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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 11, 2014 - 03:39pm PT
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The problem with denialist blogs is that they tend to be polemical, not scientific. Often they publish pseudoscience, to gullible readers like Rick who can't tell the difference but are eager to believe sciency-sounding words that fit their politics. For example, Rick wrote this about one such blog post a while back:
Even if i was a statistician, why bother Ed, Bob Tisdale did an extraordinary job of deconstructing Rahmstorf and Larry over on WUWT sometime ago. A true professional, his grasp of the full range of mechanisms, values as forcing or moderating agents, and their complex interactions was beyond argument. I asked Rick what field he thought Tisdale was "a true professional" in, but he could not answer.
Since Rick claimed that Tisdale was somehow deconstructing me I went back to look this thing up, and learned it was a fiasco. As far as I can tell, Tisdale had not even a beginner's grasp of multiple regression at the time he wrote that piece, in which he tried (and Rick believed him) to discredit a refereed paper by a professional statistician. In his blog post Tisdale made basic errors that were obvious even to a few blog readers right away -- he did not grasp what a "trend" means in multiple regression! Most WUWT readers don't either, so Tisdale argued against those who pointed out that all his calculations, on which he based his whole attack, were not just statistically wrong but physically impossible. Tisdale did not understand their point at the time. But he was so badly wrong, in such beginner ways, that eventually he was persuaded to write this "update" to his failed attack.
UPDATE 3 (January 14, 2012): I displayed my very limited understanding of statistics in this post. This was pointed out to me a great number times by many different people in numerous comments received in the WattsUpWithThat cross post.The errors in that initial portion of the post were so many and so great that they detracted from the bulk of the post, which was about the El Niņo-Southern Oscillation. Please disregard this post and the WUWT cross post, and any other cross posts that may exist. Well at least he admitted it you might think, but since then he's gone on to make many other attacks likewise based on his "very limited understanding of statistics." While true believers like Rick give him attaboys every time.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 11, 2014 - 03:51pm PT
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Tisdale with his "very limited understanding of statistics" (basically, he had recently learned that Excel has a multiple regression function), was attacking the time series analysis of professional statistician Grant Foster, of Foster & Rahmstorf (2011), who also has written papers on "Wavelets for period analysis of unevenly sampled time series (209 citations according to Google Scholar), "The cleanest Fourier spectrum" (189 citations), "Time series analysis by projection" (76 citations) and much else.
It's the content, not the credentials, that make Tisdale's blog post embarrassing nonsense while Foster's work is widely respected by experts. But Rick embraced Tisdale because what he wrote fit Rick's politics, with no comprehension of content or credentials.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Jan 11, 2014 - 06:33pm PT
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If they even gave today's youth that much thought.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jan 12, 2014 - 07:35am PT
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The tropopause is easily visible on a balloon sounding, or skew-t chart.
The tropopause is lower in the winter than in the summer in temperate areas.
You also need to understand the multi-cell aspect of the atmosphere. The Hadley Cell and on and on....geostrophic flow is another one.
Every day at 00Z and 12Z, around the world, balloon soundings go up. The top of the troposphere is marked by a very warm and dry temperature inversion. If you've ever seen a supercell or other thunderstorm, the updrafts can't rise very far into the stratosphere because of that inversion. The moist air spreads out and blows downstream as an anvil.
Sorry. I worked with NSSL for many years on spring tornado field experiments. I'm only good at mesoscale events, though.
Anyway, seeing the tropopause is easy.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Jan 12, 2014 - 10:08am PT
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Where are the Death Panels? Lobbyist.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Jan 12, 2014 - 10:28am PT
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 12, 2014 - 10:31am PT
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Rick writes,
It's good that Larry feels the freedom to critically evaluate some of the material produced on Skeptics blogs, Of course, why would I not feel that freedom?
But then in the blink of an eye Rick makes a false assumption and slips from there into fantasyland,
but for him to fear return criticism coming from that quarter Fear criticism? You're making that up. Back in the real world, when my work has been attacked on blogs I've often shared the whole thing with my students right away, they're bemused and sometimes appalled to see how it unfolds. I might share the links and the stories with colleagues. Made a slideshow from one particularly egregious WUWT episode and have presented that, starting great audience discussions, at several public or scientific meetings. It's all data.
You apparently can't guess how the ad hom attacks, conspiracy theories and confident, wrong declarations on blogs play out among people who actually know. Like grad students who spent a good part of their summer building a dataset, then read someone on a blog declaring with certainty that it's fake.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Jan 12, 2014 - 10:49am PT
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Yep ,It was called that around here.
Where has it gone? January 11th and all.
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dirtbag
climber
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Jan 12, 2014 - 11:21am PT
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Sketch were you born a fooking idiot or have you worked hard to become a fooking diot?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jan 12, 2014 - 11:23am PT
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I will agree with Sketch that there are inaccuracies in the more eco-friendly blogs, but not in the science.
I have to deal with questions about fracking all of the time, and it is just pitiful. People just don't understand how it works. Their minds make up something, then it gets repeated over and over.
I was watching Rachel Maddow one evening, and even she got it wrong. I assume that everyone knows that she was a Rhodes Scholar. Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh have high school educations.
She did that by repeating the words of others, and not the actual facts, which is some reasonably simple math. No algebra required for a basic understanding.
The point is made, though. Hot button items such as this tend to attract flies on both sides. As usual, the truth lies within the science.
edit: The cold snap is over here. It is a beautiful day outside. I think I'll go enjoy it....
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Jan 12, 2014 - 11:28am PT
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My god, the taliban chieftain, our one practicing ayatollah of CO2 scientology on this thread is out of his cave again angry as a hornet. Larry, why all the attention to me-im not a scientist or even a blogger. If what I have to say is all dead wrong, why bother? You need to get real Larry. Try looking up new coal power plants in Germany. There you will find reference to germany's prolific return to dirty coal after failure of alternatives and hysterical abandonment of nuclear sfter listening to there own taliban environmentalista's. I don' suppose that would be a lesson you would teach in your taliban training camp, you refer to as a university.
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dirtbag
climber
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Jan 12, 2014 - 11:35am PT
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Larry, why all the attention to me-im not a scientist ...
and you are out of your league. But opinions are like arseholes...
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Jan 12, 2014 - 11:53am PT
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From an ethical stand point, you chose which side you prefer.
no!
As a voting Republican I first find out that both Fox News and virtually all of my Republican leadership opposes and denies "global warming" on the general principle that it has stuff in it that they don't understand, like "science" and all those silly Elitist advanced degree "findings"
THEN, after knowing which side to oppose, I can safely take the opposite position
simple really, no ethical stands required.....
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jan 12, 2014 - 12:11pm PT
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It is hilarious that "elite" is now a pejorative adjective. The sole requirement is that you took calculus at some point in your life. Pretty soon it will be like the Khmer Rouge. In their search for an agrarian utopia they shot everyone with an education. I've heard that they went so far as to kill everyone who wore glasses.
You can't make this sh#t up. One of my neighbors teaches evolution at OU, and his favorite movie is "Ideocracy." Check it out. Excellent B movie.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Jan 12, 2014 - 01:17pm PT
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If that were the case, then why are they not around today.
Perfect example of your delusional bullshet thinking.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Jan 12, 2014 - 01:30pm PT
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Lets talk about ethics Bruce. Tear yourself away from the horror show of that green tech laden stock portfolio of yours long enough to concentrate.Now Larry and his compatriots all agree that this is 97.1% consensus science with a 95% certainty of current and future adverse climatic conditions as a result of anthro CO2 release, right? Well, assuming the truth of that why are huge sums of limited funding still being granted for study of a consensus surety? Wouldn't ethics and morality dictate that Larry and crew shift gears from study to appled science of solving such things as the intermittancy/storage problems of wind and solar even if it meant that the notariety and funding he's enjoying would diminish since it would go to the hard sciences of physics, engineering, geology, etc and not to soft sciences like sociology , of which many studies have been conducted on identifying the stupidities of the populace in not comprehending that black is white and up is down in all things AGW? If this ethical disconnect could be corrected it might just help the green tech stocks, humanity in general, and your own ethics, I mean portfolio.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jan 12, 2014 - 01:36pm PT
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Great game in Foxborough MA yesterday, terrible weather for January in MA, rain... and warm too..
how fickle the weather... Yeah, we've gone from -14F a week ago to rain & fog last night and a windy, melting mess today. Don't think this has much to do with climate change but it keeps life interesting. We *might* put on spikes to go hiking this afternoon, but it's windy enough that branches could be falling.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Jan 12, 2014 - 01:54pm PT
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Yes Rick ,explain ethics for us delusional utopians.
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TLP
climber
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Jan 12, 2014 - 02:23pm PT
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...why are huge sums of limited funding still being granted for study of a consensus surety? There are plenty of good reasons, some of which have already been stated clearly above.
1. There's a continued political onslaught of lavishly funded opposition to the science itself, which is free speech even though it's inaccurate. The only reasonable way to counter that is to improve the science more and more.
2. The scientific community continues to reveal inaccuracies in how the modeling predicts what happens in specific places (see Santer et al. - great paper), which although they are relatively small ought to be corrected.
3. Getting the modeling as quantitatively, spatially, and temporally accurate as can be achieved is really important to the other, totally separate, social/political/economic question of what should anybody do? For example, if we knew with a very high degree of certainty that the sea level were going to rise a meter in one or two decades, talk about emissions becomes moot for low-lying cities like Miami, New York, many Asian cities, etc. Those places (cities and countries) would be well advised to start immediately to design and implement better defenses. If you had an accurate forecast that it would take 150 years for the sea level to rise that much, you wouldn't spend the billions that would require right away.
It's really important to get your mind around the idea that there's figuring out the science, and there's the completely separate political process of response. I'd have to believe that seismic scientists in Japan probably had an idea of the size of tsunami that could have reasonably been expected on their east coast. But presumably the population and decision makers figured they were just alarmists and it would be fine to build a nuclear power plant where it would be swamped and possibly melt down. Or maybe there was a open discussion, and the scientists said, well, we're not sure if it's X percent likely within 10 or 30 years, and it could be 20 feet high or 23 feet, or maybe 40; so the "alarmism" was ignored.
A similar question is why the entities that work so hard to convince people that the science is not good aren't doing any (or hardly any) publication-worthy research themselves. (Meaning, sufficiently rigorous to get through peer review.)
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Jan 12, 2014 - 03:01pm PT
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" There's a continued political onslaught of lavishly funded opposition to the science itself"
Really,Tell us more.
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