Friday, November 27, 2015

Turned not tossed - Judith Curry denier martyr with David Rose

Tabloid writer David Rose has written another puff piece on Judith Curry. Judith used to be a scientist who dabbled in climate stuff, until she gave it away to write a blog for science deniers. David Rose was never what you'd call a journalist. He's a hack writer for a tabloid in the UK. His article this time didn't even make the grade for the Mail. This time he was relegated to a magazine called The Spectator, which if you're like me and have never heard of it, is described in Wikipedia as "a weekly British conservative magazine. It was first published on 6 July 1828,[2] making it the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language." For a few years Nigel Lawson was editor. Nigel now heads up the denier lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which, as its name suggests, agitates for more global warming. So science denial articles in The Spectator shouldn't surprise anyone.

Second to none or second rate?


David Rose's article, as usual, is spattered with untruths. For example he told some big fibs about Judith:
Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none, and in America she has become a public intellectual. 
Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is arguably a long way behind that of leading climate scientists.  She has written some decent papers I'm told, in the past. She's not produced much in the last decade except as co-author, but she was lead author on more in the 1990s.

Judith is definitely not considered a public intellectual. She does blog a lot of pseudo-metaphysical babble that probably sounds "intellectual" to someone like David Rose.



What solid data? Judith doesn't use data for her denial


David didn't stop there with his Judith-spin. He decided to embroider a lot more, and wrote:
What is troubling about her pariah status is that her trenchant critique of the supposed consensus on global warming is not derived from warped ideology, let alone funding by fossil-fuel firms, but from solid data and analysis.
Nope. That's not right either. Judith doesn't use data and analysis to spread her brand of denial. I doubt she's capable. What she does instead is what many science disinformers do - she posts dumb denier articles by other people, and when she does comment, she insinuates that scientists don't know nuffin' or that scientists are committing fraud. She rarely provides any answers. To do so would turn off her readers, who are almost all science deniers.


Judith Curry's silent group of supporters!


David Rose quoted Judith as saying, boldly and wrongly:
Inside the climate community there are a lot of people who don’t like what I’m doing. On the other hand, there is also a large, silent group who do like it. 
It's easy to say there's a large silent group who are fans of Judith's brand of disinformation. Who's going to prove her wrong? All she has to say is that they are "silent". Now that's bordering on conspiracy ideation isn't it. These silent types are wimps. They are too afraid to speak out in defense of Judith. Her fans aren't silent though, are they. It's just that they aren't scientists - they probably consider themselves a slighly up-market version of Anthony Watts' rabble at WUWT. Not as mathsy as Steve McIntyre's denier fans liked to regard themselves. (I don't know if anyone is still reading Steve McIntyre's waffle.) These days, however, there's little difference between the sort of comments you read on Judith Curry's blog and the dumb comments you read at WUWT. Judith's blog is sliding further and further down the denial hill.


How Judith fails arithmetic


Oh, that's not all. Judith is boasting about how financier Nic Lewis got her to add her name to a paper he wrote. As David Rose put it:
Curry told me. ‘Even if the sensitivity is 2.5˚C, not 3˚C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that’s 2˚C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5˚C makes it much less likely we will see 2˚C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’

Curry added that her own work, conducted with the British independent scientist Nic Lewis, suggests that the sensitivity value may still lower, in which case the date when the world would be 2˚C warmer would be even further into the future. On the other hand, the inherent uncertainties of climate projection mean that values of 4˚C cannot be ruled out — but if that turns out to be the case, then the measures discussed at Paris and all the previous 20 UN climate conferences would be futile. 
Judith obviously doesn't know how quickly CO2 is increasing. If doubling of CO2 leads to a 2.5˚C rise in surface temperature, then not reducing emissions means the temperature could rise by 3˚C or more before the end of this century.

And what about the lose-lose position she's advocating. According to Judith, if doubling of CO2 leads to a 4˚C, which could mean a 6˚C rise by the end of this century, then "it's futile" to do anything to avoid it. If a doubling of CO2 leads to a 2.5˚C rise in surface temperature then there's no rush, according to Judith. She's wrong.

Climate Interactive has done some calculations to see what may happen over the coming century, with no action, nothing more than the current pledges, the Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions (INDCs), and what's required to stay below 2˚C:

Source: Climate Interactive

The chart below shows the basis for the estimates in terms of CO2 concentration vs temperature.

Source: Climate Interactive

As you can see from the above, the assumption is that a doubling of CO2 will lead to a temperature rise of around 2.6 ˚C, not much more than Judith's 2.5˚C. If no action is taken, which Judith Curry advocates, then she may well live to see a rise in temperature of more than 2 ˚C before 2050. It's already risen by 1˚C, and the CO2 isn't going to come out of the air any time soon. Instead it's accumulating. I don't know how that will affect Atlanta Georgia, but she'll be wise to restrict her trips to Australia to the winter months.


Natural variation is not neglected


I don't know what Judith's been smoking, but David Rose reckons she thinks that scientists have "neglected" studying climate - or as he put it:
Meanwhile, the obsessive focus on CO2 as the driver of climate change means other research on natural climate variability is being neglected. For example, solar experts believe we could be heading towards a ‘grand solar minimum’ — a reduction in solar output (and, ergo, a period of global cooling) similar to that which once saw ice fairs on the Thames. ‘The work to establish the solar-climate connection is lagging.’

I think that David Rose and Judith might be talking about Force X and the notch - what do you think?


Tossing and turning. What research does Judith Curry want to do?


There's more. Judith is claiming she can't get any funds to do the research she wants to do. This is the first I've heard her complain about that? Does anyone know what research she has set her heart on doing that she hasn't been able to get funds for? Here is what David Rose wrote:
Curry’s independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 ‘Climategate’ scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. ‘I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There’s no way I would have done this if I hadn’t been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I’d be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there’s no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I’ve stopped judging my career by these metrics. I’m doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing.’ 
Tossed out of the tribe? What tribe is that, and who did the tossing?  Judith was the one belittling science and scientists. Then she became a full blown science denier. Also, if she thinks that science is made up of "tribes" then that's just another sign that she's lost all touch with how science works. Talking about tribes is denier-speak through and through.

Judith has not, to my knowledge, published anything that flat out disputes science in the scientific literature. She did dabble in pattern recognition and had a shot at writing about uncertainty. Both of those were pretty awful papers. She saves her rejection of science for blogs and US government hearings - and quotes for David Rose. She pretty well gave up doing science quite some time ago now, and I doubt it's for lack of funds.


Judith Curry the martyr denier


There was one odd reference in the closing paragraph of David Rose's article, which some might think refers to Lamar Smith's witch-hunt. That would be a mistake. Judith is all in favour of witch hunts, unless she happens to be the witch being hunted. David Rose wrote about Judith:
She remains optimistic that science will recover its equilibrium, and that the quasi-McCarthyite tide will recede


PS Words of religious wisdom and "interesting essays" - Curry-style


As a post-script, this week Judith was promoting one of those denier nutters from my country, Australia. Well, not mainland Australia. From Tasmania, or Tassie as it's known down here. She published an article all about nothing which, in keeping with her "public intellectual" persona, Judith thought was a "gem", and "words of wisdom are beautifully and simply stated". It wasn't a gem. It was a load of codswallop about how climate science is "ideological".  The author, John Reid (who's been featured here once before), wrote in closing that:
My present paper on this topic, which explains global temperature changes as random fluctuations, has already been rejected twice by peer-reviewed journals. 
He ought to try one of journals on Beall's list if he wants to get his random paper published.

Here is the opening of what Judith regards as an "interesting essay" from John Reid:
In effect a new religion has grown out of secular humanism. Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytising the new faith.
And here is the opening from another "interesting essay" according to Judith Curry:
After surviving a storm-tossed voyage, King James I concluded that witches must have conjured tempests to do him ill because nothing ever happens by chance. In promoting the notion that climate trends are shaped by an industrialised world's CO2 emissions, warmists are in the same boat.

75 comments:

  1. The Very Reverend Jebediah HypotenuseNovember 27, 2015 at 3:15 AM

    I take strong exception to Rose's labelling of Dr Curry as a "heretic".

    She's an "oppressed-by-the-consenus pariah, still-optimistic, a-political, non-partisan, both-sides-evaluating, science-saving, advocating-for-Integrity(TM) intellectual, travesty-spotting, climate science heretic-heroine", which is much, much, much worse.

    It's all about the science. Identity politics has nothing to do with it.

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    1. That can't possibly be right.

      No mention of uncertainty monsters. Or flags.

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  2. The Spectator is quite right wing. It pays James Delingpole to drivel on its pages and once employed Mark Steyn too. It has a history of science denial, not just climate but HIV/AIDS as well.

    I loved the comment in response to someone asking why the main stream media was allowed to lie and misconstrue about climate change: "Don't know but Rose has been doing it for years."

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  3. "...natural climate variability is being neglected."

    Somebody should advise Judith, and David Rose, that all they have to do is load up a copy of the WG1AR5_ALL_FINAL.pdf the "IPCC Climate Change 2013 Physical Science Base", run a search on 'natural variability' and see what turns up.

    I feel a letter to the Independent Press Standards Organisation coming on as this Rose article appears to be blatant propaganda so far from the truth is it on so
    many counts.

    Judith 'Uncertainty' Curry continues her downward spiral into never never land. That is not 'slagging off' but a statement of obvious fact.

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  4. I've read the article. I've seen - to my utter distress - some fanfictions of the wrong kind. Rose's portrait of Judith Curry looked a disturbingly lot like these.

    But I'm curious about her grant allegations. Given how hard it had become to get a grant nowadays, I wonder if her grants didn't pass only because of bad luck. Happens to lot of people, even "high priests of the new CAGWWAAGTH*" like Mann.
    Or I may be cynical and consider that it is easy not to get a grant when you don't submit one ... Any way to check that ? In France it's next to impossible, but in the US ?

    (* sounds like a Ork battlecry)

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    1. You mean like her "silent group of supporters" claim? I wouldn't be surprised one bit.

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    2. I wonder if it's occurred to Curry that she couldn't get a grant because she couldn't write an application that would show that she's competent and has a good idea. Grants are very hard to get these days, and unless you've got a cracking good idea, and given the quality of her public utterances I'd think Curry's proposals would be likely to be laughed out of the room.

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    3. To be fair, nowadays even if you have a cracking good idea and a brilliant consortium you may well not be able to get a grant - for instance, NIH acceptance rate is below 10%, as is the french NSF equivalent. You have to submit 10 projets to get one.

      Even if it may appear implausible to some people, Curry may have had a good grant proposal (with who ? that raises another set of questions), and this grand may have been refused. Because of "political motives" as she alleges, or simply she was unlucky because of the sheer amount of equivalently good grant proposals submitted. Or maybe her proposals were rightly sent to the trashcan because they were subpar. Or maybe she didn't bother, as money coming from lobbies is easier to get.

      She plays her not so subtle tune "I'm ostracized by the Team" that her followers like, but she has showed no proof.
      Maybe I should ask her about her proposals. See what kind of smokescreen she would set up.

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    4. As I noted on another thread a few days ago, Curry's first-authorship on papers since 2000 has been rather thin on the ground if her climate change uncertainty viewpoint is excluded. She has no more than half a dozen from the early 2000s, about half of which are more descriptive of projects than anything else, and after than her uncertainty/denial thrust really starts up around 2011 - a good five years after the rest of her first-authorship work peters out.

      This would strongly suggest that her difficulty in garnering grants predated the commencement of her bangings on the denialist drum. By quite a few years in fact, if her pattern of publication is any indication. Of course a more in-depth analysis of her bibliography would be needed to be sure, but if first-authorships were cross-checked with corresponding authors and funding details I'm sure the implicated pause in her grant success (or otherwise) and its root cause could be confirmed.

      (Later...)

      I've just collated Curry's annual total publication output and her first-authorship output. Veeery interesting... I'll post a graph tomorrow and talk more about her publication history, as I'm too tired now. The short of it though is that her output decline, and likely her waning grant application success, started years before she had a reputation for denialism...

      Stay tuned.

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    5. So, about Judith Curry's publication history and what it might imply about her claims of funding discrimination...

      I've had a bit of a poke around Scopus and SciVal and although I haven't been able to put in the time that I might for researchers and collaborators at my institution, a first pass comes up with some interesting results.

      It will probably help those reading this to refer to this graphic:

      http://postimg.org/image/tw4pp11mh/

      It shows the total number of publications (excluding editorials and letters) logged by Scopus for each year since Curry has commenced publication.  It also shows her annual number of first-authored publications, and the field-weighted citation impact as determined by SciVal (an Elsevier product) over the period it covers.  The FWCI is a comparison of the number of citations a publication garners compared to the global average for that discipline of research, with a value of 1.00 being world average, a value of 2.00 being 100% more than world average, etc.  I've also included indications of when she started at each of the institutions where she's worked since she finished her PhD.

      Curry's publication history starts in 1983 with the publication of a paper - On the formation of continental polar air (Arctic) - resulting from her PhD thesis, and which came out a year after she finished her PhD.  For the next six years (1984-1990) she published on stratus clouds, which seems to be the result of her work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Assistant Scientist, Department of Meteorology,) and at Purdue University (Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, 1986-89).  She averaged just under one and a half papers per year during this time, of which she averaged just over one paper per year as first author.

      In 1989 she started as an Associate Professor in the Department of Meteorology at Penn State.  It's here that she seems to start to make collaboration connections, and her publication output increased slightly in 1990 to 3 papers, and to 5 in 1991 - of which she first-authored two.  Her focus at this time seems to be clouds and ice.

      In 1992 she moved to a Professorship in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and by 1993 she's publishing in the hurricane field, but not as first author.  Her move to UBC obviously increases her capacity for collaboration as her publication hit rate takes a significant hike (up to just over 8 publications per year) but of note is that her first authorship rate remains exactly where it was immediately following the end of her PhD - below 1.5 publications per year (1.4 to be more precise...).

      In 2002 she took up her current position as the Chair in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology.  This gave her a bit of wind under the wings of her publication output and from 2003 to 2006 she averaged 9.75 publications per year, although her first-authored count dropped to 0.75 publications per year.

      2006 was the year that she co-authored (as 4th author) the paper Deconvolution of the factors contributing to the increase in global hurricane intensity  (Science 312 (5770) 94-97).  It's probably easiest to let the paper speak for itself, from the abstract:

      "The results show that the trend of increasing numbers of category 4 and 5 hurricanes for the period 1970-2004 is directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature; other aspects of the tropical environment, although they influence shorter-term variations in hurricane intensity, do not contribute substantially to the observed global trend."

      (Part II follows)

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    6. Also in 2006 she published, this time as first author, Mixing politics and science in testing the hypothesis that greenhouse warming is causing a global increase in hurricane intensity (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 87 (8) 1025-1037) in response to Trenberth's 2005 commentary (Science 308 (5729) 1753-1754) raising the issue as to whether the increase in North Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995 could be attributed to global warming.  This paper is not actually a data paper, but an opinion/argument piece that includes a half-page paraphrasing of Wikipedia on logical fallacies.  It seems to arise from her previous work on uncertainty in measurements of heat flux and so forth, and it comes at the very end of the high (collaboration) publication rate that she was sailing on from her time at UBC and her start at GIT.  Rather than putting my own slant on the paper I will let it speak for itself, from the conclusion:

      "The focus of this paper has been the scientific debate surrounding hurricanes and global warming, and the influence of the media and the World Wide Web on this debate and on the scientific process itself. Because of the high relevance of this topic, particularly in light of the North Atlantic hurricane activity in 2005, the intense media attention associated with the politicization of this issue has resulted in public confusion. A case study was presented of the recent experiences of the authors of WHCC, highlighting that even senior scientists are ill prepared for their first major experience with mixing politics, science, and the media. We hope that this chronicle of our experiences will help others navigate this minefield, and will help our community become more effective in educating the public and informing policy.

      We presented an analysis of the scientific issues surrounding the Emanuel (2005) and WHCC papers in a manner designed to identify the most important critiques and focus the scientific debate. We formulated the central hypothesis that greenhouse warming is causing an increase in hurricane intensity as a causal chain consisting of three subhypotheses that are individually and collectively more easily evaluated than the central hypothesis. Assessing each of these subhypotheses against logically valid critiques has clarified the support for the hypotheses and the outstanding uncertainties. Progress on this topic requires multidisciplinary collaboration that includes hurricane researchers and forecasters, climate researchers and modelers, and oceanographers to address this complex scientific problem.
      "

      At this point it's probably worth noting that her field-weighted citation index, which was averaging just under 2.2 by 2002 (mostly through her UCB collaborators' effects, remember) had dropped to 1.1.  This, together with the nascent pattern of both her annual collaboration publication output and her own first-author publication output suggest that innovation/leadership work was not high on Curry's agenda.  And this is in 2006, remember...

      For four years from 2007 Curry produced no first-authored papers, but her UBC/GIT collaborators were following up with work that gave her a boost in her tally, but not to the glory days of her start at GIT.

      Of course, during this time she was starting to appear on the intertubes with her honest broker slant and a promotion of her uncertainty meme, and by 2010 she obviously knew something about what was happening in the background of her academic work and decided to do something about her flagging personal publication output.  And thus in 2011 she penned Reasoning about climate uncertainty (note/essay, not a paper), Nullifying the climate null hypothesis (review/essay not a paper), and Climate science and the uncertainty monster (note/essay not a paper).  The first two were sole-authored (the lowest-impact category of papers as SciVal and indeed the literature can attest), and the Uncertainty Monster had PJ Webster as 2nd author.

      (Part III follows)

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    7. Looking at her field-weighted citation index for 2011 one might think that her breaking into denialism was the cause for an uptick in her citation rate, but in fact the 2011 results waere lifted by collaboration papers, and the 20012 upsurge in FWCI/publication output comes almost entirely from her collborators on Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall and Seasonal prediction skill of ECMWF System 4 and NCEP CFSv2 retrospective forecast for the Northern Hemisphere Winter: neither were first-authored by Curry.

      From 2012 to present it's been all downhill for Curry on the publication front.

      Now it's important to note, as I did a few days ago, that there are legitimate reasons for an academic to not have a significant publication output.  However when such occurs it's usually because they are not producing much in the way of innovative science, and Curry's record definitively shows that her output was never innovative of her own accord, and was beginning to decline both in collaboration terms and in her own capacity to first-author papers from around 2006.  Coincidentally this is when she started with the uncertainty/political memes...

      Did she know that her research capacity was waning, and that "scepticism"/denialism would raise her profile (at least in the public sphere*)?  Who knows?  What is absolutely apparent to anyone who works in academia though is that Curry has had an output issue long before any putative conspiracy to deprive her of grant funding.  Certainly her first-authorship never significantly rose above that established as a newly graduated PhD, and in the second half of her career it fell even below this modest level.  If she has funding issues she should look at her research performance before blaming the science profession.

      Funding which, by the way, is not absent according to her CV.  She currently lists six grants, although they all look to be from the work on which she appeared as an author ten or more years ago, so these grants may be old/ongoing.  Either way, any lack of new funding is certainly more due to her research performance over the entirety of her career than from any plot to oust her from the inner circle of science.

      And for comparison, here's her publication output with the 2011-period non-research papers removed:


      http://postimg.org/image/mu6s2ty0p/


      I'll leave further conclusions to the reader.


      (*As her first-authored FWCI attests, her personal stuff has far less impact.  If I have the time I'll do a SciVal breakdown of this too - if I appear to forget please remind me!)

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    8. Bernard - very good work and you've explained it very clearly. That puts things into perspective. It seems to hit on the head any notion that her research output flagged this past fifteen years because of her management role. (That's how someone justified it to me a while back, when I commented that her first paper authorship was very low this past several years.) Maybe for most of her career she's been been focusing on teaching rather than research, or these days, her consultancy business, the speaking circuit and blogging.

      It also goes part way to explaining why she seems to be so ignorant about climate science. I wonder does she teach it and if so, what she teaches.

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    10. Two points come to mind Sou that I was going to include in the previous postings.

      First, there is usually a lag of a few years between the time of conduct of research and it's subsequent publication, so most the research reported in Curry's paper was likely conducted a year or two earlier than the papers' publication dates. At least.

      Second, some of the heads of department/chairs in the institution where I work still produce several dozen papers per year, even after twenty years or more of senior administration, and they still manage at least half a dozen first-author papers annually. Curry's output would probably not meet the performance expectations here unless she was raking in buckets of new funding and/or graduating a caravan of PhDs: the standards may of course be different elsewhere.

      And of course she may have many non-research duties (which is fair enough), but if so people should be very careful about ascribing pre-eminent climate science expertise to her, when she is patently not participating to any serious degree in her own field, let alone in those of the other disciplines of climate change in which she so merrily offers contrary opinions.

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    11. Agree Bernard. I was comparing Judith's paltry output with that of people in equivalent positions here in Australia (and in the USA), which is generally quite a bit higher. There is a lot of pressure to publish here in Australia, particularly if one aspires to head of department or more particularly a Chair. I think Deans of Faculties are given a bit of grace, while they are Dean - but not Professorial Chairs.

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    12. The Very Reverend Jebediah HypotenuseDecember 1, 2015 at 5:14 AM

      OK - Curry's scientific publication record may not be stellar.

      But remember that while she was busy not publishing much science, she's become an expert in all of the following:
      history of science,
      epistemology,
      decision theory,
      ethics,
      policy formulation,
      stealth advocacy,
      consensus-deconstruction,
      freedom of speech,
      politicization,
      righteous indignation,
      and,
      expertise itself.

      As the world heads to Paris, everyone needs some of what Curry is selling. Step right up.



      Delete
    13. Reverend, to that list one can add Curry's expertise in uncertainty. That is a product which she offers with much relish...

      Delete
  5. I do not think that they refer to Lamar Smith at all when talking about McCartyism. Quite the opposite I'd suspect..

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  6. I'm one of the few regulars at Climate Etc. who talks about natural variation. Since the PDO betrayed them, and the AMO keeps drifting close to peak, they don't seem interested in talking bout it.

    How many stadium wave papers should the United States of America pay to publish?

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    1. Should read the latest Lindzen in the BigIssue London street mag "Why the climate hysteria?" from a couple of days ago.

      "There is experimental support for the increased importance of variations in solar radiation on climate and a renewed awareness of the importance of natural unforced climate variability (associated with long period circulations of the ocean that exchange heat between the surface and the deep), which are largely absent in current climate models. There is observational evidence from several independent studies that ‘water vapour feedback’, essential to amplifying the relatively weak impact of carbon dioxide alone on Earth temperatures, is cancelled by cloud processes."

      The problem with Lindzen is that he can not admit there is any determinancy in processes such as QBO and ENSO. It is possible that he actually thwarted those who suggested that QBO could be driven with deterministic outcomes. The minute that predictability enters the picture, the uncertainty monster is diminished, and that is no good for Lindzen or Curry. Its plausible that that's why they are making a mess of the science. They don't care as long as they can advance their politics or their consulting paycheck.

      Watch Lindzen over the years and you can also see he has the ego of someone that is desperate to be proven correct. He is still holding onto his iris cloud theory, even though that has been completely debunked from what I can tell.

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  7. Judith needs to knit a new Nic Lewis.

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  8. David Rose writes (my emphasis):

    Curry told me. ‘Even if the sensitivity is 2.5˚C, not 3˚C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that’s 2˚C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5˚C makes it much less likely we will see 2˚C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’

    Bernard J and others have pointed out before that this is painfully disingenuous. Pretending that the warming will stop - as if by magic - at 2100 is a particularly cheap rhetorical trick.

    However, *if* equilibrium sensitivity is ~2.5C per doubling of CO2, then yes, we might see a transient warming of ~1.6C when we hit 560ppm later in the century and perhaps only just 2C by century's end. But the warming will continue into the C22nd, and with it, consequences.

    There's also the implicit assumption that total emissions will magically stop at or even below ~560ppm without policy intervention. More disingenuous rhetoric.


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    1. There is so much wrong with what Judith said, even in that short segment. Every time one reads it there's something new. You've picked out more.

      There's also her "fixed target" and if people question it they are slagged off as a denier. Er what? Is James Hansen a denier now? What about Bill McKibben? Does Judith think they are both "slagged off" as deniers?

      She could even be trying to argue that four degrees of warming in a miniscule amount of time will be harmless.

      She spouts so much nonsense it's impossible to know just what swirls around in that head of hers - if anything. (I think her head is empty, and there's nothing swirling around. Her words pop out at random, like buzz phrases from the denier handbook.).

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  9. Curry: "I've been tossed out"

    Sou: "No, you haven't, you ignorant good-for-nothing liar".

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    1. Curry was only briefly in before she chose the timing and manner of her departure. She has as much scientific cred as... well, you Richard.

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    3. Cook: "There's a consensus on climate science"

      Tol#1: "No there isn't you fraudulent ignorant lying scumbag"

      Tol#2 :“There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.”

      #Freethetol300

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    4. Did Sou say this:

      "No, you haven't, you ignorant good-for-nothing liar".

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    5. JCH, no, those aren't my words, that was just Richard doing a Richard. (He thought it so nice, he said it twice.)

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    6. It's hard to imagine a college professor would be stupid enough to do that.

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    7. I'd reverse that. It's hard for many people to imagine that someone who says the sorts of things that Richard Tol says could hold down a job as a college professor. But that's only if you're not familiar with what goes on in universities (the petty politics etc). There are some very, shall we say, eccentric individuals who hold academic posts, even in some of the leading institutions.

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    8. Never mind the quality, feel the tenure!

      Delete
    9. Richard's comment might explain a great deal. I'm assuming he's implying that criticising what someone has said is somehow equivalent to throwing them out of your tribe. Maybe this is why he seems reluctant to criticise Matt Ridley whenever he incorrectly quotes Richard's now corrected meta analysis?

      Delete
    10. Can anyone play this fun new Richard Tol game?

      Curry: "I've been tossed out"

      Sou: No, you jumped off.

      Delete
    11. Sorry, Dickie. In English there's a difference between being a tosser and being tossed off....

      Glad to help

      R the Anon.

      Delete
    12. Richard Tol, seeking to perfect the drive-by strawman...

      Delete
    13. Ooh. I think bill has Tol pretty well pegged there.

      Delete
    14. Richard S J Tol: "I'm a grossly dishonest ahole."

      Tol should patent his super powerful form of quote marks that, unlike the orginal kind, aren't restricted to being placed around things that people actually said.

      Delete
  10. She set a pattern in April 2010 at Collide-a-Scape, when she injected Wegman into discussion, got pushed back, twice allied Deep Climate "reprehensiblel" for allegations of plagiarism in the Wegman Report. (of course, copy-paste-edit plagiarism is one of the easiest things to assess). She made some factually false statements.

    After more pushback, she more or less admitted that she hadn't sudied the issue, and blames others for pulling her into talkng about Wegman, and ruled the topic out of further discussion. There was no apology or retraction of "reprehensible" I could find, although I will; happily look at them if someone knows of such.

    This was not a good start.

    Likewise, happily accepting a certain T-shirt would not have made friends.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Rejected after reading the first sentence, no doubt.

    ReplyDelete
  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Because there's always a large silent group of scientists sitting back, not publishing, and allowing themselves to be sidelined and made irrelevant by those who publish and aren't silent, right? They're not really interested in proving their interpretations of the data at all. Give me time and I'm sure I'll come up with an example. Right now all I can think of are the numerous acrimonious and furious debates/arguments that litter the history of science (e.g. the origin of birds).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh, those pretend debates only carry on until the order to close ranks and present a united front goes out from the Chief Scientist. All fall into line since they know what side their consensus bread is buttered on and won't risk losing their luxurious high-flying grant-funded lifestyles. (rolls eyes)

      You have to wonder how many of these denialists have ever actually met a scientist... yet some of them even spend time on their pet theories of how science *should* be conducted.

      Delete
    2. Nice kitties.

      I once heard a researcher describing his research division as a great bunch of people but he hoped he was never in a lifeboat trying to get them all row in the same direction.

      One had to suspect that the closest most deniers have come to a scientist is a high school science teacher who was deliberately dumbing things down for them. It seems to make them think there is an answer.

      Delete
    3. Of course there's an answer.
      And supposedly, 97% of scientists agree on it.

      It all on it whether it is the correct one.

      Delete
    4. Somehow resonates with the claim that science has to produce "proofs" that some of them had (still have?), and their astonishment when Michael Mann clarified that the term is much more frequently used in mathematics and describing potency of alcoholic beverages..

      Delete
    5. 'It all on it whether...'? I think I know what you mean but I can't figure out what gave rise to that.

      The race is not always to the swift, nor correctness to the 99.9%, but that's the way to bet. I sometimes wonder just how many credentialed skeppos there are--people who deny AGW but have some believable claim to climate expertise (relevant education or publications in refereed journals)? Christy, Curry, Lindzen, Michaels, the Pielkes, and Spencer, say, but not economists like Lomborg or professional liars like Singer. I would guess maybe a couple dozen.

      Delete
    6. Of course there's an answer.
      And supposedly, 97% of scientists agree on it.

      It all depends on it whether it is the correct one.

      Delete
    7. ..the claim that science has to produce "proofs" ...

      No proof needed in this case. Apparently we already understand it well enough that it's all sorted.

      Delete
    8. Marke 1138: Ah, I did understand what you meant. Still got an extra 'it' in there, tsk tsk. :-) Also, 'supposedly', my ass.

      1141: We understand AGW well enough that its existence is proven beyond reasonable doubt. It's not all sorted--the climate sensitivity, for example, isn't known for certain even within a factor of 2--but it certainly exists. But if you say 'Prove to me that AGW is real while I stand on one foot', no, that kind of proof is neither possible nor necessary. AGW is proven by an immense consilience of inductions and observations, some (like the fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas) going back to the early nineteenth century. Melting glaciers, paleoclimate and the 'hockey stick', measurements of radiation from the earth, on and on. When a skeppo demands one article 'proving' global warming, they should be pointed to a Wikipedia article, and when they say that's not enough, they should be pointed to any of a number of books that lay out all the evidence, and when they say that's too much to read and anyway the author is a liar, they should be relegated to the trash along with Wilbur Voliva, who in the 1920s and 1930s offered $5000 for anyone who could prove to him that the earth wasn't flat. (Nobody could ever collect, of course.)

      Delete
    9. Thanks Phil.
      It's nice to know that climate change is all sorted.

      Pity about that flat earth and the $5000. Even in the days of Columbus, and well before, they understood that they could observe the shape of the earth by viewing its shadow on the moon. There is not much better proof than direct observation.

      Voyagers refers to a lunar eclipse which Columbus observed while marooned on the island of Jamaica at Santa Gloria Bay (today's Saint Ann's Bay). The eclipse occurred on Leap Day, February 29, 1504. Ten years prior, on September 15, 1494, Columbus had seen another lunar eclipse from the Dominican Republic. Columbus probably consulted an astronomical almanac such as the Calendarium of Regiomontanus ....


      http://aerospace.wcc.hawaii.edu/Curriculum_Voyagers/shadows.html

      Delete
    10. Nonsense marke it is just the shadow of the turtles shell! Bert

      Delete
    11. marke is one of those annoying chaps who reverses what another person writes to suit his own agenda, as you can see from his latest remark. (He doesn't just put words into another's mouth, he says they wrote the opposite to what they did write.) I suspect he thinks it makes him appear to be cleverer than he seems to be, much in the way the class clown craves attention. (He's wrong.)

      Marke is best ignored as a run of the mill, rather slow on the uptake, denier who pretends at times that he doesn't reject science - but mostly does.

      Delete
    12. "... it makes him appear to be cleverer than he seems to be ..."

      That would not take much.

      " ... is best ignored ..."

      I know. I know. But he is such a hoot.

      Delete
    13. The point is, it's either 'sorted', or open to debate.

      Delete
    14. Here you go marke

      https://www.google.com/search?q=turtle+world&lr=&as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJwZKXsbfJAhWDIqYKHe8UCkgQsAQILg&biw=1531&bih=954

      I lean to the Elephant version as it can explain earthquakes. Bert

      Delete
    15. Don't play dumb marke. Read Philip Cohen's comment again. The one that you lied about.

      You're as bad as the worst of the WUWT crowd who say that if something is known to have some uncertainty (quantified or not) then nothing at all is known. It's a logical fallacy.

      Delete
    16. ... AGW is proven by an immense consilience of inductions and observations,....

      Seems a strong enough statement to qualify for the "all sorted" stamp.

      No doubt there are still a few peripheral issues such as climate sensitivity to iron out, as Phil mentions. But, from the viewpoint expressed in this site, there is apparently nothing that should impinge upon the serious business of decision making.

      Delete
    17. @marke
      "Seems a strong enough statement to qualify for the "all sorted" stamp."

      No it does not. "All sorted" does not mean "all established". What is that style of argument? Something like logical fallacy strawman?


      Delete
    18. In your terms, all I was trying to say was that the existence of AGW is 'all sorted'. But if you want to go beyond that, I'd say it's 'all sorted' that the probability of AGW-influenced local disaster is 100.00% (California, Syria), the probability of AGW-influenced worldwide disaster if we don't take strong action fast (or draconic measures later) is > 99%, and the probability of AGW-influenced worldwide catastrophe in the next fifty years if we don't take strong action fast is hard to say, but my guess would be > 50%. It's a recipe for ruin to assume, like Ridley and suchlike scum, that every uncertainty will end up in our favor. If we insisted on certainty in our decisions, rather than rational risk assessment, nobody would buy insurance.

      Delete
    19. Syria?

      Population quadrupled in 25 years.
      Huge hikes in the taxes on diesel limited pumping of underground water.
      A rainfall deficit of 7%/ year over some parts of the country over 3 years.

      And somehow this war is due to 'climate'?

      And you later might wonder how these 'proofs' sow doubt.

      Delete
    20. AGW-influenced ≠ due to.

      AGW-influenced = influenced by

      Drought = worst drought in the instrumental record, made 2 to 3 times more likely because of human-caused global warming.

      http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241 (2015 paper)

      http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059.1 (2014 paper)

      "In Syria, a devastating drought beginning in 2006 forced many farmers to abandon their fields and migrate to urban centers. There’s some evidence that the migration fueled the civil war there" - Read more (Smithsonian 2013)

      Delete
  14. if you consider the line second to none.... it could quite correct.
    Her recent contribution is less than zero.
    BtM

    ReplyDelete
  15. If Curry can't get government grants it occurs to me that she should try the Berkeley Earth route and solicit grants from private sources.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If she can't get grants, she should free-lance it like I do. She can get herself a machine learning program, feed it a load of climate data, and let it chomp away in the background. And do the 9-to-5 job in the foreground.

      On second thought, no.

      Delete
  16. Judith's sense of victimhood is second to none.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. From now on I'm referring to Dr Curry as 2ND20

      Delete
    2. :)

      It plays to the conspiratorial mindset of deniers. It's crude but not ineffective for her target audience (the tin foil hat wearers). Judith might not be very clever, but she's canny enough. She's seen how playing the martyr works for people like Anthony Watts.

      Delete
  17. If you really want to understand the Curry mindset, remember that she has a business on the side as a weather/tropical storm forecaster, with her former(?) husband Peter Webby. That is designed to make money and to make money you have to act like you have inside knowledge that others don't have. It also works to badmouth others and suggest that there is uncertainty.

    Put this in another context. I have been touting my QBO model because it works pretty good and it has lots of theoretical underpinnings. But sure enough, lots of Curry wannabees have been jumping out of the woodwork claiming that I am either plagiarizing their ideas or that they have something better. But of course for what they have, they refuse to divulge because of their claims of Intellectual Property rights. One knucklehead even said that what I am doing is ripping off Piers Corbyn's forecasting work. Yet, Corbyn also hides behind proprietay rights, so how would I know what Corbyn is doing?

    It really is amateur hour and a clown show on the other side of the fence. Curry, Corbyn, etc are all cut from the same cloth and they have their minions all wound up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you really want to understand the Curry mindset, remember that she has a business on the side as a weather/tropical storm forecaster, with her former(?) husband Peter Webby. That is designed to make money and to make money you have to act like you have inside knowledge that others don't have. It also works to badmouth others and suggest that there is uncertainty.

      Yep. It does seem a little bit shallow on the face of it, that this could explain Curry's behaviour for the past few years. But I believe that explains quite a lot. It's the elephant in the room. I've always thought that myself.

      Delete
  18. " the Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions (INDCs), and what's required to stay below 2˚C"

    Sou, be careful what you wish for --

    http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2015/11/wheels-on-fire-on-road-to-paris.html



    ReplyDelete
  19. And now from the Chinese (from He Jiankun, a professor at Tsinghua University who was a senior author of the new “Third National Climate Change Assessment Report” )

    “It’s precisely because of the uncertainties that we need controls,” Professor He said. “Without a goal, your future emissions might be even higher.”

    ReplyDelete
  20. Maybe this explains things a bit more clearly.

    http://climatecrocks.com/2015/12/02/anybody-want-to-go-to-a-hearing/#comments

    Fine company she keeps. Bert

    ReplyDelete

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