Frank Lemke mathturbates in public -- Judith Curry watches

Words fail me.

Briefly said, knowledge mining is data mining that goes steps further. It is a data-driven modeling approach, but in addition to data mining, self-organizing knowledge mining also builds the model itself, autonomously, including self-selection of relevant inputs by extracting the necessary “knowledge” to develop it from observational noisy data, only, most objectively in an inductive, self-organizing way. It generates optimal complex models according to the noise dispersion in the data, which systematically avoids overfitting the data. This is a very important condition for prediction. These models are available then explicitly in form of nonlinear difference equations, for example.

So this approach is different from the vast majority of climate models, which are based on theories.

Frank Lemke -- a face you can trust.

Translating Mr. Lemke into English, he is curve-fitting, ignoring any physical reality, and trying to make predictions for the future and assertions about what elements of the physical system matter according to the mathematical games he is playing with himself. As was foretold:

There seems to be a rash of trying to explain global warming by theories that either ignore, or flatly contradict, the science called “physics.”

Lemke brings this unphysical approach forward as an exciting a new take on scientific inquiry. It's not. Real scientists are quite familiar with how incredibly easy it is to tune and tweak a made-up mathematical construct to say anything you want it to say. As the poet said:

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

 Judith Curry, who has given this clown her increasingly promiscuously bestowed "fascinating"[!], slips in a backhanded acknowledgement that Lemke is selling snake oil:

Conclusions regarding AGW and the role of CO2 cannot be drawn from 23 years of data, but this methodology in principle could be extended to longer time periods.

 Of course Lemke has already drawn such conclusions. That's the point of the whole pointless exercise:

Looking at observational data by high-performance self-organizing predictive knowledge mining, it is not confirmed that atmospheric CO2 is the major force of global warming. In fact, no direct influence of CO2 on global temperature has been identified for the best models.

So Lemke's main argument gets no traction even with Dr. Curry -- so why push this huckster into the limelight?

A while back -- in fact, I'm the only one who even seems to remember this -- Dr. Curry came out with a post called "Meta-expertise" that provided an excellent list of questions with which to evaluate a self-described expert:

Finally, here are a few tests that can be used to evaluate the “experts” in your life:

1. Credentials: Does the expert possess credentials that have involved testable criteria for demonstrating proficiency?
2. Walking the walk: Is the expert an active practitioner in their domain (versus being a critic or a commentator)?
3. Overconfidence: Ask your expert to make yes-no predictions in their domain of expertise, and before any of these predictions can be tested ask them to estimate the percentage of time they’re going to be correct. Compare that estimate with the resulting percentage correct. If their estimate was too high then your expert may suffer from over-confidence.
4. Confirmation bias: We’re all prone to this, but some more so than others. Is your expert reasonably open to evidence or viewpoints contrary to their own views?
5. Hedgehog-Fox test: Tetlock found that Foxes were better-calibrated and more able to entertain self-disconfirming counterfactuals than hedgehogs, but allowed that hedgehogs can occasionally be “stunningly right” in a way that foxes cannot. Is your expert a fox or a hedgehog?
6. Willingness to own up to error: Bad luck is a far more popular explanation for being wrong than good luck is for being right. Is your expert balanced, i.e., equally critical, when assessing their own successes and failures?

 I think these are excellent questions. Put them to your favorite "skeptic" expert today, see how they get on. Based on the howls of outrage that followed when I brought, I think maybe they are only intended for use "outside the family," as it were. But no matter. Let's explore Frank Lemke's claims to climate modelling expertise.

Credentials: Does the expert possess credentials that have involved testable criteria for demonstrating proficiency?

From Lemke's Linkedin profile:

Education: Master, Electricial Engineering and Technical Informatics 

Exciting day, huh? An electrical engineer come to teach us about climate science. Never seen that before. Question two:

Is the expert an active practitioner in their domain (versus being a critic or a commentator)?

The Linkedin profile gives no publications. I did a Google Scholar search for publications authored by "Frank Lemke" in the past five years.

"A Unified DAQ Interconnection Network with Precise Time Synchronization"
"Modeling tool wear in end-milling using enhanced GMDH learning networks"
"A unified interconnection network with precise time synchronization for the CBM DAQ-system" "Knowledge Extraction From High Dimensional Data Using Multileveled Self-organization" (self published on his own website)
"High-density active optical cable: from a new concept to a prototype" "Parallel Self-organizing Modeling" (self published on his own website)
"Algorithms for (Q) SAR model building"

Lemke is not a climate scientist and has not published anything on climate science. He publishes in his field -- electrical engineering. He has tried to apply his mathurbation model to climate systems, but nobody published that stuff -- he posted it on his own website.

Overconfidence: Ask your expert to make yes-no predictions in
their domain of expertise, and before any of these predictions can be
tested ask them to estimate the percentage of time they’re going to be
correct. Compare that estimate with the resulting percentage correct. If
 their estimate was too high then your expert may suffer from
over-confidence.

I doubt Lemke's going to help us with this one, but it's hardly necessary. Curry herself has already called Lemke out for sweeping conclusions not justified by his data. #3 and #6 are pretty similar to one another:

Confirmation bias: We’re all prone to this, but some more so
than others. Is your expert reasonably open to evidence or viewpoints
contrary to their own views?

Willingness to own up to error: Bad luck is a far more popular explanation for being wrong than good luck is for being right. Is your expert balanced, i.e., equally critical, when assessing their own successes and failures?

Fortunately Lemke is participating in the discussion at Climate Etc, so we can see his response to criticism:

knowledgeminer | October 18, 2011 at 5:57 am |
@anander
“After reading a bit more on the subject, I get a hunch that this is not that mainstream – this is just a hunch mainly based on lowish citation counts. What I was able to find (quickly) were written almost solely by Frank Lemke himself. This doesn’t mean it is somehow false or anything, just wondering!”

Well, this is really an ill-posed task. Try solving it with the info you have and observe yourself how assuming different aspects impacts your answers.

Kind of brittle, sarcastic and not to the point, huh? Let's try another:

knowledgeminer | October 17, 2011 at 3:32 pm | Reply

“There is also some danger in the application of theoretically derived paradigms by individuals without reasonably detailed knowledge of climate physics, because this can easily lead to small misinterpretations that generate inaccurate conclusions.”
Fred, to make it clear: There is no application of theoretically derived paradigms in this modeling approach at all! EVERYTHING, including the model and the composition of inputs is derived from observations, only. Observations, measurements of system variables, hide essential information about the behavior of the system. This knowledge can be extracted by self-organizing modeling and transformed into predictive models.

Not a lot of humility there either -- the questioner is totally wrong, everything (EVERYTHING) Lemke did is right and correct, so there you go. Further down MattStat has a nice critique:

MattStat | October 17, 2011 at 6:39 pm | Reply

The objective function of the algorithm is not well described. To continue a thought posted by Vaughan Pratt, within a range of 90% of the optimal objective function achieved, and the optimal itself, you can usually find a large set of models that have different entities included, different parameter estimates, and different interpretations. The difference in the objective function between the best and all these second and third raters can’t be known to be other than chance variation. With many variables and few observations, it is next to impossible to avoid overfitting and over-interpreting. So tell us more about how you are not excessively fitting noise.
FWIW, this post reads like an advertisement.

Which leave Lemke sputtering with indignation, but not admitting any shortcomings:

knowledgeminer | October 17, 2011 at 7:10 pm | Reply 1. There is a proven history of this approach of more than 40 years. References are also given in this discussion. 2. Follow the “advertisement”. Sometimes people also call it transparency.

Is Lemke a hedgehog or a fox (#5)? Hard to care particularly when his performance on #1-#4, & #6 is a series of epic fails.

Lemke's not an expert, not a scientist, not even a phD. What does he actually do? Well, funnily enough, he sells software. What kind of software? Modelling software -- the same kind he's using to argue that CO2 doesn't warm the planet. Public mathturbation may be "fascinating" to Dr. Curry, but I doubt very much it will either transform climate science or even sell his software.

Mark Lynas gets Jared Diamond wrong.

Mark Lynas joins the cottage industry of hating on Jared Diamond as he spins a myth of "The myth of Easter Island's ecocide:"

 Few historical tales of ecological collapse have achieved the cultural resonance of that of Easter Island. In the conventional account, best popularised by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book ‘Collapse’, the islanders brought doom upon themselves by over-exploiting their limited environment, thereby providing a compelling analogy for modern times. Yet recent archaeological work suggests that the eco-collapse hypothesis is almost certainly wrong – and that the truth is far more shocking.

As we will see, the most "shocking" thing Lynas brings to bear is evidence of his own incompetence and/or malice in misrepresenting Diamond's argument in the measured, carefully argued Collapse.


Judith Curry spreads the meme, and extends the faulty argument:

[C]omplex coupled social-ecological-environmental systems, simple theories are almost certain to be too simple.  The complexity of such coupled systems precludes simple cause-effect analyses.   If we are arguing about such a system on the scale of Easter Island, what hope do we have of understanding and managing such interactions on  continental or even global scales?  Ecosystems eventually adapt to climate change and insults from humans. 

From arguing that Diamond got Easter Island's tragedy wrong, Curry somehow gets to the point that all of Diamond's thinking is wrong, because it is "too simple," and by the way, climate science is impossible, because it is too simple too. Also, ecological devastation is nothing to worry about because "Ecosystems eventually adapt to climate change and insults from humans." (That single sentence is wrong in so many dimensions -- the moral, the practical, and the scientific -- not just Pollyannish but horribly pantheist and anti-humanist -- that it deserves its own post.)

Judith Curry was once a respected climate scientist. Now she poses for photos like this.

But we should really start with patient zero, Lynas himself. The reality he is describing -- one historian has one idea about how something happened, supported by pieces of evidence, and other historians highlight new evidence that challenges that account -- is really not punchy enough for the kind of "gotcha" post Lynas is writing (those evil environmentalists are trying to scare you!). So he sexes up the allegations with a small army of straw men:

Diamond’s thesis is that the island’s original lush tree-cover was destroyed by the Polynesian colonists, whose cult of making massive statues (for which the island is now famous) required prodigious amounts of wood to transport these huge rock idols. He suggests that as the ecological crisis brought on by deforestation worsened, the islanders tried to appease their apparently angry gods by making and transporting yet more statues, creating a vicious circle of human stupidity.

Anybody who has spent five minutes paying attention to Jared Diamond would know that he would be highly unlikely refer to an entire culture's spiritual practices as a "cult."  The only use of the word "cult" in the entire book refers to a post-disaster religious practice which Diamond regards positively: "The survivors adapted as best they could, both in their subsistence and in religion . . . the new religion developed its own art styles . . ." (141).

 What about the vivid (and given Curry's reaction, unintentionally self-referential) phrase "a vicious circle of human stupidity"? Did Diamond say anything like that?

Actually, if you search Collapse for the word "stupid," you find the opposite -- Diamond stressing the intelligent and cultured native civilizations, whose behavior we unfairly judge, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been unintelligent:

Page 24: "The societies that ended up collapsing were (like the Maya) among the most creative and (for a time) advanced and successful of their times, rather than stupid and primitive."

Page 513: "With the gift of hindsight, we now view it as incredibly stupid that colonists would release into Australia two alien mammals . . . But it's still difficult for professional ecologists to predict which introductions . . . will prove disastrous. . . . Hence, we really shouldn't be surprised."

Page 518: "We unconsciously imagine . . . just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an act of incredible self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the changes in the forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable . . ."

Whenever Diamond mentions stupidity (and there's one more reference, on page 624, but it's just the same) it is always to defend societies (and not just native societies; he sticks up for the Australian colonists too) from our harsh judgements, with the benefit of hindsight, that they behaved stupidly.

This is incredibly obvious to anyone that has read any of Diamond's books, including his most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (and if you haven't read it, do). The theme that runs through all of Diamond's writing is that people are people and in the long-term make a similar proportion of good and bad decisions, decisions which however are usually based in a fairly deep understanding of the conditions in which the people at the time lived, decisions that are often smarter and more flexible than we tend to attribute to societies other than our own.

That is Diamond's big idea, and Lynas gets him entirely backwards. So how does he sell this straw man Diamond to the reader? Check out this epic bait and switch:

Diamond was not the first to draw this specific analogy: over a decade earlier, in a 1992 book entitled ‘Easter Island, Earth Island’, Paul Bahn and John Flenley (both palaeoecologists) wrote:

“…the person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. But he (or she) still felled it. This is what is so worrying. Humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn. Selfishness leads to survival. Altruism leads to death. The selfish gene wins. But in a limited ecosystem, selfishness leads to increasing population imbalance, population crash, and ultimately extinction.”

Lynas suggest that Diamond's thesis builds on this one, but as we now know, Diamond's conclusion was precisely the opposite:

“…the person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. But he (or she) still felled it."

Page 518: "We unconsciously imagine . . . just a single tree left, which an islander proceeds to fell in an act of incredible self-damaging stupidity. Much more likely, though, the changes in the forest cover from year to year would have been almost undetectable . . ."

Lynas depicts Diamond as extending the argument of Bahn and Flenley (doubtless the most extreme and unsupportable conclusion he could find) despite the fact that Diamond specifically addresses this theory and categorically refutes it. That's not just a poor argument: it's dishonest to attribute to Diamond a thesis he specifically entertained and vehemently rejected.

There's more here, much more, but after we've caught Lynas using Collapse to attribute beliefs to Diamond which are exactly the opposite of what he wrote in Collapse, that's sort of the end, isn't it? He's committed credibility suicide as that point. As so often with such as Lynas, we are left with the eternal question: is he a liar or just a sloppy incompetent?


UPDATE: Yes, I know I said that catching Lynas in a 180 degree misrepresentation of Diamond was enough to call it right there, but here's one more fun fact about his fallacy-laden screed.

Lynas casually introduces the following reference:

As Benny Peiser points out in this 2005 paper, fish supplies were abundant, and reports from early European explorers that the islanders were thin and miserable-looking are highly contradictory (others report that they lived in comparative luxury). Certainly Diamond’s reading of this seems highly partisan. As Peiser puts it:

“Together with abundant and virtually unlimited sources of seafood, the cultivation of the island’s fertile soil could easily sustain many thousands of inhabitants interminably. In view of the profusion of broadly unlimited food supplies (which also included abundant chickens, their eggs and the islands innumerable rats, a culinary ‘delicacy’ that were always available in abundance), Diamond’s notion that the natives resorted to cannibalism as a result of catastrophic mass starvation is palpably absurd. In fact, there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever for either starvation or cannibalism.”

Sounds bad for Diamond. I'll just do a quick check, as I always do, to make sure this paper is good science by a respected author in a reputable peer-reviewed journal . . .

B. Peiser (2005) From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui Energy & Environment volume 16 No. 3&4 2005

 Energy and Environment. Your source for all your archaeological and archaeometrical needs, without the stress and hassle of peer review. So, Mr. Peiser, how did you come to be publishing in such as illustrious pillar of the historical sciences?

Of course there's a Sourcewatch page:

Benny Peiser is a UK social anthropologist on the Heartland Institute "Global warming experts" list. He runs CCNet (network) and is frequently quoted in Local Transport Today, a transport journal that frequently features the views of climate change skeptics. He is director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.^[1] He is co-editor of the skeptic journal Energy and Environment^[2] and is on the editorial board of the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development.

 An expert in climate change and historical instances of Polynesian cannibalism. Talk about your double threats.

His educational background is not given . . . I'm sure we can all come to a reasonable inference about that. But he is (or was) an academic, to be sure:

Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology & Sport Sociology, Liverpool John Moores University

 So far Mark Lynas has promoted this clown, and Judith Curry repeats the quote, whilst praising Lynas' "opening mind." Who will be next to join them in embarrassing themselves with lavish praise for psuedoscience? This threatens to become the Jonestown of credibility suicides.