Lindzen and “No statistically significant warming since 1995”

So I see that as credibility-reducing gaffe after credibility-reducing gaffe has piled on the AGW community you’ve shifted from dismissing skeptics as “denialists” to dismissing them as “delusionists.”

I shudder to think what you’d start calling the skeptics if some of the more core AGW research starts to come into question. Puppykillerists? Goatbuggerists?

Or would you stick with the Ds for poetic continuity? Doodooheadists perhaps?

Hint – escalating the name calling doesn’t elevate your credibility or stature. It just kind of makes you look like a tool.

Substance: having crazy opponents doesn’t make you sane. Having stupid opponents doesn’t make you smart.

Its reasonable to conclude that the IPCC is mostly credible. It just plain dumb to conclude that the IPCC is no less credible now than it was 6 months ago.

It is sad to see a respected scientist reduced to this kind of thing.

It is, but it seems to be pretty normal among scientists past a certain age (50-ish?) to turn into caricatures of themselves with fixed positions held more and more vocally with age. I hope that if I age into such a person someone will gently tell me that I need to shut up.

‘Inconvenient truth’ is most definitely not even close to ‘gaffe’. Lots of Kinsley and not a lot of gaffe; sorry to be cheeky, but it seems a bit of a Freudian slip on source checking.

My dental hygienist told me yesterday that my wingnut dentist has been singing the praises of “Germany’s greatest geophysicist” who believes we’re entering a mini-ice age.

Anyone know the origin of this particular bit of denialism or who “Germany’s greatest geophysicist” is?

Milankovitch was guy who came up with the (now reasonably accepted) idea of orbital effects as causes of ice ages, and I suppose that sounds German enough for some.

Also, his life was pretty much a shining example for conspiracy folks: he was a civil engineer who was laughed of the stage by the meteorologists. Only after his death the data became reliable enough to show that his ideas had value.

He was also a university-employed geophysicist whose ideas were taken reasonably serious within that community, but the first story sounds better of course.

Climate skeptics love astromical effects as explanations, so I can easily imagine that a long-death Serbian writing about past ice ages turns into a living German writing about the next ice age.

John, I understood you perfectly but ‘which translates almost perfectly as’ is simply untrue. Oh well, let this not come between us. I hate this ‘inconvenient truth’ thing (also because when I am hearing ‘Gore’ my brain goes ‘Tipper’). The thing is true or not (& I think it is true) and all of the fuzz about inconvenience is a Hollywood diversion at best.

” It is sad to see a respected scientist reduced to this kind of thing.”

onymous: “It is, but it seems to be pretty normal among scientists past a certain age (50-ish?) to turn into caricatures of themselves with fixed positions held more and more vocally with age. I hope that if I age into such a person someone will gently tell me that I need to shut up.”

I don’t think that it’s that, but more of the fact that the fixed position he holds has been disproven, and more and more evidence comes in every year, burying it still deeper.

He has a choice, and is choosing denialism. At first, he can point to the inevitable flaws in any theory, and the odd bits of data which support his position. However, as the data keeps rolling in against him, it’s got to be quite easy to slowly shift into dishonest junk science, especially because there’s a whole network set up to support him.

Shorter Lindzen: “A-Rod hitless since the end of the World Series. Is his career over?”

Alternatively, as we know that statisticians can’t predict the outcome of a single throw of a dice, this shows us their entire field of study is invalid, and anything based on statistical analysis is false (unless we happen to agree with it, of course).

It isn’t that older scientists automatically turn into cranks. Even most gadflies are more invested in pointing out potential problems with how we interpret things than, say, rejecting the Big Bang Theory. However there is a certain species of gadfly who fall in love with their contrary views so deeply that they simply can’t accept alternate evidence. An astronomy example is Chip Arp, convinced that quasars are local, while everyone else believes them to be enormous black holes which live at the centers of distant galaxies. He did good work before he went around the bend on this (which happened 40 years ago, by the way.)

The difference is that Arp doesn’t have a powerful political and economic lobby on his side.

“An astronomy example is Chip Arp, convinced that quasars are local, while everyone else believes them to be enormous black holes which live at the centers of distant galaxies”.

Another example is Einstein, who opted out of quantum mechanics after the 1920s, and spent his remaining years pursuing what most working scientists believed was a chimera. That being said, he maintained a status of admiration and hero-worship. Even today, there is a certain hope that Einstein’s final labours may bear fruit.

Fed Hoyle suffered the spectacular demise of his Steady State Cosmology after the Big Bang clocked up a confirmation with the discovery of cosmic background microwave radiation. Hoyle never fully conceded and continued trying to revive his theory until he died.

Neither Quantum Mechanics nor Cosmology interfered with the Free Market, however.

I find that Krugman’s arrogance and sticking to his view a little too long

I dunno. I’m hard-pressed to come up with a view that Krugman has held onto too long. I’m not sure I’m sympathetic to his free-trade views, for example, but his defense of those views is reasonable, and backed by appropriate evidence.

Sebastian: “…e.g. I find that Krugman’s arrogance and sticking to his view a little too long has a positive effect on his punditry.”

Krugman has proven that he’ll change his views as the evidence rolls in. Anybody who read his (popular) writings back in the 1990’s knows that.

Onymous @ 7:

It is, but it seems to be pretty normal among scientists past a certain age (50-ish?) to turn into caricatures of themselves with fixed positions held more and more vocally with age. I hope that if I age into such a person someone will gently tell me that I need to shut up.

Max Planck:

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Shorter Max Planck (often attributed to Paul Samuelson):

Science advances funeral by funeral.

bq. F[r]ed Hoyle suffered the spectacular demise of his Steady State Cosmology after the Big Bang clocked up a confirmation with the discovery of cosmic background microwave radiation. Hoyle never fully conceded and continued trying to revive his theory until he died.

And wrote a mediocre science fiction novel, _The Black Cloud_, in which the alien confirmed to a grateful humanity that Steady State was right. Pratchett has a Steady Gait joke about the great A’Tuin somewhere (probably _The Light Fantastic._ )

a mediocre science fiction novel, The Black Cloud

Henry, I’m shocked. I thought it was a great novel. Probably all true, too.

I don’t find it sad. I find it infuriating that Lindzen’s denialist crap gets distributed by an irresponsible media. I find it comic that a scientist who has been bettered in an argument resorts to more and more desperate misreadings – the essay to go to on this is Stephen Jay Gould’s piece on Lord Kelvin, False Premise, Good Science in The Flamingo’s Smile which puts its finger on where scepticism is useful and where it is not (and might be useful as a reference in your book about Zombie ideas, John). And as for the league of Hummer fetishists that eat up every factoid like they were swalling the eucharist itself, what can one say? They are the sad ones, and make life sad for the rest of us.

“I’d be amazed and delighted to read a better science fiction story than The Black Cloud.”

I enjoyed Hoyle’s October the First is Too Late. But then I usually don’t like science fiction, so maybe that just goes to show that it’s crap.

34: “A question for Lindzen and his ilk”

Ah, you’ve already gone wrong there. That side of the debate never answers questions. Nor do they pay attention when their own questions are answered. The point is always to raise further “disturbing” questions, and demand (but then ignore) more evidence. There’s a very widespread rhetoric of constant investigation and search among the delusionists; in a way, they are rightly called “skeptics,” since the point is always that everything is uncertain, and no conclusions are ever well-proven enough.

I guess I’m satisfied that it’s being treated as a matter for evidence, not as something rejected out of hand.

However, I think that you’re underplaying the evidence. See here, for example. It’s not just Western Fuels, and it’s not just back in the 90
s. He gets speaking fees, he’s had a speech underwritten by OPEC, and he’s a member of three different right-wing foundations that are largely funded by industry.

“Ah, you’ve already gone wrong there. That side of the debate never answers questions. Nor do they pay attention when their own questions are answered.”

I know. I’m just wondering what could be going on in someone’s head to make them claim that, out of all the warming over the last 100+ years, the period where it accelerated the fastest doesn’t actually show warming. I’m just curious as to how someone sympathetic to this argument would justify it.

“in a way, they are rightly called “skeptics,” since the point is always that everything is uncertain, and no conclusions are ever well-proven enough.”

That’s certainly true when it comes to conclusions they don’t like. However, denying the mainstream view requires one to believe that you can pump virtually unlimited amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without causing significant warming. That is a hypothesis that they do not regard with the least bit of skepticism.

@45: but usually, when that kind of nonsense is attacked, they very quickly retreat to “hey, I was just trying think outside the box; maybe there are some problems with my idea too, but let’s enrich the debate by inviting some more creative thinking. Free your mind, man.” At least, I think that was Levitt’s defense. It’s a skepticism that puts all suggested theories on the same level, regardless of the amounts of evidence for or against them (the more I think about it, the more it seems like a parody of Sextus Empiricus: balancing opposing arguments, and always ending with uncertainty). This not only allows them to continue disbelieving the predictions, but also allows them to entertain multiple mutually contradictory opposed beliefs: there’s no global warming, it’s not caused by humans, it’s not harmful, it’s not worth the cost of preventing, there are several better ways of preventing it, etc.

@46: true, predictions of economic disaster are believed. But surely that’s reasonable: after all, physical scientists will say any old thing, but predictions about the economy are matters of reliable, unquestionable fact.

I’ve read a lot of SF, and I liked The Black Cloud quite a bit and October the First somewhat. It’s true that Mr. Black Cloud gets in a good word for the steady-state theory.

And it’s definitely true that Hoyle branched out into all kinds of crankiness, including claiming that Archaeopteryx was a fake and that most disease germs come from outer space. (I dimly recall one interviewer asked him if he thought HIV came from space and he said, no, he thought HIV was made in a biological weapons lab.)

One other thing to remember about Hoyle: The Black Cloud was published in 1957, and Penzias and Wilson’s discovery of cosmic background radiation was in 1964. It’s true that Hoyle continued to believe in his pet theory long after it had been disproved, but in 1957 I don’t think there was anything unreasonable about it. Putting it in his novel felt more like a little inside joke than the screaming of a crank.

On where the real money is:

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/the-climate-industry-wall-of-money/

Discuss.

In addition, one stat error is one thing, but a record of repeatedly playing cutsie in one direction is another.

Old-timer, that is indeed the correct answer, but it’s tricky to do on-air, especially when trying to be careful about many other statements. It’s not that one thing, it’s the whole pattern.

“Similarly, ‘skeptics’ warning about ‘alarmism’ turn into gullible believers when the scare story concerns the supposed collapse of the economy to be brought about by a carbon price of $50/tonne. Lindzen has been among the worst in this respect.”

At $50/tonne a lot of CO2 reduction becomes economical – carbon sequestration, for one. $50/tonne CO2 emissions is roughly 50 cents on a [U.S.] gallon of gas. Yet somehow the price of gas has varied by more than a buck over the past few years and we haven’t reverted to flint tools and stone axes. Anyone telling you that addressing CO2 emissions will destroy the economy is Full. Of. Shit.

What they don’t realize, CO2 emissions being cumulative, is that more CO2 emissions today means sharper cuts in the future. The U.S. Dept. of Energy is already looking at capturing CO2 from ambient air – i.e. for the scenario where zero emissions of CO2 aren’t enough, but we have to go to *negative* emissions. That’s *a lot* more expensive.

Unfortunately, I think the UEA emails complaining about McIntyre’s FOIA-harassment of climate scientists have created enough FUD to screw any movement on pricing carbon in the U.S. for a decade, at least. Which means the Chinese won’t do much that’s substantive, although probably still enough that when the U.S. does do something in 2020, it’ll be too far behind in the technology curve relative to China to gain any market share.

#59: the argument is laid out clearly, and you can’t even be bothered to construct a counter-argument. You just know what you believe and who you believe, and that settles it.

You do fit your chosen name perfectly.

Non-scientists can get confused about statistical arguments, but this particular one was constructed by Lindzen to be dishonest. Namely – take a data series, find the longest period of time when a trend falls below some threshold of statistical significance, and broadcast an incredibly misleading statement that nothing has occured during the time period in question.

When, as a practicing scientist in the field, you know full well that you would have reversed the claim if you pushed the starting time by one year.

has never risen above tendentious sophistry

Why is it that certain types of people think the term “sophistry” is a valid place-holder for argument? What do you think the term means, dear libertarian? Is “sophistry” more than an arrangement of words that you don’t like?

“Indeed, this kind of response is characteristic of the intellectual collapse of libertarianism.”

Heh. At least we had somewhere to collapse from Quiggin.

#63 “Sophistry” is specious argument designed to deceive. Lindzen is one of the top few atmospheric scientists on the planet. Yet we should rather listen to some blogger/part-time economist barely known outside his own country in his chosen field? I am not one for arguing from authority, but let’s just say Quiggin’s take on the veracity of Lindzen’s statements are hardly relevant. More important is that the climate scientists themselves admit their models are at a loss to explain the plateau in temperatures for the past decade.

“So I presume Libertarian would apply the same principle to all of those who are experts in the field of climate science and give more credence to professional scientists like Hansen or Schmidt than to bloggers with no relevant qualifications or expertise.”

I think that this is a classic symptom of junk science – taking one or two actual experts in a field, hyping their credentials, and ignoring the several hundred to several thousand who disagree. Note that it’s a classic in creationism – setting up a debate between a creationist with some credentials, and *a* biologist. This makes a 10,000:1 controversy look like a 1:1 controversy.

Now, if there was something happening in the real world which added weight to those few dissenters, that’s one thing; it might well be that those dissenters are heading for historical fame as the pioneers of a new theory. But what we see here is year after year after ….. after year of more and more evidence piling up agains the dissenters.

“There has been a plateau in global temperatures for the past decade ”

Bullshit – now you’re leaning on the 1998 El Nino.

double fault to the libertarian – anybody want to go for strike three?

hahaha. You guys are so funny. The plateau is significant for the *models*. They don’t exhibit that kind of decadal variability. There’s a good reason for that: they’re programmed for CO2 to produce warming, not so much to model the more complex processes in the climate system (since many of them are still not well-understood). So all they can do when you pump up CO2 is show a largely monotonic temperature rise.

If you read Lindzen more widely you’d realize his primary schtick is the difference between what the models predict and how the real climate behaves. Of course, if you’re a devout believer in the Church of Global Warming, you’d prefer to listen to washed-up blogger-economists than have your faith questioned by someone who knows what he is talking about.

There’s some big words in that explanation Barry/aa, so feel free to take your time responding.

Lindzen says ‘There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995’.

Libertarian says “Regardless, the argument here is about “statistically significant” vs “significant”. ”

Convenient word that, “Regardless”, as in “plunging on, regardless”, … libertarian wants to go here:

Fox News: Global Warming in Last 15 Years Insignificant, U.K.’s Top Climate Scientist Admits

“If you read Lindzen more widely you’d realize his primary schtick is the difference between what the models predict and how the real climate behaves.”

No, the difference is between what the (accepted) models predict and what Lindzen’s models predict. The trope of “you’re talking about models, I’m talking real climate” is a loada baloney. Even the denialists use satellite temperature data, but the satellites don’t measure temperature, they capture microwaves, whiich must be converted to temperature by … a model.

Phil Jones did say the change was “nearly significant”, I wonder if he said “Well, the slope of the linear model fitted to the time series of temperatures over the last 15 years is significant at the 10% (or 15%) level”, would the denialists have jumped all over him for exaggerating the significance? Jones (as a good and cautious scientist) stuck with the 5% level, but as any statistician will tell you, 5% is more a traditionally-used figure than one derived from any first principles. The medical crowd use it a lot, so it turns up a lot in treatment protocols, but in many ways it is arbitrary. Pity Jones did not just quote the p-value and leave it at that.

Libertarian #75 – CO2 does produce warming, as do methane, CFC’s and a few other gases. So I fail to see what the problem is with models showing warming…

Furthermore, the models are programmed to include clouds, ice, land surface, ocean surface, ocean overturning circulation, rivers, sulphates, vegetation and probably other things that I can’t recall and aren’t immediately written in the reference I have here. (reference page 99 chapter 1 IPCC FAR) Moreover you have failed to give us an example of a model showing a largely monotonic temperature rise. Care to do so?

“And why would we need to rely on “washed up blogger-economists” when we there is a huge body of peer-reviewed science which supports our position?”

All created by what we now know to be the biggest circle-jerk in the history of science.

What’ s he point in debating a scientific question with someone who rejects the entire body of science?

Wow, that was one humiliating exchange for libertarian.

“What’ s he point in debating a scientific question with someone who rejects the entire body of science?”

What’s the point in debating a scientific question with someone who believes global warming alarmism constitutes the entire body of science?

Sorry control freaks, you don’t get to tax me for breathing.

I think we can tell the Lawyers Guns and Money crowd that a New Internet Tradition has been formed today: the glibertarian version of Godwin’s Law

libertarian #90 – is that supposed to be an argument or a contradiction?

Can’t we all just agree that he is Wrong on The Internet, and move on?