I wonder about the scientific illiteracy cliam, though – managing error and uncertainty are a large part of science (I’d hazard a guess that it’s in a different manner to engineering). The understanding of the impact and meaning of error – which apply from statitsical error in psychological studies right through to the physical error when using large hadron colliders – is essential to science. This broad understanding should ideally be taught in high school, not just atomic theory and Pavlov’s dog, which are specific to individual fields.

In short I think scientific literacy is more about the understanding of factors such as error than it is about trivial facts like rubidum’s atomic weight or the width of a mitochondria. The lack of this form of scientific literacy is hampering the climate change discussions to a great degree.

Even if I was a climate skeptic, I wouldn’t donate anything to those folks. They just have a habit of denying any science that’s inconvenient for their politics. Not smart.

Scientists are not being intellectually honest when they enter the political arena. There is never a time to politicize science because that draws into question their motives and casts doubt upon their methods and data.

Great science and great scientists have all been silenced by political processes both in and out of the science community.

If science is to be redeemed, for the betterment of mankind, it is up to the those that revere science to see that the stain of politics is removed and remain absent in their discussions. If any individual can not do this then they dishonor science and should give up their rights to carry the title of “scientist” with honor.

Sigh…….

“One mistake in IPCC?
1. Glaciergate – publishing of an absurdly false prediction which claims that lives of millions of people will be in grave danger despite knowing full well (scientists informed IPCC about the error well before publication) that it is nonsense just to press politicians and obtain million dollar grants. This alone is enough to sink the credibility of IPCC forever, but there is more, much more:”

Yes, that’s the one – at least it was the only one I was aware of on Sunday.

“2. Amazon – another set of absurd false claims.”

No idea what you’re talking about here. If you’re talking about the reference to drought in the Amazon, this is not “absurd”, not “false”. Yes, the authors of WGII quoted a WWF report which in turn ACCURATELY described the published science – see the following.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8488395.stm

“3. Using anecdotes from student dissertation as credible scientific evidence.
4. Using anecdotes from mountaineering magazine(!) as credible scientific evidence.”

Since these were described in the Sunday Telegraph (affectionately known as the Torygraph) over the weekend, and that’s not something I’m in the habit of reading (even on an occasional basis), it’s not surprising that that was not in my count.

“5. Using not peer reviewed WWF nonsense in numerous other cases beyond the above.”

Come on Tony, be quantitative why don’t you? How many times exactly? Which page numbers? Have you checked? Where are the references to WWF in WGI?

“This is *pseudoscience* plain and simple.”

All the above examples occur in WGII (I’m assuming you know what that is). If you think that errors in WGII affect the scientific underpinnings of climate change and global warming, then, well, I suggest you do some more background reading from reputable sources. To clarify

WG I: The Physical Science Basis
WG II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
WG III: Mitigation of Climate Change.

“And you Adrian, as a climate scientist…”

Ummm….I don’t believe that I have ever characterized myself as such, here or anywhere. Some of research involves climate, but that’s not how I would characterize myself.

” …[you] should be even more appalled as the actions of IPCC and some of your peers …”

Thank you for telling me how I should feel, I was trying to figure it out for myself but was having trouble.

“…contribute to the demise of millions of people which according to the likes of you will die due to catastrophic climate change.”

Did I say that? Did I say that millions of people will die? Funny, I don’t recall ever saying that, writing that or thinking that. Can you provide me with the reference, I seem to have lost it.

Adrian

One mistake in IPCC?

1. Glaciergate – publishing of an absurdly false prediction which claims that lives of millions of people will be in grave danger despite knowing full well (scientists informed IPCC about the error well before publication) that it is nonsense just to press politicians and obtain million dollar grants. This alone is enough to sink the credibility of IPCC forever, but there is more, much more:
2. Amazon – another set of absurd false claims.
3. Using anecdotes from student dissertation as credible scientific evidence.
4. Using anecdotes from mountaineering magazine(!) as credible scientific evidence.
5. Using not peer reviewed WWF nonsense in numerous other cases beyond the above.

And those are just examples found during the last few days of which I am aware, there are likely many more.

This is *pseudoscience* plain and simple. As a scientist myself I am appalled that some pathetic characters at the top of climate research decided to squander public trust of science for their own political and financial gain, this fiasco will hunt all of science for decades.

And you Adrian, as a climate scientist and a true believer (i presume) that AGW is a serious threat to the planet, should be even more appalled as the actions of IPCC and some of your peers not only put the whole discipline in a terrible light they also irreparably harm all efforts aimed at preventing AGW – so they indirectly contribute to the demise of millions of people which according to the likes of you will die due to catastrophic climate change.

“When one claims that there is consensus and that science is robust and then it happened to be completely false, who needs to care about or take seriously the content of “science” (or of used car sales pitch)?”

Firstly, there was (as far as we know) one mistake in the IPCC report – a mistake that had nothing to do with the science behind climate change, but instead was a prediction of what would happen in the future if global warming continued apace. If average global temperatures continue to rise then at some point, the glaciers will melt (unless global warming also brings about a cessation of the laws of physics), the date given in the IPCC report was woefully incorrect. This prediction had nothing to do with the science underlying global warming. Yet Saul appears to claim that this makes all the science behind global warming “completely false”. This seems a huge leap.

Earlier in post #75, Saul states:

“all responses from NASA scientists to Smith, D’Aleo points (which I am aware of) look more like responses of used car dealer to presumably credulous customers.”

So, in other words, Saul doesn’t believe the climate scientists. Why? I don’t know. Instead he seems to believe Smith and D’Aleo. Why?

Doing a quick internet search for various climate related stories one tends to find that the first several pages of links refer to pages of noted climate skeptic sites (climateaudit, wattsupwiththat etc) and of other climate skeptic sites linking back to them. In fact, one has to dig quite far to get to the responses by the climate science community. Is this because answers are not forthcoming? No. It seems partly because the climate science community takes care and time to assess the claims of skeptics. The popularity of the skeptic sites also accounts for this low signal strength in internet searches.

However, if one does dig, and one is persistent, one does find that just about every claim from all the skeptics has been shown to be either false or not to make a difference. Current global warming is caused by cosmic rays – no. It’s an artifact of the way you handle data – no. It’s caused by the sun – no. etc. etc.

Saul goes on to say:

“How many climategates do we need to start asking questions?”

I agree. How many times does a “climate skeptic” have to be wrong before people stop believing them? After all, it would appear that Saul disbelieves climate scientists at the drop of a hat – the first minor, tangentially related mistake and the whole of climate science is questionable. Yet Watts, Pielke, Smith, D’Aleo, McIntyre….oh boy, they’re always believable.

So, perhaps it’s not really about asking questions. If it were, Saul would be equally inquisitive about the climate skeptics. He appears not to be. Why?

My suspicion is that Saul, and those like him, hold these views because of their preconceived notions. Climate scientists are telling them things they don’t want to hear, so they take the slightest opportunity to attack it without applying the same criteria to the arguments (and motives) of the skeptics.

The fact of the matter is that there is now a vast body of disparate data and science pointing towards global warming. There is similarly a vast body of disparate data and science pointing towards the role that human activity plays in global warming. The tactics of the deniers are not to challenge this corpus of knowledge directly (they would lose). Instead, they snip at the heels with many rapid, small attacks. All the casual on-looker sees is the multitude of these attacks and, seeing their large number, concludes that there must be something to these arguments. Without digging further, they do not realize that all these attacks either are false, or have no impact on the conclusions of climate change science. Those, like Saul, who call for people to question the climate scientists do not make similar calls to question the climate skeptics; it’s one-sided. Similar tactics are employed by those who argue against evolution.

Saul suggests that:

“I guess the answer would totally depend on political affiliation”

I disagree. I know scientists whose politics are right of center and yet are convinced of climate change and the role humans play. I think it is more likely that those like Saul see something they do want to hear and rather than examining it and examining their own lives and thoughts, fight hard against the messengers. Rather than live in the real world, they wish to continue to delude themselves that things are ok, that they don’t have to change what they do and the way in which they live.

How do we change this? I don’t know. Scientists must do a better job of communicating their science and showing that the arguments of the climate skeptics are wrong (where they are indeed wrong). People in general need to do a better job in confronting themselves and asking themselves tough questions about the way they live.

Adrian

“all responses from NASA scientists to Smith, D’Aleo points (which I am aware of) look more like responses of used car dealer to presumably credulous customers. Gavin Schmidt says: ” the data do not come from us, it is another agency,” he says : ” we used interpolation and it is too subtle for you fools to understand what interpolation means .” ”

How about this, from Gavin Schmidt

“Their claim is apparently that coastal station absolute temperatures are being used to estimate the current absolute temperatures in mountain regions and that the anomalies there are warm because the coast is warmer than the mountain. This is simply wrong. What is actually done is that temperature anomalies are calculated locally from local baselines, and these anomalies can be interpolated over quite large distances. This is perfectly fine and checkable by looking at the pairwise correlations at the monthly stations between different stations (London-Paris or New York-Cleveland or LA-San Francisco). The second thread in their ‘accusation’ is that the agencies are deleting records, but this just underscores their lack of understanding of where the GHCN data set actually comes from. This is thoroughly discussed in Peterson and Vose (1997) which indicates where the data came from and which data streams give real time updates. The principle one is the CLIMAT updates of monthly mean temperature via the WMO network of reports. These are distributed by the Nat. Met. Services who have decided which stations they choose to produce monthly mean data for (and how it is calculated) and [has] absolutely nothing to do with NCDC or NASA.”

I don’t see anywhere where Schmidt says “it is too subtle for you fools to understand”. Perhaps you could point me to where you got this quote from – it is a quote isn’t it? Notice that Gavin gives an explicit reference, so you can follow that up and find out exactly what was done.

By the way, if you wish to learn something of how things are done and why they are done, you can read Tamino’s blog “Open Mind”. There he discusses technical aspects of why and how climate data are analyzed.

Further, you state “As long as I remember New Zeeland “skeptics” come with some calculations, not just general ideas about altitude influence.” Your point being? Calculations can be wrong as well! To see an explanation of the New Zealand debacle, look here

http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/

“CRU folks would not thin this way, or else why to hide the data and calculations?”

Actually, I would be surprised if they did not think this way, and there is no credible evidence that they have hidden data or calculations.

“The climategate #1 exposed criminal behavior in violating the FOIA (it is now official).”

First of all, the data was dumped back in the 1980s. Also, the original data still exist, and yes, even you can ask for them (look at the last sentence in this extract from http://mediamatters.org/research/200912010030):

“At issue is raw data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, including surface temperature averages from weather stations around the world. The data was used in assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reports that EPA has used in turn to formulate its climate policies.

Citing a statement on the research unit’s Web site, CEI blasted the research unit for the “suspicious destruction of its original data.” According to CRU’s Web site, “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”

Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit, said that the vast majority of the station data was not altered at all, and the small amount that was changed was adjusted for consistency.

The research unit has deleted less than 5 percent of its original station data from its database because the stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends, Jones said.

“When you’re looking at climate data, you don’t want stations that are showing urban warming trends,” Jones said, “so we’ve taken them out.” Most of the stations for which data was removed are located in areas where there were already dense monitoring networks, he added. “We rarely removed a station in a data-sparse region of the world.”

Refuting CEI’s claims of data-destruction, Jones said, “We haven’t destroyed anything. The data is still there — you can still get these stations from the [NOAA] National Climatic Data Center.”"

On this basis, I’ve destroyed data. I’ve deleted data from my computer. Do the data still exist? Yes!! Either as backups, or in paper form somewhere else.

“The other climategates undermined the clime of robustness of IPCC scrutiny, which was a big advertisement points: “consensus,” “robust peer reviews.” When one claims that there is consensus and that science is robust and then it happened to be completely false, who needs to care about or take seriously the content of “science” (or of used car sales pitch)?”

The science, as far as we know it (and there’s a great deal we do not know), is pretty robust. To give you an idea as to how science is actually done, take the recent article by Solomon showing the effects of stratospheric water vapour. This is something people hadn’t really considered before, and there’s still a great deal we don’t know about it, but her work has opened up new questions and new lines of investigation.

I repeat, the science in the IPCC report is NOT “completely false” as you claim. One very small sentence about the the effects of global warming on Himalayan glaciers was shown to be wrong. One sentence out of the hundreds of thousands in the IPCC report.

“How many climategates do we need to start asking questions?”

Scientists ALWAYS ask questions, it’s what we do BY DEFINITION!!!!! Given your predilection for swallowing anything that comes out of places like climateaudit, perhaps it’s YOU who should be asking questions.

“I guess the answer would totally depend on political affiliation”

I guess it does doesn’t it……let me know when you start asking questions.

Adrian

As long as I remember New Zeeland “skeptics” come with some calculations, not just general ideas about altitude influence. There is also those Russian report about missing data stations and the calculations that show the impact of this action.

>>However, what I (and I suspect most respectable scientists do the same) do is to check and re-check my calculations. Have I missed something?

CRU folks would not thin this way, or else why to hide the data and calculations?IPCC: The climategate #1 exposed criminal behavior in violating the FOIA (it is now official). That was a crime, plain and simple. The other climategates undermined the clime of robustness of IPCC scrutiny, which was a big advertisement points: “consensus,” “robust peer reviews.” When one claims that there is consensus and that science is robust and then it happened to be completely false, who needs to care about or take seriously the content of “science” (or of used car sales pitch)?

How many climategates do we need to start asking questions?
I guess the answer would totally depend on political affiliation

Politics aside (that’s a whole other discussion), there are some mis-representations in what you say.

“If you caught you dealer lying, you would go somewhere else.”

If the car dealer said that the car had an engine under the hood, but on opening the hood, one finds no engine, then yes, I suspect most people would go elsewhere. If the dealer said that the car had no scratches on its bodywork, and you found a small, 1 cm long shallow scratch on the underside of the rear fender, then I suspect most people would still stay with the dealer.

” Similarly, if you got IPCC caught in 4 climategates”

Perhaps you would like to elucidate on what you think these are and their impact. I can only count two – well, one and a bit really:

1) The melting of the Himalayan glaciers – a grand mistake, but not one that impacts the science behind global warming, climate change or the record of what is happening. The mistake arose in part from using a WWF report as a source (the WWF report had the date wrong) and was never a main conclusion of the IPCC reports.

2) The use of a WWF report concerning the effects of global warming on the Amazon. In this case, the WWF accurately reported the science -the IPCC report should have used the primary citations, instead it used an NGO report which summarized that information, albeit accurately. So, this is not really an issue. By the way, according the rules of the IPCC, reports are allowed to cite a very small number of NGO reports.

“got NASA and NOAA using interpolation methods which generate warming”

OK, this is a new one on me. Are you referring to the hypothesis by Watts and Pielke about the placement of temperature sensors? Or are you referring to the hypothesis of Smith an colleagues concerning long term temperature records being biased by changing the number and distribution of stations?

In both of the above cases those who posed the hypotheses could have done some elementary checking to see if their hypotheses were correct or not. Instead, others had to this for them and in both cases have found their hypotheses to be incorrect (see the links I’ve posted in previous comments on this thread).

Or perhaps you’re referring to the cases in Australia and New Zealand where people posed the hypothesis that temperature time series were corrected to show a warming that was not present in the raw data? Well, the corrections were made to take account of the fact that temperature stations were moved to higher elevations and, as well all know, temperature decreases as we move to higher elevations. So in this case, the climate skeptics hypothesis is also false.

So, if I were to take your car dealer analogy, I would not listen to or believe anything coming from Watts, Smith, D’Aleo, Pielke – i.e. some of the main characters trying to disprove global warming.

If one were to keep a score card, even with the so-called “climategate” and the IPCC blunder, the IPCC still comes out far ahead of the skeptics whose hypotheses have been demonstrated to be incorrect.

So again, using your car-dealer analogy, one should still prefer to “buy a car” from the IPCC, NASA or NOAA, rather than from the likes of Watts etc.

I am actually aware of only one argument from any climate skeptic that has stood the test of time and the data. That’s the claim by McIntyre that the original Mann et al., hockey stick paper messed up their principal components analysis (this is a type of multivariate analysis that is used to
reduce the number of variables determining the amount of variance in the data). It turns out that Mann et al., did indeed make a small mistake in their PCA analysis, and when this was accounted for, it made next to no difference in the result – the hockey stick was still there. Once the error was pointed out, Mann et al. corrected things and admitted the mistake. By the way, their codes and data are freely available.

A modus operadni that seems prevalent amongst the climate skeptics (even those who should know better) is to do an analysis and find a discrepancy with a standard, or published, result. They then rush to their blogs or to the newspapers and claim that global warming is not happening or is grossly exaggerated. Now, I frequently re-analyse data or work through some calculations and from time to time I get a different answer than the accepted one. However, what I (and I suspect most respectable scientists do the same) do is to check and re-check my calculations. Have I missed something? Have I made a mistake? If, mulling it over I cannot find my error, I try and find out why my result differs from the accepted one. If I still cannot make these two results compatible, I contact the original authors to see if I’ve missed something, or maybe there was something I should have been aware of that was not in the original paper. Most cases never get this far, and I realize my blunder – though one has to admit that sometimes I’ve missed an assumption that, on reflection, might not be valid, and this prompts me to contact the original author and discuss our sets of results with them.

So, the skeptics seem to assume that they are correct and the many climate scientists who have sweated over the data are wrong or have missed something (possible, but don’t ask me to put a lot of money on it). Most scientists will assume that, if they get a result contradicting others, that there is a mistake somewhere and will work very hard to find out what it is.

As I’ve said before “You don’t buy a Degas from Snr. Bonatti”.

Adrian

This is a nice reference to individual rational choice .When we ask “should I waste my time on this?” we are good at finding the right answer which make things efficient. When it is someone’s else time we may become more generous. And finally, when the resource in question is public money we can become extra generous (unless we are some sort of conservative Republicans from other state than California) .

Consider fictional scenario where we all agree that probability of AWG which leads to global catastrophe is .05. How much money we are going to bet to stop it. Even here the answer depends a lot on your attitude to spending public money which is correlated with your political affiliation. It so much more so when you ask question “How much should we know before we start … Submitting to international regulations?” If you are a liberal lawyer who believes in living and breathing Constitution and wants to see larger role of UN you would not need to know anything before submitting to international regulations, you would be looking for “science” which calls for urgency of doing it.

>>>It might seem strange, even insane, for the public to base views of the carbon cycle and water vapor feedbacks on politics. Is it a problem of science illiteracy?

IMHO public cares about theoretical underpinning of science just as much as an average customer of used cars cares about mechanics and thermodynamics of car engine. The questions are: (1)can I trust this dealer? (2) will this good looking car really work or will its engine blow up in a month?
If you caught you dealer lying, you would go somewhere else. Similarly, if you got IPCC caught in 4 climategates and got NASA and NOAA using interpolation methods which generate warming , you would do not take them any seriously, nor would you consider their “science” as science.

I really do not know where to start in answering your post, so I won’t.

Adrian (who does indeed have a guilty conscience … about the delicious chocolate biscuit he just ate when he shouldn’t have because he was already full from the rather delicious lunch he had)

I’m not sure which work you’re referring to. Are you referring to the work recently published By Susan Solomon in Science? If so, I’ve not read it, nor am I an atmospheric scientist, so anything I would say may very well be wrong. However, if you look through various legitimate climate sites such as “Open Mind” and “RealClimate” you may find something.

Adrian

Many thanks for your kinds words.

Adrian

So it looks like the only people left defending IPCC are not surprisingly climate scientists themselves who directly profit from all the climate alarmism.

You are wasting your time, no sane person will ever trust “scientists” who would rather commit a crime and delete(!) their data then make it public. And not just any data but the ones on which supposedly the future of the whole planet depends! It screams scam to any neutral observer, and this scam is happening at the very top of climate establishment.

Now add to this IPCC which supposedly provides “the most authoritative assessment of climate change” is purposefully including false statements to pressure politicians and milk funding agencies for green money and it’s becoming obvious what climate “science” is all about. If you cannot see the pattern here then it’s your problem. General public is neither blind nor stupid and this is why all the polls show public support for AGW evaporating.

Good luck with your whitewashing Adrian, one wonders if you also have guilty conscience.

I am not a Glaciologist but a Climatologist and the statement attributed to me in “Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified” By David Rose in UK Daily Mail on 24th January 2010 has been wrongly placed. I never said this story at any time and strongly condemn the writer for attributing this to me.

More specifically, I never said during my conversation with Rose the following statements being attributed to me:

(a) ‘it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.’

(b) ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.’

(c) ‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’, and

(d) ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’.

Contrary to the claim by Rose that “Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly,” the Asia Chapter does include this finding under section 10.2.4.2 on page 477.

What I said was “As authors, we had to report only the best available science (inclusive of a select few grey literatures as per the rules of procedure) which is “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral” and that’s what we collectively did while writing the Asia Chapter. None of the authors in Asia Chapter were Glaciologist and we entirely trusted the findings reported in the WWF 2005 Report and the underlying references as scientifically sound and relevant in the context of climate change impacts in the region.

hi, one sign that i saw in copenhagen (i went with a chinese ngo) captured my attention, not just for global warming but for the way we treat the environment in general. it read “there is no planet B”. i wrote on the frag ecol blog site about street slogans that decisionmakers should listen to and think about. signs can say in a few words what we tend to take much longer to write about. thanks again for the thoughtful thoughts . mickey

Michael H. Glantz, Director
CCB (Consortium for Capacity Building)
INSTAAR
University of Colorado

From what I understand, Smith and D’Aleo claim that later data sets are biased because they favor coastal (thereby warmer) sites and that they preferentially exclude high latitude sites.

As you state, ” As anyone would conclude if you compared the average temperature data from a smaller data set made of warmer stations and compared it to a larger data set including colder stations you will have an average increase even if none exists.”

So first, Smith and D’Aleo are claiming that a multitude of climate scientists have missed this very elementary fact. It’s possible, but exceedingly unlikely. I’m afraid that I really have to admire the temerity of Smith and D’Aleo, to stand there and effectively “You scientists are so dumb, you missed this!”. AS in the link I provided in a previous post, there were some elementary and basic tests of their hypothesis that Smith and D’Aleo could have done to show they were right. They didn’t do any of them. Someone else did and showed the Smith and D’Aleo analysis to be a red herring.

Again, to quote one of my favorite TV programs “You don’t buy a Degas from Senor Bonatti” (kudos points to anyone who can say where that one comes from! – Big Hint: Bonatti is talking to someone called George Smiley). Caveat emptor, as they say.

Adrian