Jose L. Duarte
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All sides

6/1/2015

18 Comments

 
A few days ago on Twitter I said that climate skeptics needed to distance themselves from the conspiracy theorists and harassers. This upset a dozen or so climate skeptics and led to a flurry of rebukes that I had trouble following due to their sheer volume and the constraints of a 140-character medium. I can't coherently respond or clarify my thoughts on Twitter itself, so I'll do so here.

Since joining Twitter, I've posted variously on science, social science, climate science, statistical methods, fraud cases, interesting articles in the Atlantic or New Yorker, and the catch that was definitely a catch.

Most of my tweets (oh God) on climate issues over this period would have been more satisfying for climate skeptics than environmentalists. The Cook 97% fraud case has been a popular issue with skeptics, and understandably so. The climate science consensus has been systematically overestimated by untrained researchers, fraud, invalid methods, failure of peer review, and an ancient enemy of science that I will elaborate upon in upcoming peer-reviewed literature.

I've occasionally reminded people that I'm not a climate skeptic, and I try to cleanly separate climate science from estimates of the consensus from policy issues and so on. These are all very different things to me. Because I've called out the Cook fraud, people seem to have sorted me into the skeptic camp, including skeptics themselves. That's a mistake.

My perceived scolding of skeptics was prompted by this:


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I know of no body of evidence that would lead a reasonable person to conclude that climate science is the most massive scientific fraud in history.

This whole conspiracy issue has come up a lot recently as a potential personality disposition. I think it's worth lingering on what would have to be true for the science of human-caused climate change to be a massive fraud.

First, a lot of people would have to be in on it, virtually all climate scientists that work on the issue and the boundaries of the issue. I think for that to be true would in turn require both an unrealistic model of human psychology and an unrealistic model of how science works.

If it were a fraud, one ethical and capable climate scientist could blow it open. Even a capable outsider like Steve McIntyre could blow it open. What do I mean? If CO2 doesn't cause warming, or if the true value of ECS was 0.1 °C or something, and the field was hiding this fact, this would be discoverable. Someone could report their analyses revealing the truth.

Assume that they couldn't get into journals because the field is a fraud and they censor any off-message findings. They could post it online. Most people wouldn't believe it at first, would do the whole source/peer-review harrumphing. But it would certainly circulate among climate skeptics and eventually climate scientists would have to confront it. Republicans in Congress would start asking them about it and so on.

Has that happened? Not to my knowledge. Where is there a finding or analysis that debunks the AGW hypothesis?

Instead, all we see are lower estimates of human forcing, ECS, model quality, etc. When Judith Curry argues against climate science orthodoxy and overconfidence, she's not saying it's all false. Her scientific work offers lower estimates of ECS, for example (Lewis and Curry, 2014). Steve McIntyre has never argued that the hypothesis is false, or offered any debunking of it. His work has been focused on specific issues with specific papers and methods. If it were all a hoax, I think McIntyre would have been both inclined and able to expose it some years ago.

If this is about disagreeing with the magnitude or confidence of prevailing climate science estimates, for example where they project a 3 or 4 °C warming and you think it's 1 or 2 °C, then that's not a fraud issue. That's disagreement. You can argue bias, tribalism, or political ideology as factors driving their estimates, but that's a long way from fraud.

Fraud is willful deception. My vehemence against the fraud cases I discovered should not be confused for a loose definition of fraud. When I say "the Cook fraud", I mean concrete acts of fraud, like claiming this:












When they did this:

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They lied. The ratings were not independent. They asked each other for feedback on their ratings, undermining both the validity of the ratings and the ability to compute rater reliability.

Authors and journal identities were not hidden, which was essential for a subjective rating study – they were freely disclosed. They routinely broke researcher blindness, and routinely outed scientists who were friendly or hostile to their cause, sometimes even by "smell".

In fact, the entire papers were freely distributed, shattering any notions of blindness. The first author himself broke protocol and blindness, identifying the authors of papers. And they all worked at home, so they could pull up the whole paper and break blindness anytime they wanted.

We would panic if researchers broke blindness in a biomedical study – e.g. the person handing out placebo or treatment pills to patients. If the researchers in a double-blind study knew what condition the patient was in, what kind of pill or other treatment they were giving them, it could affect the study. They might interact differently with patients if they knew their condition, and those differences could have downstream consequences, like for example the patient inferring what group they were in from the researcher's confidence or other cues. Or something about the researcher's administration of more complex treatments could change were blindness broken. In any case, if a biomedical study claimed that the researchers were blind, and it turned out they weren't, that study would be retracted in a heartbeat. Everyone would get it.

This is much worse. This is a subjective rating study where the researchers read textual material and made complex inferences from it. Given the nature of the topic, blindness to author and journal was critical, as would be the procurement of qualified neutral raters situated in a controlled environment on campus, not activists working from home. Breaking blindness in this kind of study is much more serious than for a pill handler. And lying about researcher blindness is the crux of the fraud issue in both cases.

That's what fraud is. They knew they had this forum where they routinely broke independence and blindness, yet claimed their ratings were independent and blind.

Show me that kind of fraud in climate science, and then we'll talk. Bias isn't fraud. Disagreement isn't fraud. Lying is fraud, but you can't just assume that people who disagree with you are lying.

People on Twitter complained that I had called out skeptics unfairly, that climate activists or scientists behave worse. I don't like that kind of blame shifting.

First, we have to keep in mind that human communication operates under lots of constraints. It's sequential and somewhat discrete. We can usually only say one thing at a time. This is especially true on Twitter. It's not reasonable to expect that when I criticize skeptics I'm also going to put it in context by criticizing environmentalists. Grown-ups should be moderately tough and resilient. Ethically, we should be open to criticism of our groups, our friends, ourselves. We know, a priori, that some of that criticism will be true (over the course of a human life.)

There are features of human language that shape the ways we communicate on these and other issues. The content of present communication is usually much more salient than past communication, past experiences, knowledge of a person's character, etc. And that's just one class of constraints. For the last two years, I've thought about how we could create new languages that would enable humans to communicate classes of concepts that are difficult or impossible with current languages, as well as overcome some of the temporal and salience issues. Linguistics, constructed languages, and human concept-formation and reasoning are deeply interesting topics. Eventually I think we'll have better ways of communicating, including constructed languages, but that's a very long-arc projection (50 - 200 years). It's useful to step back and consider the constraints in how we communicate with each other. That's a tangent, but some of these constraints impact our increased political polarization. Another tangent: It's fun to think about less ambitious ways to improve communication, like evolutions of Wolfram Alpha's Computable Document Format.


18 Comments
Barry Woods
6/1/2015 07:27:46 pm

Tom Nelson is an individual, he represents no one but himself, and how much of Tom tweets are rhetoric, rather than a belief in actual 'fraud'

I for one do not think climate science is a fraud or hoax, neither do many 'sceptics', lukewarmers' or members of the public that I know..
(ie certainly not @nmrgip - Prof Jonathan Jones, Oxford)

However ;-)

If NASA is prepared to push 'fraudulent' (your description of Cook, Oreskes papers), for whatever purpose. perhaps some people think the rest of it is equally dodgy, (my joke)

Here is NASA's Scientific consensus page:
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

to quote:

Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities

References​

1. J. Cook, et al, "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature," Environmental Research Letters Vol. 8 No. 2, (June 2013); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Quotation from page 3: "Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-cause, Global Warming], 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. Among scientists who expressed a position on AGW in their abstract, 98.4% endorsed the consensus.”

W. R. L. Anderegg, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.

P. T. Doran & M. K. Zimmerman, "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Eos Transactions American Geophysical Union Vol. 90 Issue 3 (2009), 22; DOI: 10.1029/2009EO030002.

N. Oreskes, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science Vol. 306 no. 5702, p. 1686 (3 December 2004); DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618.


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Rob
6/5/2015 01:19:40 am

Yes, there is no way around it: on its own website NASA is treating the fraudulent studies as if they were reliable sources for the claim of 97% consensus. If that is not evidence that NASA itself is engaged in fraud, I don't know what could possibly be.

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Brad Keyes link
1/8/2016 09:14:04 pm

For amusement, look at the construction NASA has to resort to: "studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals."

Why not just describe the consensus papers as "peer-reviewed scientific studies"?

For one thing they're not scientific and, in Oreskes04's case, not even peer-reviewed.

So the *journal* it appeared in was peer-reviewed, even though the article wasn't peer-reviewed.

Whatever (if anything) that means.

I first smelt this rat in 2006, when Al Gore resorted to the same circumlocution in 'An Inconvenient Truth.'

Oreskes04 was practically tailor-made to fill a missing link in Gore's 'proof.'

Not that I'm suggesting Oreskes was approached and came to an understanding, written or implicit, with Generation Investment Management that she would write, and put her meagre academic respectability on, a sub-scholarly piece of propaganda the corporation desperately needed for its infomercial.

After all, human beings don't actually conspire. That's just a theory.

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tlitb1
6/1/2015 08:03:01 pm

I personally agree about the uselessness of throwing out the the "scientific fraud" trope. However with the clear upper hand the consensus side has in media, academia, and politics, taken with the distribution of harassers and conspiracy theorists surely being about the same on both sides, my personal feelings about your request is that it was plainly silly, a bit like asking all skeptics to somehow independently become taller than the alarmists!

I would not be so harsh on Cook et al. Personally I see them as poor operators, operating in a poor field. From their leaked forum I think you can see they started out utterly sure they would find the 97% magic number and were merely driven to generate a "scale" of work that would automatically jump them to prominence.

The low standards used to ensure they got that number looks like a collective self-delusion to my lay interpretation, with Cook now and then steering any dissent back to the cause.

However I do think now in hindsight that there may be many of them that hold an inkling that their work is flaking away to reveal its feeble core,. It seems to me more often you see the two lead authors resorting to the plaintive refrain that they were only replicating previous 97% studies, and this looks less convincing as time moves on. ;)

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Paul Matthews link
6/1/2015 08:13:25 pm

I have a few things to say about this, which I will say in separate comments. I will start by agreeing with you. It's true that both sides of the climate debate have people on their side who overstate the case. For example saying that climate science is all a fraud, or saying that climate sceptics are all in the pay of the Koch brothers.

It's also true that neither side is prepared to 'call out' these people. Why is this? Well, it's obvious, though I don't recall seeing it written down anywhere. The problem is, where do you draw the line? How do you say "A, B and C are smart people who I agree with, but X, Y and Z are nutters / conspiracy theorists"? Who am I to declare that somebody else is a nutter? Maybe I'm a nutter? It could be claimed that anyone getting involved in the online climate debate is a nutter. There are some interesting issues here for social science/psychology, that AFAIK haven't been touched.

But: This issue is far more damaging to the 'consensus' side than to the sceptic side. The conspiracy theorists and harassers on the 'consensus' side are, as you well know, supposedly reputable academics, at prestigious universities, who have won awards from top science organisations. This is, or should be, quite a scandal. On the other hand, those on the sceptic side are random people on twitter or blogs, often using pseudonyms.

I thought it was particularly ironic that your comment came just before it was announced that the Chairman of the IPCC had been found guilty of harrassment!

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BDAABAT
6/2/2015 01:07:19 am

Jose: It sort of depends... what is your definition fraud?

Did Mann commit fraud when publishing Mann et al 1998? Steve M won't come out and say it's fraud. Steve M is consistently cautious, especially using terms that have specific, legal definitions. He's appropriately circumspect when choosing his words.

Despite Steve M's caution, a reasonable case can be made that Mann 98 is fraudulent... in fact, Brandon Shollenberger made the statement in his post here: https://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/michael-mann-committed-fraud/

Did Mann lie? Yes. Repeatedly. The reality is that Mann lied and continues to lie about MM 98.
Did Mann conceal information about this study that might have adversely affected study outcomes? Yes. And, he continues to lie about it.

IANAL: However, what Mann has done in MM 98 seems to meet the common definitions of fraud (e.g, first Google definition is wrongful deception intended to result in personal or financial gain). Mann certainly gained fame and fortune as a result of his hockey stick studies.

What's most troubling about these experiences is that the other peer scientists have continued to publicly support Mann. They've not only supported Mann, they've attacked those that have had the temerity to question his findings. They've colluded in private to respond to criticisms and develop strategies to deflect criticisms, while privately acknowledging that the Mann work is crap.

This isn't how science is supposed to work.

Bruce

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Shadeburst
6/27/2015 03:03:13 pm

Richard A. Muller says that Climategate shows scientific malpractice on a massive scale, and Muller's a warmist.

Malpractice isn't fraud. But read the Climategate emails and see for yourself the cupidity and hunger for fame at all costs. It's difficult to separate these semantically or logically from fraud.

Gavin Schmidt isn't a scientist embarked on a noble cause. He's a political appointment. His participation in the various data swindles and cover-ups is morally no different than the Pope's lack of action on priestly child molestation.

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Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.
6/2/2015 02:45:46 am

I really think Jose is simply not aware of some of the more egregious transgressions committed by the alarmists. Chris Mooney just yesterday quoted Jeff Masters as saying current temperatures are the hottest ever. He didn't say hottest in the instrumental record, he said hottest ever. That is irresponsible and fraudulent as a meteorologist to say that, and when it goes uncorrected, science loses.

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Sheri link
6/2/2015 06:55:17 am

I am curious how one would "disprove" global warming caused by humans. Before one can say that no one has yet disproved the theory, one should be defining what is required to disprove it. There does not seem to be any way to actually disprove the theory. Can anyone clarify this? (As an aside, defining that theory is also problematic. I have had numerous exchanges with persons who define global warming very differently from one another.)

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John M
6/2/2015 12:18:42 pm

"Show me that kind of fraud in climate science, and then we'll talk. Bias isn't fraud. Disagreement isn't fraud. Lying is fraud, but you can't just assume that people who disagree with you are lying."

One can lie through selective reporting and omission, which is how a great deal of fraud actually occurs in the real world, in both the media and science. Technically, nobody "lies" yet people are misled. This is why there are often reporting and disclosure requirements in the business world to prevent fraud and I think this article by Steve McIntyre does a very good job of talking about how science in general and climate science in particular fails with respect to auditing to prevent fraud:

http://climateaudit.org/2005/02/14/some-thoughts-on-disclosure-and-due-diligence-in-climate-science/

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Mike S
6/2/2015 02:43:56 pm

Tom Nelson should be thanking you, not attacking you.

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Nick Milner
6/2/2015 09:35:04 pm

FWIW I agree with José. Although I consider myself a sceptic I don't believe a for a moment that prominent climate scientists are perpetrating a deliberate fraud. Being wrong is not a crime.

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Sheri
6/3/2015 12:38:59 am

Agreed, Nick. I have never really believed in true secretive or widely organized conspiracies—people are too hard to keep in line. In global warming, there's the problem of now that things have grown politically and career wise based on the idea that man is destroying the planet, how do you go back? You can't just say "Oops, I was wrong". Backing off can get you ostracized, as many well know. Politicians are vilified if they don't go along. It just grew and grew and now there's no backing off. If one gets a result that might go against the consensus, the average person would go back and try to find out why they were "wrong", rather than right, because being right just has too much at stake. They're just stuck now.

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MikeR
6/4/2015 01:12:00 am

It's obvious to most of us that climate science is not a fraud. That doesn't mean that individual climate scientists can't be frauds, of course. A lot of the hockey stick debate (Hide The Decline comes to mind) seems pretty close to it to me. I remember an interview where Richard Muller basically said as much: they showed a graph multiple times, over several years, where contrary data was was trunctated, and that truncated curve hidden behind the others.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/

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MikeR
6/4/2015 06:56:46 am

Not on topic.
I just saw a new post at judithcurry about an exciting new NOAA study that casts doubt about "the Pause". Dr. Curry quoted a dozen scientists who gave various opinions on the value of the study. As I pointed out there,
http://judithcurry.com/2015/06/04/has-noaa-busted-the-pause-in-global-warming/#comment-708541
given that this is a brand new independent study about how to calculate sea temperatures, surely I should expect zero correlation with their opinions about other parts of climate science?
But my snap impression was that the correlation was a perfect 1.0. Possible explanations: a) pro-AGW people are not scientists at all, but charlatans. b) anti-AGW people are not scientists at all, but charlatans. c) politics and partisanship makes it impossible for anyone to do good science.
Reader, choose between a), b), c). Will there be a correlation between your choice and your opinion on other climate issues as well?

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Nick Milner
6/4/2015 09:25:34 am

I came to say the same thing; maybe Karl et al. 2015 would be a good paper for someone like Jose to take a close look at.

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Bdaabat
6/4/2015 10:32:48 pm

Clipped from Brandon Shollenberger's site: sums up my feelings about this issue nicely.
Brandon Shollenberger
June 1, 2015 at 9:35 pm
A person on Twitter referred to global warming as the “most massive scientific fraud in human history.” This led to a post by Jose Duarte, who you might remember due to his criticisms of the Cook et al consensus paper. I largely agree with his post, but I had to leave a comment because the user on Twitter was talking to Gavin Schmidt when he made his claim. If you’ve read this new eBook, you know Schmidt receives some attention in this book due to his discussion and defense of Michael Mann’s 2008 hockey stick paper. The book doesn’t discuss a fraction of the things Schmidt has done over the years, but it shows one case where he acted in a dishonest manner to defend/promote what could be considered fraudulent work.

My comment didn’t go into details, but it referenced that and other things Schmidt has done over the years. It’s currently in moderation (I assume due to simple pre-screening or my word choices), but since a user on Twitter asked me for a link to it, I thought I’d copy it here. It’s somewhat relevant to the book this post is about, and I hate having to wait for comments to clear moderation when you have no way to know when the blogger may check their moderation queue next. So without further ado, here it what it said:

While I fully agree climate science as a whole is not a fraud, it has a troubling habit of accepting fraudulent work without question. Michael Mann’s hockey stick is the most famous example. If anybody had actually examined it when it were published, they’d have realized there were significant problems with it. If Mann and his co-authors had actually been forced to accurately describe what they had done, everyone would have known there work was bad. If they had been forced to publish all the results of the verification tests they performed rather than just the ones that made their work look good, everyone would have known their work was without merit.

Instead, Mann was made a leading author of a chapter for his own field in a major IPCC report, a role which resulted in his work getting incredible coverage. Not only that, but he knowingly made the IPCC report exaggerate the merits of his work, again intentionally covering up the fact it failed basic verification tests he himself had performed. That resulted in Mann become hugely popular. Rather than condemn fraud, climate science promoted it to the highest levels and rewarded the person who committed it.

This is particularly important to this topic because Gavin Schmidt is one of the major enablers of Mann’s fraud. He has defended Mann’s fraudulent work for over a decade with a multitude of dishonest actions taken to hide the flaws in Mann’s work. In other cases, he’s used similar dishonesty to downplay or cover up flaws in other work, including NASA’s GISS, which he now heads up.

Given Gavin Schmidt has spent something like the last 15 years using dishonesty to downplay or cover up errors, including ones he knows amount to fraud, it’s not completely unreasonable to say he’s based his career on fraud. It’s unlikely he’d hold his current position if he had been open and honest about the problems within his friends’ and colleagues’ work.

Gavin has spent a lot of time helping fraudulent work prosper in the field of climate science. I know that’s not what that Twitter user had in mind, and I don’t think people should overplay their hands like he did, but still, people like Gavin are the problem. They’re the ones who know fraudulent work is fraudulent but defend and promote it anyway.

And I have to feel a little sympathy for people who call global warming a fraud/hoax. When fraudulent work is freely accepted in a field, it’s easy to think of the field as fraudulent."


Bruce

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Brad Keyes link
1/8/2016 09:34:49 pm

Jose,

I've been know to call fellow deniers out on hyperbolic (and occasionally totally false) pronouncements.

It's not a big deal. Never lost a friend over it. We should all do it, when we see it.

However, it's worth noting Tom Nelson didn't call climate science a massive scientific fraud. He may think that, but he didn't say that (in the present Tweets).

No "denier" of my acquaintance actually believes the entire climate science profession is fraudulent—unless they think Richard Lindzen is a fraud too? That kind of sweeping universality quickly swallows its own tail.

I believe Tom was talking about CAGWism. Or climate alarmism, if you will.

Ever read Hal Lewis' resignation letter from APS? It refers to a "tidal wave" of "pseudoscientific fraud."

If such a tsunami exists, would it mean *Gavin Schmidt* is a fraud? Not necessarily. Of course not.

There IS a massive fraud being perpetrated on and "within" science, and I can say that WITHOUT saying that cli sci IS a massive fraud (whatever that would even mean).

The IPCC, for instance, is fundamentally fraudulent—its raison d'etre is to launder policy opinion as scientific advice. The IPCC's product is that moment when your local politician holds up an IPCC report and says "this is what the science is telling us."

That's a lie. (Or more likely, when it's in the mouth of a scientifically illiterate politician, an understandable delusion. The lie was higher up in the IQ chain.)

It's nothing of the sort, but the imprimatur of the UN is all it takes to sell the lie.

And within the IPCC are (apocryphally) the world's 2500 top scientists.

But if the world's 2500 top scientists are volunteer members of a deceptive-by-design, functionally-deceptive organization, we can no longer doubt there's something "massive" and "fraudulent" going on, can we?

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