Friday
Feb252011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Freeman Dyson interview
Feb 25, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Steve Connor, the science editor of the Independent has published an email exchange with Freeman Dyson. I was more struck by what Connor said than Dyson's thoughts. This for example:
As you know these [climate] models are used by large, prestigious science organisations such as Nasa, NOAA and the Met Office, which use them to make pretty accurate predictions about the weather every day. The scientists who handle these models point out that they can accurately match up the computer predictions to real climatic trends in the past, and that it is only when they add CO2 influences to the models that they can explain recent global warming.
And how are the predictions made by these models turning out, Mr Connor?
Reader Comments (54)
...and more on the circular logic.
"I build a model that incorporates a specified temperature response from CO2 forcing.
I remove the CO2 forcing and the model doesn't warm.
ergo CO2 forcing is causing the warming."
The correct response is "Yes, but only in your model"
I think this could be a canard... oh, look, I have one right here
http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com/canard_scr.jpg
www.cartoonsbyjosh.com
like the tree rings were a good proxy for temperature ?!
http://www.realclimategate.org/2011/02/hide-the-decline-2-pictures-for-2000-comments/
There is no such thing as a computer prediction. Even if one programmed hypotheses into a computer, there is another matter known as solution strategy. Ask yourself this question: if all my hypotheses were programmed into a computer, how would I get the computer to treat them as a problem to be resolved and to give me a solution. Well, that is what programmers are for. They use what are called "heuristics" to cause the computer to reach a solution. Who chooses the heuristics? The programmers. Why? Because the scientists do not have the expertise to choose a heuristic. Is it not possible that there could be a scientist who is also the chief programmer? It is. Alan Turing was one. Enough said.
The Dyson dialogue is a fine example of intellect vs faith. Strange that the Science Editor of the Indy thinks his position is the intellectual one, when it is clearly based on unshakeable faith.
Just love this comment;
From: Freeman Dyson
To: Steve Connor
My three days of silence are over, and I decided I have no wish to continue this discussion. Your last message just repeats the same old party line that we have many good reasons to distrust. You complain that people who are sceptical about the party line do not agree about other things. Why should we agree? The whole point of science is to encourage disagreement and keep an open mind. That is why I blame The Independent for seriously misleading your readers. You give them the party line and discourage them from disagreeing.
With all due respect, I say good-bye and express the hope that you will one day join the sceptics. Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Yours sincerely, Freeman Dyson
This is the science editor of a broadsheet?
1. GCMs are not meteorological forecasting models.
2.
The GCMs only hindcast C20th climate 'accurately' when the level of sulphate aerosols is boosted to get mid-century cooling. Yet the evidence that sulphate aerosols were in fact responsible for the cool episode is extremely tenuous. The 1910 - 1940s warming relies on 'turning up' TSI yet current understanding of solar variability does not support a correspondingly high level of solar output for the period.
3.So you have a manually-edited virtual process being used to 'validate' itself in a deeply questionable manner as a sound basis for predicting future behaviour of the climate system.
4. The story, should Connor ever decide to exercise journalistic curiosity, is points 2 and 3.
Is this what passess for an interview in the Indie ? Connor's responses seemed ever more desperate in trying to get Dyson to agree with his point of view. He clearly didn't want to hear an alternative to his narrow minded view. His comment about "sceptics" changing there argument was a laugh. Think about the AGW's..."Global Warming"....er no....."Climate Change".....er no lets have another....."Climate Disruption"...ah that should cover any annomolies that might be troublesome to expalin.
BBD
Do you have any references to the "boosting" and "turning up" that you refer to, please? I have not been able to find them.
And picking up on BBD, remember that each individual model only accurately hindcasts if it incorporates exactly the amount of alleged aerosol cooling that is necessary to match the data given its climate sensitivity - where different models have different sensitivities, they strangely have different values for aerosol forcing, with no explanation for the difference save what an inquisitive observer might infer from the claimed accuracy of the hindcast..........
I wonder how I missed humans moving to a planet with predictable weather?
I read the Freeman Dyson exchange and had a lot of empathy with it. It reminds me of a joke I use to teach people about predictions from models.
Three experts, a geologist, a geophysicist and a geostatistician are sitting in a pub in Wales, drinking and gazing out of the window at a field full of white sheep. After a while the geologist says:
“Look – there’s a black sheep in all the white sheep. Just think – there must be black sheep in flocks all over Wales, thousands of them”.
At this comment the geophysicist snorts into his beer and says “Typical geologist. You see one data point and then extrapolate it to the whole of Wales. The only thing we can really say is that there is at least one black sheep in Wales”.
The geostatistician thinks about this for a while and then says “Actually I think we can do better than that. If we count the number of sheep in the field then we can propose a probabilistic model for the proportion of black sheep within the overall sheep population. Estimating the number of fields, we can then propose a probabilistic model of the number of black sheep”.
The three experts fall to arguing amongst themselves about their various proposals. After a while a farmer, who has been standing at the bar listening to them, puts down his beer and walks over to them.
“Excuse me” he says “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Is that my dog you’re talking about?”
And the moral of the story is…wrong model.
I liked the bit where Connor obviously gets onto Wikipedia to find out about Alfred Wegener and reverse the argument...
Connor was extremely fortunate to get the man's time, and he wastes it by keeping to dogma.
Something to tell the grandchildren eh Steve? "Freeman Dyson in an open exchange, and I blew it...". What was more important? The science or the faith?
Had Connor just opened his mind, Freeman Dyson might have kept the dialogue going. But why should he continue when all Connor wanted was confirmation of his narrow world view. Maybe even a scoop from a irrefutable quote in an email...
Science correspondent? Don't make me laugh. Faith correspondent? Absolutely.
Basically after reading that I felt: "Connor, who the **** do you think you are?"...
That adding CO2 aligns model output to measurements does not prove anything. It is the old fallacy:
If A then B.
B;
therefore A.
To get what the other side want, they would have to somehow prove that nothing else could produce the same effect. Nothing like this has been attempted, as far as I know.
Given that the GCMs have so little physics in them, and have so many "parameters" that can be set to any value that is convenient to the modellers, their outputs are not to be trusted. They can produce any temperature curve the modellers like. Hence the flip-flop on snow in winter.
A microbe (connor) fighting a giant
connors take on wegener is interesting..however he spins it: the scientific consensus was wrong, and wegener had the better judgment on this.
dyson touches on the politisation of it all which is true. I think Nigel Lawson described this the best.
In the face of uncertainty , econometrists should have the last word on climate change mitigation.
if GCMs only handle fluid dynamics they are plain wrong ?
A determining variable in climate is entropy exchanges . Condensation (rain, snow)
Lucia the scientist, for examples, never got her head around that really on the blackboard :)
I cannot be bothered to enter the fetid labyrinths of GCM parametrisation (only to be found back later,probably, in a post wegener accolade, in a glacier of excluding website moderation ) but I am really curious how the entropy mechanisms (statistical mechanics on molecular interreactions, really) have been worked out by the erm scientists??
the GCMs predicted enduring drought in Queensland as well I think :)
"The Independent is a newspaper in the United Kingdom published by Independent Print Limited, owned since 2010 by the former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Independent
----------------------------
"Independent titles sold to Lebedev family company"
Thursday, 25 March 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/independent-titles-sold-to-lebedev-family-company-1927436.html
“In addition to the London Evening Standard, The Lebedevs also co-own, with President Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's few pro-democracy newspapers. The paper has a reputation for independence and high-quality journalism. Anna Politkovskaya, whose fearless reports from Chechnya resulted in her assassination in 2006, worked for Novaya Gazeta.”
“Alexander Lebedev said: "I invest in institutions which contribute to democracy and transparency and, at the heart of that, are newspapers which report independently and campaign for the truth to be revealed. I am a supporter of in-depth investigative reporting and campaigns which promote transparency and seek to fight international corruption. These are things the Independent has always done well and will, I hope, continue to do." “
----------------------------
Yup, sounds about right
I think Dyson was very patient. His irritation was politely expressed, but very effective:
"I wish that The Independent would live up to its name and present a less one-sided view of the issues"
Excellent!
I wonder if Mr Connor could explain the weather we are having in California today. It may snow in San Francisco and even Hollywood and is the worst winter storm since 1976, and the coldest I remember.
Now this would be worth getting a picture of, should it happen:
Snow in Hollywood?
I love Freeman Dyson. I love his attitude of subversion. A true scientists.
Connor has the opportunity to be educated by Dyson and instead chooses to lecture him! Priceless, but also typical of the hubris of the CAGW fraternity.
The Hadley Centre amongst other modellers of climate started with an answer and worked towards it.
As others have effectively said, the various models are hopelessly padded by parametrisations to reach the answer they wanted.
This is a useful and valid tool for day to day forecast models as you can test the "fudge factor" quickly over a fairly short period of time (weeks to months to a year depending on the parameter you are forecasting) to see if it adds "skill" to your forecast output. For instance - If your model isn't forecasting enough showers then nudge it to do so and verify the change. Many outputs can be improved this way (not just in meteorology).
BUT any change in the fudge factor in one equation will have knock-on effects for others and in some forecasting centres I bet they have lost track of what parametrisations are doing what to whom.
The short-coming of applying fudges to climate models to predict 50 to 100 years ahead should be obvious to anyone.
jheath
There is an excellent discussion of the use of outdated solar forcing reconstructions to tune GCM hindcasts here.
It has links to the IPCC AR4 supplementary materials showing which TSI reconstructions were used to force each of the models referenced by AR4.
Annoyingly, I cannot find a similarly synoptic treatment of the way in which model hindcasts are forced with assumptions about increased anthropogenic sulphate aerosols to produce a mid-century cooling. But that is how it is achieved.
I have noticed before that information on the way in which GCM hindcasts are tuned is extremely hard to find. Odd, that.
Apologies for the html tag error above. At least the link is easy to spot ;-)
Mr Connor is just another example of an AGW foot soldier who still trots the same guff that some of his leaders have slowly, quietly started to turn down the volume on.
e.g the people like him and Zeds who comes on here with comments still stating that there has been unprecedented rapid warming in the last 50 years, when not only has there not been, but even Phil Jones admits there has not been any to speak of for 15 years.
Mr Connor has a religious/political belief not a scientific one.
O/T Bish
I bought the book, should be here tomorrow.
Have you thought anymore on the income stream??
Does Steve Connor have any scientific training? It didn't seem like it. He seems to be an intellectual minnow.
"You ask me where the extra trapped heat has gone, but I do not agree with the models that say the extra trapped heat exists. I cannot answer your question because I disagree with your assumptions."
That is a great statement from a great scientist.
Embarrassing and very sad.
If Steve Connor still has a job in 10 years time he will hopefully look back on this interview and weep with shame. An ill educated, arrogant true believer hectoring one of the great minds of the 20th century.
I never thought I'd see the science editor of a national newspaper proud to be ignorant.
Who is Steve Connor? Apparently he is angry: http://www.badscience.net/2009/07/steve-connor-is-getting-eggy/. According to Ben, he is not a very accurate journalist.
(I know who Freeman Dyson is).
Don Pablo...I was in LA in early Jan...it was raining in Santa Monica...and there was snow on the Antelope Valley....and the coast road was shut....warming is headed your way! A 15 year old kid in Rosamond was excited about 1 inch of snow
BBD
Many thanks - missed that one. We have a library full of uncertainties and yet media types and self appointed activists only give us one book. Originally I only thought (knew) that the economics of the policies was up the spout. Greater uncertainty in the science should mean more cautious policy making!
I too tried to find out where Steve Connor drew the prestige from to patronize Dyson like that. De haut en bas I called it the other day; a masterpiece of the genre in many ways! Anyway, I couldn't find any such authority except the implicit one of the 97%. To be fair, in his clash with Goldacre, it was hard to work out who was being more pompous.
jheath
Glad to be of help. Agree with what you say. If only it was just the wretched Stern Report.
There must be more acknowledgement that the value for climate sensitivity is poorly constrained and not at all 'settled science'.
I expect more from the researchers, more from the IPCC and when it comes down to it, more from Connor.
Steve Connor is one of the worst of the activist scaremongering journalists.
One of his gems was the 'exclusive' that ice was on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole in summer 2008 (in fact of course it recovered after the 2007 low).
His daft claim that climate models are the same as weather models just shows how little he knows about science.
Some great comments from Dyson (I have always thought, as he says, that the "Independent" is mis-named. ) It is hard to pick out any one bit, but:
Indeed. This reminds me of Aynsley Kellow's comment on the recent Myles' Flydd thread:
"There is an old saying from IBM: The problem with simulation is that it is like masturbation: the more you do it, the more you confuse it for the real thing".
A journalist lecturing to Freeman Dyson waving a Simon Lewis/Nepstad paper in his face...
Does Connor know that Dyson has spent significant time thinking about the very problem?
The Amazon became a 'carbon emitter'. We can all slam the brain door shut and throw the key down the gutter.
It reminds me a bit of Dawkins slagging Dyson off. To see individuals arguing with him when they clearly have no idea who they are talking to is quite funny.
@ PaulM His daft claim that climate models are the same as weather models just shows how little he knows about science.
I agree. All the same, the dear old Met Office say they use essentially the same model for predicting weather as they use for predicting climate. Which may explain (since their model is tuned to confirm AGW, as it is required to) why they repeatedly predict mild winters.
The ignorance and rudeness of Connor in addressing Dyson is astounding.
Fascinating. The twit at the Independent is so busy arrogantly talking down to one of the great intellects of the modern world that he never realizes how he's been made to look an absolute twit.
Read the whole Dyson letter on Delingpole.
You'd have to be VERY brave (or, in Connor's case, stupid) to try to argue with any of it...
Could you give a link, please David?
Here is the Delingpole link
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100077736/freeman-dyson-v-the-independent/
I read the article on the Indy link.
I'm amazed that Connor let it go into print. He seems to think that Dyson had no answer to his (Connors) questions, and that Dyson ran away from the debate? The reality is Dyson obviously realised he was talking to a brick wall, and decided he had better things to do with his time than, er...'debate with jesters' I think the term was?
Its either upstanding of Connor to let it go to print or, as I believe, Connor does not realise he just got publicly shafted. Which would mean, er, Connor ain't that bright is he?
Why do we keep getting this same emotional contradicting stuff from CAGWers...can't they form a logical thought process? Do thier brains work on emotion above logic?
I wish I lived on the same planet as this Steve Connor person.
As it is, I live on the South Coast of England, where MET Office forecasts are the subject of richly-deserved ridicule.
If I want to know what the weather is going to be, I ask my neighbour, an elderly farmer. He may not have a 'super-computer' but he doesn't change his forecasts ever few hours then claim that the one issued ten minutes after the rain started proved him right.
On the issue of climate models let us consult the oracle, Kevin Trenberth. In a moment of clarity he said:
And on. The first four paragraphs are not consistent with Trenberth's claim immediately following that "The IPCC report makes it clear that there is a substantial future commitment to further climate change even if we could stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases." The only way the IPCC be certain of anything given the myriad model uncertainties Trenberth highlights is through assuming that higher CO2 must cause climate change, for they have yet to prove it.
O'Connor:
"As you know these [climate] models are used by large, prestigious science organisations such as Nasa, NOAA and the Met Office, which use them to make pretty accurate predictions about the weather every day. The scientists who handle these models point out that they can accurately match up the computer predictions to real climatic trends in the past, and that it is only when they add CO2 influences to the models that they can explain recent global warming."
Scientist who handles the models:
"In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers what if projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent story lines that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.
Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match todays state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized."
Dr. Trenberth seems to be at odds with Mr. O'Connor.
I'm happy to take that quote of Trenberth's at face value (at least for the sake of argument) but it immediately raises two questions.
1 Where did the politicians get all their science-is-settled, worse-than-we-thought, we-must-take-action, sky-is-falling beliefs from? People like Connor? Monbiot? Gore?
2 If there are so many caveats and uncertainties (I counted 9 in that quote alone), why the hell are we all bothering? There's nothing there that provides any basis on which the CEO of any private company would do other than say either "Come back when you've got something I can use" or (more likely) "Pick up your P45 on the way out".
While I'm in full agreement with all of the above commenters about the relative merits of Dyson and Connor, I can't help but notice that Delingpole in particular lays on the argument from authority quite thick with this caption:
"Winchester and Princeton scholar Dyson: hell, what does he know about AGW?"
We sceptics should try to resist using the same tactics as the warmists. After all, a similar caption could have been used (and no doubt was) about Paul Nurse, knight of the realm, eminent scientist, president of the world's oldest scientific institution blah blah...
"he doesn't change his forecasts ever few hours then claim that the one issued ten minutes after the rain started proved him right"
Nice example last week: I checked the local MO 5-day forecast for Thursday the day before, and clouds and fog were predicted. The day proved sunny and bright, which was confirmed by them the next morning...