AGW "experts" - Know Thyselves

I think Jim meant the first time.

I had no idea that he ever stopped.

So you can grab your willy now and bend it all over the place. Does that mean you've gotten stronger over the years?

Your perception of greatness is judged by your lack of awareness.

You say your IQ has increased over the years? Could it be that you've forgotten what it was you didn't know? Maybe Alzheimer's settling in ?

Oh well, why do I bother? Just a Brit that wishes they were born as an American!

Good day to you!.

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That would have been in 1943, when Jim was a remarkably precious four- year-old electronic engineer. Such a pity that all that infant promise evaporate, leaving only the infantile sense of humour.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sense of humor is inseparable from electronic design. They spring from the same sources. Of course, crude humor could be associated with crude design.

John

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That's our Jim.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It might have been, a long time ago.

Go to scholar.google.org and search on "A W Sloman" which is the name that I put on publications in peer-reviewed journals.

This may be a little more difficult for you to interpret that some impossible-to-confirm claim about how well I did at secondary school, but - unlike you - I don't waste the readers time with pointless bragging.

He hasn't resigned - he has merely stepped down while the university looks into the matter, which is pretty much an administrative necessity for an department head. He did say something to the effect that he would destroy data rather than give it the denialists were were using the freedom of information act to harrass various colleagues, but he did it in a private e-mail. It obviously doesn't seem to have been acted on, does it, so there's no legal offense to discuss.

Big deal. Non-evidence of a non-existent offense.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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So you too could join Mensa along with Clive Sinclair - another prize example of the proposition that having a high score on a IQ doesn't have to correlate with intelligent behaviour.

If your really do still score well on IQ tests, all this demonstrates is that IQ tests don't measure anything all that useful.

ITT-Creed used to run IQ tests on all the degree-qualified people they hired. After working there for a few years I got to ask the then boss

- who was smart, unlike his predecessor - if there was any correlation between the test results and performance on the job. There wasn't.

A similar test on high performing academics showed that the distribution of their IQ results was just the same as that of their more ordinary colleagues - just the upper tail of the normal distribution, which is imposed on the undergraduate intake by the school system.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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More than merely being right, it was testable. And when tested was = validated.

Earlier, there were people who went to their graves swearing that they = would=20 rather err with Galen than accept the testable results of Harvey. It was= =20 another case of testability versus "truth".

Similar stuff happened around Einstein's work. And many physicists went = to=20 their grave calling Einstein a liar a fool and worse. It took about 30 = years.

Climate change looks like it will take about 50 years, or maybe not. 10 = years=20 of it and its "predictions" are falling apart, and its observed = testability is about nil.

lifted a

eport_july_09.pdf

Many here have pointed to:

Who _IS_ well qualified, has access to the methods and data, and still=20 challenges AGW and CRU. If you could find the models and source data=20 would you study it? I have got ahold of some and found it poorly=20 documented (too many unstated assumptions).

You and I have sparred a little over Spencer and Christy, before.

First off, let me agree with you that Dr. Spencer is _qualified_ to speak on _certain_ subjects related to climate analysis. This means he is _one_ voice of many. It does NOT mean he has a comprehensive view nor that his opinion (or any one specific person's) should be taken. That's part of why there are so many separate processes in place, within countries as well as internationally, to help develop consensus in science.

In short, this means we don't take Dr. Lovelock's position (which is extreme) that the world as we know it will end soon, either. Dr. Lovelock is a remarkable scientist, one of the very with credentials that span from biology through to chemistry and physics and with a few inventions that we simply could not do without, today. Yet his opinion is one from the outside of climate science and it is a solo voice, as well. Nor do we take Dr. Hansen's opinion, despite the fact that he has been involved in areas of climate research far more broadly applied to the overall conclusions than Dr. Spencer and is at least equally qualified.

If you read what I wrote, you will notice that I'm trying to get past that kind of argument here. I want to engage the science itself, to arrive at our own opinions, and this means working hard at it. No question. But that's what it's about. Just as anyone here knows with electronics. Trotting out some authority here or there does NOT replace actual experience with real parts and personal hard work and crafted thinking. And authority _certainly_ doesn't replace good theory, either.

The point if it isn't clear is that no ONE person is to be taken in isolation and should not be used to replace theory. The very smartest and best of all scientists are wrong about most of their opinions. We read from them because we want to know _how_ they think, not _what_ they think. And none of that replaces theory, which guides all meaning of data. It is only through the light of theory that data has any meaning, at all.

Toting up Dr. Spencer does nothing here. It's just yet another "argument by authority." I'd recommend taking me up on some aspect of climate theory. If you want to challenge the conclusions of nearly every science organization that bothers to weigh consensus and form an opinion on it, then you need to _engage_ yourself not quote one man's thoughts; no matter who they are.

Now, if all you want to do is compare his knowledge with mine I will immediately back down and let you have the point. He is a practitioner, I'm not. End of story. But that point does not raise him up any higher; it instead puts me down lower. (Something I'd gladly accept!)

...

But since you brought him up, let's talk a little about his behavior as a practicing scientist.

Back "An artifact of the diurnal correction applied to LT has been discovered by Carl Mears and Frank Wentz (Remote Sensing Systems). This artifact contributed an error term in certain types of diurnal cycles, most notably in the tropics. We have applied a new diurnal correction based on 3 AMSU instruments and call the dataset v5.2. This artifact does not appear in MT or LS. The new global trend from Dec 1978 to July 2005 is +0.123 C/decade, or +0.035 C/decade warmer than v5.1. This particular error is within the published margin of error for LT of +/- 0.05 C/decade (Christy et al. 2003). We thank Carl and Frank for digging into our procedure and discovering this error. All radiosonde comparisons have been rerun and the agreement is still exceptionally good. There was virtually no impact of this error outside of the tropics."

The correction yielded a new higher trend than before, at something like 0.193 C/decade.

Spencer and Christy posted their data after months of delay _on the same day_ that GW Bush signed the new energy bill. This itself was after the conference committee dumped the Senate's recommendations regarding GHG emissions.

The early release at an _inauspicious_ time, the immediate removal the following day, and the re-posting instantly __after__ political issues were made moot was interesting timing, to say the least. I don't mean to imply much here. Scientists often time releases to inform political discussions. But that means __before__ and not __after__. And I thought it was curious timing for that particular reason. But I'm not interested in debating my curiosity here. It's just my own ruminations and nothing more than that.

Regardless, their correction at the time brought the slope of their results within the range of the IPCC TAR (the AR4 wouldn't be out for a couple of years, yet) and removed the distracting use of their MSU T2LT trending as a point of instrumental record dispute.

Their artifact didn't appear in MT or LS data, just the LT. (I believe the MT and LS data was processed by a different team.) The new global trend from Dec 1978 to July 2005 was +0.123 C/decade, or

As I pointed out to you before, for years, scientists outside this inner circle had been "clubbed" by the University of Alabama's results from Spencer and Christy. Their results had conflicted with pretty much every other approach, instrumentation, and fusion of analyzed datasets by teams all over the world.

Both Spencer and Christy were repeatedly asked to go back through their methodology to see if they could find an error. Over and over, they insisted they didn't need to do that. Finally, Carl Mears and Frank Wentz apparently got sick and tired enough with the continuing conflict that they decided to waste their own precious time to duplicate the efforts by Spencer and Christy.

That effort, by all rights, should have been Spencer and Christy's efforts. It is sad that someone else had to take them by hand and show them their own error. That isn't easy to do, as they knew their own work better than anyone else. But they refused, so others were finally so worried about the conflicts that they rolled up their sleeves and revisited it.

In any case, Mears and Wentz went through all the trouble to secure the data sets and then attempt to duplicate the processing. In the end, they discovered an error in the diurnal correction used by the Spencer and Christy's team. Once shown their error -- and it took them four or five months to admit it -- they publicly made corrections to their processing and republished old data. Remote Sensing Systems began publishing their own analysis in parallel and continues to duplicate Spencer and Christy's efforts to this day, I think. The fact that they do points up just how much scientific credibility has been lost by Spencer and Christy over this stubborn error of theirs.

...

An an irrelevant aside, John Christy served as a pastor of an evangelical Baptist church and went to Kenya as a missionary before he took up his mathematical career, which led to his working for UAH/NASA MSFC. A story in the NY Times quoted John Christy:

"The most common remark I've heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken," said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama's curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.

A web site article from Roy Spencer used to be here:

But that is gone. You can find it in the wayback machine at:

Read it. It's titled "Faith-Based Evolution."

You want my opinion? The two of them let the politics of their own fundamentalist religious views get in the way of their results. Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer have very similar world views. In addition, they made some gross mistakes and refused to revisit their work, forcing another group to jump in and _find_ their own errors. This is unusual. In this case, Christy and Spencer each had significant conflict in the results of their analysis of one instrumental record which differed profoundly with the rest of the instrumental records, then. Yet they didn't feel sufficiently motivated to search out the conflict, prodded or otherwise. And they were the ones responsible for the processing here, as others depended on them for their results.

But I don't know what caused their failure. That's my own opinion about it, though.

The code itself isn't as important to me. I need to get out ahead of that by understanding the theories. Before I could attempt to criticize a model, I'd need to understand a great deal more than I do. However, if you want to point to specific errors that you know are decidedly wrong, I'd be happy to examine a case in hand. I can certainly make judgments about whether or not an intended formula deduced already from theory is being handled appropriately. I've been programming for 40 years now and know a great deal about a lot of languages, including FORTRAN, so I can certainly read for obvious mistakes.

However, if your point is simply that the code doesn't state its assumptions, I'm not sure where to go with that. First off, they aren't writing code to us used to teach students how to write well documented modules. And lots of working code I've seen doesn't express all of the underlying assumptions. Sometimes, a reader is expected to have sufficient training before reading the code. In this case, I suspect that climate models are in a continuing state of development and the code docs may be _way_ behind the times. Even wrong, given what follows it!! This is because changes are made and the documentation above it NOT edited, for whatever reason. So the only safe approach here is to completely ignore the documentation and simply read the code together with an informed knowledge of what it should be doing at that point.

If you feel competent to do that, I'd feel honored to try and follow your points. If not, there really isn't any point in the exercise until you and I gain the necessary foothold, first.

However, my earlier post was about _acquiring_ knowledge, firsthand, so that we master some facet ourselves. Perhaps, after doing so, we might be in a position to read some part of modeling code with a new eye that may be useful!

Jon

In case this isn't clear, I don't mean to suggest that either Dr. Christy or Dr. Spencer intentionally made a mistake in processing the MSU T2LT data to yield some desired outcome. Nor do I think that the mistake they made was a grievous one or of a character uniquely different from mistakes scientists make from time to time. It was simply that the outcome they got due was a desired one from their world view.

Even that is fine, as far as that goes. Scientists get results that comport with their world views. The problem wasn't there. It was that they refused to investigate themselves when their dataset was the _only_ outlier that consistently conflicted with other instrumental records. And I think they stubbornly held to it because of the politics and dogma of their religious beliefs, which embolden them against the prevailing winds of overwhelming science results arriving elsewhere.

In effect, it was their own religious hubris. Other scientists, faced with overwhelming and manifest conflicts with other results, would have (should have) examined themselves with far more vigor. And chances are, would have discovered their errors and corrected them (I think they were competent to have done so.) Or, at least, responded better to the criticisms, when errors were indeed found by others.

I think their problem wasn't making an error. That could happen to any team. They damaged themselves by how they comported themselves during the conflict, and afterwards.

Jon

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You've been listening to too much denialist propaganda. The actual projections of the consequences of continuing to burn fossil carbon at the current rate or faster were all made over the next century, which is long enough that short term noise on the global temperature record would be swamped.

The "predictions" that you claim are falling apart come from the denialist camp, who happily claimed that because the IPCC was projecting a rise of about 3.8=B0C - with a range from 1.1 to 6.4=B0C - by the end of this century, they were thus predicting a rise 0.38=B0C over this decade, assuming that the IPCC projection was for a linear increase, when in fact it allows for increasing economic activity and lower rates of CO2 absorbtion in a warming ocean as the century progresses.

In fact the current rate of warming is about 0.13=B0C per decade

while the year to year temperatures show something like +/-0.5=B0C of noise.

You are correct is saying that the testability over ten years isn't high, but wrong in claiming that this means that the theory is falling apart.

The basics of the theory have been tested against some 600,000 years of ice core data, and it does seem to stand up, and it also does seem to fit the last hundred years or so of meteorological data. This is observtional science rather than experimental science, but none the worse for that.

But you are welcome to back your hunch and buy as much low-lying coastal land as your can while investing the rest of your money in coal-mining, as long as it is your money that you are putting at risk.

National governments are not really free to back hunches - they are required to act rationally, because expereience shows that when a politician does something that looks irrational, somebody has usually bought their judgement.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen