfy by the empirical resources we now have.
I believe this kind of argument has been used before in a context that is not very far from us. In fact, according to a recent post by Judith herself, this could be considered as a mean of desinformation. The onus is on the one who proposes this criteria to show that it would be possible to “detect”, and then to show that this criteria is a necessary condition for an influence to “matter”.
Perhaps there would a way out with what you say in the end of that comment:
> We would do better to worry more about hidden ideological bias.
I’m not sure how much hidden is Fox News’ bias, but I suppose you are referring to other outlets, like the Daily Mail (?). In any case, suppose we can find how these biased outlets promote (?) Judith Curry’s words, we could have the beginning of an empirical (?) verification. We could assume that Fox News or the Daily Mail have some impact (?). I’m not sure anyone would like to contest that they do.
Journalistic Network Analysis, anyone?
Ed Forbes,
I am not an expert in the statistical techniques being discussed. Tol seems to give a good account of his side to me. It isn’t obvious that he is being spanked.
The thing that turned me against Curry was her touting the non existent Salby paper and book, which supposedly showed that humans were not responsible for the CO2 increase we are experiencing. There is no published paper that has come out, and the talk didn’t have any slides or graphs.
There is no reasonable doubt among climate scientists that humans are responsible for the rise in CO2. Simple accounting shows that human activity is emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere than is absorbed by human activity since 1800. Whatever the magnitude of natural fluctuations may be is beside the point.
To present such a paper as something worthy of consideration is ridiculous.
Academic freedom is an old privilege. Academics can report the results of their research without fearing that the political fall-out would affect their economic security or their career.
But freedom creates duty. Academics should not publicly mingle in discussions on topics that are outside their expertise.
In the discussion, Curry admits that she had not thoroughly considered the original guest post by Ludeke; and it also clear that she does not have any particular expertise in statistics.
Curry thus exercises her democratic right to write whatever, but fails her academic duty to restraint in public.
Unfortunately, the “about” tap positions Curry as an academic and Climate Etc as a serious forum. This blog does show such pretense, but the discussion here (and at Bart’s) is much better than at Curry’s.
Lewis Deane (166),
You set up a false dichotomy of either keep debating everything until the end of time or being authoritarian and manipulative. Needless to say, I find both unpalatable.
What I think of science is not important. What matters for the societal debate is to what conclusions the scientific process has converged; what evidence has accummulated. Imo, the media ought to report on scientific issues somewhat in the same ratio as the scientists view these issues: If the vast majority of scientists concluded that HIV causes aids, than the media ought to report that vast majority opinion, and leave only a few % space for the minority (if in scientific cirlces that’s also a few% opinion). Doing otherwise gives a skewed picture of the science.
#175,
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. The thing that bothers people about Judith is that she meets all the requirements to be a “scientific authority”, and so it completely ruins all the arguments from authority to have her sometimes batting for the other team. It’s not that people are worried the public will take these papers seriously because Judith chose to highlight them, it’s that they can’t attack them without also attacking the basis of argument from authority on which they rely. They’re peer-reviewed papers being presented by a professor of climatology. How are non-experts supposed to know what the orthodoxy they’re supposed to believe is, if you can’t trust the experts to know what they’re talking about? Or if the experts don’t speak with one consistent voice, not having “curated” away any different opinions before letting the public see it?
The problem Judith poses is not simply about what it does to her own site’s usefulness or reputation, or what confusion any snippets of “misinformation” she passes on might cause, but what it does to the very idea of gatekeepers and trusted authorities whose self-appointed task it is to separate the wheat from the chaff on behalf of us lesser mortals, and ensure we only get to see that side of the picture.
#177,
In science, no ideas are out of bounds for discussion. I’ve seen physicists seriously discuss tachyonic neutrinos and time machines and bridges to other universes hidden inside spinning black holes, and what consequences they might have. When I see some claim that nobody is allowed to question, my immediate reaction is to turn the rock over to see what is hiding underneath. The usual reason for people not liking questions is that there is something about it they don’t understand – if they did, they’d be only too happy to explain it.
But this doesn’t mean they’re being dishonest in doing so. What usually happens is that when they are taught it the teacher glosses over that part, says something plausible and moves on swiftly, and the student internalises the step or assumption as “obvious” without being aware of it. They checked the premises, they listened to the argument without any alarms going off, so the conclusion must be solid. They can’t remember exactly what the argument was, but know it must have been a good one. It’s a constant and serious danger.
So it’s a good exercise to sometimes consider crazy ideas, and construct again the chain of reasoning by which you can know it is wrong. Whether you can personally be bothered to participate in every such exercise is another matter, but it’s not a bad thing to do.
While I don’t expect Salby is correct, the simple accounting of CO2 emissions is not sufficient to make the case either. The problem is feedback – rates change in response to changes of state. Biology is involved. If there is a feedback mechanism that controls CO2 level, then adding or removing CO2 would in itself have no effect, and any changes would be to do with the control mechanism. I put the warm left-overs in the refrigerator and in the process nudge the thermostat. The refrigerator warms up. Can I safely assume the heat from the left-over food is the cause of this rise?
#178,
It is amazing – isn’t it? – how often people who say they agree with the principle of absolute freedom of speech then go on to miss the point entirely by listing the exceptions.
Most people who talk about climate science are not experts and are not in a position to judge. If a journalist is unable personally to check out the statistics in a paper, are they too not supposed to talk about it? How about a politician? What is the actual rule being applied here, and what happens if we try to apply it universally?
#179,
The media ought to report on issues not according to the ratio of scientists, but according to the ratio of evidence. Science is not a democracy. Whether it is the solid majority or some lone maverick coming along with a new theory, the journalist’s question should be exactly the same: “What’s your evidence? Why should we believe it?” If the maverick has the evidence and the majority make vague assurances, the maverick gets the air time. If the lone voice turns out to have nothing concrete, he doesn’t get any, because there is nothing to say.
The journalist’s role is to do the leg-work of research, gathering the information and background from both sides with which to make an informed decision, and organising it to make it easily comprehensible. It is NOT to make the decision on behalf of their audience.
My understanding is that several surveys have found about 10-15% of climate scientists being sceptical, to some degree. It depends on the precise question you ask. Do you think the media devotes as much as 10-15% of its presentation of climate issues to sceptics?
> But freedom creates duty.
I prefer the way Spiderman says it. It’s more general and perhaps more palatable to compassionate conservatives.
How can I trust?…
Trust is not binary.
I might trust a 95% consensus of experts less than a 99% one, perhaps not much less, but more than a 100% consensus of non experts.
Trust is not an argument from authority, it’s not an argument.
“the thing that bothers people about Judith […] it’s not that people are worried the public will take these papers seriously“
… is an over generalized guess.
“It is amazing ““ isn’t it? ““ how often people who say they agree with the principle of absolute freedom of speech then go on to miss the point entirely by listing the exceptions.”
If you are defining support for ‘absolute freedom of speech‘ as requiring disavowal of ethics in speech… then I would oppose ‘absolute freedom of speech’ as you define it. I would also think that definition is kinda odd, compared to the usual legal definition.
#183,
Whose choice of ethics?
Nullius,
I don’t see how mechanics of ethics would apply to speech actions differently from other actions… each individual decides what ethics will guide their actions, witnesses judge the ethics of those actions by their own criteria. Hopefully those decisions will have some reference to real world effects.
Lazar,
Quite so. Judith is evidently happy that what she has said conforms to her own ethics, and her own definition of academic freedom. (Which is not specially distinguished from freedom generally.)
Disagreeing with what she says is fine. Disagreeing with her decision to say it it is also fine – but is an ethical position in conflict with freedom of speech. You can say that saying such things conflicts with your own ethics so you wouldn’t have said it, or that she is wrong to hold to different ethics, but that’s different from saying that she shouldn’t have said it even though her opinion about the facts or the ethics is different to yours.
Many people do think there should be restrictions on speech, voluntary or not, and that’s as respectable an ethical position as any other. It might even be the majority position. If it’s what you believe, then feel free to argue directly for it; don’t feel the need to pay lip-service to “academic freedom” just because it is politically correct nowadays to do so.
[…] a recent post, Keith Kloor worried about what would happen when a “bad paper spotlighted on a popular climate blog” is not […]
Ed: “there is political consensus in the US on CAGW”¦it is to be sent to the dust bin.”
J Bowers: “83 percent of respondents said they believe the climate is getting warmer, compared with 75 percent last year. Seventy-one percent said they believe human activities are partly or mostly to blame for climate change”
So what ? I would answer yes to this 83%. Of course human activites are PARTLY to blame for clime change. Now ask these same people if they want to double (or more) their cost for power and cost of items that require power or ask them if they believe humans are going to destroy the world with co2 (CAGW).
“ Now ask these same people if they want to double (or more) their cost for power and cost of items that require power”
The question is incomplete unless you explain the consequences; that continuing to use cheap fossil fuels at our current rate or at a growing rate will make large areas of the earth unlivable for humans including those people’s children and grandchildren. The cost of not addressing human-caused climate change will be much higher than the cost of addressing it by becoming more efficient and less wasteful of energy.
#178 Richard Tol : <em>”In the discussion, Curry admits that she had not thoroughly considered the original guest post by Ludeke; and it also clear that she does not have any particular expertise in statistics.”</em>
I agree. It follows that the fact that Curry’s staking out of territory in the field of uncertainty quantification is flatly unjustifiable.
NiV # 180 :<em>”The thing that bothers people about Judith is that she meets all the requirements to be a “scientific authority”, and so it completely ruins all the arguments from authority to have her sometimes batting for the other team. It’s not that people are worried the public will take these papers seriously because Judith chose to highlight them, it’s that they can’t attack them without also attacking the basis of argument from authority on which they rely. They’re peer-reviewed papers being presented by a professor of climatology. How are non-experts supposed to know what the orthodoxy they’re supposed to believe is, if you can’t trust the experts to know what they’re talking about?”</em>
Indeed. I agree thoroughly. By prominently stating inexpert opinion with an expert hat on Curry behaves in a way I consider unconscionable. Whether she overestimates her own capacities, or underestimates those of the substantive participants in the field, or both, she is muddying the discussion every bit as much as the willful acts of propagandists, and the clumsy contributions of marginal participants, do.
It does in fact call into question the functionality of climate science that Curry has attained to a position of repute.
I think nobody would argue that climate science is as functional as it used to be before it became embroiled in politics. Without a simultaneous increase in resources, how could it be? Still, for a person of some stature to make some of the claims that Curry has made reflects badly on the state of the science. For those unequipped to decide who is right and who is wrong, the level and ferocity of disagreement should surely indicate something amiss. So doubtless, the mere existence of Curry does demonstrate problems within the science, almost surely involving quality control.
While the early climatologists (look at the signatories to the Charney report) were as impressive as scientists ever have been, and there are some climate experts out there of comparable intellectual power, it is impossible to claim that every climate scientist is of the first caliber.
But the case of a department chair with no sophistication in statistics taking on uncertainty as a cause is a profound embarrassment to the field. There is no denying this.
Still, NiV and I presumanly take opposite conclusions from this, as might be expected. I think Curry should STFU, or at least stick to such matters, if any, where she has reason for confidence in what she says. On broader questions, I continue to insist that the less confidence one has in climate science (and mine is not by any means boundless) the more one should be concerned about anthropogenic disruption of the climate system.
Tol: “To be sure, some people want to keep arguing whether carbon dioxide accumulation is a big deal or not. At this point in time, some people, myself included, believe that the question is no longer worth discussing.”
.
LoL…”whether carbon dioxide accumulation is a big deal or not” is the ENTIRE point. And you do not want to talk about it.
.
Of course you do not. The best the “Team” can currently prove through the math is about 1 to 2C in a double of CO2, and this is theory and lab, not proven real world data.
.
As the theory for CO2 affect is by log, it would be a VERY long time at the current rate of increase in CO2 to get the next 1 to 2C if the theory holds true with real world affect, if it even could. Not a problem
The issue comes down the funny numbers you use to “enhance” the co2 affect.
So I very much understand why those on the “Team”, and those like you with a political agenda, do not want to see this issue discussed.
Holly. I agree ….ask them if they think co2 will destroy the world and if the entire econ of the US has to be torn down and rebuilt with low use of power to save the world.
But do not link a push poll that does not directly address the issue.
Ed Forbes is free to argue against the pythagorean theorem to his heart’s content, but mathematicians of high school level and beyond may be forgiven for not paying any mind.
What’s more, we have a reasonable expectation of a right to public venues where further implications of the result may be investigated without being bothered by people who don’t understand the proof.
My apologies. I miss quoted above. Should have noted Tobis, not Tol.
Michael Tobis Says:
November 12th, 2011 at 8:32 pm “At this point in time, some people, myself included, believe that the question is no longer worth discussing”
Michael ,
I very much understand the difference between the Pythagorean Theorem and the vast lack of knowledge on the climate “forcing” of CO2 and others. That you even try to say that they are equivalent speaks volumes and proves that this is more of a political debate on your part than a science debate.
Keith,
My screen is only showing the far right digit for the comment numbers. Is this something local with me or with your system?
I’ve noted that people in confrontational mindsets have trouble with analogies, as well as with many other sorts of argument come to think of it.
Tobis: “I’ve noted that people in confrontational mindsets have trouble with analogies, as well as with many other sorts of argument come to think of it.”
I agree
We are talking of your equating the Pythagorean Theorem and climate “forcing” as equivalent are we not?
Even the IPCC and the BBC are backing off a bit
.
Richard Black-BBC on new draft IPCC report
.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15698183
.
“..And for the future, the draft gives even less succour to those seeking here a new mandate for urgent action on greenhouse gas emissions, declaring: “Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability””¦”
.
“..There is “low confidence” that tropical cyclones have become more frequent, “limited-to-medium evidence available” to assess whether climatic factors have changed the frequency of floods, and “low confidence” on a global scale even on whether the frequency has risen or fallen”¦”
.
and it continues
@ 175
I am opposed to a society that deludes itself that there is no such thing as expertise, and thus that opinions can be weighed only such basis as sincerity and intent. This is a recipe for disaster.
Nobody says that is no such thing as expertise, that’s just a straw man. It’s important to understand that the expertise has limits and that it doesn’t really help to deal with future uncertainty. It is a delusion to think otherwise. Look at the recent financial crises for evidence.
Michael T (190)
I fully agree.
If all this was just pub chatter with no discernible influence, prominent skeptics wouldn’t be engaging in it. They’d be using other ways to spread FUD and astroturf.
NIV @180,
Physicists arguing about tachyons don’t prove anything.
Your reply to my 177 is nonsense.
The net contributions of humans to the CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 200 years has been twice the amount of the increase in CO2. This shows that natural processes have been absorbing CO2 over this time period. There is no doubt about this whatever.
The short term fluctuations in CO2, which are driven by natural processes, which are what Salby focuses on, cannot possibly be responsible for any long term increase in CO2.
Just like Curry, you are blowing smoke, rather than fostering enlightenment.
Holly Stick Says:
November 13th, 2011 at 12:47 pm “
The cost of not addressing human-caused climate change will be much higher than the cost of addressing it by becoming more efficient and less wasteful of energy.
Really?
25 years ago local telephone companies started burying 4 sets of phone wires for each residential customer to accommodate phone,second phone, fax, and computer modem. It was ‘cheaper to bury them then then did a second ditch and the needed lines later.
How many residences use more then one ‘land line’ now for anything?
The only way one can make a statement ‘it will be more expensive later’ is to assume ‘all other things remain equal’. In the history of the world ‘all other things’ have never remained equal.
#203 Eric writes: “The short term fluctuations in CO2, which are driven by natural processes, which are what Salby focuses on, cannot possibly be responsible for any long term increase in CO2.”
I get your narrow point. But in the real world natural processes MUST have been responsible for long term increases in CO2 which happened in the past. That seems to be the catch. What caused them?
Until that question is answered any blanket statements about what is or is not possible from natural variation are just speculation.
I’ve noted that people in confrontational mindsets have trouble with analogies, as well as with many other sorts of argument come to think of it.
Michael Tobis @197: Since this is yet another Curry topic, perhaps you may recall your earlier quote from the previous Curry topic:
But I can hardly read a paragraph from Curry about an actual scientific question without finding gobsmackingly sophomoric mistakes.
That’s an argument you would have trouble making. Not surprisingly, you haven’t tried.
It’s interesting that you choose to lecture others about being confrontational and handling arguments well.
What a fascinating thread – thanks, Kloor, for the opportunity to see Tobis and Tol in full flight. Tobis in particular is new to me. What an appalling attitude. Is it clinical, I wonder? I’ll wager it is.
You know what’s fun? Pointing out that after all the vitriol from Kloor, (which is SOP for him) WUWT did not run the Lüdecke paper.
It was emailed to me directly from Lüdecke, and I chose not to run it.
Heh.
@208
Ah, yet another climate blogger who can dish it out, but can’t take it. Typical. Big bark and glass chin.
So are you suggesting that the paper was too flawed for even you? If so, then that should be good for at least another 50 comments on this thread, which has pretty much wound down.
Richard:
“Academics should not publicly mingle in discussions on topics that are outside their expertise.”
so, yes climate scientists should not talk about policy
And scientific academics should not talk about journalism
And most importantly academics should not talk about ethics.
As always it depends upon how narrowly you want to define expertise and the subject matter. What your sentence proves to me is that you should not use the word should. Frankly, you don’t have the expertise.
I am interested in any model of how a social contract is to be reached which accounts for genuine hard-won expertise and rejects snake oil. It is the crucial problem. A great deal of contention and anger vanishes in a puff of smoke if only that problem can be solved.
I haven’t seen any cogent proposals, other than that real experts should be encouraged to communicate, and that trusted intermediaries should be around to identify the real experts.
Also, people who overstate their expertise, whether through dishonesty or confusion, should be called out by such intermediaries. Shoudn’t they?
Apparently this idea upsets some people. Regardless of whether my own (or some other specific person’s) judgments in the matter are sound, it would be wonderful to hear of any alternatives to this process anybody has to propose, that don’t amount to ignoring expertise altogether.
#203,
Your first paragraph (“The net contributions…”) I agree with. The second offers no argument in support of its assertion.
#209,
Did you mean Anthony or yourself? Or both? Is #209 supposed to be evidence you can “take it”?
#211,
Experts still have a genuine role, but the point is that decisions are to be based on evidence, not trust. An expert is a person who is especially capable of providing the evidence; succinctly, comprehensively, and organised so as to be easily comprehensible. That’s hard to do, of course, which is why there are so few real experts.
Steven (210)
That quote is my phrasing of the duty not to abuse your academic freedom. You’re told that when you obtain your PhD, and professors are reminded every time they grant a PhD.
Ethics, by the way, is a branch of philosophy, economics, and logic. I did publish on ethics (but unrelated to this topic). I also published on the role of science in policy (but unrelated to this topic). My expertise is by triage, so.
Richard,
Then you just proved that publishing in a field doesn’t ensure expertise.
Too many years of philosophy, logic and ethics here.
sorry no cookie for you.
Well,
one thing you all missed in the comments is that Judith seems to have modified her position somewhat ( gosh, two suggestions from moshpit ) She’s going to demand questionable papers supply code and data before getting a place on her blog and going to demand the actual authors stand and answer questions.
So, while experts in ethics prattle on about what other people should and should not do, pragmatic sorts of people just try to make things better. I guess we left the ivory tower for a reason.
Isn’t it funny that Judith listened to a suggestion that did not impugn her character while she ignored experts in ethics.
If your expertise fails to change things, maybe you should question either your expertise or the whole notion of expertise.
This has been a great thread – thanks, Keith, for that. I thouight that one of the most interesting points, intriguingly, was by Gavin, #76. “Judith decided a while back that the judgement of the community on what was interesting and what was not, was not itself to be trusted.”
When all is going smoothly in science, the argument from authority is a good one, strangely enough. There are so many papers, so many ideas, so many players that it really helps to have loads of filters in place that allow you to focus on things that are likely to be interesting. So you mostly only read the major journals, and mostly only attend to papers from recognized high-quality groups, or to ones that have been pointed out to you by such authority figures. For non-scientists like our host, this is even more essential: to interpret the cacophony of claims, you attend to what the people with the most kudos in the field are saying, and assume people disagreeing with them are wrong. Hence you assume that it is clear that Ludecke’s paper is a “bad” one and that everyone can see that.
If you want to use Kuhn’s language, this is a way of working that is effective within “normal science” – when everyone agrees on the paradigm for the field (here, the Earth is warming, anthropogenic CO2 is to blame, there’s a significant risk that the warming will be dangerous), and set out to work out the details within that paradigm.
What Gavin hints at is that Judy Curry thinks that climate science is not normal science. He disagrees. I do not. What that means is that all these filters do not work so well. Papers that are described by the mass of people working within the consensus as “bad” or “uninteresting” may not be either (though I sense that the Ludecke paper is probably not so interesting). That makes things a lot harder for everyone: open-minded scientists need to attend to a much broader range of papers, as publication in a “crappy” journal is no longer a quasi-automatic sign of low quality. Likewise, papers in major journals can be partly wrong, especially in terms of their unspoken assumptions. And for outsiders, relying on the views of the opinion-leaders can be very misleading.
In such a context, wielding authority is a much less innocent exercise, hence all the arguments about who is allowed to say this, who should exercise judgement before talking about that, etc. Science becomes a power game.
Jeremy,
Postnormal science is characterized by – the science being policy relevant, and – having inherent uncertainty. It does not mean that filters are suddenly unneccessary. Perhaps to the contrary: Those characteristics (esp the former one) make the need for good filters greater (since the policy relevance means that people may be tempted to twist the sicen to suit their policy preferences). As I wrote at my blog: I is no coincidence that Heartland and EIKE don’t concern themselves with the mating behavior of fruit flies (as an example of ‘normal science’).
Bart: “Those characteristics (esp the former one) make the need for good filters greater (since the policy relevance means that people may be tempted to twist the sicen to suit their policy preferences).”
So…the public needs “guards” [filters] to protect them from “bad” thought?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
[ literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” ]
Ed, they guard each other through peer review and professional discussions. People like you are not capable of guarding them, because you clearly do not understand the issues.
Holly:Ed, they guard each other through peer review and professional discussions.
O’boy…..when peer reviewed papers, as per this entire post, requires that the public be protected from them….
Holly, you have a very strange way with logic. If you note, this entire post is that some say that these peer reviewed papers should NOT be discussed.
So…again Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Holly Stick @220: I’m happy to let the experts duke it out in the journals. I’m confident the current questions about climate about will be settled in a few decades.
However, the problem is that some of the experts and their supporters are demanding huge, expensive changes to global civilization. It’s additionally problematic that some of the top climate scientists have shown themselves to be dishonest and incompetent in varying degrees, while the rest of the science community has done little to police these abuses.
Ordinary citizens are now like jurors listening to expert witnesses in a court case. The jurors aren’t experts but they will have to make decisions about the experts.
I see no way around this in a democratic society.
> Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Custodians all the way down.
[…] Verheggen raises interesting questions about the interesting questions raised by Keith Kloor about the interesting questions raised by Richard Tol about some marginal research discussed Judith […]
My follow-up is here .
OK…just when I think there is no coming to terms with someone, they come back with something that suprises you.
MT”..Whether the the result enters the canon or not is a social process, not an editorial one..”
a portion from his link. It is worth a read. other than the end of the world and doom and gloom stuff, MT is starting to make some sense.
Michael Tobis Says: November 14th, 2011 at 9:49 pm
[link]
MT..”But I wonder why all this attention to peer reviewed publications. This is confusing the symbol with the substance. Science is the advancement of knowledge. It is achieved by theory, observation and computation, not by publication. The publication is not the result. Nor is it especially certification of the result. It is simply the announcement (or, as some say, the advertisement) of the result. Whether the the result enters the canon or not is a social process, not an editorial one. If we want people to understand science, we should stop pretending that publications are central to the process. It will be easier to open up the data and the methods in a paper than it will be to open up the process whereby results are added to the canon, which has really been astonishingly informal.”
Keith and all,
What impresses me most about this discussion is the utterly pathetic display this inane bickering shows to the public by so many people that call themselves “responsible.”
No wonder the public lacks faith in climate science. In reading this material all I see is a bunch of spoiled brats. That’s consistent with my personal experience with many (thankfully not all) scientists, and it’s one of the reasons that I walked from my PhD after passing my comps.
Despite the good work of some people, the entire university system, scientists included, needs a good sweep. Out of touch doesn’t even begin to describe most of you.
“… Yes, you can see a flattening, if you do the scientifically unethical thing, take an insignificant portion of the data, and present it as significant. You also need to make the huge statistical errors of keeping the bad data points that you know are bad, and to cherry-pick your starting year and month to be April 1998 (or just a couple of months before), which happened to be the hottest month recorded (at the time), worldwide, since the invention of the thermometer. (And even if you do that, you still see warming, just by a slightly smaller amount.)”
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/11/exposing_a_climate_science_fra.php
Ed Forbes,
Good question, but it doesn’t negate the need for good filtering, preferably by a proces (e.g. the scientific proces) rather than by (a group of) persons.
If you’re interested in the mating behavior of fruit flies, it’s probably not too complicated to find out what the current state of knowledge in the field is. WHether it’s hard to understand the content of the knowledge is something else of course.
But with cliamte science, or societally contentious health issues, it’s a hornet’s nest just to find out what that current state of knowledge is. Because there are so many smokescreens out there. Distinghuishing the smoke screens from genuine knowledge is hard. Shortcuts can be taken (and are not without merit), but the difficulty is greatly reduced by having solid filters.
Bart, #218, I didn’t say that filters are unnecessary in a post-normal science context. I said that they become less reliable. When (small-p) political pressures affect where work gets published, which work gets published, the unspoken assumptions used by scientists to describe their work, etc., then it gets harder to work out which work to follow.
Hank Roberts,
You recall in #228 something I raised at Judith’s the other day:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/10/disinformation-vs-fraud-in-the-climate-debate/#comment-136935
I don’t believe Judith has responded to Wolverine’s criticism.
Perhaps it would be too “authoritarian” (?) to do so?
Bart: “Ed Forbes,Good question, but it doesn’t negate the need for good filtering, preferably by a proces (e.g. the scientific proces) rather than by (a group of) persons.”
.
Works until the process is high jacked by a group of persons who control the process.
.
Thomas Jefferson had it right. Full and unfettered information is required for the public to make informed decisions.
.
Pravda worked to filter information. I know a good portion of the greens would like to go to a Pravda style format to “remove false balance”. Are you really advocating for Soviet style reporting so as not to “confuse” people?
Ed,
You are pointing out something important that Bart does not seem to realize: There is no non-human agency to act as a perfect filter for information in any human endeavor, except final physical reality. think of the HMS Titanic and its final gatekeeping at the iceberg for physical reality.
The need for AGW believers of all persuasions and stripes to call for gatekeeping regarding the discussion of the policies their interpretation of the science calls for is depressingly predicatble.
Donna’s book on the IPCC sheds some light on how out of control the gatekeeping process in climate science /the AGw movement has gotten.
It is amazinf to see how academics who hold themselves out, allegedly, for liberalism and freedom have embraced the Pravda approach to communication of climate science.
#233, either that, or y’all are just flat out wrong on the substance. That’s the alternative hypothesis.
Noone goes to Judy Curry’s website anymore. It’s too crowded.
Ed, Hunter,
You are correct that there is no perfect filter (or perfect anything for that matter).
You are incorrect that “the process is high jacked by a group of persons who control the process.” That is based on conspiracy-talk.
Bart,
seems it is documented pretty well
both by the CRU emails we all love to read and referance and by a certain new book on the IPCC.
Exactly my point
Reading these comments about “filters” etc, I sense massive amounts of self-justification. People accept as valid what they want to accept as valid and dress it up as unemotional reasoning.
This is all just politics and moral bluster which is dressed up as scientific discourse. Why don’t we just accept that. Nobody changes their minds. Nobody, especially the scientists ever admits ignorance or mistakes.
When “Bart” put some elementary signal processing analysis up in comments on Steve McIntyre’s blog, I was astounded at how baffled the climate cognoscenti was with it. They are full of talk about models and feedback but know nothing of even simple second year concepts such as Bode plots.
I was of the opinion then and am of the opinion now that the world needs much more than the IPCC and peer review. The world needs another Robert Oppenhiemer. He was put in charge of making the bomb when the elite physicists at teh University of Chicago demonstrated that they were incapable of doing it. For me, the IPCC is a replay of this.
Tom Gray @239 — you do realize that Robert Oppenheimer was himself an “elite physicist”?? He was famous for his theoretical work before the bomb.
The IPCC is full of smart people. If anything they need better politicians to fight the crap from people like yourself and the McIntyres of the world.
I think one of the most important points that I’ve not heard discussed in any of the posts is whether the ERRORS in the paper were obvious, impossible to miss and unmistakable. A scientist casually reading a “flawed” article from a peer reviewed journal and deciding it “sounds interesting” , has done nothing wrong passing it along. The moral failing only occurs with the intent to mislead or if missing the flaws in the article is evidence of gross inexcusable incompetance. Recently, an article in Science indicated that neutrinos traveled faster than light. It was a flawed study, but the error in methodogy was not obvious. Skilled scientists had difficulty finding the flaw. I would think an accusation of irresponsibility against JC would only be warranted if you belived she was intentionally trying to mislead. A presumption of innocence should only be overridden if the flaws were so glaringly obvious that it would be impossible for any expert to skim the article and miss the problem. While peer review is imperfect, I would think the fact that an article survived that process would generally mean that it fooled at least some experts. I am not a climate scientist and lack the skills to analyze the article. I accept from the preponderance of evidence that it is probably garbage. The question is do the flaws stick out like a sore thumb, or does it require some detailed analysis to determine exactly why the paper is wrong. What I need to know to determine if Tol’s criticism is valid is how obvious the flaws are. Would 100 out of 100 climate scientists skimming the article be able to specifically state why it is invalid?
So, my question for those of you who are climate scientists is the following:
Just by skimming the article, did the errors stick out so glarringly that you couldn’t imagine a single one of your colleagues not being able to easily and instantly point out why the paper is ,not questionably or potentially, but inarguably and obviously methodologically wrong?
re 240
The point is that the Manhattan project was not organiszed around academic research and peer review. From the evidence of the IPCC reports, academic research and peer review are not up to the AGW challenge. There are other more capable ways of organizing large projects
TG @242
Maybe that’s because the Manhattan Project was an *engineering* project. In any case, I think if you look into it, you’ll find there was still plenty of science being done and plenty of peer review. You think they just built a bomb out of thin air? Or just built whatever R. Oppenheimer told them to? Even engineering projects have reviews — at least the successful ones do.
The IPCC is not a “project” in the same sense as the Manhattan Project was. The IPCC does not do original research, nor is it trying to execute a plan to reverse global warming or kill the economy. The IPCC is mostly a bunch of scientists volunteering their time to read lots of papers and summarize what they find. Then the summary gets watered down so that everyone can agree with it.
If you had someone like R. Oppenheimer leading a Manhattan Project on climate I can imagine the howls of outrage that a communist was dictatorially trying to force the US to bow to our UN overlords. What a surprising person for you to pick considering the treatment he suffered after the war.
steven mosher — “so, yes climate scientists should not talk about policy”
Every voter has a rightful say on public policy in every forum. Not every scientist is an expert on pharmacology.
Ed Forbes — “seems it is documented pretty well both by the CRU emails we all love to read and referance”
You’ll find the “gatekeepers” published rebuttals to papers they thought were quite simply crap. No gatekeeping involved. If you read the emails, that is.
Ed Forbes — “and by a certain new book on the IPCC.”
Ed Forbes — “and by a certain new book on the IPCC.”
The same Laframbroise who made a rule that self-cites and books that are often collections of peer reviewd literature will not be listed as citations of peer-reviewed literature? Sounds like “gatekeeping” of a sorts to me.
An open letter to Donna Laframbroise (or, You have got to be f****** kidding me)
@JonMChe #241
The Neutrino analogy is a poor one – that was an excellent paper, and – AFAIK – the flaw which everyone is expecting has not been definitively identified yet.
There have been overly-certain newspaper reports of the flaw having been found, but these are based on the many dozens of papers that sprang up claiming to have solved the problem, and so far none of them have been verified correct.
Indeed, a better analogy is with the irresponsible, ill-informed or premature trumpeting of some of the more obviously flawed response papers as having definitively solved the issues with the original.
@JonMChe
First, I would put the threshold a bit higher. If Curry is no statistician, then why does she spotlight a statistical paper? Tens of climate papers are published each day, so a selectivity in blogging does not preclude high volume.
Second, the paper is interested in trends but uses detrended fluctuation analysis. That should raise a flag for any English speaker. The paper is interested in the question “how unusual was the 20th century temperature record?” but only uses 20th century data. That is tautological. These papers do not withstand cursory reading.
Richard Tol: First, I would put the threshold a bit higher. If Curry is no statistician, then why does she spotlight a statistical paper?
Reply : I am no musician, but I find music interesting. I am not a scientist, but I read science articles. A Dermatologist as a medical specialist may be very interested in an article on heart surgery but she may not spot a flaw in the article that a cardiologist would find. If her blog reflects her communicating her interests beyond her own subspecialty, not recognizing an error would not be negligent unless as you say “These papers do not withstand cursory reading.” My problem was simply that without expertese, I was able to recognize by the lack of defense and virtually universal condemnation that the articles were seriously flawed, but I am/was unable to judge is how obvious those flaws are to anyone in a related field. There is a differance between not being able to tell from a single sip if a wine is a fine $100 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon or a cheap $5 bottle, and telling the differance between the $100 bottle and a bottle of Reisling.
If the article, fatally flawed or not, stands up to a cursory reading I am perfectly sympathetic with her posting it as “gee, this looks interesting” on her blog. A blogger who recommends a restaurant wouldn’t have a responsibility to check the safety inspections of the kitchen, clean or not. However, a blogger who sees rats on the table does have a responsiblity to report it. If as you state, no one with her skill set should have been fooled for a second, then I would absolutely agree with your assertation that she was spreading misinformation and was irresponsible. If the flaws are more subtle, then I believe your characterizations are unfair.
@JonMChe
The blog is not run by Judy Curry, loving wife and mother. Rather, it is run by Professor Judith A. Curry PhD, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Tom Gray,
“When “Bart” put some elementary signal processing analysis up in comments on Steve McIntyre’s blog, I was astounded at how baffled the climate cognoscenti was with it. They are full of talk about models and feedback but know nothing of even simple second year concepts such as Bode plots.”
It seems we have managed thus far to learn about climate without some people, somewhere, knowing of Bode plots. However I eagerly look forward to anyone adding to the human wealth of knowledge through their use. That would be a more convincing, useful, and gracious use of the knowledge given to us by God and our ancestors than by pointing out the alleged deficiency in some people, somewhere.
Thanks!
To: Richard Tol
Richard,
I fear that your interaction over at the Curry place risked pleasing few and none, I cannot know for certain why that would be, but it does seem to have been the so.
We, the readers, come at these papers from many different angles, with differing goals, and biases.
My personal example is that I focussed on the “five long stations” paper. Perhaps I thought it was being neglected! I also focussed only on the method and data that constitutes the analysis of the five stations. Hence on the issue of detrending. The analysis from the raw data to an estimate of the underlying scaling factor is I think essentially the same in both papers. (Interesting the contrary conclusion of this paper is that the data is not at all explicable WITHOUT assuming deterministic trends in both centuries!!!)
There are issues with the application of DFA that I must be uncomfortable with but, not the one you mention were it to rest solely on this quote from your posting above:
“Second, the paper is interested in trends but uses detrended fluctuation analysis. That should raise a flag for any English speaker.”
(I have looked at your other postings here and there and do not see that you say much more than that on this narrow point.)
In me the quote produces the response: “Not if they have done the DFA correctly and the data really does scale.”
To explain to all: it is my understanding that the detrending is done to scale. From a five year period the five year trend and average are removed, from a ten year period the ten year trend and average are removed. (As the initial step is I think to integrate the data it is a quadratic that is actually removed.) The data should not have been detrended in the sense that a trend was initially removed as a first step in the analysis.
This self-scaling removal of variance is not I think in itself the issue. Providing the data at each step in the analysis is scaled systematically along with the filtering process (the detrending) all should be well and an attempt at inference could be made, provided:
the data really does have a single underlying scaling exponent at all scales.
That we cannot know such a caveat holds true, given the data available, seems to be the issue, as you correctly point out.
Now I come back on board your boat in that you go on to express what I will call the need to span the period of interest. If the recovered estimate of the scale exponent were the same upto the period of a century, as when beyond towards a millenial period, the issue that DFA was used would not be the issue. We would go on to other issues.
That example is by the bye. My point is that when engaging in such debates it is truely difficult to foresee what people are going to latch on to, except that it will be the salients that jar with their understanding. Above I may have been way off beam, yet I would consider myself to have been rational, to be English speaker, and to know how and when to raise a flag. Hence I would feel not just a little insulted, but dismissively so.
This leaves me in a bad place, how do I defend what I think to be the case, without defending the paper, (I think I have sufficient understanding to see many other issues just in DFA step). To launch in at the Curry place would likely be counter-productive, to remain completely silent ignoble. So I am attempting here to make something helpful out of a muddied pool. I expect I am too late in shouting “Caution, minefield ahead”, but perhaps I can add a perspective on the real difficulties whilst still encouraging your continued participation.
The extended example I gave was not intended as lesson in DFA (I am not so presumptious, but an illustration in just how easy it is to lose friends and natural allies.
Alex
Thanks, Alex.
With DFA, one estimates the Hurst exponent of the fluctuations around the trend. The fact that the trend is redefined and re-estimated as one moves between time scales does not take away the fact that the data is detrended (albeit in a complicated manner).
There is nothing wrong with detrending data unless, of course, one is interested in the trend.
The question “did nature cause global warming?” is a question about the trend. It is not a question about fluctuations around that trend.
November 17th, 2011 at 8:06 am
@JonMChe
The blog is not run by Judy Curry, loving wife and mother. Rather, it is run by Professor Judith A. Curry PhD, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
First, I don’t think it is a matter of who is running it. I think we both can probably agree that it is a moral imperative not to knowingly spread falsehood. The question what level of responsibility and due diligence does a bloggers have to fact check to avoid spreading falsehood. I believe the responsibility of a blogger to fact check is significantly lower in a blog than in professional communication. The ramifications of due diligence are obviously significantly different. Suggesting a computer retailer to a friend, even if you are a professional IT consultant, is different than recommending a purchase by your employer.
Thats why my question was whether a causal examination of these articles by an knowledgable expert should instantly have raised alarm bells. If the article was plausable enough that a casual reading could mislead an expert, I have no problem with her actions. I don’t believe her responsibilites as a professional climate scientist require her, in nonprofessional discourse, to do a critical analysis of an article before commenting. However, if the article was so bad that she should have detected the errors with a cursory examination, then she was negligent in her responsibilities.
Please correct me if I am misinterpreting you, but from your prior statements, it seems to me that you believe there is no way that JC should have been able to read the articles in question without realizing they were invalid. If (forgive me for using the C word) that position would be supported by a consensus of experts, I would be comfortable with your position. If the above statement is true, she was either incompetent or immoral in her actions. If on the other hand, the article was plausable enough that a significant number of experts reading it would not be able to dismiss it instantly, then I’d have to think you are guilty of Role Model double standard- believing she and her blog should be held to a higher standard because of her “influence” on others.
Frankly, the evidence seems to support your position, but without expertese on the topic, I find it necessary to rely on consensus (the C word again!)and would really like to know how obvious the errors are to other scientists.
@JonMChe
I agree that, in this matter, my word is irrelevant.
I disagree with your opening sentence. Curry chairs a school at a public university, and her blog is about her area of research. I don’t think there is anything personal about this, and I don’t see why one’s standards would vary with medium.
I believe the differance is that I view her blog as a personal forum on climate by a woman who is a climate scientist as opposed to a professional forum as a climate scientist. Even if a blog is on your area of expertese, the distinction matters. A woman who is a doctor might tell a friend at her home that she needs to “cut those carbs” because she looks like she is gaining weight without the expectation that her opinion is a formal medical diagnosis and treatment plan. If she tells her friend the same thing at her office after an exam, her opinion should meet all appropriate professional medical standards. I would be open to the counterargument that unlike the “at home” vs “office” analogy above, the personal/professional distinction may not be obvious to her readers, and therefor she has a moral obligation to either make the personal/business distinction explicit, or conform to the higher professional standard.
A few days ago, Judith Curry reported her invited talk in a session on Scientist Participation in Science Communication at the forthcoming AGU Fall Meeting. Here is her first comment:
> Presumably I was invited to give this talk because of Climate Etc.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/13/public-engagement-on-climate-change/
That might explain some part of Richard S.J. Tol’s expectations.
This might explain some part of Judith Curry’s expectations too.
Richard,
Thanks,
It seems clear to me, that one of us is missing something, and hence each other.
What interests me here, is why experts tend to alienate some of their natural allies with respect to climate issues. Somethings are clear to me. Web interaction is not a true medium for rational empathy, whereas one might easily perceive the passion of the dialogue, the subtleties of the thoughts may be opaque to transmission.
This is much the case when one states that something is obvious and the other that it is not.
The conclusion “obvious” can be arrived at by bringing to bear a weight of experience that is not common knowledge. It may not be at all obvious and if not, may be ripe to be deemed erroneous.
Consider it to be the case that amongst these natural allies are some that take care that precision of argument caries the heavy burden. Those for whom to conclude correctly is a necessity but is not sufficient and may even be counter-productive.
Returning to the specific of the “five stations” paper, the one the concluded that the 20th Century trend was NOT natural, based on evidence from the five stations data.
“The detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA2) evaluated – for the five records selected here – very small natural probabilities for both centennial events. Therefore, the probability that they are the result of deterministic trends is high, but what actually caused the trends to be diametrically opposed remains unknown.”
I may of missed something, for there was a deluge of comments, but this conclusion seemed to get a pass. As it happens I think that it is not correct in that it is not robust. Perhaps a case of: right answer but flawed analysis. Given that it flies in the face of the other paper and uses the same analysis, their pairing is clearly problematic.
I put forward the following case, largely as illustration.
An important question is whether the data is self-similar, at least over periods that span the intervals of interest. If it were, then DFA could be used, with care, to estimate the scaling exponent. As you say this would not give us “the” trend, but could inform us as to the statistics of “trends” over various intervals within the spanned range. That is a necessary step. If the data is truly self-similar (which I truly and rationally doubt) then the systematic filtering of the type performed by DFA may give a useful estimate of the scaling exponent from which we can attempt the construction of the relevant statistics. To do this we must attempt the removal of functions that are considered likely candidates for the deterministic component as we wish only to analyse the non-deterministic part, the natural fluctuations. DFA can perform this function in certain cases (I truly and rationally doubt this is one such case). Having determined not just these raw statistics but our confidence in their worth we can proceed to making some judgement as to likelihhod that “the” trend during a certain interval could be due to natural fluctuations.
You may say that the process doesn’t work because the DFA removes trends, I must say that their removal is necessary but problematic and such attempts are likely to be subjective but that there is no inherent absolut bar to the use of DFA for this purpose.
In the case of the standard FA, is it not true that we may no nothing of the mean, (which is the case for anomalies) and that we systematically remove means during the analysis? Although no wiser as to the mean, can we not estimate the statistics of means over sub-intervals of the data? Given the mean during a particular interval, can we not make some statistical inference as to the likely distribution of the mean in adjacent intervals? Is not this what the inherent self-similarity (if present) allows us?
What I hope is clear from the above illustration, is that your view, is not as obvious as you might think. If so, there is a real risk of alienation if one were to persist in restating that something is obvious when it clearly has been proven to be otherwise. Being right ceases to be the question and is of little use as a defence.
It worries me, that experts do alienate their natural allies. In turn these can morph into rational terrorists. People who may be knowledgable and judge themselves to be supremely rational and go on to choose the paths of vendetta due to a perceived slight. Creating a nightmare enemy of people who collectively put more effort and skill into being on your case than can be either tollerated or overcome. To become thick-skinned would be understandable but that in turn can alienate another constituency.
I have some unconventional and unfashionable views as to how the online world works. Far from disseminating power and influence, it concentrates it into the hands of natural leaders. The ability to create a large and largely loyal audience is a necessary if insufficient step. I say online, as the most seasoned trench fighters may have been at it since before the web. It is an expert rich environment in which to try to operate. People with honed online skills. I think it is significant that it is opaque to many conversational signals, it can be a bar to rational empathy, any attempt to sense how people are reasoning, what their goals are, how best to reason with them.
I think I have said enough except to mention that I have not singled you out for being a bad case in question, far from it. I can have no idea how you will receive or interprete my thoughts and so I act out of hope that they would be considered fairly even if they are dismissed. Whatever is right or wrong about my reasoning, it is reasoned so beware. That is a big issue that I have tried to highlight, education can be viewed as a pulling process, a drawing in towards knowledge. I clearly do perceive an online tendency for experts to push away rather than pull in. That is my point, not one of mathematics or science but of education, an empathetic collaborative pursuit.
Alex
I think I understand what Curry is trying to do. I’ve spent much of my adult political efforts at working for a more inclusive and participatory democracy. If the question at hand is (1) Cap and Trade, or (2) Carbon Tax, or (3) None of the Above, then I would strenuously insist on discussion with no gate-keeping.
But I infer that this does not contradict anything that Michael Tobis or Richard Tol says and I struggle with how to apply the above sentiment with scientific endeavor. I also infer that Curry is trying to apply the above sentiment to science and I don’t think it is working. Some people claim that the author’s response to Tol’s criticism has helped to clear the air. But if Tol is right about the paper, then it has only resulted in wasting more time.
Participatory democracy also wastes time, lot’s of it. But participatory democracy by it’s nature cannot have a gate-keeper. Democracy is a pluralistic project. Science is not. The crux here is managing the science-policy boundary, and I don’t think anybody has a perfect solution for that. Peer review isn’t perfect, but I don’t see Curry’s process improving on it so far.
Alex:
The five station paper uses 200 year records. That is, it observed 2 centuries. How can you conclude anything about what can happen in a century if you have two observations only?
Suppose you were from Mars. The only two humans you know are me and my brother. What have you learned about the human race from the two of us? That we’re all male and over six feet tall?
LLE get around this by assuming self-similarity. That is, month-to-month variation is the same as year-to-year variation is the same as century-to-century variation. They do not test this assumption (indeed cannot as they do not have enough data), but it is an implausible assumption.
Bart, Michael, and Richard,
It seems I left the room just when the conversation, for a while at least, was getting interesting, a steer I flatter myself I might have had some hand in turning with #164 and #166. So apologise. I think that steer resolved around the question how is science, and, therefore, how are scientists and, thus, expertise more generally, situated in an open society? If you look at #164, you can gather the beginnings of my particular answer. Particularly that 1) an open society is not about process, of which voting and ‘popularity contests’, as one of you would have it, are two, but about essence and that essence is, a more or less open negotiation between powers, as opposed to a closed and dictated enforcement and, 2), an open society is not in contradistinction to hierarchy but is perfectly at one with it. And that this not merely a matter of a ‘division of labour’ but also involves a ranking of respect. To say otherwise is to ignore actual democracies and aspire to none democracies. Worse, to confuse form with content.
So, to put that in simpler terms, I more or less agree with you but only up to a point. One does defer to well earned ‘expertise’ (and despite what some have said, there are well attested and more less trust-able mechanisms to determine who in such cases one should respect) and one should. But in such a ‘deference’ there is a hierarchy of respect and not a respect for ‘numbers’ and hence consensus. That is the nature of academia but also of society more generally. Such real ‘authority’ is particular, to some extant mysterious and the opposite of abstract, of which a bare counting of hands would be. It is ironic that those who would talk of consensus at the same time are the first to say the tedious cliche that ‘science is not democratic’. They are obtuse on the latter as they on the former.
In this specific case, Richards anxieties are partly involved with that of his feelings about EIKE, a grouping of which, outside of Germany, we know little – ie this may be something of which we see merely the surface. But in your case, Michael, however much you protest otherwise, your anxieties about an amorphous mass being ‘misinformed’ is purely political and, may I say it, a blind man’s shadow boxing. Bart, is a little more subtle and one is grateful for it.
(Yes, one does not elect a plumber and, if one particular plumber shows incompetence, one does not condemn plumbing. See #164)
My own personal opinion is based on my own so far reasonably attested belief in the general sagacity of the common man or woman. That one can trust them to see ‘experts’ disagree, that one can expose them to information, whether dis or not, that one can let out truly inconvenient and contradictory findings, and they can and will come to a reasonable choice and understanding. It is all about trust – not just of the experts but, working both ways, of society in general. Hence, the open society. And that takes courage.
And, just to add, I think, with that last paragraph, it would be hard to say I am not with the true ‘consensus’, ie orthodoxy of what being a democratic citizen is. Trust and the courage of trust. Something which is not an ‘ought’ but rather an ‘is’ and without which our open society dies in guffaws of cynicism and stupidity.