Stats and climate change – a response to Jim Ryan

cuffleyburgers

And especially if the 97 doctors were all working with the same interpretation of the same data which had been tampered with to remove signs that might otherwise indicate a negative diagnosis.

Rhoda Klapp

Is that the level of their debate? A lot of folk agree with me so I must be right? Well, it hasn't worked for me at the coffee house.

Anyhow, if their case is so damn good why did they need to cheat. And if their cheating was by fixing the accepted temperature record of the last century, how many of the people on their side have been duped by that data?

Time to start the debate again, and exclude all the cheats, this time.

Rhoda Klapp

Oh, and surgeons ALWAYS want to cut you open.

David

"Remember that a generation ago we were worried by global cooling and the coming of the next ice age"

Sigh. In the seventies, there were a relatively small number of papers predicting a new ice age which were picked up by the mainstream press. Within the field though there were already a much larger number of papers prediciting a rise in temperature.

People really need to stop peddling myths. I'm all for debate, but you have to start from the facts.

Seacole Shanty

I wish I was good at maths (and stats.). I'd probably be a maths teacher and not an English teacher! They get paid more, don't they?

Peter from Maidstone

Rod, what do you think of Hugo Rifkind's rant in the Spectator this week? I found myself wondering, again, why I was paying to be called an idiot by the Spectator?

Jim Ryan

Hello Rod, Appreciate the response and at risk of this becoming a love in I agree with much of what you say, except as you might guess, in regard to one very important point. Yes, there are no certainties in Science, perish the thought that there might be. I also agree that science is, necessarily so, a very conservative process and any theories which challenge the prevailing standards will and should get a rough ride. Theories must be robust enough to withstand an avalanche of criticism.Individual scientists will only reluctantly give up their pet theories but if the evidence is sufficient they will have no other choice! Individual scientists may even try to suppress or distort data but sooner or later the data will out. There are many other scientists who will repeat experiments or observations. This is the crux, it's always the evidence, it always was. I think it was David Hume who sagely said that 'man should proportion his belief to the evidence'. Perhaps my cancer analogy was unfortunate and I don't think your response holds up but we digress. The point is that the evidence (sorry to be tiresome with that word but it is an important one)for AGW is compelling or in the words of the IPCC 'very likely' (> 90%). I'm not a climate scientist I hasten to add; but I'm a scientist nonetheless and one who has a reasonably good grasp of a complex area of research. Thatcomplexity deserves scrutiny but it also deserves respect. All scientific language is careful for obvious reasons which is why conditional terms like 'suggests', 'probable' and 'likely' are used as descriptors for probabilistic outcomes. You've said that you have some learning when it comes to statistics so tell me in your opinion that if there is a greater than 90% chance of something happening, say a storm coming, do you fold your arms and wait for the impossible until you confirm the prediction or do you act according to the evidence to prevent it, if at all possible. I can understand how a few holier than thou AGW types can have the opposite effect to their intentions but please bear in mind that the basis of AGW is good science, not green NGO posturings. You may neither have the time nor inclination but if you really want to get a grasp on the science, particularly in the context of AGW scepticisim you could do worse than checkout the highly accessible http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php. At the very least it will arm you against the lunatic fringe who often contribute to this site and some of whom imagined that my post was addressed to them. Anyway this exchange has been appreciated and now I feel I must retreat from this particular 15 minutes of fame and get back to the day job. You know how introverted and socally ineffective we scientists are! And should your sceptical position prove justified one day I shall be happy, if somewhat surprised, to buy you a pint or ten.

Bickers

Jim Ryan: good post but I'm worried about the way AGW has ben positioned by its advocates and the media ie. AGW = all global warming and/or all(dangereous) climate change.

In trying to understand what drives climate I'm afraid the masses are lazy in doing their own homework, instead depending on the media and so-called experts - I was in despair watching Question Time last night and an audience member stating the the Cumbrian floods were proof of climate change- how as a nation have we become so ignorant and ill informed/educated to make such a crass kindergarten comment.

The World has been warming since the Little Ice Age and is probably cooler than the Medievil Warming Period. Scientists are unable to work out what mankind's contribution is to this warming; it's likely to be small when compared to the vast natural forces at work e.g. the Sun & Oceans.

And to those that believe in AGW can you tell me what the right temperature is for our planet & why and how you can guarantee we can keep it there? Any problems, call King Canute, he was delusional in believing he could control nature!

Cool

This might seem a little unkind. A friend and I were discussing the AGW debate and pondering why they do it. Who are these climate warriors? What's in it for them?
Well you see, apart from the salaries and jobs it gives people, it also allows nonentities to have their moment, to be an 'expert', a specialist. Did anyone see the Daily Politics debate (BBC) chaired by Andrew Neil? Professor Watson seems an exact case in point.

Rhoda Klapp

Jim, the crooks at the CRU suborned the IPCC process, as seen in these emails and the reviewers comments and replies. So the evidence is tainted. No problem, just put it all out again, without the input of the crooked CRU, and we'll start the debate again.

Oh, it would be nice to see the working for the IPCC's climate sensitivty figure, which assumes water vapour feedback not in evidence. Just how do they come to that 1.5-4.5 degrees per doubling? And where is the tropospheric response that is supposed to be there? How about the earth's radiation budget, how do the predicted figures fit with the staellite observations? And there's albedo. who has the figures for that?

No rush. We'll be looking at all this stuff, and I'm sure you can assuage any doubts.

Lee Jakeman

Rhoda: "Oh, and surgeons ALWAYS want to cut you open".

No they don't. Only 97% of them do. :-)

John Levett

David - (sigh) read what Rod says:

"Remember that a generation ago we were worried by global cooling and the coming of the next ice age."

That's exactly how I recall it. It doesn't matter how many scientists published papers saying something quite different - what got reported to the public was that we were all going to freeze to death. Now we have the same hysteria except that, this time, the papers are only reporting the other side of the story.

They were wrong last time and my guess is that they're wrong this time. The main difference now is that we have some evidence that suggests that the other side of the story has been suppressed by the so-called 'scientists' as well as the press.

Jim Ryan

FYI, particularly those hostile to AGW. This is a link where you can examine the context of the CRU hack job. Go on I dare you, try challenging some climate scientists with arguments based on wait for it.........science. Yes, that's right open forum, lots of data links with which you can try to formulate your own hypotheses. That will be a little difficult for you, should prove amusing. Bring Melanie, that will be even more amusing: Mel P v NASA Goddard Scientist
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/

Dixon

"Cool
November 27th, 2009 3:05pm
This might seem a little unkind. A friend and I were discussing the AGW debate and pondering why they do it. Who are these climate warriors? What's in it for them?
Well you see, apart from the salaries and jobs it gives people, it also allows nonentities to have their moment, to be an 'expert', a specialist. Did anyone see the Daily Politics debate (BBC) chaired by Andrew Neil? Professor Watson seems an exact case in point."

To understand such "tribes" ( whether pro or anti anything ) you must always consider the importance of being of one view or another to a persons fundamental sense of identity. In the case of religion, this is openly worn, "I am a Christiam/Buddhist/Muslim/Jedi" and everyone understands the importance of it to the persons sense of who they are. In other "tribes", such as environmentalists, the same atavistic process masquerades behind "excuses" and rationalisations, such as pseudo-science and pseudo-rationalism.

We are ALL subject to this dynamic. We should ALL question why we believe what we do. This is an attitude utterly alien to environmentalists, even more than to those who have "faith".

Baffled

You say: "Suppose the tumour which the doctors believe afflicts me is a fairly rare type of tumour, one which affects only, say, one in 5000 people."

You don't make clear whether you mean it affects one in every 5000 people on Earth, or one in every 5000 who has a tumour. If it's the latter, that changes the odds.

Presumably, in this example, you already have a tumour, or you would not have consulted the 100 surgeons in the first place.

That changes the question from "What are the chances of getting this kind of tumour?" to "What are the chances that this tumour has that cause?"

It's a great mistake to treat events that have causes (even if those causes are unknown)as if they were random, as the famous miscarriage of justice about cot deaths proved.

EyeSee

Jim Ryan supports the 'fact' of AGW by saying that the IPCC say it is a greater than 90% chance that it is man made. So keeping it in the club. A small group of people, controlling the agenda set up the IPCC and draw data from friends (suitably altered where required) and 'peer review' each others work. Pure politics. MP's trust themselves with their expenses and if considered in error, investigate and judge themselves; nice little closed club. It is a totalitarian and intolerant attitude and it is prevalent in politics today. The EU is based on it, so is the IPCC.

AGW position; Carbon Dioxide, now to be referred to perjoratively as Black Carbon, pollutes the atmosphere and, acting as a greenhouse gas traps solar radiation within the atmosphere thus raising global temperatures. Without man and his burning of fossil fuels this would not be the case as the planet would be in balance naturally. The proof of this is that in the last 150 years temperatures have risen, dramatically so in the 20th century. Computer models of this show it will be catastrophic within 100 years.

The anti position is: Temperatures have fluctuated throughout history, being warmer in the 1300's, how come this one is our fault? CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas and has almost no impact on global temperature. CO2 levels rise 400-800 years AFTER the temperature rises not the other way around. The computer models are programmed to produce the results as desired and anyway, how is a computer prediction science? The hottest years in the 20th century were not that recent, they were in the 1930's. Even the IPCC reports contain caveats (though usually nothing like what the contributing authors originally submitted) but these miraculously disappear from the confident, strident views of the Summary for Politicians.

Rod talks about a quashing of debate and that is right. The Warmists simply do not want debate, they cannot win it. If you demand facts and proof, they they just tell you to trust them and cross their fingers behind their backs. All the publications that try to bring proof to the table are from the anti's.

Baron

Jim Ryan @ 1.54:

Nothing much to disagree except for the resultant policy response to the ‘higher than 90% certainty’ that the 6bn of us plodding on this planet are messing the world up. Bickers puts the finger on it. Is 280ppm density of CO2 (the pre-hike level) the right level? Why? You may correct me, but plant growth benefits the most with CO2 levels around 1500ppm. Since plants provide the bulk of sustenance for humans and the animals we slaughter for meat what’s the problem? Rising sea levels? Well, let’s move to the higher grounds. It’s cheaper than killing off the industrial machine that made us comfortable beyond belief.

Moreover, the response to the GW, if indeed it is engendered by our plundering the earth primary resources and burning fossil fuels like mad, doesn’t have to be the reversal of it. We might adapt to it. Isn’t the adaptation of species one of the central tenets of Darwin’s theory?

The Red Menace used to argue that ‘everyone who isn’t with us is against us’. As the regime continued to lose the battle of ideas, the slogan morphed to ‘everyone who isn’t against us is with is’. A subtle, but a clever difference. The AGW zealots won’t get far calling the sceptics deniers, refusing to debate AGW seriously, and denying grants and assistance to those scientists who have a different take on the issue.

Still, to switch from a near wholesale reliance on fossil fuels to alternative energy within a lifetime of one generation or so seems to me to border on insanity. The relocation of financial resources will have to be massive, at a time when those countries that will bear the burden of it can hardly afford it. The West may just about to bear it, for the developing countries it may be suicidal

Some of the ideas on curbing GW don’t inspire confidence either, and may lead to outcomes similar to the DDT fiasco. The solar panels conversion ratio hasn’t moved much beyond 15% . The rest of the energy gets reflected back, and hence my contribute to an acceleration of the greenhouse effect. Wind power relies on steady winds, has anyone told the winds to behave? Mercury in discarded GW approved bulbs may find its way into water supply…

Rhoda Klapp

Jim links us to realclimate. Not so convincing, for the ralclimate site is linked to 'scientists' who are part of the same crew who are in CRU. They have hijacked peer review between them, reviewing each others' papers and excluding others. And of course realclimate does not put up comments which pose difficult questions. Just prove it all 'again', Jim, too many crooks the first time. And my questions about the sensitivity number, or the radiation budget, or the troposphere's absent signal? You perhaps didn't notice them?

KB

Rod,

Interesting analogy. You're talking about sensitivity and specificity, I think. It would be interesting to plug some historical data into that (how many times have "right thinkers" been right or wrong about major issues) and see what kind of figure you get.

Also, we talk of climate research as if it's just like any other branch of science. But it is fundamentally different in that you can't repeat the experiment and you can't vary conditions, so the usual "Scientific Method" is inapplicable. Add to this the difficulty that direct data is unavailable - proxies of unknown quality must be used for most of the record.

Who are these climate warriors? What's in it for them?

One of the leaked CRU files shows that Phil Jones was in receipt of £13.7 million of grants/funds. I can understand this if one goes around shouting "the end of the world is nigh", but for saying "relax, everything is fine"?

Dr Rigueur

Mr Cool,

Right. That Jim Ryan who Rod is talking about, doesn't sound like a real scientist to me. Most of the real ones can't string a half decent sentence together. They all sound a bit Daleky. Mr Ryan seems to be too nice. Even if he is a fool.

Frau Klapp,
The best surgeons don't open you up at all. They do it through a keyhole these days.

rod seacole liddle

KB and others, but especially KB - bang on. How do we check that out?

Jim - nothing wrong with a love-in, think we should have them more often.

Richard Dale

Jim Ryan

Your entire argument is rendered meaningless as it is entirely based on data and models that are fundamentally flawed.

The most damning evidence from the CRU information is not in the emails, but in the data and the computer programs used to process those data. The data is so confused that a programmer who spent 3 years trying to could not make sense of them. The computer programs are both flawed (they manage to give negative answers to squares, appropriate I suppose as only imaginary numbers have negative squares) and fraudulent. The programmers' remarks (used to document programming) show that algorithms were applied simply to force the results to come out as expected. They had no basis in reality.

Since all the organisations you talk about rely on this incomprehensible data set and those flawed and fraudulent models, nothing you are basing your beliefs on is reliable.

Baron Pipin II

Jim Ryan:

And another thing: On Rod’s previous blog on the same subject I suggested to you that the list of the institutions that you posted that endorsed the AGW proves nothing by pointing to a similar list of institutions in the former USSR that proved conclusively that communism wasn’t the most perfect societal arrangement only in theory, but real life, too. The arguments put forward for the creed of communism were very persuasive, involved many scientific disciplines, and many were based on computer modelling, too. Nobody forced these scientists to make such claims They did it, because they knew who buttered their bread.

Moreover, there were many in the West, both institutions and individuals, who were convinced proponents of the same doctrine. No pressure from the Red Menace, no pressure from anyone. These esteemed bodies, and the highly erudite individuals were proven wrong.

Fanaticism doesn’t imply the greatness of an objective, merely an obsessive desire in reaching it.

Rhoda Klapp

Jim, what we see here is the way people are thinking now. If you have anything better, bring it. Don't be relying on cheats though.

Jim Ryan

EyeSee(not)- where to begin. You repeat so many falsehoods and misunderstandings that have been around for years. Either you are a contrarian or you have no scientific understanding of the issue. Rhoda asks 'is this the level of debate' and then goes on a paranoid rant about cheating scientists. So Rhoda, if the scientists can't be trusted, do you get your science from London Taxi drivers? Why are all you people so frightened of science? I gave you a link to the science and some climate scientists. Climate science is not some monolithic club, there are several diciplines and many different strands of research which converge on this issue. Ask them the questions please! They will respond, they respond exhaustively to these questions all the time. About the e-mails, about the science, there are lots of links to the data at NASA Goddard - LOOK AT IT IT IS THERE. Find one, just one, serious scientific publication in recent years which refutes AGW?

Eyesee says:
The anti position is:

Temperatures have fluctuated throughout history, being warmer in the 1300's, how come this one is our fault? JR- Temps have fluctuated throughout geologic time and have a myriad of causes, so? Medieval warm period to which you allude was not very likely warmer than today - the hockey stick, yes that stick, has been based on 10 separtae strands of data and ALL show the same pattern. Yes it is your (anthropogenically) your fault. Don't take it personally, get over it and start thinking.

CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas and has almost no impact on global temperature. JR - CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas but is also responsible for significant climate forcing. Have you heard on Venus? It's truly a case of size doesn't matter.

CO2 levels rise 400-800 years AFTER the temperature rises not the other way around. JR - True but CO2 is not the only factor in global warming. The Milankovich cycle results in warming of the earth and retreat from periodic ice ages; as the sea warms it releases more CO2 into the atmosphere amplifying the warming process and demonstrating CO2 as a potent greenhouse gas because unlike water vapour which is a significant feedback not forcing, it stays in the atmosphere. Water vapour, to you rain, does not.

The computer models are programmed to produce the results as desired and anyway, how is a computer prediction science? The hottest years in the 20th century were not that recent, they were in the 1930's. JR - F**k me, the 1930s are NOT the hottest on record, 10 of the last 15 years have been the hottest on record, these have been measured itis not a case of opinion. The 1930s to which you refer was the hottest on record for the US, not for average global temperature!

The actual climate scientists can address these issues much better than I. Why not ask them and if you are not satisfied with their answer you can challenge them. Assuming you are genuinely interested in the science.

Dr Riguer - almost funny until predictably you compare scientists to Daleks, must have had them rolling in the aisles. My PhD is from Imperial, I suspect your pseudonymn is just that.

Baron, no one but a few misanthropic deep greens are advocating 'killing off the industrial machine that has brought prosperity'. But you make a good point about adaptation, something we humans are very good at. It won't be easy but do you really want the alternative when there is no real practical obstacle to supplanting fossil fuels. All is required is a bit of vision and the econmic and political will. Take a look at the DESERTEC project. Apparently 1% of the deserts of the world seeded with concentrated solar thermal power would satisfy the world's energy needs and maintain current lifestyle. This is big stuff but there is no scientific or technical obstacle, only social and political ones. fossil fuel consumption is not sustainable regardless of AGW.

Richard, I'd like to see an exchange between you and an actual climate modeller as you appear to have specialised knowledge - well abit of maths anyway - so off you go and get back to me with the answer. I know that modelling has been successfully used to retrofit 20th century warming and agrees very well with the actual measurements and only does so when anthropogenic activities are factored into the model. Jim Hansen of NASA modelled the climate, in a nature paper I think, in the late 80s and his predictions agree well with the measured temps over the next 20 years. Uncannily he entered a theoretical volcanic eruption into his model which predicted relative cooling, in order to show that certain aspects of the model worked. Remarkably the temps variation due to an actual large volcanic eruption in the 1990s once again agreed with the model. All of this is in the literature, not my opinion.I'm no expert but methinks this modelling stuff has got something going for it. And once and for all AGW doesn't stand or fall with modelling which is merely one of several strands of research. But you know this, don't you. Look forward to your exchange with Jim Hansen or an associate at NASA Goddard.

Rod, I think I'll buy you those 10 pints now! Just for the hec of it. I fear my words, not that they are anything special, will fall on 'deaf ears'. Keep an eye on the responses, it might be interesting if you can gauge from the tone and content how interested these people are in the science.

Augustus

We need more eminent scientists to make a statement along these lines: We have discovered that global warming over the past x number of years was indeed man-
made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2, it was created by man-made adjustments
of the temperature. That is the disgrace that should be repeated
until the press and public get the message.

Jim Ryan

Baron @ 6.38,

I didn't respond to that particular analogy because it was fatuous in the extreme and redolent of a 'reds under the bed' paranoid neurosis. Such shoddy thinking if it can be called thinking at all has no place in scientific discourse. If the institutions listed are blindly following the AGW mantra then they must be doing so in regard to evoultion, germ theroy of disease, theory of gravity, quantum theory etc etc. There come's a time when a man is so open minded his brain falls out - quite apt in your case.

Jim Ryan

EyeSee(not)- where to begin. You repeat so many falsehoods and misunderstandings that have been around for years. Either you are a contrarian or you have no scientific understanding of the issue. Rhoda asks 'is this the level of debate' and then goes on a paranoid rant about cheating scientists. So Rhoda, if the scientists can't be trusted, do you get your science from London Taxi drivers? Why are all you people so frightened of science? I gave you a link to the science and some climate scientists. Climate science is not some monolithic club, there are several diciplines and many different strands of research which converge on this issue. Ask them the questions please! They will respond, they respond exhaustively to these questions all the time. About the e-mails, about the science, there are lots of links to the data at NASA Goddard - LOOK AT IT IT IS THERE. Find one, just one, serious scientific publication in recent years which refutes AGW?

Eyesee says:
The anti position is:

Temperatures have fluctuated throughout history, being warmer in the 1300's, how come this one is our fault? JR- Temps have fluctuated throughout geologic time and have a myriad of causes, so? Medieval warm period to which you allude was not very likely warmer than today - the hockey stick, yes that stick, has been based on 10 separtae strands of data and ALL show the same pattern. Yes it is your (anthropogenically) your fault. Don't take it personally, get over it and start thinking.

CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas and has almost no impact on global temperature. JR - CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas but is also responsible for significant climate forcing. Have you heard on Venus? It's truly a case of size doesn't matter.

CO2 levels rise 400-800 years AFTER the temperature rises not the other way around. JR - True but CO2 is not the only factor in global warming. The Milankovich cycle results in warming of the earth and retreat from periodic ice ages; as the sea warms it releases more CO2 into the atmosphere amplifying the warming process and demonstrating CO2 as a potent greenhouse gas because unlike water vapour which is a significant feedback not forcing, it stays in the atmosphere. Water vapour, to you rain, does not.

The computer models are programmed to produce the results as desired and anyway, how is a computer prediction science? The hottest years in the 20th century were not that recent, they were in the 1930's. JR - F**k me, the 1930s are NOT the hottest on record, 10 of the last 15 years have been the hottest on record, these have been measured itis not a case of opinion. The 1930s to which you refer was the hottest on record for the US, not for average global temperature!

The actual climate scientists can address these issues much better than I. Why not ask them and if you are not satisfied with their answer you can challenge them. Assuming you are genuinely interested in the science.

Dr Riguer - almost funny until predictably you compare scientists to Daleks, must have had them rolling in the aisles. My PhD is from Imperial, I suspect your pseudonymn is just that.

Baron, no one but a few misanthropic deep greens are advocating 'killing off the industrial machine that has brought prosperity'. But you make a good point about adaptation, something we humans are very good at. It won't be easy but do you really want the alternative when there is no real practical obstacle to supplanting fossil fuels. All is required is a bit of vision and the econmic and political will. Take a look at the DESERTEC project. Apparently 1% of the deserts of the world seeded with concentrated solar thermal power would satisfy the world's energy needs and maintain current lifestyle. This is big stuff but there is no scientific or technical obstacle, only social and political ones. fossil fuel consumption is not sustainable regardless of AGW.

Richard, I'd like to see an exchange between you and an actual climate modeller as you appear to have specialised knowledge - well abit of maths anyway - so off you go and get back to me with the answer. I know that modelling has been successfully used to retrofit 20th century warming and agrees very well with the actual measurements and only does so when anthropogenic activities are factored into the model. Jim Hansen of NASA modelled the climate, in a nature paper I think, in the late 80s and his predictions agree well with the measured temps over the next 20 years. Uncannily he entered a theoretical volcanic eruption into his model which predicted relative cooling, in order to show that certain aspects of the model worked. Remarkably the temps variation due to an actual large volcanic eruption in the 1990s once again agreed with the model. All of this is in the literature, not my opinion.I'm no expert but methinks this modelling stuff has got something going for it. And once and for all AGW doesn't stand or fall with modelling which is merely one of several strands of research. But you know this, don't you. Look forward to your exchange with Jim Hansen or an associate at NASA Goddard.

Rod, I think I'll buy you those 10 pints now! Just for the hec of it. I fear my words, not that they are anything special, will fall on 'deaf ears'. Keep an eye on the responses, it might be interesting if you can gauge from the tone and content how interested these people are in the science.

rod polar bear liddle

Jim - an elegant and painstaking and measured response, sir. The ten pints are on me. I will post up a response tomorrow under a new blog. This is becoming like Marx v Feuerbach. I'm happy to be Feuerbach..............

Russell Seitz

Rod , if you'd rather consult 17,000 psychic surgeons , chiropractors and leech farm proprietors than face up to a single GP, it's your funeral .

Perhaps you should buy a climate science textbook before delivering your 17,001st opinion as to how palaeoclimatologists behaving badly are supposed to overrule something so A-level physically commonplace as the impact of thermally opaque gases on radiative transfer . It's sad to see the Speccie look so dumb, given Monbiot's candor.

Michael Gill

@Jim Ryan

Didn't take you long to claim the "if you don't agree with me you must be mad mantra" did it?

Tosser.

Fearless Frank

Bickers: call King Canute, he was delusional in believing he could control nature!
Poor old Canute, how often this charge is leveled at him!
His aim was to prove that he could NOT control the tides. Obviously, they didn't have media advisers back in those happy times.

John Symes

Jim
Keep trying. If you keep saying it long enough, people will believe you. As Lewis Carroll said:

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."

bit thick... but trying!

“Suppose the tumour which the doctors believe afflicts me is a fairly rare type of tumour, one which affects only, say, one in 5000 people. If that is the case then the likelihood that I do not have that tumour, and that those 97% of surgeons have made a wrong diagnosis, and that I therefore do not need an operation, is far, far higher than the likelihood that I do have a tumour and do need it operated upon.”

Err, wait a moment. Surely the variable of interest is the rate of false diagnoses each of your doctors commits on average, not how common the disease is in general. These two variables (rate of false diagnoses, rate of incidence in pop.) should be independent, at least if we assume that the doctors you're consulting are specialists who see these kinds of tumors on a regular basis. Then how common the disease is in the general population becomes irrelevant to the individual likelihood each of your doctors have of getting your diagnosis Right (the likelihood that you Have contracted the disease) – what matters is simply their individual rates of success/failure. Say they’re crap – each has a diagnosis-failure rate for this particular disease of 0.7 (i.e. out of ten diagnoses, they get 7 wrong). Each doctor’s diagnosis is independent of the others (they work at different hospitals). Then the cumulative likelihood that all 97 got the diagnosis wrong is 0.7 (to the power of 97) = 9.43*e(to the -16). Even if you set their failure rates at an extremely conservative 0.9 (i.e. 90% of their diagnoses are wrong), their cumulative likelihood of having gotten it wrong is still only 0.0000364.

Rod, you’d better get down to the operating room well quick!

Fergus Pickering

Though Jim Ryan's posts are very long and, I have to say, bloody tedious, they don't seem to SAY much other than that there are these long-headed scientist types about, sort of super-Jeeveses, and that we Bertie Woosters had better go along with them decidng everything right down to our tastes in socks. It doesn't address at all the idea that they appear to be lying in order to protect their status and income. Now I know that Jeeves would do no such thing, but I'm not quite so sure of the scientists. Didn't the third Reich have armies of scientists, good at the rocket and bomb-producing end, perhaps not so dusty in other discplines? And wasn't the Victorian theory of the wandering womb scientific? Of course that was then and it's quite different now. I mean we live in the 21st century, don't we? The Modern World. Progress etcetera.

GeoffM

Rod, I had a method of uncovering fraud, fiddles, resistance to change, obfuscation and lies during my years as a Finance Director.

Follow the money!

You have put your finger on it. there is money in climate change. Researchers are always hungry for it.

What was one of my biggest shocks in my working life? When I worked for a national charity that supported medical research.

I began to question researchers about objectives, spending, assets, peer reviews etc as a part of my job to ensure our money was well spent.

First I had people ignore me, then they were condescending (after all I was "only" the Finance Director - not a Scientist), then my CEO had "irate" Professors on the phone (How DARE he), then they approached Trustees.

Only with persistence and a thick skin did I prevail.

Then every stone I overturned exposed something ugly. Wasted money, expensive assets gone missing, shoddy administration, falsified/unsupported findings, late or missing reports and so on.

I NEVER trust a scientist now. they are not high minded saints - just guys who are careerists and who desperately need research funds to pay for their faculty and salary.

rod polar bear liddle

Then read something else, Russell, you arrogant arse. You clearly haven't read this properly.

Rhoda Klapp

Yes, Jim. but they did cheat, and so their work is not to be trusted.

And now it seems that UEA is practicing something called post-normal science. Here's their professor's view...

Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government (including the UKCIP98 and UKCIP02 scenarios, and reviewer for UKCP09), the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF-International and the IPCC, and was co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, as well as a contributing author for several other chapters. Hulme has been a champion and exponent of post-normal science for some years to serve his own socialist agenda, and this is what he has to say about post-normal science (some italics added):

Mike Hulme wrote:Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs…where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken.

It has been labelled “post-normal” science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus…on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy…The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.

Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.

The largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday [March 12, 2009] in Copenhagen…I attended the Conference, chaired a session…[The] statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team…contained…a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee…interpreting it for a political audience…And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.

…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.

Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…

The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.

There is something about this idea that makes it very powerful for lots of different interest groups to latch on to, whether for political reasons, for commercial interests, social interests in the case of NGOs, and a whole lot of new social movements looking for counter culture trends.

Climate change has moved from being a predominantly physical phenomenon to being a social one…It is circulating anxiously in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy, and with mobilising force in business, law, academia, development, welfare, religion, ethics, art and celebrity.

Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves…mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition…

The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.

…climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences…climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes…climate change has become “the mother of all issues”, the key narrative within which all environmental politics – from global to local – is now framed…Rather than asking “how do we solve climate change?” we need to turn the question around and ask: “how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations…?”

We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us…we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit…As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our geographical, social and virtual worlds in creative ways…it can inspire new artistic creations in visual, written and dramatised media. The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking about our relationship with the future….We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.

RK: Jim, do you believe in this? Yes or no is enough, don't go to the trouble of writing in a giant diversionary screed, like last time.

Rhoda Klapp

Models! He comes here with models! The climate lobby want to spend trillions, dial back our standard of living, introduce a world tax, and what they base it on is models. Not only that, but the people who want the money wrote the models, and won't show us the models themselves OR the parameters they use for their runs, NOR the data from the runs which don't give the results they want. They justify their accuracy by saying that in the past they fit the data record. Except that we now know the data records were put together by cheats, so if they match the cheats' data they don't really match anything relevant at all.

Why do I call them cheats? Their own programs as revealed in the leak show them subracting fixed amounts from past temperature records and adding fixed amounts to more recent records, to show a change that does not exist. Then you get some idiot on here saying the records from the 30s don't show as higher than now. Of course they don't, the cheats are in control of the old data.

Which is why it all has to be done again, honestly this time.

And if the models could be shown to be at the standard of programming, validation and verification met by any commonplace cash-machine software, well, isn't that a reasonable pre-requisite to even pretending they predict anything worth worrying about.

Baron Pipin II

Jim Ryan @ 8.14:

a word in your ear: never respond with anger, if you do, it shows you got hurt.

The analogy of the many institutions and individuals, in the USSR and elsewhere, coming up with scientific justification of the creed of communism has bugger all to do with the ‘reds under the beds’ nonsense. For the brain of a scientist to miss this seems strange. It simply says that scientists may, and on occasions do chase the wrong trail, and that money talks. That’s all. Eugenics in the pre-war years were backed by Left and Right, and others. I bet you, a keen proponent of it could have scribbled a list like yours, too.

And yes, in other disciplines a similar, albeit less pronounced tendency to silence critics, also exists. It’s more visible in those fields of scientific endeavour where orthodoxy has been threatened the most e.g. Darwinian evolutionary theory. The Dawkinses are kicking like hell, in part because their careers, sinecures, money are at stake. Ever seen any of the arse-licking media giving half an hour to Michael Behe or Michael Denton? Nope, but Mr. Dawkins keeps travelling round the world to interview religious nutcases regularly. When asked ‘show us the fossil ‘evidence’, the camera obligingly scans the shelves of natural science museums at speed as if the random piles of bones were ‘the evidence’ of fishes morphing into reptiles or whatever.

In your scientifically solid reply to any of us who aren’t convinced and who express scepticism you conveniently missed answering, amongst others, the following simple points:

Why is the 280ppm of CO2 density the ‘ideal level”? Or, what is the ‘ideal’ level?

If human activity – flying, driving, cooking, steel bashing and the rest – accounts for around 4% of the annual aggregate discharge of the gas, what difference does it make to cut it by 40%, 60% or 80%? If we all dropped dead, the total release of CO2 would dip but marginally, i.e. 4%.

What was the cause of the mini-ice age between 1600-1730? Absence of CO2?

Like you, I have no desire to mess us for my three grandsons. Unlike you, I would prefer to rely on human ingenuity, the stuff that got us where we are, rather than on an unproven theory that calls for squandering billions, helping to fill up the dustbin of future waste with monstrous, unreliable wind turbines and such like.

I’m afraid, you have along way to go to make a solid case for the creed of AGW.

Ivan

Jim, it is good to see the care with which you are handling the debate, but I still remain unconvinced on a couple of levels.

There seem to me to be two main aspects to this whole issue; trying to understand past behaviour and predicting what will happen in the future. Both these require modelling - and this is where there is pleanty of scope for fun.

Some of the core science that underlines these models is uncontroversial, such as the greenhouse properties of CO2. However, what is much harder to ascertain is wherther the models are complete, and whether the balance between the various factors is correct.

How you set these parameters is key, and anyone with experience of trying to model systems with the sort of complexities that we are talking about here knows how difficult it is to get accurate predictions (or even know the true error estimates). We should be extremely cautious of basing policy on the results of such modelling (to put it in nice, diplomatic terms).

This is not to say that we should not be considering the environment in policy. In fact, there is a strong case for being much more aggressive in protecting the environment and that the current emphasis on AGW risks taking attention away from other important environmental issues.

Hugh Davis

Exactly! I believe it was Einstein who said that it only takes ONE fact to disprove a scientific theory.
And your fellow columnist Hugo Rifkind in this week's Spectator wants James Delingpole (and presumably you also) to desist from writing anything about AGW because he does not have a PhD in Climatology. I have responded with a letter to the Editor as follows:- Sir:
Hugo Rifkind is under a misapprehension if he believes that scepticism of man-made global warming is merely a consensus of ignorant right wing pundits -see U. S. Senate Minority Report:
More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims, 16 March 2009. His assertion that James Delingpole is not qualified to report on the research of these scientists because he does not hold a PhD in climatology clearly does not bear scrutiny. Is he more willing perhaps to listen to non-scientist Al Gore who stated recently that the Earth's temperature a few miles down is several million degrees, and whose film "An Inconvenient Truth" has been shown to contain 35 inaccuracies?
Mr Rifkind writes that he trusts engineers to build bridges, but if they are designed using scientific research that has been massaged to make it conform to some preconceived notions (as appears to happen at the Climatic Research Unit) then they will be quite likely to collapse.

Baron Pipin II

And another thing. Below is an extract written by a scientist. It’s longish, but worth reading. It back up Rhoda’s views fully, and yes, Rhoda, you are a Star.

'The globe has been, in trend terms, warming since the last ice age, with natural variability of cooler and warmer periods, but with a definite tilt to the upside. So to say we're experiencing warming, whilst perhaps true, is frankly irrelevant to the debate of AGW.

To prove AGW you will have to show that the warming is increasing at a much faster rate than the trend, that this faster rate of warming is unusual (indeed unprecedented), that the levels of atmospheric CO2 correlates to and drives the warming, that the increased levels of CO2 are resulting from mankind burning hydrocarbons (and not simply a lag of oceanic release responsive to increased global temps), that projected warming will be a net debit to mankind.

As the climate troofers can't even get off first base (by their own admission), by proving that the globe is warming above trend I'll give the whole thing a pass.

Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has recently published a paper which proves that IPCC models are overstating by 6 times the relevance of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Dr. Lindzen has found that heat is radiated out into space at a far higher rate than any modelling system to date can account for. Dr Lindzen’s peer- reviewed work states: "We now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate."
Dr Lindzen also states: "The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant global warming for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly 8 years. Even a strong el Nino ‘expected in the coming months’ will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend. More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade 'global warming' must accumulate, have been cooling over the past 6 years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the official theory that global warming will happen on anything other than a minute scale."
Lindzen & Choi (2009). 
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L16705, doi:10.1029/2009GL039628, 2009 
On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data 
Richard S. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi 
Received 16 June 2009; revised 14 July 2009; accepted 20 July 2009; published 26 August 2009.'

James

Jim Ryan, I must admit, you make a persuasive case. I think for any of us to come back and comment, we really need to actually get off our asses and genuinely question the scientists who "respond exhaustively to these questions all the time" at the links provided.

Personally, I am too lazy to do this... but I hope Rod does, and can come back with more info on these links.

James Murphy

Am I alone in detecting more than just a whiff of scientific sanctimony operating here between the blessed Rod and his communicant, Jim Ryan? Though he confesses himself a sceptic, it is surely revealing that His Holier-than-thou-ness, Rod, sees fit to bestow the grace of a personal blog audience upon a blatant MMGW supporter over and above anyone else! - Rod implicitly defends this by recommending Mr Ryan's informed and scientific approach, when the latter's is, in fact, nothing of the sort; being, in fact, an expression of 'parti pris' dressed up as objectivity. - Rod's attitude also lends dangerous support to the dogma that only scientists with intellectual access to the language of complex models can understand the problem. In the religion of scientism, this leads to a fatal separation between the priesthood (them) and (us) the lowly faithful. It's as if we mere unscientific mortals, not being party to their higher statistical truths, thereby exclude ourselves from revelation. How can we be foolish enough even to question the doctrine, not being conversant in its metaphorically Latinate language? Fortunately, there IS a Vulgate translation of the MMGW heresy - it is called common sense and deals in the straightforward facts and figures that lend themselves so fluently to simple truth. They are of the kind that do not blind with science but reveal themselves as self-evident. They are bravely disseminated by heterodox thinkers like Mel, rather than closet authoritarians masquerading as sceptics like Rod.

Ken

Corrupted scientific reports in the warming/cooling industry appear to have a track record, witness concerns from 1996:

Frederick Seitz Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996
http://www.congregator.net/articles/majordeception.html

bit thick... but trying!

Rod - what Would it take to persuade you that climate change is man-made, a serious problem, and requires an immediate policy response? If skepticism is rational, then surely there must be a point at which it becomes rational to abandon that skepticism. What is that point? What would you need to see?

Btw, are you off to the doctor now, or not? I fear for your health...

Nele Schindler

I very, very much liked when Rob called that bloke who mentioned The Monbiot without an enlightening epithet (such as 'lunatic') an 'arrogant arse'. Tally-ho! There are signs of life in them old bones!

Snowman

bit thick... but trying @ 3.43

well, perhaps the bit posted by Baron @ 1.53, the one that quotes from the recent report by Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT may be of help. What do you reckon?

Simon Stephenson

I'd be interested to hear from those in the AGW camp the answer to the following question:-

If the argument was turned on its head, and models predicted that the only way to prevent damaging increases in atmospheric temperatures was to increase forecast levels of atmospheric CO2, would you be more likely to:-

(a) press for a ratcheting up of industrialisation and human consumption

or

(b) be totally silent about global warming, and move on to the next piece of camouflaged dishonesty in your agenda to re-primitivise humanity

Simon Stephenson

James Murphy : 28/11 2.08pm

Quite right! How insightful to describe the MMGW attitude as that of a priesthood operating at a level of understanding out of reach to the hoi polloi.

Thank you.

DZ

Jim Ryan 1.54 'Yes, there are no certainties in Science, perish the thought that there might be'.

E=mc2
Boyles Law
First Law of Thermodynamics
Daltons Law
and so on ..... ??

Perish the thought indeed.

Fearless Frank

If we do all the things advocated to prevent or reverse climate change, when and how will they know whether or not it has worked?

bit thick... but trying!

Simon Stephenson:

I would start by burning all the straw men set up by the "skeptics" (e.g., "the next piece of camouflaged dishonesty in your agenda to re-primitivise humanity"), then I would buy stock in SINOPEC and fly on holiday in Tahiti.

Snowman: Well yes, Prof. Lindzen seems to have an argument, and I hope to goodness that he's correct. However, not being a climate scientist I'm not in a position to evaluate his argument. So I come down to the problem of choosing between the vast number of climate scientists who say climate change is a major problem, and the very, very small minority of qualified (!) scientists who disagree with them. (I ignore the Dellingpoles, just as I don't go to a novelist for medical advice) Given that the scientific process has generally been extremely successful at advancing human knowledge & well-being, and that scientific majorities in fact often Are right, I'll go with the 90%+. The other reason I'll go with them is for insurance reasons: if the science is uncertain and models are imperfect then, as Martin Wolf of the FT observed, there is even More reason to be scared, because all you are left with is the knowledge that you are dealing and messing (!) with a system that is vital to your well-being, has shifted in dramatic ways in the past (e.g. ice age), and may well do so again in ways that you find very hard to predict at present but have strong reason to believe you might be affecting. A shift of 4-8 degrees C in a few decades would be utterly disastrous. I would not wish to take the chance. For all of you who despise models and modellers, you may be interested to know that that is basically the view of Nicholas Taleb of Black Swan fame, arguably the greatest model-despiser currently around. If you don't understand how it works but it is vital to your well-being, then don't mess with it.

Btw: Am I the only one who thinks Rod L. doesn't have a clue about probabilities, or did I make a mistake (see above posts)?

Simon Stephenson

bit thick ... but trying : 6.50pm

So, what's your answer? If accelerating human material consumption were shown to be a help to combating global warming, would you be equally concened about GW as you appear to be now? Or, as it would no longer be a rod with which to beat human consumers, would you go lukewarm about it?

It's a serious question. I'm trying to establish the central motive for the AGW crusade, because I'm afraid that I'm not wet enough behind the ears to believe that it's Global Warming. Just as the Iraq invasion wasn't about WMD, and the anti-smoking crusade isn't about passive smoking, so the anti-emissions brouhaha isn't about the physical environment. Each of these is an attempt to use deception to railroad through a "beneficial" solution to a moral question without actually establishing the acceptability of the answer that the solution assumes to be correct.

Why is it that radicalism so seems to lack confidence in its ability to persuade that intellectual dishonesty becomes its default strategy?

Ivan

OK then DZ, I'll bite. If you are so confident about the First Law being certain and implicitly ALWAYS true then please explain the Big Bang in terms of this law and without using a phrase related to "we simply don't know whether the FLT held true at this time"

bit thick... but trying!

Simon Stephens:

Sorry, I thought I'd made myself clear. To be completely unambiguous: Yes, if increasing human material consumption would help to reduce/slow/halt climate change I'd be even more in favour of it.
Indeed, one of the reasons I'm highly concerned about climate change is because the environmental havoc several degrees C of warming are likely to wreck would be massively detrimental to sustaining human consumption at its present level, let alone increasing it. (See the Stern report for details. Also if you play about with his assumptions on discount rate etc., the basic point remains: warming of more than 2 degrees is likely to cause tremendous economic damage, read: massively decreased, let alone not expanded, human consumption). For the same reason you'll find that I'm also in favour of nuclear power and, esp., GM crops.
Indeed, if you look you’ll find that this is the reason most serious people think that climate change is a major issue that needs to be tackled – esp. people in my generation (under 35), who’ll get to enjoy the full effects if predictions come to pass. Just because some hippies are in favour of dealing with climate change doesn’t mean there aren’t serious people who have the same view, people otherwise as different as Martin Wolf and the Chinese government.

Incidentally, I’m not a radical. In many ways I’m a conservative, in the sense of being concerned with preserving social structures and social stability.

Rhoda Klapp

Bit thick, there's a point about the Lindzen paper which makes it exceptional. (I do not claim that it is true, yet) and that is that it attempts to quantify the observed effect of CO2 through its use of satellite data on the earth's radiation budget. The AGW edifice depends on the radiation outgoing from the earth to be reduced. Meaning the heat stays here, and the radiation is only in balance at a higher surface temperature. If the radiation balance can be measured (and that's what the satellite was put up there for) then confirmation or refutation of the AGW theory is possible. Nobody in AGW land seems to be working to show observed effects of actual CO2-based AGW happening. Or if they are, they are not publishing. There are a couple of dodgy assumptions in the AGW theory, which are being protected by a bodyguard of propaganda. They are feedback and clouds.

If Lindzen is true (or the Svensmark cosmic ray/cloud hypothesis) then the AGW people have to do it all again. Not just keep screaming about bloody polar bears.

Nele Schindler

@bit thick ... but trying:

I think the point is exactly that we are MADE to believe that the science is settled and that the majority agrees.

Whenever a substantial group of scientists declares themselves against the MMGW theory or raises even a shred of doubt over the prevailing orthodoxy, they are rubbished, silenced, derided as cranks, shills in the payment of oil companies, or, as the recent hacked emails demonstrated, muscled out of the way, and the list rolls on.

If the 'majority' resorts to such means, I don't care what the majority have to say.

(Check out the newly founded Global Warming Policy Foundation by the way.)

And please don't insult James Delingpole, for he, incidentally, is the Man Who Is Always Right.

Augustus

"A conduit for remuneration." You can say that again! In fact, you should say it loud, and often. This hysteria knows no bounds. The financial impact on consumers and businesses will be devastating. In America the Obama administration recently admitted that their cap-and-trade would cost the average American family $1,761 per year. But a Heritage Foundation analysis puts the cost at an average $2,979 per year, and as much as $4,600 a year by 2035. It's obvious that jobs will disappear, energy prices skyrocket, and the American Dream become an unattainable fantasy for most people. But environmentalists will continue to live comfortably and fly around the world telling other people they should forsake air travel and
all the while trying to scare people with their doomladen predictions. Even governments are spending millions on downright stupid ads featuring
an animated puppy drowning, a rabbit crying, and a carbon monster spewing soot from the sky. The whole science behind global warming is an evil an false doctrine, and the sooner these people are grilled and made to account for their green-induced evil the better. Otherwise it will be an economic disaster for the whole world for many years to come.

Simon Stephenson

bit thick... but trying! : 28/11 10.50pm

I apologise if I have implied to you a motive and an intellectual dishonesty that you don't have, but I think you would do well to read Rhoda Klapp's post of 28/11 9.22am in which she reproduces Mike Hulme's explanation of post-normal science. Maybe then you will understand why those of us not persuaded by the merits of post-normal science are so skeptical about Stern and the rest of the AGW crusade.

This is not to dispute that much valuable work can be done within the framework of unproven presuppositions, but I do dispute the validity of the argument that suggests beneficial progress can be made by camouflaging or denying the unproven nature of such presuppositions. I also take issue with the concept underpinning this attitude - the concept that holds adult humanity to be so incapable of differentiating right from wrong that it should be treated in the same way as we treat 5-year old children who have not yet developed adult thought processes.

Sean

This is physicist Freeman Dyson from a feature in the New York Times. Well worth reading.

"The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,? Dyson was saying. ?They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.? Dyson speaks in calm, clear tones that carry simultaneous evidence of his English childhood, the move to the United States after completing his university studies at Cambridge and more than 50 years of marriage to the German-born Imme, but his opinions can be barbed, especially when a conversation turns to climate change. Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. ?The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,? he continues. ?Al Gore?s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

DZ

Ivan 08.24

I think that we both share an understanding of the scientific method. At the moment the FLT holds true, but if further experiments show it to be false, a new hypothesis will be proposed, tested and then accepted (or not). There will then be a new theory (or not).

But that was not the issue in my little post. It was a mild protest against people with no scientific education wittering on about a subject of which they know little or nothing. Or alternatively, are very knowledgeable about one element of the problem and ignore all other inputs. Thanks for the reply.

daniel maris

JR's wrong on one thing. He says water vapour is not like carbon because it doesn't stay in the atmosphere.

But this is to ignore the effects of greening of deserts. If desert land is being irrigated the water is evaporating many times over whereas before it would evaporate once and dry out. The water currently used for irrigation would previously have run into the sea as parts of a river or gone underground (or stayed underground).

So there is no doubt in my mind that there have been huge additional quantities of water vapour put into the atmosphere by agricultural irrigation. The fact that it doesn't stay there forever is neither here nor there - it's more than was there before man started irrigating the land.

Of course land irrigation is a "good thing" unlike smokestacks and therefore gets completely ignored.

Rob M

From the title and opening line of this thread, I assumed that it was Jim Ryan that was one of the 'people who deny [RL's] right to debate'. From his later comments, it appears that he [RL] granted him [JR] an honourable exemption, so who exactly does deny Rod Liddle's right to debate? He seems to be exercising that right quite frequently on this blog. I assume that he, in his turn, wouldn't deny the right of others to think and argue (for example) that his arguments are flawed, and show an inadequate understanding of the research that has led to the majority view on AGW? (Note that I've no idea whether that would be the approach of any opponents, or indeed what Rod's arguments against AGW are - I haven't seen any on this thread.)

Re bit thick... but trying!'s posts about the second part of the original article: I think that the sort of argument that Rod Liddle may have had in mind was something like one given in Leonard Mlodinow's book The Drunkard's Walk. Let's say a test for some rare condition has a 97% true positive rate and a 1% false positive rate and the prevalence of the condition in a population of 1,000,000 is 1 in 10,000. Then 100 people will have the condition, and 999,900 won't. Of the 100 who do, the test will correctly identify 97 of them (and miss 3); of the 999,900, there will be 9,999 falsely identified as having the condition. So if the test is applied to the whole population, of those the test identifies as having the condition, the vast majority (9,999 out of 10,096 - 99%+) will not in fact have the condition.

However, the applicability of this argument to the case of the rather remarkably persistent patient who visits 100 doctors seems limited, since most doctors (I trust) do not immediately slice you open on the basis of a single, randomly applied, diagnostic test; they might control their itching scalpel fingers for a few moments to allow a second test to be performed. If this second test has the same statistical reliability as the first, but is independent, then (on average) almost all the 97 correctly identified people will again be correctly identified, while only about 100 of the 9,999 will be; and a third independent test will improve matters still further. And if the test is applied only to those who complain of the symptoms that are associated with the tumor, that in itself filters the population and changes the odds. So if you are ever in such an unfortunate position, Rod, it might be better not to push your scepticism too far: by the time you've visited even 50 doctors, they might start suspecting that you're a bit of a time-waster.

Incidentally, in an earlier thread ('Remain sceptical at all times'), Rod Liddle stated "I'm not a mathematician by profession, no; I'm educated only to degree level in the subject" - which I took (reasonably?) as meaning that his degree was in maths. However, that fount of reliable information, Wikipedia, states that his degree was from the LSE in social psychology. If that's right, and another degree in maths hasn't been removed from his biography by those puckish Wikipedia editors, it might be that his "education to degree level" may have consisted of 'Statistics for social scientists' type courses. Is any of that right? Normally, of course, that would be none of my business, but if Rod uses his maths education as an indication of the reliability of his opinions, I think it would be interesting to know.

Ivan

DZ, what you describe is very true but argues against the very point you were making earlier (viz-a-vis certainties in science).

(the gas laws were an even worse example by the way - they are riddled with approximations although that all starts to get a bit technical for this kind of forum).

I agree that trying to express this kind of uncertainty in a form for public consumption is difficult, but expressing poorly understood systems in terms of certainties is what has made this AGW mess look so ugly.

bit thick... but trying!

Sorry guys, but I fear I’m on a very different page.

1. post-normal science. Not very familiar with this, but just read the wiki entry as well as Mike Hulme’s article in the Guardian on (link on wiki site). What he seems to be saying is that it is wrong to think you can have a ‘hypothesis-refutation’-style debate on GW and provides as evidence for that… precisely the kind of debate we’re having here. So our understanding of GW has to be informed by our political, social etc. values – your values, my values, etc. Only this will allow us to make sense of the kind of debates we’re having about GW. We have to ask questions such as, what does GW mean for our several personal, ethical, social, economic projects – your projects, my projects, etc. – rather than ask which level of warming is ‘safe’.

My response: A. this is ANYTHING but a mainstream view of science. Postmodernists will surely go with this perspective; not many natural scientists, nor even many social scientists, will. B. I think this perspective is useful for making sense of the Debate About GW (such as we’re having here). I don’t see that this perspective is in any way useful for making sense of the physical phenomena we shorthand as ‘GW’. Sorry: I just don’t buy into po-mo in that way. I think that while some po-mo (post-structuralist if you want to be posh) perspectives can be useful for making sense of societal phenomena (e.g. the Debate about GW), but when applied to understanding the natural world you end up with a sort of cargo-cult science. What someone’s perspectives on private vs. gov-owned enterprise is, is to me just not relevant to figuring out what the effects of carbon emissions are.

2. Arguments by various scientists skeptical of GW (Lindzen, etc.). A. I hope they’re right. B. Without a PhD in the relevant disciplines I can’t evaluate whether or not they’re right. C. I thus have to choose between the vast majority view and the small minority view. D. I have no strong theoretical reasons for why I should expect the minority view to be correct, because I have a lot of trust in the peer-review process (see below). That the minority view is more appealing to me is not a valid reason. E. Therefore I go with the majority view. F. I do that also for insurance reasons (see earlier post).

3. Peer review. Yes, what goes on in the dark alleys of science is not always pretty. But today there are So Many journals out there that it is just not possible to prevent an argument that actually stands up from being marginalised except in the extremely short term. As evidence I simply mention the fact that the Lindzen paper someone referenced above has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. I have full trust that if it is robust to the various criticisms that will surely be launched at it, it will help to redefine climate science (if the paper is really so revolutionary as suggested by posters above). If it’s not robust to them, it will be trashed and soon ignored (except maybe in fora like this☺) – which, except for the latter point, is as it should be. This process has given me all the amenities of modern life, from advanced medical care to the laptop I’m typing on. That seems like a pretty strong argument for it.

4. Group Think. Yes, there is such a thing. But scientists are actually pretty aware of it and its dangers (in my experience). Also, those who emphasise Group Think ignore the massive incentives individual scientists have to go against the mainstream view, esp. on something like GW. Imagine what the person who ‘disproves’ GW would win: instant celebrity status, a book deal for sure, lucrative speaking engagements, eternal thanks from the fossil fuel industry, … While it might in theory be collectively rational for scientists to hype GW, as the conspiracy mongers suggest, it is not individually rational. Enter collective action problems, etc. (read Mancur Olson) – Hey, shouldn’t you rightwingers be familiar with all that stuff?! Isn’t tht why socialism doesn’t work?

5. Cherry-picking experts/changing one’s opinion. I remain confused about what it would take to persuade you folks that GW really Is a serious problem. I’ve made my position fairly clear, I think. If the mainstream scientific view comes round to thinking that GW is not actually an issue, I’ll change my opinion. When would you do so? (This is a serious question! At present, one gets the sense that if people like me yell ‘scientific consensus’, you respond with ‘group think’. If we say, ‘ok, no absolute consensus, but the Vast majority of climate scientists…’, you respond with ‘so the science is unproven’. So which is it? When would you change your opinion? Or would you Never accept the view that GW could be real/a problem? But that is irrational.) This relates to cherry-picking random experts who happen to have an opinion palatable to you. That’s not a valid reason for picking the expert.

6. The Rule of the Expert. Many here on this threat seem to loathe the idea that someone else may know more than they do about some topic, and thus have an opinion on it that is, to be blunt, to be taken more seriously than their’s on this particular topic. Sorry folks, but that’s modernity: lots and lots and lots of extremely complex and specialised knowledge – much of which is extremely counter-intuitive and ‘non-common sensical’ (string theory, anyone?) – that you just can’t evaluate and comment on in a way that is meaningful & relevant without extended training in the relevant field. We all know that. We operate on that fact every day. When I want medical advice, I go to my doctor. When I want legal advice, to a lawyer. When I want my car fixed, to a mechanic. And thus, when I want advice on climate science, I go to a climate scientist. If you don’t like this fact, there are only 2 ways out, neither of which is appealing to me: A. extreme post-modernism. Any opinion is as good as any other opinion. When I’m ill, the doctor, the homeopath, the chiropractitioner, the witch-doctor, and the novellist next door all have equally valid views on what ails me and what to do about it. B. Give up modernity. Return to the world c. 1700, when an intelligent, educated (and presumably leisured) man was able to be up to speed in more or less all fields of knowledge & scientific inquiry. Goodbye modern medical care, laptops, cheap travel, …

7. That’s it folks, I’m off to do some… science! Shock Horror!!!

I've written so much I don't think I have much more to contribute and thus will probably not respond to your comments - but I would be genuinely interested to read them.

EyeSee

Mr. Ewing, or can I call you JR? As has been said your strange and rambling (without much point) replies seem very much of a piece with all AGW output. But never mind, you let slip that you have a PhD and I for one would never underestimate such achievement (assuming your surname shouldn't start with an L not R). Considering your witty comment -EyeSee(not)- I wondered if it is a comedy PhD or a PhD in comedy? Bearing in mind your status perhaps a reading of 'Intellectual Morons' by Daniel J Flynn might be useful.

As a footnote; by endlessly refering to 'science' from people within the AGW bubble ( a group caught lying more than once) doesn't make for a strong argument. Nor does blaming CO2, agreeing that warming occurs before CO2 rise without explaining what IS causing the warming then. (And water vapour isn't rain, it's clouds -the main greenhouse gas on Earth). Good argument using Venus though. I have to agree, Venus is very hot and it is due to atmospheric CO2. But as CO2 forms 96% of the atmosphere there, I can't say I see the relevance.

bit thick... but trying!

Rob M:

I'd be careful about dissing social scientist statisticians. Some of the most interesting statistical work (in my view) is being done by social scientists - check out Gary King on ecological inference problems. I'd also not want to measure my own rather poor grasp of stats and math in general against the folks from the econometrics seminars.

(That said, your basic point is probably quite valid: outside of economics and maybe poli-sci, the average social-scientist undergrad course in stats is quite likely to not go into much detail, let alone formal-technical detail.)

Fergus Pickering

Rob M, the trouble with you scientific johnnies is that you missed out on your O level English Language and therefore nobody can understand a word you say. It isn't only scientists who write this way, Social Scientists do it as well. Actually I'm convinced you like it because it means you don't have to talk to anyone except yopur mates. But I'm buggered if I'll stop driving my little car or having nice hot baths on your say so. I don't understand you and I don't trust you and I can see too many reasons why the rich and powerful should go along with what you say. Follow the money may not be science but it's something older. It's wisdom.

Interestingly, when you are slagging off the great and good Liddle, you suddenly write lucidly and your intellectual snobbery just shines through. He may have donme some maths but itn wasn't REAL maths like mine.

Rhoda Klapp

bit thick... but trying!

Youevidently cannot be dissuaded from tending to go with the majority, although you know science is not decided by vote. Very well. But surely you are aware that many of the principal climate scientists have been caught cheating, not just this last time but time and time again? Why not just go with that part of the majority which is willing to disown the cheats and discount all of their output when presenting the AGW case? Isn't that fair?

Rob M

Damn, I could have sworn that I did in fact pick up an O-level in English Language in the dim and distant past. I must have been mistaken. However, Fergus, could you point to where in the first three paragraphs I was especially obscure, so I could try to improve. I was trying for clarity throughout (believe it or not), and they didn't seem to me any more opaque than the lucid (gosh, thanks!) last.

I agree, however, that you didn't understand what I had written: for example, you say "I'm buggered if I'll stop driving my little car or having nice hot baths on your say so". What say so? I questioned RL's claim that he was being denied the right to debate, I tried to give a numerical illustration of what he might have meant by his "the likelihood that ... 97% of surgeons have made a wrong diagnosis ... is far, far higher than the likelihood that I do have a tumour" comment, and I wondered about his maths education. Where in that did you see an edict against your baths and little car? (And just how small is it, by the way? I'm envisioning a Goggomobil size, max. If it's really small enough, I'll have a word with the rich and powerful when I'm next chatting with them, and see if we can arrange a special exemption for you. They always go along with what I say.)

Simon Stephenson

bit thick... but trying! : 4.32pm

Peer Review

Interesting to contrast your confidence in this process with Frank Furedi's recent comments in Spiked:-

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7748/

Rob M

One other thing: both Fergus and bit thick... but trying! apparently read my queries about Rod's maths education as an attack: it wasn't, I was just trying to establish where his expertise lies, and to clarify the statement from another thread that I quoted.

bit thick... but trying!

Said I wouldn't and then I do... Oh well.
Quickly read Furedi's piece, wasn't too impressed. He doesn't actually seriously analyse the peer review process - just trots out a few old tropes. For instance, the fact that reviewing generally takes place anonymously, with neither reviewers nor reviewed supposed to know who they are, kind of weakens his arg./tropes. Is the process perfect? No, and it would be irrational to claim so. Has it generally proved pretty reliable in the medium-term (say, 2-4 years)? Yes, I think it has. The massive advances in knowledge speak for themselves.
As for Furedi's general arguments, as far as I'm familiar with them (not very). When he's writing about social phenomena ("paranoid parenting", to a lesser extent the green movement) he may well have a point. But I'm unconvinced by his generalisation from that to science. I don't see how his arguments about societal perceptions of risk significantly change the results coming out of the labs. Just because many people have irrational fears about e.g. the prevalence of
paedophilia, and our political system exacerbates these fears, does not mean that it might not be entirely rational, given present state of knowledge, to be quite worried about something else.

More generally, I tend to distrust ex-radicals about as much as I despise most radicals. After someone has committed to a set of ideas so unconvincing as a systematic intellectual construct as revolutionary Marxism, I'm not sure why I should take any of their views particularly seriously - also, or maybe especially, if they have ended up at the diametrically opposed point in the political spectrum. I'd need to see evidence that their thinking has grown more sophisticated, not just that they've ditched one set of crazy ideas for another set of ideas that are equally silly, just different. Furedi has more than a whiff of Noam Chomsky to me, just re-poled - much like Mad Mel (Phillips). First everything was an evil plot of the establishment to keep the working class down, now everything is an evil plot of the liberal establishment to destroy Western culture, and probably kill the Jews too. An (ex-)Trot in capitalist clothing is often still a Trot.

Ok, I'm doing Furedi something of an injustice, probably, in lumping him together with Mel P., but still...

DZ

Ivan 3.34 pm
certainly, to a theoretical physicist, your statement is correct. But I don't think I am contradicting the message behind my first statement (quoting: perish the thought that there are no certainties in science). The uncertainty inherent in any Law or Theory is vastly less than the uncertainty expressed in the journalistic thoughts all too frequently expressed on AGW.
I enjoyed this exchange: your comments are quite correct, but I hope that I now express myself more clearly.

sean

Now the CRU at East Anglia says it shredded all the raw data behind its findings when it moved buildings as you do.

At this rate the only threat to the planet is the rising sea of Bullshit.

Hugh Janus

Sorry Rod, I've posted this link to various other blogs and it only confirms the BBC/Skynews/most other news outlets blackout of this issue.
Check out what the blonds at skynews (believe it not the weathergirls I kid you not) have to say on the subject.
Link below.

http://blogs.news.sky.com/theweathergirls/Post:35c7a6d4-9e59-4208-9703-34d64bd6d7fd

rodmatic

To DZ
Boyle's Law is a good example - as it only applies to ideal gases, i.e. it breaks down in the real world particularly noticeable at high pressures and with gases that are less like inert gases (eg He etc) such as CO2 (see van der Waals equation).

Scott

Phil Jones got over $22 million in grants, its like asking a barber if you need a haircut, a car salesman if you need a new car.

Simon Stephenson

bit thick... but trying : 29/11 8.56pm

"[Furedi] doesn't actually seriously analyse the peer review process - just trots out a few old tropes...

Is the [peer review] process perfect? No, and it would be irrational to claim so. Has it generally proved pretty reliable in the medium-term (say, 2-4 years)? Yes, I think it has.

Phew! That's all right then.

But why didn't Furedi, instead of coming out with a "few old tropes", merely accept what is so obvious to everyone else, as shown in your exquisitely argued proof set out above?

Moreover, why do you, when you so obviously have all the weapons of truth and reality on your side, see the need to resort to an ad hominem attack on Furedi, and thereby use fallacy to discredit his contrarian views?

Is it that the truth has become too difficult to portray for it to be any longer an effective tool of argument?

Or is it more that truth and actuality have just become an embarrassment and an inconvenience - too much of an obstacle in the way of what is indisputably social "progress"?

rod liddle

Rob M - are you a bit stupid? The people who deny a right to debate are those who insist that there is NO debate to be had about global warming; that's it, no more discussion. There are a lot of those and they influence certain elements of the media.

Mt degree was actually, technically, economics but was largely statistical methods of social research. I'm also a Physics/astonomy undergrad. You're too credulous, mate, of such things as wiki.

And re the commentary upon false positives; perfectly fair. I was attempting to show that stats are too often misread and misapplied, nothing more. I don't know the book you're referring to.

Rob M

Rod,

Thanks for the reply. To answer your first question - yes, probably - aren't we all? How about you?

As for those who deny your right to debate: do you think, perhaps, that there might be a fair number on the other side of the debate that also assert that there's no debate to be had: they certainly seem to be well represented on this blog, and even more so on Melanie Phillips'. "It's a religion, it's a lie, AGW is bollocks, it's a means to implement an Anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic system of slavery upon mankind, a symptom of the self loathing perpetuated by the left, etc". Not perhaps the most balanced of debating points. (I think MP attracts the most hard-line sceptics - you're too wishy-washy for many).

Thanks also for the information on your degree - especially since, as I said, it wasn't really any of my business, but I was nonetheless interested. I thought I was reasonably tentative about the Wikipedia information, rather than credulous - wasn't the question 'Is any of that right?' a sufficient indication? And that paragraph was lucidly written, I'll have you know - Fergus said so!

PS Currently a physics/astronomy undergrad? Hope it goes well, and be careful not to become a scientific johnnie, as otherwise no one will understand a word you say, which could be a handicap for a journalist.

rod liddle

Rob M - thanks for that. Have to say I find the MP line to which you accurately refer more obnoxious and totalitarian than the AGW line.......

JohOfEnfield

Progress is made in science by proposing theories that often contradict the "conventional wisdom" of the scientific community. Unpopularity or even lack of acceptance of a scientific theory is no guide to whether or not it is "right". And vice-versa.

Discussion about "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (now conveniently morphed into Climate Change just in case it goes down as well as up)is now more akin to discussion about religion than about scientific theory.

I would submit that Climate Change is ever-present, a natural part of the world we live in. How much of this, if any, is caused by human beings is going to be very difficult to tease out. A bit like working out how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin.

EyeSee

Rod, re Melanie Phillips and her 'line' on AGW. How can her point of view be more worrying than the Royal Society saying that no-one should be allowed to oppose AGW? Science is about proving theories. That is my dogmatic statement. I believe that if you write a notation 2+2=4, then I can understand what is being said, but it is abstract. When I get two pebbles and then two more, I can then count them and see that it does indeed prove what I had been told. Warmists bring five pebbles and say don't bother with proof. That is Melanie's point. The climate may well be changing, there are many things that may be causing it. CO2 isn't one of them and that is a scientific fact, that the Warmists are well aware of. But as they dwell in the world of politics, inaccurate science is a minor concern, the narrative you see has to be kept alive.

Strangely Rod, it seems more likely that your disagreement with how Melanie makes her point is more akin to censorship because you feel she shouldn't, perhaps, be allowed to say it.

I think her problem is exasperation with this modern shift to stupidity. By ensuring education is at rock bottom and through the use of political correctness we have a cowed population who just take instruction; frighteningly 1984. How many times do you see people interviewed in the street saying 'I think they should do whatever they need to to keep us safe from terrorism'. With no evidence of terrorism beyond the odd nutter. Blair; 'wouldn't you pay more tax for a better NHS?', to which the street nods and says yes. Even though Blair couldn't possibly in his wildest dreams deliver the milk of a morning, let alone a better NHS. So just the tax bit then, thanks.

No, I think the Warmists got their timing wrong. People are starting to realise that maybe they should do some thinking and not believe the moon is made of green cheese because Dr. Jones says so, OK?

And essentially, that is what debate is, two people having opinions. I don't think that someone can't have an opinion, but that bthey must expect that, once voiced it may be tested. 'La,la, la, not listening' is not debate. And not scientific. So when warmists start talking about actually affecting the weather by pumping chemicals into the atmosphere or by putting a sun shield in space, then you know you have allowed the children to much leeway. These Warmists talk about man as causing problems and at the root they mean through arrogance, man's belief in his own superiority. But they have it the wrong way round. Their hare brained, half baked ideas are they arrogance -'you must trust me' and that man can put right what he has done wrong, we are that clever. Well Icarus, you just might not be. Your room with deep-buttoned wallpaper awaits.

Stuart Seacole Smith

Great article. Funny how it started off deliberately non-scientific, and the comments have got more and more scientific.

I didn't know that Monbiot was the proud holder of a Zoology degree. Oddly, I've a Zoology degree myself. I'll never forget the humbling moment more than 20 years ago of sitting on the bog as a first year in the biology block and noticing that someone had scrawled on the wall above the toilet roll holder "zoology degree - please take one".

The original RL post says "the status afforded to science is now... so exalted...". Well, I would say that it is very selectively exalted. AGW support-science is very much cherished. Inconclusive food-scare science is lovingly clasped to the public bosom. However, "reassuring science", as in confirming that actually you're not going to die of that food scare you heard about last week because you can only realistically have been exposed to 1 millionth of the dose needed to do you in - is routinely cast aside, uncared for, unloved. Just boring.

Going back to the unscientific again, it's always worth bearing in mind the many and varied vested interests which favour talking up AGW:

- government (tax opportunity);
- media (scare story - the best!);
- industry (money to be made - viz carbon credits fiasco);
- academia (include climate in a grant application; receive dosh by return post);
- NGOs (scare story, bumped up subscriptions mean more mullah for mischief, and increasingly fat director salaries);
- developing countries (you can't put a price on climate change - oh, just a minute, yes we can!)
- The UN, christian church, sundry other coat-tail hangers on (get involved in something "topical", try to appear remotely relevant)

There's also the insidious reality that "climate change concerns" are now routinely tacked onto debates about virtually anything you care to mention - whether it be on public transport, the NHS, food production, light bulbs, your local cake-baking contest etc etc.

And here's the problem: a spokesman arguing for one policy option or another on any of these topics will be tasked with achieving certain objectives, and getting into an "oh no it isn't/ oh yes it is" debate about climate change with your typical on-message BBC reporter is definitely not one of those objectives. For that reason, AGW is used as a supporting argument if it's helpful to the points being made, and if it's not helpful it's either ignored or tacitly acknowledged in order to avoid getting into a side-argument. In any case, it will generally be taken as fact.

The Conservatives have adopted much the same line in the run-up to the next election, and depressing as it may be, for the time being it's probably the only option open to them if they want to avoid getting monumentally sidetracked.

Craig Goodrich

Suppose, moreover, that every MRI and other fancy scan and diagnostic test found no sign of the cancer. And suppose that the manufacturer of a new and extremely expensive drug designed to cure just that exact cancer had been making the rounds of doctor's offices.

But no, of course, that would be ridiculous...

Richard Jones

Now just hang on. As a graduate in theology when it involved reading and writing, thinking, memorising and stuff, it took me a while to realise that it was all bunkum and Richard Dawkins was completely right.
It's really too much like hard work to go through it all again so could you, Rod, please ask the venerable Dawkins what his view is on the whole climate change fiasco? Using his brain and judgement will leave me to have a snifter and relax.