How to respond to annoying reviewers…

@Orac

Also see:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=581

Considering what I know to be your views about climate, I wouldn’t let this post be found by any ClimateGate critics, Orac.

Get your Hilter-Downfall meme info here…

I’m sure it was embarrassing for that to be made public, but it was not what the deniers say it is.

Think now. If Orac saw the goings on which we see in those climate papers in a medical journal, and wrote a scathing post, whose side would you be on? “Embarrassing” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Fixed data. Smearing opponents. Dodgy peer review. Irregular methodology. One man, unchecked science. Lots of anecdotal evidence. All sounds pretty familiar in the medical area, except this time the anecdotes tend to involve polar bears. The medical equivalent regularly gets the beating it deserves here, but apparently climate science has a different set of rules.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Read the released material at face value and it looks worse than shabby. Google the Harry-read-me.txt material is you want a laugh/sob.

Of course that says nothing about what other climate scientists might be doing. Perhaps their material is above board. That’s why they release all the data and all the methodology. (Hint: this is sarcasm.)

If Orac saw the goings on which we see in those climate papers in a medical journal, and wrote a scathing post, whose side would you be on?

I doubt if Orac would make judgments based on selected stolen emails. I imagine that there are very few scientists who could not be made to seem to be doing something improper by private communications quoted out of context. As a biologist, I find the level of transparency & data sharing in the climate science community to be quite admirable.

I’m not sure there are legitimate scientific reasons to exclude Dr Deth, who is an academic pharmacologist with relevant research publications (I don’t know Palmer).

I’m not concerned so much about their qualifications. I just think it’s strange that exactly these two guys would turn out to be the peer reviewers. (Normally, we wouldn’t even know who the peer reviewers are.)

Dr. Deth once called Kathleen Seidel to try to convince her about the mercury hypothesis (which was the anti-vax hypothesis at the time.) He ended a subsequent letter with this: “I would like to make a virtual wager that within the next 18-24 months scientific evidence will make the thimerosal-autism link a near certainty. If you are willing, I’ll let you name the stakes.” That was in March 2006.

Dr. Palmer has produced two papers doing basically the same analysis: Associating mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants in Texas to the administrative prevalence of autism by school district. He attended a rally/demonstration in Texas with other parents of autistic children to protest coal-fired power plants.

I suppose it’s possible that the editors simply looked for researchers who had done other work on mercury and autism. The results of this method don’t give me much confidence in the process, though.

Obligatory –

Hitler has only got one ball
Goering has two but they are small
Himmler has something similar
And poor Goebbels has no balls at all

Hitler has only got one ball
Mussolini has two, but small
Stalin, he was three-ballin’
And that’s the dictator’s rise and fall

Hitler has only got one ball
The other is in the Albert Hall
His mother, the dirty bugger,
Cut it off when Hitler was small

She threw it into East Germany
It landed between the deep blue sea
The fishes got out their dishes
And had scallops and bollocks for tea

There’s a scene in another movie wherein Ike and the senior command staff are discussing the D-Day invasion, and Ike finally says “Go” that would make for a good “okay, we’ll submit it for peer review” clip. Except it’s in English, and subtitles in the same language would be silly.

Well, it’s nice to see that climate change denial has been reduced to stealing personal emails and using them out of context in an attempt to smear a few academics.

Some nice non-reasoning here.

Some rotten apples in the “denial” basket – so we throw the lot out. Some rotten apples in the “warming” basket – no problem, they aren’t representative.

You use the word “few” to describe hundreds of relevant documents. Many of which are very detailed. (The e-mail portion, by the way, is not the important bit. That would be the files where they discuss how they are removing data they don’t like and making up data they do like.)

Then you resort to ad hominen, assuming that the only use the documents have been put to is as a “smear”. Yet if you go to the best “denial” sites you will see that serious work is being put into analysing them. Sure they are having fun laughing at their opponents. But no worse than what you engage in above.

Note: the provenance of the documents is of zero relevance except as evidence in some legal proceedings. They are either true or false. I note you don’t even claim them to be false.

If they cannot support the “deny” claim, show that. Don’t resort to arguing that they can be ignored because you happen to not approve that the person leaked them. But you don’t need evidence of theft, do you?

Also, what’s with this constant fixation on that single decade-old “hockey stick” graph?

Because that graph, changed the paradigm. After that point it was easy to support warming and hard to deny.

So now the burden of evidence has swung to the “deny” crowd, while the “warm” crowd can say outlandish things with impunity.

Worst of all, the data and the techniques the “hockey stick” is based on is actually what almost all following climate assessments use.

Follow this link back to the original data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-raw-data-in-new-zealand-tells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/
Don’t trust the “deniers”. Go to the original source and you will see that the straightforward collection of temperatures over a century, which shows no warming, is “adjusted” to show the correct result.

What annoys me is that in twenty years you won’t be able to find a “warmer”. Everyone will always have been a “denier”.

Also, what’s with this constant fixation on that single decade-old “hockey stick” graph? If that graph were shown to be completely fraudulent in every possible way it would make bugger all difference, as the basic conclusions are supported by thousands of independent peer-reviewed papers.

The interesting thing is that this is not at all unique to climate-change denialism. Evolution denialists attack Darwin. Germ theory denialists attack Pasteur. AIDS denialists attack Gallo. It is as diagnostic as a tinfoil hat–even if they sound superficially reasonable at first, it invariably turns out to be wrapped around a hard core of paranoia.

It is so different from the way scientists think that it seems almost incomprehensible. Scientists are always interested in the latest, most comprehensive data and methods. Why would anybody want to debate the early work? The early work may be of historical interest, but it invariably has limitations and methodological weaknesses that have been ironed out by later studies. But of course, if denialists engaged fully with the literature and the huge mass of evidence, they wouldn’t be denialists.

Denialists do not see scientists as a disorganized band of individuals each hoping to prove everybody else wrong, but rather as a huge game of follow the leader. In the denialist universe, a few dreadfully flawed papers by a single scientist somehow (they are never very clear about how this happens) instantly creates an orthodoxy. Everybody else immediately jumps on the bandwagon to get published or funded. They all then conspire to deny access to the tiny but brave band of mavericks who challenge the orthodoxy. If one can disprove the original work that started the whole thing, then the Emperor’s New Clothes will be revealed as the fraud they are, and the entire edifice will come tumbling down like a house of cards. Most denialists came late to the party, and since they haven’t read the literature (aside from what they see as the “key” papers), they are unaware that the actual history if the field is quite different than they imagine–that instead of everybody jumping on the bandwagon at once in response to the original papers, it is a story of individual investigators, one at a time, slowly becoming convinced by their own work that the primary conclusions are broadly correct. The “brave mavericks” usually turn out to be die-hards who either had retired from actual research (and thus never had the opportunity to be convinced by their own work), or else people from other fields who imagine that their expertise in that field has bestowed upon them such brilliant scientific intuition that they can now see the truth in a different field without actually bothering to do the work.

This is at the basis of the perpetual demand for access to primary data. The Climate Change field is almost unique in that a huge amount of the primary data, and even much of the analysis tools, has been made publicly accessible. Climate Change contrarians pore over it, looking for errors. And of course they find them, because any scientific work has errors, just as any book has typos. Yet despite years of “auditing,” not one error has been found that alters the conclusions in any important way. To scientists, this is not surprising, because in practice, mistakes in scientific data, being random tend to cancel out. The way serious errors in science get caught is not by “auditing,” but by different scientists carrying out similar studies by somewhat different methodology, and getting different results. Yet climate change denialists never attempt this–they just demand more and more data. The real reason is that they are not interested in reproducing the work; they are already absolutely convinced that it is wrong, so why even bother to try? What they are looking for is proof of malfeasance, because they are convinced that the entire field is not merely in error but intentionally fraudulent (why huge numbers of scientists, who entered a relatively modestly-remunerated profession out of a desire for discovery, would end up wasting their careers knowingly perpetuating a fraud is another question denialists never seem to confront).

Having failed to find it in the data (which only convinces them that the data made available is not the “real” data), they are now seeking it in stolen correspondence. And just as it is always possible to find mistakes in scientific data, it is always possible to find examples of people behaving badly in private correspondence, or that at least saying things that can be interpreted as such. And just as they have seized on any little error in the data as evidence that it is all unreliable, they will seize upon each incautious remark as proof of what they already know in their hearts–that everybody in the field is colluding in a grand conspiracy.

I believe it has been around for some time now, definetly before the interwebs.

I suggest it is similar to, if not an actual version of, the genetic fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

What annoys me is that in twenty years you won’t be able to find a “warmer”. Everyone will always have been a “denier”.

ROTFLMAO!

Wanna bet?

Of course I want to bet! But 20 years is a long way out.

I’ve been following the climate denial evidence for the last month. I have enough Science to make sense of much of it (Chemistry to post-grad, plus reasonable Physics and Maths) and I teach Maths, so can handle most of the Statistics.

Previously I thought the science was sewn up, although I disliked the “solutions”, and this would be my first steps into “denial” of any sort. Mostly I’m a SBM type guy.

The denialist support crew are mostly quite loopy. Claims of conspiracy and fraud abound, based on little or nothing. Their politics is often quite offensive to me as well (Obama being a fully paid up Marxist is a fairly moderate position). I am sure their political nonsense puts off people who would otherwise believe them.

However, if you ignore the politics and follow the science, they have a very strong argument. Firstly, don’t fall for the straw man that they are denying warming out of hand. We have known for a long time the earth is more or less warming. The issues are the rate of warming (and more specifically the acceleration of the rate) and the cause.

I’ll ignore the leaked documents, as they tend to inflame the warmers.

Try this graph:
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Armagh_an.html
That’s 160 years of not very much warming!

In fact it is pretty representative. If you go to any long record of temperature and see the base data, you will get the same thing. For stations in towns there tends to be a slight gradual warming, as the urban heat island effects take hold, but nothing too major. Rural stations show a very slow warming, and no acceleration.

(Make sure you get the base data, as the warmers have a tendency to add “corrections” and then publish it as if it was the actual values on the thermometers.)

The dodgy warming is mostly a result of cherry picking which stations to use, with the warmers picking and choosing which to use based on very little other than what result they want. The science in it beggars belief.
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part2_GlobalTempMeasure.htm

Now I realise Orac that you won’t have time to follow all of this. Nor should you IMO. You are doing a sterling job with your field of expertise. I am posting because I know many people with enough science to follow this come here.

Sure, Orac, I’ll bet. You name the stake.

Inherited characteristic denialists attack Lamarck and Lysenko.
Peptic ulcer denialists attack the stress/food consensus.
And you have to see the really loopy science the quantum types come up with when they deny Newton and Maxwell! Pure giggles!

Except, of course, that real science does not work the way that denialists imagine that it does. Natural selection did not win out by virtue of attacks on Lamark, but by discovery of evidence supporting natural selection rather than acquired characteristics (actually, Darwin and Lamark were not as opposed as some oversimplified modern accounts make it appear; Darwin himself proposed some hypotheses that were very similar to Lamark’s, but which turned out to be incorrect). Lysenko, of course, was a genetics and natural selection denialist, and a good example of the damage that can be done to science when denialists succeed in using politics to suppress valid science. The stress consensus of peptic ulcer causation was not overturned by attacking the original papers that suggested causation by stress; it was overturned by new studies providing compelling new data that was consistent with the infection hypothesis, but not with the older stress hypothesis. And quantum theorists never attacked Newton; they carried out additional experiments, showing that there were experimental paradigms in which the results could be explained by quantum theory and not by older theoretical frameworks.

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen genuine scientists try to discredit decade-old papers in this way; it is pretty much exclusively the hallmark of the crackpot.

Inherited characteristic denialists attack Lamarck and Lysenko. Peptic ulcer denialists attack the stress/food consensus. And you have to see the really loopy science the quantum types come up with when they deny Newton and Maxwell! Pure giggles!

Well, I do have to give partial credit for being less obvious about the “Gallileo Gambit.”

Unfortunately for you, the key difference in this case is that in all of the above cases (and Gallileo’s, for that matter) the new approach was based on actually having, like, facts instead of just a chorus of “No!”

If you want to play “Historical Rerun” the roles get handed out to the people who bring data to the table and those who stick fingers in their ears while attacking the ones with data.

Here’s a trick though. If you are going to cast doubt on the leaked “e-mails”, take the time to find out that most of the leak wasn’t e-mails. The e-mails are incriminating, to be sure, but the real damage to the Hadley crew is that the methodology of its charts and calculations is exposed. The methodology that they have previously tried to hide.

Ah, and you’ve read the code line-by-line and fully understand it. I see.

If they cannot support the “deny” claim, show that.

Nope. You need to show that they support the “deny” claim. I’ve seen the best the deniers got on this, and it’s not a whole lot. There’s just no evidence of wrongdoing from the leaked documents. There are only tortured interpretations of ambiguous statements and code.

Follow this link back to the original data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-raw-data-in-new-zealand-tells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/
Don’t trust the “deniers”. Go to the original source and you will see that the straightforward collection of temperatures over a century, which shows no warming, is “adjusted” to show the correct result.

I believe deltoid has the correct read on this.

The sun-spot theorists are particularly active. What they can’t get is political traction.

No, what they can’t get is evidence. There is no change in the amount of solar energy coming from the sun, and no evidence of any other plausible mechanism to account for the changes in global temperature. So we have nothing but a correlation. It’s worth noting that the H. pylori guys started out with a correlation, but they at least had a plausible mechanism. That alone wasn’t enough to convince many people, but they collected more convincing data, and in relatively short order transformed the prevailing opinion of the biomedical community.

Thing is, climate science is different from physics, chemistry or maths or medicine, because you can’t run an experiment on a big collider or field trials.

Actually, much modern physics is done in mathematical simulations similar to those used in climate science. Many areas of science are largely observational–cosmology, astronomy, evolution, geology–so there is well established methodology. What distinguishes climate science is the huge amount of data available to test the predictions of physical models.

AGW proponents claimed 10 years ago that the rate of warming was accelerating. They made a hard claim. It failed to come true. The world had cooled slightly since then.

Except, of course, that this is not true. And if you’ve looked into even the basics of climate science, you know it is not true. Making patently false claims is another thing that leads people to classify you in the tinfoil hat crowd. In fact, runs of climate change models do not predict an inexorable rate of warming over 10 years. They predict large fluctuations up and down that in many runs are sufficient to obscure the warming trends over a decade or so.

If you go to the actual temperature readings for places you see very little warming.

So you cherry-pick records from a single location, discard corrections for known measurement errors without even bother to investigate the science behind those corrections, and even then you still see warming, but you dismiss it as “very little.” And you actually think that is evidence against global warming. Again, this is tinfoil hat argumentation.

Err – that’s by the 2030s.

So, somebody lead me to the published global surface temperature observations that show that 2009 is warmer than 1909.

Betcha can’t!