Or, hell, any global warming denialist to publish predictions at all, or build any model at all beyond their day jobs of quote mining and writing clever PR releases that prey on the public's scientific illiteracy and fossil fuel barons' desire to violate other people's lives and properties with untrammeled carbon pollution.

This is not a political position, it is an expert's evaluation after having looked at the code and documentation for some of the better models. You simply can't parameterize away as much of the physics as they do, or impose conservation conditions by hand the way they do, and expect a long-term integration to produce anything but the crudest approximation to reality.

System-wide averages are likely accurate in terms of scale. That is, global heat content is increasing at the order of 1 W/m2, probably not 0.1E-2 W/m2 and certainly not 10 W/m2. This is important, because 1 W/m2 is consistent with observtions and likely problematic in terms of local climate. The global economy is heavily optimized to the current climate, and even relatively modest changes would turn trillions of dollars of investment into malinvestment. This is a bad thing, if you care about global capitalism.

Climate scientists are not computational physicists. They have not spent most of their careers modelling systems that are ultimately subject to laboratory testing, and as such they have not seen their best laid plans gang aft agley.

I have long wondered how much of the hubris in climate prediction was coming from the policy level and how much was coming from the scientists themselves. This release suggests that it really is coming from the scientists, and that's unfortunate. Twenty years from now most of these predictions will prove to be false. That falsity will be in all directions: some will have temperatures or rainfalls far too low, some far too high. And the enemies of science will use that to further attack us.

Unfortunately, when I stand up and say this, I get attacked as an enemy of science by people who think they love science, but who are actually drawn to it simply as a useful stick with which to beat their political opponents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing#/media/File:...

Also, using the phrase "global warming denialist" distracts from your point. When some scientists thought neutrinos traveled faster than light, they weren't called "light speed denialists". Have some respect for alternate scientific opinions.

The problem with GW predictions is that most of them are wrong and the ones that are correct aren't correct for the right reasons.

It comes down to the evolutionary history of Earth throughout life's 4 billion year tenure on this planet. The climate has gone through EXTREME changes [1][2], including the Chicxulub impact, which radically impacted the atmosphere's composition and life on this planet. Yet, the biosphere has always adapted and life continued.

Assuming that mankind is destroying the biosphere at an unprecedented rate (we are), and burning hydrocarbons at an even faster rate (we are), are these two factors enough to turn the earth into a Mars-style wasteland, completely devoid of all life?

It just doesn't seem plausible to me on an intuitive level. We can use linear regression models of the atmosphere and show temperatures rising until life becomes impossible, but that is not how complex biospheres work.

In any case, climate science is definitely a worthy scientific discipline to study, but it is becoming akin to economics in the prediction department. As in, the principles are sound, but the predictions of the experts are laughably wrong on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, this is all due to Al Gore and his "moment of genius" which instantly politicized the scientific process, thereby destroying any potential for real scientific progress through the feedback loop of empirical testing and model formation. If you disagreed with Al Gore's version of climate change, Al Gore's version of climate models, and Al Gore's version of climate science, you suddenly became a heretic "climate change denier".

Alas, we humans really are terrible at science.

1. http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg

2. http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/images/CO2History.h...

I'm old enough to remember when the Scientific Consensus was that we were causing global cooling. Amusingly enough, one of those guys became one of the most notorious global warming "scientist".

At this point, that should be worth at most an eye roll. But it bears re-iterating: never happened. Not true. And repeating it is dishonest.

Try again.

Like, for real. He more or less explicitly lied when reviewing the stolen Climategate source code, very deliberately and consciously presenting commented out code in a way to deceive his audience and provide talking points for right wing media. And when called out on it, he refused to take it down or even acknowledge the critique.

Unless you also think it's mean to call Rush Limbaugh a global warming denialist, calling ESR out on this is totally fair game. He's a hack. I wouldn't say the same thing of, say, Lindzen, but ESR is very committed to motivated, destroy-the-liberals reasoning, for the good of the Party.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20131031.png

Science works by building theories and programmes of research. A single counterexample, contrary to what you seem to think, doesn't invalidate a theory--it's driven by multiple lines of evidence. And ESR's strategy of digging through comments of source code to quote out of context fragments doesn't even approach providing a single counterexample, particularly when he admits that he's in a quest to show that climate scientists are a conspiracy, part Gaian-religionists and part KGB psyops. Like, really.

I took that to mean that you considered his criticism of climate models to be invalid because he hasn't produced better models himself.

Perhaps I mistook your meaning.

> Noting that “buoy data have been proven to be more accurate than ship data,” the new study applies a new “bias correction” to address the difference between them.

It also reduces the long-term temperature trend to the pre-1950 trend (i.e., pre-anthropogenic trend).

This is a paper that requires a significant degree of corroboration rather than simple endorsement because of its publication.

AGW skeptics assert this places a burden of proof on AGW proponents to show that warming since 1950 is beyond what could naturally occur.

swoon

During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)

"My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code." -Theo De Raadt http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129261032213320

citation needed

http://publicationethics.org/news/cope-statement-inappropria...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ - "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%... - Editor in Chief of the Lancet talking about about upwards of half of biomed studies are faked or over-estimated

As in 'building a graph of who quotes who ?' What's wrong with that ?

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/01/quote-mining-code...

     > Most of the environmental movement is composed of 
    innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard    
    core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops.

[0] http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-global-warming-projecti...

[1] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/06/noaa-t...

[2] www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jul/21/realistic-climate-models-accurately-predicted-global-warming

[3] http://skepticalscience.com/curry-mcintyre-resist-ipcc-model...

[4] http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm

That doesn't feel like a particularly strong response to ESR's claim. Taken as a response to that claim, it feels kind of like: "our predictions were wildly inaccurate, but it's a complicated system with short-term and long-term factors and the short-term factors caused more warming just before we made our predictions and less just after, and that threw us off".

Which doesn't inspire confidence. If you can't predict the short-term factors, you need to widen your confidence intervals. I feel like at the very least, you should be making predictions like "conditional on these factors staying within these bounds, we expect this amount of warming". Then if that condition doesn't hold, you don't lose any bayes points.

(I recognize that the article wasn't written as a response to ESR, I'm not even sure it was a response to the same thing that ESR is talking about. But you offered it as a response, so that's how I'm evaluating it.)

The greatest changes in the new NOAA surface temperature analysis is to the ocean temperatures since 1998. This seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements – ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend. Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998. ... The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target. So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.

------

The link above also includes more on some of the specifics of the new adjustments NOAA made.

Judith sure knows how to play to the gallery.

The science behind climate change has nothing to do with any personality or politics and everything to do with physics and atmospheric sciences. Or are you going to debate that the radiative forcing of an atmosphere with CO2 at 450ppm is magically less than one with 250ppm?

The accusations you mention completely flopped and the "accused" were exonerated by half a dozen independent committees and investigations.

Climate scientists do not on the whole make a lot of money for their level of technical skill and training- if any climate scientist was "in it for grant money", they simply would switch to data analysis in the private industry or another field. Climate science is a diverse and huge field with many research areas that existed long before our awareness of climate change, and researchers' careers do not depend on the current climate change consensus- it's not like every university would simply fire their Earth Sciences department, or the NSF would stop funding Earth Science grants, if the climate was not warming. Additionally, you don't seem to understand how the grant process works- grants are awarded before results are obtained, chosen by committees of scientists, and a majority of climate science grants do not even write proposals concerned with future predictions. Finally, the irony is of course, the handful of denialist scientists are the only people who have been explicitly (and universally) linked to outside conflict of interest funding in their work.

Al Gore did not "help invent" any part of climate science, he merely brought popular attention to the issue.

Your failure boils down to the following: you have no perspective of the magnitude, operations, or workings of the scientific community. You have accused tens of thousands of scientists, safely employed at universities across the world, in countries with wildly different politics and governmental situations than the US, of conspiring together to produce dozens of scientific papers every week and an entire worldwide network of data collection, from satellites to buoys to promote a false theory, all of which gives them essentially nothing to gain.

Have you ever read a journal in the Earth Sciences? Can you even name one? If not: you haven't even begun to examine the scientific matters at hand. When you realize how wholly out of your field you are, it should become clear that your concerns are rooted in anti-intellectualism and rabid ideology, and nothing else.

http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/five-things-we-still-dont-kn...

Moreover, if the premise is wrong, the conclusion can only be false, that's basic fallacy.

Follow those models like they actually say anything is like giving a driver's license to a good racing gamer (NFS, GTA, etc.). It's just simulation, it's not real.

Weird how a "quack" manages to get her work into top-tier peer-reviewed journals, isn't it.

When one side of an argument descends to ad hominem as their first move, it is a sure sign their side has lost the argument.

Unfortunately, ACC is likely real and deserves a strong policy response. People like you, who admit to having no actual argument for their position, are actively damaging the cause of science and good policy.

Your idea that this is an ad hominem is intellectually dishonest. Curry has been criticized by the vast, vast majority of climate scientists for her outrageous and ignorant interpolation of other climate data.

Finally, there is nothing "weird" about people who are quacks publishing things on Nature. Nature is not the end-all of scientific publications, and it's not by any means a specialty publication in the field of climate science.

Quote: 'These results do not support the notion of a “slowdown” in the increase of global surface temperature.'

"And that is actually a valuable hint about how to get beyond racism. A black man with an IQ of 85 and a white man with an IQ of 85 are about equally likely to have the character traits of poor impulse control and violent behavior associated with criminality — and both are far more likely to have them than a white or black man with an IQ of 110. If we could stop being afraid of IQ and face up to it, that would give us an objective standard that would banish racism per se. IQ matters so much more than skin color that if we started paying serious attention to the former, we might be able to stop paying attention to the latter."

Making discussing statistics "racist" is a disservice to disadvantaged communities.

And it is racist to be credulous of statistics that support one's racist point of view. Statistics come from actual data, so shortcomings in the data collection can produce shortcomings in the statistics.

For example the testing that goes into IQ is not without controversy. And crime statistics are directly dependent on the policing and prosecution of crime--they don't reflect the objective reality of crime, they reflect the outcomes of an imperfect system that detects and punishes crime.

There is ample and growing evidence that many such systems are significantly biased by racism. See: the recent Justice Department investigations of municipal police deparments like Ferguson, Cleveland, etc. So judging the criminality of a particular "race" by aggregate police statistics is not likely to be objective.

Finally, the concept of race itself is socially constructed, and therefore not objective. If a person has a white mother and a black father, are they black or white? What if one grandparent is Asian? Ultimately the attribution of race is a human social decision--a person self-identifies with a particular race, and/or others define their race based on how they look. Neither is scientifically objective the way that height or eye color is.

> And it is racist to be credulous of statistics that support one's racist point of view.

Note that these are kind of circular. You've judged that the speaker's point of view is racist, and therefore his use of statistics is racist.

Also note that, to a first approximation, everybody only quotes statistics that support their own point of view, and everyone is credulous of statistics that support their own point of view.

It's easy to think of reasons why statistics would be biased in favor of showing IQ differences between races. It's also easy to think of reasons why statistics would be biased against that. In a world where most people don't believe in IQ differences between races - or even a world where people don't want to look like they believe in them - there's going to be publication bias against that direction. That's true even if there are no true IQ differences between races.

> Finally, the concept of race itself is socially constructed, and therefore not objective.

Imagine a world where there was a single gene which added ten IQ points to someone. (Which is definitely not the world we live in.) Imagine it was a mutation which arose in a single location a thousand years ago. It didn't become fixed in that population, and it's spread outside. But it's certainly more common in people who were born in that region, whose parents and grandparents were born there, than in people born on the other side of the world.

In this world, it seems to me that race would be just as much a social construct, and therefore not objective. But it would also be true that there would be a strong correlation between IQ and race.

That's true for drug use crimes and to a lesser extend drug selling crimes, which make up way too many of the crimes prosecuted. Similarly for other crimes where police have a large amount of discretion to decide whether or not to arrest someone.

However there are also big differences in crime rates by race for murder. It's very hard to dismiss this as the result of how murder is policed. Police generally have much less discretion in how to deal with murder.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-rushing/the-reasons-why-...

See http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m....

Also, they say that the differences in crime rates by race can be explained by socioeconomic disadvantages. But among the effects of socioeconomic disadvantages are poor early childhood nutrition and more likely exposure to toxic environments (hello, old buildings with lead paint!). These things tend to hold back cognitive development, which tends to result in lower IQ scores. So to deny a link between lower IQ on average and higher crime rate on average is in effect denying a link between socioeconomic disadvantages and higher crime rates.

Whether or not someone is being racist when writing about the link between IQ and crime depends on what they think is the causality behind the link between IQ and socioeconomic disadvantages, and the factors behind whichever one of those they think is the cause of the other. ESR may indeed be a racist, but you've not shown it, and the source behind your link could be reasonably cited to support the ESR statement you quoted.

We need to find some way to get some statistical sense into people at an early age, so as they grow up it becomes routine and automatic to recognize when you should care about group averages and when you should not.

In almost every situation where you are dealing with individuals, the fact that one individual comes from a group whose bell curve for some characteristic of interest is slightly displaced from the bell curve of the group that some other individual comes from is meaningless trivia when it comes to deciding which individual to choose for something that depends on that characteristic.

"His work and expertise in computer technology[9][10] has been all but overshadowed by his batshit insane wingnut tendencies in the wake of 9/11, as well as his increasingly wanky ego-gazing[11][12] as he acknowledges that people aren't so crazy about him anymore. "

Growing up in poverty, which many minorities do in this country, has been linked with lower IQ. Criminal populations are 8 IQ points below the mean. Whether there's a connection here is beyond me, but I really hate how people play up the hysterical political correctness card to censor these types of discussions. In many countries, raising people out of poverty lowers crime. There's definitely a connection here and in the US we're so PC, that we can't discuss these things, thus our continued high crime rates in many urban areas.

Calling everyone who disagrees with you a "racist" doesn't add to the conversation and only helps to make sure that we cannot discuss race issues without unneeded emotional drama.

cites:

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v18/n5/full/nn.3983.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178903...

Please read my primary sources before handing me more drive-by downvotes.

I don't know if he's right or not, but the idea is conceivably plausible. Suppose a white person can work 40 hours a week and make enough to live in a tier 1 neighborhood with a tier 1 lifestyle when it comes to physical goods, and suppose because blacks get lower pay for the same work, a black person would need 60 hours a week for that lifestyle.

If the black person only does 40 hours, like the white person, the black person can only afford a tier 2 neighborhood. Now what if the black person figures out that if he lived in a tier 3 neighborhood, he'd only need 30 hours a week?

If the gap between the quality of the neighborhood and goods affordable in tier 3 and tier 2 is relatively small, especially compared to the gap between tier 2 and tier 1, then going for tier 3 and trading away a small bit of housing and goods quality for an extra 10 hours to spend with family and friends or personal interests might easily be worth it to many.

For the white person, dropping from 40 to 30 hours would kick them from tier 1 to tier 2, which is a much bigger drop, and might not be worth gaining 10 hours of family and friend time.

So you end up in a situation where whites have a single peak in their work vs happiness curve at 40 hours. Blacks have two peaks: 30 hours for tier 3, or 60 hours for tier 1.

Using the term "lazy" for those who opt for tier 3 was a mistake. He doesn't seem to be trying to use it as a pejorative. I think he was thinking more along the lines of The Dude or Cosmo Kramer style laziness.

Do you really think black people go through such mental calculations like that, when deciding what to spend their time on next? Do you, whatever race you are?

You and Russ are presuming that you have any idea what thoughts and mental calculus goes through a black person's mind when they decide when and how hard to work on what, and that you could even know or deduce it without asking, and that it's the same for all black people, and that there's a difference between how black and white people think, which rules and formula they use, and which numbers they plug into them.

Don't you see how condescending it is for a white man (or anyone) to lecture black people (or anyone) about how they think and why they behave, presuming to know better about the cause of their problems, explicitly calling them lazy as a class, acting like he's doing them a favor by justifying their laziness? That level of patronizing, smug, self righteous condescension directed at black people as a class is racist.

He's backward chaining from his racist foregone conclusion that "blacks are lazy" to a bunch of made-up speculation he pulled out of his ass about how "black people" think and what motivates their behavior, which he can't possibly know.

He purposefully led with as offensive a title as possible just to get attention, and then he tried to demonstrate how clever he is to be able to logically argue himself out of the huge hole he just dug with the click bait blog post title "Blacks are Lazy". And it's not just that his arguments are "badly written", it's also that his assumptions and logic are deeply flawed.

My theory: Russ was just inexpertly trying to ape Eric Raymond's favorite rhetorical tactic, and he failed miserably. But Eric was flattered, and stuck up for him.

“Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”

The Dog Whistle Has Sounded: How the Right Talks About 'Thugs' Like Trayvon Martin

http://gawker.com/5899322/the-dog-whistle-has-sounded-how-th...

Of course not.

> You and Russ are presuming that you have any idea what thoughts and mental calculus goes through a black person's mind when they decide when and how hard to work on what, and that you could even know or deduce it without asking, and that it's the same for all black people, and that there's a difference between how black and white people think, which rules and formula they use, and which numbers they plug into them.

Nope. I'm presuming that black people make these decisions exactly the same way white people do, which is by observing the outcomes of the decisions of others similarly situated and picking a path similar to the paths taking by those whose outcomes they would like to also achieve.

They can see that blacks living in the tier 1 neighborhoods need to put in a lot more work than the whites living in those neighborhoods. They can see that putting in merely the same level of works that whites do results in at best tier 2. They can see that working less than that results in tier 3. They can see that their friends working less and settling for tier 3 are spending more time with family or personal interests. The can see that tier 2 is only a minor improvement physically over tier 3, and is a long way behind tier 2.

But now you're quoting ESR on witch hunts, not ESR on race.

> My point is that ESR is not a trustworthy source of information.

Then the word to use for that is "untrustworthy". The word you've actually been using is "racist".

Rationalwiki is not a trustworthy source of information. That's not something I can provide a firm citation for, so I don't expect you to start ignoring the place, but personally I try not to believe anything it says without doing the research myself. (And on the subject of ESR, I try not to believe anything anyone says without doing the research myself.) I don't remember the details of ESR on climategate, and don't particularly care to look it up.[1]

I do remember this, however:

> ESR wrote a blog post suggesting that the Haitian people really did summon up the Voudon god Ogun to kill off all the white Frenchmen.

and it's not a fair description. ESR suggested that the Haitians really did attempt to summon Ogun. He suggested that the ritual was valuable for physchological reasons. He did not suggest that they succeeded in summoning Ogun.

[1] There's a failure mode that I sometimes fall into, where I don't care about an object-level discussion, but weigh in on the meta-level, because the meta-level is more interesting to me. Then I get sucked in to the object-level. I'm trying not to do that here.

So... you're saying the only possible opposition to his climate results is distraction via playing the race card, logical fallacies, and sophistry? So you're a strong supporter of his climate claims. Yet you were implying between the lines earlier that his climate claims are perhaps not so good. Which is it? Or is it just the anti-scientific "truth depends solely upon who says it"?

As a meta analysis I'm not sure dramatizing or personalizing a statistical analysis is supposed to improve anything anyway. So how deep does the sophistry go? Is there any reasoned response to the claims other than personal attacks against theoretical semi-libelous attacks against individuals based on unrelated political beliefs? Sadly, there probably is, so you're doing a disservice to that position. Are you are being paid to disrupt scientific reports about climate change by discrediting "supporters"? It is known there are people being paid to do that, although I'd expect hirelings to do a better job for their pieces of silver.