Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes . . . .

I guess there’s more than one way to make a hash of something . . . .

I’m afraid you’re thinking of public key cryptography. One-way hashes generally are bit-shuffling based, not number theory based (with the exception of VSH, which is impractically slow).

I think they operate on a different level. One-way-hash is “concise compound fallacy requiring much more effort to unpack than to assemble.” M&M don’t do that. They deluge the reader with data and methodology, much of it with an objective basis or bona fide usefulness. Whether this reflects good faith on their part, well . . . I notice on climateaudit.org they’ll be careful to quote Nature (or one of its referees) questioning whether the article isn’t too heavy on technical detail for Nature, but then follow that up with their own objection about the curious phenomenon of a science journal rejecting a paper for being “too technical.” Apples and oranges, guys—but the same fruit to many of their followers, I guess.

If the analogy fits, wear it: M&M aren’t offering one-way hashes, rather, they are generating new prime numbers for others to use in one-way hashes. One-way hashes don’t just use primes—they use large primes. It takes a lot of effort to come up with this stuff.

. . . it would be a bad idea to concede ground to misleading attacks just to appear reasonable. There’s a limit to how far you have to bend over backwards.

I think you can concede ground to attacks that are very likely misleading (but too effectively camouflaged as reasonable to make the charge of deception really stick), while not really bending over backwards at all, though you might strike that pose for rhetorical effect as needed.

Nature rejected the M&M submission, and M&M ended up in a journal probably more appropriate, given the technical detail the authors insisted upon. Nature argued as Nature would: its role is to report the most significant scientifc results across a whole range of sciences, not to publish virtual monographs (by dilettantes, though they were perhaps too polite to say so) about what might in the end be rather minor points of statistical methodology.

What M&M wanted to publish just didn’t fit any of Nature’s size/protocol categories for print publication. So they ended up looking like stodgy bureaucrats hung up on rules, and M&M had the basic makings of a Galileo Gambit. It might have been a brilliant move on the part of the editors of Nature to make a huge exception here, though. They could have said, “Yes, given the iconic significance of the Hockey Stick in what might be the defining environmental issue of the 21st century, that’s something Nature needs to be seen as wanting to be really careful about. So let’s give this economist and this retired mining executive the floor, in a science they are not even specialized in, and see how the fur flies. It’ll be mostly their fur on the floor in the end. If M&M know this likely outcome, they’ll just meet our special-issue offer by adding yet more special requirements, and complain about how they aren’t being met. In which case, we as the editors of Nature can say to the, world, ‘Well, look—we bent over backwards, but they just kept pushing!’ (when in fact it was a jiu-jitsu move, if anything.) If M&M were in fact arguing in good faith—well, in science, nice guys can lose and bastards can win. All it takes is for the bastards to be, you know, closer to being right?”

Every so often, a respectable pharmaceutical journal publishes a paper announcing clear evidence that homeopathic treatments work. Every time, the paper gets shredded. This kind of exercise can be very useful.

Bending over backward? It’s the right wind-up move for some nose-breaking head-butts.

The problem, of course, is that these precautions might be counter-productive. For instance, “Holdren confirmed the administration was looking at using a method of geo-engineering that involves the shooting of particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere to deflect the sun’s rays.” Any unknown secondary effects there?

I have to confess, I come from a stand-point which is skeptical of technology and modeling. My conclusion is that we need simpler lives, fewer cars and more bikes, etc. Tax oil and polluters, and so forth. That is, I support what has hitherto been the same policy measures as many of those who believe ardently in global warming. I just arrive there at a different route.

Unfortunately, those who believe in global warming have set us up, not just for the right solutions, but also techno-engineering miracle solutions, because these latter are less costly.

Their most common tactics are to attempt to show that global cooling or stable temperatures can be extracted from the data by an analysis just as good as Mann et al.’s, or a hockey stick from random data by an analysis equivalent to Mann et al.’s, but when you look into M&M’s analysis it almost always involves either handwaving or embarrassing mathematical blunders: confusing degrees and radians, representing missing data as a temperature of zero degrees on some scale, missing the point of the Mann principal component analysis, arguing that some cooked-up norming procedure with an obvious bias is just as good as an average temperature because average temperature is in some sense an invalid concept, etc. They’ll correct their mistakes but come back later with different, equally unbelievable arguments. The MO seems to be a sort of shotgun approach with the hope that reasonable moderates in the debate will see all these objections and think that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

It’s true that action on climate doesn’t require the Mann hockey stick to be correct in every detail, and it’s true that paleoclimate is a hard thing to study. Nevertheless it would be a bad idea to concede ground to misleading attacks just to appear reasonable. There’s a limit to how far you have to bend over backwards.

I drove from Denison to Dunlap, where my parents are buried. For most of 20 miles there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal. If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.

See? It’s not just that he invoked imagery from the Holocaust, he also substituted “irreplaceable species” for the Jews in that imagery, clearly indicating that he would have wanted to . . . uh . . . well, to save the Jews from the Holocaust—but only because they were an irreplaceable species! Anyway, the point is, he clearly called Jews subhuman, so even if he wanted to save them from the Nazis, he’s no better than the Nazis himself. Clearly.

Clearly.

OK, not so clearly. But I know what he meant. I know this because I can read his mind.

What is abhorrent is refusing to open up data sources, fudging figures, and admittedly exaggerating possible outcomes, as both Hansen and Schneider have admitted to doing.

I tried to find where, for example, Hansen admitted exaggerating possible outcomes, just to get started on your litany of charges. My doubts were sharpened when I my initial searches turned up scurrilous attacks on winger blogs, supported by links to (uh-oh) Investors Business Daily, and (double uh-oh) WorldNet Daily. With those links being dead in some cases. I guess even IBD and WND have fact-checking standards of some kind, even if they sometimes kick in a little late.

Well, Tom, I won’t say I find it “abhorrent”, but I will say I find it annoying: when making extraordinary claims, one ought to provide the appropriate extraordinary evidence. Or at least a link. And you don’t. And evidence for these offenses you’re talking about appears to be hard to find, when it obviously shouldn’t be considering (a) its inherently egregious nature and (b) how vocal and well-publicized AGW critics have been.

In this paper in Nature last year, the authors conclude that their “results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”

Wending its way from Nature to the newspapers, to interpretations at sites like The Reg, to the blogs I found initially, it all somehow gets turned into James Hansen Big Time Fraudster, even though all I can conclude with any substantial backing is “current global cooling is just natural variation in a long-term trend warming trend” and “NASA’s GISS keeps updating its data, sometimes with difficulty when temperature stations go out of service en masse.”

So I’m still down with Richard Muller, when he wrote of the infamous (but somewhat overblown) “hockey stick” controversy:

“If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. Suppose, for example, that future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously—that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small—then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend, since according to the hockey stick, such fluctuations are negligible. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.”

Try that tack, people, next time someone tries to “debunk” global warming by telling you there’s been no warming in the last decade. If they don’t get it, they aren’t smart enough to be in the debate in the first place. If they ask who the hell is Dick Muller anyway, just say, forget about it, nobody, he was just this guy who once financed a Thai restaurant in Berkeley, run by his daughter, that failed. (I once worked with her husband, at a company co-founded by Luis Alvarez, Muller’s mentor.) I mean, if you mention Muller was a MacArthur Fellow, and a U.C. Berkeley physics professor, you might get accused of arguing by reference to authority. For shame, for shame!

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Where did I say you called me an idiot? I’ve never claimed that. Me @25, I thought I made it clear I noticed you were calling Sock Puppet an idiot (Tom Fuller @21). As you must have been doing, since Sock Pupper was the one who first applied the “Chewbacca” epithet to your argument. ( A glove that I’d say fits pretty well under the circumstances, actually.)

I think all that is natural—I often misread long threads and confuse commenters.

I can believe it. What I can’t believe is that you believe that I believed that you called me an . . . oh, screw it.

We need a game changer, and I think either satellite power or OTEC could be that.

Yeah. And global warming could be nothing to worry about, on about the same odds.

. . . check out what’s happening in the private sector regarding payload costs per pound.

Unfortunately for your argument, this is technology territory I know far better than most. At one time, I was in frequent correspondence with some of the better minds on the subject of how to reduce launch costs (particularly Sam Dinkin). I’m sorry, but it’s “multifactorial problem” with a certain stubbornness with regard to each factor; space launch is just not going to get very cheap, very soon. Russian launches are (relatively) cheap mainly because you don’t have to pay Russians very much. Launch that’s as cheap as you need to develop SPS (so that we won’t need more coal plants) isn’t something one would wisely wait around for. After all, there’s tech already in the works, like carbon sequestration, thorium as a nuclear fuel, large-scale investment new materials for energy conservation, and hybrid vehicles, that are far more likely to produce results over the next few (and presumably) crucial decades. And please understand: I say this as someone who thinks SPS and OTEC should be getting more funding right now, a lot more —so that they have at least a ghost of a chance of going into production at useful scales sometime in the late 21st century, when other energy supply approaches might run out of steam, threatening to throttle growth in living standards globally.

http://www.spaceenergy.com/s/Projects.asp

“With his new line of Falcon rockets, Elon Musk plans to reduce NGEO cargo transport costs from $10,000/lb to around $1000/lb. His target “Musk Factor” savings is therefore 10x. The first successful Falcon 1 launch on September 28, 2008 and an upcoming first attempt to launch a larger Falcon 9 rocket suggest Musk is once again traveling down the lucrative road to success.

“However, the Futron study raises a key question: Even if SpaceX succeeds, how will payload efficiencies affect Falcon launch costs? Even with the right technology and a string of launch successes, Musk might not achieve his 10x reduction in NGEO cost per pound… or conversely, the effective savings could actually be higher for efficiently packed payloads.”

I think all that is natural—I often misread long threads and confuse commenters. On to the substance.

Space based power satellites, regardless of what acronym is used to describe them, can provide all the power we need. All clean. All off planet. Forever. It’s worth spending the money to get the satellites up and running, don’t you think? It would be stimulative spending, have spin-off surprises that would help other technology sectors—what’s not to like? As for OTEC, (at least I think I got that acronym right), in the 90s they had a pilot plant in Hawaii pumping out electricity—you’d need a lot of them, but again, they’re completely green, offshore, and it scales—you can put a lot of them right next to each other.

Although Consumatopia brought it up, let me endorse his point of view—the poor people need energy above all else to get out of poverty. Too many die because they cook on three stone ovens inside their homes. Too many don’t have electricity, running, or even clean water. It takes energy to solve these problems. I’d be happy to endorse nuclear, but we can’t even build enough nuclear power plants to replace dirty energy sources. We need a game changer, and I think either satellite power or OTEC could be that.

If you were to design a staged plan of action to address global warming over the course of this century, the plan for the next decade might look very much like Obama’s energy plan. And I agree with all of it—including cap and trade. Investment in alternative energy—check. Cap and trade—check. Weatherising houses—check. Improved data collection to improve our knowledge of what’s actually happening to the climate—big check.

The only thing I don’t like about Obama’s plan is that he feels constrained to tie it to global warming, when it would be just as effective coming from a Republican president who was campaigning for energy independence—a Schwarzenegger type. Senator Inhofe joined with Nancy Pelosi on an energy bill last year—because she was smart enough not to use the term global warming.

It is possible that global warming is a serious threat. In case this turns out to be the case, it is prudent to take certain actions now. It is also logical to postpone certain actions to a future date. If you want to debate that, I’m happy to.

And check out what’s happening in the private sector regarding payload costs per pound. Or dismiss whatever the hell you want.

I ardently believe that global warming is potentially catastrophic, without being 100% convinced that it’s really happening, or much more than 95% convinced that it’s AGW. I’m perfectly happy to go to serious measures, right now. I’d be even happier upon eventually learning that were unnecessary, but I doubt that’s going to happen. As things stand, models show continued warming for about a century even if human GHG emissions were to stop tomorrow, just from emissions so far. Why take any further chances?

You say you’re worried about poor people? Think of all the poor people in the world who would hate the rich industrialized world, as their hillsides shanties wash away in unprecedented torrential rains following unprecedented dry spells that killed what was holding the hillside’s soil in place. That kind of thing could give progress a bad name.

Maybe it won’t happen, but policy is always a judgment call, and this is a hard one, even personally, for me, because I love the smell of gasoline in the morning. (No, really, I do—as should any red-blooded California male born in the mid-50s ,who grew up to be an engineer.)

Now, as someone who “ardently” holds this belief about global warming, what, so far, have been my “abhorrent tactics”?

(1) Pointing out that you complained about being called names in these sorts of debates and then responded to someone who didn’t call you names by calling that person an “idiot.” Is it “abhorrent” of me to point out rank hypocrisy when I see it?

(2) Pointing out that you don’t actually seem to know a proper term for a very conjectural technical fix to fossil fuel dependence (solar power satellites), whose progress you’ve described as “desultory” because of a (presumed) lack of seriousness.

Why, it’s as if Earth-to-orbit transport costs couldn’t be the real showstopper there. (The whole L5 dream was based on estimates of shuttle lift costs at around $200/lb, instead of the $10,000/lb we got.) I’ve looked pretty deeply into OTEC, too, by the way; nice trick, exploiting such inexhaustible (but, in Carnot efficiency terms, poor) temperature differentials. But it’s no panacea either.

These tactics of mine . . . . of pointing out error and hypocrisy. Abhorrent. Truly ghastly.

7a. If you attack the man and not the argument, it means you don’t have a response to the argument.

Maybe usually. At least in Barry’s case. (As I know personally from being attacked by him on absurd grounds, on a certain other issue.)

But sometimes it only means the man and his style of argument are too ridiculous to merit any other response. Complaining about being called names, then calling someone an idiot when he didn’t call you names, but only got exasperated and provided some sources, well . . . that hits my dismissal threshold. Definitely.