They have a plan

Texas Gov Rick Perry thinks the jury is still out on global warming. This whole "science" thing is not persuasive to him -- which is why Texas is now the only state refusing to implement the EPA's greenhouse gas regulations.

Texas is now in the grip of a severe drought, the worst in a century (80% of the IPCC's climate models predict declining rainfall in Texas.) What's a conservative to do?

WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s ... NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

People having a bad day: Muammar Gaddafi and Anthony Watts

For those not following the news from Libya, Gaddafi's foreign mercenaries have been rolling over poorly-equipped and mostly untrained rebels. Yesterday, however, the UN approved a no-fly zone and Britain, France, and the United States all declared their intention to pound the snot out of Gaddafi's forces.

This has, of course, provoked more invective and threatening from the Libyan dictator, but Gaddafi is smart; faced with the bully's nightmare, somebody bigger and stronger coming down on him, with him as little able to resist as the people he has been bullying, he declared a cease-fire and played for time.

Watts is not so wise. Google has struck fear in his heart, and so he has unleashed a Gaddafiesque rant, making not an iota of rational sense, but expressing the same fears -- nobody bigger and stronger better get between him and his lunch money racket. So he has unleashed his most moronic acolyte, Willis Eschenbach, to proclaim:

GOOGLE IS TAKING SIDES IN A MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR POLITICAL/SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE

My goodness, how dare they . . . what, exactly?

Google.org, the technology giant's philanthropic arm, has hand-picked a team of 21 fellows working in climate research to improve the way the science of global warming is communicated to the public and lawmakers through new media.

So it is not Google's search engine, but a raindrop of the money made off the search engine, which is going into this effort. It is not policy advocacy, but rather an effort to improve science communication. They did not chose sides in a scientific debate, they chose scientists over non-scientists like Willis who mistakenly believe that they are engaged in a scientific debate.

Nobody, not even the late and lamented Steve Goddard, can compete with Willis is sheer fallacy density, which is no doubt why Anthony picked him for this assignment, pitching "An Open Letter to Google" in which he drops the bombshell that he doesn't trust Google any more:

In fact, that’s why up until now I trusted Google, because I always felt that I was being given the unvarnished truth. I always felt that Google could be trusted, because you didn’t have a dog in the fight.

Willis thinks Google searches return only "the unvarnished truth." That certainly explains some of his odder opinions.

Seriously, though, what is going on here? Well, they're scared. They're scared, because Watts measures his importance according to the only metric by which he is successful; his presence on the internet:

No other climate related blog has a 50 million hit number. Some, like Joe Romm try to claim the numbers don’t matter, or try to claim that some other number matters more. But (and it’s a big one) he doesn’t show his own number counter.

Watts uses this internet presence to bully others, from threatening commenters he doesn't like with letters to their workplaces, to slandering other bloggers, to attacking people with his readers, as he did when he urged them to visit Discovery blogs and "shout them down."

Google's tiny project to improve science communication scares Watts because in his imagination, he has transformed web traffic into the be-all and end-all of significance. It's not degrees, scientific expertise, or other accomplishments, it's not business success, political office, or general respect of the public. It's not, needless to say, a reputation for honesty or integrity. Watts is a giant zero according to all those conventional metrics. Page traffic is the one thing he can point to.

So it's not hard to see why Google taking notice of climate science is as disturbing to Watts as the warplanes of the Sixth Fleet are to Gaddafi. Because if the measure of a man is his page views, who gets more page views than anyone?

Ted talk on the oldest living things

H/t (not that they need it from me) to The Daily Dish:



One of these creatures has been alive for four hundred thousand years. It's incredible.

The most common measure of climate change is how the world is going to look in 2100. That's a useful signpost, but when you look at an 80,000-year-old tree, you can't help reflect on the narrowness of our horizons. The world's going to continue to turn, and the physics of greenhouse gases continue to operate, in 2101 and 2150 and 2200.

Should we think about how the world will look after we're gone? Should we worry about destroying unique patterns of life that have weathered nature's changes since before humanity came down from the trees?

We would be in a bad way if the Greeks and the Romans and the Caliphate hadn't had any concern for the next century or the next millennium. The cultural heritage, and the institutions of democracy and human liberty which grew out of them, would be gone. Billions of people around the globe build their lives around principles and precepts of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism -- the youngest of which is more than a thousand years old.

Our modern world-spanning civilization is the richest, the most scientifically advanced society ever to emerge on this earth. Most of the people in past eras could not begin to conceive of it. It's richness is a result, in no small part, of the labors of philosophers, scientists, and artists, proselytizers and engineers of the last 5,000 years. They knew they were working for a future that stretched much further than a few decades, and we are all the beneficiaries of that legacy.

Have we now as a people embraced the role of the spoiled child, to be given everything and value nothing, work for nothing? Are we so rich and our lives so easy that the concept of building for the future has lost all meaning for us?

Cuccinelli’s mini-me McCarthyism quashed

The quick eyes and fingers of Joe Romm have the story.

Cuccinelli's bogus "investigation" was a particularly chilling piece of ideological thuggery, striking as it did at any notion of free inquiry in science. Attacking Michael Mann, one of the world's foremost climatologists, with fraud charges and the threat of an endless, Whitewater-style partisan witch hunt, represented a new and dangerous corruption of the public sphere. Even the creationists, the tobacco pushers and the "scientific" racists, while attacking scientists' results, never dared attack the scientists in this brazen, harassing, threatening way.

It seems like a bad dream, and thanks to Judge Peatross, we can hope against hope that that is all it was. I fear, though, that the loss today will only be temporary. Cuccinelli lost on the facts almost instantly. But the effectiveness of McCarthyism never depended on the ability to win in court. All it requires is a bald-faced liar in a position of authority, a complacent media, a fearful populace, and the willingness to accuse. As far as I can tell, all those factors still exist. Expect to see more scurrilous accusations, and more big lies, until and unless the consequence of such are not just to be defeated but to be discredited, disgraced and speedily dismissed.

The tell-tale ice

Arctic sea ice continues to to trend below the numbers for 2007, and indeed below all the years in the IJIS database. The seasonal anomaly is relatively stable at roughly a million square kilometers below the 1979-2009 average. And the volume of ice is plummeting, according to PIOMAS:



None of this, needless to say, impresses Steve Goddard, who is responding by doubling down on the crazy. Eschewing the wise denier strategy of simply ignoring the unfavorable data in favor of obsessing over cherry-picked short-term trends, Stevie to still worrying the Arctic sea ice, and looking progressively more batty as he does so.

It was only a few weeks ago that Ben Lawson predicted, sensibly it appeared at the time, that WUWT's increasingly embarrassing "sea ice updates" would be quitely phased out as the fact of the Arctic's rapid ice loss took its toll. His reasoning seemed sound, but it was predicted on Steve Goddard's having a working brain with a normal human capacity for shame. Instead of backing off, Stevie's gone from one sea ice post per week to this:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/28/does-piomass-verify/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/01/piomas-non-verification-ii/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/02/the-undeath-spiral/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/31/wuwt-arctic-sea-ice-new-7/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/29/arctic-ice-volume-has-increased-25-since-may-2008/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/28/the-great-2007-ice-crunch/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/27/shear-ice-decline/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/25/past-the-tipping-point/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/24/the-sea-ice-monster-its-a-scaly-thing/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/23/wuwt-arctic-sea-ice-news-6/

That's is the last two weeks alone. Five posts per week, slaving over a hot search engine, trying to rationalize his way out of his little trouble.

As one would expect for someone afflicted with this kind of essayists' diarrhea, Steve throws a lot of arguments out there to see what sticks, but for those without the patience to wade through the dreck, read on for the bullet points.

After heaping scorn on scientists for drawing attention to the loss of sea ice volume, Steve decides to change course 180 degrees and push aside sea ice extent to talk about volume. This is the exact behavior he accused climate scientists of here:

The AGW chameleon changes it’s colours constantly. It complains about area and extent when convenient, and about thickness when convenient.

Sea ice extent is doing the opposite of what Steve wants, so suddenly tracking the volume -- a measure both he and Watts himself have repeatedly scorned as changing the subject -- is the subject of post after post. Blatant hypocrisy aside, this is a bit of a problem, since the ice volume is also at record lows. Steve tries to edge his way around this problem by suddenly discovering that the PIOMAS measurements of ice volume, which are used everywhere, are supposedly "unverified" and untrustworthy. See here and here.

Steve has his own, really obscure data set, created by the Navy for short-term forecasting, which is not used, as far as I've been able to determine, by any climatologists anywhere, and is in process of being replaced by a different and hopefully better model. But hey, it shows volume increasing over the past few years. Cool! This is how the model is described by its creators:

Currently the NIC uses the Polar Ice Prediction System (PIPS) version 2.0 as the basis for its “operational” short-term (24–120 h) sea ice forecasts. These forecasts are evaluated daily and amended by skilled analysts using reconnaissance data (if available), the most recent weather charts and data, and historical knowledge of the conditions in the area to provide the highest quality forecasts possible out to 120 h. Special emphasis in these forecasts is placed on the location of the ice edge and the conditions in the marginal ice zone (MIZ), as these are the most critical operational areas for marine transportation and safety.

The system is used for short-term forecasting, is focused on the ice edge, and is not particularly accurate even there:

Using the more relaxed criterion of a threat index for defining correct forecasts, it was found that PIPS correctly made 24-h forecasts of decreasing sea ice concentration 10%–15% of the time (it also correctly forecast increasing sea ice concentration an additional 10%–15% of the time). However, PIPS correctly forecast melt-out conditions <5% of the time, suggesting that there may be deficiencies in the PIPS parameterization of marginal ice zone processes and/or uncertainties in the atmospheric–oceanic fields that force PIPS.

Not exactly confidence-inducing. Steve is using this data is a way it was never intended to be used, rather than the system designed and maintained to estimate ice volume -- that is, PIOMAS. An alert commenter at Skeptical Science, Michael Sweet, spots one potential problem:

I just looked at the Navy website. The red color shows ice AT LEAST 5 meters thick. Much of that ice was 10 or more meters thick (some was over 30 meters thick)in past years. You cannot integrate it as 5 meters thick. This results in underestimating the ice volume in past years. This alone is probably enough to explain the difference between you and PIOMAS.

This is really just scratching the surface of the snake oil Goddard is hawking in the word salad it pleases him to call his prose. But it's beautiful outside, and I'm not spending any more of my Saturday with Stevie. I'll leave you with this quote, from the comments on WUWT. In my next post, I'm going to answer the question posed:

Has anyone actually explained exactly WHY and HOW an ice-free Arctic is such a disaster? And for whom would it be a disaster? And in what way it would be a disaster? --Kevin Cave

Deniers sink into depression

Seems like the evidence for dangerous climate change has been mounting relentlessly of late. The Arctic sea ice, which so recently was being celebrated by Watts et al, is now trending below the record 2007 numbers, putting an end to their premature gloating about the "recovery" of the sea ice, the absurdity of which we've noted before.

April 2010 was the hottest April in GISS records from 1880 -- which likely makes it the hottest April in more than 2,000 years. This is more bad news for pretend scientist Scott Armstrong, who used his pretend field of "scientific forecasting" to create a pretend bet with Al Gore -- a "bet" he has lost for seven out of the last eight months. That's no problem for Scott -- he's just stopped giving monthly updates on the "bet" -- the last was in September of 2009. He has replaced them with full-on pathetic ramblings promoting the disgraced serial liar Monckton (even repeating his oft-shredded claim to have been a "science advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher") and promoting his own psuedoscience in the face of the National Academy of Science report (which found that global warming is real, humans are the cause, and the threats to human welfare are large), which he hopes will be persuasive if he crams enough repetitions of "science" and "scientific" into the description:

Based on scientific research on forecasting [by which they mean not hypothesis tested by experiment, but naive reasoning by analogy; see below], the most appropriate method for forecasting climate over the 21st Century would be a naïve no-trend extrapolation. Due to the substantial uncertainty about climate, it is not possible to forecast even the direction of change and one should not, therefore, forecast changes. As with many conclusions from scientific research on forecasting, this conclusion derives from a finding that is not intuitive: in complex situations with high uncertainty, one should use methods that are conservative and simple (Armstrong 1985; Armstrong 2001).

While much has been made of the climate models used to support forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming, these were used in effect only as tools to present forecasts. The actual forecasts were made by unaided judgment; that is, by judgment unaided by forecasting principles. A substantial body of research has shown that unaided judgment cannot provide useful forecasts in complex situations with high uncertainty (Armstrong 1980; Tetlock 2005), such as is the case with climate.

What Armstrong is trying to say here, with many unnecessary words, is that predictions are hard, especially about the future, and that, per his made-up discipline of "scientific forecasting," it's impossible to make predictions about complex systems.

Except climate models have predicted warming from 1980, and we have had three decades of warming. Armstrong doesn't explain that, he merely launches into more meaningless jargon-ridden "sciencesque" drivel:

The forecasting procedures described in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report violated 81% of the 89 principles relevant to climate forecasting.

81%, wow. 81% is a lot. And such a precise number! But what does it mean? It means that Scott Armstrong, a non-scientist, made up a bunch of rules, rules we may assume real working scientists were blissfully ignorant of. And then Scott Armstrong, in his capacity as judge and jury, decided that the scientists failed to follow his rules -- 81% of the time. And this is how he "proves" that climatologists don't follow the "principles" of his psuedoscience, "scientific forecasting."

Not convinced? Well, let Scott Armstrong protest to you a little more that his work is scientific:

For example, the methods and data were neither fully disclosed nor were they easy for independent researcher to access, no reasonable alternative forecasting methods were assessed, and prediction intervals were not assessed objectively (see “Global warming: Forecasts by scientists versus scientific forecasts”).

Those who were responsible for making the forecasts had no training or experience in the proper use of scientific forecasting methods. Furthermore, we were unable to find any indication that they made an effort to look for evidence from scientific research on forecasting. It is perhaps not surprising then that their implementation of their forecasting method was inappropriate.

There are pages more of this wearying dreck, but it is just more of the same. Prediction is impossible. I, a scientific scientist, have proved it scientifically. So-called scientists, who fill their work with boring stuff like observations and testable hypothesis, fail because they are not SCIENTIFIC, like me!

Scott Armstrong on "scientific forecasting" sounds like a guest column for What's Up With That penned by Gollum. They aren't ssssscientific, my Precious! We hates them forever!



And speaking of the denier Mothership, the sea ice is stressing them out. For the time being, they're continuing the "Sea Ice Updates," but as the sea ice plummets, the "updates" become ever more free-floating, defensive and vague:

It is still too early in the year to see much interesting. Still about six weeks before significant melting begins in the interior of the Arctic. Stay tuned.

Really, Steve? If it's too early to see anything interesting, why did you start providing weekly updates five weeks ago? It was interesting enough when a late melt season brought the ice close to the 1979-2009 average. Now, as in the old Weekly Update skit, suddenly, Steve's lost interest. Pay attention, budding conspiracy theorists, because Steve is giving a clinic: You feed a conspiracy by seizing on and hyping any random piece of data that fits with your theory, and letting your eyes glaze over at the masses of dispositive evidence, which is inevitably "not interesting." What other tips of the trade do you have for us, Steve?

When the facts are running against you, change the subject:

The Catlin Arctic Survey arrived at the North Pole this week. . . . Arctic non-warming since 1938 . . . predictably conclude that pH might be lower than it used to be – due to CO2. . . .

Note particularly the claim that the Arctic hasn't warmed since 1938, a lie backed up with a random graph from a patchwork, discredited data set in direct contradiction to all the reliable temperature records from the Arctic:



This is ninja-level distraction, because not only are the temperatures irrelevant to the "sea ice update," the outrageous lie distracts the critical reader from the central problem -- Steve's not talking about the sea ice.

How about vague and shifty claims, Steve? No problem:

As you can see, not much has changed during the last two weeks.

The sea ice anomaly -- the ice missing compared to the 1979-2009 average -- has increased by over a half a million square kilometers and there in now less ice than the there was in 2007, the worst year on record. Sea ice volume as of 5/13/2010 is at its lowest level ever, worse than 2007. Yeah, nothing much.

The trouble with Pollyannaism

The NYTimes brings us word of a well-intended balm for our fears of the future, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley.

The gist of Ridley's argument is that naysayers have been wrong in the past, that humans are endlessly adaptable, and we can look forward to a century in which:

Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.

Dr. Ridley, a former editor of the Economist (the only newsweekly in the English language worth the paper it's printed on) is no idiot, nor is the idea that things are going to get better an idiotic one. Hence, consideration of his thesis is a little OT for this blog, but we aren't going to let that stop us, especially as Mr. Ridley's thesis is a favorite canard of the most dangerous and savvy deniers, those that have given up attack the science of global warming and instead dedicate themselves to attacking the case for action. The endless adaptivity of humans figures prominently in this set of crackpot ideas.

While acknowledging the challenges posed by "politics, wars, plagues or climate change," Ridley proposes what is essentially one meta-argument -- one comeback to rule them all, as it were. And this is that people have always predicted the fall of civilization in the past, and have always been wrong: instead, things have gotten better and better. From the review:

The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. . . .

Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.

Arguing that the future is going to resemble the past is the cornerstone of rational thought. There's many a slip bitwixt the cup and the lip, however, and Ridley's thesis falls afoul of most of them.

The first problem is the straw man fallacy -- the idea that the discourse is monopolized by doomsayers who are always wrong. In fact, Utopian predictions are just as ubiquitous as catastrophic ones, and equally unreliable. Contrary to the reviewer's assertion, you most certainly can get on the bestseller list with predictions that the Dow will soon be at 30,000, or that we are on the verge of curing cancer, or that America will be the benign despot of the world for decades to come. Here in 2010 we have no flying cars, no sentient computers, and only an anemic little space station hardly worthy of the name. None of those predictions have come true in the past either. So rather than an unblemished record of failure by the opposing side, a more realistic picture of the history of populist prediction is that bold predictions get you on the bestseller list -- especially when they echo the zeitgeist, optimistic or pessimistic as the case may be.

It's also part of the straw man error to treat people who warn of disaster as generic prophets of doom. There are such people, as we have discussed on this blog before, who are unhappy with Western civilization and enjoy prophesying its demise. Yet the recognition of severe problems and the tireless campaigning for their redress are, just as much as the exchange of technology and resources which Ridley praises, a part of the power and resilience of open societies. It was doomsayers that ended slavery, that struggled unsuccessfully to avert the Holocaust, that pushed governments to act on acid rain.

If you are diving in a car, and your passenger screams at you to hit the brakes, it would be better not to turn to them and explain that you've never had a serious accident. And you probably would know better, anyway: part of staying out of accidents is slamming on the brakes when you need to. If you want to believe things will all come right in the end, more power to you. But for that to happen we as a society must listen to specific warnings of problems ahead and not lump them in with professional peddlers of gloom.

And bad things may come, despite Ridley's argument that in the past things have gotten better and better for our society. In fact, Ridley's reassurance is no reassurance at all, really. Consider some of the things that fall under Ridley's heading of constant progress. The Great Depression. World War II with its 50 million dead. The Black Plague, which killed a third of the population of Europe. Did society come back from those things? Yes, eventually. Does that mean we want to march straight into the jaws of comparable disasters, secure in the (supposed) knowledge that all will come right in the end? No, we do not. Many things that do not end our civilization are nevertheless better avoided, if one can.

We cannot even be assured on the narrow point that our civilization will not collapse, despite Ridley's assurances that it has survived every challenge to date. Bright man that he no doubt is, he has formulated a classic friendly dolphin paradox:

There are many anecdotal reports of dolphins finding sailors in the water and nudging them towards land and safety. Can we conclude that dolphins are friendly because they saved those sailors?

Give it a second, if you haven't been exposed to this thought experiment before, then read on:

No. Suppose the dolphins are merely playful, and pushing sailors in random directions. Those that randomly find land praise the dolphins' helpfulness. The others drown and are never heard from again.

In medicine this is called a reporting bias, and it decapitates any conclusions you might want to draw from the data. Here, it defeats Ridley. He argues All past predictions of the collapse of our civilization have been wrong. But of course they MUST be wrong, or there would be no civilization and Ridley would not be writing his book. To have a valid sample, Ridley needs to look at the predictions of societies that have collapsed: to see if the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders did or did not predict the collapse of their civilizations before it happened.

It's a tall order, but there's no escape from it: we can't conclude anything from the non-collapse of a civilization that could not be collapsed, or the argument would not exist. A favorite novelist of mine once set a scene between a young man driving aggressively and carelessly and a matronly women who told him to shape up. "Don't worry!" the young man says, "I've never had a serious accident!"

"You won't have but one," the women replied.

Thanks, Tim, now I have nothing

Tim Lambert steals my shtick. When informed of the controversy, Lambert replied "Who?" and "That's his gimmick, really?" We scorn his petty efforts to deflect.

As an aside, he's perfectly right: Camille Paglia is a science illiterate, and her weighing in on climate change is a bad joke.