Dave’s Archives

There's a subtle difference here that I can't quite put my finger on.

An article in The Register (by Lewis Page):

Agricultural brainboxes at Stanford University say that global warming isn't likely to seriously affect poor people in developing nations, who make up so much of the human race. Under some scenarios, poor farmers "could be lifted out of poverty quite considerably," according to new research.

The Stanford University report on which it was (purportedly) based:

The impact of global warming on food prices and hunger could be large over the next 20 years, according to a new Stanford University study. Researchers say that higher temperatures could significantly reduce yields of wheat, rice and maize – dietary staples for tens of millions of poor people who subsist on less than $1 a day. The resulting crop shortages would likely cause food prices to rise and drive many into poverty.

But even as some people are hurt, others would be helped out of poverty, says Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell.

(My emphasis.)

The Register's article is a transparent and spectacular case of selective reading. The Stanford report briefly discusses a complex set of effects, some of which are actually positive. The rose-tinted spectacles at The Register apparently have a problem seeing the opening paragraph, and instead treat the report as though it were some sort of vindication of climate inaction.

Climate researchers really can't win in the face of such wilful distortion. If their research shows that the effects are all negative, they are portrayed as "alarmists". If their research shows some mitigating factors, then these will be trumpeted as proof that climate change is a "scare".

The title and subtitle of The Register's article hint at the underlying attitude:

Global warming worst case = Only slight misery increase

The peasants aren't revolting - they've never had it so good

The world's poor have "never had it so good", eh? I'm glad to see such overflowing concern for the less fortunate.

Here's a sign I noticed while cycling:

Perhaps there's hope for us yet.

Slashdot notes an article from the Guardian: "If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too". The author is, Darrel Ince, is a Professor of Computing at The Open University. You might recognise something of the mayhem that is the climate change debate in the title.

Both the public release of scientific software and the defect content thereof are worthwhile topics for discussion. Unfortunately, Ince seems to go for over-the-top rhetoric without having a great deal of evidence to support his position.

For instance, Ince cites an article by Professor Les Hatton (who I also cite on account of his recent study on software inspection checklists). Hatton's article here was on defects in scientific software. The unwary reader might get the impression that Hatton was specifically targetting recent climate modelling software, since that's the theme of Ince's article. However, Hatton discusses studies conducted from 1990-1994, in different scientific disciplines. The results might still be applicable, but it's odd that the Ince would choose to cite such an old article as his only source. There are much newer and more relevant papers; for instance:

S. M. Easterbrook and T. C. Johns (2009), Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change, Computing in Science and Engineering.

I stumbled across this article within ten minutes of searching. While Hatton takes a broad sample of software from across disciplines, Easterbrook and Johns  delve into the processes employed specifically in the development of climate modelling software. Hatton reports defect densities of around 8 or 12 per KLOC (thousand lines of code), while Easterbrook and Johns suggest 0.03 defects per KLOC for the current version of the climate modelling software under analysis. Quite a difference - two orders of magnitude, for those counting.

Based on Hatton's findings of the defectiveness of scientific software, Ince says:

This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error — just one — will usually invalidate a computer program.

This is a profoundly strange thing for a Professor of Computing to say. It's certainly true that one single error can invalidate a computer program, but whether it usually does this is not so obvious. There is no theory to support this proclamation, nor any empirical study (at least, none cited). Non-scientific programs are littered with bugs, and yet they are not useless. Easterbrook and Johns report that many defects, before being fixed, had been "treated as acceptable model imperfections in previous releases", clearly not the sort of defects that would invalidate the model. After all, models never correspond perfectly to empirical observations anyway, especially in such complex systems as climate.

Ince claims, as a running theme, that:

Many climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs.

His only example of this is Mann, who by Ince's own admission did eventually release his code. The climate modelling software examined by Easterbrook and Johns is available under licence to other researchers, and RealClimate lists several more publicly-available climate modelling programs. I am left wondering what Ince is actually complaining about.

Finally, Ince seems to have a rather brutal view of what constitutes acceptable scientific behaviour:

So, if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.

This is quite a militant position, and does not sound like a scientist speaking. If Ince himself is to be believed (in that published climate research is often based on un-released code), then the reviewers of those papers who recommended publication clearly didn't think as Ince does - that the code must be released.

Ince may be convinced that scientific software must be publicly-auditable. However, scientific validity ultimately derives from methodological rigour and the reproducibility of results, not from the availability of source code. The latter may be a good idea, but it is not necessary in order to ensure confidence in the science. Other independent researchers should be able to confirm or contradict your results without requiring your source code, because you should have explained all the important details in published papers. (In the event that your results are not reproducible due to a software defect, releasing the source code may help to pinpoint the problem, but that's after the problem has been noticed.)

There was a time before computing power was widely available, when model calculations were evaluated manually. How on Earth did science cope back then, when there was no software to release?

Optus's website is a work of malevolent genius. It attacks one's psyche on every level, from the stupefyingly inane animals to the incomprehensible maze of links to the bizarre concoctions that are the descriptions of the Optus service itself.

It is the latter that most effectively tests my composure. The concept of "pre-paid" is theoretically quite straightforward - one hands money to the mobile carrier, which accordingly provides services to the value of whatever you paid. Now, take the Optus pre-paid offers (which I've done, perhaps unfortunately).

In fact, take all seven of them. Why seven? You can access any Optus mobile service with any offer, so this has nothing to do with paying for different services. Moreover, for each "offer" there are five levels of payment ($30, $40, $50, $70 and $100). Why just five? The actual cost of Optus's services are measured in cents, so why can't I pay $20 and receive $20 worth of service? (You can, in fact, but that's merely part of a whole other ad hoc set of offers.)

The reason there are seven "offers" is that you get other stuff. Not other services, just... free stuff (the kind of free stuff that you pay for). For each of the thirty five ways of paying for "pre-paid" (38 if you include the $10, $15 and $20 offers), you get different types and amounts free stuff. These are all explained in detail on the website. Each payment option has "value", "included value" and "bonus", which are apparently all different, but these are just headings. What you actually get is some combination of the following: "MyCredit", "MyBonus", "Pre-Paid Messaging Money", "Pre-Paid Money", "RevUp Bonus", "FreeCall Minutes", "MyTime Minutes", "PowerUp Money", "MyTime Money", "MyData" and a range of ad hoc deals.

A few points on this appalling spectacle. First, from a rather well-hidden document, "MyBonus" and "Power Up Money" appear to be identical:

[MyBonus/Power Up Money] is a bonus credit that can be used for standard calls and texts. [MyBonus/Power Up Money] excludes premium SMS and content, international roaming, Zoo browsing usage charges, Video Calling, 966 and satellite calls.

It's also not clear how this differs from "RevUp Bonus". None of the three labels describe what you actually get, of course.

Second, "Pre-Paid Messaging Money", "Pre-Paid Money" and "FreeCall Minutes" can only be used to contact other Optus mobiles, which isn't quite what their names suggest.

Third, "MyTime" is further restricted to 5 nominated Optus numbers. What this has to do with the words "my" and "time" is anyone's guess. Do other types of credit not involve "time"? That would be awfully generous of them. Or does "MyTime" mean that Optus opens up a personalised pocket of time, just for you, that exists outside the ordinary cosmic flow of events? You'll also notice that "MyTime" comes in both "Minutes" and "Money" versions, for no readily explainable reason.

Finally, a note on the "Money". When you pay $30 under the "TurboCap" offer, Optus tells us that you get $400 "value". Optus clearly doesn't understand the concept of money (or, at least, it doesn't want us to understand). If such service was truly valued at $400, then Optus's accountants would be shredding documents and setting fire to the building. In other words, what you're getting are 400 Optus Dollars (where 1 Optus Dollar = $30/400 = 7.5¢, in this scenario). These come in several entirely non-exchangeable varieties. They cannot be sold, or indeed used for anything except phoning, messaging and downloading 60 kB chunks of data from the Internet (depending on which particular variety of Optus Dollars you happen to have). You don't ever see this "money", because it's just an electronic construct maintained in an Optus database somewhere.

I try to apply Hanlon's Razor - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. I'm not sure that incompetence is an adequate explanation.

I've stumbled across yet another "ClimateGate" article (by way of James Delingpole), this one going right for the jugular of science: peer review. The author is journalist Patrick Courrielche, who I hadn't come across until now.

Courrielche argues that peer review is kaput and is being replaced by what he calls "peer-to-peer review", an idea that brings to mind community efforts like Wikipedia. This has apparently been catalysed by "ClimateGate", an event portrayed by the denialist community as something akin to the Coming of the Messiah.

Courrielche asserts that peer review is a old system of control imposed by the "gatekeepers" of the "establishment", while peer-to-peer review is a new system gifted to us by the "undermedia". Courrielche has very little time for nuance in the construction of this moralistic dichotomy, and clearly very little idea why peer review exists in the first place.

It should be noted from the start (and many an academic will agree) that peer review is a flawed system. It's well known that worthwhile papers are rejected from reputable journals from time to time, while the less reputable journals have the opposite problem. Nevertheless, there is a widely-recognised need for at least some form of review system to find any weaknesses in papers before publication. It seems obvious that the people best placed to review any given piece of work are those working in the same field. Peer review acts both as a filter and a means of providing feedback (a sort of last-minute collaborative effort). The reviewers are not some sort of closed secret society bent on stamping their authority on science, as Courrielche seems to imply. Anyone working in the field can be invited by one relevant journal or another to review a paper, and it's in a journal's best interests to select the best qualified reviewers.

Courrielche sticks the word "review" on the end of "peer-to-peer" so that it can appear to fulfill this function. The premise seems to be that hordes of laypeople are just as good, if not better, at reviewing a given work than those who work in the relevant field. This is really just thinly-veiled anti-intellectualism. How can a layperson possibly know whether the author of a technical paper has used the appropriate statistical or methodological techniques, or considered previous empirical/theoretical results, or made appropriate conclusions?

That's why papers are peer-reviewed. Reputable journals get their reputation from the high quality (i.e. usefulness and scientific rigour) of the work presented therein, as determined by experts in the field. Barring the very occasional lapse of judgment, the flat earth society, the intelligent design movement, the climate change denialists, and any number of other weird and wonderful parties are prevented from publishing their dogma in Science, Nature and other leading journals. There's no rule forbidding such publication; that's just what happens when you apply consistent standards in the persuit of knowledge. Ideologues are frequently given an easy ride in politics, and it clearly offends them that science is not so forgiving.

However, Courrielche appears to be more interested in describing how the "undermedia" is up against some sort of vast government-sponsored conspiracy to hide the truth. His tone is one of rebellion, of exposing the information to the media, and doing battle with dark forces trying to prevent its disclosure. Even if such a paranoid fantasy were true, it has nothing to do with peer review. Peer review is not a means of quarantining information from the public, but simply a way of deciding the credibility of that information. In reality, the information is already out there, and in fact it's always been out there (just not necessarily in the mass media). The problem is not the lack of information, but the prevalence of disinformation. We are all free to ignore the information vetted by the peer review system, but we don't because it's intrinsically more trustworthy than anything else we have.

Courrielche makes mention of the "connectedness" of the climate scientists, as if mere scientific collaboration is to be regarded with deep suspicion. Would he prefer that scientists work in isolation, without communicating? This is quite blatantly hypocritical, because his peer-to-peer review system is based on connectedness.

Well, sort of. I also suspect that most of the many and varied denialist memes floating around have not resulted from some sort of collective intelligence of the masses, but from a few undeserving individuals exalted as high priests by certain ideologically-driven journalists. There is nothing "peer-to-peer" about that at all.

From my point of view, what Courrielche describes as the "fierce scrutiny of the peer-to-peer network" is more like ignorant nitpicking and groupthink. There are no standards for rigour or even plausibility in the many of the discussions that occur in the comments sections of blog sites. Free speech is often held sacrosanct, but free speech is not science.

The denialists are up against much more than a government conspiracy. They're up against reality itself.

I was hearing vague snippets of the disaster that was the Virgin Blue computer system, but my JetStar flight had its own problems. Everyone was seated (that is, except for the restless and very, very sensitive toddler standing on the opposite window seat, who burst into tears whenever mum dared suggest he sit down and put his seat belt on), but there seemed to be a delay.

It was getting quite stuffy, actually. A couple of people took to fanning themselves with the A320-232 safety instruction cards. It emerged that there were "maintenance issues", which sounded a little dubious. Shortly thereafter, the captain (or someone) informed us that the problem was indeed related to the air-con. He could fix it in 2 seconds, but he would need to switch the plane off.

Had they, on the spur of the moment, installed a new air-conditioning software update? At least this was happening before takeoff, I thought to myself. (For instance, they didn't say this: "Sorry, ladies and gentlemen - we will shortly begin a rapid descent towards to ocean while we install this critical software patch and restart the aircraft. Not sure how long we'll be - let's just hope it works this time.")

So, for about a minute, the cabin lights were replaced by blue-tinted torch light, the engines died down and there was eery quiet (that is, except for the gentle snorting of the person next to me and the squeals from across the isle). It was also a reprieve from the terrible, cheesy music that had been playing over the speakers to pass the time; cheesy to an extent that can surely only be achieved with premeditated malice.

Then, with our air-con software apparently working as advertised, all hands reached for the vents above our seats and we were off.

Tony Abbott has tried his hand at modelling the economic costs of carbon emissions reduction. The results are a little disturbing. Unless Abbott was being deliberately, deceptively simplistic in order to appeal to the burn-the-elitists demographic of Australian society, he truly doesn't have a clue what he's talking about:

He says given a 5 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will cost Australian taxpayers $120 billion, the cost of the emissions trading scheme's 10-year aim of a 25 per cent reduction will be much greater.

"The Federal Government has never released the modelling," Mr Abbott said.

"Now if there is modelling that shows the costs of a 15 per cent and a 25 per cent emissions reduction, let's see the modelling, let's release the figures.

"I think it's reasonable to assume in the absence of other plausible evidence that five times that reduction, a 25 per cent reduction in emissions, might cost five times the price - half a trillion dollars, 50 per cent of Australia's annual GDP."

I'm no economist, but I suspect the experts might shy away from confidently predicting that 5 times the reduction implies 5 times the cost. We're talking about billions of dollars flowing through all the intricate structures that make up the economy. There are feedback mechanisms, economies of scale, and the little fact that a "5%" reduction in CO2 is relative to 2000 levels but the projected cost is based on 2020 levels (because that's when it's happening). Even a "0%" change from 2000 levels represents a substantial cut in what our 2020 CO2 emissions would have been, but according to Abbott's model this scenario would cost nothing.

Why even have economists if a constant factor is all it takes to convert a percentage CO2 reduction into a dollar amount? If Tony, our alternative Prime Minister, thinks it's "reasonable to assume" such things, perhaps we can get him to try out this approach to economic modelling in a controlled environment where he can't hurt anyone else. Say, in a padded cell with Monopoly money.

Deltoid takes a look at a piece of code taken from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that apparently has the denialists salivating. Buried therein is the following comment: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL [sic] correction for decline!!" Are you convinced yet of the global leftist socialist global warming alarmist conspiracy?! I certainly am.

I'd also like to apply for membership. You see, trawling through my own code for handling experimental data (from September 2008), I've re-discovered my own comment: "Artificially extends a data set by a given amount". Indeed, I appear to have written two entire functions to concoct artificial data*, clearly in nefarious support of the communist agenda. I therefore submit myself as a candidate for the conspiracy. The PhD is only a ruse, after all. Being a member of the Conspiracy is the only qualification that really counts in academia.

* I'm not making this up - I really do have such functions. However, lest you become concerned about the quality of my research, this artificial data was merely used to test the behaviour of the rest of my code. It was certainly not used to generate actual results. I can sympathise with the researcher(s) who leave such untidy snippets of  code lying around, and I'm a software engineer who should know better!

I read with ever growing fascination the comments that continue to flood into climate-related blogs. Deltoid has collected a few truly astounding ones. I've also discovered the UK's very own James Delingpole, who's a riot. As mentioned in my previous post, there seem to be a veritable army of those convinced that the climate sceptics are not merely right (and righteous), but that this time they've actually, truly won. This, based on an assortment of stolen email.

In the long run, reading these comments is probably a recipe for the development of psychological issues, but for the moment it's like a spectator sport. While ignorance regarding the climate change science is merely frustrating, the euphoric surety of ultimate victory that so many commenters share is hilarous. As a general rule, I don't like laughing at other people, but when so many start running at full pelt toward the cliff edge, convinced that it is they who are to inherit the Earth, I cannot help but anticipate schadenfreude. I can't do anything about it, after all, so why not laugh?

(Doubtless, to someone not familiar with the issue, I myself might be sounding a little overconfident. To assuage such doubts, you would do well to remember that the reality of climate change is propounded by the world's scientific community, which is constantly engaged in critical self-examination. By contrast, the opponents of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have very few actual scientific results to draw from in support of their arguments. Having long since been consigned to scientific irrelevance, they resort to reading other people's email in search of conspiracies.)

But why are so many stampeding over the edge all at once? My theory is that so little motivation or desire exists for critical thought that commenters feed on each other ad infinitum. They come to believe, for instance, that there has indeed been widespread scientific fraud, based on existing angry comments, which themselves were derived from still older comments, etc. Eventually we find ourselves back at the source of the allegations - the use of the phase “hide the decline” in one of the emails (which in reality has a much more innocent explanation*). The newer commenters aren't aware that these three little words are the entire basis of the supposed fraud. They think their arguments are much more solidly grounded, simply because everyone is talking about it.

The other piece of the puzzle is the ideology of those who “spread the word” in the first place. Opposition to action on climate change - as put forth by Andrew Bolt, and of course many others around the world - starts to make some kind of twisted sense if you accept the following fact. There are people out there for whom the greatest and most insideous evil in the world is not war, poverty, disease, starvation or tyranny, but simply the fact that you are required to help fund public services. This is their antichrist - taxation - the worse imaginable horror that the universe could bestow on us. My intuition fails me here, but however untenable the premise, the logic thereafter seems to hold. It is an article of faith that none of the consequences of climate change can outweigh the evil of taxation. Indeed the proposition that we should deal with climate change by introducing emissions trading schemes - seen by some as a form of tax - must place the issue firmly in the socialists-taking-over-the-world basket.

I sense that this deeply-held belief serves to justify intellectual dishonesty in the minds of climate change deniers. This might be analogous to the obligation felt by creationist pundits to argue against evolution, not because they feel the evidence is in their favour (as their followers do), but because they perceive the science to be a moral challenge to their beliefs.

* The “hide the decline” hysteria is one of my favourite pieces, actually. I shall attempt to summarise, based on some very patient explanations by Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA. The “decline” refers to the “divergence problem”, where temperature reconstructions based on tree-ring data show a spurious decline after about 1960. This needs to be “hidden” simply because it's not real. Several important points to note are:

1. The comment cannot possibly be connected to the fabled “cooling” of temperatures this decade, since the email was sent in 1999.
2. The collection of tree-ring data is a relatively peripheral issue to climate change, since other data sources are available (including actual temperature measurements).
   
3. We know that the tree-ring data is reasonably accurate before 1960 and inaccurate after 1960, because we can compare it to other sources of data. Actual temperature measurements, for instance, certainly do not show a “decline”. The reasons for the divergence are the subject of debate, but may be a result of climate change itself.

Update (7 December 2009) - A couple more points, for the sake of completeness:

4. Nothing has actually been “hidden”, in the lay sense, anyway. All the data is out in the open and the problem has been discussed in the peer-reviewed literature over a decade ago.
5. According to the email (which you can Google for yourself), the only action taken was the addition to the data of real temperature values. The sources of these values are even described in the email.

Climate denialism has taken a turn for the worse. I say this with great trepidation, of course, because it was never an especially pretty sight to begin with.

A substantial number of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have been retrieved and published online without permission*. One hardly needs to read between the lines: the hackers were presumably looking for the "smoking gun" that would prove some kind of conspiracy on the part of climatologists. Real Climate are methodically refuting all the miscellaneous scraps of hysteria that seem to have been whipped up over this.

However, observe some of the comments at the bottom of this blog post and you'll get a feel for the way this incident is being perceived. Many of the denialist fraternity (and it's still early days) have apparently decided that this is it; that this is the clincher. They feel confident that it's all over, that even the dreaded "mainstream media" (MSM) can't ignore it, and generally that the tide of history has swung in their favour. (This is the result of some interpretation on my part.)

It's not the hubris that bothers me particularly, but where this is leading the public debate. The IPCC, the world's other scientific institutions and science in general will all carry on as if nothing had happened, because of course in reality it hasn't. The notion of a climatologist conspiracy is extraordinarily bizarre and improbable, and as such would require an extraordinary body of evidence to demonstrate its existence. If there was to be a "smoking gun", it would need to be strong evidence of the systematic fabrication of evidence on a scale that would beggar belief. It would also beggar belief that such a venture could have been kept secret up until now, considering how widespread it would need to be. This is the same problem that most conspiracy theories face. Nothing remotely approaching the requisite level of evidence has been discussed so far, and yet there is a sense in some quarters that the conspiracy has been cracked wide open.

What happens when the denialists realise that nothing is going to change, having already convinced themselves that "The Truth" has been well and truly exposed? Will they then perceive an even greater global conspiracy, with the power to make the world ignore what is sitting in plain sight (as occurs in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four)? How far down the rabbit hole will they go?

More importantly, how will the world's politicians react, particularly with Copenhagen around the corner? Will they see this stunt for what it is and ignore it, or will they perceive some increased political risk in taking action? Or will more be sucked into believing the conspiracy themselves?

* I haven't downloaded the emails for myself, because frankly I don't believe I have either a legal or moral right to do so.

Also note: as you'll be aware, I've not been keeping up with my regular blogging, owing to other commitments. I hope to become more prolific with my postings in the future, but that may be several months away.