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Dr John Dee

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Everything posted by Dr John Dee

  1. It's not a licence, though, it's an award. Athletes are stripped of awards, medals etc daily ... well, maybe not daily.
  2. I don't think it should be construed as punishment. By his actions, Watson made himself ineligible for the award. It's just taken some time to establish that.
  3. I think the word you're looking for is excrabiliolate, isn't it? Although Robbo's a pretty good example of chaos in action anyway.
  4. Morning tea at the Herald Sun?
  5. Obviously they couldn't, they're a court. But then Robbo thought there were four judges on the CAS bench. Maybe the mysterious fourth was a specialist they brought in, a Doctor of Evidence. Sounds impressive. I think I'll add that to my qualifications.
  6. Late, I'm afraid but thanks to peerless functioning of private enterprise in this country I've had no, or only fitful internet for the last week. I do have a reply. It's very long. You can read it or you can ignore it, I don't mind. I'd initially just focussed on the Soon effort but, with all that time on my hands and no training reports or squabbles over Jack Watts to read I added a few thoughts: A bit desperate, Ben. The link you’ve used for some reason doesn’t work for me, so I went to what’s probably a more a more substantive and probably more sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly (SCC) paper (on Watts Up With That?) than the blog version you’ve relied on. The SCC paper might be a contribution to the scientific discussion about climate change, but it ain’t in any sense ‘the science’. There’s a debate to be had by those properly qualified to have it, who don’t include me; so I’m not going down that path although at the level of methodology I’ve got some significant suspicions anyway. But even if SCC’s argument proves to have any credibility, which it probably doesn’t, it has to be taken in the context of all the other issues, measurements, findings, calculations and so on that constitute the climate as a field of study. As far as that credibility is concerned: (i) maintaining that SCC is a published peer reviewed paper might be a step too far. All I can find is a draft version of the paper as submitted to Earth-Science Review. A Google Scholar search of that journal doesn’t show up a published version of the paper. But Earth-Science Review is also not a journal for publishing original research. Its parameters, as set out in its explanatory note for authors, are: ‘Every review article published will advance existing knowledge and highlight new directions being taken at the forefront of expanding subject areas by synthesis, evaluation and discussion of previously published literature’ (my emphasis). There’s some expectation of a new contribution of some sort, but only by way of interpretation. I don’t know about the Connollys but Willie Soon, it turns out, has made a bit of a career of this reinterpreting of the work of others. And as for peer review, the journal requires only that authors submit the names of potential reviewers. Peer review is supposed to be blind and objective. Being reviewed by your mates isn’t really top drawer academic practice; (ii) the ‘new’ argument that SCC present relies crucially on a statistical reworking based on a reworking of what was originally (also statistical) a reconstruction of solar activity prior to when it became reliably measurable (1978). An whatever they make of it, SCC don’t in fact share your confidence that their case represents ‘the science’, since they propose more modestly that warming due to total solar irradiation (TSI) is a plausible alternative to the CO2 account; (iii) the reconstruction SCC rely on, by Hoot and Schatten (1993), despite being described as having ‘stood the test of time’, has also been disputed thoroughly, but in any case SCC appear to lean less on Hoot & Schatten than on an ‘updating’– conveniently amplifying the potential effect of the original reconstruction on the global warming debate – by Scafetta & Willson (2014). There seems to be just too much motivated research involved in the way some (or perhaps more than some) denialists go about their business; (iv) speaking of which, Jara is entirely within his rights to raise the problem of Willie Soon’s funding by the oil industry. It’s only a minor ad hominem alongside the shrill calumniating of climate scientists by the denialist mob with their constant nonsense about continuing access to some bottomless trough of funding as the motive for the findings they (climate scientists) make. The interventions of the oil industry in this area of inquiry are well documented and there is no reason not to examine closely (sceptically indeed) anything produced by oil industry funded researchers. The case of big tobacco, as Earl has already mentioned, ought to be just a little salutary when it comes to evaluating paid for ‘scientific’ findings; (iii) Willie Soon has form with fiddling the figures: check the Soon and Baliunas controversy, if you like; it was another case which rested on ‘findings’ published in a peer reviewed journal but – in terms of that peer reviewing – in highly suspicious circumstances. In any case the figures were quickly and roundly challenged. And then there’s Soon’s accomplice on that occasion, Sallie Baliunas, a CFC denier (seriously) at the time. You can’t really get it any wronger than that … and the case of CFCs and the damage even a very minor anthropogenic contribution to the atmosphere started to do might also be salutary to those who think that CO2 constitutes only this or that proportion of the atmosphere. CFCs and CO2 are not – obviously – equivalent issues involving equivalent scientific questions, but recognising a need for caution to carry from one question to the other is probably useful. I could go on but I won’t … the problem here is not the specifics and scientific standing of SCC’s paper, which as I’ve said I’m not competent to judge, but the kind of dubious uses this sort of stuff is put to by lay denialists or those bloggers with ragtag qualifications masquerading as informed scientists and knowledgeable journalists and the like. Sorry to have to go all socialist on you but science is more or less a co-operative process, it is conducted in labs, in groups, in all sorts of other forms of association and interaction (how many scientists do you think work at CERN or work on the data CERN produces?) The myth of the heroic individual who'll set to flight all those lesser minds with some improbable discovery or understanding or graph is something the denialist gaggle wants to hang onto, but that’s only self-interest on their collective parts (it’s because they’ve got nothing in common anyway other than their determination to deny or, beyond the reach of scientific questions, their tory beliefs and superstitions to bind them together). It’s also based on a complete misunderstanding of science’s past … FFS even Newton, who’s one of the biggest names in the game, said that thing about the shoulders of giants that Google is fond of quoting. Whoops, sorry, I forgot that you don’t use Google. But collaboration is what even Willie Soon does, with his co-authored papers and his digging out of dust-covered studies by others. With people like Willie, though, the denialists are so desperate for a hero that they don’t really notice little problems with their dreams like that. But what their mythology means to the denialists is that they’ll latch onto any self-described contrarian with a theory or a paper or even what looks like a proof that one bit or other of the global warming science is wrong … and each and every partial fact or possible issue is turned by some thaumaturgical wave of the hand – recognisable only by the denialists – into a supposedly complete demonstration that there’s no such thing as global warming, no problem with CO2 or other greenhouse gases, nothing to worry about. It’s a bizarre misconstruction of what is usually taken as debate in scientific circles (which is not about simple objection and obstruction but involves sharing, discussing, evaluating, modifying, testing and so on in a broadly co-operative way. That’s one of the things peer reviewed journals are for: the sharing of the latest knowledge). It’s a substitution of a whole ensemble of approaches to inquiry by a flat-pack insistence on nothing but binary oppositions – either/or. I presume that these are expected to amount, opposition by opposition, to some kind of proof or other, adding up to something like a tipping point where climate science will be set to rout. Not that the denialists are patient enough for that; as I’ve said any one proof, or the illusion of it, any single vaguely credible argument is supposedly enough – as far as the bloggers and other imposters are concerned – to bring on the ruin of all that rigorously and systematically compiled knowledge that is climate science. Nor do they seem to care all that much whether it’s real science and real findings or not that they’re invoking in all these individual acts of denial. In the end, it’s only the impression that counts (making a pother of discontinuous skirmishes look like a war). Their only significant purpose is, as others have put it, the manufacturing of uncertainty* not the pursuit of truth. It’s not science and facts that matter but the facsimiles of facts and the illusion of science, enough facsimiles and enough illusions to produce and spread a belief in the non-scientific community that the scientists must be wrong, must be self-interested, must be this or that or part of the great communist conspiracy to take over the world by other means or anything else they might be up to in their secret, sinister laboratories. Whatever happened to the Illuminati anyway? There’s nothing particularly wrong with binary logic, it’s familiar, comfortable, we use it all the time. But we also use it a bit too often to reduce complex issues and behaviours to what seem like simple choices (politics, obviously, which in western democracies usually relies on choosing between two main parties and even when other parties can get a look in things still default to crude distinctions between left and right … you know that, or you ought to, you depend on it all the time to carry you into all sorts of errors and problems). And if binary oppositions aren’t enough even to get at the intricacies of politics, when it comes to climate change they’re woefully out of their league. Climate and the science of climate involve all sorts of complexity that can’t just be unthreaded by conventional forms of calculation, or by statistics (even conducted competently and properly) especially reduced to neat but inevitably simplifying graphs and graphics, or by mere contrasts between measurements and records. For one thing, there’s no single scientific discipline that encompasses the knowledge necessary to deal with it … which can be a bit of a problem since its reliance on other areas (physics, chemistry, meteorology, geology and so on) allows scientists from those areas to pass themselves off as ‘climate scientists’ without any significant or even sustained research history in the area. But more to the point, climate, in whatever way it’s described, is a dynamic system and understanding it doesn’t just involve complex mathematics but also trying to work with the potential effects of chaos. Chaos theory was, in part, developed to try to cope with the difficulties (seeming impossibilities) involved in weather forecasting. Climate, as we know, is not weather, it’s weather multiplied by at least 30 (the agreed minimum number of years whose weather patterns provide a description of a climate). Nor is climate a straightforward global system, it’s a series of very different systems in multiple geographical areas that are themselves at best crudely delineated. Chaos presumably functions everywhere and with all sorts of potential force that we can’t see and can’t understand, even afterwards. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t be trying to work out specific issues and effects; for example, whether or not accumulated CO2 is likely to have this or that contribution to climate, measured globally or otherwise. But it does mean that simple oppositions brought to bear on that level of working out need to be taken in their context, and their context involves so much more. Chaos theory (the butterfly effect in meteorology) has been translated as ‘sensitivity to initial conditions in dynamic systems’, a simplification but one that tries to capture the progressive nature of changes that occur. There’s nothing linear (there’s certainly nothing reducible to binaries) about how changes take place, their scale, direction, effects and so on. This leaves climate scientists open to all sorts of assaults from deniers, all sorts of manoeuvres got up to look like evidence that, because chaos still continues to outrun their capacity to calculate its possibilities, they don’t really understand climate at all. But the kind of complexity that chaos introduces to the mad theatre that is the debate over climate change is one reason that I refuse to get into the-models-and-the-events-they-didn’t-predict game. The thing about climate modelling is that it’s an imprecise science, and admits to being such. Forget Tim Flannery, he’s only a geologist; look at the way responsible projections for, say, 2050 about warming and its likely consequences are expressed: as percentages; just the way forecasts are given on the Weatherzone page for my area that I consult from time to time and, as the binman has said, when they tell me there’s a 70% chance of rain I’m inclined to take an umbrella, or at least a hat. In any case, when your findings don’t match your predictions (your model) what you do is: (a) review your findings and correct any errors; (b) review your methodology and change it if necessary; (c) change your model. If climate is a dynamic system there’s no reason why its study shouldn’t be dynamic as well … indeed there’s every reason why it should be dynamic: open, adjustable, fluid. But those steps are all necessary in any proper scientific inquiry; it’s just that the moment (a) and/or (b) occurs in relation to climate models we get the inevitable hysteria from the denialist cacodoxy about fraud and manipulation and anything else that might make it seem as if there’s another error, another problem, another source of opposition. But as long as the modelling processes are sufficiently open to scrutiny and are thus potentially falsifiable (Karl Popper’s test) then there’s absolutely no problem with errors showing up. Indeed, it’s best that they do. That’s how knowledge and understanding in this, and not only this, particular area develop and I’d rather that sort of development than some smug assumption, based on dodgy science – whether funded by big oil or not – or unscrupulous statistics, that things are going to be ok. No doubt it’s possible to say that chaos theory might well save us all since, by some twist or turn, changes could head in another unpredictable direction (but if it does that won’t redound to the credit of any denialist because there’s no way denialism can even begin to predict or calculate such an outcome either). But it might just as easily mean that things become much worse than they’re predicted to be (which won’t be much to the credit of climate scientists themselves, although they will at least be able to say that they understood the direction if not the manner or proportions of change). Chaos comes with other unpredictabilities, though. One possibility is: chaos might mean that some small action by some community or country in the present might, by the conditions it introduces to the dynamic system of one local climate, have some very substantial effect globally later on. Wishful thinking, maybe, but it does put at risk the already recognisable silliness of deniers who want to recycle the old argument that if the Chinese aren’t cutting their emissions we don’t have to. If anything I do amounts to the flapping of a butterfly’s wing I’d rather it was in a direction that contributed in some likelihood to a more benign unravelling of chaotic possibilities than not. Oh, and don’t start me on the 2% warming will be good for humanity crap. Chaos also says you’ve got no idea that this is likely and what we know already suggests it isn’t. But I’m with Jara on this one anyway. There’s another kind of smugness that goes with those sorts of attempts to turn climate change on its head, a smugness that might be easy enough to hang onto somewhere in the middle of a city with its nicely snowdomed protection from the real environment. But like Jara I’ve stood in the path of bushfires, armed only with a puling fire hose or a hoe. I’ve been on a firebreak as a fire jumped it. I don’t want others to have to go on experiencing the same or worse. And, sure, bushfires have always been around. But we’ve also got a pretty good idea of what their purpose and scale and effects were all about in this country. Where I live looks in one direction towards a place called Bald Mountain. It’s covered in trees. It wasn’t when the Europeans came because they scattered the locals and it was the locals who’d farmed it forever with fire and the fire killed off the saplings every burning season. Of course the Europeans chopped down all the other trees but – with an irony that’s hardly restricted to this place – they allowed Bald Mountain to reforest itself. Accidental environmentalism. We’ll need a lot more accidents, I suspect. But I see you’re also back to saying silly things about planning and economies. Which is where I came in. * perhaps you might to look at this on the doubt industry … and on the industrious Willie Soon: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/mar/05/doubt-over-climate-science-is-a-product-with-an-industry-behind-it. I only came across this last night looking for something else. It probably makes much of what I’ve said redundant, but I’ve left that in place anyway.
  7. There's relevance and there's relevance. This little diversion is also now irrelevant.
  8. You do realise that relevance is a criterion for decisions on whether posts stay or go don't you Ethan? This thread is also already overly cluttered.
  9. I've taken you at your word and deleted your subsequent posts (in particular given the 'get stuffed' bit above). This is the second thread on women and football you've derailed with your antediluvian interjections and endless subsequent efforts to justify yourself. You've had your say, for what it's worth, which is nothing. Find something else to do.
  10. A lot more than I'd expect of Dank, of course, although I suppose he's managed to put together a reasonable approximation of a fictional world over the last few years. I don't know the book. Must check it out.
  11. Or there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile_dilemma
  12. You'll be receiving a letter from the Charlatans' Association about that slur on our reputation.
  13. Well, that may be true in theory, Moonie, but when it comes to earning a quid there's only a certain number of instruments I can keep to hand.
  14. I had a moral compass once but someone from Essendon stole the needle.
  15. Don't worry, I've been busy but I'm back now. Who's first in line ... ?
  16. I thought they'd cut down all the trees in Bondi for the sea views. But seriously, Pearce has redefined the word pillock.
  17. There's a lot of things you don't realise but trying to itemise them might take all night. Here's a few: Trying to compare the Guardian with the NT News just demonstrates why there's no point dealing with anything you say. And then you go and compound the idiocy with some attempted point about original sources. If you have access to online academic journals (given your Dick and Jane level reading skills I have some doubts about that), go and find it for yourself. Very few members of Demonland do. We trade in publicly accessible documents here. I'm under no obligation to answer anybody's questions, particularly (as I've already said to ProDee) questions that are so prejudicially phrased (I'd add bombastically and mindlessly to that description in your case if I could be bothered) that they've already answered themselves, no matter what nonsense that answer implies. Your last two posts are a perfect example of why I mentioned to ProDee in an earlier post that I had no intention of posting anything in this or other threads about the science of climate change. I broke my own rule, briefly, to see what might happen and it has, with unerring precision. Nothing is ever likely to be discussed (a difficult word, look it up) by the clockwork denialists here; it's all just cant and obfuscation and evasion and the endless repetition of denialist pieties, errors and misinterpretations. As you've amply demonstrated, when you can't understand anything about the point someone might be making, don't bother with it, just throw in some question or other that's got nothing to do with a topic and see if the awkward issue can go away. Oh, and in any case, I was talking to ProDee, not you. You don't get to stick your nose into conversations demanding answers to questions that have nothing to do with the topic – especially employing some attempted feint that indicates that you haven't even had the courtesy to read a post properly – without risking having it cut off. Go away.
  18. The Guardian is a respected mainstream British newspaper, not a sinkhole for bloviators and political hacks. It still practises what's known as journalism. I don't expect you to know what that means but if you were even half careful enough to read the article you'd see that it's about a study published in an entirely reputable scientific journal. It's only people incapable of anything other than brainless servility to ideology who use terms like 'left wing rag'. And you really need to abandon your efforts at ridicule. They're about as ept as your spelling and your understanding ... nor was it my 'bit' about the 70%, it was ProDee's, which I was replying to. Congratulations on another expert demonstration of your ignorance and your inability to comprehend anything about the language you supposedly speak.
  19. Perhaps you might like to apply the same standards of validation to your claims about the weather 'drones' and their purported religious practices.
  20. That the oceans make up 70% of the earth’s surface … so there are some facts floating around, but what are we to make of this one? Not, I suspect, what Jo Nova and the rattlers of saucepan lids might want us to make. (i) the 70% certainly doesn’t mean that there are no measurements of surface air temperatures across the oceans. There are, and there are plenty of them … but their relevance isn’t in absolute numbers anyway, rather it’s in the comparative data they provide (if they’re accurately measuring the same thing at the same place across time then there’s sufficient consistency and thus reliability in what they tell us); (ii) but all that water in all those oceans also produces, through evaporation, what are known in the trade as clouds. Clouds play havoc with satellite measurements, which have to be adjusted to provide their version of consistency across time; to which we can add: (iii) those satellite measurements are not, as everyone knows, or ought to know, of temperature at all but of radiation and need to be transformed via complex calculations into temperatures; not all calculations are equal either, different meteorological groups calculate different things; (iv) there are significant other impediments to deriving straightforward, unmediated temperature figures, one of which is that satellites do not record information on a daily basis; their full coverage of target sites is produce over a 3 to 4 day cycle and so any continuous picture of temperatures at a particular time at each site is also the product (derivation) of processes of calculation; (v) satellite measurements are also subject to drift (the time at which a satellite passes over a designated spot changing with the decay in and other influences on its orbit) so temperatures derived from those measurements have to be adjusted; (vi) satellites, as everyone knows or ought to, do not record, or allow for transformation into measurements, data that has anything to do with what weather stations, buoys and any other forms of collecting terrestrial information record. They record data that provides information about changes in the lower and middle troposphere … different regions, the figures for which have to be averaged (adjusted) to provide an overall picture of temperature activity in the troposphere; (vii) satellite measurements are not all of a piece. Any reference to satellite data is a reference to the result of a reconciliation (adjustment) different kinds of information collected by different kinds of instruments. We also know that establishing the accuracy of satellite data has been a long and painful process, and Roy Spencer and his mate John Christy (at the University of Alabama, Huntington or UAH) provided troposphere temperature figures for quite some which were clearly problematic and subsequently invalidated. They were problematic not just because they were out of step with terrestrial figures in what they indicated about warming (cue the conspiracy theorists) but also with existing data from the troposphere (radiosonde instruments, i.e.) weather balloons. Over time, however, the UAH group – responding to the criticisms of its figures – has eliminated the systematic errors that dogged its calculations and the warming trend those figures now reveal is consistent with trends identified from all the other sources. Or perhaps they’ve only eliminated some of the errors (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/mar/25/one-satellite-data-set-is-underestimating-global-warming) Whatever the case, the alignment of trends is the important issue even if Spencer, who seems no longer to be associated with UAH, is still producing dodgy interpretations of those trends from the satellite record … although he’s hardly alone in that – as the inestimable Jo Nova demonstrates – as the denialists cling desperately to 1998. If all or even a few of those operations in all or even a few of those interventions were practised to the detriment of what the denialist regard as their case against global warming (or if that history of error pointed to something similar), we’d no doubt have the usual hysterical language being dug out of the Standard Denialist Phrasebook (3rd Edition) and thrown at every satellite-derived figure that they could find … ‘manipulation’ is, of course, a favourite as you know, but there’s ‘fraud’ (they particularly like ‘criminal fraud’), ‘forgery’, ‘deception’ and so on. But all that NASA or a Bureau of Meteorology has to do is recognise that data from a particular weather station has become inconsistent with its historical record because of changes in environmental circumstances or conditions, and seek to apply an adjustment to the figures from that station, and the Phrasebook is almost torn to shreds in the stampede of the denialist cacophony to calumniate the agency involved … and to extrapolate from a handful of examples, or even one or two, to a claim that the accumulated figures from all terrestrial stations in a country or even across the globe are somehow consequentially invalid (an operation that isn’t anything other than a grotesque and hyperbolic parody of the ‘manipulating’ of evidence they’re purporting to condemn). So what I think about NASA’s supposed ‘manipulation’ has very little to do with science or with empirical fact, but it has a lot to do with discourse, because all that the denialists really have to go on is shoddy discursive manoeuvres, although these are, of course, inevitably based on even shoddier, cherry-picked and distorted bits of information.
  21. He said it was a joke. Just let it go.
  22. It’s one thing not to understand what someone else has written, any fool can do that. But you show a rare talent (sic) in not being able to understand what you’ve written. Here’s how it works (I realise that context and consistency aren’t concepts that denialists have much familiarity with, but I’ll rely on them anyway): (i) you chose to indulge, gratuitously, in one of your regular tropes, the one about people who accept the possibility of global warming as belonging to some sort of 'religion' ('Do you guys pray 5 times a day to this religion of yours ? ') (ii) I noted that insofar as superstitious beliefs were concerned, plenty of denialists were well ahead ('I doubt it, but these clowns probably do: http://www.cornwallalliance.org/2009/05/01/signers-of-an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/'); (iii) you replied (or, rather, evaded the point) with some gibbering about the signatories to that declaration being 'devout Christians' (yep, your words) who were more concerned about the poor than climate change; (iv) I pointed out that there was considerably more to it than that, given that one of the signatories to the evangelical declaration was the grand panjandrum of denialism, Roy Spencer, who openly admits his denialism is underwritten by his religious dogma; (v) you replied with some confused effort (more evasion, presumably) to disown any reference you'd made to Christianity. If you think there's anything tenuous in those connections it's no wonder you choose to follow the loony charivari of denialism. And don’t tell me what to answer. You don’t run this thread even if you’ve recently been exhibiting delusions of petty grandeur here and elsewhere. If you want to ask a question that's so ridiculously loaded that its knees are wobbling, don't expect it to be treated with anything other than the contempt it deserves.
  23. He doesn't use Google. His search engine is called 'Ask Rupert'.
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