Over Easter, psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky moved from Perth to Bristol (lucky UK). He’s the psychologist who is expert in an imaginary group of humans called “Climate deniers”. Neither he, nor anyone else has ever met one but he discovered their imaginary motivations by surveying the confused groups who hate them. As you would, right?
None of the so-called researchers can explain what scientific observations a climate denier, denies. It’s an abuse of English, profoundly unscientific, but has some success in shutting down public debate, if that’s what you want.
Can humans change the weather and stop the storms? If you know we can, Lewandowsky calls that “science”. If you wonder “how much”, you are a denier.
The Royal Society, possibly reaching a tipping point in its rush to abject scientific decay, has immediately awarded him the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. It’s effectively a top-up on his salary for the next five years, just in case the UK might lose him. While Australia is grateful, scientists everywhere, cry. Hat tip to Geoff Chambers
The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with the permanent post at the host university.
The focus of the award is a salary enhancement, usually in the range of £10,000 to £30,000 per annum.
The Royal Society now “owns” Stephan Lewandowsky’s achievements, for they have decided he is talent from overseas “of outstanding achievement and potential.” We presume they have the internet, and bothered to google the obvious? Apparently, either The Royal Society has not much idea of what they now need to defend, or they have changed their definition of “outstanding achievement”.
I should think that now was an excellent time for concerned fellows to write to The Royal Society and politely ask what that definition is.
What does it take to be “outstanding”?
Does an outstanding Royal Society Scientist base their work around namecalling? Hello “deniers”. Do they hail the chosen ones — annointed climate science experts (aka the Gods of Science) and declare authority to be more important than observations? (How many fallacies-per-page does it take to qualify for RS recognition these days?)
Is it “outstanding” to call thousands of scientists “stupid” or to falsely pretend thousands of people could have seen your survey on a site that never hosted it?
Call me a cynic: Is “outstanding” success now assessed in a pragmatic spirit — say managing the unthinkable — like achieving journal publications and media headlines with only ten results from an online internet survey? It might not be outstanding maths, but it is outstanding PR-for-a-cause, especially given the data doesn’t remotely support the title of the paper or the headline.
Perhaps his real “achievement” is to get ethical approval for work done by researchers who hold their subjects in contempt and don’t bother trying to hide that? That would breach normal National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) ethical standards. It would mean psychology could be used against personal enemies, and taxpayer funded grants be used against taxpayers. None of which is what “outstanding” science should be, or used to be.
The Royal Society was established near the start of the Enlightenment, to promote empirical science over political authority. It’s motto: Nullius in verba, Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it”. Now it aids and abets in the old Soviet tactic of medicalization of dissent, to silence and discredit those who promote opinions or facts that the political establishment finds inconvenient. The Lewandowsky connection risks damning the Royal Society forever as just another corrupt political authority, and profoundly anti-science.
But sometimes it’s not some abstruse subtle bias. Sometimes it’s not a good-natured joke. Sometimes people might just be actively working to corrupt your data.
…
The paper’s thesis was that climate change skeptics are motivated by conspiracy ideation…
Unfortunately, it’s…possible Stephan Lewandowsky wasn’t the best person to investigate this? Aside from being a professor of cognitive science, he also runs Shaping Tomorrow’s World, a group that promotes “re-examining some of the assumptions we make about our technological, social and economic systems” and which seems to be largely about promoting global warming activism. While I think it’s admirable that he is involved in that, it raises conflict of interest questions. And the way his paper is written – starting with the over-the-top title – doesn’t do him any favors.
(if the conflict of interest angle doesn’t make immediate and obvious sense to you, imagine how sketchy it would be if a professional global warming denier was involved in researching the motivations of global warming supporters)
…This then devolved into literally the worst flame war I have ever seen on the Internet…
Voting closes on Tuesday. Look for “Jo Nova“. Click “next” until you get the chance to click Finish, or Submit. Thanks! Overseas votes welcome.
This week in stem cell news one research group announced they’d accidentally figured out a way to easily convert human bone-marrow stem cells into brain cells which could in future repair spinal or brain damage. Another group showed that if you happen to be a particular type of old mouse with memory problems, researchers can give you a transplant of stem cells that restore your learning and memoryand help you swim through water mazes faster. But seriously, these discoveries could help a lot of very needy people.
Meanwhile Australia, celebrated it’s one millionth roofing panel that provide expensive, irregular electricity.
Ladies and Gentlemen — there is a revolution going on, and it’s not the Green one. How much could $2 billion wasted dollars have achieved if it were spent wisely?
These two studies fit together quite well — the first shows it’s possible to use stem cells to restore brain function, the second suggests it might be easier to get the right stem cells than anyone thought.
Repairing damaged mouse brains
How’s this for odd, wierd, exciting and worrying at the same time, human embryonic stem cells were implanted into a strain of mouse that does not reject transplants from other species. The cells were cultured with chemicals that helps them develop into nerve cells, and they apparently went on to become functional and useful.
[University of Wisconsin-Madison] “After the transplant, the mice scored significantly better on common tests of learning and memory in mice. For example, they were more adept in the water maze test, which challenged them to remember the location of a hidden platform in a pool.
The study began with deliberate damage to a part of the brain that is involved in learning and memory.
Three measures were critical to success, says Zhang: location, timing and purity. “Developing brain cells get their signals from the tissue that they reside in, and the location in the brain we chose directed these cells to form both GABA and cholinergic neurons.”
These cells were placed at the hippocampus, and grew out to connect with the damaged part of the mouse brains (the medial septum). They specialized and connected the right cells together.
This is Big Medicine, and there are big risks. Often, stem cells grow into tumors. This time, the research team say they got it right by coaching the stem cells to differentiate before they were injected.
[Science Daily] “Ensuring that nearly all of the transplanted cells became neural cells was critical, Zhang says. “That means you are able to predict what the progeny will be, and for any future use in therapy, you reduce the chance of injecting stem cells that could form tumors. In many other transplant experiments, injecting early progenitor cells resulted in masses of cells — tumors. This didn’t happen in our case because the transplanted cells are pure and committed to a particular fate so that they do not generate anything else. We need to be sure we do not inject the seeds of cancer.”
Brain repair through cell replacement is a Holy Grail of stem cell transplant, and the two cell types are both critical to brain function, Zhang says. “Cholinergic neurons are involved in Alzheimer’s and Down syndrome, but GABA neurons are involved in many additional disorders, including schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression and addiction.”
Though tantalizing, stem-cell therapy is unlikely to be the immediate benefit. Zhang notes that “for many psychiatric disorders, you don’t know which part of the brain has gone wrong.” The new study, he says, is more likely to see immediate application in creating models for drug screening and discovery.
Converting human bone-marrow into brain cells on demand
Ultimately, who wouldn’t prefer to stay outside the ethical quagmire, avoid embryonic stem cells, and generate your own perfect “transplants”, as needed? Our bodies won’t reject our own cells, but it is expensive and difficult to generate a personal cell-line for every patient — this discovery may change that. A group, directed by Richard Lerner at Scripps, discovered that an antibody can be injected into bone marrow cells and transform the cells into brain cells. They thought the antibody they were injecting would stimulate the growth of the stem cells, but did not expect it would set off sweeping changes and induce the formation of neural cells. A serendipitous discovery.
[Scripps News] Current techniques for turning patients’ marrow cells into cells of some other desired type are relatively cumbersome, risky and effectively confined to the lab dish. The new finding points to the possibility of simpler and safer techniques. Cell therapies derived from patients’ own cells are widely expected to be useful in treating spinal cord injuries, strokes and other conditions throughout the body, with little or no risk of immune rejection.
“These results highlight the potential of antibodies as versatile manipulators of cellular functions,” said Richard A. Lerner, the Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Immunochemistry and institute professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at TSRI, and principal investigator for the new study. “This is a far cry from the way antibodies used to be thought of—as molecules that were selected simply for binding and not function.”
Lerner says. “With this method, you can go to a person’s own stem cells and turn them into brain cells that can repair nerve injuries.
This group plans to work with another team who are trying to regenerate nerves in the eye.
What was especially ground-breaking about this was that a single type of molecule tranformed the cells instead of a long, risky, series of steps:
Only five years ago Australia had a mere 20,000 solar systems installed on homes across the country. Now thanks to a Gonzo-Big-Daddy-Government we have over one million solar systems, almost all of them producing electricity that could have been made for something like a fifth of the price with coal.
The Clean Energy Regulator spins it as though wasting money on inefficient equipment in the hope of reducing world temperatures is a good thing for Australia.
“…the Clean Energy Regulator, which estimates that those solar energy systems provide power for around 2.5 million Australians. With a population of around 23 million, that means over ten percent of the country benefits from solar power.”
So 10% of Australians benefit from solar, and 90% pay for it?
“The regulator also says the installations have saved Australians about half a billion dollars on electricity bills!”
The regulator doesn’t say how much Australians had to pay to “save” a half a billion dollars.
At the prevailing REC prices, this effectively provided an up-front capital subsidy of $777 million to solar PV systems in 2010.
In October 2012, The Weekend Australian estimated a cost of $3 billion:
SUBSIDIES for the Gillard government’s rooftop solar scheme are threatening to blow out to $3 billion as households rush to install panels to beat price hikes related to the start of the carbon tax.
In NSW that was nearly $300 per household or business:
NSW Energy Minister Chris Hartcher said the combined impact of the carbon tax and the RET added $270 to NSW household and small business annual electricity bills and the state government wanted the RET closed.
The Victoria Auditor General showed large scale solar costs about 5.5 times as much as coal, and small scale rooftop solar would cost even more. The part time nature of solar power means large scale baseload providers (like coal fired power) run less efficiently. There are rarely any actual CO2 savings, and the savings there are, are not cheap. (The productivity commission estimated the RET scheme “abated” CO2 emissions at a cost of $177–$497/ton. Tarrifs have been reduced since then, but then, on the EU market, CO2 credits sells for 3 Euro a ton.) Peak electricity use at home is before 9am and after 3pm, (not the sunniest part of the day). Our baseload power consumption even on the quietest nights is still 60% of the peak. Solar just can’t do that.
As usual, fans of solar talk about the “capacity”:
The national installed capacity is now at 2.452 GW from 1,011,478 solar PV systems.
But when it’s dark their capacity is zero GW. The average works out to be around 5 – 20% of the total installed capacity. (See also wikipedia)
If we have spent $3 billion on solar power we could have bought the same electricity from coal instead and had $2 billion to spare for medical research. Buying inefficient solar panels from China is not going to make us a world leader, and it isn’t going to cool the planet. Are we doing it in the hope that the profits from the fake solar market will help someone somewhere “invent” solar power that works? If so, why not just spend the money on research ourselves? We might even discover something worth using and selling.
The irony: the answer to “clean” energy might not be the glossamer sun or the lilting breeze, but an infectious germ.
[Science Daily] …a team from the University of Exeter, with support from Shell, has developed a method to make bacteria produce diesel on demand. While the technology still faces many significant commercialisation challenges, the diesel, produced by special strains of E. coli bacteria, is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel…
They’re not there yet, yields are … tragic.
[BBC] Professor Love said it would take about 100 litres of bacteria to produce a single teaspoon of the fuel.
“Our challenge is to increase the yield before we can go into any form of industrial production,” he said.
But speaking as someone who did microbiology, sooner or later, the bug solution is coming. I presume everyone knows the old exponential growth story where one bacteria weighing 10-12 of a gram, doubles every 20 minutes, and if Earth were a cheesecake, 2 days later you’ve converted it into E.Coli (and 4000 times over)? (There’s more on this theme here).
There is power in them efficient little biology machines. Our chemical factories are mere shadows of the curmudgeonly ‘Coli. Though in the end — even bacteria need to be fed, and these ones will be eating some kind of sugar. It has to come from somewhere.
To create the fuel, the researchers, who were funded by the oil company Shell and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, used a strain of E. coli that usually takes in sugar and then turns it into fat.
Using synthetic biology, the team altered the bacteria’s cell mechanisms so that the sugar was converted to synthetic fuel molecules instead.
Other biofuels are pathetic
Apparently biofuel made from vegetable oil is so bad it’s worse than fossil fuels. See the recent report by Chatham House.
For some inexplicable reason, the EU has decided the UK must use 5% biofuels in its fuel mix starting from last week. (And just who runs the country eh?) But the ethanol distilled from corn and rapeseed oil are not so environmentally friendly. Tropical forests get razed to grow the palm oil, and hungry people can’t eat the corn that’s fed to cars, it’s expensive (UK motorists need to pay out an extra £460m a year), and it isn’t very good at reducing CO2 (if that mattered). Basically it kills humans and trees, but protects underground rocks.
So some bright spark thought we ought insist on people using “used cooking oil” — which would’ve been thrown away. But apparently there are too many hungry cars on the road and the price of “used cooking oil” rose so high that it was a sensible financial decision to buy new palm oil, fry a single dim-sim in the vat, and sell the lot at a premium because it was now “used”.
Tony Abbott has a plan to try to convince China and the US to sign up for the “global climate change deal.” As if the world’s number one and two economies, with a population of 1.6 billion combined, will be waiting for instructions. And as if the global climate needed “a deal”. Hey but we do have 22 million people. squeak. squeak.
To make matters worse, Greg Hunt — the opposition spokesman for the environment — said a Coalition Government might not wipe out the emissions reductions target but… wait, they might lift the target instead. Thus taking something useless, expensive and ineffective against a problem-that-doesn’t-exist and making it moreso.
It’s a mistake every which way. The Liberal Party could play them at their own green game and beat them, just by applying common sense. Instead its appeasing the politically correct namecallers (who wouldn’t vote for them anyway), and the price they pay is to look weak, irrational and lacking in conviction.
A true environmentalist would stop wasting money on schemes that don’t help the environment. (Why spend a cent cooling Australia by no degrees? There goes the carbon tax…)
If the Liberal Party were serious about protecting the environment, they would promise to drop funding for pointless fantasies and token do-gooder projects and get the science right first. A government that was serious about the environment would use some saved funds to set up an entirely new climate science research unit — one that aimed at predicting the climate (inasmuch as it is possible). Better climate models would help farmers, town planners, tourism operators, emergency services, dams and water catchments. It’s not just green, its a productivity thing too. Better than a wind-farm…
The new unit could compete with the BOM and CSIRO and may the best scientists win.
A real green policymaker would audit our temperature records independently. How can we be serious about managing Australia’s climate if our records have biased and inexplicable adjustments, that are described as “neutral”? Why would anyone who cares about the environment be prepared to accept shoddy data, bugs, and mysterious black box methods that no one can test?
At the end of the day, if the Greens cared about the air, the temperature and the trees, they would care about the data used to track these things. They would care about the outcomes. Anything less is just “seeming”.
What the government giveth, the government can take away. So it came to pass that the glory of green investments fell over its peak and started to slide — a slide we hope will continue forthwith with speed until such day that Renewables Actually Work.
Weakest quarter for clean energy investment since 2009
Investment worldwide in the first quarter of 2013 was $40.6bn, down 22% on a year earlier, due to a downturn in large wind and solar project financings London and New York, 15 April 2013 – Global investment in clean energy in the first three months of 2013 was lower than in any quarter for the past four years, according to the latest figures from research company Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
2013 Q1 is not marked here (except with a dodgy red star thingy). It s somewhere around 22% below Q1 2012. 🙂 [Graph: Bloomberg]
Remember in the land of warmer-investments, this is just a global pause. It’s the fourth highest first-quarter investment. Ever. (!)
The US leads the way. Europe is following. Australia is too irrelevant to mention.
“Among the key details of the first quarter 2013 data were a 54% year-on-year fall in US clean energy investment to $4.5bn, a 15% setback in the Chinese total to $8.8bn and a 25% drop for Europe to $13.4bn. The rest of Asia, outside India and China, bucked the trend with a 47% jump to a record $10.1bn, led by a surge of investment in Japan to $8.2bn.”
Among different types of investment, the largest decline was in the asset finance of utility-scale projects such as wind farms and solar parks – this fell 34% to $19.3bn.
Why the fall? … Capricious governments (It doesn’t help that Mother Nature is not making “free” energy easy-to-get)
Policy uncertainty played a part in limiting asset finance in the early months of this year – in particular, wind farm investment halted in the US during the winter because a key incentive, the Production Tax Credit, appeared to be heading for expiry at the end of 2012. Ultimately, the PTC was extended but the uncertainty about its status had already front-loaded financings and construction of US wind into calendar years 2011 and 2012. Relatively little new wind project construction is expected in 2013…
If only those renewables had been competitive, it could have been so different.
The EU is a basket-case, teetering, so when the European Parliament had the chance to “fix” the carbon market yesterday, they surprised everyone and chose not to. Being unfixed, it’s free to collapse, which it did and by 40%.
The EU carbon market once was around €22/tCO2 (that was 2008). Australia turned up five years late to the party, and is still trying to trade at similar rates.
Today Point Carbon is listing the carbon price as “€2.80“. Obviously, subject to change, and possibly trending-to-zero.
[BusinessTimes] “Campaigners and traders warn the carbon price could now fall below 2 euros or even to near zero in the coming weeks, and government sales could fail if they don’t meet minimum price requirements, as banks that act as liquidity providers pull out.”
The EU carbon market is not dead yet, but this could be a game changer
[The Economist] The rejection [of the bill to rescue the carbon market] was a surprise. The parliament’s environment committee had looked at the plan in February and approved it by a surprisingly wide margin of 38 votes to 25.
As expected, most members of the largest political alliance, the centre-right European People’s Party, voted against the proposal. This was needed, they argued, to protect consumers from higher energy bills. What came as a surprise is the fact that all but four British conservative members of the European Parliament also voted against the plan. In doing so they defied their own government, which has introduced a carbon floor price in Britain that could soon be higher than the European carbon price. And the European Socialists, which had been expected mostly to back the proposals, instead split, with 44 in favour of the plan and 31 against.”
Go the Brits!
The Economist speculates on whether the proposal might be resurrected (it’s been sent back to the environment committee). It could come back. Though ultimately, the MEP’s would have to change their minds. Since it was an important vote, and practically everyone turned up on the day, that’s a good sign. It might be hard to get any version through. Still, hold the champagne. The vote was 334 to 315.
There goes the Australian budget
The next Australian Budget is delivered in May. It was never going to be in surplus anyway was it?
[The Australian] LABOR will revise down its carbon tax revenue estimates following a crash in the European carbon market, at a likely multi-billion dollar cost to the federal budget.
Five seconds after the price fell, Australian’s started asking why we are paying five times as much. Greg Combet said (effectively) but it’s only for two years. (We all feel so much better then.)
[The Australian] Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry economics director Greg Evans described the Australian scheme as “economic recklessness” and said it should be scrapped.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitch Hooke declared the scheme was now “untenable”.
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said the government would revise its forecasts for its carbon price revenue when it delivered the budget in May.
Mr Combet said linking with the European scheme was still two years away. A lot could happen in that time, and the Europeans would try other measures to raise their carbon price.
…
The carbon price will be linked with the EU scheme from July 2015 and the price will float. [or sink — wonders Jo]
Opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey said it’s a “$7bn revenue hole”. Henry Ergas estimates $10 billion (and that’s just two financial years).
Last year the Australia Treasury predicted by 2015 the carbon price would be $29 a tonne.
Gillard can compensate some people, but whatever she does, she can’t compensate The Nation.
It’s difficult to say anything for sure about Antarctica because the weather is so variable. Bumper snow one year, not so much the next. (Noise and uncertainty is large). But 800 years of ice cores spread across Antarctica shows the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) is more likely to have been increasing over the last century. (Which fits with what Zwally et al found in 2012 with ICESAT satellite data).
Note the correlation of the smoothed average of the SMB (orange line) with Total Solar Irradiance (green line).
Antarctic Ice has been increasing for the last half century, and over 800 years it correlates with solar radiation. TSI: Total Solar Irradiance (Click to enlarge) Fig. 5. (A) Mean normalised stacked SMB anomaly time series at the continental scale, calculated as described in the text (black line with positive and negative values filled in with red and blue contours, respectively) and the 40-yr central running average smoothing (orange line). The green line represents the normalised TSI anomalies, and the corresponding ±1 uncertainties are indicated by the green vertical bars.
A paper published today in The Cryosphere finds Antarctica has been gaining surface ice and snow accumulation over the past 150+ years, and finds acceleration in some areas noting, “a clear increase in accumulation of more than 10% has occurred in high Surface Mass Balance coastal regions and over the highest part of the East Antarctic ice divide since the 1960s.”
They used 67 firn/ice core records to reconstruct the last 800 years.
From this paper we can see:
Over 800 years, Antarctic ice changes all the time, but current rates of change are not unusual. The surface mass balance (SMB) “changes over most of Antarctica are statistically negligible.” The “current SMB is not exceptionally high compared to the last 800 yr.”
The times with highest accumulation (1370s and 1610s) match records of solar radiation.
Since 1960 the ice and snow accumulation has increased by 10% in high SMB coastal regions and over the highest part of the East Antarctic divide.
Fig. 4. Mean normalised anomalies of the annually resolved SMB time series at continental and regional scales obtained from the time ice core dataset, as described in the text. (A) Number of records from each year in the period from 1200 to 2000 used to calculate the continental (black line, left y-axis), WILKES, DML, and WAIS stacked records (black, blue, green and red lines, respectively, right y-axis). (B) Mean normalised anomalies of the SMB time series at the continental scale. (C) The DML mean normalised anomalies stacked record. (D) The WAIS mean normalised anomalies stacked record. (E) The WAIS mean normalised anomalies stacked record along with the ±1 uncertainty standard deviation (grey-filled contour around each stacked record). The blue- and redfilled rectangles represent periods with negative and positive SMBs at the continental scale, respectively, as described in the text.
Solar irradiance seems to matter to Antarctica
How curious:
Eight hundred years of stacked records of the SMB mimic the total solar irradiance during the 13th and 18th centuries. The link between those two variables is probably indirect and linked to a teleconnection in atmospheric circulation that forces complex feedback between the tropical Pacific and Antarctica via the generation and propagation of a large-scale atmospheric wave train.
As far as we can tell, the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is growing
The Surface Mass Balance appears to be growing at 2100Gt/year (though this is much higher than the ICESAT satellite estimates of Zwally which estimate a net gain of 49Gt/year.)
[UPDATE:ManicBeanCounter, pointed out that if 2100Gt was being shifted from the ocean to the land, it would reduce oceans by 5mm annually. An improbable figure! DumbScientist below helpfully points out that Zwally is using Total Mass Balance, which is different to Surface Mass Balance. The SMB figure involves “precipitation, evaporation and snowdrift physics” but not glacier run-off. Thanks to both readers.]
“The SMB of the grounded AIS is approximately 2100 Gt yr−1, with a large interannual variability. Those changes can be as large as 300 Gt yr−1 and represent approximately 6% of the 1989–2009 average (Van den Broeke et al., 2011).”
Climate models predict that snow and ice ought to accumulate over Antarctica and that this will help slow down sea-level rise. Maybe the models are right on this, but there’s no evidence in this data that the current accumulation is different to natural cycles.
The summer melt might be faster at the moment, but the accumulation rate is also seemingly at the higher end. If climate scientists want to blame increased CO2 emissions in the last 150 years for the increased ice mass (snow accumulation) and faster summer melt, then how do they explain all the other rises and falls over the last 800 years? Look at the graph below and ponder that all the bumps and falls were natural apparently but that last bump — we’re 90% sure it’s caused by coal power stations.
Stephan Lewandowsky’s work is a case study in government funded inanity. Some Australians are sure that burning coal will make storms stronger. Others are not convinced. In November 2012 Lewandowsky’s intellectual contribution to science in Australia was to call the unconvinced “stupid”. If that’s not inane enough, at the same time he claimed that he didn’t recieve funding from any organisation that would benefit from his article.
How many taxpayer dollars went towards funding that? No conflict of interest?
Are Australian Research Council funds used as a form of third party advertising for Labor Government policy?
Writing in “A storm of Stupidity, Sandy, Evidence and Climate Change” on The Conversation, his reasoning is like this: some scientists reckon that a very bad storm called “Sandy” has “links” to man-made emissions of a trace gas. Lewandowsky reasons that because those scientists are called “experts”, anyone who questions them should be called stupid. (He thinks this article and that tweet were overdue). Though, in a twist, apparently he doesn’t actually think the unconvinced are actually stupid, he thinks they are ethically “disembodied” people who “mislead”. (As an aside, notice how he approves of news articles that call them stupid even though he doesn’t really think they are. Is that a commitment to accuracy, science, and evidence, or a commitment to marketing and PR?)
In the end, a government appointed group of “experts” like the Climate Commission, declared that humans made a storm worse, and a government funded psychologist says they’re right and everyone else is dumb (or as good as liars) because they are not convinced we are changing the weather.
Note the “Disclosure Statement” next to the “Stupid” headline.
“Stephan Lewandowsky
Australian Professorial Fellow, Cognitive Science Laboratories at University of Western Australia
Disclosure Statement
Stephan Lewandowsky does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.”
The Conversation November 5th, 2012
Stephan Lewandowsky is funded by Australian Research Council Grants (ARC). The ARC is headed by a Labor Party Minister (though you’d have trouble figuring out which one, after Julia Gillard’s emergency reshuffle). The ARC site has a link to a “Minister” which now points at eight ministers. The top dog, probably, is The Hon Craig Emerson.
Let the money flow
Stephan Lewandowsky is a Winthrop Professor according to his CV. UWA tells us that is the highest level of researcher, earning $ 162,396. And that says a lot about standards at UWA, in the School of Psychology, and at the mostly government funded “Conversation” (which got $6 million in grants to get started). Lewandowsky’s name is listed on ARC grants totalling $2 million since 2007. (See here and here). More often, his “Disclosures” simply say he gets money from the ARC and has no commercial interest.
No Conflict of Interest?
The Australian Labor Party is an organization which has hinged everything on a belief that man-made climate change is a problem worth spending billions on. Their future and status are arguably “improved” if seemingly independent experts write about how smart they are, and how stupid the voters are who disagree with their climate policy. The Labor Party is not funding Lewandowsky directly, but Labor party members are in Government now, and decide what the Australian Government funds. The ARC is “an independent body” whatever “independent” means when the panel appointments, and the size of their funding is determined by the Government (and amount to about $880 million per annum). The ARC mission is to deliver policy and programs that advance Australian research and innovation globally and benefit the community. Note the word “policy”.
Fundamentally, Lewandowsky and most academics are reliant on big-government handouts. He scorns the small-government crowd, and thinks they are the blindly driven free-market-people who can’t make rational decisions:
People who subscribe to a fundamentalist conception of the free market will deny climate change irrespective of the overwhelming strength of the scientific evidence.
Which only goes to show how little he knows about the free market, and how divided on tribal lines this is. The free market ultimately is what provides the funds for big-government to feed its fans. It’s not perfect, but irrational decisions don’t last long in a competitive market.
Yet, here is a Prof of Psychology, apparently unable to see even the potential for a “conflict of interest” in this chain. His entire career depends on big-government, and he thinks he can write quasi-science-opinions that slur opponents of big-government policies and pretend there is no conflict?
Blinded by his own ideology perhaps?
It’s not a conspiracy
I may be called a “Conspiracy Theorist” for pointing out the conflict. But there’s no conspiracy necessary here. I’m suggesting a systematic failure and incompetence on every level. Craig Emerson probably has no idea how badly ARC funds are spent. The ARC may not know either. I seriously don’t think anyone higher up has ever phoned Lewandowsky to ask him to write this kind of fallacious and barren prose. As far as I can tell, he is pursuing his own personal belief rather than being “hired” to do so. The editors of The Conversation didn’t see the inanity, possibly because it’s their personal pet topic too, they are a product of big-government, and they were never trained in logic and reason either. And all of the lack of rigour is funded by the taxpayers of Australia. Layers and layers of sloppy thinking that would never survive in the free market.
The real problem here is that someone is responsible for handing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to incompetent people, and no one has demanded that Professors of science follow the tenets of science or the laws of reason. Lewandowsky, of course, is welcome to call us stupid deniers if he feels that way, but why is the taxpayer funding this kind of unscientific namecalling?
The Monster is in the house. I haven’t actually laid a finger on it, but I’ve been introduced.
It is currently being fed with special monster baby food — heavy windows, slow drivers, stuff like that — it is pacified with shiny plastic discs and drip-fed digits from far-distant lands.
At a hundred-billion-tera-flops a gargle-second, it’s learning fast. A lot seems to be going on.
In the meantime, sorry for the silence. I’ve been working as fast as I could on a tiny coaster-sized array of pixels with unfamiliar software, no mouse, and no ability to load up pictures to my usual storage site, or read my usual emails (except one at a time with 14 keystrokes of complexity and a 20 second wait for the next – I gave up). I dream of graphs I can’t make. I reboot the old machine, and sometimes feel normal for a half hour. Then it goes.
Space-time is being warped in my head. Things I used to do in five minutes take me all day.
Some futurists have waffled on prophesizing about the coming integration of hominid brains and silicon chips, blah-de-blah. I always thought they were bonkers. But I was wrong. My computer was already a part of my brain. I can’t think straight without it.
There was a system failure in my IQ.
To all the people who chipped in and dug deep… Thanks for rescuing me!
Soon, soon, I’ll get that monster on my desk.
And I am so looking forward to it…
; D
PS: The technical details (because I know some readers like these things) direct from the engineer:
The new computer is an i7 with a 240 GB SSD (Intel 520 series), a 1TB HDD, and a video card big enough to run Joanne’s two 30 inch screens. Have loaded Windows 7 Ultimate (sorry, but Windows 8 gets too many bad reports) and anti virus, and got on line to update drivers and operating system, so far.
In astrological terms, Jupiter must be passing through my technology zone. Yesterday the web-host was down for 15 hours. Today, my computer collapsed randomly into the blue screen of death. It can be revived, sort of, but the five-year-old-overworked-disc only springs to life for short bursts in between intermittent freezes. It’s been kind, letting me back up. But it doesn’t last — we are now stuck in an infinite degrading loop where it crashes, logs off and restarts, thoroughly error checking the full disc, and an hour later I can do another two minutes work, before the Goto-loop-from-hell starts over. 😐
Sorry to all the people who emailed me today, Robert, Horst, Jennifer and Jim I was about to reply… Tony, Mods, I’m working from a lap top… my brain has shrunk from 2 x 30 inch, to 1 x 15. Please be patient. I don’t think I’ve lost emails, but I can’t see them right now.
Five years! The blog-war-horse is gone. 🙁
Donations gratefully received. A newer monster with more memory has been ordered…
Right now these self funding academic researcher-analyst-commentators could do with support. Those billion dollar government departments don’t seem be in a hurry to fund people who want sensible policies that reduce your tax-burden. We’ve got our nest-egg packed away with a long term view in a moderately ambitious arrangement — we never want to work for anyone — but until that boat comes in (and it may not) we sure do appreciate your support, so we can keep saying things you want someone to be saying…
**TIP JAR – a number of readers have asked about the tip jar. It is in the top right hand side of the page. Click on that and it will take you to a place you can make a Pay Pal contribution or below that a non Pay Pal or Non Credit Card contribution. Jo is too modest to put this up here, but as one of the moderators I can attest to the incredible amount of work Jo puts in and I can also attest to her lack of big oil or government funding. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks to the contributors on behalf of Jo- Mod
UPDATE: Wow! I’ve been out most of the day but what an amazing response! This is all so extremely helpful. I’m humbled. Really. Contributions are still coming in from all over the world. Speechless… this is so useful!
A very grateful Jo
PS: I want to thank everyone… please be patient. I can’t email easily at the moment…
Tic, tic, tic. The sleeping MSM is stirring. Headlines no one could imagine seeing a few years ago are popping up on a regular basis. The backdown is beginning.
For those who have not gone-over-the-falls and chained their reputation to a big-Green-rock, there is time to backtrack. This is a good moment to start mentioning that “things have changed.” It’s five years too late, but that’s better than being ten-years-too-late, and it still has a tiny bit of kudos for being ahead of stampede that is coming.
The term du jour is “new evidence”. It’s the ticket back to reality, even though strong evidence has been there for a decade, and the lack of warming is just one more clue that the models are wrong.
As far as I can tell, Geoffrey Lean is one of the commentators who’s been very much on the side of the global warming drive, but not a zealot. He allowed the odd caveat, he spoke of skeptics, but not of deniers. When the ClimateGate II emails were released, mostly he wrote about how they didn’t matter, were misrepresented, and the science was settled. Even then, there was a small caveat that “disturbing questions” remain, but largely he defended Phil Jones. Right now, he is still saying we need to reduce CO2, but it’s not as urgent as we thought. This is not a U-turn, but a fork in a better direction (with a nice headline).
What caused the shift? Lean noted in late December that the UK Met Bureau reduced its forecasts, that there has been a long pause in warming, and he points out here that there are now, increasingly, new lower estimates of climate sensitivity. I would argue that there have been plenty of lower estimates in the past, and that environmental journalists ought to have looked at the skeptical position years ago and interviewed a few key players, or looked at the data directly themselves.
The other thing that has changed is that this is the fifth cold winter for the UK, and a few authoritative groups have finally succumbed, acknowledged the “pause” and trimmed their hyperbole. An investigative journalist would have been hunting for the signs this was coming long before it did, rather than waiting for official announcements. But don’t be too hard on Lean, he’s doing a better job than many compatriots.
The meme that skeptics do have a point has made it through to a new circle of journalists.
Presumably this will only make the religious followers more apoplectic.
The Telegraph, UK
Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?
Climate change scientists acknowledge that the decline in rapid temperature increases is a positive sign
… there are important, and possibly hopeful, developments in the complex, contentious world of climate science that might finally give us all a sense of spring. For some recent research suggests that climate change might not be as catastrophic as the gloomiest predictions suggest.
…
The resulting increase has long been put at between 1.5C and 4.5C (the threefold range itself gives some idea of how little is known): the best guess has been 3C, which would be likely to have devastating effects on the climate. But the latest findings – which stretch over several papers from different, well-established scientists – suggest that the rise may be towards the lower end of that big range, possibly less than the 2C danger level.
Rupert Wyndham is an eloquent treasure. For those who have not already seen this (and I’ve received many emails about it) — Enjoy! — His turn of phrase is something to behold: the damning indictments carefully understated, yet laid bare. That the Royal Society President has been reduced to ad hominem attacks “… demonstrates more clearly than anything else the loss of dignity it has endured and depths of corruption to which it has been reduced under your stewardship and those of your two predecessors. “
— Jo
The Royal Society in better days: Boyle, Newton, Franklin, Jenner, Babbage, Wallace, Lister, Rutherford, Hodgkin, Shackleton. (From The stamp collection).
—————————————————————————————————————-
31 March 2013
Sir Paul Nurse, President, The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG
Dear Sir Paul Nurse,
Your reply to Lord Lawson dated 8 March has come to hand. It goes without saying that I make no claim to be responding on his behalf; he is more than capable of doing that for himself. Your letter, however, is such a singular juxtaposition of barely suppressed personal antipathy (malice even), blatant mendacity and shameless evasion, especially coming from a person in your position, that comment seems warranted.
Nigel Lawson’s letter never “implied that you should not be commenting on climate science” sic. Only a wilfully distorted reading of the words written could possibly have placed such a construction on them. The point of emphasis very plainly was and is that there is no excuse for wanton misrepresentation, either generally or personally. You are then provided with a specific example, which the writer unequivocally and in terms describes as “a lie”. He is, of course, quite right, is he not? And, if he is, what then are you?
You write that you ‘understand very well the importance of reliable observation, experiment and consistent rational argument’ sic. Good, and so you should! After all, to borrow Prof. Lindzen’s elegant and succinct definition, “Science is the continuing and opposing dialectic between theory and observation”. In principle, nothing in science is ever “settled”, so long the contra-scientific contention of anthropogenic global warming consensus proselytisers, conspicuously amongst them The Royal Society. Against this backdrop and of your assurance in particular, perhaps you would care then to explain why such propagandists:
decline to publish empirical evidence;
usually with insolence, refuse to offer their raw data, their algorithms and their methodology to the scrutiny of the scientific community at large;
manipulate and misrepresent the data they claim to possess;
refuse to validate or have validated their general circulation models, even though these are known to be flawed;
decline to engage in any form of debate which might expose them even to questioning, let alone to constructive criticism;
who, in substitution thereof, prefer instead to smear and defame any who challenge their dogmatic orthodoxy, with many amongst the dissenters being scientists of immense distinction, equal at least to your own, and often experts in disciplines far more directly relevant than yours to matters in hand.
No wonder Flannery and co. are playing double or nothing. While headlines have shouted for years that vested interests of the fossil fuel players dominate this debate, few journalists point out that the renewables industry, carbon trading markets, and the climate-scary-science-campaign have an all-or-nothing interest in propagating alarm.
As I keep saying, those in private business who provide real goods to real voluntary customers will suffer from a carbon tax, but they still have a market. For them it’s a “dent” in profits. We’ll still be buying coal, oil and gas for decades to come. In contrast, those who make a living from government funds could lose everything in an instant. Their wealth and status depends on a forced payment and a decision from one Minister. It is far more ephemeral and subject to whim. The state-dependents are far more desperate. The stakes are higher.
Gillard calls the “climate commission” an independent body, which is only true in the same sense that any parasite can be described as “independent” of the host while being completely dependent on it.
This shows just how independent and apolitical the Climate Commission reality is:
Tony Abbott said he didn’t see the point of paying Professor Tim Flannery about $180,000 a year for views which he considers already public knowledge. Source: The Daily Telegraph
Andrew Bolt: More spin Latest weather forecasts TONY Abbott has signalled he could sack chief climate commissioner Tim Flannery if he is elected as prime minister in September.The Opposition Leader, who has vowed to dismantle the Climate Change Department and merge it with the Environment Department in government, said he did not see the point of paying Professor Flannery about $180,000 a year for his views which Mr Abbott considers already public knowledge.
I’m sure Flannery sincerely believes he helps, but does the net benefit to the nation exceed the cost? How are those predictions panning out — Anyone want an unused desal. plant?
Speaking of Desalination, Flannery sat on the sustainability advisory board of Siemens in 2011, which helps make desal plants (like Perth’s). It also makes wind farms. He is also the Panasonic professor, and a few years ago they held a whopping 40% of the market for rechargeable electric car batteries, and were moving into electric car making. For Panasonic, spending $690,000 on Flannery’s research was much cheaper and more effective than buying prime time advertising to tell Australians how much they need electric cars. After all, the ABC don’t even sell ads, but Flannery speaks unchallenged there.
In the end, vested interests are everywhere. Only evidence from our atmosphere tells us which side is right. I’m still asking for that Mystery Paper. Flannery can’t find it.
If he stuck to arguing the evidence and providing a service to the Australian people instead of to government gatekeepers, he wouldn’t have so much to fear. Half of Australia pays his salary, but they aren’t convinced humans can change the weather. How does Flannery serve them? He calls them names.
Flannery recognizes the power of the fossil fuel lobby (see below), but not the “government grants and junkets lobby”. If people are going to reason-by-vested-interests (which is unscientific) then let them at least be honest about the vested interests on all sides. What is magically pure about government money? Since when was $1 from oil more influential than a $1 from a whimsical government program?
Italian police have seized assets worth 1.3 billion euros ($1.7 billion) from a Sicilian renewable energy developer in the biggest ever seizure of mafia-linked assets.
The assets, including 43 wind and solar energy companies, 98 properties and 66 bank accounts, belonged to Vito Nicastri, a 57-year-old businessman dubbed the “Lord of the Wind” for his prominent role in the business.
“This is a sector in which money can easily be laundered,” Arturo de Felice, head of Italy’s anti-mafia agency, told local media.
“Operating in a grey area helped him build up his business over the years.”
The anti-mafia agency in a statement said it was the biggest seizure of mafia-linked assets.
This was not a free market, but a free-for-all.
Italy’s renewable energy sector has been heavily infiltrated by the mafia because of once-generous state subsidies and lax controls, as well as the availability of land in areas of southern Italy with a strong mafia presence.
As far as Italy’s environment and emissions go, we know that it probably makes no difference whether the renewables were actually running or not. But it does matter if a system feeds criminals. They get empowered at the expense of honest people.
The classic hot spot prediction (A) compared to 28 million weatherballoons (B). Click to enlarge. You won’t see this in the new report.
It was a major PR failure in 2007. The IPCC won’t make the same mistake again. They’ve dumped the hot-spot graphs.
In AR4 they put in two graphs that show how badly their models really do. In the next report they plan to bury the spectacular missing-hot-spot images through “graph-trickery” and selective blindness. Each round of IPCC reports takes the spin-factor up another notch. It’s carefully crafted.
In the new extra-tricky AR5 version, the IPCC “quote the critics” and ignore them at the same time. That way they can say they include the McIntyre’s, McKitrick’s,Douglass’, and Christy’s: the words are on the page, but that doesn’t mean the information is used in the conclusions. The models have failed and they bury that undeniable result under the clutter. (You’ll need to read the fine print). There is no acknowledgement that this issue of the “hot spot” drives more amplification of predicted warming in their models than any other point (though that is obvious and implicit in Fig 9.44, and you can see that below). Which policymaker exactly is going to notice that?
The IPCC are an abject lesson in how to hide a message in plain sight
In the new report they have dumped their former fingerprint predictions which looked so definitively and technical, but proved to be so wrong. However they will not join-the-dots. They won’t admit this is a major point their models have failed on, instead they flat out deny the results from 28 million weather balloons are conclusive.
In a sense, in AR5, the IPCC just throws up its hands and says “yes ok, the models don’t align with the data, but the data might be wrong, and rather than fix those models, we’ll quietly dump that test and the awkward results and pick a different set of inconclusive tests instead. It’s known as shifting the goal-posts. ” It’s what any rational weasel-grade bureaucrat would do if their job and their junkets depended on it. You can hardly blame them… 😐
The art of tricky-graphs: The All New Hot Spot is turned sideways, extended up, and “smallified”
The graphs up the top have been split into four bands, screwed sideways, and extended to far higher in the atmosphere. The net effect visually is to minimize the disparity at the point that matters. Only by reading the caption and text, and reams of information, would you figure out that the action occurs in the bulge of the red line in the second graph (that’s the models best shot at the tropics). Compare that to the black line which is what the weather balloons found. I’ve blown it up further below, and removed the clutter. The green line is irrelevant (that’s model predictions without CO2 — which is argument from ignorance with unverified models). The results in the stratosphere are not that important. The water vapor changes at the upper edge of the troposphere are what matters (about 200hpa or 10 km up).
Official caption: Figure 10.7: Observed and simulated zonal mean temperatures trends from 1961 to 2010 for CMIP5 simulations containing both anthropogenic and natural forcings (red), natural forcings only (green) and greenhouse gas forcing only (blue) where the 5 to 95 percentile ranges of the ensembles are shown. Three radiosonde observations are shown (thick black line: HadAT2, thin black line: RAOBCORE 1.5, dark grey band : RICH-obs 1.5 ensemble and light grey: RICH- τ 1.5 ensemble. After (Lott et al., 2012).
See the second graph on the left up, expanded close on the right below.
Close up of the second graph of Fig 10.7 (see caption above).
How do you say “we have no evidence” without saying it — like this:
“In many cases, the lack of long term observations, observations suitable for the evaluation of important processes, or observations inparticular regions (e.g., polar areas, the upper troposphere / lower stratosphere (UTLS), and the deep ocean)remains an impediment.”
Blame the equipment. They have fifty years of data and millions of results.
This is the money statement:
In summary, there is high confidence (robust evidence although only medium agreement) that most, though not all, CMIP3 and CMIP5 models overestimate the warming trend in the tropical troposphere during the satellite period 1979–2011. The cause of this bias remains elusive.
What they don’t say is that this point on its own is responsible for half the warming projected in the models, and hence that after twenty years of trying to reconcile the models and observations it’s past time they turfed the models and trashed the assumption that humidity will cause monster positive feedback. Forget the projections of 6 degrees of hell, the best estimate would be half the current one (or less) and we can all go home.
Is water vapor feedback critical?
Is your skeptical brain wondering if I’ve got that point right about the positive feedback being so large? Remember it’s the IPCC that says without feedbacks CO2 will only cause 1.2C of warming.1,2 It’s the feedbacks that drive all the scary projections above that. Then gaze upon the graph below, 9.44. Spot the largest single feedback, one so big, it’s almost as large as “total feedbacks”. That would be “WV” or water vapor. This is almost the same graph as it was in AR4 – see Fig 8.14, on page 631.2
This is central to maintaining the scare.
Figure 9.44: a) Feedback parameters for CMIP3 and CMIP5 models (left and right columns of symbols) for water vapour (WV), clouds (C), albedo (A), lapse rate (LR), combination of water vapour and lapse rate (WV+LR), and sum of all feedbacks (ALL) updated from Soden and Held (2006). CMIP5 feedbacks are derived from CMIP5 simulations for abrupt four-fold increases in CO2 concentrations (4 × CO2).
For the die-hard IPCC interpreters, here is the full “Fifth Assessment Report” section where they discuss the pesky discrepancy that the whole crisis hinges upon.
The survey questions included conspiracies likely to appeal to a small percentage of conservative or free market thinkers, and largely left out conspiracies that would appeal more to supporters of bigger government (like the idea that the rise of “climate denial” was a big-oil funded conspiracy). It studied big-government conspiracies and ignored big-corporate ones. There are gullible conspiracists who also believe in global warming, but there was no danger this survey would find them. The survey bias was so obvious, even alarmist commenters said they feared few “denialists” would take it. The results that were headlined in newspapers were based on a tiny sample of ten respondents to an anonymous online survey. Not surprisingly Lewandowsky’s university (UWA) received many complaints about ethics, methods, and the dismal quality of the data, and bloggers had a field day shredding the paper.
In response, the Australian Research Council awarded Lewandowsky et al another $338,000. Just where do their priorities lie?
The paper was delayed. The typesetting oddly took 8 months, and includes a new key point. To answer the rabid critics, Lewandowsky needed to show that that many real skeptics did fill out the survey. The evidence for that apparently relies on Cook’s site (the ambush-labelled “Skepticalscience”). Lewandowky et al now effectively claims skeptics really were reading Cook’s site and lots of them did the survey there.
How 78,000 equals zero
Lewandowsky et al go out on a limb to say skeptics may have made 78,000 visits that month and could have seen that survey link (if only there had been one there):
Prevalence of “skeptics” among blog visitors All of the blogs that carried the link to the survey broadly endorsed the scienti fic consensus on climate change (see Table S1). As evidenced by the comment streams, however, their readership was broad and encompassed a wide range of view on climate change. To illustrate, a content analysis of 1067 comments from unique visitors to http://www.skepticalscience.com, conducted by the proprietor of the blog, revealed that around 20% (N = 222) held clearly “skeptical” views, with the remainder (N = 845) endorsing the scienti c consensus. At the time the research was conducted (September 2010), http://www.skepticalscience.com received 390,000 monthly visits. Extrapolating from the content analysis of the comments, this translates into up to 78,000 visits from “skeptics” at the time when the survey was open (although it cannot be ascertained how many of the visitors actually saw the link.)
For comparison, a survey of the U. S. public in June 2010 pegged the proportion of “skeptics” in the population at 18% (Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, & Smith, 2011). Comparable surveys in other countries (e. g., Australia; Leviston & Walker, 2010) yielded similar estimates for the same time period. The proportion of “skeptics” who comment at http://www.skepticalscience.com is thus roughly commensurate with their proportion in the population at large.
But, as Barry Woods and DHG both discovered and Geoff Chambers pursued relentlessly, it appears no link was ever posted on SkepticalScience. Steve McIntyre points out the total number of skeptics doing the survey on Cook’s site can thus be ascertained — and it is exactly zero. It’s hard to believe any scientist would think they would get away with this. The paper will surely have to be withdrawn. (But will the government funding be withdrawn? The Australian Research Council (ARC) needs to answer some very awkward questions.)
Here’s a study in dishonesty
FOI documents obtained by Simon Turnill show that Cook didn’t post the link at all, he tweeted it (how many people were on his twitter list in 2010?). You might think this is a minor change, but not at all. Cook’s tweet probably didn’t get the “390,000 visits” his site might have got that month. Instead the records show he got five retweets.
More importantly, above all else, Cook has been untruthful with his readers and with skeptics all along.
Like a five year old explaining where the cookies went, his story keeps changing as Woods and especially Chambers pin him down. Back in September last year, Lewandowsky said eight sites hosted the survey and Cook’s site was one, but strangely no one could find a link on SkepticalScience. Cook then said he hosted it in 2011. But it wasn’t there either. Cook apologized, and said it was 2010. When Chambers pressed on for evidence, Cook and the moderators stopped the questions and insisted it go private. Cook emailed Chambers, saying he couldn’t add much more. Chambers wanted the comments from the discussion of the survey at Cook’s site because the comments on other sites where the survey were hosted revealed the thoughts of the people most likely to have done the survey. Strangely the post and all the comments had been deleted. [Read the whole exchange at Climate Audit].
It’s odd for a whole post to disappear, but even odder when the post is then quoted in a peer reviewed study. Cook repeated that he had provided a link to the survey, but Chambers could find no record of it in the Wayback Machine either. Cook then suggested that he had “forensic evidence” — an email from Lewandowsky asking Cook to post the link, and Cook’s reply that he posted it the same day. What Cook wasn’t saying but must have known (since he checked his email records), was that his emails forensically showed that Cook tweeted the link.
The tweet by Cook, that Barry Woods and DHG both found, is online here on August 27, 2010. The Wayback Machine recorded Skepticalscience on August 30, 2010 — and there was no post. Nor was there a post about a survey in the following week either. So it appears unequivocal, as much as anyone bar John Cook can tell, that SkepticalScience did not host the survey.
McIntyre asked Cook to explain:
Not to put too fine a point on it, it appears to me that you lied, when you asserted that your correspondence with Lewandowsky on 28 August 2010 was “forensic evidence” that showed that you had posted a link at Skeptical Science to the Lewandowsky survey on that day. I use the word “lie” because you had clearly examined the 28 August 2010 correspondence at the time of your email to Chambers and knew that this correspondence did not show that you had posted a link at Skeptical Science to the Lewandowsky survey on 28 August 2010 or any other day.
Before I make any public statements about this matter, I am offering you an opportunity to rebut the belief that the statement bolded above was a lie.
Cook did not respond.
If Cook did post that survey long enough for anyone to comment on it, he would probably have a record of the comments made even after deleting the post. Where are they?
The “smart” thing for Cook to have done at this point was to make sure the published paper was corrected to “seven sites” and not eight, and did not rely on the link at his site which no one can find. He and Lewandowsky both must have been aware that skeptics knew. It speaks volumes that Lewandowsky and Cook cited a post on Climate Audit (Steve McIntryre’s site) about this point in their second “conspiracy paper” called Recursive Fury, so they knew that they were wrong, and that skeptics knew that too. Despite this, they still went ahead and published the revamped edition of the Moon Landing paper with the misleading information in it.
To the skeptics who suggest that Lewandowsky or Cook planned the first paper to fish for comments to use in a second paper, I say not a chance. They just aren’t that competent. They struggle from one gaffe to the next.
As Skiphil notes, Lewandowsky expects skeptics to keep two year old emails from unknown assistants at a university they may never have heard of, but he doesn’t expect his own co-authors to keep posts up displaying supposedly “scientific” surveys with results that are used in his papers.
Their incompetence will hurt the reputation of Psychological Science and Frontiers, if they do not take quick action, as well as the University of Western Australia, the School of Psychology, the University of Queensland and the ARC.
The strategy here appears to be double or nothing.
The Risk Monger (David Zaruk) was astonished to receive an advertisement from the Dutch government looking for 60 young PhD students to help with the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
They salary is “none”. But they are not just looking for any old student. You don’t need experience, but to qualify you need “an affinity with climate change”. I guess they are not looking for skeptical students who feel an affinity with logic, reason, and empirical evidence?
The reasons for asking the unpaid students is actually described as an “ambitious plan” to do a “thorough review” because there were “errors in the fourth assessment report…”. O.K.
The Risk Monger:
Maybe I am jumping to conclusions, but with all of the mess of the last IPCC Assessment Report (including a non-scientific WWF campaign document predicting the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers getting through the review process and becoming one of the IPCC’s main conclusions), shouldn’t they try to do a more rigorous review process this time around? Students, working for free, are not perhaps the ideal choice of reviewers needed to challenge the experts
What troubles the Risk-Monger more here is that many environmental activists are working on their PhDs and would jump at the opportunity of shaping the IPCC’s subjective conclusions to match their personal political biases. I suppose Greenpeace or WWF will pay their time-sheets to help shape the IPCC’s most socially important chapters.
Strangely, in that month when the entire review process will be done, students will also be taught about what the IPCC is, and how to review a document (I really wish I was making this up). The review process starts with a drink on April 12 and ends with a dinner on May 13. One lucky reviewer will receive € 250; the rest go home with nothing.
I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report will be loaded with more than just spelling mistakes.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m the one who says there are no Gods in Science, and scientific truth lies in evidence and reasoning, not in qualifications — perhaps an unpaid student will straighten out the IPCC and stop them from making more embarrassing mistakes? But note the contradiction that hiring unpaid students provides compared with the IPCC promotion that they only use expert peer review.
No doubt the students work will be checked and overseen with a leading top climate expert with decades of experience (but then a government appointee will re-write their conclusions anyway). This expedition appears to be more about fishing and training up-and-coming PhD’s rather than the IPCC running out of money.
We all know that newly graduated PhD’s are sometimes the best at rewriting history and producing hockeysticks to fit the policy.
Richard Betts (the IPCC Lead Author that Lewandowsky mistakenly thought suffered from “conspiracist ideation”) points out that technically anyone can review an IPCC report, which is true. You can apply too.
The review of the WG2 volume starts tomorrow, and last until 24th May. Further info is here:
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How’s this for odd, wierd, exciting and worrying at the same time, human embryonic stem cells were implanted into a strain of mouse that does not reject transplants from other species. The cells were cultured with chemicals that helps them develop into nerve cells, and they apparently went on to become functional and useful.
Tony Abbott 
The EU is a basket-case, teetering, so when the European Parliament had the chance to “fix” the carbon market yesterday, they surprised everyone and chose not to. Being unfixed, it’s free to collapse, which it did and by 40%.
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