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@GalileoMovement has been leaked a peek of the main Catastrophic Climate Change keyboard. This is where the emergency response team arguments are generated for the public debate. For example: 97% of climate models didn’t predict the “pause”. The correct response is…  Alarmist Debating Keyboard … all of the above. h/t, credit to Paul Evans of The Gallileo Movement. February 4th, 2014 | Tags: Satire & Parody | Category: Funny stuff, Global Warming |  Print This Post | |  The Age, sometimes the free press is not enough… Gay Alcorn suggests when voters get it wrong (and you are but a powerless columnist on a major daily paper) the answer is not “explain your case”, or “publish and study the views of the people who disagree” but be fiercer, get arrested and resort to civil disobedience and blockades. Meanwhile her “respected” CSIRO scientists let her step into an obvious scientific hole, and Naomi Klein spins a fantasy that Alcorn finds appealing. Ask all the wrong questionsThe journalists of The Age have read their own paper for so long, they don’t even know what questions to ask:
Gay Alcorn asks” What if you couldn’t accept the elected governments position”. She doesn’t ask: What if I’m wrong and windmills won’t stop floods? What if a tax won’t change the weather? Or how about, “If we make cheap energy more expensive – How exactly will that increase national productivity and help the economy?” She also doesn’t ask, “What if a few dozen scientists have got their key assumptions wrong about the climate, and the models grossly exaggerate the threat?” What if thousands upon thousands of scientists (and a large slab of the population) know that name-calling “deniers” is not a scientific argument, want real evidence and are protesting? What if the newspaper you read hides the other half of the story, and doesn’t tell you that 31,000 scientists disagree with the 62 who reviewed Chapter Nine of the IPCC report? What if The Age never reports that atmospheric physicists, solar astronomers, geologists and engineers are skeptical, and have excellent reasons to be so, not to mention 1100 papers?
What if none of the CSIRO scientists was willing to be bluntly honest and remind you that none of these heatwaves or warm records was unusual in the long run, and none of them show that the warming is man-made? If the warming was natural, we’d get heatwaves, wouldn’t we? But instead of honest or forthright admission, the CSIRO scientists feed the unscientific pap that any warming is proof that CO2 caused the warming. So much for this respected institution. Few will respect it ten years from now, when it becomes obvious how much it has cost us.
Was that a lie a wink and a nod, or was it just a response to global bullies?She points at the apparent contradictions of conservatives who say they believe but appear not to act, but misses the obvious reasons why:
Keep reading →  “Baffled” Switch off your brain, Prince Charles has said you are a headless chicken if you do not accept what political committees tell you to think.
Thus Chicken Little yells “headless chickens”, and climate sensitivity must be 3.3C. Right?
So one of the richest men in the world, future ruler of nations, feels bullied by unfunded volunteers? Such bravery from our next Head of State. (I’m not Monarchist or Republican, but if Charles keeps talking, that could change.) This is the same old argument: authorities want us to believe authority, while stupid punters ask for data instead. Using all the inductive reasoning he could muster, Charles admits he cannot figure out why everyone does not accept the pronouncements of people who hide declines, data, emails and methods:
We can only assume this eloquence and insight is a product of the best education the British Isles establishment could offer. That’s not just one, but two forms of namecalling, you headless chicken deniers. How could you possibly disagree?
Photo: Wikimedia Image Dan Marsh. February 1st, 2014 | Tags: Argument by Authority, Name-calling | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | A new paper suggests there is an “unprecedentedly” low number of tropical cyclones around Australia at the moment. (How much should we spend to avoid this dreadful outcome I wonder?) I am a little skeptical of how we can be so sure of the cyclone activity in, say, the year 900 AD. But nonetheless, the study is worth a look. Haig et al took stalagmites from two places in Australia (Chillagoe, Qld, and Cape Range, WA) and got very nice long year-by-year records of 18O and 16O data. They calibrated these against observational instrumental records — though I note these are but a tiny 20 years of data (1990 – 2010), and that during a period described by mainstream climate science (cough) as “unprecedented”. Assuming that it is possible to pick apart normal rain and cyclonic rain, and that cyclone activity did not just shift to be more than 400 km away (where these stalagmites won’t record the cyclones) then it does appear that there are usually more cyclones in Australia than now. Note the top graphs are the WA site which go back to 500AD, and the lower pair are the QLD graphs “only” going back to 1300AD. Both graphs show an increase in storm activity during the Little Ice Age around 1700AD. If things do get cold in the next 20 years, will we get more cyclones and will fans of man-made global warming still be blaming CO2 if we do?  Figure 3 | CAI over the last 1,500 and 700 years. a, c, Cape Range (a) and Chillagoe (c); black line indicates smoothing of the series using ref. 31 (smoothed data were not used in the statistical analysis). Grey shading indicates the r.m.s.e. of the model. Four values, which were more than 1 s.d. outside the d18OA range specified in Fig. 1, were removed from the series. b, d, Wavelet power spectra (Morlet wavelet) of Cape Range (b) and Chillagoe (d). Power increases from blue to red, black contours indicate regions above the 95% confidence level, and the white areas are regions subject to edge effects. The spectra have lag-1 autocorrelation coefficients of 0.75 (Cape Range) and 0.78 (Chillagoe). Software provided by C. Torrence and G. Compo (http:// The paper has the usual obligatory vague claims pretending to connect this to anthropogenic causes, when there is nothing definitively unnatural shown in this long study, and given that the Earth has 1500 year and longer cycles, the long data is still not long enough anyway. We all know the debate is over and the science is settled, but note the 95% certainty is not quite evident in the conclusions (see my bolding).
These waffly phrasings of uncertainty will be studied one day as a comment on the politically distorted scientific culture of the early 21st century. There are a couple of caveats, one is that normal rain and cyclonic rain are difficult to tell apart. The other is that these stalagmites can only record cyclones within 400km of the cave. Keep reading → January 31st, 2014 | Tags: Australian rainfall, Cyclones, Extreme weather, Hurricanes, Queensland (QLD), Storms, Western Australia (WA) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |
The scandal remains that Copernicus did not close the journal because of any scientific flaws. They first and foremost closed the journal because it “doubted” the IPCC, as they baldly declared in their original emails and official statement. That Copernicus then post hoc claimed there was a fault with the reviewing process doesn’t change the fact that a major scientific publishing house took the extraordinary decision that the IPCC can not be questioned and naively admitted it, as if it was acceptable. It reveals the utterly unscientific mindset of the gatekeepers of Peer Review. My position is that Peer Review is a bureaucratic process so corrupted with this poisonous attitude, that the most important aim of any skeptic is not to try too hard to play an inherently crooked game, or to pander to its dictats, but to tell the world how crooked it is. Peer or Pal is not the point. The point is that science is done by evidence and reason not by private review. Whether or not the papers lead on to fruitful developments in our understanding of the sun is another matter entirely. It was no concern of Copernicus Publication when they terminated the journal. On another point, curve fitting (as speculative as it is) is a form of pattern recognition, and thus speculation about curves is would seem appropriate in a journal called Pattern Recognition. Most new theories in science, both the successes and the failures, start out as curve fitting. (Some later progress to a model whose elements are based on physical observations or theories, and some finally progress to a further stage where the curve can be calculated from the known physics of the elements of the model.) Monckton also makes the rather savage point that while the journal was axed because it doubts the “accelerated warming” of the IPCC, the IPCC itself doubts the accelerated warming it once predicted, and no longer predicts any acceleration in the next 30 years. – Jo Selected excerpts below, Monckton’s full letter here. From: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley 20 January 2014 Dear Mr. Rasmussen, Closure and reopening of the learned journal My kind friend Professor Niklas Mörner of Stockholm, who in close to 50 years has published approaching 600 papers in the reviewed and general scientific literature, is an internationally-renowned expert on sea level and is one of the most gifted instructors of students I have ever had the pleasure to work with, has copied me in on your sad and, indeed, bizarre decision to bring to an end the excellent learned journal Pattern Recognition in Physics, less than a year after its first publication in March 2013. Professor Mörner, who is usually the most genial and even-tempered of scientists, is plainly furious not so much at your decision to axe this promising journal, which was already galloping towards the forward frontiers of research in the physical sciences, as at the extraordinary reason you have given for your decision. Keep reading → January 30th, 2014 | Tags: Monckton (Christopher), Peer Review | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | What we need is a mature national discussion. But what The Conversation (and the Business Spectator) gives us is logic-according-to-Clive, which is a black and white world where complex debates are reduced to yes or no answers and there are no shades of gray. How much will our climate warm? Clive says “Yes”. Clive Hamilton is an Australian “intellectual” a Professor of Public Ethics and holds the Vice- Maurice Newman talked about the IPCC, the satellites, Climategate, Renewable Schemes and $100 billion dollar funds. Clive responds: “Now unleashed, Newman is in full flight mimicking the anti-vaccinators.” Clive does not refute a single point that Newman makes. He calls him names and merely declares what Newman said was “bizarre”. Clive obviously has no answer and no evidence — he can’t point to models that work, or predictions that were correct, the best he can do is a pop-psychology analysis of “tactics”. It amounts to smear by association. Like saying that Attilla the Hun rode horses, so if you ride a horse you are mimicking Attila. Indeed the tactics he cites are so meaningless and common, he uses them himself. “Deniers” he says, may portray themselves as David vs Goliath. (And which academic makes out they fight against monster Fossil Fuel interests against a conservative media?) “Deniers” spread theories about cover-ups, and conspiracies. You mean, like saying that Fossil fuel companies are “the most powerful industry lobby we’ve ever seen in Australia”, so powerful that politicians dance to them, and “they’ve captured universities“? (Or they have their own political party and sometimes form government? That would be the Greens.) Who thinks the ABC is biased in favour of skeptics, thanks to “political pressure”? (What kind of bias means skeptics almost never get any airtime and when they do, the editors take the trouble of editing skeptics sentences to produce quotes they never said?) His thesis of deniers who can’t be persuaded collapses in a hole upon the smallest inspectionHamilton argues skeptics can’t be persuaded, but if he’d bothered to do any research he’d know that many leading skeptics used to think CO2 might cause a crisis, or used to be active Greens themselves, like me. What about former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, or conservationist David Bellamy? Margaret Thatcher set up the Hadley Met Centre, but later become openly skeptical. Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon, or Peter Taylor (who wrote Chill, A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory) are hardly conservative commentators making ideological calls. My other half Dr David Evans, used to work for The Australian Greenhouse Office. “What kind of denier changes their mind? The kind that aren’t deniers. There are virtually no former skeptics who have become believers, instead there is only a pretender — Richard Muller, who dishonestly makes out he was skeptical, despite obvious quotes of him praising the consensus and calling CO2 “the greatest pollutant”. Time to turn off the tapSensible people would just ignore Hamilton, but it’s time those who channel our tax funds to him need to start explaining how we get value out of his unresearched, untested pop-psychology, used to denigrate half the population and reduce our national debate to name-calling. Charles Sturt University needs to explain if this is the kind of logic it applies to the rest of it’s science research departments. Do they allow Hamilton to teach students? Will they censure him for abusing English and being irrational? The ARC likewise, and all the universities that fund The Conversation, mostly using your money. Academia in Australia is an irrational swamp and it’s time the bog was drained. The Conversation is the megaphone over the mud. Are you an alumni of any of these? Can you write to the VC and ask why it supports this kind of baseless, fallacious reasoning, abuse of English and derogatory namecalling?
First up, our national institutions need to stop supporting name-callers and start speaking English
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Let’s see if we can get them to put Science and Technology back in 2015?
Filed under: Skeptics are winning.
The EU was always the leader in the Great Green Push, and announcements on Wednesday are an excellent sign. Both the media and politicians are finally coming around, dragged by reality. This is the good news. The bad news is it’s cost hundreds of billions, and there are still renewable targets when there shouldn’t be, but we are over the peak…
Today is a big day in Brussels as the EU has begun the gradual process of rolling back its bankrupting climate and green energy policies. Of course this modest climbdown is not the end of Europe’s climate hysteria that has dominated Brussels for 20 years. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the beginning of a much deeper retreat of its unilateral approach in coming years. –Benny Peiser, 22 January 2014
The talk is for an “ambitious” 40% target by 2030, but really this is about dropping the legally binding nature of the targets. So as usual in warmist politics, no one is up front and honest. It’s a face-saving move as the green reality falls.
European Commission to ditch legally-binding renewable energy targets
Climbdown on setting mandatory national targets, enforced in the EU courts, will be welcomed by Britain
“A 2009 EU directive set the objective of ensuring that 20pc of the energy used by 2020 should come from renewable sources. ”
“The binding target for renewable energy has probably had more impact on how power is generated and the bills paid by households in Britain than any other single piece of EU legislation.”
The media is turning around: more than half the stories in the UK are negative about renewables.
“A study by British public relations consultancy CCGroup analysed 138 articles about renewables published during July last year in the five most widely circulated British national newspapers: The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, which enjoy a combined daily circulation of about 6.5 million.
“The analysis revealed a number of trends in the reporting of renewable energy news,” the study found. “First and foremost, the temperature of the media’s sentiment toward the renewables industry is cold. More than 51 per cent of the 138 articles analysed were either negative or very negative toward the industry.”
More than 80 per cent of the articles appeared in broadsheet titles The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the report says, “but 55 per cent of these articles were either negative or very negative about the industry”.
Two weeks ago, the Czech government decided to end all subsidies for new renewable energy projects at the end of this year.
Now that the Spanish government has dramatically curtailed these subsidies…
Germany has the most expensive energy, “26.8 euro cents (40c) a kilowatt hour”. It has half the world’s solar panels, but while they make up to 40% of the countries electricity in summer, they make nearly 0% in winter, when energy is most desperately needed. Germany is building 20 new coal plants, and its CO2 emissions are rising. This despite the enormous bill most electricity users are paying.
Finally the mainstream press is starting to report the real pain. Cons are always cloaked in good intentions. And this is no different. A stupendous swindle dressed up as being good for the poor and the planet has instead extracted money from the poor towards some of the wealthy. Nearly a million people have lost access to one of the most basic essential services, electricity, thereby rolling back one of the great advances of the last century.
Keep reading →
Print This Post | | Mike has been an active skeptic in Scotland, and has designed a demographic and opinion survey that I think would give us interesting results. It’s very reasonable, I hope you can take a few minutes (it is short) please try to finish it if you start it. – Jo
I am writing to you on behalf on the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum, we are conducting a survey of those interesting in the climate debate. The aim of the survey is to understand the nature and background of those interested in the climate debate online. It will provide an invaluable insight into the education and work experience of participants, test the relevance of politics in forming views and assess employment and social factors for their relationship with views on climate.
We would be very grateful if you would take the time to complete the survey. The responses are confidential.
The url is: http://scef.org.uk/survey/index.php/868721/lang/en.
Keep reading →
Showing that academics can cost the country more than they return, ANU’s Geoff Cary posits that there is an 80% consensus (an unmeasured, meaningless statistic) that there will be more fires in Australia 60 years from now.
This is an opinion about opinions of experts who use models that we know can’t predict temperatures. Not only is this “fact” already piled three layers of nonsense deep, the most abjectly stupid point is the fourth layer, the pretense that these models might, in their wildest dreams, be able to predict rainfall — which is an order of magnitude harder than just predicting global temperature. Predicting bushfires is dependent on knowing not just total rainfall in one region, but how that rainfall is spread throughout the year. Not to mention that bushfires depend on wind speed, wind direction, land-use (fuel load), and humidity.
Everyone knows that different climate models predict both higher and lower rainfall in the same areas at the same time, and the type of phrases used to describe the ability of climate models are: “low confidence” (National Centre for Atmospheric Research), “irrelevant with reality” (Koutsoyiannis ), or an “absence” of skill (Kiktev). Compare the different projections of climate models below, which model is right.
Predictions of changes in bushfire 60 years hence are thus equivalent to alchemists attempts to turn lead into gold. These are National Tea-leaf Readers, and they are not only afforded nice salaries and all the accoutrements, but given space in our national news as if they had something remotely useful to say.
Climate change means more fires: academic
Australian National University’s Geoff Cary said a projected lift in temperatures of more than 2C would probably mean much more bushfire activity across the country.
“There’s an 80 per cent consensus indicating that increased fire activity into the future is highly likely,” he told reporters in an online Australian Science Media Centre briefing.
Associate Professor Cary said in areas with wet climates, like Tasmania, bushfire risk could double over the same period.
“In the Tasmanian climate, the future scenario for 2070 which is warmer and drier suggested a … 70 to 100 per cent increase in area burnt,” he said.
However, he predicted bushfires would burn far less area in central Australia by 2070 as hotter, drier, weather reduced the amount of fuel blazes had to feed on.
“We predict a significant decrease in the area burnt,” he said.
On rainfall, there is almost always one model that is “right” because there are so many models and they all say different things.
Figure 2.Projected changes in temperature and precipitation for the 2050s. Left: United Kingdom Hadley Center. Right: Canadian Center for Climate Modeling and Analysis. Source:Rosenzweig and Solecki, Climate Change and a Global City, 2001.
Source: Columbia .edu
Here are comparisons of 5 different models over Australia. Is CSIRO Mk 3.6 the “right” model?
Figure 2.1.1: Leading mode of annual rainfall variability over Australia, from observations (Bureau of Meteorology), the CSIRO Mk3.6 and Mk3.5 climate models, and three leading international models: HadGEM1 (United Kingdom), GFDL CM2.1 (USA) and MIROC 3.2, medium resolution (Japan).
Source: Indian Ocean Climate Initiative
The IPCC AR4 report shows that over most of Australia precipitation increases and decreases are only shown in two-thirds of all the models, in other words, up to one third of the models might predict no change or the opposite result in exactly the same area.
Keep reading →
Print This Post | | A boat full of climate scientists and their adoring media entourage got stuck in sea-ice in Antarctica on Dec 24th, and they’ve finally made it back to Australia on Jan 21st.
The ABC PR machine covers for their embarrassment — lest anybody think that climate scientists might be clueless. In the ABC’s world an “Australian Research Team” with “60 scientists” left because “scientists believe there is evidence of climate change.” After they got stuck in ice they didn’t predict, and looked like partying fools on an ill-prepared junket, the magic wand of ABC-apologia stopped using the term “climate” and they underwent a magical transformation to become a “Russian Passenger Ship“.
The sudden lack of accurate reporting was all the more strange given that the ship and the icebreaker had a dedicated on-board media team from BBC World News, the Guardian, and Fairfax news. They had media on satellite connections, but probably needed meteorologists on it instead.
Repeat after me, The media IS the problem. If reporters were reporters instead of political activists, $1.5 million dollar junkets to promote climate scares would not be approved in the first place. Total cost of this mission now could be almost $4m:
“Director Tony Fleming says the total bill (for the rescue) could be as high as $2.4 million.”
No one is sure who will be paying for the rescue. It depends on insurance clauses. But we all know who pays a billion dollars a year to be fed climate spin.
For those who appreciate poetry, the infamous Speedy has penned an Antarctic epic.
There seems no shortage, nor a dearth, of those who plan to save the earth;
Christopher Turney, (“That’s Professor, thanks”), felt the need to join their ranks,
So he organised his own crusade, somewhat pricey, mostly paid,
By largesse of the public purse – not the last time, nor the first.
His purpose and his noble goal – to sail towards the Southern Pole,
To collect, collate and then report, all data of the climate sort,
Thus confirming something we all “knew” – the evil role of CO2;
Any changes he would show, compared to Mawson, years ago.
(To raise the profile of his scheme, he passed it off as “Mawson’s Dream”.)
Apart from that, not much to do, just hire a boat with Russian crew,
And, to tabulate the climate ruin, invite some friends and camera crew in;
(These climate types, I don’t know why, are rarely, rarely camera shy.)
The ship sailed southward, out to sea, and all was going, swimmingly,
However, as the South Pole beckoned, a fact arose; no-one had reckoned;
For, despite what they’d all been told, the South Pole still was JOLLY COLD!
And, nearly 60 k’s away from shore, the ship was blocked, could go no more.
Chris gazed upon the icy sea; “We’ll disembark, – just follow me,
To explore the ice; this will be awesome – we’re gonna do a Dougie Mawson!”
So the kiddies all got off and played, but, tragically, they overstayed;
For when they returned, the time had passed – the ship by now was stuck and fast!
These latest antics off the coast, had worn quite thin with Russian host;
To Chris he cried: “You stupid jerk! You’ve cost me time and lots of work!
I’m sure you thought it would be nice, to take that frolic on the ice;
You came back late, now, thanks to you, my ship is firmly in the pooh.”
Keep reading →
The Australian Academy of Science has announced its 2014 Academy awards to “celebrate scientific excellence.”
To show how excellent, their excellence is, the Frederick White Prize for scientific achievements contributing to the understanding of natural phenomena goes to Professor Chris Turney, University of New South Wales.
Professor Chris Turney
“Professor Turney is an internationally recognised earth scientist and research leader in both climate and environmental change, from the tropics to the poles. By pioneering new ways of combining climate models with records of past climate change (spanning from hundreds to thousands of years), he has discovered new links between variability mechanisms in the Australian region and global climate change”.
Curiously the 2015 McFarlane Burnet Award has already been awarded. Professor Lambeck will be doing wonderful work this year. Good to know.
The point of this post? Just another poke at the scientific hierarchy for awarding a prize to a man who uses broken models with proven flaws to help us understand the natural phenomenon that he so famously got 74 people and two ships stuck in. And there are people who think we should listen to and laud these associations?
The Frederick White Prize is “up to $3000”.
The termination of the Pattern Recognition journal ought to be PR gold for skeptics. Nothing like this happens to unskeptical scientists, ever. It’s a telling spectacle.
A major science publisher gasped in horror that one amongst its scores of journals had “doubted the IPCC”, so the journal had to be axed forever. Oh the Crime! The over-the-top dummy-spit exposes the religious zeal in a supposedly scientific process. So much for the hallowed “Peer Review”. Fans of establishment science want us to believe it’s a gospel part of the scientific method, but it is neither intrinsic nor essential, and skeptics should not be fooled into thinking it is.
Peer reviewed papers may be gems or junk but we won’t know which by discussing who reviewed them.
Let’s follow due process in science, but that is not by review whether peer-or-pal, it’s by prediction, test, observation, and repeat.
Some people seem to have lost sight of this, and think that skeptics ought to be trying to play the Peer Review Game according to the fine print of arbitrary rules dictated by unscientists who hate skeptics and who don’t even play by the rules themselves. The game belongs to them — they set, change and break the rules, and they decide who gets an invite to the clubhouse. But in the end, the review game is a sideshow, and it is usually used to lock out those who question a consensus.
Decisions by anonymous unpaid reviewers are not worth much and never will be.
Should skeptics maintain the high ground? Absolutely, but the real high ground is another level entirely. I’m not going to fight to preserve the current system. Decisions by anonymous unpaid reviewers are not worth much and never will be, the incentives are too weak. We need accountability and responsibility of one individual, not so much committees, or brand-names, or boards.
Anyone who claims that science only exists on official approved pages of anointed publications is a Gatekeeper of Dogma. (How many trolls respond to a valid point by saying “why don’t you publish it in the peer review?”) Real scientists know that the truth is not dependent on where it was printed, nor who reviewed it. It’s time to rise above the Gatekeeper’s Rules, not fight over them.
The rules are arbitrary, the hypocrisy rife. When establishment climate scientists do pal-review they call it peer review; when skeptics do anything that could be construed as pal review, it’s “nepotism and malpractice”, and destructo-the-journal. Seriously?
It’s about politics not science. The publishers themselves said:” PRP was never meant to be a platform for climate sceptics”. No one can define “climate sceptic” in scientific terms (who denies there is a climate?). It follows that if PRP was used as a platform for climate unskeptics, presumably that would be fine.
You don’t need to have a science degree to understand that there is nothing rigorous or scientific about what happened. The charge of “nepotism” was added as an afterthought. The journal announced the termination, and then got blow-back and apparently realized they had accidentally revealed their very unscientific philosophy where the IPCC = God, and one of the ten commandments was that it shall not be doubted. The publishers (“not-so-Copernicus“) belatedly added, without any detail, that the 14 papers published by 19 scientists in one special edition had reviewed each others work, and therefore should not have been published. The only “error” listed was to disagree with the IPCC. This is a scandal.
Not permitted: “This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project.”
If all these articles had been published one month after each other, who would have noticed or cared that over a year there was a form of what could be construed as pal review? Isn’t this business as usual — if we looked at many clusters of specialist topics wouldn’t we find patterns where a small group of authors and reviewers cross check each others work? What does it mean? It means we can’t ever get past the human foibles, and there are always conflicts of interest. On the one hand if-you-pat-my-back then I’ll-pat-yours is a real phenomenon and definitely a temptation, and virtually impossible to police. But, in a Special Edition, if I allow your junk paper to be published next to my good one, I’m hardly doing myself a favour.
Asking someone outside the group doesn’t guarantee rigorous reviews either. How much effort should an unpaid unnamed reviewer go to, to cross check and improve a paper that they won’t get any credit for? There is no perfect solution. It’s not a bun-fight we need to waste time on. Bureaucratized Peer review is highly flawed, doesn’t prove a thing scientifically and works to the advantage of those who are already in the game.
Asking one outside-reviewer might improve the paper, asking two is better, but how long is a piece of string, and where is the sweet spot? Let’s ask a thousand outside reviewers — call it published and set it free. Then pick the most insightful responses and publish them too.
The only way to know if the review process helped or hindered is to discuss the papers themselves, not the details of the review process. Let’s not get lost fighting in the bureaucratic maze, when what matters is the rest of the universe.
Curve fitting or wiggle-matching is a low end tool. It doesn’t prove anything, but sometimes it points to something worth investigating. Nearly every discovery starts with noticing a curve that fits, then people ask why…
For some perspective, ponder that the people who misuse it shamelessly are the ones with billions of dollars, PR departments, a BBC fan club and two-week junkets to Bali. Climate modelers are the worst Curve Fitters of all. The infamous IPCC climate models do the lowest form of wiggle-matching possible yet are hallowed in the peer review literature and in hundreds upon hundreds of papers, and then in thousands of media articles. In their wiggle-matching there are not even any wiggles to match. It is all done on a monotonically rising CO2 trend. There are no turning points, and no places on any graph where CO2 falls, and leads to a temperature fall. There is only the weakest of correlations between rising CO2 and a rough-rising temperature. (And there are countless examples where temperatures fell while CO2 rose.) Yet billions of dollars rests on these curves.
Just because curve-fitting finds a match, doesn’t mean “therefore” the match is a false one. This is as illogical as pretending curve-fitting is “therefore” the truth. Some forms of curve fitting are worth protesting about. Let’s keep our eyes on the target.
Current journal reviewers are not crucial to science, there are other ways to review material.
If their pal-review system blocks the truth emerging in their journals, it will emerge somewhere else. So be it.
Reviewing papers is treated far too seriously after the fact, and often far too casually during the review. We have it completely back to front.
Peer review should not be raised on a pedestal, but it should be overhauled, as well as put back in it’s place. Here’s one possibility, but there must and ought be many, and the more we force science to fit a bureaucratic regimen, the less science we’ll get.
What if one named editor solely makes the decision to publish, and they can ask advice from reviewers, whomever they should choose. The reputation of that one editor should depend on the value of the papers they pass. The buck stops with them. They need to be paid, and the best ones, more. An editor’s name ought go on the paper (obviously as an editor, not as an author). Great editors would accrue great status. Reviewers can earn brownie points from the best editors by doing a good job to protect the editor’s reputation (which means accurate, complete reviews). Good editors pay off the brownie points, in turn, getting the best reviewers to improve and review each others papers. Whether the reviewers are pal or peers is up to the editors judgement — if they only ask pals, and the paper is poor, it’s on the editors head. Reviewers can still be anonymous. If the editor leaves the journal, the cachet of the editor stays with the editor, not with the journal. Some editors will prove to be much better than others at choosing which papers are worth publishing. It would be a very hard job.
As a small point to notice, bloggers sometimes work just like this…
Many journal editors today palm off their responsibility to vague anonymous reviewers. It’s death by committee.
I am disappointed to see many good names in the Pattern Recognition paper being treated with so little respect and goodwill. This is not the way to advance science. Can we get back to ideas, tests, logic and results?
The Pattern Recognition debacle exposes what a waste of time most peer review journals are as they currently stand. (Has a single one spoken out against censorship because a paper “doubts the IPCC”?) Anything that shows that there is nothing rigorous about peer review is a good thing for independent thinkers.
Therefore this incident is a bonus in the campaign to let the public know how weak the warmist case is, how unable to compete.
The Peer Review Game works as a gatekeeper to silence critics, so pandering and bowing to it is exactly what the unscientists want. Let’s put the process exactly where it belongs. It’s not science, but sometimes it’s useful despite that, and sometimes it’s fun to play anyway, so we do it for the entertainment and wins we get (despite the odds). But the deck is stacked, and when we play the game we should not be placing big bets, nor attacking real scientists to score points in a flawed game.
Science, after all, is not done by “Peer Review”, it’s done by evidence and reason.
People will accuse me of double standards, but quote me carefully (and in context) and you will find I have never attacked a paper purely because it was pal-reviewed, but always because I had problems with the reasoning and arguments first. When good scientists pal review good science, we can get better science. When poor scientists pal review poor science, we get a cheating loophole, though good editors ought to know that, and rebuttals can clean up mistakes. Pal review merely explains why some truly junky papers get put into supposedly eminent journals. My real problem is with scientists who make out that Peer Review is gospel while practicing bad pal-review. There is active deception in that contrast.
Nils Axel Morner, Roger Tattersall, Ian Wilson, have not said their papers are true because they are published, they all say “judge me by my work”.
In response to Anthony I would say:
1. The media are going to one-sidedly cherry pick a belated unsubstantiated excuse anyway. They always falsely try to pin any flaw to “all skeptics”. Why amplify that or accept it? I would point out their hypocrisy, rather than join the chorus.
2. The real priorities are logic and reason, evidence and free speech. In the peer-pal debate there is no win worth achieving. Peer review is a weak system anyway. And current journal editors are only going to send alarmist papers to independent skeptics as a matter of course when everybody realizes the real debate occurred online, and some bloggers were closer to the truth than Nature. Let’s help independent scientists continue to push the bounds of knowledge.
3. As far as dashing “…any chance of any sort of climate skeptic or citizen science based journal coming into existence…”. I would say, No. Not at all.
4. Until Copernicus shows that the papers contained flaws worse than MBH98, which was not even retracted, terminating a journal for no named error at all is a scandal. When will Copernicus be closing the other journals?
* * *
Roger (Tallbloke) stands by his work: “our papers are still available for download at PRP so people can read our science and decide the merits for themselves. Backup copies are available at the Talkshop in case the link dies. “
So how sure are they of their climate model predictions? So sure they demand we pay billions but when it comes to betting their own money, the modelers are all bravado over the chance to bet on any warming “above zero” 20 years from now.
Some of Australia’s top climate scientists, including those from the CSIRO, have said they will be willing to bet Tony Abbott’s business adviser Maurice Newman $10,000 that the world will warm over the next 20 years.
These gutsy scientists are offering bets that the climate “might” warm, and which might pay out to a man who will be 95 at their completion. The Guardian takes them seriously?
Here’s an offer to those climate scientists, yes I’m interested in a bet, for sure, but I won’t be offering you a shot at winning in a situation where you predict (and we pay to prevent) far more warming than you are willing to bet on. Hypocrisy what? Your own models are abject failures, and we are forced to pay for policies fueled by your failures and your salary as well.
So show you have the balls and come and talk about a real bet — one that demonstrates you honestly really do think your models work, and you understand the climate.
There are many readers here who are keen as well, and I’m happy to arrange things. I’m already been party to a serious bet, and you can read the details there, we are happy to negotiate on volcanoes, prefer 5 year smoothing, or decadal trends, and talk about a neutral range where the bet is draw because we all know there are error margins.
I offered Brian Schmidt a bet based on the weak outcomes he talked about, but climate modelers don’t deserve to bet on anything except their own predictions.
All of these ones, who insult taxpayers by offering to accept a “win” if they fail as scientists:
The CSIRO’s Dr John Church, who is also an IPCC lead author, said he would take up the $10,000 bet, while Dr Tony Hirst, deputy research program director, said he would bet $500 based on “clear terms” of a three or five-year temperature average.
The other scientists include David Karoly of Melbourne University, Will Steffen of the Climate Council, and Dave Griggs, director of the Monash Sustainability Institute.
Prof Andrew Blakers, director of the centre for sustainable energy systems at the Australian National University, said he would be willing to bet $10,000, placed into an escrow account along with a “legally binding agreement” over the payment of the funds.
“Let’s put real money on the table and do this properly,” said Blakers.
Ian Lowe, emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University, said only a “catastrophic meteorite impact” could avoid the “inevitability” of higher temperatures in 20 years’ time. Lowe said he would be willing to join Schmidt but questioned the viability of the wager. He said: “He [Newman] was born in April 1938, so he is nearly 76.
Dr Alex Sen Gupta, of the University of NSW’s climate centre, said it was a “pretty safe bet” and that he would have “no chance” of losing his $10,000, based on his understanding of climate science.
In addition to the scientists, economist John Quiggin said he’d be prepared to bet $10,000 to prove Newman wrong. — The Guardian
I’m willing to be serious, the question is — are these scientists serious too, or are they media-show-ponies who think betting on “anything above zero” is worth discussing as a bet while other days they stand in front of cameras to tell us they are 90% sure we are headed for cataclysmic warming. “Pay us your money”.
Keep reading →
So much going on…
…
In extraordinary news, the scientific journal Pattern Recognition in Physics has been unexpectedly terminated, a “drastic decision” taken just ten months after it started.
The publisher appears to be shocked that in a recent special issue the scientists expressed doubt about the accelerated warming predicted by the IPCC. For the crime of not bowing before the sacred tabernacle, apparently the publishers suddenly felt the need to distance themselves, and in the most over-the-top way. The reasons they gave had nothing to do with the data, the logic, and they cite no errors. There can be no mistake, this is about enforcing a permitted line of thought.
I must say, it’s a brilliant (if a tad expensive) way to draw attention to a scientific paper. It’s the Barbara-Streisland moment in science. Forget “withdrawn”, forget “retracted”, the new line in the sand is to write a paper so hot they have to terminate the whole journal! Skeptics could hardly come up with a more electric publicity campaign.
Naturally, as with all good Barbara-Streisland-moves intended to suppress information, as soon as I heard, the first thing I did was to seek out and download copies of all the papers. Right now, people everywhere would be starting to do the same, curious to know what could be so unsayable. (See the links at the bottom).
In the official announcement the excuses are amazingly transparent. There is little attempt to cover up the reasons. The publisher pays the usual lip service saying science needs disputes and discussion of controversial topics. But some things are apparently too awful to contemplate — like pointing out how the high priests of the IPCC might be incorrect.
http://www.pattern-recognition-in-physics.net/
Copernicus Publications started publishing the journal Pattern Recognition in Physics (PRP) in March 2013. The journal idea was brought to Copernicus’ attention and was taken rather critically in the beginning, since the designated Editors-in-Chief were mentioned in the context of the debates of climate skeptics. However, the initiators asserted that the aim of the journal was to publish articles about patterns recognized in the full spectrum of physical disciplines rather than to focus on climate-research-related topics.
Recently, a special issue was compiled entitled “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts”. Besides papers dealing with the observed patterns in the heliosphere, the special issue editors ultimately submitted their conclusions in which they “doubt the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project” (Pattern Recogn. Phys., 1, 205–206, 2013).
Copernicus Publications published the work and other special issue papers to provide the spectrum of the related papers to the scientists for their individual judgment. Following best practice in scholarly publishing, published articles cannot be removed afterwards.
We at Copernicus Publications wish to distance ourselves from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims & scope of the journal and decided on 17 January 2014 to cease the publication of PRP. Of course, scientific dispute is controversial and should allow contradictory opinions which can then be discussed within the scientific community. However, the recent developments including the expressed implications (see above) have led us to this drastic decision.
Interested scientists can reach the online library at: www.pattern-recogn-phys.net
Martin Rasmussen
January 2014
UPDATE: I hear that there is a newer version of this note which added an extra paragraph:
“In addition, the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing and not in accordance with our publication ethics we expect to be followed by the editors.”
Copernicus is a large publishing group which also publishes many other journals. I wonder if “nepotism” is the word for pal-review which occurs all the time…
UPDATE #2: So no one misses it, the Editors primary objection was “doubt of the IPCC” and this shows in their original Termination page as well as in their emails to authors. The “nepotism” excuse appeared later, probably when they realized how pathetic their reasoning was as the authors pointed out in their replies.
N.-A. Mörner1, R. Tattersall2, J.-E. Solheim3, I. Charvatova4, N. Scafetta5, H. Jelbring6, I. R. Wilson7, R. Salvador8, R. C. Willson9, P. Hejda10, W. Soon11, V. M. Velasco Herrera12, O. Humlum13, D. Archibald14, H. Yndestad15, D. Easterbrook16, J. Casey17, G. Gregori18, and G. Henriksson19.
If you would like to thank the editor for guaranteeing that this paper will now be discussed in magazines and newspapers (when it might have been ignored) or if you’d like to suggest a different title for their business (Not Copernicus, perhaps) you can write to him martin.rasmussen AT copernicus.org. As always, be polite, please.
Nils Axel Morner has published 580 papers and presented 550 talks at major international conferences. He was the editor of the special issue which includes 14 papers and 20 authors. He writes to Martin Rasmussen:
We were alarmed by the authors’ second implication stating “This sheds serious doubts on the issue of a continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project”.
So the editors were alarmed that scientists were not alarmed. It’s in writing. Who decides which papers have scientific merit these days?
Skeptics do not need the rusty clanking gears of peer review paper journals. We have free press, we have the Internet. It’s time we got back to what science is supposed to be. Science is not “peer review” — it’s reasoning and evidence. It’s not about the paper, the editors, the brand name or the color of the print. It’s about the truth.
Tallbloke is shocked at the censorship
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Over a week ago Christopher Monckton sent this letter below to the Editor of Copernicus Publications, suggesting they reconsider their 
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