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Comments 54701 to 54750:

  1. CRU tampered with temperature data
    karl, regarding the effects of adjustments, see the Skeptical Science post Watts' New Paper - Analysis and Critique.
  2. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Leaving aside for a second the probability of one swimming into Lewandowsky's net, chimeras apparently do exist, presuming various anecdotes such as that related in the link are not all lies. To me the most interesting part of Tom's analysis lies in the case he constructs for the improbability of catching a sample of the relatively few very most strange fish swimming in the ocean. On the one hand, Tom shows mathematically how bizarre these creatures are, yet it seems it's not impossible to find examples without an absurd amount of effort. It's nonetheless a leap to say that a properly constructed survey instrument will bump into them as easily as a person steering a browser into particular places. Many confounding factors.
  3. Realistically What Might the Future Climate Look Like?
    Does the unexpectedly fast loss of cryosphere albedo mean IPCC AR4's temperature projections are too low?
  4. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    Your graph shows that we can certainly expect recovery to be just around the corner, Dana. It seems we can always count on a corner, though we'll probably soon have to begin restricting the seasonal coverage of the graph in order to find one. What's interesting about the ABSIA graphs and all the others recently behaving in similar hysterical fashion is indeed the superficial appearance of "recovery" from year to year. I suppose that's pretty much perfectly in keeping with what we've learned of diminishing volume. We can see the same behavior in mud puddles-- thick ice takes longer to vanish. Folks new to the topic and who are intrigued should be sure to pay a visit to Neven's Arctic Sea Ice Blog
  5. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Did you actually read Tom's response @108? May I suggest you do so again?
  6. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Tom, I see someone who is not an expert in a subject claiming a peer reviewed paper is wrong based on their back of the envelope calculation. We see this all the time at SkS. We normally rely on peer reviewed data to support arguments. You normally cite peer reviewed data to support your analysis. Here you cited your wife as agreeing with you. In this case you have cited no papers. You have provided no data to support your claim that the distribution should be a normal distribution. The sample size is small so it is difficult to calculate the normal curve, let alone count extremes. There are abundant papers counting conspiracy beliefs, why don't you cite one of them to support your claim that these outliers should be excluded? You have not drawn a line where you would include a response and when you would exclude a response. In my experience a line like that is impossible to agree on. In the end all the responses are counted. If you think the responses are gamed you discount the conclusions. Lewandowsky discusses this in the paper. If you can cite a paper that says results that appear gamed to the researcher should be excluded from the analysis I will consider your data. My understanding is that all responses are normally included. AIUI Lewandowsky's conclusion is that deniers often believe in conspiracy theories. What is so contraversial about that? You don't like his title.
    Moderator Response: [Dikran Marsupial] The first paragraph of this comment is verging on ad-hominem territory. The correctness of an argument does not depend the expertise of its source. The absence of a suitable reference does not mean that the argument is incorrect, just that you have to judge it on its intrinsic strength and Tom has been completely candid about that. Please keep the discussion more tightly focussed on the argument and not the individual making it.
  7. Record Arctic Sea Ice Melt to Levels Unseen in Millennia
    Astrofos@37....um, *intriguing* analysis. Have you had this published in a refereed journal? As a geologist, I find your conclusions--well, let's say--*fascinating.* I await to hear other learned voices, here, comment upon them, also: Assuming I read it correctly, you assert the melting of the Arctic to be more a function of the heat from the "Thermosphere," rather than heat absorbed by the oceans? As for the Mars reference...you do know Mars has no magnetic field, certainly nothing even remotely close to Earth's, right? Some peer-reviewed references to back up your conclusions would be appreciated.
    Moderator Response:

    [DB] Fixed typos per request.

    Fascinating? No. Merely interesting.

  8. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    Thanks doug. I'm no Arctic expert, but given the huge amount by which 2012 will shatter the previous record, and be well below the exponential trend line, I have to think there were some natural factors at play in this minimum that will likely lead to one of those 'recoveries' over the next year or two. I could certainly be wrong, but that would be my guess.
  9. Dikran Marsupial at 01:09 AM on 7 September 2012
    CRU tampered with temperature data
    karl there are many sources of known bias in the raw data, of which UHI is only one. The process of dealing with this is known as "homogenisation"; google scholar should provide references to papers discussing the issues involved. There is a particularly good review by Blair Trewin that you can find here, which would be an excellent place to start. n.b. I actually work at UEA so I am not going to comment on this one other than to give a pointer to the literature.
  10. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    And speaking of dynamic things, that's a very thought-provoking visualization you've created, Dana.
  11. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    Further to Chris and CB's remarks about what we might expect going forward, there's another startling graph at Neven's blog here, detailing the annual behavior of Arctic Basin sea ice area. Area is of course one of the less favored metrics of sea ice, but it's not the absolute numbers shown in that graph that are interesting but rather the dynamics year-on-year. When I look at ABSIA graph, I don't see an obvious reason why it would revert back to the previous mode of behavior. After 7 years of being "stuck" in an apparently new mode, what's going to change it back to the previous mode?
  12. CRU tampered with temperature data
    what bothers me is this: the raw temperature data from USHCN do not show a warming trend and only after adjustments, the trend appears. Is there a sensible explanation for that? I know of urban heat index, but that would adjust data in the other direction.
  13. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    michael sweet @104, the evidence that the two responses with the strongest support of conspiracy theories are outliers cannot be found in any academic book or paper, but only in Lewandowsky's data. Analysing that data shows them to be 6.49 and 6.28 standard deviations greater than the mean value for responses to the conspiracy theory questions (excluding that regarding climate change). If this were a normal distribution, that would mean they have probabilities of occurring in a single trial of 1 in a billion, and 1 in ten billion respectively. This is not a normal distribution, and there were significantly more than 1 trial, so the probability of their occurring is significantly greater than that. Never-the-less, the occurrence of two such extreme results is improbable - hence the assumption that they are just a statistical aberration has little force. This is particularly the case given that both of these statistical aberrations are also aberrations (in this survey) in having very strong disagreement with climate science; and given that they come from the smallest bin and a bin with a narrow distribution. (See my post at 105). If they had been statistical aberration is it approximately 8 times more likely that they would have occurred in the acceptor bin, and more than 2.5 times more likely that they would have occured in the undecided bin. That means that even if two such improbably events should be expected, the probability that both would be in the rejectors bin is less than 0.76% (It is, of course, far less probable than that they should actually occur, although I am unable to determine a reasonable estimate of that probability.) I do not need a reference to know that it is far more likely that the survey has been gamed than that so improbable an event has occurred. This is especially the case in that anonymous internet surveys are known to be plagued with attempts to game them, even when they deal with uncontroversial topics. On Lewandowsky's own data, he has excluded 16.8% of responses as having been probably gamed. If this percentage was carried through the rest of the results, then any two results taken at random have a 2.8% chance of being gamed. It should not be supposed that the responses that survived screening are as likely to have been gamed as those that did not - but nor can it be assumed that none of those responses that did survive screening where not gamed. Obviously the more unusual the data in a response, the more likely it is to have come from gaming the survey. Therefore, on statistical information alone it is highly probably that these two responses are scammed. It has been suggested that people adhereing to nearly all conspiracy theories are not uncommon. The two academic papers I have read on the subject, however, never report more than three conspiracy theories held by one person (including Goertzel 94, cited by Lewandowsky). I am aware of just one person who accepts near universal conspiracy theories (cited by Goertzel on a web site), but he did not accept all theories, and would only avow that there was "a kernel of truth" in most conspiracy theories. On that basis, for most conspiracy theories he would answer 3 (agree) rather than 4 (strongly agree). In that way he is like the two other outliers in the survey, of whom I am not suggesting that they are scammed. Here are the two suspect responses along with the next two most extreme responses so you can compare them, and note just how extreme the suspect responses are: Very little of this information is new information; and I have argued these points before on this thread in detail. Paraphrasing such detailed analysis as merely saying "I doubt it" is gross misrepresentation. If you have a serious rebutal to make, make it. I would like little better than to be shown that I am wrong. Simply suggesting that I am wrong because you are unwilling to actually analyse the data, however, is hardly convincing. Finally, you say that I am damaging my reputation. My reputation at SkS has been built on reasoning in exactly this style, but with "skeptical" arguments and comments as the target. The only difference now is that my target is somebody closely associated with the defense of climate science. It appears, then, that my reputation with you has been built not on my analysis, but on my agreement with your opinion. [inflamatory snipped] Perhaps you would like to reconsider that comment; [inflamatory snipped]
    Moderator Response: [Dikran Marsupial] [Mildly] Inflamatory snipped. Discussion of this topic is becoming a little too heated. Please can we all keep the discussion as impersonal as possible, and based purely on reason [for which Tom rightly has an excellent reputation IMHO].
  14. Record Arctic Sea Ice Melt to Levels Unseen in Millennia
    Thanks Dana.. In a parallel research that I summarized and published on http://planet-earth-2017.com/heat-not-from-the-sun/ I link the change in temperature belts as well as the increase in global temperature to the tilting and weakening of the magnetic field which started some 150 years ago and has greatly declined in the last couple of years. If my analysis is correct through proposing a different model of the geophyisics that govern the planet and through histroy records, then the situation will get worse before it gets better! You can only design and deploy the right strategies in Agriculture, Energy, Infrastructure, ..etc once the root cause of Earth changes is confirmed.
  15. Realistically What Might the Future Climate Look Like?
    Lanfear. Speaking of animal-based technologies, it would be a travesty if we didn't tip our hats to a true artist with a poignant message.
  16. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Micheal Sweet @104: May I tentatively suggest that you appear to me to be trying to create excuses to avoid engaging with the evidence? Tom is not writing a peer-reviewed paper, he is analysing the data and presenting his results on the fly. I've done the same on SkS comment threads, and so have many others. Furthermore he seems to be the only one on this thread who is analysing the data. May I further, and again tentatively, suggest that the sociology of what is occurring on this thread is very interesting in ways which go beyond what has been noted up till now. Yes, skeptics have been throwing up conspiracy theories as if in a bizarre attempt to confirm Lewandowsky's research. But AGW proponents have been responding in a similarly bizarre and self-discrediting manner. If I may use the tribal metaphor (hopefully this will be permitted since I am applying it to my own tribe), when one of us applies our skepticism in a way which undermines rather than reinforces tribal values, the reaction of the tribe is to scapegoat that person. That undermines our supposed credentials for supporting an evidence-based approach. I'm only a dabbler in social anthropology, but if you want a reference I believe this book by Rene Girard (510 citations) is a seminal work in the field.
  17. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Foxgoose wrote: "A great many people are sceptical, however, of the politically led and inspired "science" which grew out of the UN inspired IPCC." Mmmmm... I might be skeptical of that too. If it actually existed. Let's imagine for a moment that the IPCC (heck, the UN) never existed. How would this change the scientific research on global warming? The answer is, of course, that it would have no impact whatsoever... because the IPCC does not conduct research. Rather, it collects existing research into a report for policy makers around the world. In short, it is an effort to transmit the scientific consensus to the political establishment. We could debate the merits of that, but the fact is that it has absolutely no impact on the science itself... and the belief to the contrary amongst 'skeptics' is just another demonstrably false conspiracy theory. The idea that the IPCC is conducting biased research fails utterly in the face of the fact that they are not conducting any research... yet it is a cornerstone of 'skeptic' beliefs. Again, Lewandowsky's study is redundant. The sky is blue. Earth revolves around the Sun. Many online GW 'skeptics' are conspiracy theorists. Nothing new here.
  18. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Further to my 90 and 100, here are the updated data for the distributions; the first being in absolute numbers, the second in percentages. In my opinion, the change in data requires no revision to my commentary @90:
  19. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    Good article, but one point of 'dissent'. I'm not sure it is very likely that we will see a 'regression towards the mean' next year. As stated in the article, this is usually the result after a number of factors have aligned to produce an exceptional anomaly. However, I've read several analyses which say that conditions for melt in the Arctic this year weren't particularly unusual. The 2007 record low ice extent and 1998 record high temperature anomaly were both driven by several major factors all happening to line up in the same direction... but the 2012 record low ice extent was just a 'normal' year so far as melt conditions were concerned. There was one significant storm in early August, but given that extent is still dropping a month later any ice impacted by the storm likely would have melted anyway. The only other 'exceptional' factor I've read about impacting this year's melt was how thin the remaining sea ice has become... but that will be even more true next year. Of course, weather factors could align to produce an anomalously low melt next year... but we could also get weather factors like 2007 and see another profound drop. Thus, the only real point I'm making is that by all accounts I've read this year wasn't an outlier in terms of melt conditions... it was 'business as usual' and the resulting extreme melt thus may be a 'new normal' rather than an anomaly unlikely to be repeated soon.
  20. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    If you look at this graph described in neven's blog you understand very well why Arctic Ice is misbehaving starting from middle 2010. You don't need to play silly "WUWT predictive games". Basic data that ridicules those games is available for 2 years already. Wieslaw Maslowski was spot on when he anounced in 2006 that the then trend was leading to ice free sumer 2016. About "recovery". Classic denialists, in my experience, will never stop trumpeting it. It's not only about ice: after 120F summer in USA, there will be "recovery" in winter. Then, there will be "recovery" of oil/gas in Alaska/NWT/Greenland. Sad but very true. If those people are not forcibly shut up, there is no upper ceiling to AGW.
  21. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    Very nicely done. I would love to be facile with animation like that. It really makes the point beautifully.
  22. Potential methane reservoirs beneath Antarctica
    John Hartz@7: If you'll permit me, I'd like to finish your sentence: "because if we do, we're dead."
  23. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Tom, I have not seen any references in your posts to justify your analysis. The Lewandowsky paper provides copius references to support their analysis. Please provide a reason I should listen to an amateur analysis without any peer reviewed input? I am dissapointed in your posts here and I think it affects your reputation. For example, you are completely wrong about the two "outliers". You have provided no justification for deleting these responses further than "I doubt anyone would answer this". You must provide an objective reason to discard any results. Where will the line be drawn between acceptable and "gamed"? "I doubt it" is completely unacceptable. You have suggested nothing so I cannot even criticize your proposal. I have participated in scientific surveys and you need a reason to delete samples. I regularly talk to conspiracy theorists at my job teaching High School in the USA and I am not surprised by those two results. There is a lot of literature on this subject, you have provided no links to support your claim that these points are outliers. Perhaps you could start with Landowsky's references. Your other claims are similarly unsupported.
  24. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    It is likely the neverending story will repeat itself in 2013, as there is a sizeable chance 2013 levels will be (a bit) higher than 2012. And, when everything will go horribly wrong, they still will be able to shout "recovery !" when some ice will reappear after the first ice-free Arctic summer. The most important question is : will they still have the mainstream media audience they get nowadays, allowing policymakers to sit on their thumbs ?
  25. Realistically What Might the Future Climate Look Like?
    Bostjan@61 You are in principle correct about the animal-based farming. However please take into consideration the population size that this animal-based technology did, and still does support in some parts of the world today. You will notice that it could not, and will not support the current population of 7+ Gperson primarily due to the ratio of animals needed to replace a single farm engine such as a plowing tractor. On a tangent, there is/was an interesting opening sequel in James Burke's Connections-series called 'The Trigger Effect'.
  26. Realistically What Might the Future Climate Look Like?
    Lanfear, right, which is why I mentioned the Carnot cycle, which is what brings batteries of any kind within the sphere of useful in comparison to caveman-style combustion and wretched castings full of thrashing parts. Getting to an apples-apples comparison is not easy but some choices are easy thanks to context. For my driving habit and addiction level an electric car is now easily feasible; I was about to plunk for a Leaf but now am dithering between that and a Focus. I'm one of a vast number of people who can now ponder over this choice and what a terrific thing that is. Tractors, not so easy.
  27. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Tom Curtis #95 Of course there's a good reason for randomizing the order of questions. No doubt Kwiksurveys offers that feature. That's not what happened. Climate Audit was offered a different survey with different questions and a different ID. So Lewandowsky can claim he was fully justified in announcing the results of his n=1100 survey at Monash, because the survey Climate Audit was invited to participate in was a different one. Or he can continue to claim that 5 sceptic blogs were invited to participate in this survey, (-Snip-), since his n=1100 survey was likely to be swamped by a totally different type of respondent at any moment. He can't logically do both. #96 You say "the reason for using bins is that no single question clearly demarks those who accept AGW from those who reject it". True enough,and it's a serious criticism of the survey that they couldn't even devise a question to do that. The four questions are logically linked, so someone who strongly agrees with one and strongly disagrees with another is not undecided, but more likely seriously confused. No wonder they believe in conspiracies. I can see the use of a battery of questions with the general public, because a single question which adequately distinguishes the warmist from the denier is likely to be too complicated for the average punter to understand. ( -Snip-). But this question is aimed at climate obsessives who weigh the meaning of every word (well, I know I do). A perfect opportunity to devise THE climate question wasted.
    Moderator Response: [DB] Accusations of dishonesty and sloganeering snipped.
  28. 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #35
    A comedic excerpt about climate change from a physics lecture at UQ.
  29. Realistically What Might the Future Climate Look Like?
    Doug Bostrom@64 Just to be clear, 45MJ/kg is energy contained in the diesel fuel, but the diesel engine has a practical thermal efficiency of less than 50% (just a quick Wiki-loookup), so one should really compare the drive shaft-output in both cases. Nonetheless diesel still is more 'efficient', but not with that huge a difference.
  30. Miriam O'Brien (Sou) at 15:17 PM on 6 September 2012
    AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    John Cook has written a good article relevant to posts in this thread. It's just been published today on The Conversation (click here). Maybe he'll post it on SkepticalScience as well.
  31. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    Planning on it, skywatcher! Look for an update in October.
  32. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Re the Lewandowsky research and paper and all the discussion and analyses of it on this thread and elsewhere in the blogosphere. "Much ado about nothing!" Let's get back to discussing and analyzing stuff that really matters.
  33. Vanishing Arctic Sea Ice: Going Up the Down Escalator
    Dana, make sure you update it with 2012's figure once the melt season ends! If we're lucky, it will fit on the bottom of the chart...
  34. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Further to my comment @90 and @96, here is are the tables for my second point @90 after correcting for the error. The error I made was that, contrary to my intention, the bins where not symmetrical in terms of the number of possible responses that could fit in a bin. That biases the result. Once corrected so that the three main bins are of equal size in terms of possible responses, the results differ from what I first thought them to be. Specifically, as can be clearly seen below, acceptors of AGW are less prone to accept conspiracy theories than either rejectors or undecided. This is so whether or not the two outliers are included. However, the undecided are still more accepting of conspiracy theories than are either acceptors or rejectors. Further, with the two outliers included, rejectors are very similar to the undecided, but without those outliers, they are far closer to the acceptors. Given these more accurate results, it is seen that a key point of my analysis @90 was incorrect. Never-the-less,the conclusion that Lewandowsky's paper misses important detail, and overstates the relationship between rejecting climate change and acceptance of conspiracy theories are still substantiated.
  35. Miriam O'Brien (Sou) at 13:40 PM on 6 September 2012
    AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Incidentally, the discussion board I referred to is not a conspiracy theory site - it presents itself as a 'normal' discussion board. For some reason it attracts a lot of extreme right-wingers, many of whom are able to hold regular jobs (even quite senior jobs) but are also wacko conspiracy theorists. (At least one of the moderators is a conspiracy theorist along the lines of Jo Nova - gold bug, one world government etc, which may explain its tolerance of wacky and sometimes downright ugly posts and threads.) The main topic of the board also attracts rational people.
  36. Miriam O'Brien (Sou) at 13:16 PM on 6 September 2012
    AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    People can and do believe in a whole range of conspiracy theories at the same time. One discussion board I visit demonstrates that fact. Thing is, how many of those people visit mainstream climate science blogs? (Not many, going by this survey.) See here, for some examples of the mental contortions of some people (as if this thread weren't enough): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120126152134.htm
  37. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Your remarks about the excluded middle and the improbability of one person believing in the whole range of conspiracy theories need to be repeated again and again. I'm sure we can all count on it; it'll be thrown right in the same "stone soup" as Geoff's chronological numerology, stirred relentlessly, consumed with gusto regardless of whether anybody understands what Tom's talking about or the relative merits of survey methods versus blog science astrology.
  38. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    geoffchambers @94, the reason for using bins is that no single question clearly demarks those who accept AGW from those who reject it. Taking the "acceptors" under my definition. They must have answered three of the global warming questions with a 3, and a third with a 2 at minimum. Somebody who does that is certainly broadly accepting of AGW, but if we used the question that happened to answer with a 2 as a benchmark, we would mis-classify them. Thus, the use of bins is more robust than basing the classifications on a single question. Having said that, I notice that my bins screen rejectors more rigorously than they screen acceptors. That is an error, which I will correct within the next two days.
  39. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    geoffchambers @92, there is a very simple reason for using multiple surveys. Peoples answers to questions in surveys have been shown to vary depending on the order of the questions. To eliminate this effect, it is not unusual to use multiple surveys asking the same questions, but in different orders. That is a good practice, and is designed to eliminate bias. I do not know that that is what Lewandowsky has done. However, it is a plausible explanation; and no evidence exists which suggests anything more than that.
  40. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Tom Curtis #90 Thanks for the intelligent and well explained analysis. I’m still not sure why you, like manicbeancounter, choose to divide your groups in this arbitrary way by scoring the climate questions. As you say, what you get is bins, instead of well-defined groups assenting to or denying well-defined propositions. If instead you had chosen those who agreed or disageed with one or other of the climate propositions, you would have two coherent well-defined groups, instead of a population spread out over an arbitrary scale. I suppose it must have some statistical justification which escapes the understanding of us ordinary mortals. Your remarks about the excluded middle and the improbability of one person believing in the whole range of conspiracy theories need to be repeated again and again. Would you consider reposting this on one of the sceptic blogs where this is being discussed? I can promise you, from my experience discussing research into climate scepticism with the psychologist and green activist Adam Corner, that the experience of trying to make contact across the nomansland which separates the two sides is a fascinating one. (Foxgoose thinks I’m an idiot to try, but that’s just our little personal difference). You could drop the accusation that Foxgoose and I believe that this affair reveals a conspiracy. We don’t. We say so again and again. We have never accused Lewandowsky of being party to a conspiracy. My belief (I can’t speak for Foxgoose) is that those who believe that every criticism (of Lewandowsky or the IPCC or whatever) is an accusation of conspiracy have a naively oversimplified vision of how society operates.
  41. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    So..."skeptic blogs" are not then a subset of "pro-science blogs"? Got it.
  42. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Tom Curtis #87 McIntyre has now stated that he received the reminder on 23rd September, the day that Lewandowsky was announcing his results at Monash University. The questionnaire attached was not the one publicised on the “pro-science “ blogs, but another one. Lewandowsky has never mentioned the existence of a second questionnaire; all his statements, in the method section of his paper and in his blogs, imply (without expressly saying so) that sceptic blogs were to be part of the same survey. In his paper, Lewandowsky says “Links were posted on 8 blogs”. According to Graham Readfearn at desmog blog, who has interviewed Lewandowsky “Some eight "pro-science" blogs agreed to post the link”. Conspiracy? No, simply shoddy science.
  43. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Tom@87: Well, to be fair, Foxgoose did say "reminder" in his first comment about McIntyre's receipt of the email. Only Foxgoose knows why he wanted to use the later date of the reminder, instead of the date of the original email. He appears to have known exactly what he was doing, though. The comments policy prevents me from expressing my opinion as to why Foxgoose might have done that. Other readers can draw their own conclusions.
  44. Why Arctic sea ice shouldn't leave anyone cold
    In comment 48, I provided a graphic of the daily change in sea ice extent using the IARC/JAXA data, showing how this year's melt was continuing to a greater extent than is typical. I also said I'd update the graph. Here it is, with data up to yesterday. Image and video hosting by TinyPic Same caveats as before: a five-day running mean, running off the end so that the last few days are incomplete. One slight modification: the most recent day in the IARC/JAXA data set seems to always get updated to a larger value the following day (Tamino has mentioned this), so this time I've left it out, as it really kicks the end of the 2012 data downward. If you compare this graph to the one from a week ago, you can see that the last bit of last week's graph has come up - due to the dual effects of the incomplete running mean and the last subject-to-revision data point. A bit of clarification: someone at Neven's blog mentioned that this doesn't show much other than what you see on the direct extent graph. It shouldn't - it's the same data, just visualized a bit differently. What does become clearer in the graph here is that the rapid decrease in ice extent is quite unusual this year. The early August storm shows up clearly - and this was the second period of rapid loss this season. Only 2007 shows a similar drop. This year's data around day 230 is not nearly as dramatic as it appeared in the earlier graph, but it does show that the melt rate was at or past the bottom end of anything seen before for that time of year. Once the line reaches zero and passes into positive numbers, we'll basically be making the passage into freeze season. (Yes, I know: this is extent, not area, so an increase in extent could be less ice spread over a larger area, but the big numbers will be dominated by freezing.) Currently, ice melt continues, but now at rates that are pretty common for this time of year - the line is in the middle of the pack (pun intended) compared to previous years. Other blogs have mentioned that the arctic weather forecast is showing chances of another good storm in the next few days. It will be interesting to see if this has any effect. If something odd shows up, I'll try to post another graph.
  45. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    I have followed up on my analysis, with the following results: First, as regards the possibly scammed nature of the two outliers, I split the data into three groups based on responses to the climate change questions. The groups are the rejectors of AGW (mean score less than 1.34), the undecided (mean score greater than 1.34, and less than 2.67), and the acceptors (mean score greater than 2.67). The distributions for all responses, and for each of the various groups are as follows: {-SD {Mean }Mean }+SD }+2SD }+3SD }+4SD }+5SD }+6SD Total 203 473 319 104 34 8 1 1 2 {1.34 18 23 18 5 4 0 0 0 2 1.34-2.67 15 42 41 11 7 3 0 1 0 }2.67 170 408 260 88 23 5 1 0 0 (Note:I have used { to mean less than, and } to mean greater than to avoid problems with html code.) In each case, the mean is the arithmetic of all responses to conspiracy theory questions, excluding YClimateChange; and the SD is for the all responses likewise. We can expect outliers, but we expect most outliers in the groups with the largest populations, and with the broadest distribution. We do not expect the two most extreme outliers in the smallest group, especially when that group has a narrow distribution. Given this more detailed analysis, I must continue in my belief that the to most extreme outliers are the results of attempts to game the survey. This is particularly the case given that adherents to conspiracy theories tend to follow conspiracy theories favourable to their ideologies, so that adherence to some conspiracy theories will be negative predictors for adherence to other conspiracy theories. My limited reading in the professional literature, and extensive experience debating conspiracy theorists leads me to believe that a conspiracy theorists who strongly believes all of 14, not closely connected conspiracy theories are rare. The belief that two such rarities decided to grace the survey with their presence lacks any warrant. Second, as regards whether the two outliers have an impact on the results, I split the data into three bins as above and determined the mean acceptance of conspiracy theories for each bin. It is not clear to me whether a large number of agreements, or a few number of strong agreements should be given more weight on this issue, so I repeated the analysis using the the Arithmetic, Harmonic, and Geometric mean. In all cases, as can be seen below, rejectors were less accepting of conspiracy theories than the undecided. More importantly, if the two outliers were included, rejectors where more accepting of conspiracy theories than acceptors, but if they were excluded, rejectors were equally or less accepting of conspiracy theories than acceptors. N= 1.34- N= 1.34-(Excl) N= 1.34-2.67 N= 2.67+ ArithMean 70 1.6 68 1.53 120 1.66 955 1.53 Harmean 70 1.42 68 1.35 120 1.48 955 1.37 Geomean 70 1.5 68 1.43 120 1.56 955 1.44 (Note: in this and the following table, x- should be read as less than the number, x; while x+ should be read as more than the number x.) On a hunch I repeated the experiment for the arithmetic mean only, and using only two bins (less than 2.1 and more than 2.1). In the two bin case, the group least supportive of AGW also had the greater propensity to accept conspiracy theories. I suggest that this result is an artifact of the very small number of true rejectors (N=70) relative to the number of undecided (N=120) and supporters (N=955). N= 2.1-(Excl) N= 2.1- N= 2.1+ 154 1.6 156 1.63 989 1.53 It should be noted that among the undecided, those that lean towards rejecting AGW (N=86) significantly outnumber those that lean towards accepting AGW (N=34). Therefore slight changes to the binning algorithm may have significant affects on the apparent acceptance of conspiracy theories by AGW rejectors, and also on the robustness of the result. However, the acceptance of conspiracy theories by the undecided leaning towards rejection is almost identical to that of those leading towards acceptance. Therefore any signficant changes in this result as a consequence of changing the binning algorithm is likely an artifact of the very disparate sizes of the various groups. N= 1.34-2.1 N= 2.1-2.67 86 1.67 34 1.63 All in all, I cannot see how this data supports the claimed correlation between rejection of climate science and acceptance of conspiracy theories. Certainly it supports far better the more interesting result that firm opinions about climate science in either direction are negatively correlated with acceptance of conspiracy theories. There is, however, no discussion of that fact in the paper. For those people trying to find a conspiracy in this incident (geoffchambers; foxgoose), it seems far more likely to me that the "errors" in analysis in this paper are the result of insufficient care in allowing for the very disparate numbers between acceptors and rejectors of AGW in the responses. I place "errors" in inverted commas as it is still not certain that Lewandowsky cannot explain why his result in fact follows from the data, although I am dubious that he will be able to do so. Thirdly, with regard to surveys with no neutral option. Speaking as a taker of surveys, there is no doubt I feel manipulated whenever the neutral option is denied to me. My strong impression is that surveyors taking that option are not interested in my actual opinion, but only in forcing me into their own predetermined categories. The logical fallacy of the excluded middle does not magically become sound because it is used as a survey technique.
    Moderator Response: TC: This post contains a substantial error, which has been corrected @100 below. Most important is the correction to the tables for section 2. The corrected tables are as follows: The corrected table for part 1 is as follows:
  46. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    "As far as I'm aware, there has never been a precedent in free democratic societies for science to be politically directed to reach a specific conclusion" Very funny. Now where is your evidence to support that assertion at all? The IPCC summaries science, it does not fund nor does it direct. I can state catagorically that no scientist in my institution working on climate-related science was directed by anyone to reach a particular conclusion. Your belief that this is so seems to rather confirm Lewandowsky results.
  47. Record Arctic Sea Ice Melt to Levels Unseen in Millennia
    Excellent post, Dana!
  48. Philippe Chantreau at 07:45 AM on 6 September 2012
    AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    This would funny if it wasn't also pathetic. It is also somewhat typical. In the absence of anything they can latch on in the real science that would lead to a serious revision of the consensus model of Earth' climate, so-called skeptics make a target of one tiny, marginally relevant item and try to show all the possible evil they can think of in that item. With passionate self-righteous outbursts to boot. A hurricane in a thimble. And the inevitable acusations against IPCC, of course. These are so self defeating as to defy how any intelligent person could even go that route. Let's think about where the political pressures could come from in IPCC: China, Russia, US, the emerging nations? Russia, a huge producer/exporter of fossil fuels, is already drooling all over the opening Arctic Ocean. China, with enormous reserves of dirty brown coal that they're so glad to have as it dispenses them from importing too much from, say, Australia. The US, a gargantuan powerhouse of fossil fuel burning, where lobby groups for coal, oil and natural gas spend millions of dollars and maintain full time crews to influence the political process. Let's think of who else is in he UN: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Indonesia, etc, etc. How about Europe? Which one of the European countries does not have a huge infrastructure geared for fossil fuel use? Which one has an agriculture that isn't on a lifeline of fossil fuel? But all of these countries together exercise political pressures in a direction pointing to the eradication of the industrial scale use of fossil fuels. That makes perfect sense. The immense green conspiracy has managed to gather more means and more influence than industries generating billions of dollars in profit every month. They've thwarted the KGB, CIA, overwhelmed Exxon Mobil and Koch brothers, while developing that stupendous power all in secret. Of course, perfectly plausible. How could such a theory not be true? The idiocy of it all greatly reduces the entertainment value...
  49. AGU Fall Meeting sessions on social media, misinformation and uncertainty
    Foxgoose @73&77, McIntyre did not receive the email requesting that he post notice of the survey on the 23rd of Sept as you claim, but on the 6th of Sept. He received a follow up email "two weeks later", which is vague enough that it may have been the 23rd, but equally, may have been as early as the 17th. It seems to me that you are fishing for problems rather than observing the facts for problems that actually exist.
  50. Models are unreliable
    For the modellers and the funders of modellers, the point is not see if the science is right - way past that and as Sphaerica says not needed. What the models can do that other lines cannot, is evaluate the difference in outcomes between different scenarios; estimate rates of change; predict the likely regional changes in drought/rainfall, temperature, snow line, and season on so on. Convincing a reluctant joe public that there is a problem is not the main purpose. And yes, I do agree that we need to understand the limitations but the IPCC reports seems to be paragons of caution in that regard.

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