Warming trend
Jessica explains peer review
December 5th, 2009
Climategate 3
December 5th, 2009You have seen the worst of the climategate emails “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick … to hide the decline”
But there are over a thousand emails. What is the typical average email like? Download them. Are most of them just showing good honest scientists industriously at work doing real science?
Here is a random sample. I selected the emails at random and entered them in this post before looking at what was in them. I have selected three emails, 1213387146.txt, 0933245004.txt and 1138042050.txt and as I write this text, after having done the selection, have no idea how bad they will be. This is not the worst of the worst, this is the average typical email. We shall now see how bad the typical email is.
1213387146.txt: Benjamin Santer threatens to sue American Liberty Publishers who disagree with his global warming results. Court imposed truth – the government that wants global warming to be true will be paying for the lawyers to sue American Liberty Publishers, and the government will also be paying the judge who is in charge of the case.
o933245004.txt: An assistant is instructed to change the statistical standards for the charts to what supports the argument, thereby cherry picking data, a minor transgression, but typical of global warming charts.
1138042050.txt: Ooh, by sheer luck, this one is juicy: “we cannot afford to being caught” They are revising what will appear in the IPCC report after the official last minute, showing that the official rules are merely for outsiders, not for insiders, which implies that the IPCC is merely the voice of the conspiracy.
So we have a thousand emails, any one of which should be adequate to discredit the “science” of anthropogenic global warming.
Winning on Climategate
December 4th, 2009The mainstream media is reluctant to report Climategate, except that evil hackers have stolen private emails in a vain attempt to create to cast doubt on a dire emergency that creates an urgent need for a massive transfer of power and wealth to a centralized one world government.
Rasmussen polls, however, indicate that the vast majority of voters are aware of the general situation – not because they have been informed about Climategate, but because of reflexive suspicion on being told they need to make sacrifices because the sky is falling. They know the truth from wise judgements of character, not from knowledge of science.
We are also getting some traction at the top. In addition to a leading Australian politician losing his job as a direct result of Climategate, Phil Jones has “stepped aside”. By and large one does not “step aside” from where the bodies are buried unless the Vice Chancellor is standing in one’s office with a large gentleman from security who is there in case one needs him to respectfully assist one in finding the exit.
The man appointed to replace Phil Jones in charge of the buried bodies, Peter Liss, looks to be crypto skeptic. Papers of which Peter Liss is listed as author used dog whistle language, subtly ambiguous phrases that mean one thing if one believes that once the most eminent scientists have formed a consensus, the science is settled, and all that remains is the minor detail of torturing the data till it repudiates its heresy and acknowledges the true faith, but which mean another, very different thing, if one adheres to the reactionary old fashioned idea that science rests of evidence and consensus is for synods, ambiguous phrases that sound as if the authors of the paper are respectfully acknowledging the authority of the consensus, but which subtly take the mickey out of it.
What is wrong with Wikipedia
December 4th, 2009Wikepedia’s rules innately and inherently create bias. One is required to source stuff, not in reality, not in what is observable, but in what respectable authority says, which necessarily excludes Climategate from Wikipedia. Evidence based data is “original research”, thus the scientific approach is forbidden. To present the actual science, rather than the “consensus”, is a violation of Wikipedia rules
Thus, for example, respectable authority does not like anything that Darwin said, for all of it is apt to support raaaciiiiissssm. But respectable authority cannot simple throw Darwin overboard as an evil Nazi. So instead, respectable authority attributes to Darwin the advances of his predecessors, loudly praises him for those ideas, and denounces Darwin’s actual ideas as “ultra darwinism”. It is then necessary for respectable to deny that Lamarck proposed common descent, so that they can attribute common descent to Darwin, in place of Darwinism. And so, if one quotes Lamarck’s own words discussing common descent, this will be deleted from Wikipedia in fifteen seconds, and replaced with some eminent academic telling us what Lamarck supposedly said. Quoting Lamarck as evidence of what Lamarck said is “original research”, and obviously that is unacceptable in Wikipedia. Indeed, any evidence based assertion is “original research”. and thus all of Climategate, and all of the results of Steve McIntyre, are “original research”. The rule against original research, necessarily prohibits evidence or facts based on evidence from appearing in Wikipedia.
In place of the “no original research” rule, we need to have a rule that privileges evidence and deprecates authority. And that rule is: Nullius in Verba
The Cathedral loses
December 2nd, 2009When the mainstream media, academia, the state department, senior civil servants, and the leading politicians (the Cathedral) get behind an issue, they win, no matter how stupid, evil, or simply insane that position is. And if they are temporarily stalled, there will be some compromise, followed, when no one is looking, by a compromise on that compromise, until they have what they were determined to get.
It is interesting therefore that so far, neither president Zelaya, nor anyone resembling him, is president for life of Honduras.
In a free and fair election, conducted with lots of international observers, the candidate the Cathedral did not like, won.
Quietly, furtively, and shamefacedly, the US has announced it will recognize the result, despite previously ranting that if free and fair elections were permitted, it would legitimize a coup – the “coup” being the procedures that the Honduran constitution prescribed to prevent free and fair elections from being subverted by political power.
The Honduran Constitution prescribes swift, simple, informal, public, and drastic solutions to such problems. This seems to work against the Cathedral, which likes a cloud of complexity, compromise, and secrecy to conceal its shenanigans. It was a “coup” because it was not the kind of process that the Cathedral could manipulate without anyone understanding what was going on.
No twentieth century warming:
November 29th, 2009The Strata-sphere has found that surface temperature measurements fail to show twentieth century global warming. The raw CRU data released in Climategate shows that surface temperature readings measure the first half of the last century (1900-1960) as warm or warmer than it is today.
John Pittman has found some interesting science in the Climategate emails: The treeline is an sensitive treemometer, since it is very sharply defined, a few kilometers broad. Trees grow, just barely, south of the treeline, they entirely fail to grow north of the treeline. During the Medieval climatic optimum 750-1450 trees grew north of the present day treeline, indicating that the medieval climatic optimum was warmer than today in the north. During the past century, 1897 to present, there has been no movement in the treeline, indicating no twentieth century warming in the north,none.
Global sea ice area has also remained constant since it has been observed, from 1978 to the present.
Nullius in Verba
November 28th, 2009In the past, I ridiculed the Royal Society for backing away from “Nullius in Verba” in its efforts to accommodate postmodern science – however, I recently learned that the president of the Royal Society, Bob May, that was responsible for retranslating that into something more politically correct and respectful of the consensus of the synod, is no longer president of the Royal society – which may have something to do with the the Royal Society eventually finding its testicles
Checking the Royal Society website I find that the old translation, “take no one’s word for it”, which had mysteriously disappeared from the website, has mysteriously returned.
Despite this, and despite demanding that Warmists provide evidence rather than assertion, the Royal Society under its new leadership has continued to pressure private organizations to defund those who doubt the consensus of the Synod on global warming as it did under the old leadership. That it demands that evidence be presented by one side is rather less impressive if it continues to object to the other side also presenting evidence.
Climategate 2
November 28th, 2009The climategate letters, programs, and datafiles show a systematic and repetitious pattern of hiding and falsifying inconvenient data, cherry picking, self deception, and replacing peer review with theological review of the holy synod. It is worth examining particular incidents from this sorry story in detail.
When considering one particular such incident, you should keep in mind that each such incident is not an isolated bad apple. Rather, the climate gate emails and data reveal that it is all like this, every paper, every publication, every claim. Every single climate warming paper, every single piece of climate warming evidence, every graph. Official science is not science, but theology, theology concocted to impose on us a theocratic state, which state will deny us the ability to make our living in an ‘unsustainable’ way, ‘unsustainable’, being code for impious, just as ‘legitimate peer review’ (scare quotes in original email) is code for illegitimate peer review, and ‘corrected’ data (scare quotes in original source code) is code for falsified data.
climategate 1
November 28th, 2009“Hide the decline”
In this scandal, we see antiscientific attitudes of the IPCC, the big government branch of the big science conspiracy Hadley CRU, a coalition of big government and big science to take control of your life, with the intent of preventing you from making a living in an “unsustainable” way. And if the earth cannot support so many people “sustainably”, that is your problem, not their problem.
The men revealed by the emails knew what the truth must be, no matter what the evidence might show.
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment …the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
and if the data is surely wrong, then the wrong data must be hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden lest climate skeptics misuse it.
or better than hidden, wrong data must be corrected, replaced by the values known to the the truth, so that the data showed the real truth, lest people be confused by mere observations:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps … to hide the decline”
Phil Jones to Tom Wigley:
Tom,
Keep quiet about both issues.
Tom Wigley replied.
The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.
But nonetheless did indeed keep quiet.
Scare quotes around ‘corrected’ in original source code.
And what, you may ask, were the corrections. That too is available in the source code. Now while comments, intended for humans, may well be involve nuance, ambiguity, and disagreement as to the meaning, computers do what they are told. And what the computer source code told the computer to do was lie
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
Mann asks Briffa to make his data agree with that of Mann
everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series.
>> … dilutes the message rather significantly …
They perceived those who did not accept the real truth (regardless of what the data might show) as enemies of the earth, not to mention enemies of their grant applications,
Such enemies of the earth and the truth must be kept out of science, to preserve the truth and save the earth from its enemies. ‘Legitimate peer review’ (scare quotes in original) must stop such inconvenient and potentially misleading data from being published.
‘Legitimate peer review’
‘Legitimate peer review’
‘Legitimate peer review’
‘Legitimate peer review’
‘Legitimate peer review’
‘Legitimate peer review’
‘Legitimate peer review’
‘Legitimate peer review’
Against Libertarian Imperialism
November 26th, 2009Faré on Distributed Republic criticizes the Rothbardians for supporting the enemies of their country.
Many libertarians, after Rothbard, start from the correct assumption that one’s government is one’s first and most direct enemy, to the conclusion that one should always side with the enemies of one’s current oppressor.
Rothbardians are wrong in supporting our enemies and the government is right to do something about them, the trouble is that the government is not very effectual or successful in doing something about them, while at the same time forbidding private citizens from acting.
Imperialism is not libertarian, colonialism can be.
Obviously I want the US to win in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our enemies to lose – which issue Rothbardians seem alarmingly confused about. But we are having problems in Dar al-Islam, and have alway had similar problems for a thousand years, due to diseconomies of scale in the application of force. The Rothbardians are wrong in that we really do need to kill people and break stuff but governments are not in fact very good at killing enough people and breaking enough stuff. Our past successes in this thousand year war have always involved meeting centralized state violence with centralized state violence, and decentralized non state and micro state violence with decentralized privatized and semi privatized violence. Centralized violence against the likes of the Taliban will work no better than centralized violence did against the Barbary pirates or the Saracens.
Imperialism worked and was good for everyone when the East India company was robbing the natives, for the Company was a colonialist. It became a disaster when the British government took over the East India Company and tried to do good to the natives from afar.
A big central government is bad at building local roads, and it is bad at providing law and justice. To the extent that good old fashioned Cecil Rhodes imperialism substituted competent civilized white stationary bandits for ignorant primitive and savage native stationary bandits, it was a huge improvement. Instead of being robbed by vicious cannibal rapists, the natives were robbed by people who mostly upheld private property rights, freedom of trade, and organized the building of roads. To the extent that imperialism substitutes distant do gooder bureaucrats in a foreign capital city for local primitive and savage stationary bandits, it is a disaster. It is better to be ruled by a local illiterate cannibal rapist despot than a Harvard educated bureaucrat located in Washington.
One of the best of the old imperialists, a man who was on the transition from brigand to bureaucrat, was Sir Stamford Raffles, a man who was willing to turn a city into a desert, and who rewarded troops by permitting them to ravage a city, a man who on a clerk’s salary somehow mysteriously had gold enough to buy princes by the dozen and support armies on the march. He a spy who charmed people while arranging their deaths, and a brigand. Everyone loved him, and thought what a kind and gentle ruler he was. When he was replaced by men who were wholly bureaucrats efficiently representing the will of London, men who did not enrich themselves to any extraordinary extent, no one liked his replacements.
Rhodes and Raffles were better for those they ruled than London bureaucrats nor has governmental military action served Christendom sufficiently well in the war with Dar al Islam. We never got anywhere in the war with the Barbary pirates till the French started settling their lands. Until the colonialists arrived, the Barbary pirates would just surrender, then promptly unsurrender.
The peace of Vasvár in 1664 depressingly resembled the innumerable “peace” agreements that Israel has made.
Our installation of Karzai depressingly resembles Charlemagne’s assistance to Ibn al Arubi. When Israel removed the settlers from Gaza, rockets followed. Therefore, when the settlers were there, they were preventing rockets.
This post has been corrected: The earlier version was overly critical of Faré.