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So I just glanced through this and it reminded me of a question that's been on my mind. Is Stephen McIntyre of climateaudit.org doing the world a service or not? Now, I've read a lot of his work, and he does very good analysis. His description of himself as an "auditor" is in my opinion quite accurate, as what he is good at is finding mistakes or gaps in published work. He also takes pains not to get political on his site, and let the results speak for themselves. However, there are several criticisms that can be levelled at him: 1) Sure, he doesn't use his findings himself, but there are legions of attack dogs on other sites (Watts, Motl, McKitrick, ...) who are happy to do so. McIntyre doesn't actually stop them from doing so, and so he's reponsible. 2) McIntyre should put up or shut up. Sure, he picks apart all kinds of climate reconstructions, but why doesn't he do his own? 3) His findings may be true but they're usually not significant to the conclusions. 4) McIntyre should stop trying to be an iconoclast and work within the system to make the climate reconstructions better, rather than just "auditing" them after publication. What do you guys think about these criticisms? Valid? Now I don't want this to get bogged down in a discussion about whether AGW is real and significant or not. Can we take as a premise for this thread that the IPCC is largely correct, AGW is real, etc., and just have a debate about whether McIntyre is doing the world a service?
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 02:48 |
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| # ? Nov 20, 2009 22:43 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:
I do agree with most of what you said, with the exception of this line. I don't think that's really a criticism to make against McIntyre. Even if he can't show his own models and prove them correct, showing that others are (possibly, I'm not certain as to whether his work is correct or not) are not is still a service in that it steers others away from that false information. Showing something incorrect can serve the purpose of also moving us towards other, correct information.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 02:52 |
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Who appointed him auditor. Thats actually whats annoyed me with the guy, its literally the most pretentiously named blog in the climate politics sphere, and I just don't see the evidence that the guy has the qualifications or institutional backings to claim that. I mean I can "audit" physics and write an "auditor" report, but would that make me an authority on it? Well no, especially after I obstinantly refuse to acknowledge faults in my own "audits".
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 04:33 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:3) His findings may be true but they're usually not significant to the conclusions. The only thing I have seen from McIntyre is his debunked (by realclimate) criticism of Mann's paper. Lets assume that statement #3 is true. I'll conclude that he is doing a disservice by allowing those that don't understand science to improperly wield his results as proof that AGW isn't happening.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 05:29 |
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MickeyFinn posted:The only thing I have seen from McIntyre is his debunked (by realclimate) criticism of Mann's paper. Lets assume that statement #3 is true. I'll conclude that he is doing a disservice by allowing those that don't understand science to improperly wield his results as proof that AGW isn't happening. Ah, now that's another thing. Yes, McIntyre makes mistakes. However (and some people will probably disagree with me here), he's always been good about accepting technical criticism and fixing the error. That, and of his three major 'scoops' (the original criticism of MBH99, the 'Y2K' error in the GISTEMP product, and the recent Yamal/Schweingruber thing), none of his arguments were fundamentally flawed. Yes, there were mistakes in his implementation of Mann's work, etc. but if one honestly reads what he did, he was basically right. People tend to forget this, or ignore it. This is really why McIntyre is so interesting to me. Most of the criticism he levels at the 'climate establishment' is valid, and I think it diminishes scientists like Gavin Schmidt when they do things like refuse to call McIntyre by name on RealClimate (instead saying some people have claimed such-and-such about our work...) At the same time, it's also possible that none of McIntyre's criticisms have any impact on the conclusions of the papers he 'audits'. And this is where my ethical problem with him starts. McIntyre makes a post on Climate Audit outlining some problem with D'Arrigo et al. 2009 or whatever, and says, hmm, well isn't this interesting -- technically, I mean! -- it's not my place to discuss the political implications of this. And then Anthony Watts and a million right-wing bloggers and op-ed writers take his findings and write scathing articles that say The findings Al Gore doesn't want you to know about! And then Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt get really angry and say McIntyre should call off his attack dogs, and McIntyre says I have no control over them! and we get the huge mess that is the blogosphere's reaction to climateaudit.org today. There is a separate line of criticm, outlined nicely by 'duck monster' up above, that I totally disagree with. This is the idea that because he has no formal training or accreditation, that he is to be ignored. I think that formal training and accreditation is nice to weed out those who truly don't know what they're talking about, but let's not get too carried away with this idea of science as an exclusive club. I think McIntyre has proven he knows what he's talking about, regardless of his lack of a Ph.D in statistics or earth science.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 06:23 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:At the same time, it's also possible that none of McIntyre's criticisms have any impact on the conclusions of the papers he 'audits'. And this is where my ethical problem with him starts. McIntyre makes a post on Climate Audit outlining some problem with D'Arrigo et al. 2009 or whatever, and says, hmm, well isn't this interesting -- technically, I mean! -- it's not my place to discuss the political implications of this. And then Anthony Watts and a million right-wing bloggers and op-ed writers take his findings and write scathing articles that say The findings Al Gore doesn't want you to know about! And then Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt get really angry and say McIntyre should call off his attack dogs, and McIntyre says I have no control over them! and we get the huge mess that is the blogosphere's reaction to climateaudit.org today. Do you think he's being deliberately coy when he displays his results, or do you think he has no real political agenda? I'm not too familiar with the guy, but it's often easy enough to tell the difference between someone who is just obsessed with technical details versus someone who is nitpicking mistakes they've found in order to stir poo poo up. I'd say the former is alright, but if it's obvious he's doing the latter, then its more ethically dubious.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 08:09 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:At the same time, it's also possible that none of McIntyre's criticisms have any impact on the conclusions of the papers he 'audits'. And this is where my ethical problem with him starts. McIntyre makes a post on Climate Audit outlining some problem with D'Arrigo et al. 2009 or whatever, and says, hmm, well isn't this interesting -- technically, I mean! -- it's not my place to discuss the political implications of this. And then Anthony Watts and a million right-wing bloggers and op-ed writers take his findings and write scathing articles that say The findings Al Gore doesn't want you to know about! And then Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt get really angry and say McIntyre should call off his attack dogs, and McIntyre says I have no control over them! and we get the huge mess that is the blogosphere's reaction to climateaudit.org today. The problem, as you imply, is the political context. We're at a point where we have settled scientific consensus, and now need to be working towards a political consensus. For a variety of reasons, there are a lot of people who oppose *any* effective political consensus, and their main tactic in achieving this end is to continually obfuscate the process. In doing so, they use basically the same tactics that creationists and intelligent design proponents used - pretend that there's a scientific controversy. And they do this in large part by nitpicking away at things (or just using data completely out of context or lying about it), and then arguing that the 'science is incomplete' or 'we have to wait longer to determine xxxx', etc. I don't know what McIntyre's motives are. But there is no way that he is ignorant of this context. Furthermore, I don't think I've ever seen him taking on any denialist talking points, so it's not as though he's a disinterested observer in all of this.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 08:54 |
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Think about it this way: if McIntyre decided he was going to be a flat-out denialist, signed on with right-wing think tanks, took fat checks from fossil fuel companies, wrote pugnacious op-eds about Al Gore, and generally went the whole nine yards like the people who emptyquote him, would you think more of him or less of him? Personally, I find his restraint to be worthy of respect. Sure there are lots of folks who exaggerate his criticisms, but that's not his problem, nor is it incumbent upon him to preemptively denounce any and all occasions in which Stupid Right-Wing Blogger Writes Something Stupid. The fact that he chooses to confine his criticisms to the realms of statistics and methodology makes them far more convincing than they would be coming from some blogger with a bunch of NewsMax banners on his blog. Elotana fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 13:51 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 13:43 |
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Verviticus posted:Do you think he's being deliberately coy when he displays his results, or do you think he has no real political agenda? My gut feeling is that he does have a political motive, but is extraordinarily disciplined and has managed to keep it almost entirely to himself. I'm going to go very armchair psychologist here, but he probably also continues this work precisely because of the frigid reception he's always got from the academy. He's won over a lot of people (including me) on his statistical abilities precisely because he's so patient and disciplined, in the face of a pretty clearly expressed desire on the part of the "auditees" for him to just go away and shut up. Readman posted:The problem, as you imply, is the political context. McIntyre clearly knows about the political context. He's not autistic. So the question is, does he care about the political context and what his findings will be used for? If he makes legitimate criticisms, but ones that don't change the conclusions, and others use his work to delay carbon-reduction legislation by five years, how many people will die because of that? This must be a very old question in scientific ethics: do you publish findings that have the potential to do damage to society? I'm sure there are lots of people who have written on this but I haven't taken the time to read about it yet. (Any suggestions?) There's also the question of why he doesn't do his own temperature reconstruction. He's never really taken this on directly, but it's my guess (strongly supported from reading his website) that he believes that tree-rings and most climate proxies are not good enough to actually do a reconstruction, and that the whole field is fundamentally flawed. In other words, to do a reconstruction to the standards he would want is impossible: the error bars go to infinity about 400 years ago. And we need a reconstruction for at least 1200 years to include the medieval warm period, or else it's not much use for determining if today's warming is unique. Sgs-Cruz fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 15:13 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 15:09 |
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If you have a problem with people pointing out methodological flaws in any paper (regardless of content or political context) then you might as well just argue for a scrapping of the peer review system, and the automatic publication of any scientific paper that has conclusions you agree with. Science is entirely about methodology.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 15:14 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:Ah, now that's another thing. Yes, McIntyre makes mistakes. However (and some people will probably disagree with me here), he's always been good about accepting technical criticism and fixing the error. That, and of his three major 'scoops' (the original criticism of MBH99, the 'Y2K' error in the GISTEMP product, and the recent Yamal/Schweingruber thing), none of his arguments were fundamentally flawed. Yes, there were mistakes in his implementation of Mann's work, etc. but if one honestly reads what he did, he was basically right. People tend to forget this, or ignore it. The problem with his analysis of Mann's data is that he cherry picked by dropping relevant data. Has he recanted and said that Mann's analysis was solid?
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 16:25 |
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Well without getting too deeply into the matter: Yes, the "this is what the reconstruction would have looked like" reconstruction that McIntyre and McKitrick put in their Energy & Environment can be seen as a mistake. Using properly centred PCA moved the "hockey stick" signal down from PC1 to PC4 and MM only retained 2 PCs in their "alternative" reconstruction. It's debatable whether this is an "error" or just a difference in judgement about how many PCs to retain. That is sort of beside the point, because when I say that the fundamentals of the criticism are correct, I mean that everything McIntyre said about Mann's incorrect use of principal components was true. This was acknowledged in subsequent reports from the National Academies of Science and the 'Wegman panel' that Rep. Joe Barton convened. The algorithm MBH98/99 used really did hunt for "hockey sticks" in the data. That's why subsequent papers by Mann and colleagues use other methods like RegEM. edit: It was Rep. Joe Barton that convened the Wegman panel, not James Inhofe. Also spelling. Sgs-Cruz fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 16:54 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 16:39 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:That is sort of beside the point, because when I say that the fundamentals of the criticism are correct, I mean that everything McIntyre said about Mann's incorrect use of principal components was true. This was acknowledged in subsequent reports from the National Academies of Science and the 'Wegman panel' that Rep. Joe Barton convened. The algorithm MBH98/99 used really did hunt for "hockey sticks" in the data. That's why subsequent papers by Mann and colleagues use other methods like RegEM. But the whole of the data shows a hockey stick. So searching for the subset of the data that best represents the whole of the data isn't a bug, its a feature so that you need not include the whole of the data. Mann's use of principal components was correct and McIntyre's criticism was untrue (because he, wittingly or not, cherry picked). He then went on to wave it as a legitimate criticism of Mann's results when really it was just a cautionary tale that one must be careful when using a given statistical analysis. However, it was McIntyre's use of the data that is questionable not Mann's.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 18:37 |
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Nodrog posted:If you have a problem with people pointing out methodological flaws in any paper (regardless of content or political context) then you might as well just argue for a scrapping of the peer review system, and the automatic publication of any scientific paper that has conclusions you agree with. Science is entirely about methodology. This isn't exactly peer review. Its a blog that claims its performing an "audit" of some sort. Peer review in science tends to be a somewhat more formal process, both at publication, then in later refutation or expansion via further properly reviewed papers.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 18:54 |
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MickeyFinn: I'm not quite sure how to reply to you without derailing this thread into an argument about whether the 10th century AD was warmer than the 20th. The purpose of the principal component analysis is to extract the vector that represents the largest component of the variance of the original dataset. This is the "first principal component" or PC1. Then you have PC2, PC3, etc. that contain smaller and smaller amounts of the variance of the original dataset. When a correct PCA is done on the MBH98/99 dataset, the "hockey stick" signal shows up in PC4. You can argue about how many principal components one should retain. But in the original "hockey stick" papers, only one was retained. Why was this okay when the "hockey stick" showed up in PC1 but not when it's in PC4? Unless you know beforehand that you're looking for a 20th century upswing and keep enough PCs for it to be included. edit: To be clear, one can argue about motivations, politics, methodology. But a principal component analysis is a precisely defined procedure, and MBH98/99 did it wrong. This is not up for debate. MBH98/99 did it wrong and published PC1, MM03 did it right and published PC1+PC2, when maybe they should have published PC1+PC2+PC3+PC4+PC5. Okay, fine, that's debatable. Certainly the damage done to efforts for a global climate treaty by McIntyre is up for debate (that's the point of this thread). But the original PCA was done incorrectly, end of story. Sgs-Cruz fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 19:07 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 19:01 |
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duck monster posted:This isn't exactly peer review. Its a blog that claims its performing an "audit" of some sort. Actually what McIntyre does is far more detailed than peer review. I've been peer reviewed once, have done it twice, and have asked several scientists and professors at my school about what's involved in a peer review. It's not nearly as rigorous as McIntyre's "audits". The real oversight in science comes over a period of years. Peer review weeds out those who are really obviously wrong or unoriginal. Over the years, unimportant papers are not cited and fade into obscurity, and wrong ones are refuted in the literature. This is why it's so bizarre to me that McIntyre publishes so few of his findings. If he wants to be taken seriously by the academy he needs to take it off the blog, and into a journal that isn't Energy & Environment. I know he had a lot of trouble getting a Letter into Nature, although that's not saying much because everyone has trouble getting into Nature.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 19:15 |
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duck monster posted:This isn't exactly peer review. Its a blog that claims its performing an "audit" of some sort. Science blogs have long offered less-formal criticism of peer reviewed papers, and I think it's great. Credentials are unimportant. For example, I don't know if the author of Org Prep Daily has credentials equivalent to or better than the authors of this article which he criticized on safety grounds. But his warning is eminently sensible and the factual basis for it can be confirmed by anyone who spends a few minutes searching chemical safety literature. The proper scientific response to factual/logical criticism of climate models is "thank you for helping to refine our models." And if you want to rebut critics who take McIntyre's criticism as evidence of something larger, the proper response is to show your model results before-and-after fixing problems highlighted by McIntyre. I don't think the results change enough to materially alter the political implications of climate models. Science should not shy away from criticism that is grounded in reality. It is fundamentally a critical process. We believe things to be true when they have survived repeated critical challenges, but that notion of truth is always subject to revision in the face of new evidence and theories. Of course that also means that scientific criticism should not shy away from counter-criticism if that counter-criticism is also grounded in reality. "Al Gore is smug," "emissions controls will hurt the economy," and "carbon dioxide is vital to plant life" aren't even in the same league, and I don't think McIntyre should be blamed for adding arrows to Republican quivers any more than Darwinian evolution should be blamed for social Darwinism.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 19:31 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:edit: To be clear, one can argue about motivations, politics, methodology. But a principal component analysis is a precisely defined procedure, and MBH98/99 did it wrong. This is not up for debate. MBH98/99 did it wrong and published PC1, MM03 did it right and published PC1+PC2, when maybe they should have published PC1+PC2+PC3+PC4+PC5. Okay, fine, that's debatable. Certainly the damage done to efforts for a global climate treaty by McIntyre is up for debate (that's the point of this thread). But the original PCA was done incorrectly, end of story. These men disagree with every point you have brought up here. If you are going to claim Mann did it wrong you are going to have to come up with points that aren't McIntyre's because his work has been discredited because he didn't use the appropriate number of PCs and when you do use the appropriate number of PCs his results are remarkably similar to Mann's. You are basically giving a free pass to McIntyre for his dishonesty (incompetence?) at the same time sweeping that under the rug in order to ask if he is doing any good. Or you don't understand why McIntyre's work is flawed. And yes, I think if we start from the premise that McIntyre has done some things correctly we can come to the conclusion that he has done some good. But I disagree with the premise and because of that don't think he has done any good. Peer review is great, vital even, for a healthy debate within science but McIntyre's work (at least in this case) has been shown to be faulty and it has caused damage to the political/economic debate on GCC. To claim that he is just doing his job and others are misusing his work belies the faults of his work. Your argument comes down to the fact that he merely dropped a matchbook where pyromaniacs could get it, so he isn't responsible for the fires.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 20:02 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:This is why it's so bizarre to me that McIntyre publishes so few of his findings. If he wants to be taken seriously by the academy he needs to take it off the blog, and into a journal that isn't Energy & Environment. I know he had a lot of trouble getting a Letter into Nature, although that's not saying much because everyone has trouble getting into Nature. He doesn't get published because his papers are rejected for faulty use of data analysis...
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 20:03 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:4) McIntyre should stop trying to be an iconoclast and work within the system to make the climate reconstructions better, rather than just "auditing" them after publication. Change comes from the iconoclasts. Science isn't accomodating to people with ideas that counter political orthodoxy, regardless of their qualifications. One only has to look at how Michael Behe is regarded to see there's no incentive to work within the system.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 20:17 |
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Have you read that page you just linked me to? I challenge you to find anywhere in there that the original PCA was done correctly (i.e. according to standard PCA methodology). They keep calling their choice of centering a "centering convention" when it's not a convention at all, it's just how the PCA is supposed to be done. Here's what basically happened: 1. MBH98/99 -- Here's a PCA of these temperature proxies, and here's the PC1 containing a hockey stick. 2. IPCC2001 and a bunch of other multiproxy papers -- *uses MBH99 PC1* 3. MM03 -- Uh, you did the PCA wrong, you did it decentered. If you do a centred PCA (i.e. the correct way), the hockey stick shows up in PC4. Also, here's a reconstruction consisting of PC1+PC2 that shows 20th century warming is not unprecedented. 4. Mann et al. on RealClimate -- It doesn't matter whether the PCA is decentred or centred! Preisendorfer's N-rule says you have to keep 5 PCs anyway! 5. A million bloggers and the U.S. Congress -- *goes apeshit* Look, I'm not disagreeing with you here. McIntyre may have hosed up bad by putting that "alternative reconstruction" in his 2003 Energy & Environment paper. But that doesn't change the fact that the actual PCA in MBH98/99 was done incorrectly. Ignore how many PCs you keep after the fact. The PCA itself was done incorrectly. That's all I'm saying. Sgs-Cruz fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 20:21 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 20:17 |
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Tape Speed posted:Change comes from the iconoclasts. Science isn't accomodating to people with ideas that counter political orthodoxy, regardless of their qualifications. One only has to look at how Michael Behe is regarded to see there's no incentive to work within the system. Michael Behe isn't taken seriously because he isn't doing science, not because he has ideas that counter the political orthodoxy. Cruz, why does MBH98 match all other proxy records if it was done so horribly wrong? Was it a coincidence? Zwiftef fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 20:39 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 20:31 |
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Zwiftef posted:Cruz, why does MBH98 match all other proxy records if it was done so horribly wrong? Was it a coincidence? Correcting the PCA and keeping 5 PCs gives a similar result, ergo we can conclude that McIntyre's criticism probably wasn't too important to the conclusions of the original work. So the question is, did McIntyre do a good thing or not by publishing the criticism in the first place? Which is the entire point of this thread. It should be noted that Edward Wegman had this to say about the idea that the criticism doesn't matter because it doesn't affect the conclusion: "Answer Correct + Method Wrong = Bad Science"
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 20:49 |
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Ohh, I see what this thread is about... Not whether or not McIntyre has changed any conclusions but rather has he done good for science because he corrected a clearly irrelevant piece of statistical analysis (at least so far as the thread I created is concerned). To quote Disraeli through Mark Twain: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." If the analysis that Mann had done had shown itself to not be robust under centering than he would have been doing a service. As it is, he has applied PCA analysis by the book without regard to whether or not it is relevant and then mucked up the ending. In doing so he has created fuel for the GCC isn't real/true fire. The answer to your thread's question (which I finally understand - thanks for the patience) is that McIntyre has done right by science (sorta) and done very wrong by the world. Had he kept this as a criticism note in Nature and not gone on to his botched PC choices it would have been great but he didn't stop there and has done far more harm to the cause of fixing the planet we are ruining than his correction has done good to science.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 21:10 |
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Tape Speed posted:Change comes from the iconoclasts. Science isn't accomodating to people with ideas that counter political orthodoxy, regardless of their qualifications. One only has to look at how Michael Behe is regarded to see there's no incentive to work within the system. Can you name a single significant scientific result that has come from outside the system in the last hundred years? This wouldn't just be non-scientists coming in with weird results and getting them published in journals. It would be people whose work is ignored for decades who are then vindicated in some fashion.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 21:23 |
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Lyesh posted:Can you name a single significant scientific result that has come from outside the system in the last hundred years?
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 21:40 |
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Nodrog posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 22:54 |
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The relevance of the Grigori Perelman analogy depends on what Lyesh meant by "working outside the system." Perelman was a widely respected and formally trained mathematician before he posted his famous papers on arXiv -- not exactly analogous to McIntyre. And while Perelman was hardly an amateur mathematician, if he was it would be easier for experts to debunk or accept a purely mathematical argument. My sense is that with these statistical analyses, there are a lot of subjective decisions on whether to include or exclude data, and for making those decisions experience in the field seems very important. I know little about climate science, so from my perspective McIntyre's criticisms mean almost nothing unless validated by actual climate scientists, unless they're purely technical.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 22:57 |
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Why is anyone talking about MBH99 anymore? There were a number of valid criticisms, but no more than could be made for many published papers in the Environmental Sciences because what we're working with is so complex and difficult. Mann et al. (2008) definitively answers all of McKitrick's criticisms about data use and omission. The PC debacle is more of the lack of understanding of current uses of PCA in climate science from McKitrick than from any error of Mann et al. Once Mann et al. 2008 was released, the Climate Audit blog got a lot quieter and, I think, definitively showed the value of reconstruction.
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| # ? Nov 09, 2009 00:57 |
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Sgs-Cruz posted:1) Sure, he doesn't use his findings himself, but there are legions of attack dogs on other sites (Watts, Motl, McKitrick, ...) who are happy to do so. McIntyre doesn't actually stop them from doing so, and so he's reponsible. Reponsible for what? This is a stretch to suggest that someone implicitly endorses anything that contains a reference to their own work. You also seem to imply that something nefarious is going on, can you point to examples of the "attack dog" postings that include Steve's work. Sgs-Cruz posted:2) McIntyre should put up or shut up. Sure, he picks apart all kinds of climate reconstructions, but why doesn't he do his own? He isn't a trained climate scientist. He is a statistician. His work is analyzing the statistics used in the studies. Are you sure you've read his writings extensively? Sgs-Cruz posted:3) His findings may be true but they're usually not significant to the conclusions. Wait, what? The two most referenced temperature reconstructions (Mann & Briffa) have both been falsified by his work. His latest was finding out that a less widely used reconstruction used an entire graph upside-down! Mann has refused to acknowledge that it's wrong! And by the way, on those two reconstructions, BOTH of the lead authors REFUSED to provide the data until their hands were forced by third parties. Sgs-Cruz posted:4) McIntyre should stop trying to be an iconoclast and work within the system to make the climate reconstructions better, rather than just "auditing" them after publication. Alright I am definitely calling bullshit on your claim that you have read McInytre. Steve was an IPCC reviewer for AR4. This is clearly working within the system. Sgs-Cruz posted:What do you guys think about these criticisms? Valid? What you have presented is poorly researched and unsourced. Much of it is also wrong. Verdict: invalid.
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| # ? Nov 13, 2009 23:12 |
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It disturbs me that some people seem to think that scientists/statisticians should keep quiet about inconvenient truths that may make political action difficult. Science should care about nothing but the technical truth. If it starts taking political context into account, I don't know that it could be really described as science.
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 00:51 |
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Kitiara posted:It disturbs me that some people seem to think that scientists/statisticians should keep quiet about inconvenient truths that may make political action difficult. It disturbs me more that you can't bother to quote anyone saying this and address them directly. This sort of posting makes it look like you're trying to straw man people rather than engage in any actual debate. It's really no different than the "some say" bullshit I see on cable news.
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 01:07 |
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Solkanar512 posted:It disturbs me more that you can't bother to quote anyone saying this and address them directly. This sort of posting makes it look like you're trying to straw man people rather than engage in any actual debate. It's really no different than the "some say" bullshit I see on cable news. "1) Sure, he doesn't use his findings himself, but there are legions of attack dogs on other sites (Watts, Motl, McKitrick, ...) who are happy to do so. McIntyre doesn't actually stop them from doing so, and so he's reponsible." Other people use his work politically, therefore he shouldn't do it?
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 01:30 |
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Solkanar512 posted:It disturbs me more that you can't bother to quote anyone saying this and address them directly. This sort of posting makes it look like you're trying to straw man people rather than engage in any actual debate. It's really no different than the "some say" bullshit I see on cable news. Oh, please. Readman posted:The problem, as you imply, is the political context. Happy?
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 01:50 |
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What we're saying is that McIntyre is creating an artificial controversy by very publicly nitpicking at issues that are ultimately inconsequential. Whatever his motives are, that's not a good way to conduct an honest debate.
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 02:00 |
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Kitiara posted:Happy? That is a complete and utter distortion of what I was saying. My point was simply that it is absurd to suggest that McIntyre is ignorant of the political climate. He's not a disinterested observer, and it's untenable to portray him as such. On your other point, if McIntyre genuinely wants to make a contribution to the climate science field, then he should engage with it and subject his papers to peer review (Energy and Environment doesn't count)'. He doesn't do that, and so the criticism that he deliberately leaves his work open to abuse is entirely deserved.
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 02:14 |
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My view is that a scientist's right to "nitpick" at "inconsequential" issues is absolutely sacred. "Judge whether this is something the public can be trusted not to misinterpret" is not a part of the scientific method. I don't care if McIntyre is a sceptic and out to discredit the global warming idea. I don't care if Mann is looking for the most dramatic proof of global warming he can find to goad the world into action. As long as they can prove their work, it is valid. That is science. Kitiara fucked around with this message at Nov 14, 2009 around 02:29 |
| # ? Nov 14, 2009 02:23 |
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Nodrog posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman Perelman isn't a scientist, and it's disingenuous at best to use theoretical mathematics as an example of scientific iconoclasm.
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 02:24 |
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Kitiara posted:My view is that a scientist's right to "nitpick" at "inconsequential" issues is absolutely sacred. "Judge whether this is something the public can be trusted not to misinterpret" is not a part of the scientific method. Are you conceding that you grossly misrepresented my earlier statement?
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 02:36 |
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No, I'm not conceding that. You're saying that McIntyre is making true but irrelevant criticisms in order to stir up trouble. I'm saying that if his criticisms are true, nothing else matters.
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| # ? Nov 14, 2009 03:01 |
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