Making a hash of it

I do have a mild snark – this is not atypical for people arguing against global warming. I don’t recall Julian or many others in the ‘sort-of-libertarian opinion journalist set’ saying this about economics. And in economics, we have much better evidence that one side (the right-wingers) are dishonest to the point where they discredit themselves, regardless of their status (evidence to be found on Brad Delong’s blog).

[obvious type=”self-referential”]Sounds convincing, but how can I be sure it’s not one of those one-way hash arguments.[/obvious]

Slashdot provides a wealth of examples of the one-way-hash phenomenon. The articles posted there will often plausibly claim something shocking or terrifying (e.g., “hackers could bring down the Internet in less than 30 minutes”), but if you read through all the comments, you’ll usually find that the hype gets drained out and a less outrageous kernel of truth gets backed out of the article.

“one-way hash” =”specious”?

Hi there, I’m better at prime factoring than you are. Now, sit still while I convince you that the ability to factor large integers is important and worthy of your respect. Wait, where are you going? Come back!

If you’ll permit a sociolinguistic perspective on this question:

The AGW denialists have enjoyed a huge advantage besides snappy rejoinders that can be factored into only a few single-digit primes at worst: their rhetorical stance is the opposite of sales talk. AGW has, after all, been a hard sell. Global warming is still largely invisible (greenhouse gases themselves are intrinsically invisible), and serious repercussions, if any, still seem like they could be a long way off, during which time lots of other events might transpire (including death from age-related causes among many of those now hearing the debate). AGW proponents are too easily cast as the pushy fly-by-night insurance salesmen in this picture, warning about the dangers of certain kinds of phlogiston. Not to mention that, being mostly scientists or policy analysts on the public payroll in one way or another, they’re from the government and they’re here to help.

Are people not naturally skeptical about such talk? I love the following exchange from Luria’s Cognitive Development (1976), in interviews with Uzbek and Kirghiz peasants:

[Q.] In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?

[A.] I don’t know what color the bears there are, I never saw them.

[Q.] But what do you think?

[A.] Once I saw a bear in a museum, but that’s all.

It is not that those people were incapable of coolly reasoning from hypotheses. Perhaps it was more that, in a landlocked society at the nexus of trade-routes, with lots of strangers passing through and persistently trying offload unsellable merchandise on unsophisticated locals, certain patterns of talk from outsiders got strongly correlated with trickery. Note that the interviewer got pushy about the color of arctic bears, and the subject pushed back by actually starting to hint at reasonable doubts about the very existence of living bears in the first place. You have to admire it, in a way.

“one-way hash” = “specious” ?

Yes, but with emphasis on the encoding-decoding asymmetry. I like it.

Are people not naturally skeptical about such talk?

I’m not sure they are in all cases, or in all important cases; you’re correct in this context but this can’t be generalized too far. People are not especially skeptical about warnings that a given set of lifestyle characteristics are individually damaging to themselves. It’s when one argues that such characteristics are damaging to others that people tend to get touchy, defensive, and closed-minded.

An intuitive foundational moral principle: One is free to be whimsically damaging to oneself, but one is not free to be whimsically damaging to others.

If you argue that [characteristic X] of a typical [social group Y] lifestyle is self-damaging, e.g. leads to an increased risk of heart attack, people overall will probably accept what you have to say with a low threshold for evidence demanded.

But if you argue that [characteristic X] of a typical [social group Y] lifestyle is damaging to others, e.g. damaging to the environment everyone lives in, people from social group Y will tend to resist or reject the argument, because it’s natural to resist the accusation that one is being damaging to others. This is especially true when the characteristic is indirectly and/or collectively contributing to the damage, just because that makes it less difficult to reject the argument by deferring to other factors.

“You shouldn’t eat a lot of beef because lots of red meat in your diet increases your risk of heart attack or diabetes or something.”
~shrug~ Okay. I’ll deal with it. Maybe I’ll eat chicken instead occasionally.
“You shouldn’t eat a lot of beef because the land and energy used to grow the cattle feed is taking away from uses that could be instead used to… harness solar power and reduce our dependence on oil, or something.”
~bristle~

zamfir, that’s julian sanchez himself, walking around some big ol’ building in DC.

Let’s see how this works in practice. I am unconvinced of the claims regarding anthropogenic contributions to global warming. I have been trained in physics and quantum mechanics, but that was a long time ago–I can follow the math, but only from the sidelines. Both sides make a plausible case. From the global warming side, I learn about greenhouse gases and a potential positive feedback cycle. From the skeptics, I learn (actually re-learn) about some of the frailties of computer modelling, urban heat bias and problems with the hockey stick graph.

From news and weblogs, I learn that Al Gore consistently exaggerates the claims backed by science. I learn that Richard Lindzen accepted travelling expenses 15 years ago from an oil company. I learn that both sides are really angry at each other. By reading both the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, I can quickly see that there are a variety of statements in the SPM that seem to be a few steps ahead of what the scientific contributors are willing to say.

Again from the news, I learn that the personal behaviour of the leaders of the global warming movement are not really consistent with their stated expectations of the rest of us. I also learn that Michael Crichton, popular novelist, Harvard grad and climate skeptic, supported cap and trade 25 years ago and that Richard Lindzen thinks a third of recent warming is caused by humans. I learn that one scientist who makes a lot of sense is Pielke the Elder, who makes a cogent case that humans are having a significant effect on climate, but through deforestation, land-use policy and the hydrologic cycle. But nobody else really wants to talk about the issue.

Remembering the late 60s, I go back to find out what happened to large scale alternative energy generating technologies such as Solar Based Satellites and Ocean Thermal Energy systems, and find that the work has advanced at a pace that can only be described as desultory. It doesn’t really appear that people are looking seriously at solutions, when the people most worried about warming refuse to look at nuclear, don’t want to site solar systems in the desert, and don’t even seem to know that SBS or OTEC exists.

This is the background with which someone who is scientifically literate and does a bit of research can find very easily. Yet when I recently began commenting on weblogs, I got called a lot of ugly names, was characterised as an ignorant idiot who obviously didn’t know anything about the issue, and was immediately classed as a Republican denialist. (I’m neither.) All of this from people evangelizing about the catastrophic effects of global warming.

My point is that the discussion gets twisted long before anybody has the chance to make plausible sounding cases on climate change before or after. I’ve had people tell me quite seriously that JSTOR is a Japanese research agency funded by oil companies and that the fact that people cannot find an explanation for Earth’s escape from Milankovitch cycles completely proves that the postulated positive feedback cycle exists and explains warming between 1976 and 1998.

There’s a lot of clutter to clear away before we even risk being hypnotized by false argumentation. Clutter is too polite a word for it, actually.

“The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. ”

I don’t particularly believe this, myself.

QED

I’m extremely pleased that you are able to characterise my reading habits and my up-to-dateness so quickly. If you spent as much time analysing the subject under discussion as you have spent on learning about my predilections and behaviour, then it is no wonder that there is so much fluff coming from you and your companions-in-ink.

Tom F is surely wrong this time.

Anyone who can end their comment with “This was addressed in a Science paper” is obviously irony-aware.

Well, as proof Eli offers that some, indeed most of those “scientists” were dentists or worse. As a matter of fact a lot of them were worse, for example

James DeMeo, Ph.D, University Of Kansas (retired).

Well the Ph.D. is for real, and it is from the University of Kansas, where James got his Ph.D. in 1986, but other than that Cato is writing science fiction. DeMeo’s CV says that while he was a graduate student at Kansas he was an instructor. Wanna bet he was a Teaching Assistant.

DeMeo is, well, unique. His day job is head of the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab. What is that you ask, something near Salem, OR. Close, but no, poor bunnies, a follower of William Reich, an around the bend psychiatrist from the last century. One of Freuds kookier successors. DeMeo himself could give Piers Corbyn a run for his money.

It goes downhill from there

Hello Michael and Eli,

Nice to see people carrying on the same meme-chose… Solar Based Power Satellites have been known by a variety of nicknames and acronyms since what, 1978… just ask Ben Bova. Or Jerry Pournelle.

Guess it’s that nicotine gum/lung cancer thing, but unlike Satan’s Spawn or whatever his monicker is, I don’t have a saved list of links to paste in. It’s not really that tough to find either side of these arguments, and I have seen these links and spirited responses to them before. Yawn. Go tell Watts Up With That or Climate Audit about your problems.

Eli, you brought up qualifications for skeptics, not me, but how do you really feel about Freeman Dyson or Ivar Giaever? Does the fact that many of those who have found fame and fortune advocating radical action to prevent climate change have less than stellar scientific qualifications bother you? Would you care to give us your qualifications, or Al Gore’s? Does the fact that many skeptics have quite respectable sets of initials after their name impress you or depress you?

C’mon, we gotta surpass 313 comments.

Sure, but it’s false.

TF: “Does the fact that many of those who have found fame and fortune advocating radical action to prevent climate change have less than stellar scientific qualifications bother you? ”

Here’s a useful example of bad information, which should lead to a Bayesian reduction in the evaluation of Tom’s honesty *and* competancy.

Honesty: the trademark of global warming denialism is the document signed by miscllaneous dudes (see CATO, Heartland, etc.). Here Tom is using that against the side with the scientific consensus. It’s like a creationist accusing biologists of refusing to see the evidence for creationism, or of not paying attention to flaws and gaps in evolutionary theory. the comment term, of course, is ‘Pot. Kettle. Black’.

Competancy: any time there is a scientific consensus on an issue, one would not be surprised if this means that a large number of people agree with it. This pretty much means that a large number of whackjobs/loons/etc will agreee with it. For example the group of people who agree with a heliocentric solar system should include millions of people whose opinion on anything else is dubious. In the end, it’s a variation on pointing out the whackjobs hanging out on the fringes of a demonstration to discredit the cause of the demonstration.

Watch the weather forecast and see how much uncertainty is left despite very sophisticated models . . .

Invoking weather modeling to imply that climate modeling get any better traction for our present purposes is a little like saying “No model can predict where the first bubble will break the surface in a pot of water being brought to a boil” (true enough) but then concluding from this that any models aimed at predicting, to within a few seconds, say, when the water will start to boil is probably an equally doomed enterprise. One requires that you accurately model turbulence (next door to impossible, still, even with our ever-more-powerful supercomputers), the other probably requires less computational power than your average 1970s-vintage minicomputer featured. As you should know, if in fact you have a lot of modeling experience. (My experience in modeling is limited to some brief experiences back in the late 80s at a company doing multiprocessor circuit simulation products, and an even briefer brush in the mid-90s with simulation systems for freeway traffic, and both performed admirably in comparison to real circuits and roads. But since neither is natural-world modeling, perhaps they don’t count in your book.)

Tom s, I appreciate your spirited defence of my comments–but I gotta quit making those typos on acronyms or nobody will ever believe me!

As a thought experiment, I would suggest you post comments on other blogs saying that you have doubts about one or more elements of the received wisdom on climate change (unless you’ve already done this and witnessed the weird results).

Usually you get one attempt to present their side of the story, and usually it is pasted directly from Real Climate or Gristmill. If you don’t post a Eureka! Of Course You Are Correct–How Daft Of Me Not To Have Seen The Truth, then you will be labelled a crank, ignorant of science and a denialist. [By the way, I sincerely hope that all of you …folks… who throw around the denialist term end your existence in a hot environment with no water available. You trivialise the Holocaust and the deaths of six million innocents, and the use of the term should be considered an extension of Godwin’s Law. I guess what I really mean to say is, Fuck You.]

The other thing is, here at CT, as at other blogs, there are people who are just trying to provoke, regardless of the subject.

A simple look at their responses shows that they prefer to attack their own reconstructions of my statements than to talk about anything real. The original nicotine patch/lung cancer analogy is just a bit coarser than what follows afterwards.

See?

7. Those who ardently believe that global warming is potentially catastrophic are using tactics that are abhorrent. This does not disprove their case. It does make engaging with them a royal pain.
7a. If you attack the man and not the argument, it means you don’t have a response to the argument.

Sir, you have proven that Tom Fuller is not to be taken seriously.

5. Data collection efforts to date have not been adequate to prove the existence of positive feedback. Neither has data collection to date given an indication that the level of sensitivity of the climate is high

Didn’t we just have a thread where you agreed that the CO2/temperature lag in paleoclimate data is precisely an example of how we know there is a positive feedback? Didn’t I further dig up several references purporting to show that the probability that climate sensitivity is below 1.5 K is less than 5%? Are you claiming to have found flaws in those references sufficient to believe that positive feedback is unimportant?

Hi, er, onymous,

Just checked my previous comment and I did say I’m not convinced about sensitivity–sorry! But we’re in the duelling citation mode on this. My real opinion on this after reading your references and others (usually listed quite helpfully below the abstracts of yours) is that we don’t know enough about other factors in the distant past that may have influenced climate shifts–I am not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying we don’t have enough data yet to make the call.

Well, really, my blog is pretty much irrelevant fun time, but I appreciate Tom not assuming I am a male despite my obvious interest in heavy metal, comic books and beer.

I appreciate Tom not assuming I am a male despite my obvious interest in heavy metal, comic books and beer.

(shrug) You do kind of give up the ambiguity when you cite family conversations as occurring between “Me / Dad / Kid” of course.

This is one of the reasons I think we need more study of past climate change–I don’t think we understand enough about comparative frequency of vulcanims and other planetary processes, such as tectonic shifts, in either the creation or release of greenhouse gases, contribution of sulphates, etc.

“Tectonic controls on greenhous gas flux to the Paleogene atmosphere from the Gulf of Alaska accretionary prism
Travis Hudson, Applied Geology, 1432 Fox Hollow Road, Sequim, Washington 98382, USA, and Leslie Magoon, U.S. Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA. Pages 547-550.
Tectonic processes produced a tremendous amount of the greenhouse gas methane (8.35 x 105 kg) in the Gulf of Alaska accretionary prism during a time that overlapped the major period of global warming between 61 and 56 Ma. Much of this methane appears to have escaped to the atmosphere and, if accompanied by polar stratospheric cloud development, may have been sufficient to have forced global warming during this time. The Gulf of Alaska accretionary prism is an example of tectonic controls on greenhouse generation and the recycling of large amounts of carbon from the geosphere.”

And here Tom F is going through so much effort to prove that he is ambiguously full of baloney.

See, Tom Fuller, the difference between your experience and mine is that in the last 15 or 20 years that I have followed (from the side, and with no real interest) this business of anthropogenic global warning, I have never once learned anything from a skeptic. Everything I heard that sounded plausible coming from them turned out to be wrong, and more often that not laughably so, to the point that I can readily point to credible sources debunking most of what you claim to have learned from them (even though, to re-iterate, I have never really studied that subject closely).

Mr. Fuller’s accusation of violating Godwin’s Law is itself the first Godwin’s Law violation of the thread. If “denialist” crosses the line, what should we do with “eco-fascist”, “liberal fascist”, “totalitarian”, “communist”, and the rest of the epithets the denialist movement uses to characterize mainstream climatologists?

Regarding point 7a, you should check the addendums to Sanchez’s OP.

I’ve always been perplexed at how the denialist movement gets the asymmetry of the argument backwards. They think it’s enough to simply cast doubt on modeling. But “we need more information” is just another way of saying “climate change could be even more fat-tailed than we think”. It’s a strange world in which humility is supposed to compel us to interfere with the environment even more, in which being unable to remove your blindfold is a reason to run even faster. Gather more data, sure, but let’s take some prudent precautions in the meantime.

Climate change is kind of low on my list of priorities (I think before you ask impoverished people to sacrifice to save the world, you have an obligation to ensure they have a place in it), so I’m probably not actually that far from the denialists in carbon policy conclusions. Bad arguments piss me off, though, and the skeptics have more than their fair share. I don’t have the patience to confirm or reject the conclusions of climatologists by direct examination. But whenever the skeptic starts talking about something I’m interested in, like scientific method, economics, or rationality, they almost uniformly do a terrible job. It’s possible that climatologists have reached the wrong conclusion from incomplete data, as reasonable people will sometimes do when forced to rationally satisfice in our imperfect world. But if there’s a systematic intellectual error or dishonest conspiracy one one side or the other, I know which side it would be on.

7. Those who ardently believe that global warming is potentially catastrophic are using tactics that are abhorrent.

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.

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2009/01/18/musk-reduce-launch-costs-10x-payload-costs/

“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.”

Got that wrong–they use SBSP. Sigh.

[aeiou] Oh, and just one other thing–the tactics I consider abhorrent are not calling people like me names. 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.

As far as using the term denier, you think it’s cute, like Republicans using the term Democrat party instead of Democratic. You’re wrong. It insults the memory of the dead by cheapening the disgust we all felt when people denied the Holocaust happened. And as I said before, fuck you.

Oh, Tom, you forgot the part about how James Hansen called subhuman. Or implied it. Sort of. See here.

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!

As reasonable as the paragraph from the Muller article sounds, I don’t actually agree with Muller, since McIntyre and McKittrick’s objections to the hockey stick are mostly exactly the kind of one-way-hash arguments we’re talking about here. Tim Lambert of Deltoid has been really good on the subject since he’s actually patient enough to go through all the arguments; I recommend looking at his old posts. M&M’s objections sound cogent in a one-paragraph summary but are actually remarkably poor.

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.

McIntyre and McKittrick’s objections to the hockey stick are mostly exactly the kind of one-way-hash arguments we’re talking about here

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.

Oh, sorry — I assumed Julian Sanchez knew his cryptosystems, when he wrote

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 . . . .