Tag Archives: denialism

The Mad Monk’s modelling mockery

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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.

Admit me to the conspiracy

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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!

Climate: ‘mission accomplished’

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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 conspiratology

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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.

Freedom of obfuscation

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I have regrettably discovered that my old faithful source of technology news (which I haven’t paid much attention to in recent years) is engaging in one of those enlightening let’s-all-laugh-at-the-scientists climate change denialism campaigns.

This article in The Register caught my attention today, and made me despair a little. Andrew Orlowski reports light-heartedly on a freedom of information (FoI) crusade by Steve McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit website and who is frequently cited, quite falsely, as having discredited the hockey stick graph (the one showing global temperatures over the last 1000 years with a dramatic spike at the end). McIntyre is actually an academic, which at least sets him aside from the likes of Viscount Monckton and other more political protagonists, but he certainly isn’t a climate scientist.

The issue at stake is the availability of raw temperature data, as opposed to the aggregated, processed datasets put together by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), of which Phil Jones is the director. This Nature blog post sheds more light on the nature of the dispute between McIntyre and Jones; more than you will be exposed to by reading The Register’s article at any rate.

McIntyre, unlike his hangers-on, seems to define his objective very precisely: the free availability of the raw temperature data. To this end, McIntyre appears to have encouraged (or possibly orchestrated) a barrage of FoI requests to Jones, who Orlowski describes as an “activist-scientist” (a term I would consider quite an insult).

Orlowski’s article appears to have been informed by little more than a perusal of McIntyre’s blog. He must have left his journalistic scepticism in his other trousers.

First, Orlowski claims that the CRU has “lost or destroyed all the original data”. This is both factually incorrect and highly misleading, even if you accept McIntyre’s version of events. The CRU says it faced storage constraints in the 1980s, meaning that some of the older original data could not be preserved. This is hardly implausible – scientists still face storage issues today, and will still face them decades from now, McIntyre’s personal incredulity notwithstanding. Furthermore, the CRU doesn’t own the original data, and says that due to agreements with those who do, it cannot release what raw data it does have.

Besides – and this is what I find most astonishing – Orlowski himself notes two things:

  1. McIntyre already has the raw data. This apparently occurred through some sort of FTP security lapse at the CRU, which was then fixed in what McIntyre describes – in excruciating detail, as if the tanks were rolling into Washington DC – as an “unprecedented data purge”.
  2. McIntyre “doesn’t expect any significant surprises after analysing” it.

That would seem to indicate that, through all the bluster, there is actually not even the pretence here that anything is wrong with the IPCC’s climate projections. It’s presented (by both Orlowski and McIntyre) in a fashion that suggests some sort of cover-up or conspiracy, and so that’s what some readers will doubtless believe. In fact, such an allegation has been downplayed by the one person apparently best placed to make it.

The free availability of data is, I believe, a worthy cause – let’s not make light of that. According to the Nature blog post, Jones wants this as well. However, McIntyre’s own blog makes his FoI campaign look more like a vindictive assault than a fight for principles. Orlowski’s article looks more like an Andrew Bolt post than an attempt at journalism.

Bolt’s climate comedy

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Any appearance of Andrew Bolt on the ABC’s Insiders programme is bound to result in at least one deranged pronouncement on the conspiracy that is climate change. (This is something of a shame, because on other issues discussed on Insiders he does often approach sanity.)

In the closing comments, Bolt had this contribution to make:

The latest results just in a couple of days ago: the world has… the planet has warm… cooled for the last 8 years to normal levels; the land surface measurements cooled for the last 8 years; and sea levels – good heavens, Penny Wong was wrong in that too – that too has cooled over 5 years.

To put this into some perspective, NASA offers the following global temperature data:

NASA global temperature graph

“Normal levels” indeed. Bolt gave no indication of where his particular data comes from, and a more comprehensive denial of climate reality (complete with what could be a Freudian slip) would be hard to pack into such a small window of time.

Note – Bolt says that sea “levels” have “cooled”. Either cooling or dropping would be a neat trick, since the data shows quite unambiguously that the sea levels are rising, with about half the rise due to thermal expansion. Bolt himself posted a graph on his blog showing the changes to sea levels just days ago, though with the reality-defying annotation “FLAT” (in comic sans, no less) plastered across the last three years (in much the same way you might expect a bright red sign to be cheerfully labelled “blue”). Bolt himself didn’t add the annotation; that honour goes to former meteorologist Anthony Watts. Now, because one must always strive for betterment, Bolt has apparently decided that “FLAT” = “cooling”, and that 3 years = 5 years. He was reading from notes, so if it was a slip-up it was a very well planned one.

Annotated sea level graph

As you can see, the above graph quite handily refutes its own annotation (which was not on the original, just in case you’re wondering). One despairs at the futility of debating people who not only fail to notice such an astoundingly obvious trend, but manage to perceive precisely the opposite of what is staring them in the face.

I was also struck by the time frames Bolt was using. The normal denialist claim is that there has been no warming since 1998. Though that one is easily refuted (in no small part because 1998 recorded a temperature spike due to El Niño), it’s still a stronger case than for the last 8 years. After all, 2001 looks to have recorded some of the coldest temperatures in the last decade (though it’s still in the top 10 warmest years on record).

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Bolt simply printed off some three-year old (because then 1998 would be 8 years ago) piece of denialist propaganda and regurgitated it on-air as “the latest results”. That’s mere speculation, of course.

Reality fails to sway Fielding

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From our adorably naïve Family First Senator, via the ABC:

When I put forward the question ‘isn’t it true that carbon emissions have been going up and global temperature hasn’t?’, they wanted to rephrase my question and not answer it.

Of course they did you fool – it’s a loaded question. Technically the answer is “yes”, but that has nothing to do with the validity of climate change. If you’d wanted a straight answer you’d have asked a question related to climate (e.g. regarding the global temperature trend) and not merely weather.

There’s some irony in the ABC’s use of the phrase “fact finding mission” to describe what Fielding was doing in the US. He was at the Heartland Institute’s so-called “International Conference on Climate Change”, which, considering the denialist preconceptions that pervade the website, might not be the first place you would think to look for actual facts. Unless, of course, you’re an elected member of parliament.

Science fail

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Apparently one of the world’s foremost experts on global warming – as far as the denialist camp is concerned – is Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. The sum total of his qualifications appear to be his propensity to comment on the subject. A google search turned up the Heartland Institute’s take on Monckton.

Observe the ad on the left of the page: “Why Does Gore Refuse To Debate His Critics? CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT A CRISIS”. It looks like something straight out of a political campaign, which ought to be enough to toss it aside without further contemplation. But let’s contemplate for a second. The ad shows Al Gore’s face above four people who – we presume – are “his critics” (one of whom is our esteemed Viscount Monckton). How much tomfoolery can you squeeze into something so small?

  1. The one-versus-four theme makes Al Gore look like he’s on his own, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
  2. The ad conjures up images of public debates of the sort that have nothing to do with science. One does not resolve anything, least of all matters of scientific enquiry and public policy, by having proponents of each view point stand up on a stage and hurl sound bites at each other.
  3. If anyone did need to be involved in a debate, it would be the hundreds of scientists who contribute to the IPCC’s reports, not Al Gore, who is after all just the messenger.

Science. We’ve heard of it.

Keeping score

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It seems 300 names have been added to the original list of 400 “prominent scientists” who dispute things about climate change. If you follow that link there are a couple of good examples of the calibre of debate on the issue. I posted a few days ago about attempts to rubbish the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I can’t help myself, however, so I’ve been looking at the “highlights” of the 2009 update.

Needless to say, there’s no remotely valid methodology behind this whole exercise. The people on the list were not asked in a standardised fashion (say, via a questionnaire or interview) whether they believe AGW to be real or not. It appears that their quotes were simply harvested opportunistically from myriad sources of unknown reliability, while the reader is left to ponder (or ignore) the total absence of any argument for the existence of AGW. This is clearly not a survey, but nor does it attempt to paint any coherent picture of what the evidence itself tells us. It’s simply an exercise in industrial cherry-picking. Now, since the whole sordid result is in one convenient compilation, it has been endlessly regurgitated in blogs, forums and pseudo-news sites across the web. Grassroots climate change denialism* thrives on copy-and-paste.

Now for some of the people quoted.

First up there’s Ivar Giaever, a Nobel laureate. This is fantastic, but his Nobel Prize winning research was in superconducting, and it was half a century ago. You might recall that just two years ago the IPCC and Al Gore jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. If Giaever’s Nobel Prize is a mark of authority, then what does that make Al Gore?

Second, we have  Dr. Joanne Simpson, whose heavily edited quote makes it sound like there’s a conspiracy going on in the research community. She is represented as a climate sceptic, but consider an excerpt from her full statement:

What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain skeptical.

Of the above excerpt, the report quotes only the highlighted part. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a scientist to say, but quoting such a remark without context is clearly very misleading, if not an act of deliberate deception. Scepticism means very different things in science and politics. How can a scientist who explicitly states that “we must act” on the IPCC’s recommendations be tagged as a dissenter from the consensus?

Third, there’s a  Dr. Kiminori Itoh, who describes himself as “physical chemist familiar with environmental sciences, and not particularly specialized in climate science. He is described in the list as a “UN IPCC scientist”, which is somewhat misleading because Itoh was a reviewer for the IPCC report, not a contributor to it. His quote, that “Warming fears are the ‘worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists,’” is clearly mangled, and the second part isn’t actually his.

I’m selecting a small sample of quotes because it helps illustrate how the deception works. I clearly don’t have the time and energy to go through them all, but I shouldn’t have to because the methodology is rubbish to begin with. The introduction on page 2 is farcical enough. Consider the point being made – that there is no consensus on climate change. Now consider that throughout the entire document, virtually no attention is drawn to disagreements between those actually quoted. The report states that “The over 700 dissenting scientists are more than 13 times the number of UN scientists (52)”. If that ratio reflected the general balance of opinion, there would be a consensus – a consensus against the notion of AGW. However, nobody argues this, because it would imply that a large part of the world’s media, many of the world’s governments and most of its scientific institutions are part of a vast conspiracy. That’s the point where most people would – quite rightly – stop listening.

Even if we accept the legitimacy of the entire list of AGW sceptics, the 700:52 ratio is still complete nonsense. If someone had the patience to draft a list of “prominent scientists” who believe AGW to be real, by similarly harvesting every available quote, that list could easily run into many tens of thousands. But we don’t need to. More than ten years ago, when we were far less certain about AGW than we are now, a group of more than 1500 scientists actively urged “action at Kyoto”. The IPCC itself is a forum for hundreds of scientists actively contributing to fields relevant to AGW (not just the 52 who summarised the report). Its reports are endorsed by numerous other organisations, including the science academies of the G8+5 nations in a joint statement.

But that’s all irrelevant, because we have luminaries like Chris Allen, who assures us that AGW is wrong primarily because “it completely takes God out of the picture.”

* I don’t usually like using concocted terms like “denialism”, but there has to be a label for the kind of grossly dishonest, politically charged make-believe that goes far beyond scepticism and even cynicism. Scientists are right to keep an open mind about climate change – and for the most part that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. Denialism, by contrast, is something quite different. It seems to be broadly interested only in accumulating sound bites, treating the acquisition of quotes like a point-scoring system and stripping away all context and nuance.

Climate control

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For someone who rails so vehemently against global warming “alarmism”*, Andrew Bolt sure seems to be alarmed about hypothetical fatalities attributed to air conditioning failure during blackouts. Bolt states: “Just how many died because power blackouts knocked out their airconditioning is not known.” It’s not known, of course, because nobody has reported it happening, not because there’s some sort of shadowy government conspiracy. By contrast, the World Heath Organisation estimates that about 150,000 excess deaths are already occurring annually in “low-income countries” as a result of climate change. But then that’s based on actual research, so we can safely ignore it.

Indeed, the scientific consensus on global warming has been ignored and disputed by any number of media and political hacks. There are lists of the scientific battalions that supposedly dispute anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but most of the people on them are (a) connected to the fossil-fuel industry or funded by some like-minded “think tank”, (b) not connected to climate science in any significant fashion, or (c) not actually in denial of AGW at all. For instance, Dr Olafur Ingolfsson (whose credentials I have no particular reason to doubt) merely reassures us that the polar bear may not be in danger of extinction. For that he made it into the US Republicans’ list of “Over 400 Prominent Scientists [who] Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007“. The Heartland Institute’s list of “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares” doesn’t give any reasoning at all for the inclusion of any given name, and many of those listed have expressed their outrage.

Al Gore, who in the US now seems to be a piñata for the cynics (as though discrediting him is equivalent to discrediting the entire field), tried to point out that the consensus on AGW is real. In An Inconvenient Truth he cited a metastudy on the subject, which found that none of a sample of 928 climate-related papers had argued against AGW. A newer, more direct survey has since found that 96% of climatologists (actively publishing) agree that temperatures have risen, and 97% believe that human activity is a significant contributing factor. Moreover, the closer you are to the science, the more likely you are to agree with this view. Only 58% of the general public believes that human factors are influencing the climate. However, to argue that there is no scientific consensus is risible. Such claims seem to be based on the views of a few outspoken individuals, amplified by political and corporate interests and parroted by ideologues in the media (who, of course, complain loudly that it’s the other way around).

Needless to say, air conditioning failure is a lot more likely if more people are relying on air conditioning.

* Can one accept that anthropogenic global warming is occurring without being contemptibly tagged as an “alarmist”?