Announcement of new elements allows WUWT dittoheads to flex their ignorance

Every now and again, Anthony likes to cut-n-paste a science press release, to try and delude himself and his readers into thinking his website has something to do with science other than whining about it. Unfortunately, changing the subject merely serves to illustrate the pathetic science illiteracy and reactionary politics of his little band.

Recently actual scientists were able to synthesize four new elements -- creating materials never seen on earth before. And Anthony, "citizen scientist," was able to copy their press release!

This should be easy. Not much is required of the commentors by way of response here. Scientists toiled for years in obscurity and today they leave their mark on history. Yay science! Unfortunately, this simple PR exercise is beyond the ken of Tony's tinfoil hat brigade.

Needless to say, "just get past…around 110" is not anyone's idea of how to synthesize stable superheavy elements, which is still very much a thing. But perhaps I am getting sidetracked from "JPS"'s main point, which seems to be: Scientists were wrong about an island of stability (wrong) so global warming is a lie!

Multiple dim bulbs simply reject the idea that anything has been discovered. It's just another hoax!

"Mark" one goes off on a weird tangent about element names, but "Mark" two stands ready to pull the discussion back to what the site is all about:

Having belittled homosexuals, the tinfoil hats decide it's time to bring up slavery and the New World Order:

I'd like to reiterate: this is a puff piece about a feel-good story about the discovery of new elements. But these deniers can't get through a simple press release on a totally non-climate-related subject without devolving into an anti-intellectual, homophobic, paranoid cri de coeur. It does not make one hopeful for their output of the course of the rest of this, an election year.

Hell, yes!

In a Guardian piece on things that annoy climate scientists -- a piece that hit all the usual marks about ignorant politicians, people who don't understand uncertainty, etc. -- was this gem:

The thing that bugs me most about the way climate change is talked about in the media is journalists citing scientific papers without providing a link to the original paper.

Readers often want to get more details or simply check sources, but this is very difficult (or sometimes impossible) if the source is not given. I've raised this a few times, and get lame excuses like 'readers get frustrated when the journals are paywalled' but that's not good enough. Media should provide sources – end of.

-- Professor Richard Betts, chair in Climate Impacts at the College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, UK

 Dear God, that irritates me to no end! Not only no link, but often they don't even give you the name of the paper, or the issue of the journal it's in! (Or is going to be in.) It's 2014, cite your fucking sources! Preach it, Dr Betts, preach it!

The intolerant moderates

Skeptical Science won the internet last week with a superb original paper by Cook, Nuccitelli et al that evaluated over 12,000 sources and found 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening.

Amazingly some people managed to miss the point:

On @skepticscience study of scientists' #AGW consensus, I'm with @davidappell davidappell.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-… and @keithkloor blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/…
— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) May 16, 2013

Their names are practically a role call of the "intolerent moderates" -- journalists who have chosen to define themselves as independent-minded thinkers ready to castigate both sides. The intolerant moderates accept that climate change is happening and action is necessary, but struggle to occupy a middle ground condemning the excesses of both sides. Since the excesses in the climate debate are not at all equally distributed between science deniers and the concerned, this positioning often leads to tepid critiques of climate deniers coupled with energetic castigation of the other side for minor, or, as in this case, nonexistent sins.

Dave Appell just doesn't see the point of the study:

I'm not very keen on these kinds of numbers -- they are made for lazy journalists who don't want to examine the complexity of the science, reporters who just want a number that quickly and easily supports their position.

Or maybe reporters who want to convey to their readers a simple, rock-solid case that a majority of climate scientists believe climate change is real and is caused by humans something only 30% of Americans know to be true (Really).

Kloor is spouting the same sort of nonsense:

The latest example is this survey by John Cook et al that is getting a lot of undeserved attention in the mainstream media. I say that because, questionable methodology aside, the survey tells us nothing new and is, as science journalist David Appell noted, “a meaningless exercise.”

I enjoy their quoting one another for added support: but they are both completely, utterly, ludicrously wrong.

It's hard to say which is the more fundamental fail here: that Kloor doesn't understand that replicating results is critical to science, or that he thinks that he has somehow become a scientist, whose responsibility it is to follow and critique the bleeding edge of climate science, rather than his actual role as a science journalist helping the public grasp the critical core of the field, a job that evidently has to be done by scientists, who have pulled off a massive coup of science communication, only to be sneered at by the people who are paid to perform that function themselves.

I really expected better of Revkin than to jump on this bandwagon. This is why the survey is not a "meaningless exercise":

Source

Half of the public in this survey -- HALF -- said that if 90% of climate scientists agreed that global warming is happening, it would increase their concern. This mind-boggling result is possible, again, because SEVENTY PERCENT OF THE PUBLIC DIDN'T KNOW MOST CLIMATE SCIENTISTS THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS HAPPENING.

That three SCIENCE JOURNALISTS do not know this about their audience is scandalous. It borders on professional incompetence. These people are lecturing scientists about science communication?

UPDATE: In the comments, MikeH perceptively notes that the intolerant moderate is a subspecies of the VSP:

They are the Very Serious People (popularised by Paul Krugman in his NYT column)
(http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Very_Serious_People)

"Valuing common sense over scientific consensus when there is a conflict. When pushed far enough VSP will eventually err on the side of science but will hold a candle for pseudoscience as long as it has a veneer of respectability.
Loves the hell out of the balance fallacy. They feel uncomfortable pointing out flaws concentrated in the right-wing or left-wing without pointing to an opposite example. "Both sides do it!"

Climate scientist 2+2=4
Denier 2+2=5
VSP 2+2=4.5

The Signal and the Noise: the King of the Nerds on Climate Change

Buy it now.

This book fluttered the needle in the climate community already when Michael Mann expressed concern that not all was well with Silver's chapter on climate. Having read the book, Silver may not have everything right, but he's made a strong contribution to the world of reality-based thinking.

It isn't so much what he has to say specifically on the subject of climate. He doesn't dig into that too deeply. What he is very concerned with is how we evaluate evidence, how we assess and make use of expert predictions and computer models both, and how we recognize the difference between serious prediction and entertaining spin.

Relevant? I thought so. Here are Silver's main points, as I see them:

1. Experts work better with models, and just as importantly, models work better with experts. Neither one is as strong as both of them together.

2.Numbers don't speak for themselves. Without an underlying theory of what might be happening and why, you can't propose a reasonable pretest probability, and without a reasonable estimate of the pretest probability, you can't get much useful information out statistical tests of your data.

I don't know if Silver has even heard the term "mathturbation." If he has, he's far too classy to make use of it. But he shows us in a very compelling way why statistical analysis without theory is useless in a Bayesian universe.

3. In prediction, an average of many estimates from many different models and experts is typically better than just picking your favorite.

4. Many predictions from self-described experts are made for entertainment value and should be judged as such. Professionals are not inherently better or smarter than amateurs, but they are less likely to be subject to perverse incentives that reward them for being grossly wrong over and over.

Especially in our connected, information-rich world, the first task of a talking head is to call attention to their prediction -- to get noticed. That incentive favors extreme predictions, not accurate ones. A professional, however, who needs to maintain relationships with a smaller community paying closer attention over many years and many predictions, has a strong incentive to get things right. Which is one of the reasons we will not be replacing Nature with climate blogs any time soon.

Michael Mann points out that Silver says some nice things about Scott Armstrong, a creepy statistically illiterate self-declared "forecasting expert." That guy makes my skin crawl, but as far as I could see Silver did not side with him and correctly dismissed his climate "bet" thought experiment as dubious.

If you look away from the scant remarks on climate and look at how the larger argument applies to the climate debate, the points Silver makes are powerful arguments for the practices of the quote-unquote "climate establishment," and a devastating takedown of the "skeptic" argument.

He shows why we need experts, not just blind data analysis. He shows that statistics in the real world depend on a reasonable estimate pretest probability, which (and this is a simple but powerful point) means that a clear theory of the underlying process -- not a vague appeal to "natural causes"! -- is necessary to make intelligent use of the data.

Silver explains how the science of statistics justifies taking as many models and methods as possible into account when developing estimates of complex outputs like climate sensitivity and sea level rise.

Finally, by dissecting the pundit model of prediction, where the little known and little remembered predictor/entertainer makes dramatic declarations and evades responsibility for mistakes, Silver strikes a rare and welcome blow for professionalism in a culture that sometimes seems to worship the amateur as a higher and purer source of insight. Professionals don't just know their stuff, Silver argues, they themselves are known, and valued, only as far as their predictions are more successful than not. This gives them a strong incentive to get it right that amateurs struggling to be noticed and political voices pushing an agenda simply do not have.

Silver is worth reading, and I hope the valid caveats expressed by Dr Mann don't discourage pro-science voices from picking him up.

Graph of the day

Courtesy of Mother Jones, h/t The Dish:

xkcd on the election

Randall nails it as usual:

Bookmark it if you haven't

The permafrost carbon feedback, ctd

Field information links permafrost carbon to physical vulnerabilities of thawing

Deep soil profiles containing permafrost (Gelisols) were characterized for organic carbon (C) and total nitrogen (N) stocks to 3 m depths. Using the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4) we calculate cumulative distributions of active layer thickness (ALT) under current and future climates. The difference in cumulative ALT distributions over time was multiplied by C and N contents of soil horizons in Gelisol suborders to calculate newly thawed C and N. Thawing ranged from 147 PgC with 10 PgN by 2050 (representative concentration pathway RCP scenario 4.5) to 436 PgC with 29 PgN by 2100 (RCP 8.5). Organic horizons that thaw are vulnerable to combustion, and all horizon types are vulnerable to shifts in hydrology and decomposition. The rates and extent of such losses are unknown and can be further constrained by linking field and modelling approaches. These changes have the potential for strong additional loading to our atmosphere, water resources, and ecosystems. 

Similar general estimates as compared with this paper: 68 billion tons to 508 billion tons in 2100 versus 436 billion tons. This is estimated thawed carbon, though; it's not clear to me from the abstract if they even attempt to estimate how much of that ends up in the atmosphere. This is particularly important in the case of nitrogen, given that NO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas (with 310 times the warming potential of CO2) as well as an ozone-eating chemical.

Conversions

Note the use of "C" rather than "CO2"

This has been bugging me for a bit, because I am not a scientist -- well, mostly not -- and I get confused:

Pg = petragram = 10^15 grams = 10^12 kilograms = one billion tonnes = one gigatonne

They're all the same . . . news stories tend to say "billion tons," which is understandable, but why scientists cannot agree on either petragrams (Pg) or gigatonnes (Gt) I have no idea . . .

Tg = tetragram = 10^12 grams = 10^9 kilograms = one million tonnes = one megatonne

While we're on the subject:

There is one ton of carbon per 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide. So when we talk carbon emissions or carbon taxes, it's important to note whether we're talking the mass of the carbon alone, or the mass of the carbon dioxide.

The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.1480×10¹⁸ kg, so 1ppm (part per million) is 5.1480×10¹² kg, or (using our new en-smartening conversion above), about 5 gigtonnes (Gt) of CO2. While CO2 emissions are conventionally reported by mass, CO2 in the atmosphere is reported by volume, in parts per million of the total volume of the atmosphere. One part per million (ppm) of CO2 is 7.81 billion tons. The carbon itself weighs 2.13 billion tons.

A little more than half of that goes into natural sinks (for the moment, knock on wood) so it takes about 15 Gt of human CO2 to bump atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm.

UPDATE: Thanks to anon for pointing out the error above.

Further info at Skeptical Science, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, and CO2Now.

Judith Curry and the fallacy of the excluded middle

Judith Curry has a bad habit of preening over her worst examples of careless and sloppy thinking. In just the past few weeks, for example, she has repeatedly referred back to this awful train wreck of an argument:

There does seem to be an IPCC/UNFCCC ideology, let me try to lay it out here. I am using quotes from Michael Mann’s recent interview in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which I find to be a lucid statement of some elements of this.
1.  Anthropogenic climate change is real: “there is a very consistent story told by surface, sub-surface, ocean, atmospheric, and ice observations that Earth’s surface is warming, and in a way that is only consistent with human-caused increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.” (Mann)
2.  Anthropogenic climate change is dangerous and we need to something about it: “I believe it’s not too late to take the steps that are necessary to mitigate truly dangerous future climate change. There is still time to take action to stabilize greenhouse gases to a point where they don’t become a dangerous threat to humanity.” (Mann)
3.  The fossil fuel industry is trying to convince people that climate change is a hoax: “[P]owerful special interests in the fossil fuel industry . . . have invested millions of dollars in well-honed disinformation campaigns to convince the public and policy makers that human-caused climate change is either a hoax, or not nearly the threat that the scientific community has established it to be.”
4. Deniers are attacking climate science and scientists: “I’ve been the subject of attacks by climate-change deniers for more than a decade now, because of the prominent role that the “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction has played in the public discourse on climate change.”
5.  Action is needed to prevent dangerous climate change: “There are various episodes in our not-so-distant past when we were threatened by global environmental catastrophe and took action.”  (Mann)
6.  Deniers and fossil fuel industry are delaying UNFCCC mitigatory policies. “[Powerful special interests] have delayed any policy actions by at least a decade, perhaps more. The potential opportunity cost of that delay to humanity is impossible to estimate, but it is certainly staggering.” (Mann)

This is a political ideology.  #1 is about science.  #4 is in principle about science and scientists, except there is the automatic assumption that a bonafide scientific criticism is a political attack.  The rest of it is politics.

Leaving aside the small army of straw men (Michael Mann is synonymous with a "IPCC/UNFCCC ideology," really?) Curry here plunges into a straightforward embrace of the fallacy of the excluded middle, aka a false dilemma. The two tentpoles of her fallacy are "science" and "politics"; anything not science is "politics."

Of course many propositions are neither science nor politics. If you see a Mac truck barreling down on a jogger crossing the street, and you scream "Look out!" is that "science" or "politics"?

Dear idiot, get out of the way. Sincerely, "politics."

"Look out!" as a statement cannot be considered scientific. As some say of the case that climate change is dangerous, it relies on "values" (most statements do). In this particular example, those would be the "values" or not wanting to die of infected bedsores in a nursing home after a speeding truck smashes your spine. That is a matter of placing a "value" on life and health, but it is hardly "political" or "ideological" because both of those adjectives describe positions emerging from values that are not widely shared.

Ferinstance, take Rick Santorum (please). Rick Santorum says contraception is harmful to women. This is a belief that comes from the teachings of the Catholic church, and does not reflect a widely shared notion of "harm." It doesn't reflect harm to one's health (pregnancy being a greater danger to women's health than the expected consequences of contraception-assisted sex) or one's economic or professional position (unplanned children are bad for both) or any widely accepted measure of women's mental or emotional well-being. It is a moral position, which is to say, he believes that contraception and non-procreative sex are morally abhorrent and damaging to the spiritual health of women. That is a position shared by a group of American who share a number of other beliefs. It is ideological.

Is it ideological in the same sense to say "Anthropogenic climate change is dangerous" (point 2a)? Or is it more akin to "Look out!"?

The scientific facts of a multi-meter sea rise mean the loss of land and other resources to the ocean, to erosion, to greater storm surges, to the salinization of the water table. You can argue against the science that says this is likely to happen (the truck's not really headed for the crosswalk; the truck is already braking; I am the favorite of the Sith Lords and will stop the truck at the last minute with the Force, etc.) But that is not a political or ideological argument; it's still a scientific argument.

The political argument would be that, within the accepted facts, the truck hitting us isn't dangerous. That a multi-meter sea level rise would be a good thing for humanity -- or that humanity deserves to suffer. In order for ideology to come into play, as Dr. Curry wishes, we would need an ideology to raise its hand and explain how a poorer, hungrier, storm-wracked, Amazon-to-ash world is something that we should want.

Pseudoskeptics know that there is no argument to be made there: that is why you see them spending their industry millions attacking the teaching of global warming science,  funding dubious research into global warming science, questioning the objectivity, reliability, and veracity of science.

If there was a "values" argument or an "ideological" argument to be made, you would expect them to be promoting ideas like "Rising oceans will purge the sinful coasts" or "Wealth -- the root of all evil and how global warming will save you from it."

If no one wants to live in that poorer, more dangerous, more extreme post-warming world, then there is no ideological question; there is no values question, at least until when get to how to prevent global warming and who should make the biggest adjustments. I think I can safely speak for Michael Mann and many other presumptive members of the so-called "IPCC/UNFCCC ideology" when I say we would love to move the debate forward to the how.

Until we do, as long as we are still debating the whether, there is only the scientific question of whether are current actions are likely to lead to that future. If they are, and that future is dangerous, then our actions are dangerous. No politics come into it.

Many propositions are neither scientific nor political. "Climate change is dangerous" is a statement assuming commonly held ideas about "danger" -- that we don't want to be killed, or lose our homes, or go hungry. "We should do something about it" involves the idea that people can through forethought and action avoid danger. Again, until and unless there arises a political lobby for the proposition "Our fate is inescapable" or "Humans are dirty sinful creatures and deserve to suffer," these aren't political statements, but statements of common sense.

Similarly, points #3 and #4 may not be "scientific," but they are factual. Not all that is factual is science. John Kennedy was assassinated November 22, 1963 -- that is not a scientific proposition, but it is true, and is neither "politics" nor "ideology." Parts of the fossil fuel industry (among others) are trying to convince the public climate change is a hoax. Deniers are attacking science and scientists. Those are objective realities, not "political" claims. Curry is flirting with outright tinfoil-hat membership when she attributes widespread belief in such things to "ideology" whilst failing to even nod at the overwhelming factual evidence that they are true.

A new way to assess permafrost

Airborne electromagnetic imaging of discontinuous permafrost – Minsley et al. (2012)

H/t you know who. This airborne survey does not tell us -- yet -- about permafrost melting, since it only reflects a single point in time. But repeated annually, it could become an indispensable record of the evolving (read: melting) carbon storage lockers of the North.

I wonder if similar methods have been/could be used in the shallow waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf? They say they got data down to 100m -- parts of the ESAS are considerably shallower than that.

Solar activity hits seven-year high

Solar cycle 24 continues to ramp up, as expected. When La Nina falters -- it's now expected to persist through the middle of 2012 -- temperature records will fall. Until then, enjoy another data set following the trajectory predicted by scientists based on a model.

Why BEST matters.

Confirming earlier results that had already been repeatedly confirmed is nice, but that's not why BEST matters. BEST matters because, as great as it would be in a perfect world to confirm all facts through direct personal observation and replace all expert opinion with each individual's perfect mastery of every field of science and human endeavor, until that blessed day we will have to rely on the expertise of others in fields in which we are not experts ourselves. And while this does not ask us to surrender our own reasoning and common sense, the loudest demand of common sense when confronted with a complex and technical issue is to find people with good credentials and a good track record and let them explain things. So who has a good track record on climate change?

BEST is another reminder that it is the mainstream scientists of the "consensus" that have the track record. They said they had controlled for UHI and that station dropout was not notably altering the trend. They were right. "Skeptics" that pushed these issues as discrediting the temperature record were wrong. They said that siting issues might affect individual sites, but would not distort the global trend. They were right. "Skeptics" were wrong.

As with the temperature record, so with predictions of warming. The real scientists got it mostly right:

Kellogg, no cookie for you

The "skeptics," when they have made predictions, have been consistently wrong:

And so it goes with CO2 levels, ice loss, sea level rise and pretty much any other parameter you can name. Where you can compare the projections of real scientists to "skeptics," science wins, every time.

So who are you going to trust?