Comments for Rearranging the Deckchairs

Comment on Naomi Oreskes on her new book ‘Merchants of Doubt’ by Carol

Carol — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 03:45:17 +0000

The only ones who are lying about tobacco are the anti-smokers. They are guilty of flagrant scientific fraud for ignoring more than 50 studies over a period of over 20 years, which prove that human papillomavirus infects at least a quarter of all non-small cell lung cancers. It doesn’t require a university to figure out that ignoring evidence is fraud! And because the anti-smokers’ studies are based on nothing but lifestyle, they’re designed to cynically exploit the circumstance that smokers and passive smokers are more likely to have been infected, in falsely blame tobacco.

http://www.smokershistory.com/hpvlungc.htm

Furthermore, those so-called “opponents” she denounces are nothing but phonies, because they never mention HPV, or anything else that really refutes the anti-smokers. Their real job is to drown out the real critics, with the collaboration of lying media, to create the false impression of dissent, and their weak strawman arguments are intended to provoke provoke public derision. It’s the anti-smokers themselves who give the phonies a forum, and censor the real critics, and then lie to us that they presented “both sides of the issue”!

And she is concealing the fact that the same anti-smoker who lobbied for the EPA to take up the issue of secondhand smoke, John C. Topping Jr., subsequently went on to found the Climate Institute.

http://www.smokershistory.com/NCCIA.htm

And she’s concealing the fact that Seitz’ association with the tobacco industry was really to monitor Stanley Prusiner’s work on prions, which was being funded by R.J. Reynolds after the Rockefeller Institute, with which Seitz had been associated, stopped doing so. (Why was smokers’ money being used to fund prion research in the first place? Apparently purely as a crony favor.) Any so-called “historian of science” who can’t ferret out the fact that Seitz was merely doing site visits on Prusiner, and had nothing to do with tobacco research, is nothing but a propagandist hack!

http://www.smokershistory.com/prions.htm

Yours truly,
Carol Thompson
THE REAL OPPONENT WHO IS RUTHLESSLY CENSORED, WITH THE COLLUSION OF THE FAKE OPPONENTS

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by dcardno

dcardno — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:54:04 +0000

What is the clear unambiguous piece (or pieces) of evidence that you think would refute global warming “theory”?
Peterd – this is a really good question… unfortunately I can’t offer a really good response, or even any response, although I have been thinking about it for a few days now. It has forced me to think about falsifiability in observational sciences, as distinct from experimental ones, and I can see where you are dissatisfied with falsifiablity, or “Popper lite” (tastes great / less filling!). I am still not convinced that alarmists have made their case – but I have to think more carefully about why.

None of the contrarians has, to my best knowledge, responded adequately to the challenge that we now appear to have before us a number of analyses of the temperature data… that (seem to) arrive at basically the same answer.
Not quite – we have a number of assertions about the results of an analysis that we are not allowed to see. It isn’t that much of a surprise that they agree, at least directionally. As an example, either on this thread or at Robert Grumbine’s site he was commenting on an observation by Roy Spencer that he had found that a set of temperature records more-or-less randomly selected, had been in close agreement with a particular dataset from CRU. Robert jumped on that observation, and was chortling that surely Roy Spencer wasn’t one of the ‘inner circle’ of climate science, and obviously his findings validated whatever dataset he was comparing to. The odd thing that Spencer noted a couple of days later was that the CRU results were (or claimed to have been) adjusted for UHI, while his was not – it was raw temperature.

It is possible that this was just an inadvertent error; an unadjusted file was mistakenly labelled as adjusted – but unless someone had made that comparison, it would never be known, and we would be left with the impression of warming in excess of what a (hypothetical) non-UHI affected temperature record would show us (in the alternative – there was exceptionally close agreement between a random raw file that included urban sites, and a UHI-adjusted file: I find that to be a credulity stretcher). When investigators have pre-concieved notions about what they will find, they are too quick to accept results that match those expectations: this dataset was simply taken as ‘correctly adjusted” or the mechanism that produced it was thought to be correct – because the results matched expectations. If it had gone the other way, and the adjusted results showed a decline in temperature, I suspect that the algorithims would have been exhaustively tested and recalibrated. In a non-experimental situation, the quality control offered by replication and attempted falsification is absent; allowing inspection of data and code is a step in regaining that quality control.

Comment on Macs Don’t “Just Work” by Frank

Frank — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:10:56 +0000

I had problems with Vodafone mobile on snow leopard at first, however they (voda) have released new software since which seems to fix it. I think it still doesn’t support all of the modems but worth a try, it may fix your issue.

As far as Ubuntu vs OSX (vs Windows) it seems to me that none of them really have the ‘just works’ feature. I like Ubuntu but any time I try it there is always something that is either a showstopper or too much like a mini-project to get working for my liking – Macs are the best compromise out of the bunch for me at the moment, as they mostly have good ease of use together with UNIX under the hood like Ubuntu. But that probably has more to do with the fact I use other apple products too (iphone, atv etc).

Anyway in some ways it feels like we are going backwards in terms of reliability as the feature sets of all OSes get more complex.

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by Frank

Frank — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:02:17 +0000

peterd,

“None of the contrarians has, to my best knowledge, responded adequately to the challenge that we now appear to have before us a number of analyses of the temperature data, using a variety of codes, that (seem to) arrive at basically the same answer.”

Exactly. And this has been going on for a while – every now and then somebody pops up claiming to have spotted a problem in the code for GISS, or CRU, or whatever the fashionable record for attacks is that week. They never explain how the problem affects the other records that use different code. (This is another reason why sharing code might be counterproductive – if everyone used the same code base – such errors would pollute multiple records).

It’s as if we had several clocks of different designs, all saying it is about 11pm. The ’sceptics’ fixate on one of them, and say this one is fast. Well, why does it agree with the others then?

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by peterd

peterd — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:48:33 +0000

We’ve gotten away a little from the topic of Frank’s post. The issues of replication & reproduction of results seem relevant to climate science and important. None of the contrarians has, to my best knowledge, responded adequately to the challenge that we now appear to have before us a number of analyses of the temperature data, using a variety of codes, that (seem to) arrive at basically the same answer. To be sure, “replication” (exact copying) has not been undertaken (it is of little relevance to actual science anyway, as Frank points out), but the results have surely been reproduced.

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by peterd

peterd — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:40:38 +0000

(2) You claim: “Because the burden of proof is on the person making the assertion.”
I disagree. Your assertion appears to me rather similar to that of a person who, confronted by somebody who has just come in from the rain, dripping wet and claiming “It’s raining hard!”, responds with: “Raining? I don’t believe you. The burden of proof that it’s raining is on you, old son”. You see, dcradno, I think that if the evidence for a particular argument, theory, viewpoint, call it what you will, is overwhelming, then the burden of proof falls on those who would deny the theory or argument at issue. I think myself that the accumulation of evidence in favour of the view that carbon dioxide contributes in some measurable and substantial way to recent (and, in all likelihood, future) warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans is just too substantial to be denied. But that’s just my perspective, and is what separates you and other contrarians from me.
However, I would be more sympathetic to the climate contrarians if they made an honest effort to explain, in terms of mechanism, why the climate behaves as it does. It is just not good enough to claim (as I have heard, from an engineering colleague of mine- I’m a physical scientist myself) that we’re warming because the planet is coming out of a Little Ice Age. I mean, really! As if that explains anything! GHGs offer a causal mechanism and explanation for climate change. Asserting that “we’re warming because we’re coming out of ice age” offers no such causal explanation.
You are also mistaken when you suggest that AGW proponents claim that warming is due exclusively to CO2. This has NEVER been claimed by adherents of AGW. (Challenge: show me where they do claim that.) The claim has always been that natural fluctuations, due to solar and volcanic activity variations, together with the effects from GHGs, plus other forcings due to aerosols, etc. can account for the temperature variations of the last century or so.

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by peterd

peterd — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:35:08 +0000

Oops,
the first sentence after (1) shoudl read:
As to Popper, I have noticed a tendency for climate contrarians to quote a simple, naive falsificationist view of science (I call it “Popper Lite”), as if this was the first and last word about the nature of science.

The lack of quality control is entirely my fault. :-(

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by peterd

peterd — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:31:49 +0000

dcardno,
yes, perhaps the thread had “gone cold”, and perhaps I should have left it that way, but- speaking personally- I just can’t bear to see the “contrarians” (my preferred term to “sceptics” or denialists” have the last word. Call it a weakness if you will. That’s me.
I will separate my comments into separate posts.
(1) As to Popper, I have noticed a tendency for climate contrarians to quote what they take to be a simple, naive falsificationist view of science (I call it “Popper Lite”), as if this was the first and last word about the nature of science. It is not. In fact, there are serious problems with both the naive and more serious (Popperian) versions of falsification. Read, for example, Sir A.J. Ayer’s account in his ‘Philosophy in the 20th Century’. “This is not to deny that Popper gives a luminous account of at least one form of scientific procedure, but the basis of his sytem is insecure”. Popper and his followers claim to have solved the problem of induction, and to have banished induction as a form of valid scientific method. However, and as Ayer points out, we reason inductively, and validly, all the time.
A.F. Chalmers, in ‘What is this thing called Science?’ (Univ. Queensland Press) points to the problem of ascertaining what is an observation that will refute a theory or hypothesis (or conjecture, in Popper’s term). What is the clear unambiguous piece (or pieces) of evidence that you think would refute global warming “theory”?

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by dcardno

dcardno — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:06:42 +0000

Petered – sorry for the late response; I thought this thread had gone cold. As for the reference to Popper – because it was convenient (I can remember it) and reasonably comprehensive. Would you care to expand on the ‘commonplace’ observation about the problems of falsifiability – I have never heard of them. (but that’s no proof one way or ‘tother). I would hate to borrow Robert’s refrain that you are seeking to “define science” – but I just can’t see a heck of a lot of use for ‘non-falsifiable’ assertions; to my engineer-turned-finance guy mind, that sounds like ‘just-so stories’

Why don’t the skeptics, instead of demanding to see computer code, actually get out and measure something themselves?
Because the burden of proof is on the person making the assertion. Nevertheless, with an openness that easily matches Mann’s or Jones’, I can assert that I have examined every temperature record on Earth and multiple proxies, and there is no warming. Of course, you can’t see my data (it’s under NDAs, it’s really badly organized, I lost it) nor can you see the details of my analysis (it’s proprietary, it’s none of your business, it’s adequately described in the article).
Now are you happy?
If not, why not?

Finally, no one doubts that there has been “warming” – that’s been going on since the end of the Little Ice Age. The doubt is about the (exclusive) attribution to CO2, and the assumptions that prevention is possible (let alone desirable), and that preventions will be cheaper than adaptation.

Comment on Scientific replication is not rote repetition by peterd

peterd — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:28:20 +0000

Why don’t the skeptics, instead of demanding to see computer code, actually get out and measure something themselves? Then they can submit the results to journals and the rest of us can scrutinize their data and computer code.

Ian McEwan put it well on the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s Lateline TV programme last night:
“So, I’d really like to see the debate move the other way around: let the sceptics start moving across the face of the Earth and gather empirical data, put it up for peer review and see how it goes, and if they can reassure us that they have solid scientific evidence that, strangely enough, the Earth’s temperature is not rising, then we’ll all be very, very happy. We’ll pop open the champagne.”
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2847828.htm