Sunday
Oct092011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Goldacre on science
Oct 9, 2011 Climate: other FOI I enjoyed this talk by Ben Goldacre about his work on exposing bad conduct by big pharma scientists.
I was particularly taken by his opening gambit, namely that science rejects argument from authority. Too right. However, I couldn't help but be reminded of Simon Singh's contribution to the Spectator debate, which was essentially argument from authority from beginning to end. Perhaps Dr Goldacre should give his friend Dr Singh a lesson in basic scientific philosophy.
There is also a good section on data availability, another area on which the official sceptics might like to spread their criticisms around a little bit more widely.
Reader Comments (53)
The 'official sceptics' is a new one on me. What's the difference between 'official sceptics' and sceptics ?
The trouble is Goldacre tends to regard 'climate science' as a special case becasue of its political dimensions or in other words its the classic line 'the end justifies the means' used to excuse poor behavior in one area when you attack the same poor behavior in another .
Hengist
The official list of official sceptics:
http://www.crispian.net/page3/page3.html
In the U.S., the National Academies and the National Research Council have issued a Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The 1000-page Manual “assists judges in managing cases involving complex scientific and technical evidence by describing the basic tenets of key scientific fields” and it includes “a series of chapters (reference guides) on various scientific topics, each authored by an expert in that field”.
One chapter is entitled “How science works” (authored by David Goodstein, a distinguished physicist and past Vice Provost of Caltech). In the chapter, section V is entitled “Some myths and facts about science”. The section says “… within the scientific community itself, authority is of fundamental importance … the triumph of reason over authority is just one of the many myths about science”.
I cannot disagree with anything that I remember him saying. But the pace was too frenetic and a lot of good information was thrown away by the rapid delivery. Half the content in twice the time would have been much better in my opine.
He talks the talk until it comes to climate science.
Dreadnought
To that list we can of course add Sir Paul Nurse and Professor Steven Jones, yes?
KnR
Has he actually said that?
Is it not more that the basic foundations of climate science remain solid even though the reputation of some scientists has become tarnished?
Also, please remember that there is more to climate science than the low carbon debate, so the idea of it having an "end" is a bit simplistic.
@ Richard Betts:
Agreed but the low carbon debate is the elephant in the room. Get rid of that and we can start getting somewhere.
Ah, Richard, but there is an 'end' to the low carbon debate. We might have ended up there had CO2 not been shown to be merely a peripheral actor in climate science.
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Richard
It's not just a question of whether the science stands up. The question is why so few people like Goldacre (or those on dreadnought's "official list") bother to find out whether that particular branch of science stands up.
They are mostly sceptical about Big Pharma or medical research or similar fields where the left-wing mindset reckons they are all out to make mega-bucks at the expense of the poor general public, but climate science gets a free ride.
I see no reason other than a political belief system that consistently differentiates in this way.
@Richard Betts:
"Is it not more that the basic foundations of climate science remain solid...?"
No. It will have solidity when it is able to make reasonably accurate predictions.
Richard Betts
I don't agree with you but it is good to see you here fighting your corner.
Have a nice day
Richard I'm certain that there is a lot more to climate science than then low carbon (dioxide) debate, a lot more, but unfortunately the prognostications of some members of the climate science academic community have put the low carbon (dioxide) front and centre in a political debate. Whether you, or any of your colleagues pursuing knowledge about our climate like it or not the uncertainties, I should say vast uncertainties, in a science that is very much in it's infancy, have been played down by your colleagues to give the politicians the impression that the world is facing armaggedon if we don't de-industrialise out society. We won't of course, because we can't, but in the meantime we're paying 15% more and rising on our energy bills because of climate scientists.
Richard Betts:
"Also, please remember that there is more to climate science than the low carbon debate"
Richard that debate is the key question to the science on man made global warming. What we want to know is the amount of warming that can be caused by man made co2 backed by physical evidence and openly discussed. Computer models only act on the information put in and will only respond to the values placed on the variables given.
Thank you very much for entering the discussions here, it is much appreciated.
Richard, I apologise for going on at you, but you know you and Judith Curry are probably the only scientists we get to speak to who are in the warmist, or Luke warmist camp (although Judy seems to be edging towards scepticism) and I believe it's important that I get across to you andnyour colleagues the actual severity of the problems that the theory of CAGW is causing. So here's another one, our future energy strategy is in shreds, someone, and it cannot be the engineers, has persuaded our politicians that something called "renewables" can provide 80% of our energy by 2050. As the definition of renewables excludes nuclear we are on deep doo doo, again because ofnthe prognostications of climate science. We will have real energy poverty in the next decade or so with people dying in the winter cold unless we get our politicians to take off their Rose coloured glasses and understand that you can't build an emergency power station you have to plan them at least one or two decades in advance.
Richard Betts the 'end' in this case is the political ideal not the science, that is even if we lie we do its with the best intentions in mind because we want to do what is best for the planet . Such an idea has no place in the scientific method especial when its comes from someone that attacks on other people for misusing data.
If its OK to lie in the name of your cause you open the door to others to take the same approach in the name of their cause, in which case you meant as well not bother with science in the first place but stick to religion where that approach is standard.
What Goldacre complains about is with good cause and a good idea , his failure to apply the same approach to climate science, as its a 'good cause ' is foolish and counterproductive and sadly not unknown. As climate science as become far more about the 'politics' than the science the temptation to give it a 'pass' on the requirements of the scientific approach, has become to great for some that should know much better.
Bottom line if its science they it should be expected and able to meet the standards demanded of any science, if its a 'religion' or 'political position' that is different but they it has no more right to call itself a science than any other religion or political position and no more right than any of these of respect no matter how many initials after their names its leaders have .
Hi Richard
Ben Goldacre seems to be pretty much of the if you question anything about 'climate science ' including uncertatinty and politics, then you are a p****
Delingpole: If Ben Goldacre thinks I'm a p****, what does it make him
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100073468/if-ben-goldacre-thinks-im-a-what-does-that-make-him/
I would recommend this James Delinpole article, because it is thoughtfulk and restrained..under provocation.
I spent a whileback, getting a good kicking around his Bad Science - blog forum, by his regular defenders of the 'faith'
I'm afraid Ben, is part of the problem, when trying to engage and discuss cc or cc policy.
Richard: What exactly are "the basic foundations of climate science"?
Richard
Slightly off this particular topic --- I did very much like your post on the USGCRP thread over at Climate, Etc. As long as there are some climatologists who are prepared to shout the uncertainties into the ears of the policy makers there is some hope.
Please can we get the activist NGOs and their useful (scientific) idiots — see Donna's recent postings — out of the picture? The fact that, according to information from DECC, the only people allowed to talk to Huhne are the environmental and renewable energy lobbies needs to be met head on. Their philosophy is not that of the majority of ordinary citizens anywhere in the world, let alone the UK.
They are using the science (incorrectly, in my view) to push an extreme environmentalist agenda which they know does not have the support of more than a handful of devotees.
Goldacre's major problem is that he misses the human element. I work in drug development/delivery and work with medics. Medics want to help their patients and so do all they can to help them. This makes any statistical analysis of outcome problematic to say the least.
Big Pharma are far more worried about law suits than fighting diseases, and to be frank, one can't blame them.
The whole 20 year Patent system has damaged drug development more than anything else. I wonder what 'artists' would do if their intellectual property rights were transformed from Life + 70 years to 20 years from pen to paper?
@Mike Jackson and Richard Betts
Re Huhne and his one-sided lobbyists, see for example, Bishop Hill post
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/2/9/stitching-up-the-electricity-market.html
@KnR: What Goldacre complains about is with good cause and a good idea , his failure to apply the same approach to climate science, as its a 'good cause ' is foolish and counterproductive and sadly not unknown.
In 2007 Goldacre blogged
I don’t cover green stuff in the column, for two reasons:
1. Lots of other people write about it, whereas – especially when I started 4 years ago – nobody was writing about the stuff I write about. And…
2. I tend to do things where people have simply and unambiguously got a piece of science completely wrong, and this tends not to be the issue in green issues, it tends to be more about how you synthesise thousands of little bits of evidence, which is fun for a book, but gives no sting for a column other than “I reckon”, which is exactly the kind of journalism I try to avoid writing.
"@Richard Betts:
"Is it not more that the basic foundations of climate science remain solid...?"
No. It will have solidity when it is able to make reasonably accurate predictions."
Or more to the point, admits that a science apparently based completely on computer modelling can only skim the surface of what might or might not happen as a result of N variables interacting?
From this lay person's point of view, any branch of science that has become so completely infested by vested interests and politics has to be questioned. Anyone know how research funded is split between skeptic and non-skeptic climate scientists?
@Mike Jackson:
They are mostly sceptical about Big Pharma or medical research or similar fields where the left-wing mindset reckons they are all out to make mega-bucks at the expense of the poor general public, but climate science gets a free ride.
Well, when I worked at Glaxo, we were all out to make mega-quids. Nothing wrong with that.
So 'climate science' gets a free ride, so what? Why do we need need Goldacre's opinion as well? Would his medical background lend any weight to his arguments? Do we need yet another statistician?
There's a big blowout going on at Judy's, with her censoring comments and all. I've already had half a dozen comments deleted, basically making the point that a world with increased CO2 will be a warmer world, capable of sustaining greater species diversity and sustaining more life in general.
For one big source of this mass hypnosis see Holdren's and the Erhlichs' paper of 1980: 'Availability, Entropy, and the Laws of Thermodynamics'. It is a dreadful, but influential paper.
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"There's a big blowout going on at Judy's, with her censoring comments and all."
"Smell the...<sniff>desperation." -Men At Work
Andrew
fred streeter
Nowt wrong at all with making megabucks. If you're talking pharmaceuticals we all know that research is expensive and you are probably better able to put a figure on the percentage of products that turn out to be failures than I am.
I'm not an apologist for Goldacre. I am simply making the argument that he comes down fairly heavily on medical research which is not without its problems given that every week a new cause/cure for cancer/diabetes/heart disease/ingrowing toenails which a little digging under the headlines often shows to be a re-working of old data, often procured originally for some totally different purpose.
Some of his comment is fair; some isn't but he gives climate science a clean bill of health without, apparently, having investigated it.
As for statisticians, if climate science paid more attention to Statistics as a scientific discipline it might not lay itself open to so many challenges. By and large it's statistics, and climatologists' misuse, abuse or simple ignorance of them, that has called into question many of their findings.
goldacre's last comparison isn't so simple. Not publishing data is one thing; but to compare epi studies to coin tosses, where you are either + or -, is more than a bit simplistic.
However, when you have a narrative of evil drug companies, and self-less, patient saints (medics), why bother with details ?
I would say Goldacre is definitely in the 'consensus' viewpoint camp.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/12/bad-science-goldacre-climate-change.
I've always liked his bad science column and his book - Big Pharma and alternative medicine is a nice easy target where you can be humorous too. He definitely isn't on the ball with subjects outside of medicine generally though, I would say. The Bad Science blog is another example of very religious debate going on most of the time and not science.
".... But the key to all of this is the recurring mischief of criticisms mounted against climate change. I am very happy to affirm that I am not a giant expert on climate change: I know a bit, and I know that there's not yet been a giant global conspiracy involving almost every scientist in the world (although I'd welcome examples).
More than all that, I can spot the same rhetorical themes re-emerging in climate change foolishness that you see in aids denialism, homeopathy, and anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists....."
@Mike Jackson: he gives climate science a clean bill of health without, apparently, having investigated it
Prior to posting, I read his blog entries for 'climate science'. I cannot see the 'clean bill of health', rather, he appears unwilling to get involved in 'green issues'. (And I can't say that I blame him - the mildest remark questioning the integrity of a Greenpeace publication and I am an AGW denier; the mere suggestion that there are situations where a wind turbine is appropriate and I am an AGW alarmist. Golly gosh!)
fred streeter
Read the post immediately above yours, especially the last two paragraphs.
I think this bears out the point I was making.
@Richard Betts,
Please remind us all about the basic foundations of climate science. A few bullet points will do - you know the laws, that kind of stuff. Maybe some numbers and equations if they have any. TIA.
@Mike Jackson:
Yes, I read that on his blog. Written in December 2009, it is his last entry under 'climate change'. (Which indicates his unwillingness to engage in 'green issues'.)
I, too, don't believe in a giant global conspiracy of scientists. And, yes, there is often an alarming similarity of rhetoric (on both sides) based purely on partisan sentiments, without reference to the science.
So he is of the consensus, so what? Climate is not his discipline, his support is of no use to alarmists, lukewarmers, skeptics, or 'deniers'.
I agree with your point on Statistics, I should have posted Do we need yet another amatuer statistician? Perhaps all papers that invoke statistics should be reviewed by a couple of professional statisticians - in addition to peer (i.e. just as bad at statistics) review.
@fred streeter
Perhaps all papers that invoke statistics should be reviewed by a couple of professional statisticians - in addition to peer (i.e. just as bad at statistics) review.
Great suggestion - if applied retrospectively this would ensure certain goatee-wearing hand wavers were struck from the scientific record entirely. IPCC reports would also somewhat briefer, to the point of non-existence.
Phillip Bratby, Jack Hughes
Some thoughts on " the basic foundations of climate science" – ie: the bits we think we understand reasonably well…. (this will just be an off-the-top-of-my-head braindump so apologies in advance for lack of structure and any omissions)
Planetary energy balance:
Incoming energy (shortwave radiation) from the sun: depends on energy emitted from the sun itself, and the shape of the Earth's orbit, it's position within that orbit, and angle of the Earth's axis in relation to the orbital plane.
Fraction of solar radiation actually absorbed by the planet depends on planetary albedo which is affected by clouds, aerosols and surface albedo (key factors being ice, snow, land vs. ocean, forests vs. deserts)
Outgoing energy: the reflected portion of solar (SW) radiation plus emitted longwave radiation
Surface radiation budget: Net Radiation = downward SW (from sun minus that reflected by clouds and aerosols) - upward SW (proportion reflected by surface) + downward LW (emitted by atmosphere) – upward LW (emitted by surface)
Some of longwave radiation emitted by surface is absorbed by the molecules of some gases in the atmosphere (water vapour and carbon dioxide being important examples) and these molecules then re-emit LW in all directions including out to space and down to the surface. This keeps the surface of the Earth warmer than it would otherwise have been. This of course is the mis-named “greenhouse effect” (greenhouses actually keep their interiors warm mainly by stopping the warmed air rising or blowing away, although their glass does let SW in whilst restricting LW out).
Surface energy budget: net radiation is balanced by net upward sensible heat flux + net upward latent heat flux + net downward ground heat flux
Partitioning of available energy into sensible and latent heat depends on moisture availability, which can itself depend on vegetation type and physiological functioning.
Surface water budget: precipitation = evaporation + runoff
(evaporation is related to latent heat flux in surface energy budget)
Carbon cycle: carbon reservoirs in atmosphere (as CO2) on land (in soils, vegetation and other life forms) and in ocean. Very large natural fluxes between these reservoirs. On geological timescales, flux of carbon out of atmosphere due to rock weathering, and deposition of organic carbon (vegetation and marine organisms) in below-ground (and below sea floor) deposits due to death and burial of organic matter (eventually forming coal and oil). In last couple of centuries, additional flux of carbon to atmosphere due to anthropogenic combustion of coal and oil, and net removal of vegetation cover. CO2 concentration is only rising at about half the rate of anthropogenic emissions due to uptake by land biosphere and oceans.
Global atmospheric circulation: general ascent in region of equator driven by higher intensity of incoming solar radiation, general descent either side of the equator – regions of ascent and descent shift north/south with seasonal cycle. Seasonal reversals in atmospheric flows to/from major land masses (monsoons) driven by seasonal differences in land and ocean temperature.
Modes of natural internal variability emerge from interactions between atmosphere and ocean, eg: El Nino/Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation and others – characterized by semi-regular fluctuations in features such as sea surface temperature and surface pressure, and often associated with variability in precipitation in nearby regions (or even far afield)
Climate varies naturally over a range of timescales, due to both internal variability (ENSO, NAO, PDO etc) and natural external forcings (sun, volcanoes). It is also affected by anthropogenic changes in atmospheric composition, eg: changes in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, affecting the LW radiation budget, or aerosols, affecting SW radiation, and also by anthropogenic changes in land cover which affect the surface energy and moisture budgets. The overall impact of all these drivers of change also depends on other atmospheric processes such as changes in cloud cover and water vapour.
Anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations have probably contributed to the rise in global mean surface temperature seen in recent decades (since the 1970s each decade has been warmer than its predecessor), with further anthropogenic effects arising from changes in aerosols and land cover – the latter may have had substantial impacts at regional scales. Ongoing emissions of CO2 and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases are expected to cause further warming in the long-term, but the magnitude is uncertain and the associated regional changes even more uncertain (especially for precipitation). In the near-term (next couple of decades) natural variability will probably dominate.
@ Richard B. - thanks for your off-the-top-of-my-head summary and for contributing here. wrt your paragraph on the greenhouse effect, perhaps you have not noticed what a few of us briefly discussed at the foot of the Hansen at the Royal Society thread, which if it cannot be debunked throws rather a large spanner in the whole climate science works. So could you please watch this video by Carl Brehmer and let me know your thoughts (and the thoughts of any of your colleagues within the MO, especially the physicists). The video is only 10 minutes or so and there is a transcript and note below. It is truly remarkable and must be wrong, half of me hopes so at least, considering the billions spent on AGW. But the heat of compression and gravity are real.
I hardly think it makes sense to compare drug approval to the climate science. For any drug to be approved by the US FDA (and probably elsewhere), TWO independent clinical trials are required showing efficacy with >95% confidence. The FDA receives all raw data on individual patients and performs their own independent statistical analyses of efficacy and side effects. They won't approve a drug if a clinical trial shows unambiguous benefits for some subset of the tested population, because there are many ways to partition the treated population into subsets and thereby create additional chances to artificially achieve >95% confidence. Instead, they demand that the sponsoring company spend millions of dollars perform a separate clinical trial restricted to those patients now expected to benefit. The system isn't perfect, but we are dealing with double-blind clinical trials (neither the patient nor the evaluating doctors know who is getting drug or placebo) independently analyzed by professional statisticians on an intent-to-treat basis; not cherry-picked hockey sticks assessed with the IPCC's subjective "likely" (66% confidence) and "very likely" (90% confidence). Subjective judgments are provided to the FDA by a panel of specialist research doctors who will use the drugs they recommend for approval on their own patients. (Conflicts of interest, including seminar honoraria, must be disclosed.)
Even though Goldacre doesn't have access to all of the clinical trials, the regulatory authorities who approved the drug did. In fact, they reviewed the data from every animal study too. Some of the missing clinical trials Goldacre wants to access were performed: a) using too few patients, b) at the wrong dose, or c) on the wrong group of patients. Some researchers don't want to "waste" their time reporting such negative or ambiguous results and the drug companies obviously don't want any information published that makes it harder to sell their products and/or defend them from lawsuits. Goldacre is showing his ignorance when he suggests that drug companies waste millions of dollars repeating clinical trials that have failed to achieve the desire endpoint in hopes that the next statistical "coin-flip" will get their drug approved. Any follow-up to a failed clinical trial will involve something different: a different dose, a different patient population, or a group of patients calculated to be large enough to cross the 95% confidence level based on earlier data. The nasty problems with unpublished clinical trials arise when doctors prescribe drugs for "off-label" indications - often with subtle encouragement from drug companies, which are not allowed to promote off-label use. There may be data from unpublished clinical trials would warn them not to do so. Goldacre should have discussed the controversies surrounding "off-label" use.
Goldacre is misleading about the best way to prove that a new drug has fewer side effects than an older one. In order to accurately determine the incidence of side effects, one uses the highest dose of the older drug that regulators have judged has a reasonable risk-benefit ratio. The highest dose of the older drug will usually be the most efficacious dose. In general, there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with testing your new drug against the most efficacious dose of an existing drug; hoping you can show equal or greater efficacy with fewer side effects. If you test against a dose of the existing drug that doesn't cause many side effects, you won't learn anything.
Goldacre would prefer to see clinical trials performed that determine whether or not a new drug candidate has efficacy which is superior to an existing drug, but he ignores the many problems this would cause. In many cases, head-to-head clinical trials will not establish - with a reasonable degree of statistical certainty - whether or not a new drug candidate is better or worse than the existing drug. The results will be ambiguous. How does one decide whether or not to approve a new drug candidate that is ambiguously less effective than an existing drug, without any data showing that the candidate is unambiguously better than placebo? How does one evaluate side effects without a placebo control? Many patients may not benefit from or tolerate the existing drug, often because of individual differences in metabolism. Should an ambiguously less-efficacious drug be kept off the market when it will help these patients? The appropriate (and fairest) approach is usually to do the same thing that was done when the existing drug was approved: test vs placebo and prove that the new candidate drug is both safe and efficacious. Based on that information, the sponsoring company will decide if makes sense to perform clinical trials vs an existing drug. When their decision isn't appropriate, the regulatory authorities can demand head-to-head clinical trials.
Richard,
Thanks for that. A few daft questions immediately come to mind of this non-scientist...
How do carbon reservoirs form in the atmosphere? What is the nature of these reservoirs? Are they a homogenous mix or does CO2 form a sort of shell? You talk of CO2 "concentrations", have any of these ever been detected and located - at the top of the troposphere, for instance? CO2 is a high density gas: what are its concentrations at different altitudes - are they the same or different? Do they vary from one zone to another? (Is Mona Loa a representative place to measure them?)
Has the hot spot ever been found?
Frank,
Many thanks for that excellent comment. I am sure I am not the only one here who will greatly benefit from it.
One more thing, and then I'll shut up for a bit.
I had never seen Goldacre in action but I really dislike the stand-up comedian packaging of his lecture and the way he tries to soften up his audience by encouraging fan club behaviour.
John in France
Thanks for your questions.
When I say "reservoirs" in the land, atmosphere and ocean I refer to the amount which is there at any one time as opposed to flows of carbon between them. By CO2 "concentrations" I mean the amount of CO2 as a proportion of air - this is currently about 390 parts per million, and it is measured at various sites across the globe including (as you say) Mauna Loa but also Cape Point in South Africa, Cape Grim in Tasmania and Mace Head in Ireland. Mauno Loa is found to be fairly representative of the global average.
CO2 is reasonably well-mixed - it's concentration varies a little across the globe, but not hugely, because it can remain in the atmosphere for a long time, unlike aerosols which rain out in a few days and which are therefore mostly found near their emission sources.
CO2 does vary slightly seasonally too, due to uptake by vegetation - there is more land (and hence more vegetation) in the northern hemisphere and so the CO2 concentration falls during the northern hemisphere spring and summer as plants grow, then it rises again in the NH autumn as leaves are lost and decayed. (However, we see an ongoing rising trend year-by-year on top of this seasonal cycle.)
@ lapogus 7.49am
Thanks for that link, I must say I hadn't really considered the warming effect of compression in the lower atmosphere. If Brehmer is correct it does indeed have enormous ramifications about the importance or otherwise of co2.
Have you looked into Ferenc Miskolczi's saturated greenhouse effect theory? He appears to show that there is a natural equilibrium caused by a variability of absolute humidity, such that as co2 rises humidity falls and vice-versa, which seems to keep the net greenhouse effect more or less constant.
I was quite taken by this paper, and as with Brehmer, if true is further evidence that co2 has no significant relevance to the overall picture.
Unfortunately its co2 and its reduction that is wasting all the money!!
Thanks Richard.
As you say, CO2 does appear to be fairly evenly distributed overr the surface of the Earth. One only hears about Mona Loa and I didn't know about the other sites. There you've covered the question of area but I still wonder about the mixing according to altitude. I imagine that all of the sites you mention are at or near sea level, but what happens higher up? What happens at the tropopause? As I mentioned in my last comment, I've always understood that CO2 is a relatively heavy gas - just checked it (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gas-density-d_158.html) - molecular mass, 44.01 as against 32 for oxygen and 29 for ambient air . And oxygen gets thinner the higher you go. Why would it not be the same for CO2?
Now I can envisage that CO2 could be carried up by convection in the tropics, but what then? Why would it stay up there? Would it not tend to sink lower down in the mass of the troposphere as it gets nearer the poles and the temperature decreases? So once again I ask: what is the gas mix at the tropopause and is it still homogenous up there? Moreover, if there is such a thing as back radiation, that surely presupposes a relatively high altitude layer where CO2 is concentrated (and where there is supposed to be a hot spot - never found, or so I understand), whence the greenhouse gasses, especially CO2 back-radiate down to us.
Again, daft questions, but perhaps those are the sort that we should all ask before we go any further down the road to bankruptcy.
Another of Goldacre's special cases where the end justifies the means is his support for the junk statistics behind passive smoking and smoking bans. He's a psychiatrist who's picked up a bit of statistics. I don't think his blog is very interesting and I can't understand why people hang on his every word. Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge and Tim Harford of R4's More or Less are far better sources of information for those who want to understand better the abuses of statistics.
Please, Richard, consider the findings of Livingston and Penn, and consider that the Maunder sunspots were large, sparse, and primarily southern hemispheric.
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Nice rebuttal of Diamond at Lynas's. I particularly liked the 'guns, germs, and enslavement' slipped in near the end.
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Oct 10, 2011 at 7:49 AM | lapogus
The flaw in his argument that heat of compression "causes the global temperature to be higher" is that this would require the atmosphere to go from a less compressed to a more compressed state.
Oct 10, 2011 at 5:25 PM | kim
Sounds interesting, but do you have a link to a paper? I couldn't find one, only some blog posts and newspaper articles which mention a paper submitted to Science but which was rejected - did it get published in another journal?