

The Global Climate Change Consensus: Peter Norvig's Experiment - b-man
http://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html

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drallison
I found Norwig's little experiment interesting. Even more interesting is the
response it raised with our local HN deniers who seem more interested in
discrediting global warming and climate change than in building our
understanding of the current state and the climate. They are the moral
equivalent, in my opinion, of the folks who dispute evolution.

The denier culture is sociologically interesting. Those interested in the
process should a look at John Mashey's report

The current(185-page) PDF, has a much higher production quality and a lot more
information on funding and activity patterns than earlier versions. The
current version is at:

<http://www.desmogblog.com/crescendo-climategate-cacophony> John suggests that
you read the first 4 pages, and, then, if you want to read more, do the
following:

a) Print pages 2-4, the navigational aids

b) Download the full PDF, and for on-screen reading, open a second window
(Acrobat: Window>new). Use one window to read the mainline narrative, and the
second for rummaging the Appendices. Different people are familiar with
different subsets, so I know of no way to linearize it that makes sense.

A few highlights:

p.167-168 on plagiarism:

Not just the tree-rings, but a big chunk of the “social network” part of the
Wegman Report seems plagiarized from the Wasserman and Faust(1994) textbook.
Deep Climate’s 4-page side-by-side is:

[http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/wegman-
social...](http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/wegman-social-
networks.pdf)

That one is interesting because it seems unlikely to have originated with
McIntyre and/or McKitrick.

DC is doing a further piece on that, but after that, I may look into letting
those authors know.

See Figure 2.1, p.10, for the overall flow of anti-science memes and money-
laundering “cloud”

See Fig A.2.2, p.46 ExxonMobil & Foundation Chronological Funding for Some
Think Tanks

That identifies only _visible_ funding for (Annapolis Center, CEI, CFACT, GMI,
and Heartland), which leaves ((84%, 78%, 53%, 36%, 87%) unidentified, but it
is certainly enough to be interesting. Someone with subpoena power could find
out more, as there are many potential funding routes.

For amusement, see Fig A.3.1 p.50 “What’s in a Name?” to see how often names
like “Institute” and “Science” pop up in entities that basically do PR and
lobbying, despite mostly being tax-free 501(c)3s. I don’t know the (murky)
501(c)3 law enough to understand whether the amount of lobbying they do is OK
or not …

However, here’s an interesting GoogleMap:

[http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...</a><p>Hint: zoom in
and see how many of these are located within one block of a Washington’s K
Street. Not every organization located there does lobbying, but I doubt that
it is a low-rent district.<p>See Table A.6.2, especially p.96-99 which lists
active people versus visible anti-science activities, more or less
chronologically from 1990 to now (Climategate), including continuing attacks
A.Santer, A.Oreskes (on those folks), A.GATE (the current climategate etc,
might be called A.Jones), and then shows organizational connections. I’d guess
someone might do some more social network analysis.<p>At point, I was going to
do PeopleXpeople … but in that group, no one was more than 1 hop away<p>The
attacks on the hockey stick (which could also be called A.Mann) are now
split:<p>A.Hockey is the 2002-current visible use of attacks on the hockey
stick as a pillar of climate anti-science, basically used by almost everybody
in Figure A.6.2(a).<p>A.HOCKX is my label for the 1998-2006 effort culminating
in the Wegman Report, much of which was behind the scenes.<p>That’s the part
that may well be investigated for 18USC1001 (misleading Congress) and 18USC371
(conspiracy) as per A.14, Possible Legal issues, p.184.

------
hga
This was possibly interesting ... before the leak of the emails that made it
crystal clear that the "consensus" group systematically kept the other side
out of the peer-reviewed literature.

I'd also note that "consensus" is not a word you find in real science; one
inconvenient fact can destroy the position of a consensus, although as Kuhn
says
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)),
_grossly_ oversimplifying, you might have to wait until enough of the members
of the consensus retire or die.

~~~
nollidge
> The leak of emails that made it crystal clear that _a handful of members of
> the consensus group, on a handful of occasions, talked about keeping_ the
> other side out of the _process of peer-review_.

There, fixed that for you.

The consensus of biologists is that evolution is true. The consensus of
astronomers is that the Big Bang happened. The consensus of archaeologists is
that the KT extinction event happened and that it was due in significant part
to the Chicxulub impact. The consensus of physicists is that quantum physics
and relativity are accurate models of the universe at the appropriate scales.

The consensus of climate scientists is that the planet is warming and it is
anthropogenic. Why is this fact irrelevant _here_ , but not in other fields?

~~~
hga
The talking only confirmed their community's observed actions up to that
point. Anyone paying attention knew what they were doing, the emails just made
it "crystal clear".

And it's funny you should bring up Chicxulub and the K-T extinction event.
When the Alvarez team proposed that hypothesis, it was not ... warmly
welcomed. But they were allowed to argue their point and the community
eventually agreed they were (likely) correct. If their work had been in the
climate science domain I don't think we would have seen the same outcome. I
_know_ we wouldn't have seen the same process.

With regards to the "consensus" that the "planet is warming", that "fact" has
not been true for the last decade or so, so that "fact" is indeed potentially
irrelevant (we need to wait a bit longer to be sure).

~~~
nollidge
> If their work had been in the climate science domain I don't think we would
> have seen the same outcome. I know we wouldn't have seen the same process.

But of course, that is entirely your own conjecture. You "know" this for a
fact.

~~~
hga
I "know" this as a "fact" of human behavior. Yes, it's an appeal to authority
(myself :-), but I've been watching politicized science for about three and a
half decades so I'm pretty confident about my judgment.

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mkramlich
It would be interesting if some topic in the field of software got as much
public attention and debate by non-practioners as does climate change.

On one side (because there have to be two sides, and presented in a "fair and
balanced" way, of course), you'd have the vast majority of working programmers
all agree with the position that, say, writing software in a high level
language is much more productive and useful than writing everything in machine
language. And on the other side you'd have some non-programmers who are
"skeptical" and coming up with all kinds of arguments why machine language is
best. The skeptics would point out what they say are flaws in the reasoning,
gaps in the data, etc.

This line of thought is not meant to argue that man-made global warming or
catastrophic climate change are true and urgent, but rather to argue that
perhaps that it doesn't make sense for non-scientists to take a stand on this
issue -- especially taking a stand against the position of those who have
vastly more knowledge and experience with the topic. Might they be wrong? Of
course. But they are probably way more likely to be right than the average
bloke on the street.

~~~
hga
Non-scientists can take a legitimate stand on the methods, e.g. the
statisticians from Canada who destroyed the hockey stick. We'd see even more
of that if the data, code and methods were public (pity the original raw
collected data was lost (much of it might be recoverable if someone were to go
back to the original national weather service sources)).

I think you're also misrepresenting the nature of the debate; it would be a
lot more like everyone arguing about managed (GCed) code vs. unmanaged
(C/C++/Objective C etc. with manual memory management). The other side, and
plenty of them _are_ scientists and even specialists in this area, are not
arguing the equivalent of "machine code is best", an idea that died _very_
shortly after the advent of symbolic assemblers.

------
viggity
I don't have the time to double check this hypothesis, I'd feel fairly
confident that after reviewing the titles of the journals that these articles
were published in, that the bulk of the authors are not climatologists, but
rather have expertise in other fields such as biology, meteorology, or
agronomy. And that their work speculates on the impact of "climate change" on
their respective fields, and that they rely heavily on the work of a few
select climatologists.

I think it is also very important to remember that we're likely seeing a very
large selection bias with respect to what kinds of papers get published. There
are very few institutions that will give research money to a scientist who
thinks that everything "will be ok". The people who are yelling that we're all
gonna die and the earth will be destroyed (unless you give them money), are
the types that get funding.

~~~
lutorm
I'm not sure I understand your last point: Usually when you ask for research
money, you don't know what the outcome of the study you want to do is.

Besides that, I'm not even convinced that you are right: I would think that a
whole bunch of people would be interested in concluding that AGW is not a
problem, given the political climate in the US especially. If you could
convince everyone that the scientists got it completely wrong, I'm pretty sure
even most of them would be relieved. It's just that you can't do that by
attacking one argument here and one methodology there. You need to present a
comprehensive and consistent framework that shows that AGW is not happening,
and if someone did that I'm pretty sure it would be taken seriously. But noone
does.

Instead of grasping at straws, why don't you just accept the maximum
likelihood solution: most of the papers are correct and global warming is a
problem.

