Funny that we're starting to get around to the original theme again, science or religion. DWB bought it up, and Shotglass reminded us of the thread title.
Sam's post above is actually pretty interesting in this context. There's some information and background on this story here, but i'll post the general gist...
Sir John Houghton, founder of the Hadley Centre, former Co-Chair of IPPC and former Chief Executive of the MET office, writes...
Turns out he didn't say that. Not directly quoting someone is pretty bad imo, along with quoting out of context. But what he did in fact say was something very similar. What he actually said was-
and we know this is correct through an interview with Sir John in the Sunday Telegraph uncovered only just recently. The quote also apparently appears in a Nature article titled 'Is God Green?'. As Sam points out he has routinely denied that he ever said anything like this. The context these words appear in is pretty eye opening!
For fun, here's the newspaper clipping of the interview (1995). It's dramatically entitled- Moral Outlook: Earthquake Wind and Fire.
Lol! IPCC got religion?
Here's a picture of Sir John giving some form of speech. Look- you can see the hockeystick in the background! It looks pretty scary.
true but thats what peer reviewing and papers with opposing content are for not blogs
i never have
however ive read many papers with questionable conclusions or questionable content
the thing is in my field i can tell the difference between a bad paper and a good one in climatology i cant and neither can normal people
ill admit that i havent looked much into the available popular science literature on climatology but surely there must be something written by people with the appropriate scientific background
you know something like hawkings book except for climatology instead of cosmology
sure it will be somewhat out of date but in many ways its a good thing to present the older bits that have already been established as scientific fact instead of the current hot topics that may turn out to be duds
of course its great but when youre concerend about accountability and money surely you must see people who theorise over ideas that currently are either flat out or quite close to untestable as the worst example of that
I haven't looked into string theory. I've heard from people I generally trust that it's probably not all that it was stacked up to be. I don't claim to have any understanding on that. My concern isn't really about the money part, as I said it's great that people have room for creative and theoretical testing of new ideas in physics. As long as it's not getting out of control too much. O.K. Maybe the large hadron collider is getting a bit out of control But I can't say much at all about whether that's going to bear any kind of practical fruit or not. I know that the solar physicist Svensmark will be using it to test out his cosmic ray theory of climate change at some point.
I think peer review has failed in this particular case. You should admit that a guy on a forum's apparent keenness for a certain paper to be correct and the basically uncritical acceptance by the whole scientific community over a single paper that was very radical in its conclusions compared to past papers and completely unverifiable, are two very different things. I'm not a scientist. Never pretended to be. But if you'd demand the behaviour of scientists that you are demanding of me then you should alteast agree with me that this whole hockeystick affair has been incredibly dodgy from the outset. It's been protected from criticism for years by such regarded journals as Nature- the failure of Mann to show his work has been protected by scientists and then somehow anyone critical of that kind of behaviour ends up getting lumped in with the creationist set? That's really illogical in my book, I can't see any kind of logic in that at all. It shows just how political this all is. People are not making sense.
For the record, Mann does now show his work. But it's been a long, long time coming. It's almost too late now really, the argument is moving on.
Here's a new non-peer reviewed review of Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC's new book- a smutty romance novel called 'Return to Almora'... Again, just for laughs.
Books, books, books. Hmmm... To be honest I'm not sure what would pass here. Usually the books I have seen have usually been very weighted to one side, they tend to be pretty partisan. I guess the best place to find the consensus view in written format are the IPCC reports themselves. They are online but you can print them out and then you'll have a book
In blogland there are 'guides' in point form to various arguments over AGW. For example, JoNova had a guide called the 'Skeptics Handbook' which is probably a few years old now. It comes across as very trashy and fairly politicised, imo, but quite solid on the main points from a casual skim. Her handbook was recently rebutted by John Cook who runs the Skeptical Science blog, in a guide called 'A Scientific Guide to the Skeptics Handbook'. I notice Jo Nova has since answered John Cook in a post at her website called the 'Unskeptical Guide to the Skeptics Handook'.
To be frank, I'm not a fan of the point by point argumentative format. I have not really bothered to read any of these guides myself. I much prefer a conversational style where many people get to weigh in on a particular story or paper. It's much more interesting and you can pick up subtle but important information from people with a wide range of experience and perspective. I think the best place to do this is the Watts Up With That site, it is by far the most popular climate blog and there is definitely a reason for that. It tends very much to the skeptical side, but skepticism is always a good base for discussion and people are certainly free to defend the 'consensus' through any of the information at their disposal. People tend to learn a lot because the discussion's never dogmatic or stifling in fear of veering off into non-official territory. No stone is left unturned (due to it's popularity it is routinely bashed and name called by some of the other blogs ('what's up with crap', anti science blog etc), but from my experience the name callers can hardly match it in terms of good quality content and analysis. WUWT also has a great sense of humour once you're familiar enough to pick up on some of the in jokes).
As far as pro agw blogs go, I would probably say Skeptical Science. It sounds like this is a 'skeptics' site but it's not. It's a well run blog and people tend to stay polite. Real Climate, the granddaddy of the pro-agw blogs and the 'official last word' on matters agw (apart from IPCC), can however get pretty nasty. They also have a known history of deleting awkward skeptical posts. They let the dumb skeptics through to be torn apart by the agw wolves, as an example to the rest of skeptic kind I guess. Their censorial approach has alienated a lot of well meaning posters just looking for answers, and in fact several websites have been made over time with the sole purpose of archiving deleted RC posts, one of which I'm familiar with called RC Rejects. RC sprung up as a defense against Steve M's work on the hockeystick. It is in part run by Michael Mann, author of the original hockeystick. RC are protectors of the hockeystick.
There are other nasty personalities around. Mark Morano has a big mouth and is obnoxious, he runs the skeptical site Climate Depot. I won't link to it. On the agw (or cagw- for catastrophic) side, there's 'Tamino', who has venom in his blood and a very underdeveloped sense of humour. He runs the ironically titled blog 'Open Mind'.
There are other blogs but some of them tend to be quite specific in their content, ie- they are not generalist blogs. Bishop Hill blog fits in nicely with the work being done over at Climate Audit- this is the guy who wrote 'The Hockeystick Illusion' - he is intimately familiar with every detail of this history. Once again I haven't read it but if you're looking for accessible information about the hockeystick there will probably be no better starting point.
PS, I was maybe going to recommend a book that I haven't read called "Chill: A Global Reassessment of Global Warming Theory". It's from the skeptical viewpoint but is written by a former adviser to Greenpeace, a guy called Peter Taylor. Peter sometimes appears on the various blogs and I've always found him to be a reasonable and informed kind of guy. While I was reading through the reviews of 'Chill' just then I came across a mention of another book he'd written, called Shiva's Rainbow, about his time in Greenpeace. Looking through the review of that book, I might just have to reassess my opinion of Peter. It's one of the wackiest things I've ever read.
Since I've been poking a bit of fun at current and former Heads of IPCC recently, I think it's only fair I link to this book of Peter's. Let's just hope he's grown out of all that now...
Electrik Kart, be aware of who Alastair McIntosh is, who wrote that Amazon review. It's the same Alastair McIntosh that wrote quite a bizarre review of HSI at the Scottish Book Review without actually reading the book.
Roger Snr has an interesting take on the efforts. He's pretty cynical about the motivation, I think, and points out some glaring scientific inconsistencies in the premise of the project that need addressing.
If they really wanted to win friends and influence people, they ought to invite Watts to the party. His criticisms of the CRN are very relevant to many parts of the discussion.
I'm positive. I think this can only be a good thing, both for the reputation of the MET Office and for a more accurate long term assessment of global climate/weather. It's an inevitable development, the former system was in no way up to the standard required for what we are now asking of it.
I take this partially as a bit of a 'sorry' from MET, without actually having to say sorry. A bit like NOAA's mission statement quietly morphing from the old 'NOAA understands and predicts changes...' to 'NOAA aims to understand and predict changes...' ie, less hubris, more science. The new system will of course need to be much more sophisticated in dealing with and adjusting for UHI than the old system, for one thing. I reckon it would be great for Anthony to get on board this, someone like E.M. Smith is another natural pick. I think they will do it the right way, I don't see that there is a choice really- there are just too many eyes on this. Alarm bells will start ringing the moment anything looks like it might be turning dodgy. Not good for MET at this stage.
Yup, I'm in general agreement. I think if they wander too far from the science and back into the hubris, our friend Smith will ring some alarms. I agree, they won't want to screw this up.
I'll just mention some related news for anyone interested- that recognition of the poor quality of Canada's climate data is finally in the open. They say acceptance is the first step to recovery. Let the healing begin
Cheers for that, Electrik Kar! Verrry interesting!
Dr Curry's just picked up on my analogy of climate science/scepticism juxtaposed with religious knowledge/agnosticism at Keith Kloor's blog ("The Brushback" thread), and seems to broadly concur with it. She's confirmed her sceptical/agnostic position and furthered my proposition with "ontic uncertainty". I hadn't considered ontological uncertainties as a tenable proposition. In fact I hadn't considered ontological uncertainties as a reality at all, so I'm quite excited about how this meta-science discussion will develop.
The Guardian's given Andrew Montford a link-back to his rebuttal, right at the top of Bob Ward's attempted hatchet job.. hot on the heels of giving Richard North a right-of-reply to Monbiot's atrocious piece about him. Strange things are happening at the Guardian.
I've been also thinking about this stuff the last few days in relation to the prospect of a new surface temperature record. My hope is that if done well, it's bound to represent an improvement over the current one; but ultimately it will still surely leave us with this same problem of... just how much importance or certainty will we be able to attach to to any kind of number for global mean temperature that can be coaxed out of the data? Some of this data is very old, and was collected in a ton of different ways. How reliable is it? There are sure to be a lot of arguments about just how to treat it, and maybe there will be no right way, leaving any adjustments as a best guess kind of deal.
I also agree with Pielke Sr, that we now have Argo and therefore we already have this new system (the surface of the Earth is 70% water, you can't account for that with ground measurements), but that leaves a couple hundred years of measurements sitting on the shelf, and a lot of scientists/activists don't trust Argo because it shows the oceans as cooling! Here we have the most advanced and extensive surface temperature monitoring system in existence and you can't even find this data on the web!
I also agree with Judith btw. This has been my own kind of 'boilerplate belief' whenever I've engaged with the issue of AGW (not always, but the last few years). It's basically the reverse of DWB's position, that scientists should basically know what they're talking about. I've been reading lately, that climatology as a science really only got organised into coherence around the late 70's with the journal Climatic Change. Before that it was mostly just guys collecting statistics on things, it must have been horrendously tedious. It was basically a backwater science. No money coming in. Once you've figured out that global warming/climate change represents both the grand entrance and centre stage positioning of Climatology on to the scientific world stage, it's probably only natural to assume that there will be some people who are going to want to oversell themselves on the importance of their work and what they know.
Heh. Relates to another thing I've been mulling over which is this connection between science, post normal science and ethics. Now, I don't know anything about comparative ethics, but there is a type of ethics I'm aware of called 'situational ethics'. It's a christian idea which basically says that certain things, such as laws and moral judgements, can and should be temporarily suspended if they interfere in the service of love - in other words, love is the ultimate law, or similarly- the ends justify the means.
To demonstrate what this means, examples are sometimes given on certain situations by which people are then called on to think about in terms of best outcomes and how they relate back to situational ethics. So for example,
When you look at a situation like that, you can see how closely it matches up with a typical post normal science scenario as defined by Ravetz. In Ravetz' words, post normal science should be applied in a situation of
Obviously, that describes the current global warming scenario too. Situational ethics and post normal science seem to be ideological cousins of sorts.
The problem of situational ethics rested on the fact that no matter what option you chose in a given situation, there's was no real telling what might come out of that decision (your ontic uncertainty). If the bomb were never dropped on Hiroshima, other things would have happened instead but there would always be a true uncertainty about which outcome would have been the preferable one, since one of the outcomes failed to occur, so therefore we can't say anything about it.
The other problem with situational ethics is that it basically gave people an excuse to flaunt the rules whenever it suited them, because you were 'doing it for love'. It was too individualistic. 'Love' was too vaguely defined. The Anglican Bishop John Robinson saw this and gave a critique on situational ethics, saying that 'it will all descend into moral chaos'. Similarly, in the recent history of climate science, you have evidence of scientists flaunting the rules of science in the service of 'saving the world'. But are they really saving the world, or just bending the rules to suit themselves?
This I think is why I can't get too excited about policy matters. We may choose to do this, or we may choose to do that, but outcomes will always be slippery; but by allowing the bending/breaking of the rules in order to satisfy some imagined policy outcome just sets you up for more corruption.
I think we're finding that the problems associated with PNS (Post Normal Science) are similar to the ones that the Arch Bishop was alluding to in his criticisms of situational ethics. It seems to be the same road. What you say, Sam?
PS, Ravetz on 'climategate' and PNS
interesting, but he is complicit in the group thinking he criticizes by saying the 'reality' is that more CO2 equals more warming when it is still up for (bloodthirsty) debate whether the world is indeed warming at a rate never before seen.
Always has been an odd paper The Guardian! It's in the same league as the daily mail, though it's 'dedicated' readership is in complete denial about that
Anyway into more relevant waters - what's the latest in the global warm... oh...'climate change' debate nowadays?? Seems climategate has happily slipped away into the abyss.
I think most people would agree with it. I've never actually heard a scientist disagree that more CO2 = more warming, but it's also uncontroversial that there is a limit on how much warming CO2 can cause by itself. The relationship between CO2 and warming is logarithmic - for every doubling of CO2 you will get the same increase in temperature each time (roughly about 1-1.2°C). Most of the warming from CO2 is already with us, but the great uncertainty in all this is the feedbacks. Greenhouse gases keep the Earth about 30° warmer than it would be without them. CO2 gives us about 3° of that warming. (unless someone can tell me otherwise).
I would stop agreeing with Revkin's equation at '= less ice', at least as far as the present indicates. Arctic ice is decreasing while Antarctic ice is increasing (Judith Curry has a new paper out on this which seeks to offer an explanation for the 'paradox' of Antarctic ice). Overall, global sea ice is hovering at around average atm.
I definitely agree, yep. It seems to be a direct parallel.
hehe.. no, it's not slipped away at all. It's still reverberating. You probably don't/won't hear the term "Climategate" much any more, but the reason is because Climategate was something of an instant in time but with direction-changing impact.
Any time you hear about climate change, or climate science, or anything associated with it, it's being discussed in the context of Climategate. Nobody in climate sciences is ignorant of Climategate and probably nobody has been left unaffected by its implications. The word "Climategate" need never be mentioned again, the science is still different now because of it.
I mean in the mainstream media and general public it appears we are back to pre-climategate or whatever people want to call it. We are back to the same old Oil Driven GW-Deniars Vs 'Save The Planet' Greenies arguments. That's from a general public perspective. Both have shady motives so it's impossible to gauge anything without investing days, weeks, and months into research.
My question is, in basic terms, where are we now, has the debate changed? The complexity of the debate is way beyond my knowledge of climate science so reading the previous posts is just a headache I have tried
It's a hard thing to discern. Certainly on the surface it might appear that nothing has changed, you get the feeling that climategate did nothing really but to entrench and embolden the old opinions- the skeptics have their 'proof' of a grand conspiracy and coverup and the other side has 'proof' of the low character of sceptics via their willingness to pour through tons of stolen emails and hassle scientists. I don't think either of these positions are going to go away any time soon.
On the other hand you have comments like Andy Revkin's latest-
"It's perfectly reasonable to rely on the overarching trajectory of scientific inquiry into the human influence on climate and still have a (constructively) skeptical (in the best sense of that word) approach to individual studies."
You can notice by the inclusion of the bracketed words, just how sensitive this idea of the reasonable skeptical approach is to die hard followers of the mainstream position, where any form of questioning immediately gets one labeled as a 'denier' (which I actually was in the comments of this article, simply for pointing out that a particular data set agreed with a point that a certain controversial scientist was making).
This will become the new mainstream position I feel, a slightly more critical approach taken to claims being made by scientists and media. We don't need to become cynical, but there's nothing wrong with being critical. The public is becoming more educated and with education come questions as well as confusion, but it's getting harder to simply sweep aside inconvenient truths such as the poor quality of the surface temperature record, for example. Sceptics are going to be called on to offer their opinions and expertise on these matters, which they've looked into in almost exhausting detail. Similarly, only the far gone believers still think that Steve McIntyre is in the pay of Big Oil, most reasonable people are able to see where he's actually coming from (see Fred Pearce's comments in the Guardian's climategate debate, full version audio). It's kind of just starting, but there is much more desire in wanting to carry the debate forward from both sides, getting away from the echo chambers, and there are certain new platforms springing up to accomodate this. Of course, that's going to provoke fear and lashing out from certain people as well.
sry to pick apart your post but I disagree here. The mainstream (left) media will shut out, censor, and discredit these skeptics in spite of the newly awakened public's desire for balanced debate. The main American news outlets are already doing this with people who stand against Obama and the socialist left agenda, and environmentalism is a large part of that agenda to those who stand to profit greatly from legislation like cap and trade, not to mention government research grants.
But I can't say much at all about whether that's going to bear any kind of practical fruit or not. I know that the solar physicist Svensmark will be using it to test out his cosmic ray theory of climate change at some point. 
