Why the denialists have to be fought

The Crisis of Scientific Illiteracy:
[Via The Intersection]

As a Tufts alum, I was thrilled to read The crisis of scientific illiteracy by Michael Shusterman in The Tufts Daily. It’s a terrific piece describing why the disconnect between science and American culture is so vital to address immediately. He begins:

Today the United States is faced with a serious crisis in scientific literacy and education. In the midst of debate over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, health care reform and the economy, this issue has receded further and further into the background. And yet the topic remains as salient as it has ever been. Our world is driven by scientific innovation and technology. Twenty-first century economies will be knowledge-based, science-oriented and dependent on workers in sectors like energy, biological sciences and information technology. The early by-products of this paradigm shift are already evident with the advent of personalized genetic testing, pharmacogenomic research, hybrid vehicles, advanced power sources and hundreds of other innovations and discoveries.

He goes on to discuss science literacy and the implications of a public that cannot grasp concepts like evolution or keep up with emerging fields such as genetics. Michael considers competitiveness with China and India and points out we may be falling behind in an increasingly globalized world. He also names many of the social and historical reasons that led to the current crisis which Chris and I have also outlined in Unscientific America.

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Denialists spend much of their time denouncing the very things we need to maintain our strengths. Many are currently smearing any scientist who does not follow the denialist’s worldview.

They revel in ignorance and display a real lack of analytical skills. They attempt to deny reality.

This book aptly describes the problems. Here is Amazon’s description:

The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have Won.

A veteran journalist’s acidically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.

In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle… But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.

With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.

With Idiot America, Pierce’s thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

We have had Luddites and we have had Know-Nothings. I wonder what the name will be for this era’s worshippers of idiocy?

Technorati Tags: Science

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A nice interview

James Hansen: The complete interview:
[Via SciGuy]

As promised, below you’ll find the full transcript of my interview with notable climate scientist James Hansen. I found his thoughts on nuclear energy, the East Anglia flap and Catholic indulgences most intriguing. Anyway, here you go, in all of its unedited goodness…

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Some good questions and nice answers. It won’t convince any of the denialists but at least it shows that Hansen does not breathe fire. Conspiracy theories seldom die a noble death but learning how to stand up to them is a useful task.

Technorati Tags: Environment

But what about higher carbon dioxide?

by Hamed Saber

How did flowering plants evolve to dominate Earth?
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

To Charles Darwin it was an ‘abominable mystery’ and it is a question which has continued to vex evolutionists to this day: when did flowering plants evolve and how did they come to dominate plant life on earth? Today a study in Ecology Letters reveals the evolutionary trigger which led to early flowering plants gaining a major competitive advantage over rival species, leading to their subsequent boom and abundance. The study, by Dr Tim Brodribb and Dr Taylor Field of the University of Tasmania and University of Tennessee, used plant physiology to reveal how flowering plants, including crops, were able to dominate land by evolving more efficient hydraulics, or ‘leaf plumbing’, to increase rates of photosynthesis.

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Okay, the first paragraph did not really grab my attention. But I was intrigued by the idea of ‘leaf pumping’. As I read further, I came across this:

The reason for the success of this evolutionary step is that under relatively low atmospheric C02 conditions, like those existing at present, water transport efficiency and photosynthetic performance are tightly linked. Therefore adaptations that increase water transport will enhance maximum photosynthesis, exerting substantial evolutionary leverage over competing species.

So what happens at higher CO2 levels and what do those levels have to be? Without some further context, I have to wonder. I would expect that the levels that would have significant effects would have to be much, much higher than we are seeing. I’d like that to be the case but this press release does not tell me.

Guess I’ll have to do some looking.

[Listening to: Substitute (Live at Leeds University, 1970) from the album "Thirty Years Of Maximum R & B - Disc 1" by Who]

Hadley and CRU left out important data

Why are Hadley and CRU withholding vital climate data from the public?

[Via Climate Progress]

No, not the stuff in the stolen emails — although the University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) have yet another statement out I’ll excerpt below. It notes “Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several years.”

No, the vital climate data that the Hadley Center and CRU are withholding from the public is the warming taking place in the Arctic (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“). And that missing data is why NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies data are almost certainly superior to CRU’s data “developed in conjunction with Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office.”

Remember, “there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest,” as New Scientist explained (see here and here). “The UK’s Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.” Thus it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

RealClimate has an excellent post on this very subject — “the ‘hole in the Arctic’ in the Hadley data, just where recent warming has been greatest” — with this great figure (and caption):

Figure. The animated graph shows the temperature difference between the two 5-year periods 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. The largest warming has occurred over the Arctic in the past decade and is missing in the Hadley data.

See also “Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds.”

Thus contrary to what the global warming disinformers say about the recent temperature record, it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

So that’s why the NASA temperature record should be seen as more accurate, which puts 2005 as the warmest year on record, with 2007 just edging out 1998 for second warmest. This is “the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years,” as climatologist Ken Caldeira puts it. NASA has reported June to October were the hottest on record.* And next year may well be the warmest on record.

So, no, there hasn’t been any recent “global cooling” even for the surface temperature record. And when you look at where 90% of the human-caused warming was expected to go — the oceans — you find steady warming over the past several years:

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NASA’s data includes more of the Arctic temperature change than the Hadley data, which mostly sees a big hole there. Thus the air temperature that the GISS record presents includes important data that the Hadley does not. Every model indicated that the Arctic would heat most. Only NASA really included this data.

So while the Hadley data is very important and is a useful, independent database for modeling (it is very useful for comparing changes over time in most of the world), NASA’s data would seem to represent a fuller representation of the world’s temperatures. And even the NASA data probably underestimates the total temperature increase.

Both sets of data are able to see trends but NASA’s would presumably see a larger trend because it includes more of the regions with the greatest changes int emperatures.

Also, remember that many people are discussing the temperature changes over land (which will be the temperature of the air) or in the shallow surface waters. It turns out, though, that the deeper ocean waters are a huge heat sink that have been soaking up excess energy in huge amounts. The possible effects of this excess heat on the deep ocean currents we depend on is worrisome.

This figure from Skeptical Science gives a measure of the huge difference in the heat from land measurements and deeper ocean temperatures.

Figure 1: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”

Thats small brown area is what most of us care about because we live on land not water. BUt that excess heat in the oceans may come back to affect us on land someday soon.

The amount of atmospheric heating, which we are most concerned with, pails in comparison with the amount of excess heat the ocean is dealing with. I would worry that this heat will either eventually be radiated to the atmosphere, further increasing its temperature, or perhaps cause changes in thermohaline circulation since there would be a lower heat gradient from the equator to the higher latitudes. I’ll have to see what people say about that.

I do not think that means what you think it means

by kevindooley

Mining The Source Code
[Via AllegationAudit]

In the last post we saw that accusers are willing to quote mine the released CRU emails, selectively taking a choice phrase at face value and missing the preceding and proceeding context in the longer email.

Now we will see them doing similar with some of the released CRU source code. The released source code included source for some of CRU’s surface temperature record and source code for some proxy work. No climate model source code was released as far as I know, although that hasn’t stopped many of the accusers rampantly assuming there has been – presumably either confusing or not knowing the difference between temperature records and climate models.

This post concerns the an accusation which is now spread far and wide all over the internet.

Here is one example:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

Here’s the code and comments in question:

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

The accusers point to the words “very artificial”, “fudge factor” and to the nature of what is being done.

yrloc is assigned a 20 element array, the first value starts at 1400, the second at 1904 and the rest increment by 5 until 1994. Ie 1400, 1904, 1909, 1914, … 1994. They are obviously years.

valadj is another 20 element array, you can see the values it is assigned above in the line “fudge factor”. The ‘Oooops!’ message is displayed if the number of elements in the yrloc and valadj arrays are different. They shouldn’t ever be according to the code, this line was probably added in as a first pass safety check and not subsequently removed.

yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

I have to guess a little here (I don’t know IDL), but I think this is producing an array yearlyadj to hold an adjustment value for every year since 1400, derived by interpolating yrloc over valadj

Despite so many accusers citing this snippet of code, they amazingly fail to mention (or perhaps notice?) that directly following this snippet is:

;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow
;oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=20
;
filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy,tslow=tslow
oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=21

The top line contains yyy+yearlyadj. This is the only place where the previously created adjustment array is used, I presume (I don’t know IDL, the language used here) that yyy contains each years temperature data and that this is adding the adjustments to the temperature data to produce the plot. But notice at the start of that line is a semi-colon. That line is commented out, inactivated. The lines that are used instead do not contain the use of yearlyadj and therefore do not apply the adjustment, they only plot yyy.

Of course it would be trivial to switch the comments around and activate the adjustment, but as the accusers are relying on a face-value interpretation of the source code they should fall by such silliness.

They haven’t even shown their quoted adjustment was used, let alone what it’s purpose is. A proper analysis of this would require knowing what the adjustment was based on (it clearly isn’t arbitrary), why it was done (perhaps nothing more than an experiment), and not to forget – whether it was even used at all in published results.

It’s not difficult for me to point out why the accusations of fraud are misplaced. All I have to do is point out that they have insufficient evidence. Come back with better, if you can. I am surprised they haven’t picked up on the mispelt “artifical”, surely that beggars belief – true scientists wouldn’t spell words wrong! Quick to the blogs!

Isn’t it surprising some of the same people who demand so much evidence when faced with the science behind manmade global warming are surprisingly relaxed at placing accusations of fraud with such a dearth of evidence?

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This is an important analysis. Just as people who do not understand climate science are making fools of themselves with some of the interpretations of the hacked emails, people who have no idea about coding are just looking ridiculous.

I included the whole post so you can see the entire piece of logic. Yep, there is such a thing as a fudge factor in the code. But the only part of the code that appears to use it is commented out by the semicolons. This means that the computer ignores any line that begins with a semicolon.

So, it looks like this fudge factor might only have been used to check out some code and make sure the arrays worked right. It was used in a command (yearlyadj ) but not in the actual print out. It was then commented out and not used.

What a conspiracy. And this is why it is so often useless to provide data to people who do not have an inkling of understanding.

At RealClimate, they are providing links to the data that have been open posted on the web for years. So, instead of saying “Thanks,” many of the comments are “We don’t understand this. You have to make it understandable to us.” Apparently now that it is obvious that the data, along with algorithms and some coding, are available, the conspiracy is that those fraudulent researchers will not explain everything to the denialists.

Their goal is generally not understanding but to make it impossible for scientists to get any work done by disrupting their research. That, and moving the goalposts. That is all they have left.

And, based on the tenacity of the creationists over the last 100 years, they will not go away. Even if they are treated with respect.