The APS Statement on Climate Change is now officially posted [link], minor changes from the draft. I will not be renewing my membership to the APS.
The American Physical Society released it's revised statement on climate change just over a week ago. It's not terribly strong, but it could have been even weaker given the attempts by science denying members to water it down.
National Policy
15.3 STATEMENT ON EARTH'S CHANGING CLIMATE
(Adopted by Council on November 14, 2015)
On Climate Change:
Earth's changing climate is a critical issue and poses the risk of significant environmental, social and economic disruptions around the globe. While natural sources of climate variability are significant, multiple lines of evidence indicate that human influences have had an increasingly dominant effect on global climate warming observed since the mid-twentieth century. Although the magnitudes of future effects are uncertain, human influences on the climate are growing. The potential consequences of climate change are great and the actions taken over the next few decades will determine human influences on the climate for centuries.
On Climate Science:
As summarized in the 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there continues to be significant progress in climate science. In particular, the connection between rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and the increased warming of the global climate system is more compelling than ever. Nevertheless, as recognized by Working Group 1 of the IPCC, scientific challenges remain in our abilities to observe, interpret, and project climate changes. To better inform societal choices, the APS urges sustained research in climate science.
On Climate Action:
The APS reiterates its 2007 call to support actions that will reduce the emissions, and ultimately the concentration, of greenhouse gases as well as increase the resilience of society to a changing climate, and to support research on technologies that could reduce the climate impact of human activities. Because physics and its techniques are fundamental elements of climate science, the APS further urges physicists to collaborate with colleagues across disciplines in climate research and to contribute to the public dialogue.
Judith doesn't say why she spat the dummy. The APS statement is mild for a scientific organisation like the APS. Is it because she rejects mainstream science? Sure looks like this is a formal admission and declaration that she's now full blown science denier.
The main thing missing from the APS statement is clear confirmation that it is likely that all the warming since the middle of last century is because of human activity. The statement is fairly mild, which should have pleased Judith. Perhaps she didn't like the "more compelling than ever" part.
Here's a link to the previous statement. You'd think Judith would have preferred "compelling" to "incontrovertible". I'm guessing that nothing less than "we don't know; it's not happening; it's all so uncertain; delay, delay, delay; deny, deny, deny" would have pleased Judith Curry.
So now you know. Judith Curry has now officially confessed that she's just another utter nutter.
And now she has that unspent APS subscription money she will be able to afford membership of the equally eminent (and fossil fuel industry compliant) OAS!!!!!
ReplyDeleteLast April Dr Curry destroyed the APS with her devastating attack on both its draft statement on climate change and on those physical scientists who acknowledge .......Physics
ReplyDeleteHere is my real problem with this statement. This is an egregious misuse of the expertise of the APS. Their alleged understanding of issues like spectroscopy and fluid dynamics are not of any direct relevance to the issues they write about in this statement. (my emphasis)
Curry is a joke.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/04/20/aps-members-comment-on-climate-change-statement/
They should be glad to see her go. Another crank that can no longer use their membership of APS as some kind of CV-improver.
ReplyDeleteThe APS just became a better place.
DeleteMarco, my thoughts exactly. There must have been sighs of relief all 'round when the offices of the APS heard the news.
DeleteActually, I'm not sure this is weird at all.
ReplyDeleteMany climate scientists are AGU members, but not APS members.
I'm an APS member and in 2009 I wrote about the petition to the APS to fluffyify its statement.
(This got Will Happer and co *very* angry at me, ho ho.)
Judith Curry wasn't on the list of signers, but then:
She may not have been into this yet, as her real coming-out party was in 2010.
She also may not have been an APS member then, I cannot tell.
I'm also a member of APS GPC ... which did *not* produce that statement, which was by a separate committee.
Now, GPC was a (reasonable) response to the petition, well worth having ...
but 2 of the 6 organizers of the petition were also on the GPC organizing committee ... and I think they tried hard to pack the GPC membership and officers with their friends. Curry got proposed and got on the ballot, and won. She looks fine on paper.
What i don't know is whether she was a long-term APS member, or whether her friends got her to sign up in 2011 so she could be proposed for an officer job, which she got:
Member-at-Large: Judith Curry ( 01/13 - 12/15)
Georgia Inst of Tech
Anyway, her term is up, and if she didn't really care about APS, she could score points by making noise about quiting, like Hal Lewis did (another of the 6 petition organizers).
If she was a long-time APS member, then resigning over this seems silly.
Looking at Judith's older CVs, she hasn't listed the APS until recently. So yes, she could well have joined the APS just to disrupt the revision of the climate statement.
Deletehttp://web.archive.org/web/20090311021714/http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currycv.html
Thanks for checking old CV, but this is not quite right. APS POPA is the longstanding part of APS that regularly updates position statements, whereas GPC is a recently-created topical group for APS members interested in physics of climate, and GPC had *nothing* to do with POPA's statement.
Delete1) Steve Koonin was running the POPA subcommittee on this, and invited 6 scientists to workshop, including Curry, Lindzen and Christy, i.e., there was no need to be an APS member.
See the amusing Report from the FPS Representative on the Panel on Public Affairs of the APS. It is not often you see Eli Rabett and James Delingpole mentioned in the same post :-)
2) GPC had nothing to do with the POPA process ... perhaps a problem in itself. Again, the history was:
a) Around 2009/2010, there was a concerted effort by Fred Singer and co to mush-ify science societies' climate statements, including APS, ACS, IOP (in UK) and to some extent GSA, the last cleverly preempted by Bill Ruddiman.
b) The 2009 APS Petition was driven by Fred Singer, Will Happer (atomic physicist and Chair of George Marshall Institute), Robert Austin (biopphysicist), Hal Lewis, Roger Cohen (ex-Exxon, in the news lately for long-ago quotes admitting to AGW), and Larry Gould (U of Hartford, who had made the APS New England newsletter a denial platform, but whose career pinnacle may have been invitation to speak at a Heartland ICCC.)
They got ~200 of 47,000 people, mostly old guys, few of whom very few had every published any peer-reviewed climate science.
They made a lot of noise. Most physicists are smart and know better, but ideology sometimes trumps brains in any organization.
c) When they got rejected, they then pushed to create a topical group (an OK idea), but Austin and Cohen were on the organizing committee. There was a clear effort to pack the membership with petition signers, suggest interesting candidates, and get them elected... Except for getting Curry in as Member at Large, this failed, thank goodness.
One can only guess what would have happened: "APS GPC finds climate science uncertain, more research needed..." etc.
3) There's an interesting pattern, shown when people's demands get rejected, they quit APS or APS groups, noisily: Hal Lewis, Roger Cohen, Steve Koonin, Judith Curry, Ivar Giaever.
Regarding John Mashey's point 3, one of the benefits of this pattern of noisy departure is that history will easily be able to identify those people who should have known better but chose to let ideology trump best disciplinary understanding, and thus to use that ideology to seriously hinder the progress both of the science and the repair of the planet.
DeleteFodder in another decade or so for a further volume from Naomi...
Didn't she walk away from BEST too?
ReplyDelete"walk away" would be a rather mild description.
Deletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html
DeleteTruly astonishing views from JC suggesting a "pause" based on last 10-13 years measurements, without considering how/when that "pause" links to physical trends before.. Genuine potty peer level insight. Makes me curious about what actually is required for getting a professorship in natural sciences at her University?
Delete0^0, given that a suggestion of this nature requires a misinterpretation of such basic statistics that it should result in an automatic fail for a first year undergrad who handed in such work, it's astonishing indeed...
DeleteFrom what I've seen, for all of Curry's bluster about the apparent dubious existence of climate change and the apparent lack of seriousness of its effects, she has never published anything credible on the matter. Never. Nor has she cited any serious publication that credibly supports her stance. Never.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that all she has is innuendo, accusation, prevarication, misrepresentation and supposition. No science. As far as the vast majority of real scientists are likely to be concerned, the further she separates herself from the profession the better.
From what I've read Judith doesn't understand much about climate science. I've read some people say she used to do science back in the 1990s - I'm wondering just how much was hers and how much was other people's.
DeleteShe's a very sloppy thinker. She tries to hide it by waffle, but it's pretty hard to disguise empty waffle.
The APS gave the skeptics a hearing. They had their shot. Koonin blew it because he made some really stupid arguments in front of an audience of superb physicists, and then he double down on it. The audience of superb physicists found their arguments to be very weak. Sore losers. Professor Curry knows a great deal about climate science, but she is clueless about how weak her arguments truly ate. They're getting snowed under by a heatwave,
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
Delete"I'm wondering just how much was hers and how much was other people's."
DeleteThat's an intersting question Sou.
Of the 103 original papers/chapters/conference presentations listed by Scopus for Curry since 2000, 14 are first-authored by her. Of these 14, seven are of the denial/uncertainty bent, and of these seven papers six are from 2011 or later: the seventh was published in 2006 and seems to have been the start of her fence-sitting, focussing on the link between warming and hurricane occurrence.
The hurricane piece from 2012 is a very tepid effort and starts with what has to be one of the greatest clangers in climate science commentary: "The prospect of increased hurricane intensity in a greenhouse warmed world is arguably the greatest short term risk from greenhouse warming." Obviously Curry is poorly-read outside of her own intersts or she wouldn't make that statement, as destructive as hurricances can be.
The eighth of the 14 papers is one where the co-author is Vitaly Khvorostyanov, and with his co-authorship there's an interesting pattern. Khvorostyanov is first author on 20 papers where Curry is coauthor, and another where she is third author. On another he is 3rd author and she is second. I suspect that Curry was largely a passenger in this collaboration rather than a driver, and the sole paper in this partnership where she nabbed first authorship was likely a 'remainder' effort because Khvorostyanov was busy with other things.
Of the earlier six papers in the group of 14 (from 2000-2004) three are largely descriptive of project settings-up, and of these at least two appear to be rather heavy waffle with little scientific grit. Another two are about uncertainty in sea ice modelling, and one is about uncertainty in satellite measurement of heat flux.
Overall she appears to be more along for the ride with other people than throwing down any cracking scientific points herself. Of course this is fine, as many people have perfectly valid reasons for not driving innovation or exercising research leadership. The telling point though is that her main initiative is in chirping about uncertainty - something that she seems to have inherited from her pre-denialism work - and as a one-trick pony she doesnt' appear to have any of the nous required to back her words with work that actually demonstrates anything of substance.
It would be interesting to do a serious analysis of her publishing history, if one had the time and inclination as a scientific historian and/or commentator. As far as I can see though from a cursory 10 minute poke-around she's like a teeny tiny version of the Wizard of Oz, riding on the coat-tails of others and using smoke and mirrors at every turn. Her main ability seems to use the shine that she's gathered from fortunate choices in collaborators to illuminate the sort of commentary that appeals to ideologues opposed to the implications of the hard physics of global warming.
Yes, my "wondering" wasn't just speculation. I looked at her publication history a while back and noticed something similar. Next thing is to look at her pre-2000 publications.
DeleteHer CV shows that she has a number of awards and fellowships - I don't know what the criteria were. Maybe it was enough that she was chair of a department, or maybe they were given on the basis of other recognitions. I've seen people in employment rise up on no merit, piggy-backing one recognition on preceding recognition like a house of cards. They don't always fall in a heap like Judith has. Sometimes they manage to sustain it until retirement and ensuing Wiki entry. (Think Maurice Newman.)
Sorry JCH - just fished your comments out of the spam folder. Blogger made a (rare) mistake.
DeleteCurry is obviously better at bureaucracy than at science, and has probably (victim) bullied herself through her career.
DeleteOff-Topic, but anyone know what has happened to RealClimate?
ReplyDeleteI can understand if the contributors are too busy to update it frequently, but at least such a fantastic resource should be archived somewhere? Or have Gavin et al got some other outreach project in mind?
On his Facebook, Mike Mann said "yep--we're dealing w/ it, might take a day or two for it to come back..." about one day ago.
Deletehttps://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/986618641394338?comment_id=986805034709032&reply_comment_id=987006688022200&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R1%22%7D
Phil - see comments here (and here). Gavin Schmidt is working on it, though I expect he has a lot of other things to work on at the same time. (It looks as if the nameservers need to be re-set.)
DeleteI'm pretty sure it's the negative phase of the AMO that done in RealClimate.
DeleteYeah.. It looks like there is a semi random redirector somewhere when trying to reach realclimate.org.. Landing on strange places now..
DeleteI just checked and Got one of those scam, you have a VIRUS. call this number N0W or your life will end.
Deletesounds like a serious attack on their site. but I know nothing about these things
This is very odd. The authoritative DNS has changed which makes sense if the domain expired and the registrar pointed it to a parking page but that should have been resolved in a day or so. One change on their setup to point to the correct DNS and done. Wait a few hours for the changes to propagate and the problem is solved.
DeleteYes, there's probably more to it. I'm wondering if it could have been hijacked on expiry - it would take longer to get it back again.
DeleteThe RealClimate mirror is back online.
DeleteWUWT's gloating thread on the subject is, unsurprisingly, an extraordinary - and revealing - orgy of bad-faith onanistic fantasy. The reality is much more mundane, but still a pain to work through...
It shouldn't have happened. They'll be lucky to get out of it easily. Hopefully someone will be able to sort it out.
DeleteThey may indeed be lucky to get out unscathed. I'd not be surprised if there was a frenetic amount of Denialatus activity to try to hijack, even temporarily, the domain name ahead of Paris.
DeleteNow, now, everyone, let's not jump to conclusions about Prof. Curry and her fondness for ambiguous but leading non sequiturs.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, I can equally truthfully say that:
The APS Statement on Climate Change is now officially posted. I will not be joining the APS.
or
he APS Statement on Climate Change is now officially posted. I will be renewing my membership to the AGU.
or
The APS Statement on Climate Change is now officially posted. I will be having roast chicken for dinner.
The three stooges of atmospheric physics are Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer.
ReplyDeleteRichard Lindzen worked his entire career, starting from the early 1960's until he retired working on this little climate puzzle called the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO) of upper atmospheric winds. See the Wikipedia page for both Lindzen and QBO and you can see how Lindzen is given credit for explaining the QBO.
Yet, it is now obvious that the QBO is forced by the periodic gravitational pull of the moon, aliased by the seasonal cycle. Click my avatar for the better explanation. As it turns out, this new model makes the QBO no more difficult than ocean tidal modeling, which has been was quantified by the Doodson coefficients circa 1900.
I don't understand how Lindzen could have missed this factor. It's straightforward physics featuring an obvious factor that couldn't have gone unnoticed.
Yet even more troubling is that Lindzen's theory will likely continue. Gavin Schmidt and company recently wrote a 26 page research paper on the QBO called "The QBO in two GISS global climate models: 1. Generation of the QBO" -- but with no mention of the lunar forcing.
Consider that Lindzen's Iris model was a failure. His attempt at quantifying minimal contribution of CO2 to AGW was a failure. And now his theory of QBO is discredited. Who would have thunk it? If I have learned anything, it is that you go after the white-pink underbelly of sciences if you want to make some progress. Go after the weak links and contrarians and you will find something.
And then there are Curry and Spencer, who are actually worse than Lindzen. The three of them are an embarrassment to climate science. Lost a generation of progress in climate science thanks to these people.
Whut, until you publish your lunar speculations in a reputable journal, they are every bit as embarrassing as curry et al.
DeleteVerytallguy,
DeleteWhut has already submitted these "speculations" to Phys Rev. Letters. Please explain your embarrassment. Though no expert, I find his modelling of not just the QBO but also the ENSO remarkable. I do know sufficient about aliasing to see how tidal fluctuations can lead to phenomena with much longer time periods.
VTG said: "Whut, until you publish your lunar speculations in a reputable journal, they are every bit as embarrassing as curry et al."
DeleteSo you think that the ocean tides are not caused by the moon? That's a pretty odd belief system you have.
Recall that Richard Lindzen has been studying the QBO for over 50 years, and he even said this in 1974 -- "Lunar tides are especially well suited to such studies since it is unlikely that lunar periods could be produced by anything other than the lunar tidal potential."
It is pretty easy to see whut Lindzen muffed up. He didn't consider that the lunar tidal potential periodicity would or could alias the seasonal period. Once you do that, you get the exact QBO period.And you also get all the detail in the QBO time series.
And about publishing, Lindzen said this: ""Though valuable as a process, science is always problematic as an institution. Charles Darwin often expressed gratitude for being able to be a gentleman scientist with no need for an institutional affiliation. Unfortunately, as a practical matter, the gentleman scientist no longer exists. "
I harbor no illusions to get this published in Physical Review Letters. I tried and it came right back to me without review. I am not going to try to get it published elsewhere.
Bill, WHUT shares with a not very stellar cast a conviction he knows better than the scientific literature.
DeleteA forum like this would have no truck with deniers making grandiose claims about lunar cycles without support from the scientific literature.
I will happily eat humble pie once his conjectures are accepted by the scientific community. Until then, I'm sceptical.
Judith has lost it - if she ever had it. A few months ago she posted a paper on her blog about sunspots correlating with temperatures, saying it was "new" - really Judith? I guess it is, if "new" means "the past few centuries" or so. It's been investigated many times in the past.
DeleteAs far as climatology papers, Judith co-authored this one (in Sept 2014?), with Nicholas Lewis, on climate sensitivity. Did she contribute or just put her name on it? IDK.
https://niclewis.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/lewiscurry_ar5-energy-budget-climate-sensitivity_clim-dyn2014_accepted-reformatted-edited.pdf
They make the usual idiotic mistake that all of these papers do, ignoring medium-term feedbacks like ice-albedo (let alone the longer term feedbacks like methane), & therefore coming up with something much closer to transient climate response than to eqilibrium climate sensitivity. I guess they hallucinate that the ice sheets are at equilibrium now, LOL.
Thanks Bill,
DeleteAn explanation of the seasonal aliasing is here for posterity:
http://web.archive.org/web/20151122231746/http://contextearth.com/2015/11/17/the-math-of-seasonal-aliasing/
It has long been speculated by folks that aliasing could occur, but it is usually in other contexts, e.g. see the work of Richard Ray at NASA Goddard wrt long period tidal effects on climate. He didn't see much in the data he was looking at but explains how it can happen.
I am throwing Lindzen under the bus for not finding the obvious correlation. I would rather embarrass Lindzen than everyone that blindly followed his math without questioning it. This is Lindzen's third strike and you would think that people would realize that he is just a contrarian crank.
And incidentally, I personally did not discover the correlation myself -- as a machine learning tool picked out the tidal frequencies and then it was a matter of interpretation. It's no excuse but they didn't have machine learning tools that could pump out billions of calculations over a weekend back in the early 1970's. The time-series for QBO also was not as mature as it is now.
VTG said: "Bill, WHUT shares with a not very stellar cast a conviction he knows better than the scientific literature."
DeleteThe current thought is that the QBO is caused by gravity waves. My thought is that you skip the gravity waves and tie in directly to the gravitational pull from the moon. Yes, certainly someone thought of this before, but like Bill said, these periods are much too short to explain the 28 month average period of the QBO.
I looked at the scientific literature and could find no paper that asserted that the forcing of the QBO was via lunisolar origin, except for perhaps this paper and cites to it:
[1]L. Guoqing, “27.3-day and 13.6-day atmospheric tide and lunar forcing on atmospheric circulation,” Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 359–374, 2005.
This didn't consider aliasing though, which is what is needed to get from the ~ monthly periods to the quasi-biennial period.
I would have dropped the whole thing if it wasn't for the fact that the alignment was within 0.01% and got to thinking of the incredible coincidence that this would require. Here is an page describing the sensitivity analysis
http://web.archive.org/web/20151122235037/http://contextearth.com/2015/11/21/qbo-model-sensitivity/
Anonymous said "Judith has lost it - if she ever had it. "
DeleteI knew this when she claimed that Bose-Einstein statistics were required to explained cloud droplet and ice nucleation. I challenged this on the Amazon comments for the book that the assertion was made in, and of course her attack dogs came after me. The gyrations that Judith made to get out of that pickle were fun to watch.
Uhm, Bill H:
Delete"Whut has already submitted these "speculations" to Phys Rev. Letters. Please explain your embarrassment."
was followed by
" I tried and it came right back to me without review. I am not going to try to get it published elsewhere."
Disappointing to not even try anything else but Phys Rev Lett. VTG is vindicated in my opinion.
Whut, I have to say I'm kind of surprised at your not taking your lunar-forcing idea to a climate journal. PRL is extremely competitive, and it's possible that a journal editor not especially familiar with the topic looked at the title, figured it was crank work without reading it, and passed on it. If you are right, and this does explain something important, then it's very important to get it into the literature.
DeleteMarco said:
Delete"Disappointing to not even try anything else but Phys Rev Lett. VTG is vindicated in my opinion."
I am an Applied Physics Letters kind of guy, but thought to give PRL a try for something that is truly mind-blowing. And worthwhile to be able to do the equivalent of poking the ogre Lindzen with a stick in the eye.
Too bad the QBO/lunar correlation isn't going away because you think that VTG is somehow "vindicated". Somebody else will discover it, just as I "discovered" it via machine learning.
I won't try to publish in Earth Science journals because those are all buddy-buddy systems and they won't consider anybody with the wrong credentials. I've tried and they have essentially laughed me off, sometimes with the most inane rationales. I have saved the comments for posterity cause they're often humorous.
But on second thought, I may try a Machine Learning journal or conference. The vendor of the ML tool I use, Nutonian, is sending off feelers concerning my findings to science journalists. Do you think Nutonian (or Wolfram for that matter) cares that the stuff hasn't been vetted by a peer-reviewed science journal? Not if it helps them sell their software! Do you think I care that I am bypassing the peer-review journal system by doing this? Whut do you think? The system is broken anyways by not being open and freely available!
As Lindzen himself wrote:
Science in the Public Square: Global Climate Alarmism and Historical Precedents, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 18 Number 3 Fall 2013, Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D.
"Though valuable as a process, science is always problematic as an institution. Charles Darwin often expressed gratitude for being able to be a gentleman scientist with no need for an institutional affiliation. Unfortunately, as a practical matter, the gentleman scientist no longer exists. Even in the 19th Century, most scientists needed institutional homes, and today science almost inevitably requires outside funding. In some fields, including climate, the government has essentially a monopoly on such funding.
Expanded funding is eagerly sought, but the expansion of funding inevitably invites rent-seeking by scientists, university administration, and government bureaucracies. The public square brings its own dynamic into the process of science: most notably, it involves the coupling of science to specific policy issues. This is a crucial element in the climate issue, but comparable examples have existed in other fields, including eugenics and immigration, and Lysenkoism and agronomy"
Does anybody need funding to input some data into a machine learning tool, and have it go crank over the weekend while they go off skiing or biking?
Lindzen shouldn't have wrote that if he didn't want it to boomerang back at him. He was the guy that wanted citizen scientists involved, and it would be so sweet if he got back whut he asked for.
The whole process has been vetted over at the Azimuth Project forum and the thread that we have going in trying to model El Nino. It's a bit disappointing that a lot of the regulars have gotten cold feet once the results started coming in. Why get interested in trying to solve a problem if you are scared of whut you may find?
Palindrome said:
Delete"Whut, I have to say I'm kind of surprised at your not taking your lunar-forcing idea to a climate journal. PRL is extremely competitive, and it's possible that a journal editor not especially familiar with the topic looked at the title, figured it was crank work without reading it, and passed on it. If you are right, and this does explain something important, then it's very important to get it into the literature. "
That's probably partially right, but PRL doesn't think I am a crank, it's the Earth Sciences journals that think I am.
The editor that I conversed with at PRL is a condensed matter guy, which is what I am, so understandable that he didn't know whut to do with the paper. But PRL did publish the crank Anastasios Tsonis, which I thought would give me a chance.
OK, absolutely last word from me on this and I’m afraid it’s rather harsh.
DeleteWHUT, here’s a recipe for being regarded as a crank.
1) Dream up a ground breaking new theory (Perpetual motion machine, stadium wave, QBO, ENSO, copper bracelets, whatever)
2) Print loads of plausible looking graphs demonstrating how incredible your development is
3) Loudly proclaim your superiority over others with years in the field
4) Fail to get your work published in a reputable journal.
5) Generate excuses as to why you are being unfairly treated.
You’re following this to a T. Crow over Lindzen, Curry or whoever as much as you like, but at least they got their work scrutinised and recognised by their peers.
I’m done. The field is yours.
VTG, Remember psychological projection. It may be you with those thoughts. Its certainly not me. We are working in an open forum at the Azimuth Project and Context/Earth and sharing what we find. Did you not know that a chart is useful for sharing information?
DeleteRecall that Lindzen is the guy that is badmouthing his fellow climate scientists. There is a name for this, the "Lindzen Paradox" which David Appel coined:
"I've asked very frequently at universities: 'Of the brightest people you know, how many people were studying climate [...or meteorology or oceanography...]?' And the answer is usually 'No one.'"
And – warming to his theme:
"You look at the credentials of some of these people [on the IPCC] and you realise that the world doesn't have that many experts, that many 'leading climate scientists'".
Was Lindzen suggesting, asked Tim Yeo at this point, that scientists in the field of climate were academically inferior.
"Oh yeah," said Lindzen. "I don't think there's any question that the brightest minds went into physics, math, chemistry…"
I have nothing but the greatest respect for mainstream climate scientists considering what they have to suffer through every day, what with all the trolls out there.
@whut
DeleteHowever good your idea is you are never going to be taken seriously if you think spelling "what" as "whut" is going to be endearing and winsome.
Anonymous said
Delete"However good your idea is you are never going to be taken seriously if you think spelling "what" as "whut" is going to be endearing and winsome. "
I wonder whut "some bunnies" think about that! LOL
vtg is right again. You show all the characteristics of a crank. That does not automatically mean you are one, but you sure don't make much effort to show you aren't.
DeleteWhut, Wow, the hostility to your finding here is incredible. VTG's irascibility resembles the sort of treatment you received from his near namesake, the AGW theory-hating Tallbloke. They seem to take offence at the idea that "an outsider" might make a valuable contribution to climate science. I can think of two outsiders who've done just that : Cowtan and Way.
DeleteSorry to hear about the PRL rejection. VTG would have some justification for the fourth of his five "points" if your paper had actually been reviewed and found wanting. Since it was returned to you without review he should retract that point. Still at least Tobis seems to think it worthy of consideration: maybe he'd be prepared to put his name to it.
Otherwise, publishing in a machine learning journal sounds like a good idea. If it's peer reviewed the climate science community are more likely to take note of it, just as they took note of Cowtan and Way, and that's been an unalloyed benefit to climate science.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI wish VTG would answer my question as to why whut's ideas are an "embarrassment"
DeleteI wish VTG would answer my question as to why whut's ideas are an "embarrassment"
DeleteInteresting discussion if OT. If @whut tried harder to publish (and polish?) the work, there'd probably be less criticism as VTG, Marco and Palindrom intimate. There is a lot of blog science - some good that ends up published, some that remains as blog science. (HW is often criticising blog science.) Even after publishing a novel idea has to pass muster before it becomes widely accepted.
DeleteIIRC Cowtan and Way didn't publicise their work until it had passed review and was published. Bill H's suggestion of teaming up with someone could be worth considering if @whut wants to get a better hearing with the journals.
It's actually worse than that. As part of the process for PRL submission, they ask whether there is an ARXIV version of the paper. As I have gone through that process in the past, I uploaded the paper ARXIV. I then got an email that it would go live at a certain date. However that morning I got an email saying that the paper had been pulled because my credentials were not up to snuff for ARXIV. So I updated my credentials and tried again. This time they said my archiving privileges would be revoked if I tried doing that again, now suggesting that what I had written was inappropriate for ARXIV.
DeleteLesson is that you have to be an insider to work this angle.
I think Cowtan teamed with Way because Way is an insider, in the fact that he is working an Earth Sciences degree.
This guy Nathan Myhrvold is an outsider with plenty of money (former Microsoft bigwig). He teamed with Ken Caldeira at Stanford to get climate science papers published.
That's the way it goes in this field.
Just find a good climate scientist, explain what you've done, and see if you can collaborate. It's as simple as that.
DeleteIf a good climate scientist won't go for it, there's a good possibility that the link you've found is illusory for some reason. I'm not familiar with your particular claim, but over time I've seen people make claims of periods that aren't there, and the physical mechanism for this does seem a little dodgy a priori. You have to go into this open to the idea that you're wrong, and be completely honest in examining your own idea. Once you've run down the counterarguments for yourself, then you'll be in a stronger position to persuade others. And if the effect goes away for some reason, you have to be willing to accept that, too.
This is scientific "Mom and Apple Pie" stuff -- truisms -- but truisms have the virtue of being, uh, true.
Marco said:
Delete"vtg is right again. You show all the characteristics of a crank. That does not automatically mean you are one, but you sure don't make much effort to show you aren't."
That's pretty funny considering I am collaborating with the folks at The Azimuth Project on this study, which is run by Prof. John Carlos Baez who also happens to be the author of the famous Crackpot Index. I have written over a hundred forum articles there and John never suggested that I was a crank. Everyone tends to concentrate on the math and physics in the forum.
About the Azimuth Project study -- well over a year ago John wanted to set up a collaborative project to see if a loose-knit team of physicists and mathematicians could figure out aspects of El Nino and ENSO -- and in particular whether there was some clever mathematical ideas that could be applied. I joined the project last year after it was underway for a few weeks. It started off great guns, but then eventually petered out, as many of the initial team got interested in other topics. I kept going because I thought I was making progress.
This QBO research was an offshoot of the ENSO research as there is a known interesting relation between QBO and ENSO. I continue to post stuff at Azimuth and on my own site because I think it is interesting research.
http://forum.azimuthproject.org/discussion/1640/predictability-of-the-quasi-biennial-oscillation/p1
So maybe you want to show me how I appear to be a crank instead of someone that is overly jazzed about the science? How do you motivate people when you show pessimism over what cann be accomplished? Whats wrong with going after people like Lindzen? I learned long ago that to keep motivation up, it helps to have an adversarial attitude toward something or someone. "Nature's fighting us", is a common rallying cry. It's that competitive sports mentality that is hard to suppress.
Having checked Robert Way's publication history I take your point, Whut.
DeleteAnother person with influence who could lend his name, as well as statistical input might be Grant "Tamino" Foster.
Just an idea...
@whut - I think Cowtan teamed with Way because Way is an insider, in the fact that he is working an Earth Sciences degree.
DeleteRobert Way is a Ph.D. graduate student in geography. Although there seems to be little doubt he's a smart, hardworking guy with a bright academic future, I don't think collaborating with a then-master's student in geography at the Memorial University of Newfoundland would have opened many doors for Cowtan, although they appear to have made a good research team.
http://artsites.uottawa.ca/robert-way/en/background/
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHaving checked Robert Way's publication history I take your point, Whut.
DeleteAnother person with influence who could lend his name, as well as statistical input might be Grant "Tamino" Foster.
Just an idea...
>>That's the way it goes in this field.
DeleteThat's the way it goes in any field.
Sou and @Whut:
DeleteThat's the way it goes.....
You two may be right, but you're sounding uncomfortably similar to climate contrarians when they talk about "pal review" and "dissenting voices are silenced".
By the way, my apologies that I keep somehow duplicating my posts on this blog.
You two may be right
Sou and @Whut:
DeleteThat's the way it goes.....
You two may be right, but you're sounding uncomfortably similar to climate contrarians when they talk about "pal review" and "dissenting voices are silenced".
By the way, my apologies that I keep somehow duplicating my posts on this blog.
You two may be right
It is refreshing after you have posted. Navigate away to the home page and then return to the thread. I forget every once in a while too...
DeleteIf a no-name like Anthony Watts wants to publish, he knows to get Pat Michaels or John N-G as co-author.
DeleteIt would have to be a very solid paper for someone with no prior experience to get published.
It's not just any research field, same goes for management consulting proposals, too.
BTW It's not a matter of dissenting voices - it's an expected first pass filter. Does this person have the background to speak authoritatively? There's a very high rejection rate for experienced researchers. A complete novice in a field has to build credibility.
DeleteYou don't need formal credentials to publish, at least not in the climate-related journals I'm familiar with. It helps to have a mentor or experienced colleagues to show the ropes on some of the technical requirements like reference formatting and such. But even those things are explained in the author guides. Write it up, look at the author guides for formatting (a title page, abstract, double-spacing and Harvard referencing are most of it), then submit to J. Climate or JGR.
DeleteIt is refreshing after you have posted. Navigate away to the home page and then return to the thread. I forget every once in a while too...
DeleteFormatting is not a big deal. Writing in a way that the paper is understandable to other researchers in the field is much more subtle though; a new author would normally need a coauthor to help with that.
DeleteThe bar is set very high for getting anything published. Even established researchers often have to try several times.
"That's the way it goes in any field."
DeleteNot really. I have written peer-reviewed research papers in many different disciplines and Earth Sciences is definitely not outsider friendly. I guess it's understandable because geology etc attracts lots of kooks.
Give you an example: At one time the rule at meetings of the American Physical Society was that any member could submit an abstract as long as it fit within the box. When the proceedings would come out, invariably the boxes that were filled with sideways text and hand-drawn scribbles were invariably written by kranks that were trying to describe some bizarre plate tectonic theory.
Those are now the guys that inhabit Talbloke's Talkshop.
"Robert Way is a Ph.D. graduate student in geography. "
DeleteIn other countries, geography is considered earth and environmental science. I didn't realize this until I met a geography professor at U of Southampton in the UK who was essentially doing soil science as I recall.
@whut
Delete"So maybe you want to show me how I appear to be a crank instead of someone that is overly jazzed about the science?"
Your behavior is all that is needed to make most scientists I know (and including myself) make a detour around you. You complain about being unable to publish in journals because of 'all kinds of reasons' (a common complaint of cranks). You are in my opinion also extremely confident in your statements, not showing much healthy skepticism of your own work (also quite common in cranks). You also seem to have a personal investment in wanting to show Lindzen wrong, which is never a good idea either (some cranks seem to want to show Einstein wrong...).
Again, you may not *be* a crank, but you do show some of the same behavior.
Speaking of plate tectonics, did you know it was American physicists, geologists, and other scientists/engineers, many associated with the oil industry who fought acceptance of the hypothesis? See American Association of Petroleum Geologists (1926) symposium which "shot down" the notion of plate tectonics, for example. Well at least until reality became undeniable.
DeleteBecause of their rigidity, the refused to even think about offshore drilling assuming no oil was out there.
Naomi Oreskes has written a book on the subject.
Marco,
DeletePlease show me where I am "extremely confident" in my own statements, especially on my blog or at the collaboration site Azimuth Project. Why would I keep posting new analyses based on suggestions by others on how to substantiate the finding?
While working on the QBO, I found that the top 8 aliased lunisolar tidal coefficients just happen to contribute significantly to the Fourier series. Essentially the same agreement as you would get in an ocean tidal analysis. We had another signal processing expert helping out for awhile on Azimuth and he eventually threw his hands up, saying there was nothing more he could do for the analysis in terms of proving statistical significance.
What else am I supposed to say? "Please look at this correlation. Doesn't it suck?" LOL I suppose that would be your suggested way of appearing under-confident. Science is supposed to be fun!
jgnfld said
Delete"Speaking of plate tectonics, did you know it was American physicists, geologists, and other scientists/engineers, many associated with the oil industry who fought acceptance of the hypothesis? "
Two popular books to read on the topic are Basin and Range by John McPhee and The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann. What Gell-Mann says about watching scientific progress from his perch at CalTech is entertaining.
jgnfld:
Delete"Speaking of plate tectonics, did you know it was American physicists, geologists, and other scientists/engineers, many associated with the oil industry who fought acceptance of the hypothesis? See American Association of Petroleum Geologists (1926) symposium which "shot down" the notion of plate tectonics"
No, continental drift is not plate tectonics, and the theory of plate tectonics came decades later. They share the notion of the continents moving over time, but nothing else. Wegener's proposed physical mechanism for the movement of continents was physically impossible and criticisms based on this were perfectly reasonable.
In comparison to theories on continents moving, this model that I have for QBO forcing is tame. Atmospheric lunisolar tides are known to exist -- for the QBO, all one has to do is consider that the nominal tidal frequencies are aliased by the strong seasonal signal. There is no leap of logic or creative interpretation that one has to do here, as the numbers pop out and have an error of ~0.01% to the actual values when a best fit is applied.
DeleteI keep coming back to what Lindzen said: "it is unlikely that lunar periods could be produced by anything other than the lunar tidal potential."
So what I am waiting for is criticisms that are "perfectly reasonable" as dhogaza said above. But instead the remarks I see are along the lines of : "if it's such a great theory, why has no one thought of it before?"
DeleteLate to the party - but:
@whutNovember 23, 2015 at 10:52 AM
"
The current thought is that the QBO is caused by gravity waves.
"
"Gravity waves"? This is a very dubious claim.
Link?
""Gravity waves"? This is a very dubious claim."
DeleteNot gravity waves as in the mysterious waves due to gravitational forces, but the rise and fall of Rossby waves, aka Rossby-gravity waves. See the wikipedia QBO link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-biennial_oscillation
quote on the Gravity Waves link
"In the Earth's atmosphere, gravity waves are a mechanism for the transfer of momentum from the troposphere to the stratosphere"
You know, part of the reason that I have to go on the attack WRT Lindzen is that if I don't, the AGW deniers will use what I am finding for nefarious purposes. As it is now, since I have been besmirching Lindzen's name, they are accusing me of plagiarism, and stuff like that. :) That's much preferable to mistakenly being aligned with the Tallbloke Talkshop crowd.
True enough about drift versus tectonics, but my point was the American groups fought the very notion that continents moved at all regardless of mechanism closing their eyes to all observational evidence. Hell, I'm old enough that I learned why continents could not move in high school science. And, I learned about "land bridges" rising and falling.
DeleteI do not know much of the QBO, but one thought that may be interesting: The lunar tides do not have to replace the existing theories on the QBO. The tides could be a synchroniser and the existing physical mechanisms may ensure that the QBO is large enough and at the right position.
Delete"I tried and it came right back to me without review. I am not going to try to get it published elsewhere."
If you are right, this is an important new idea. Thus please try to get it published in an atmospheric journal. Otherwise it does not exist scientifically and other scientists will not test it and build on it.
Please go to an atmospheric journal, not to a machine learning journal. A machine learning journal would not know the experts to find the right reviewers for the atmospheric part. Many mitigation sceptics try to use non-atmospheric journals to get their stuff officially published. It is not much better than not being published.
I do not have the experience that journals try to keep new ideas out. It could be a good idea to search for a co-author, that will likely make the manuscript much better readable. Also including an introduction that makes clear that you understand the orthodoxy helps. If you feel the manuscript was rejected because it was too controversial then an open review journal would be a good choice. In your case Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics of EGU would be the fitting one.
@whutNovember 25, 2015 at 7:59 AM
Delete"
Not gravity waves as in the mysterious waves due to gravitational forces, but the rise and fall of Rossby waves, aka Rossby-gravity waves. See the wikipedia QBO link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-biennial_oscillation
"
Thanks for the response.
That makes much more sense than relativistic gravity waves...
Thanks. The most important take-home message is that there are very few unforced mechanisms in nature. Invariably, something has to stimulate a phenomena and its rare to find a resonant process with the periodicity of QBO. Having a lunisolar mechanism really thwarts the AGW skeptics like Curry who claim that "uncertainty" is a valid rationale. The more that we can pin down, the better off science is, if that makes sense.
DeleteAnonymous
ReplyDeleteI guess they hallucinate that the ice sheets are at equilibrium now, LOL.
Ice sheet feedback is not included in the definion of equilibrium climate sensitivity.
Earth system sensitivity is what you want for that.
Careful what you're LOLing at.
VTG, "Ice sheet feedback is not included in the definition of equilibrium climate sensitivity"?
DeleteSo why do Royer & her colleagues use the term when investigating the entire Phanerozoic? Is ice sheet-albedo feedback not represented over million-year time frames?
http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/climate_sensitivity_II_AJS.pdf
Terminology can change, but "equilibrium" implies you have to wait long enough for ALL feedbacks to kick in.
VTG is correct. There's a nice discussion
Deletehere.
http://climatechangenationalforum.org/where-does-the-albedo-effect-fit-into-the-estimates-of-climate-sensitivity-warming-response/
Crossed with Raymond, but as I'd already written it, my thoughts:
DeleteAnonymous
I couldn’t find a quick comparison of the various sensitivity definitions; doubtless someone can point you at them.
This article on SKS has some good discussion of some of the key points
Ice sheets can take centuries to millennia to melt or form, whereas sea ice changes occur much more rapidly (as we're currently seeing in the Arctic). Therefore, albedo changes associated with sea ice are included in the fast feedback climate sensitivity, whereas albedo changes associated with ice sheets are only included in longer-term climate sensitivity estimates (which is termed "Earth System Sensitivity").
There are technical definitions, I think a reasonable summary would be:
TCR, transient climate response, what temperature we can expect instantaneously as CO2 increases
ECS, equilibrium climate sensitivity, what temperature we could expect a couple of hundred years after an instantaneous doubling then holding constant of CO2
ESS, earth system sensitivity, what temperature we could expect a few millennia after doubling then holding constant CO2
http://www.skepticalscience.com/hansen-and-sato-2012-climate-sensitivity.html
As I recall, Lewis and Curry estimated TCR, nothing wrong with that. A fairly simple model can extrapolate that to ECS, with assumptions.
Frighteningly, the consensus numbers (caution: from my dodgy memory) are something like
TCR=2C/doubling
ECS=3C/doubling
ESS=6C/doubling.
VTG
DeleteOK, points taken. But color me very uncomfortable using the word "equilibrium" for something described vaguely as a "couple of hundred years" ahead (not to question what you said; I mean in general). "Equilibrium" would make more sense attached to Earth System Sensitivity IYAM.
I also have to take issue with the SKS statement:
"Ice sheets can take centuries to millennia to melt or form..."
No, ice sheets (probably) take centuries to melt & millennia to form. A generally warming & a generally cooling climate are different things. Ice sheet break-up is rapid (geologically), wet & chaotic, & is not yet well-modeled.
Your ratio of TCR to CS is 1:1.5 (approximately in line with others); Lewis & Curry give smaller ratios, on the order of 1:1.2 (although, to be fair, their uncertainty ranges include 1:1.5). That's only one of the things that make me uncomfortable with their method.
Oops, I should have said "colour" (trying to use the Commonwealth spellings here...).
DeleteIDK if this paper has been posted here before, but it's from last month, by Knutti & Rugenstein, about how λ (lambda if it doesn't post right, the feedback parameter) varies with temperature & time. Linear methods like Lewis & Curry's don't account for changing λ.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2054/20150146
Given the marked warming we've had since 2011, would the Lewis & Curry results be different if those years were included (making their range 1995-2015) (closer in duration to their baseline period, 1859-1882)? If so, then their method is suspect, because 4 years additional data shouldn't change CS.
I just had a "skeptic" spend most of the end of last week trying to convince me that Curry and her blog were useful in terms of climate science. When I disagreed, it was suggested to me that I had been told what to think and didn't really understand her blog.
ReplyDeleteI spent a couple of years commenting at Climate Etc, and every day there was a commenter named The Chief Hydrologist who would proclaim the virtues of A.A. Tsonis, who happens to be a big proponent of the chaotic nature of climate and of the difficulty in modeling it. The uncertainty model as a theoretical construct. That was essentially an example of propaganda being drilled into the heads of Curry's readers day after day. Impossible to counteract that kind of persistence.
DeleteHotWHopper might benefit from a monthly open discussion thread, since most of the comment text has zero relevance to the topic of the post, sigh.
ReplyDeleteSo a curry recipe is what is wanted? Has relevance but no spice. I am still shaking my head at Bose Einstein Condensates having any link with atmospheric phenomena. We all know that these BEC's only occur near to the quantum ground state. Bert
DeleteSorry about that John (and everyone). I'm on the road all day today, so not as easily able to moderate comments.
Deletewhut's first comment was not off topic. The thread was hijacked by others.
DeleteBose-Einstein Condensates? Next we'll be hearing about spin-ice accumulation in Antarctica.
DeleteCareful there. We are not supposed to laugh at Judith Curry for invoking Bose-Einstein statistics when describing atmospheric physics.
DeleteNote that elsewhere in the comments, Marco warns that it is a sign of a crank when "You .. seem to have a personal investment in wanting to show ____ wrong"
Sorry, but Curry, Lindzen, and Spencer ain't no Einsteins.
Hopefully on topic, Curry's irony knob goes to 11.
ReplyDeleteContext: An underwater volcanology proponent is promoted on climate etc decrying environmentalists for following ideology, not science. A typical crank (see earlier posts above) he just can't understand why journals won't touch him with a bargepole.
JC comment
These words of wisdom are beautifully and simply stated. And they provide a good context for the forthcoming Paris negotiations, whose foundation at this point is green ideology and not science..
http://judithcurry.com/2015/11/24/environmentalism-versus-science
I'm a fan of these intellectually curious guys such as Vaughan Pratt of Stanford. It sounds as if he has something cooked up for the AGU meeting on this topic as well.
Deletehttp://judithcurry.com/2015/11/22/a-buoy-only-sea-surface-temperature-record/#comment-745750
However,, his AGU poster does not hint of any of this.
There is still room for being intellectually curious about things. Its really about knowing where to draw the line and guessing who has the political or financial agenda that clouds whatever science they are pushing.
Vaughan is genuinely curious, whereas Curry has an ideology as does this Reid character.
Both Vaughan and I were involved in DARPA-sponsored scientific grand challenges a few years ago. That was accepting of all sorts of new ideas. It really is a different mindset.
It's kind of nice that the average IQ of APS members, and the average IQ of acknowledged climate deniers, have both increased simultaneously.
ReplyDeleteOo, snap!
DeleteDid anyone else see this magnificent David Rose/Judith Curry twofer in The Spectator. Poor old Judith:
ReplyDeletehttp://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/i-was-tossed-out-of-the-tribe-climate-scientist-judith-curry-interviewed/
That was a thing beauty.
DeleteThis is for Dr Curry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAryFIuRxmQ
Saw that ‘I was tossed out of the tribe’ Curry interview.
DeleteI wanted to add that the skeptics that are mad to disprove AGW via numerology have no interest in the actual science. They tend to look for time scales over the span of 100's or 1000's of years, yet anything concerning variability on the scale of a couple of years -- absolutely no interest. That doesn't help their agenda, which they share with Curry. So by pushing the Uncertainty Monster to long time scales they can continue to sow FUD
"Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none, ..."
DeleteOKayyyy. Does not quite match the view discussed here about her publishing history. I do not think I quite buy the idea that there is not one climate scientist with a slightly better track record.