Balafon

Read a great article this morning on the dangers of scientific consensus. The Royal Navy had established in the 18th century that lemon juice cured scurvy. But in the second half of the 19th century, when steamships’ fast travel times had mostly eliminated the danger of scurvy, scientists enamoured of the new germ theory of disease hypothesized that scurvy was in fact caused by bacteria.

Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes.

On Scott’s Antarctic expidition they made sure to boil all their fresh food extra long (in the process destroying all its vitamin C), and immediately began getting scurvy. They switched to freshly-killed seal while they stayed on the Antarctic coast, which cured them, but on their final push into the interior had to make do with processed food, with fatal results.

Some guys at Intellectual Ventures scrounged up some parts on eBay, and invented a laser mosquito-zapper.

If you can’t drug ‘em, fry ‘em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Thankfully, contrary to the fears expressed in my last post, the Copenhagen conference did not finally end up with a substantive deal.

The irony is that most of North America and Europe is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.

Came across some fascinating stuff today in the area of cognitive science.

The first bit is a mention of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, in which he puts forward a trenchant argument against dualism: if the soul is to affect the body (i.e. when “I” want to move a part of my body), then it must apply energy to the neurons to change their state. Where does the energy come from? We could put a person in a calorimeter and verify that the energy of heat that they put out is no greater than the energy of the food they consume. A corollary I immediately thought of is: why does thinking (or praying, for that matter) consume a measurable amount of glucose from the blood? Why should a “soulish” activity consume matter?

I have long maintained that whatever is meant by the Biblical terms (e.g. psyche) translated “soul”, it cannot consist of matter or energy, but must consist of information. Dennett’s thought experiment is further support for this view.

The second fascinating item is an Edge talk by Stanislas Dehaene. His research on cognition and consciousness has progressed to the point where it is possible to determine from a real-time brain scan if and at which moment a person becomes consciously aware of a stimulus.

I’ve recently been reading Sydney Lamb’s work in neurocognitive linguistics; Dehaene’s work seems to tie in nicely.

I shall be interested to read his papers on the cognition of number and compare with Dan Everett’s work with the Pirahã, whom he claims do not use numbers.

People with more time on their hands than me have been poring over the source code in the leaked CRU files. Here is a snippet of IDL code that produces a graph showing temperature data for the twentieth century (osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro):

;
; 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)


That long string of numbers with some negative values in the middle and positive values at the end? Those numbers are multiplied by the real temperatures to hide a warm period in the 1940s, and exaggerate the temperatures at the end of the century.

This is scientific fraud, pure and simple.

You may have noticed some strange news articles over the weekend, saying things like, “All that these emails prove is that climate researchers are in fact honest and diligent scientists, if a bit testy in private.”

Honest, the Emperor does too have clothes!

Now that it’s been more than 48 hours, I think I can make some substantive comments. Here’s the story:

Last week the following comment appeared on a blog post at the Air Vent:

FOIA said
November 17, 2009 at 9:57 pm e

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

The comment was accompanied by a link to a zip file on an obscure server in Russia. The zip file contained 157 megabytes of emails and documents that appeared to have been taken from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which just happens to be the major repository for climate research data for studying global warming. The emails span a period of almost 15 years, from 1995 or so to the fall of 2009.

After several days it is apparent that the emails and files are genuine. The CRU has admitted that someone stole their files, and has not denied their authenticity. The story is ongoing at Climate Audit (and its alternative mirror site), Bishop Hill, Watts Up with That, The Blackboard, and the aforementioned Air Vent, among many others.

What the documents contain is telling. They do not provide a perfect “smoking gun” — they don’t say “we made it all up” — but they do cast serious light on the science and politics behind the global warming movement.

Defenders at such bastions of academic freedom as Real Climate and Discover magazine are pooh-pooing the idea that lowly proles such as yourselves could ever interpret the subtle and exalted thoughts of real scientists, who are all shown to be as pure as the driven snow.

Questions of technical scientific interpretation aside, there are some demonstrably shady things going on:

• At the very least, they clearly reveal criminal conspiracy to destroy or deny data subject to Freedom of Information requests:
  

  If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does!

  Also see 1212063122.txt, 1106338806.txt, 1228330629.txt and 1219239172.txt. This is criminal activity, plain and simple.

• The emails also clearly reveal collusion to control the scientific peer review process, by rejecting articles critical of the global warming “team”, and then detracting from their critics by saying “they’re not peer-reviewed“:
  

  This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

  1051190249.txt:
  

  One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about.

  1089318616.txt:
  

  I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

  This is nothing less than a subversion of science. The whole point of science is that members of one particular school of thought should not be able to prohibit the publication of dissenting views. Debate is the essence of science.

  The emails are a classic example of what Thomas Kuhn calls “groupthink” in science: a tight-knight group who polices their members for political reliability:
  

  Be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like.

• The “science” of global warming relies on complex computer models where the final output and predictions are the result of multiple layers of mathematical processing. This processing relies on many variables that must be tuned to make the models reflect reality. Except…
  

  I want to make one thing really clear. We ARE NOT supposed to be working with the assumption that these scenarios are realistic. They are scenarios-internally consistent (or so we thought) what-if storylines. You are in fact out of line to assume that these are in some sense realistic-this is in direct contradiction to the guidance on scenarios provided by the synthesis team.

  The dominant theme throughout the discussions of data processing (and the actual source code used), is of manipulating the data to fit a pre-conceived idea:
  

  I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

  This telling phrase has been explained as a mere slip of the tongue, but it is part of a bigger pattern:
  

  I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that … I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have.

  1254108338.txt:
  

  So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.

  I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.

• These would be enough. But the very worst thing about these emails, as far as I’m concerned, even more than the criminal activity and the perversion of science, is that “the team” is NOT EVEN SURE THEY ARE RIGHT. They are pressuring global leaders to do irreperable harm to the economies of the world — which will devastate the developed world, and condemn the developing world to a century of abject poverty, all for something they are not certain about! They are well aware of problems with the data and the process at the IPCC:
  

  The fact is that in doing so the rules of IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results. … Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent which might mine the IPCC credibility, and I am a bit unconfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this.

  1255352257.txt
  

  The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

  1257546975.txt:
  

  We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

  1255523796.txt:
  

  How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!

  The kicker from Phil Jones:
  

  I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.

  He would rather see the death and destruction he’s been predicting come true than for him to have made a mistake.