Judith Curry needs living space!

There's a whole series of these posters. They're pretty great.

I kid, she didn't reference that awful rhetorical precedent, but pretty darn close:

With regards to K-12 education, there is no particular reason to teach ‘climate change’ in the K-12 curriculum.  Climate change is a topic that is more suitable high school ‘science and society’ courses.  In such courses, teaching the controversy would seem to be of paramount importance.

"Teaching the controversy" being of course the rallying cry of the Creationists' drive to forbid the teaching of evolution. What a tradition for a professor of atmospheric science to allude to!

Somebody missed the sarcasm here.

I was interested in how far this particular meme had spread, so here you go:

"Teaching the controversy" "evolution": 38,700,000 hits
"Teach the controversy" & "evolution": 229,000 hits.
"Teaching the controversy" "global warming": 42,900 hits.
"Teach the controversy" & "global warming": 62,000 hits.
"Teaching the controversy" "climate change": 32,700 hits. 
"Teach the controversy" & "climate change": 62,100 hits.

I found some hits for other examples of science denial -- "moon landing" and "vaccines" as well as "Holocaust" -- but they seem to be primarily by people criticizing the denial by comparing their arguments to the anti-evolution malarkey. Only the climate denial crowd, as far as I can tell, is seriously trying to adopt this anti-evolution meme as their own.

As a tactic, this seems . . . not inspired. The denial of evolution, as an analogy for the denial of anthropogenic climate change, is perhaps a little too close for comfort in ways that are not flattering to Curry et al:

Denial of Evolution vs Denial of Global Warming

1. Flies in the face of a massive amount of scientific evidence. Check. Check.
2. Utterly rejected by the vast majority of scientists. Check. Check.
3. Driven by the discomfort of a particular ideology with the implications of the science. Check. Check.
4. In lieu of a compelling alternative hypothesis, portrays the uncertainties and persistent unknowns that attend all science as huge, gaping flaws that falsify the science. Check. Check.
5. Unable to come to terms with the vast body of mutually supporting evidence from multiple fields, employ a fallacy of synecdoche: whatever point, major or minor, that they are critiquing at the moment, is treated as the cornerstone of the theory without which the whole corrupt edifice comes tumbling down. Check. Check.

I could go on, pointing out their mutual love for unreliable online lists of supposedly supportive supposed scientists (see here and here) and their common dependence on short memories and highly mobile goalposts. But you get the point. This is not a flattering comparison for either side.

The reason it is not flattering is really simple: this is a method. It is not spontaneous. It is a battle-tested set of strategies and tactics for attacking science and scientists and confusing the public. For it to work, it can't look like a method; it's supposed to be just a purer, better execution of the scientific method. That lie is hard to sell over and over again, especially when the people who pioneered these tactics have long been outed as an arm of the Christian right.

There's a reason magicians don't do the same trick for the same audience over and over again; there's a reason those Nigerian bankers always include a soonish deadline. Time for the mark to think and reflect is deadly to a con artist, who relies on distraction. Distance and perspective are the enemy of the demagogue, who relies on the emotional engagement of the audience. For all these people, showing their tactics to be at work in another cause, showing the same tired arguments and rhetorical fallacies deployed against another compelling scientific theory, is a terrible, terrible move.

Judith Curry is a scientist. She believes in the theory of evolution. There must be a part of her that understands what advocating "teaching the controversy" implies about the position she's taken and the people she's allied herself with. Is this a cry for help?

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.

Berezow cherry-picked in "Who is antiscience?" smacktown

"I don't care who you voted for."

The whole left-antiscience vs right-antiscience dust-up has left me strangely cold. Should be right up our alley here at ITracker ("IT support" when we're at home). Climate denial is anti-science. Climate denial is associated with the far right, and especially prevalent among Tea Partiers. And while it doesn't make them very happy, we've argued on this blog that emphasizing the ideological roots of so-called skeptics is constructive.

So you might say that this is a debate the whole corpus of IT has helped set the stage for. So why the diffidence?

For me I guess the reason why you are antiscience on a given issue is less important than the fact that you are. If it matters what the political, social, and religious motivations of that denial are, it matters because by recognizing the motive, by elucidating the bias, antiscience is less likely to be confused with a legitimate critique of particular science.

Further, this debate seems destined to shed more heat than light. If Nate Silver has taught us anything, it's that when talking heads start debating a point like this, you need to fall back on some sort of objective numeric assessment, with reasonable caveats. Otherwise this is the kind of nonsense you end up debating (from the Alex Berezow blog post at USAToday that started the recent dust-up):

Unfortunately for Democrats, their progressive political allies often hold blatantly anti-science beliefs themselves. And in some cases, progressives actively undermine technological progress.  

Federal health data suggest that anti-vaccine sentiment is more common in progressive areas.

The "left" has been conflated with Democrats, so you would think we are about to hear about the beliefs and activities of Democrats. No such luck: the blogger holds them guilty by association with their "progressive allies." Who are they? How are they defined as progressive? How are you determining them to be the Democrats "allies"?

Guilt by association is all very well -- "Tell me what company you keep and I'll tell you who you are" -- but you need to show the association somehow! And Alex's evidence is, to put it mildly, underwhelming:

Federal health data suggest that anti-vaccine sentiment is more common in progressive areas.  With the exception of Alaska, the states with the highest rates of vaccine refusal for kindergarteners are Washington, Vermont and Oregon — three of the most progressive states in the country.

Unlike denying evolution, refusing vaccinations can be deadly.

Whoa. That's some ironclad reasoning there (*).

So Berezow is calling these states "progressive" and blaming that for their low rates of vaccination. Wouldn't it be more straightforward to poll progressives on their attitudes towards vaccines (maybe because what polling there is shows no connection between progressive politics and vaccine denial)? Other commentators pointed out that the conservative, rural eastern regions of Oregon and Washington had vaccine refusal rates just as high as the liberal west edges. Berezow glosses over the fact that Alaska, one of the most conservative states in the nation, is a top refuser.

So by Berezow's own calculation, he has an n = 4, and of that 4, one state is very conservative while the others are a mix of urban progressive/rural conservative where progressives (or at least Democrats) dominate statewide elections.

Not exactly persuasive. What if you took a slightly larger sample -- the top ten -- and used their votes in a tight national election, like Bush/Gore 2000, to gauge how progressive they are?

Wyoming did not even report its data last year, and no wonder: until 2010, they didn't even require children over the age of nine to be vaccinated. An effort to strengthen the law met with fierce resistance. So let's include Wyoming -- the unreported number is likely high. The top ten:

1. Washington (6.2%) (Gore)
2. Vermont (5.8%)      (Gore)
3. Alaska (5.5%)         (Bush)
4. Oregon (5.4%)        (Gore)
5. Michigan (4.4%)     (Gore)
6. Illinois (4.3%)         (Gore)
7. Utah (3.8%)            (Bush)
8. Nebraska (3.8%)     (Bush)
9. Idaho (3.8%)           (Bush)
10. Wyoming (?)         (Bush)

Five for Bush, five for Gore. "Progressive states are anti-vaccine" turns out to be a massive cherry pick; total nonsense. Seven out of the ten states are western states, both the Gore and the Bush states. That's kind of interesting. Really, all we learn from this is that vaccination rates depend on the strength of the mandatory vaccination law, and laws vary from state to state and region to region for any number of reasons.

I may have more on this anon, but in the meantime: beware of talking heads bearing cherries.

__________________________________________________

* It's a bit of a side issue, but I should point out that if doctors and biologists ever came to doubt the theory of evolution, the evolved resistance of bacteria to antibiotics would quickly kill a great many people. And by encouraging their children to see their biology teacher as the enemy of their faith, who knows how many potentially great scientists and physicians never got started on the path to realizing their talent, to the determent of us all.