Polar bear attack paper invalidated by non-independent analysis
Cross-posted from Shub Niggurath
Stephan Lewandowsky has co-authored (yet another) paper attacking climate skeptics. His colleagues-in-arms this time are long-time climate consensusite Jeff Harvey , Bart Verheggen, and a cohort of ecologists along with Michael Mann. First author Harvey is well-known to climate commenters as a rant-prone passionate bulldog for the climate cause.
The main supposed finding of the paper is that zoologist Susan Crockford is the source of a number of skeptical blog posts. Harvey and colleagues claim a large figure (80%). The authors then claim to identify a ‘majority-view’ position in the polar bear literature, which they say is diametrically opposite of the Crockford-based blog position/s.
Polar bear alarmism has a chequered history and scientists Ian Stirling, Steven Amstrup and Andrew Derocher have been prominent proponents. All three have made several statements pushing a specific line – that polar bears are under severe threat, that anthropogenic global warming is the cause, and that their ability to adapt to changing conditions is limited. Of note here, the paper is co-authored by Ian Stirling and Steven Amstrup. Susan Crockford has been critical of both scientists on her blog and other venues.
My first thought was on seeing the Harvey et al text was whether the so-called ‘majority-view’ papers mainly cited Stirling, Amstrup and Derocher papers in support of their views. Did they identify a view present in the literature which traced its antecedents to their own papers?
https://twitter.com/shubclimate/status/937092496034811904
It turns out the situation is much worse.
Of the 92 papers included in the study, 6 are labeled ‘controversial.’ Of the remaining 86, 60 are authored or co-authored by Stirling or Amstrup, or Derocher. That is, close to 70% (69.76%) of the so-called ‘majority-view’ papers are from just three people, 2 of whom wrote the attack paper themselves.
In other words, Stirling and Amstrup did not discern an organically coalesced body of opinion from several polar bear papers by sifting through the literature. They did not even uncover a body of literature supporting a particular stance that cited their own work, as self-referential as that might have been. They ‘found’ their own papers to constitute a ‘majority-view’ in the polar bear literature!
Stirling and Amstrup attack Susan Crockford for not following the ‘majority-view’ and the ‘majority-view’ is what’s expressed in their own papers.
But there’s worse to come. The authors list 6 papers as being ‘controversial’ for eliciting ‘critical comments and discussion in the peer-reviewed literature.’ It turns out Stirling, Amstrup and Derocher themselves wrote comments to 4 out of 6 of these papers. Put another way, Stirling and Amstrup labeled papers they did not like ‘controversial.’
It is no wonder the ‘majority-view’ (green triangles above) displays such a tight cluster of perspectival homogeneity. It is not a majority view but rather a minority one, of just three scientists. The near-absolute lack of variability in opinion along the PC1 axis is likely just due to standard boilerplate alarmist text in the papers of Stirling, Amstrup and Derocher, repeating the mantra of polar bear doom from melting ice, rather than any emergent phenomenon in polar bear literature.
A true majority view (if there can be such a thing) can be discerned only if a representative sampling of the polar bear literature is carefully assessed, with attention to their scientific content (as opposed to mere headcount), the nature and strength of supporting evidence presented and the caveats that scientists are careful enough to always include. In such a setting opposing viewpoints cannot be dismissed as being controversial merely because they oppose one’s own views.
The paper has several hallmark characteristics of a Lewandowsky piece: the language is dominated by ad hominem attack (for e.g, the word denier occurs 31 times) and the text is notable for a number of false statements. The authors purport to analyse ‘the views’ of blogs but ascribe views to the blogs themselves followed by analysis of the same views. Last but not the least, the full data from the paper is not made available. But the fatal flaw of non-independent analysis by the paper’s authors renders its conclusions invalid.
Climate Scepticism 
“Of the 92 papers included in the study, 6 are labeled ‘controversial.’ Of the remaining 86, 60 are authored or co-authored by Stirling or Amstrup, or Derocher. That is, close to 70% (69.76%) of the so-called ‘majority-view’ papers are from just three people, 2 of whom wrote the attack paper themselves.”
Did Stirling Amstrup and Derocher (SAD) have an involvement with Peer Reviewing/Authoring everything that they didn’t consider controversial?
If the SAD Team have been controlling expertology in Polar Bears, it is no wonder they wanted to ex-communicate Crockford, and it calls into question the integrity of science generated by Team SAD.
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Great work, Shub.
The authors, by the way, have yet to release the full dataset.
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Cue for Len and ATTP to talk about how that denialist floozy deserved everything she got and then some.
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Should all papers with Lewandowsky’s name amongst the authors be considered controversial, and the co-authors smeared in a manner appropriate to Lewandowsky’s modus operandi?
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Team SAD summarises the situation perfectly. At least with the Hockey Team the metaphor had some joy in it, if not the mangled mannomatics. By now, with adoption of a dirty Lew as the ideal place to prepare the next meal for the masses (remember always this dreck led to an approving article in the Guardian within milliseconds), there can only be sadness for all those once concerned with hygiene in science. Some of the joint authors here surely once did.
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How does position in the list of authors relate to how much each author was involved? It seems a stretch to claim that SAD wrote a paper when they are just part of the “et al.”.
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Isn’t there a more serious problem with the polar-bear attack paper that people are overlooking?
The authors claim that “denier blogs”:
a) Cite the work of Crockford, who says polar bears are not threatened
c) Say Arctic sea ice is stable, or declining slowly. Along the same lines, other blogs say it’s declined but this may be for natural reasons.
But the authors are conflating two totally different things. Crockford does not claim sea ice is stable, and does not make any statement (as far as I’ve read) on the cause of the decline in sea ice. Her very point is that sea ice has declined strongly while polar bear populations remained stable. (In fact, Crockford goes out of the way to point out the decline in the real world, since 2000 or so, has been stronger than in climate models). Her argument is 180-degrees opposed to the sea-ice-is-not-declining claim; if sea ice were not declining, or declining only slowly, one would not be able to make claims about the effect of sea ice decline on polar bears!
(Okay, one would be able to make those claims by looking at paleoclimate, e.g. the Eemian when the Arctic was ice-free in summer for a few thousand years. But Crockford’s argument is about the present).
A blog may post links to an article by Crockford one day, then an article saying that sea ice decline has been exaggerated in the media, then another saying sea ice decline is real but caused by the AMO or whatever. WUWT for instance publishes something like 6 posts a day so of course they often disagree with each other. Just in the last week there have been posts disagreeing with each other on the prospects for food supplies, previously they disagreed on the prospects for electric vehicles, or the effect of sunspots on climate, etc. Actually, blog posts discussing sea ice on skeptic sites hardly ever mention polar bears.
The fact that the same blog publishes both Crockford’s articles and other articles questioning the decline in sea ice is irrelevant; her argument is exactly the opposite. The authors of the polar-bear attack-paper may as well have made a chart showing how blogs that link to Crockford are hosted on Linux servers, or feature a pale-blue background, or are run by guys named Tom.
The authors have a point in that skeptic sites often make (wrong) claims about the stability / slow decline of sea ice. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with Crockford. More importantly, the question is whether the decline in sea ice has any negative consequence for polar bears – a topic on which they utterly failed to refute Crockford.
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This is a Lew paper alright. One telltale stain is the invention of a new term (“Keystone dominoes”) to help the literacy-challenged environmental journalists who never get beyond the chapter headings. For more evidence, I’d look out for the circle jerk citations of papers which appear to have nothing to do with the paper’s content; the authors are sure to be among the paper’s peer reviewers, and will be citing Lew themselves tomorrow.
Lew’s been doing this for five years now. Bristol and University of Western Australia and the Royal Society are complicit, as are the journals, even the one which retracted a paper. And OUP, who published both this paper and a recent encyclopaedia article by Lew which cites the retracted paper.
Social science stinks thanks to this stuff. It’s not about dead polar bears. It’s about the rotting corpse of the scientific press and the academics who run it, who won’t act.
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Social science isn’t science. Hell it includes economics!
[Go away Len. this thread is for grown ups. Social science and economics are serious subjects. You’re not.- Geoff]
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Answer my questions and I will (go away): How does position in the list of authors relate to how much each author was involved? Did SAD ‘write’ a paper when they are just part of the “et al.”?
[PM: Even by your usual standards, that’s a moronic question. How are we supposed to know this? If you want to know the answer to this question you would have to ask the authors, obviously.
There is an interesting point here though, which I think might have been raised first by Richard Tol – why were 14 authors required to do something so simple? In fact there is a journal policy on this that they didn’t adhere to, see my comment below.]
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LEN MARTINEZ (14 Dec 17 at 9:12 pm
Answer my questions and I will (go away)
No. Just go away.
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The ‘majority view’ is really very simple isn’t it: sea-ice has declined and will continue to decline because of anthropogenic GHGs and this poses a severe threat to polar bear populations. There’s no argument that sea-ice has declined, the GHG warming Arctic is accepted ‘science’, as is the continued projected decline (just not the rate, obviously), so the only part of the ‘majority view’ which is polar bear science is the opinion that they are suffering now and won’t adapt in the future. Beats me how three ‘scientists’ can make careers out of this, authoring 60 papers (70% of the total ‘majority view’ literature) over a period of about 20 years (i.e. average 3 per year), JUST on this very simple premise. That’s quite a lucrative monopoly they have on the reworking and restatement of a basic scientific premise. One wonders what piercing new insights into polar bear ecology have arisen during that period as a result of their substantial contributions to that science.
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Len Martinez, why don’t you ask Skeptical Science, or Real Climate or The Guardian? They have a track record of promoting Mann and Lewandowsky no matter how bad or non existent the science is.
If Team SAD have been promoting the demise of the Polar Bear, whilst numbers are actually rising, what motivates them to attack Crockford for being honest?
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ALBERTO ZARAGOZA COMENDADOR
You raise very interesting points, and it is clear you are correct. Furthermore that Susan Crockford’s interest is not predicting Arctic summer ice cover, or what controls it, but instead relates to how this factor might affect her beloved polar bears. The name on the tin (her blog) says it all.
What is also so important about her paper is that does not “merely” demonstrate that predictions of polar bear populations do not match predictions using models relating polar bear populations to summer ice cover. She shows populations are independent of this factor because polar bears can withstand starvation all summer, so can oversummer on land. Thus the amount of sea ice is immaterial. Crockford also suggests that the factor controlling populations is the incidence of thick spring ice which controls seal populations. Polar bears can oversummer but only if they can feed well on seal pups in the spring. The link is therefore thick spring ice > low seal pup numbers > poorly fed bears fail to survive summer, (decrease in bear populations) and the reverse normal spring ice > well fed bears survive summers regardless of summer ice conditions (bear population stable or increasing).
The irony is that, if Crockford is correct, the SAD group would have no need to ally with Mann and his goons, because they have not been making spring ice predictions (and these seem more erratic). Even more ironic is that our Lenny has been attacking Susan because he thinks she supports those who attack climateers and all who support them (= SAD). When she doesn’t. What a tangled web.
I would bet Dr Susan Crockford is right. Her explanation just smells right.
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Bottomline : It’s the SCIENCE that counts. Who the MESSENGER is doesn’t matter.
Saying : a piece of Science can be dismissed, cos Crockford is the messenger, is a form of the fallacy of argument from authority (which normally says that the science must be true, cos the messenger has great authority).
See how for many modern liberals a common response to debate is Label/Sneer/Dismiss/Runaway.
You’d think they’d be interested in tolerance, but no they seem to want new SEGREGATION where everyone not agreeing with their dogma has to ride at the back of the bus, and be denied access to the airwaves.
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“Social science and economics are serious subjects. “
Exactly right, but they’re not science, as I said.
“”Answer my questions and I will (go away)”
No. Just go away.”
Can’t answer, eh? Didn’t think you could. You just like to “me too” things you don’t understand. Someone here might be willing to enlighten us, but probably not Paul or Alan, not in their interest to pour any cold water on your fun. Maybe ATTP can tell us whether those down the list of authors can be said to have written a paper.
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Len, you’re embarrassing yourself.
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Len Martinez, ask ATTP to confirm the relative contributions based on this paper he co-wrote. You could also ask about his personal contribution.
http://www.bris.ac.uk/expsych/people/stephan-lewandowsky/pub/63692888
Consensus on consensus
A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming
Citation
Cook, J, Oreskes, N, Doran, PT, Anderegg, WRL, Verheggen, B, Maibach, EW, Carlton, JS, Lewandowsky, S, Skuce, AG, Green, SA, Nuccitelli, D, Jacobs, P, Richardson, M, Winkler, B, Painting, R & Rice, K, 2016, ‘Consensus on consensus: A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming’.Environmental Research Letters, vol 11.
Abstract The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by
90%–100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent
studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with
the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al.
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This article from 2007 confirms the PR value of Polar Bears
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/mar/04/climatechange.activists
“The combination of polar bears and melting ice is a heady mix – so much so that the animal’s plight has become a rallying cry in the fight against climate change. Simon Garfield reveals how activists have used dramatic pictures of the Arctic’s most fearsome predator to give their cause real bite and to ignite an emotive PR campaign”
Read the full article for contributions by Derocher, Stirling, and Peter Wadhams.
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Len, you are a great ambassador for Climate Science
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How would that be possible, Tom? I may of course be wrong about this list of publications and the trio did indeed write all 60 papers and let their names be put down the list of authors in many. Or it may be that there are only a few polar research bodies and the trio are the senior people there and get their names on papers as a matter of course. There do seem to be a large number of researchers actively publishing in addition to the trio. I could go and look for answers to this but it would do no good, as you’ve all got or acquired your meme and you won’t let reality interfere with its propagation.
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Len what is in my interest is whether Susan Crockford’s alternative explanation of polar bear success/failure is correct or not. Unlike yourself, who seem determined to ape Mann and his new ecology goons and trash her. I would have thought most people would like to know why bear populations really do crash – but not you: with you climate dogma is king.
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Len: Conventions on the order of authors vary by field. As this is a multidisciplinary crowd, we cannot confidently use conventional rules of interpretation. It strikes me that Harvey is the team leader and Mann the senior adviser, but the order of the other 12 is unclear.
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Fair point Richard, but there are broader reasons to call the authors Team SAD: these are the polar bear experts, so called, in the author list, it’s overwhelmingly their papers that are being boosted, whoever produced the dirty text, and Susan had recently made mincemeat of one of them by attending to evidence, sans smears. Sad by name, sad day for science when this bile passed pal review.
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Making explicit who has done what in scientific publications is gradually becoming the norm (for transparancy reasons, and this discussion clearly highlights why that is needed). Many well known journals already ask for such clarification, and many others are considering the use of such a policy.
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Len Martinez, why don’t you ask ATTP, as he has some experience of the subjects?
http://www.bris.ac.uk/expsych/people/stephan-lewandowsky/pub/63692888
Consensus on consensus
A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming
Cook, J, Oreskes, N, Doran, PT, Anderegg, WRL, Verheggen, B, Maibach, EW, Carlton, JS, Lewandowsky, S, Skuce, AG, Green, SA, Nuccitelli, D, Jacobs, P, Richardson, M, Winkler, B, Painting, R & Rice, K, 2016, ‘Consensus on consensus: A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming’.Environmental Research Letters, vol 11.
“Abstract. The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by
90%–100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent
studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with
the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al”
[PM: Sorry, your comments are still getting stuck in moderation.]
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Jos, it would be valuable if the authors of such destructive paper did the same, as well as providing full SI on publication, so that Dana in The Guardian at least could see he had some homework to do, before making the hit piece global. But the breaking of such rules is I think the point – the contempt for any good practice shows who’s in charge. But such boastful power has ended in tears. 1917 – 1989 and all that.
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Jos, Richard, it would be more than valuable – it is in fact a requirement of the journal (my bold):
AUTHORSHIP
Everyone listed as an author of an article must have made a substantial contribution to the manuscript. In the case of multiple-author contributions, please upload as a supplementary file a brief statement detailing the contribution of each author.
1) Authorship should be restricted to those individuals who have met each of three criteria: (a) made a significant contribution to the conception and design of the article or the analysis and interpretation of data or other scholarly effort, (b) participated in drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for content, and (c) approved the final version of the manuscript.
2) In the case of papers with multiple authors, the corresponding author has the responsibility for: (a) including as coauthors all those who meet the three criteria defined in part 1 of this policy and excluding those who do not; and (b) obtaining from all coauthors their agreement to be designated as such, as well as their approval of the final version of the manuscript. Of course, any person can refuse to be a coauthor if he or she elects to do so.
3) Coauthors assume full responsibility for all work submitted under their names and, as a coauthor, acknowledge that they meet each of the three criteria for authorship as defined in part 1 of this policy.
4) Honorary or courtesy authorships are inconsistent with the principles of this policy and, as such, are unacceptable.
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Thanks Paul. And the breaking of such explicit rules, and getting away with it, is Climate Consensus Enforcement all over. But … some others may just have noticed this time. Self-correction could indeed be painful throughout the body politic and climatic.
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Could somebody point this out on Bart’s blog? He has banned me.
[Done — rd]
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Perhaps one author was responsible for all the punctuation marks, another for taking out all the “nice” bits…..
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@paul
As an outsider, you never know what happened in a team of authors. In a team of authors as large as this, the insiders probably do not know either.
That’s all besides the point. There are 14 authors, each fully responsible for every bit of the paper, typos and all.
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Alan Kendall, in the example I gave above, the punctuation seems ok. Did they have a few sub-committess to choose the font, and assess the Consensus of each other, to establish a 100% Consensus in their paper on the Consensus on Consensus?
There wasn’t much science in evidence though, but some of them must have sorted out cups of tea, coffee, chocolate biscuits and arrangement fees, plus the distribution, publication and attribution rites.
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Richard Tol,
“There are 14 authors, each fully responsible for every bit of the paper, typos and all.”
And legal liabilities for misinforming/defamation?
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Alan, “Len what is in my interest is whether Susan Crockford’s alternative explanation of polar bear success/failure is correct or not. ”
In your interest? Are you a bear? Nevermind. Do you think breeding success of bears in any one of the 19 regions is likely to depend more on ice conditions where they are or (as C postulates) in the whole Arctic ocean? It’s not a difficult question.
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Counting dead polar bears is not dangerous, even if caught.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/29/inspector-generals-transcript-of-drowned-polar-bear-researcher-being-grilled/comment-page-1/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/04/charles-monnett-polar-bears-global-warming-settlement
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Len Martinez, do you agree that Polar Bears are breeding and multiplying in numbers, irrespective of how you divide their populations in to groups?
It is not a difficult question.
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Len. For your answer read her paper and make your mind up for yourself. ” It’s not a difficult question.” Just as important is the survivability of adults over summer regardless of ice cover. Susan Crockford’s interpretation already acknowledges considerable summer ice losses (more than predicted) so where is she arguing against AGW dogma? Her dispute is simply that polar bears can survive summer low ice conditions so long as they have not experienced a preceding spring with thick ice (which prevents access to their prey). Since AGW should not increase the frequency or severity of springs with thick ice, polar bear numbers should be insensitive to warming (affecting summer ice) – of any cause. Get your own reasoning sorted out.
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I think you missed the point, Golf, which was that breeding success will depend on local conditions, not Artic-wide conditions. A non-anti-conservation-propaganda study would aim to investigate that sensibly. I don’t know what exactly you mean by “breeding and multiplying in numbers”. If they stopped breeding, their numbers would drop at about 3% a year and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that is the situation overall.
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“That’s all besides the point. There are 14 authors, each fully responsible for every bit of the paper, typos and all.”
I agree. Authors are responsible for their papers, period. There are several reasons for journals differentiating author contributions but none of them are intended or purposed to excuse authors for the overall conclusions of the paper. Following Len’s logic, we would have to conclude Amstrup, Stirling or Derocher do *not* agree with the majority-view expressed in their papers, if we wanted to attribute these only to the other authors. Awkward.
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Len Martinez, you state that numbers will drop by 3% if they stop breeding.
Is that figure based on reliable recent statistical analysis of Polar Bear life expectancy, now that numbers being shot for food/trophies/protection are controlled?
What is a “non-anti-conservation-propaganda” study? It seems like a double negative.Any study should be done “sensibly”. What went wrong with Stirling Amstrup and Derocher’s control of Polar Bear expertise, to warrant Harvey et al 2017 in the first place?
SAD Team productions can’t be trusted to provide reliable, sensible or honest science, if Harvey et al represents the best efforts of their combined knowledge of “Science”, or Polar Bears.
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@golf
Indeed. Any and all authors are responsible and liable for any part and implication of the paper.
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Richard Tol, thank you for confirming that.
The “expertise” of Polar Bearology has been “protected” since at least 2007, as this Guardian article confirms the exclusion of Mitchell Taylor, and even includes climate change activists in the title.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/mar/04/climatechange.activists
Correlation and Causation, Consensus Confusion threatens the natural habitat and lifestyles of Polar Bear Experts, because the Polar Bears are doing better than they are.
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“I think you missed the point, Golf”
Martinez, he didn’t miss the point.
You didn’t have a point, you have never had a point and you never will have a point.
In truth, you are completely and utterly pointless.
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Len’s silly diversions aside, what I find curious about this supposedly multi-authored, amateurish piece of dreck is that the primary movers and shakers seem to have adopted and/or adapted the … uh… trick that was used by Mike Hulme, Joe Alcamo and Rob Swart in 1997 when they put together the Climate consensus coordinators cookbook.
Alcamo had at one point exhorted:
If, in the current instance, it was a case of more than simply ‘getting those names’, surely all the actual authors would have provided the appropriate details by now!
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Richard Tol, the point was that Shub said “…close to 70% (69.76%) of the so-called ‘majority-view’ papers are from just three people,…”. From what you say, it is not possible to say that these papers were all “from” these people, only that they had some involvement, perhaps only minor, in them.
Alan, “For your answer read her paper and make your mind up for yourself.”
Don’t be silly, the answer isn’t in the paper. It is obvious that populations depend on their local environment but Crockford wasn’t looking at that. Instead she’s comparing populations with other environments.
“Susan Crockford’s interpretation already acknowledges considerable summer ice losses (more than predicted) so where is she arguing against AGW dogma?”
For the Arctic as a whole, but the bears are concentrated in 19 local populations, not spread across the Arctic evenly. Data for individual population regions is available but she chose not to use it. That may be how you and she do science, and it may generate good propaganda, but it sucks.
Gold, do you have better life expectancy data?
“What is a “non-anti-conservation-propaganda” study?”
A study that is not being done to produce anti-conservation propaganda.
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@len
I think you’re missing Shub’s point, which is that the so-called consensus is primarily achieved by self-citation.
@all
Harvey and co are now claiming that all data were released on dryad …
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The argument that Amstrup, Derocher and Stirling – whose names feature prominently on the list of ‘majority view’ papers cited, often in combination on the same paper, often first or second on the list of authors – may have had minimal input to many of those papers is patently absurd. Len is grasping at pine needles from the top of the Cliscep Christmas tree.
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Excellent points, Shub.
I also find it interesting that several the “controversial” papers they cite are about the issue of whether food consumed on land over the summer matters to polar bear survival now or will in the future. The rebuttal paper (Rode et al. 2015) is one I commented about at the time and came out firmly on the side of the ‘consensus’ opionion http://polarbearscience.com/2015/04/01/polar-bear-consumption-of-terrestrial-foods-new-paper-misses-the-point/
No credit for agreeing with them. it appears. The implication is that I disagree with everything they say or write, which is simply not true. What I’ve done is used their own data against them, that’s what is so galling.
Stirling is especially are on record documenting phenomena they now deny: they are trying to re-write the polar bear life history story to fit the climate change message.
Regarding Alan Kendall’s points above, about spring feeding being most important and thick spring ice being dangerous: that data is from papers published by Stirling and colleagues before climate change became the driving meme. He and his colleagues can’t undo the literature so they simply ignore it (sometimes they cite it but ignore it in analysis).
They are angry because I keep bringing the sound science Stirling and his colleagues did (before climate change filled their heads) to the attention of the public and public officials. It supports the conclusion that polar bears didn’t die off when summer sea ice declined abruptly in 2007 because summer sea ice is not a critical factor for their survival.
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Len Martinez
Gold, do you have better life expectancy data?
“What is a “non-anti-conservation-propaganda” study?”
A study that is not being done to produce anti-conservation propaganda.
Team SAD have controlled and self regulated all Polar Bear data. Why should their data about anything be trusted, given the level of exclusion they are now trying to enforce by unscientific methods?
The Authors of Harvey et al 2017 should accept Liability for the consequences of their actions. It seems the Polar Bears can get on without regular appeals for more money, to pay for “Conservation Experts”.
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Susan Crockford, thank you for the update, and please keep up the good work.
The presence of Lewandowsky confirms how Global Warming money can corrupt decent science AND conservation, even if the process started without his skills.
The recent publicity about the polar bear dying of starvation (cause unknown) just confirms that like ladies fashion models, undernourished Size 0 sells.
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Susan, did sea ice decline markedly in each of the 19 population areas? Your recent paper correlates total Arctic sea ice with population, but that measure seem irrelevant to the bears – the amount of ice in a bear’s locality is more important to whether it survives and breeds.
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Len Martinez, did you become a Polar Bear expert having read Harvey et al 2017, or having received specific personal coaching?
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Susan:
Ah, that explains a lot. I’ve just read Fritz Vahrenholt and Sebastian Lüning on what the pre-industrial baseline for temperature should really be for the IPCC, Paris and the rest. Perhaps in polar bear studies (and many other such fields) a pre-CAGW baseline needs to be established, marking the time before the field became corrupted. And this is what you’ve been doing. So dangerous for the time and data warpers.
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Richard Tol:
Pretending to miss the point, surely. It’s so utterly clear, like so much the persona misses. Here’s my hypothesis.
The person – probably group of people, with various expertise drafted in as required – using the moniker Len Martinez is wholly dedicated to pretending the debate in every Cliscep thread is vacuous and must legitimately end in triumph for the hard-working, highly moral and long-suffering climate consensus. To do this he/they have to pretend it’s about something vacuous. Shub has nailed something in this post that utterly isn’t. So the pretence, often in the form of “when did you stop beating your wife” type questions, goes into the highest gear.
Of course there may sometimes be a legitimate point amongst the smirking. Yes, the trollists would use such a thing, if it exists, and it should be answered – or the point conceded. So to that extent the presence of a troll can improve debate. But that is very rare. Mostly they make discussion far worse. Something to think more about in the New Year.
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Len, you imply you’ve read my paper but if so, you have reading comprehension problems.
The reason my paper correlated total Arctic sea ice with global polar bear population declines and declines within ‘ecoregions’ (*not* individual subpopulations, as you keep stating) was because that’s what USGS and PBSG polar bear experts did with their models.
You want to complain that this was not a valid approach, take it up with Amstrup and colleagues. They used declines in Arctic Basin ice extent for summer back to 1979 and extrapolated survival effects on polar bears to areas where there has ‘always’ (since 1979) been no ice in the summer, like Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay and Davis Strait (‘Seasonal’ ecoregion).
I show Arctic ice declined dramatically much sooner than they expected but that the predicted effects on survival did not ensue. They predicted Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay and Davis Strait bears (‘Seasonal’ ecoregion) would be extirpated (reduced to zero) after years of low summer Arctic ice. Not only has that not happened, it hasn’t come even close to happening.
Their model failed, clear and simple, and the continued survival of polar bears is the evidence. Polar bears do not need summer sea ice to survive as a species.
*That* is what Amstrup and Stirling don’t want the public to know.
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“The authors purport to analyse ‘the views’ of blogs but ascribe views to the blogs themselves followed by analysis of the same views. Last but not the least, the full data from the paper is not made available. But the fatal flaw of non-independent analysis by the paper’s authors renders its conclusions invalid.”
If/when Trump/Pruitt/EPA proceed with the Red Team Blue Team Climate Science debate, the blog bias data produced by Harvey et al 2017 will be very useful.
Harvey et al may decide to deny this, but it was allegedly Peer Reviewed in accordance with normal standards to match the requirements of Climate Science, and seems to have been approved.
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Sorry, but I don’t believe you have presented any data to support such a sweeping conclusion:
“…polar bears didn’t die off when summer sea ice declined abruptly in 2007 because summer sea ice is not a critical factor for their survival.”
You show one graph for average September Arctic sea ice extent. Summer is longer than one month and sea ice extent in any of the individual areas for any months are not shown. You show no data on how many days there was no (or insufficient) summer sea ice in any part of the Arctic. Your discussion of sea ice extent concentrates on the September low so we have no idea how it changed during the rest of summer. You do riff about bears fasting for the whole summer:
“It is now apparent that well-fed bears are able to survive a summer fast of five months or so, no matter whether they spend that time on land or on the sea ice (e.g., Whiteman et al.2015). “
but Whiteman et al. does not discuss fasting times – it studies activity patterns and core temperatures and has no data on fasting. This makes me distrust and be reluctant to follow any of your other references. In fact Whiteman et al. ends:
” In conjunction with theoretical models linking normal metabolic rate to depletion of stored energy and mortality (32), our findings suggest that bears are unlikely to avoid deleterious declines in body condition, and ultimately survival, that are expected with continued ice loss and lengthening of the ice melt period (2).”
In short I’d say your
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In short I’d say your paper is long on speculation but short on evidence. Alan Kendall would say that makes you an expert.
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Ah, now you’ve abandoned your previous hectoring argument about Arctic ice and population declines without a look back.
You are grasping at straws with this latest. All that final statement does is give another prediction – what use is that?
Go to bed, Len. I have other things to do
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Susan, Len (or the human Borg construct formally known by this name) can be useful to you if you can avoid being distracted by the insults and sweeping statements (as if I can talk as an expert in avoiding those!). He/it gives you an opportunity to experience criticism of your work and counter it. If you answer you inform him/it of your counter ahead of time. You, of course, needn’t oblige.
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Set story into a wider setting, read Jim Steel’s excellent post
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/15/the-polar-bear-gate-saga-how-a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-lies-paul-nicklen-and-michael-mann-vs-susan-crockford/
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Alan, as I’m sure you saw Susan came by to educate us on other points of interest different from Shub’s evidence of how stupid and self-referential the smear was, then took time to correct Len in his response. He failed, as ever, to acknowledge he’d been wrong and instead completely changed his line of questioning. I think that’s a very fair point to call it a day. I for one had learned some important things about the underlying issues by then.
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Polar Bear Experts are facing a cash flow crisis.
Susan Crockford never had any.
As an exercise in Climate Science Communication, this must be one of Mann and Lewandowsky’s most disastrous hits.
Meanwhile, the Inuit would prefer to shoot more Polar Bears, as the population is rising like the blade of a Hockey Stick, having been maintained flat and level for years.
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Richard. I’m perfectly willing to “call it a day”, 6+ posts, most running concurrently, is probably more than sufficient. However, I would make two points 1. the Len-Susan exchange was extremely interesting and educational. And 2) this exchange together with Jim Steel’s posts reveals it’s not just a one-sided feud between Crockford and the SAD group but instead a “dispute” between the younger and the later views of the SAD participants. The reasons for the change, which involves adopting the climate change mantra with its reliance upon computer models and distortion of data when data doesn’t fit the models, may constitute the next bit in this ongoing saga.
Len (or Len-Borg) may be correct that Crockford is not a prolific producer of peer-reviewed material, but she is a gradeA assembler of other people’s data and by God she keeps others honest.
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“What I’ve done is used their own data against them, that’s what is so galling.”
The dissonance between the (usually earlier) work of some who are culturally convinced about the certainty of imminent catastrophe from CC, and the narrative they now promote so strongly, can be quite something to behold. Lewandowsky did reasonable work before he jumped off the deep end into conspiracy ideation and climate change. The various bias mechanisms explored in this work are clearly all present as major characteristics within the mainstream climate consensus, betraying its true nature as a cultural consensus and not a scientific position. For example:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/06/wrapped-in-lew-papers-the-psychology-of-climate-psychologization-part1/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/08/wrapped-in-lew-papers-the-psychology-of-climate-psychologization-part2/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/09/wrapped-in-lew-papers-the-psychology-of-climate-psychologization-part3/
Maybe unable to face the clash of worldview with his earlier research, Lewandowsky has doubled down. Yet this leads inevitably to a whole string of further contradictions, and is a route of diminishing returns and increasing dissonance that can only end one way. Not to mention a sense of increasingly desperate tactics that creates nervousness even in the consensus itself. Perhaps these cultural adherents will never have to face such an ending, if they’re all retired before it comes. Strong cultures can last millennia (e.g. the mainstream religions). Yet for a culture that’s hooked its wagon to science, the end will surely be much much closer. OTOH the lifespan of the consensus on saturated fats was ~50 years, despite much more modest social enforcement and emotive existential linkage.
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Another puzzle: The darkgreen papers all take the same position — yet they are shown in different places in the graph. Ditto for most of the blue and orange blogs.
The red papers are exception: 6 papers take 4 different positions. Yet, Fig 2 shows 6 distinct positions.
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I abandoned nothing. Your say you took the same approach, but Amstrup et al. (https://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/polar_bears/pdfs/Amstrupetal_2008_AGU_Ch14_WithCitation.pdf) is an extensive study involving various stressors and ice conditions across the four individual ecoregions over time, whereas you rely on a single graph of a single month of average sea ice extent for the whole arctic. You don’t even have data for number of ice-free days, which is surely an important measure, yet you draw sweeping conclusions nevertheless. That may impress CliScep but I’m not surprised it is not appreciated more widely.
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Richard Tol, the ‘darkgreen’ papers don’t all take the same positions. There are quite a few ‘NA’ entries speckled about in there.
For example, Styrishave et al 2017 (a study about anthropogenic chemicals found in dead polar bears) was given ‘NA’ for ‘ice stable’, ‘ice natural’ and ‘bear adapt’ while Galicia et al 2016 (a study showing that a polar bear subpopulation had adapted its diet in response to changed prey options resulting from declines in sea ice habitat) was given ‘NA’ for ‘ice stable’ and ‘ice natural’ but not for ‘bear adapt’, for which it got a ‘no’.
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More indiscriminate faeces throwing from the Len bot. It impresses nobody
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@vinny
The N/A were replaced by zeroes (a big no no).
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For all SAD/ASD papers (60), the bears are ‘not ok’ (all 60), ‘threatened’ (all 60) and NA (25) or ‘no’ for adaptation(35). That is, according to Harvey et al, ASD/SAD managed to write 25 papers without expressing a single opinion about the adaptation of polar bears.
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Len appears to be arguing that average September sea-ice extent is not a reliable proxy for summer sea-ice extent. Perhaps Len should also look at the average Jul and Aug summer sea-ice extents which bear an uncanny resemblance to Sept.
Summer sea ice extent has declined precipitously, much more than predicted by IPCC models. Northern hemisphere polar bear numbers, as predicted by Amstrup’s ecological model, have not declined sharply; polar bears have not been extirpated globally or in specific regions by the loss of summer sea-ice. They have in fact INCREASED in numbers. Conclusion: Amstrup’s ‘polar bear catastrophe’ model is wrong and summer sea ice extent is very unlikely to be a determinant of polar bear declining population. Why does Len (or whoever speaks through him occasionally) have a problem with this?
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Jaime, if you were actually *trying* to deceive readers, I guess you’d have removed the vertical axis scales. As it is, I think you just fooled yourself. Hint: it’s the number of ice-free days that is important, not the shape of the curve, impressive though the latter is.
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LEN MARTINEZ says:
16 Dec 17 at 9:47 pm
“Hint: it’s the number of ice-free days that is important, not the shape of the curve, impressive though the latter is.”
More ice-free days cause more Polar Bears????
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“We also collected every peer-reviewed scientific paper that we could find that investigated both polar bears and sea ice in our search process (92 papers) …”
which resulted in:
https://twitter.com/shubclimate/status/942073183976423424
I find it hard to believe there were almost no papers before 2005 that discussed polar bears and ice.
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You think I just fooled myself – and not readers – because you point out that there is more ice in July than August and more in August than September, when the sea-ice minimum is reached? What exactly do you mean by “ice free days”? The Arctic is still not “ice free”, even in September. However, where once there was ice, there now is not, in July, August and September. It is this dramatic decline, supposedly fueled by anthropogenic GHGs, which Amstrup et al say is now impacting and will in the future negatively impact polar bear populations.
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Alan,
I really did have other things to do. Christmas is almost here and I am the matriarch of my family: there are certain things I have to get done.
But for your benefit and others, I will respond to Len’s second, two-part statement. However, I see what he’s doing: misrepresenting what I’ve said in the paper in hopes no one will call him out on it and that subsequent readers will believe that his interpretation is correct without reading the paper.
I also note the irony that having read Whiteman et al. 2015 now makes Len enough of a polar bear expert to critique my paper. But having read literally hundreds of polar bear and Arctic sea ice papers *does not* qualify *me* to critique Amstrup and Stirling’s work.
1) This begins: “Sorry, but I don’t believe you have presented any data to support such a sweeping conclusion:
“…polar bears didn’t die off when summer sea ice declined abruptly in 2007 because summer sea ice is not a critical factor for their survival.”
The quote Len refers to (from my 2017 paper) is one sentence from the discussion section, which he plucked from the rest of the paragraph, which says:
“It is now apparent that well-fed bears are able to survive a summer fast of five months or so, no matter whether they spend that time on land or on the sea ice (e.g., Whiteman et al. 2015). The known concentration of feeding on ringed, bearded, and harp seal pups between March/April and May/June (Obbard et al. 2016; Stirling & Øritsland 1995; Stirling et al. 1975, Stirling, Archibald & DeMaster 1975), when two-thirds of the yearly total of calories is consumed (with the remaining one-third consumed summer through winter but primarily late fall), means that virtually all polar bears in Seasonal and Divergent ecoregions effectively live off their accumulated fat from June/July to November wherever they spend this time. One or two successful seal hunts – or foods scavenged onshore – may decrease slightly the amount of weight lost during the summer fasting period but are unlikely to make a significant difference for most bears (Obbard et al. 2016; Rode et al. 2015a). While a few persistent individuals may garner an advantage from such abundant local resources as eggs of ground-nesting geese and marine birds (Gormezano & Rockwell 2013a, 2013b) or the refuse left after aboriginal whaling (Atwood et al. 2016b; Rogers et al. 2015), they appear to be the exception rather than the rule.”
Here is what Whiteman et al. 2015 says in the first paragraph (the numbers are references):
“Between August and October, hunting can be poor (5) as seals reduce ice surface time (4). Additionally, in about two-thirds of the polar bear range (6), seals become largely pelagic as ice retreats from the continental shelf (7, 8). Some polar bears spend this period on shore, where foraging is also usually limited (9).”
The sentence Len quoted was as a statement summarizing previous work on the subject giving Whiteman as an example of the evidence available (hence the “e.g.” before the reference cited), which I expanded upon in the sentences that followed.
For another example, here’s what Obbard et al. (2016: 29) had to say about the relationship between body condition and sea ice for Southern Hudson Bay polar bears, especially the change from newborn seal pups to adult seals as prey and the reduced hunting opportunities that brings during June and July (late spring/early summer):
“…we suggest that a stronger effect of date of freeze-up [on body condition] may be because even though break-up has advanced by up to 3-4 weeks in portions of Hudson Bay it still occurs no earlier than late June or early July so does not yet interfere with opportunities to feed on neonate ringed seal pups that are born in March-April in eastern Hudson Bay (Chambellant 2010). Therefore, losing days or weeks of hunting opportunities during June and July deprives polar bears of the opportunity to feed on adult seals, but does not deprive them of the critical spring period (Watts and Hansen 1987) when they are truly hyperphagic.”
2) This complaint of Len’s states: “You show one graph for average September Arctic sea ice extent. Summer is longer than one month and sea ice extent in any of the individual areas for any months are not shown. You show no data on how many days there was no (or insufficient) summer sea ice in any part of the Arctic. Your discussion of sea ice extent concentrates on the September low so we have no idea how it changed during the rest of summer.”
First off, the reason I equate September ice extent with “summer” ice extent is that this is what Amstrup et al. 2007 and Durner et al. 2007 do. These are two of the nine-part package of non-peer-reviewed “administrative reports” produced for USGS to support the USFWS case to list polar bears as threatened with extinction. For years these USGS reports were available online but recently (a couple of years ago at least), they have disappeared. But for everyone’s benefit, I’ve posted copies in my “References” page on my blog in the section “References by Topic” taken from my 2017 book “Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change” and updated with more recent citations. You’ll find these Amstrup and Durner 2007 papers (and some others) in the section “Arctic sea ice predictions”.
Durner et al. 2007 posted “examples” of projections for “monthly summer” habitat maps (which must be September since they include a map for September 2005 at the seasonal minimum for comparison). See also their Figures 9a and 9b, which are model projected ice maps (the Amstrup et al. 2007 and 2008 papers don’t include these for summer). Fig 9a conveniently provides a baseline: “2005 is shown to illustrate observed changes in a recent record-breaking year of minimum summer ice extent.”
Their Figure 10 shows ice extent prediction graphs for the “average monthly extents” for “summer” and “winter”: why would they not be showing the summer minimum in September (and max in winter) when they are emphasizing sea ice loss?
But also look at Amstrup et al.’s (2008) Plate 8 (page 238), where they show the area of ice extent of > 50% concentration at the September minimum in 2007, which is only marginally smaller than the NSIDC >15% concentration maps generated on that same date (the one usually shown to illustrate the minimum ice extent that year). I reproduced this figure in my paper (my fig.3, page 9), with permission.
Most importantly, Amstrup et al. 2007 (pg. 35) also say this:
“…the sea ice in 2007 already has declined below the level projected for mid century by the 4 most conservative models in our ensemble (Figure 15).” [Figure 15 in this report is an earlier version of Plate 8 in Amstrup et al. 2008 and Crockford 2017 Fig. 3]
Now I have to go and make gingerbread for my grandchildren. Thanks for your interest everyone.
Susan
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@shub
A search on Scopus with the words “polar bear” and “sea ice” would reveal that you are right.
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Susan. Have the best Christmas. Build a snowman Len (or Alan) with your grandchildren (?) and, at your leisure, throw snowballs at it!
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Len Martinez, do your supplementary sideswipes represent the expert opinions of Harvey et al 2017?
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Susan, when you quote a paper as saying X, it should say X. Authors who misquote or misrepresent references are rightly distrusted (I think faults in references in Lomborg’s books are a good example). So what am I supposed to make of you and your paper when Whiteman et al 2015 doesn’t say what you say it says:
“It is now apparent that well-fed bears are able to survive a summer fast of five months or so, no matter whether they spend that time on land or on the sea ice (e.g., Whiteman et al.2015). “
If you just admitted that you made a mistake and promised to correct it, I’d give you the benefit of the doubt. Everyone makes mistakes. But if you don’t do so, why should I expect your other references not to lead me up the garden path too? It seems that admitting error in published work is difficult – Richard Tol famously has the same problem.
As for your justification for providing only one data point to support your theory, I haven’t read your references and I have reason to doubt that they are quite what you claim of them (see above). The Amstrup et al. paper that made projections of extinction that you object to used far more extensive data than one single point.
I do believe that well fattened adult bears can survive summer without much food, but less well fed juveniles are another matter. If juveniles fail to survive ice-free summers it is imaginable, as a paper I read suggested, that the bears will become functionally extinct well before the last bears die.
Jaime, ice-free is used to denote conditions where there is too little ice to allow bears to hunt effectively. I think <50% is often used.
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“in hopes no one will call him out on it and that subsequent readers will believe that his interpretation is correct without reading the paper.”
Dr. Crockford, I think the chances of anyone around here believing anything at all that clown dancer Martinez says on any subject whatsoever are vanishingly small!
His only intention is to keep silly pointless arguments going on and on and on indefinitely with his intellectual superiors in the mistaken belief that such buffoonery somehow enhances his image.
He is nothing but a total waste of time and bandwith, and if we could remove the chip from his shoulder and make it into pellets it would run Drax for a fortnight!
The best way to treat such nonentities is to ignore them, perhaps occasionally giving them a sharp prod to make them froth and wriggle – and Martinez does that quite nicely.
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Len, I for one do not appreciate your badgering Dr. Crockford with inane and out of context crap.
If you want to play tag, do it with a regular here who can put your balderdash into perspective.
I do not mind at all if you continue to post comments that address the heart of the discussion about PolarGate. But forcing Dr. Crockford to dredge up background material to address your whining and out of context ‘but-buts’ is not okay.
We have all seen too many instances where trolls have run respected voices out of a forum. At which point the troll pronounces they have defeated the scientist. Dr. Tol can probably testify at length to the phenomenon.
Our goal is to be hospitable to guests like Richard Tol and Susan Crockford who show up here to help inform us on specific and even general issues. It is not to play ‘gotcha’ with them.
I won’t put up with it here. If you want to play troll games you can do it with me or one of the regulars.
I am for the moment labeling this CliScep policy. (We have many co-authors who predate me as writers here and they are free to over-rule me.) If you don’t adhere to my autocratic dictate I will autocratically and dictatorially boot you.
Feel free to ask questions regarding this. You’re just about the only troll we have here–as an endangered species we want to take special care of you. But we do have other goals for this site than preserving your fragile ego.
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“Len, I for one do not appreciate your badgering Dr. Crockford with inane and out of context crap.
[…]
I do not mind at all if you continue to post comments that address the heart of the discussion about PolarGate. ”
I agree. If comments are not about the self-citing nature of the purported ‘majority-view’ of the paper, they are pointless if dragged on and on.
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“they are pointless if dragged on and on.”
That is the very essence of ‘Clown Dancing’.
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Len’s modus operandi is to raise a nit-picking query which is only partially or not related at all to the subject in question, then change the line of attack if his first attempt is defeated, moving on to something else that is off topic and unproductive. Not something we should tolerate with guests, I agree.
In news not unrelated to the supposed imminent demise of Ursus Maritimus, WaPo tells us that the warming in the Arctic is unprecedented in the last 1500 years. LOL
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/12/12/federal-scientists-call-the-warming-of-the-arctic-unprecedented-over-the-last-1500-years/?utm_term=.b513a023a501
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I think Jeff Harvey’s cv confirms his own double standards and hypocrisy.
https://nioo.knaw.nl/nl/employees/jeff-harvey%20%20
“….. in an attempt to stem the relentless flow of disinformation emanating from a number of surprisingly well-endowed think tanks and public relations firms that are distorting science to support a political agenda and pre-determined worldview on environmental issues.”
Amstrup’s http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/ also seems to be well funded and working to a pre-determined world view
Harvey et al 2017 (with the supporting data) is a useful reference guide. It may be used by academics, politicians, scientists etc, perhaps even Professional Liability Insurers, who would like to charge extra for bad risks.
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Watching the Len-oid’s disruptive off-topic inanities strongly suggests to me that he quite possibly learned his “debating” techniques at the feet of followers of holocaust-denying maestros such as David Irving. If either has any knowledge of pertinent facts, their respective disruptive outpourings invariably succeed in keeping it very well hidden.
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Tom, I wasn’t talking about Crockford on this thread until Alan brought her up (15 Dec 17 at 6:01 am) with reference to me. I haven’t badgered her and I have no way to ‘force’ her to dredge up anything. She could just as well ignore me.
However, if she writes a paper with a clear error (a false reference), shouldn’t she just acknowledge and fix it? That would be no big deal, nobody is hurt, no reputation is damaged – we all make mistakes. That’s what you’d or any other author here would do, isn’t it? The error really wasn’t a big deal – there may well be documented evidence of bears fasting for 5 months (though it would seem difficult to prove unless the bears are in captivity). I’ve certainly read that fasting polar bears lose 1kg a day, so a bear with more than 150kg of fat reserves might well manage 5 months. One with less obviously wouldn’t.
As I said on Thursday to Geoff, answer my questions and I will go away: How does position in the list of authors relate to how much each author was involved? Did SAD ‘write’ a paper when they are just part of the “et al.”? I see that PM did a stealth edit on that adding “Even by your usual standards, that’s a moronic question. How are we supposed to know this? If you want to know the answer to this question you would have to ask the authors, obviously. “ I’d guess he misunderstood the question, which was rhetorical. It refers to the list of 90 papers and the 60 that are supposedly written by SAD. According to Shrub, I’m supposed to believe, for example, that Lunn, Servanty, Regehr, et al. was written by SAD, presumably because they are somewhere in the et al. That’s not the only one. There’s got to be 50 authors on that list, all presumably polar bear experts, but according to CliScep they are all subordinate to SAD even when they are first named author; only Crockford, not in the list, has the real knowledge it seems.
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Sorry Len. You’re trolling, Any more of this and you’re gone.
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Len, it’s not according to me that they are authors of the papers. They are authors. Their names are listed.
You ask a question about peer-reviewed papers you failed to ask Harvey – as far as I can tell – about skeptic blogs. Anytime you do this, you(r position) fail automatically. There is no further explanation needed. All data collection and methology ought to be symmetrical.
How did Harvey decide that WUWT, which contains >4000 hits for ‘polar bear’ from articles written not just Anthony Watts but a whole bunch of guest authors, and various press releases, contains simple position/s? It is obviously far simpler and straightforward to assess the central claim of a paper (in social science terms) than to identify the viewpoint of an entire blog.
Squinting hard at the problem of self-citation will not make it disappear. It is Harvey et al’s claim that they examined the polar bear-sea ice literature, satisfactorily enough to answer the question they set out to address. It is they who came up with the list of papers. *If* the literature *they* claim to be ‘majority-view’ contains a majority of papers from themselves, the list is afflicted by argument from self-citation or the view contained is not a majority view.
Harvey et al cannot escape from both damaging conclusions at the same time. If they claim, as you do, that the papers represent views of the other authors but not SAD themselves, we are left with a ridiculous position. It would then be doubly unfair to assign positions for entire skeptic blogs while excusing the prime movers of polar bear climate alarm from their own viewpoints (and we know the paper will not stand without doing this). If Harvey et al claim that it is each paper that represents a view or position, and not its authors per se (and methodologically this is indeed the paper’s claim), it is undeniable that SAD authored/co-authored 60/86 of these papers. In this context, all authors are equally responsible.
Do not be confused: it is *not* the real-world author responsibility of co-authors for contributions to their papers that is at question here. It is the methodological meaning of what a paper represents in this social sciences study, that is.
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Important in this case is: how does the non-jittered pc1 graph look like? It seems to me that the majority of points in that graph is overlapping and that there ar just four or five distinct values. The jittering was purely applied for effect.
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[See below for HTML version :)]
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LEN MARTINEZ @: 18 Dec 17 at 3:32 am says
I suggest you first read Matthew 7:3-5, then join us in demanding a retraction of the Polar Bear smear paper on a number grounds. One of these is this claim.
None of those five references support the claim. Further, when Len says @ 14 Dec 17 at 8:57 pm that “Social science isn’t science. Hell it includes economics!” the same can said for climatology. When climatology ignores certain fundamentals, that economics at least gives a nod to, it must be viewed as a more unscientific subject.
Another more basic reason for retraction is smearing an opponent. In my opinion that is as much out of order in academia as the prosecution suppressing key defence evidence or nobbling the jury in a criminal court.
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Further to my comment at 8.30am about climatology ignoring key fundamentals that economics at least gives a nod to, these include.
1. Ignoring the difference between positive and normative statements.
2. Failure to define the boundaries of the subject
The combination of the two allows academic physicists, chemists and psychologists to make unsubstantiated comments about public policy, (e.g. at The Conversation) but does not allow the publication in any reputable journal of a paper that tests a relevant scientific hypothesis against the evidence that contradicts climate alarmism.
3. False Positives and False Negatives. Every major storm is attributed to climate change.
4. Necessary and Sufficient. Just because a bunch of computer modelers make claims of doom, does not mean that the world can be saved by switching off the lights.
5. Quality and relevancy of evidence. Something that alarmist trolls take heed of, then try to get as far away from as possible.
6. The Null Hypothesis. The default position of scientific conjectures. The onus in science is to demonstrate that the null hypothesis is wrong. Climatologists and supporting trolls make the onus on critics to show that their vague proclamations cannot be right. When successful, they smear the opponents and then move on.
More at my post “Fundamentals that Climate Science Ignores“.
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Since author Lewandowsky is probably even now mining this thread for a new paper, (“Recursive Furry”?) I’d like to point out that the core subject of the Harvey paper is not polar bears, but keystone dominoes, of which the polar bear is merely one example. How many papers have any of the authors written on this subject?
The abstract claims that the paper shows that denialist blogs “disregard scientific evidence” and that their “aim” is “to cast doubt on other established ecological consequences of AGW, aggravating the consensus gap” by spreading “misinformation.”
There is nothing in the paper that establishes that this is the “aim” of the blogs identified. The blogs identified have named blog owners, most of them with professional or other activities. Accusing them of “disregarding scientific evidence” and spreading “misinformation” are potentially defamatory charges. A simple letter to the journal editor pointing this out should be enough to get the paper retracted.
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Geoff Chambers, as one GC to another……
Harvey et al 2017 is a Keystone Domino, complete with Peer Reviewed lists of untrustworthy sources, neatly packaged and gift wrapped.
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“should be enough” are you a naïve delusional fool Geoff..
[don’t talk that way to my friend Geoff Chambers]
it won’t be enough, will it.
[fair point though]
Joe was naive, with Lewandowsky…
“I expect the study to be retracted. It would be difficult for any journal to justify not retracting a study that made up a false effect in its title, and a very damaging one at that. And more false claims in the abstract, severe issues with the provenance of the data, etc.”
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/more-fraud
and three years later……..
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Shrub, I was not questioning whether SAD are actually in the et al. I took that as read. I’m asking whether being way down the list of authors on a paper means that SAD wrote a paper. If they are listed because, for example, they checked the data for correctness/omissions then I’d say they didn’t ‘write’ a paper.
There’s an easy way to resolve the problem: remove all the highlighted papers and see if the consensus of the remaining papers changes.
Tom, I don’t understand what you want from me, I’m just discussing themes many have commented on. But I’ll save you the trouble and say no more on this thread. If readers really think Crockford’s paper is a worthy effort or that she should be heeded while 50 other experts are rejected, they haven’t paid attention. I don’t really understand the preoccupation with bears on the part of skeptics. Maybe it’s the hunting lobby in the US and the sympathetic fox hunting cliscep Tories. That must explain the fox in the cartoon picture. Bye.
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Len plays the “last word” gambit with such aplomb. Practice makes perfect I suppose.
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Shub Niggurath is the name of a creature in the Lovecraft mythos.
The position of authors on the list of authors means different things in different disciplines. Again, for us, methodologically, that is something irrelevant. If we ought to split hairs on attribution of ‘viewpoints’ of papers amongst its authors, we certainly ought to extend the standard to all sources of viewpoints, including blogs.
…” their “aim” is “to cast doubt on other established ecological consequences of AGW, aggravating the consensus gap” by spreading “misinformation.”
I was hesitant before but there’s simply no point in not saying it. If you cannot present your views without denigrating those whom you criticize by referring to personal motive, you have no business publishing in academic journals. Harvey’s paper is no better than a blog rant. Why should it survive in refereed literature where standards of discourse and ethical conduct are higher? Since when is casting aspersions on personal motive a valid form of argument in peer-reviewed journals? To top it, the underlying data and methods do not even support the gutter-level theorizing and conclusions that have been made.
It must be remembered that any scientist’s attempt to respond to his/her critic not by addressing directly the criticisms made, but by reference to an credibility metric of one’s own devising, invalidates the conjured-up metric.
The paper should be thrown out.
Finally, from the paper’s recommendations and the authors’ behavior post-publication: If scientists cannot treat fellow scientists and lay experts well in their own domain of discourse – the peer-reviewed literature, why should they expect or deserve better treatment in more open and public forums like blogs and social media?
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Well said, Shub.
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Len, I thought I was clear. You’re welcome on this thread. You are not welcome to troll Dr. Crockford on stuff that you don’t know the answer to but think she should research for you.
Feel free to ask questions. Feel free to ask me if you think a specific comment is suitable for this venue. Feel free to comment.
Just don’t act like a d**k.
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Barry, Shub
Lewandowsky’s Recursive paper was “withdrawn” a few weeks after a “small number of cogent and well-argued letters” were received by the journal’s editors, and officially retracted several months later, because it named people and attributed psychological characteristics (“feelings of persecution”, “inability to reason”) to them, and at least some of the letters pointed out that this was defamatory. The wording of the retraction notice was agreed with Lewandowsky’s lawyers.
This paper does not just “denigrate” the blog owners, it claims to have identified – scientifically – their aims, their intentions, i.e. their motivations.
A letter of complaint (or better, 45 letters of complaint) pointing out that accusing blog owners of being motivated by the desire to spread “misinformation” and “disregard of scientific evidence” is defamatory will cause the editors to consult their lawyers, who won’t be the slightest bit interested in who’s right about polar bears. The blog owners are the “subjects” of the article, in the same way that those quoted in the Recursive Fury paper were the subjects, and Recursive Fury was retracted because it didn’t protect the rights of subjects.
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Adam Corner
@AJCorner
Can teaching people to recognise fake experts solve the misinformation crisis? Interesting new paper by @STWorg @johnfocook explores this&the mega-trends that have created the epistemic mess we’re in…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368117300700 …
‘Understanding & Coping with the Post-Truth Era’
————-
Adam Corner being in-sceptical about another Lew paper
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Geoff – I was talking about the Moon Hoax paper, as was Joe Duarte.. still not retracted.
(as for the naïve delusional fool bit, I seriously thought that Chief Editor Erich Eich would retract it, when I told him they refused to release their data. more fool I than you)
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in-sceptical – Unsceptical..
Climate Outreach latest finding/recommendations.. That they need to teach (propagandise) Indians that coal fired power stations are “Un-Indian” =because they want real electricity not renewables it seems.
“One key finding was a strong resistance to renewables. “There is little affection for solar, hydro or wind energy on the ground,” says Yashwant. “People think of it as a handy application, like having a solar lamp, but not as something that can replace coal.”
As a solution, the report recommends that fossil fuels be presented as being un-Indian, imported and limited, while solar, wind and hydro power be presented as being fundamentally Indian and “jugaad”. (Jugaad is a word loved by all Indians, which means frugal innovation).
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/06/26/indians-want-jugaad-not-climate-justice-study-shows/
They really are contemptuous aren’t they – Climate Outreach
(India of course had lots of coal…. how do the make people think it is ‘imported’ – or is it that the coal fired power station is nasty Western invention)
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Look at the narrative (lies) the tell Indian research participants…
3. India is dependent on imported oil, coal and gas. Every year we send 6 trillion rupees to other countries to pay for these fuels. That is five times more than our national and state governments spend on health altogether.
These fuels are expensive and running out. And they make us dependent on foreign countries – many of them are dictatorships and are unstable with terrorism and war.
But there is a better way. With renewable energy we can be energy-independent, running off our own resources, free from dependence on foreign countries.
The old fuels are already running out. Renewable energy is unlimited because it comes from the sun, wind and rivers. It can never run out. India has always been blessed with natural resources: the water, wind, forests and sun that can supply our energy needs far into the future.
With renewable energy the Indian public will no longer be dependent on the large monopoly power companies. Energy production will be distributed around the country, from solar panels in every village to large scale wind farms, sharing the income from power generation across the whole country, not just handing it to the big energy companies and their foreign suppliers.
Shouldn’t an independent democracy like India have an independent and democratic energy supply – using Indian resources and Indian technology and sharing the income and benefits across the people of India?
4. Our power system is always breaking down – often at the peak of summer when we need the electricity the most. Just think of the cost, the misery and even deaths caused by those outages.
We have cuts because we have an old and badly designed energy system that cannot supply power when we need it. We are dependent on a handful of large and unreliable power plants and their high voltage cables. It is like being tied together to the same rope and when anything goes wrong, anywhere, the rope breaks and we all fall together.
Renewable energy is much more secure and reliable. There are thousands of smaller local suppliers in a network from small solar to wind systems. If one supplier has a problem there are always other suppliers to maintain our power. It is more like a net and even if one link fails the net still holds.
And renewables are far better at meeting our energy demands. The peak of the hot season, when our supply most often fails, is exactly when solar panels are working the best. Renewable energy combined with modern energy storage can match supply to demand far better than the old system, providing power when we most need it.
Isn’t that what we all want and deserve, a secure energy system we can depend on to provide us with a regular reliable supply for our work, homes and families? Isn’t it time to change?
Click to access climate_outreach_can_-_global_narratives_india4.pdf
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Renewable energy combined with modern energy storage can match supply to demand far better than the old system, providing power when we most need it.
“modern energy storage” – there is no such beast….
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6. Imagine this. Clean, cheap, reliable energy for everyone. Every house, every school, every village has solar panels and wind turbines. Villagers have light, refrigeration, and fans. Farmers have cheap and constant irrigation water with solar pumps. There are new industries and opportunities. And everyone who is making power is also trading in it, generating local income and jobs.
A quarter of Indians have no access to electricity. This is holding back their opportunities. Is it any surprise that so many people leave their villages and surge into cities?
Click to access climate_outreach_can_-_global_narratives_india4.pdf
—————
just because you live in the third world doesn’t mean you are stupid, somebody needs to tell these privileged fools at Climate Outreach – ie
“So when activists with Greenpeace set up a solar-powered microgrid in July of 2014, the excitement was palpable. But, residents said, the problems started almost immediately.
When the former chief minister of Bihar state visited to inaugurate the grid, villagers lined up to protest, chanting, “We want real electricity, not fake electricity!”
By “real,” they meant power from the central grid, generated mostly using coal. By “fake,” they meant solar.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-trumps-solar-in-india/
The day the power came was one of celebration. Villagers, rich and poor alike, ate sweets. Then, the wealthy families plugged in energy-inefficient televisions and refrigerators. With the power suddenly facing heavy demand, the batteries drained within hours. When Kumar woke up at 4 a.m. before his farming duties to study, the light bulb did not work.
“I think it’s wrong that when I studied, the power would get cut,” he said.
Bringing coal-fired power to town
The microgrid operators scrambled to fix the mess. The village electrification committee decided to restrict electricity supply to five hours at nighttime. Greenpeace put up posters telling people not to use energy-hungry appliances such as rice cookers, electric water heaters, irons, space heaters and air coolers.
One month after the rollout, Greenpeace invited Bihar’s former chief minister, Nitish Kumar, to inaugurate the solar village. A head of state visiting a small village under the glare of television cameras is a huge deal, and the citizens knew it was their best chance to get a permanent solution.
Children held placards and the adults chanted their mantra asking for “real” electricity.
One week later, trucks rolled in and set up a 100-kW transformer in town, connecting Dharnai to the grid.
Power is now free for Kumar and his neighbors who are below the poverty line. Others pay 3 rupees per kilowatt-hour of electricity. As of July, villagers were getting electricity day and night, albeit with power cuts. At such times, they’d use the microgrid as a backup.
Meanwhile, enrollment in the solar program has fallen to 120 households, down from 380 at the start, according to Ramapati Kumar of the Centre for Environment and Energy Development, which operates the system now. He previously headed Greenpeace India’s renewable energy program.
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The Bioscience journal editor is refusing to retract the Harvey paper. Reading through this blog (and other related ones) it is evident that there is more than enough material to compose an academic paper critical of the scientific content of the Harvey et al. paper. In addition there are moral and other arguments that could be added that would counter the excesses in that paper.
If Susan were willing to be our polar bear and Susan Crockford expert, why don’t we, as Cliscep, write it and submit it for publication? We could show how it should be done. Every author should identify specifically what they are responsible for together with a statement emphasizing joint responsibility. So
Manic, Shub, Vinny, Alberto, Richard, would you be willing to contribute? Cliscep junta would you coordinate and write much of it? If the answers are positive, we could approach Susan (after Christmas).
Just think of the unmitigated joy of being able to acknowledge the deconstructive contribution of Len.
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“Just don’t act like a d**k.”
Thomas, are you acquainted with the parable of the scorpion and the frog?
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Alan – it would be rejected, immediately. why waste the time. Any journal that published this c*** in the first place would reject criticism of it’s own failings, instantly. which is why nobody bothered with “Recurrent Fury” – all those authors, the have the time and are paid to write this stuff. It is their day job..
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Here is the graph without the jittering
https://statpad.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/fig2actual.jpeg?w=586&h=356
From
https://climateaudit.org/2017/12/18/polar-bears-inadequate-data-and-statistical-lipstick/
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@hans erren
The jitter indeed creates the suggestion that there are many, nuanced positions. There are only a few handfuls.
@all
Submitting a comment may work, but publication is not likely. Note that they are playing games: Instead of releasing everything in one go, we now have paper, supplementary material and the data for the PCA. Still missing are the R codes, and the data for the cluster analysis. Any comment written today would have to be rewritten once they drip more information.
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Barry, give me some credit. The paper is almost written (take my advice, red through the blogs) so wouldn’t take long. Also if the paper is written appropriately it would not directly attack the excesses of Harvey et al. but its scientific content and conclusions. It would be an exercise in writing a paper correctly, thereby showing up Harvey et al. by example.
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Richard. A very valid argument, however, if I have read the posts correctly, the overall conclusions are that the underlying assumptions behind the study, and the polar bear example they use are fundamentally flawed. So regardless of the absence of all released data, you would still be rejecting the main points of the paper. To me that would be more important than being able to judge if they have got their sums right.
Put it this way, if the authors never released all the necessary data, should the paper never be rebutted? I would argue that the critique needed is so extensive and profound that a comment would be insufficient. Written appropriately, cliscep’s paper could become an important contribution in its own right.
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ALAN KENDALL (18 Dec 17 at 7:18 pm)
At best your paper would get published in two years time and Harvey et al. would publish a reply. So what?
Dixon and Jones published a refutation of a Lew paper which was published along with a reply from Lew. I’ve seen Dixon & Jones cited in support of Lew’s theses. No one cares.
The only retraction of a Lew paper happened when people complained of defamation. The fact that it was a pointless mess of errors and non sequiturs didn’t count. What counted was that the “subjects” (people defamed) had had their “rights violated” i.e. had written letters kicking up a stink and might possibly go to court.
If a second Lew paper got retracted, or even was the subject of a bit of a fuss e.g. at RetractionWatch, word would get round that Lew is poisonous.
Ther are 45 blog owners who could act on this. (Not Susan Crockford, I think, because being cited by people who are out to “misinform” hardly counts as “misinforming.”)
What happened with Recursive Fury was this: Jeff Id and Foxgoose wrote letters saying: “take my name/pseudonym out of your paper or I sue,” and the editors complied. By the time the editors had received a half a dozen “cogent and well-argued letters,” they’d got three different versions of the paper floating round the internet and were no doubt fed up with Lew and everything to do with him. This would be a very easy strategy to repeat.
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@alan
I’m reminded of my response to 97% Nonsensus paper. I had to rewrite it 4 times in response to Cook releasing more data (or Brandon S liberating data).
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Richard Tol:
100% yes. We’re just hamsters in the wheel.
Geoff’s route is the only one worth trying. And deep change at a political level that those relying in any way on such crap are no longer listened to on policy at all. But that will take longer.
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A more direct action would be for Susan to pursue her legal remedies against deliberate and malicious behavior by the publisher designed to damage and harm.
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Hunter
Quite right. I was totally wrong to say above that Susan Crockford is not defamed.
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Harvey et al. have 92 papers in learned journals. Scopus returns 278 for a search on “polar bear” and “sea ice”. The 92 are not representative of the 278. If we compare the relative contribution of the 10 most profilic authors in the Scopus sample to their relative contribution to the Harvey sample, we find a chi-square of 36.5. That is, we reject the null hypothesis at a signifance level below 0.1%.
(They particularly dislike Greg Thiermann.)
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The publication of this paper did not even meet the criteria
purportedly required for publication in Bioscience. That tells
you everything you need to know IMO.
Maybe Susan, or any other injured party, can apply to the
Climate Science Legal Defense Fund for legal aid ;-).
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R code now published: https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/en/publications/internet-blogs-polar-bears-and-climatechange-denial-by-proxy(55aeda93-6e80-4f78-ab16-45bf03f75c96).html
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I rescind my suggestion for a published Crockford-Cliscep paper, not for the reasons advocated here (there are numerous short turnaround publishing sites who IMHO would only be too ready to accept a paper on such a highly topical subject; the missing data is appearing). No, by the time any paper gets published it will already be outdated by material appearing on blogs. I hadn’t appreciated just how fast technical material of the highest class can appear.
Yet I am still of the view that a rubbish paper ought to be countered by a technical paper that nails the fatuous mistakes and downright attacks and smears (as in Harvey et al.) Now, any sceptic has to read multiple discussion threads on numerous sites (and 6+ on this site alone. Much of the material lies within long threads where the reader must negotiate between nonsense-bergs as strewn by Len and others.
So my revised suggestion is that Sceptimus should assemble the relevant material using the format of a technical paper and publish this under the umbrella of Cliscep.
Over the past few years I have read many climate-related blogs and my opinion FWIW is that Cliscep is the most tolerant climate blog around. I find it inexcusable and intolerable that it did not make the list of denier blogs in the Harvey et al paper. Looking back over the past few years I see several topics taken up, with vigorous discussions, that might have merited a rewrite into a more formal style.
I would hope that when the Contributors discuss matters after Christmas, that they discuss the possibility of adding to the “home”, “about”, and “video” buttons another labelled “papers”. I further suggest that we assemble the relevant material from Cliscep and discussions in other blogs upon the inadequacies of the Harvey et al paper as a suitable beginning. Never again should this site be overlooked.
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I’d vote for Alan to join the blog…. ! If I had a vote…! If he wanted to?
[You have a vote.]
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Barry. I can hardly recommend this site doing something extra without being willing to contribute myself now could I?
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First complete draft of my comments: http://economicsofclimate.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/lipstick-on-bear.html
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Susan Crockford might be a “zoologist” but she’s got no expertise in polar bears. I can read every paper on brain surgery but it doesn’t make me a brain surgeon. No surprise that BioScience didn’t retract the paper – one read of Dr. Crockford’s rant would have told any thinking person they wouldn’t pull it.
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And Martin Smith-Omague is another who misses the point entirely. It’s almost like
it’s being done deliberately…
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Martin Smith-Omague, I have a wealthy relative in Nigeria who recently dies and we want to try to preserve his $40 million life savings. Please send me your bank details so you may help us achieve our wildest dreams and stroke polar bears.
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Harvey, Lew et al, they got the jitterbug:
‘So how did the authors create the plot near the top of the post. The last line of the
quoted text provides the answer for that question . “Datapoint[s] were slightly jittered…
” For those not familiar with this concept, “jittering” is the addition of random amounts
to each coordinate of overlapping points for the purpose of causing a slight separation .
I would suggest that in this case “slightly” is in fact a gross understatement. The
relatively large amounts added to each coordinate create a very different impression
of a data set with sufficient information and discriminatory power to justify being real
“science”, something that clearly is not the case for this data.’ Roman M @ C.Audit.
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that shwing.
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Jittergate.
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Mr. Smith Omague, perhaps you can tell us all how many tree rings Michael Mann has fondled? How many cores of ice he has yanked out of the Earth?
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Martin Smith-Omague, upon what basis do you label Dr Susan Crockford a fraud, claiming to be a polar bear expert when she is, in your humble opinion, not? How do you identify an expert? Oh you give a clue: they must have published peer reviewed papers. Guess what? She has, not many it’s true, but then she’s published on other Arctic fauna, published several books on polar bears, and kept a blogsite on those animals going for many years. That site BTW now preserves old data that has been removed from the sites of “real” polar bear experts because it doesn’t fit with their climate change predictions.
Oh you mean she isn’t a polar bear expert like Dr Charles Monnett, who had the resources to troll up and down in a helicopter counting whales, an expert who counted 4 dead bears, presumed them drowned and using mathematical expertise to rival a five-year old, produced documentation that lead to the bear’s endangerment status.
It has been noted this week that our trolls are mightily depleted. Would you apply? You demonstrate some promise, but it will take considerable work on your part to make the grade. I urge you to acquire expert troll status here. Application forms are available and we offer benefits. How are your dancing skills?
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I now checked Harvey’s 92 papers against the Web of Science. Theirs is a sample, and unrepresentative for the WoS sample.
See http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/lipstick-on-bear.html
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https://polarbearscience.com/2017/12/18/two-technical-critiques-of-the-harvey-et-al-polar-bear-bioscience-attack-paper/
The WWF and other Climate Science publicity fund raisers, should stop milking Polar Bears, no matter how rich a supply it is
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Martin Smith-Omague, I am sure BioScience are reassured by your Legal Opinion. Are you a Lawyer?
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From the last paragraph of Richard Tol’s excellent blogpost:
No Lewandowsky paper has ever offered any new evidence on anything. If Richard Tol’s rather technical demolition of the Harvey et al Principal Component Analysis is ever published, it will be refuted by a short, equally technical response from Harvey et al., saying that Tol is wrong and Harvey is right. And there the matter will rest, until some historian of the philosophy of science unearths the documents in a hundred years’ time, shakes his head in disbelief, and weeps.
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Geoff, and yet polar bear numbers are up, summer ice coverage is down, old data is removed in attempts to hide these changes and bolster up a climate change dependent computer model predicting polar bear demise. Weeping does not need to wait a hundred years. What we need is not tears, but anger.
I fear this will be a harbinger of the future when eventually the global climate unquestionably cools. Those responsible for the failed computer models will refuse to acknowledge their failings and look for climate scapegoats to smear. The all-powerful CO2 molecule must continue to be appeased.
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Harvey et al 2017 really has helped Climate Science find its own natural level.
https://polarbearscience.com/2017/12/18/two-technical-critiques-of-the-harvey-et-al-polar-bear-bioscience-attack-paper/
Lawyers and Politicians are going to love it.
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@geoff
Believe it or not, but our friend Lew leads a triple life. You know the Lew you know, but there is also one who publishes correct but trite papers on decision analysis, and one who is a serious psychologist.
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Richard Tol
In a former life Dr Lewandowsky of Oklahoma State University edited and co-authored a book about the use of torture in Iraq. I praised him for his courage and probity here:
https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/in-praise-of-lewandowsky/
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The one time I spoke to Dr Lewandowsky, coming out at the end of the Michael Mann talk at Bristol he helped to arrange on 23rd September 2014, I told him about the attribution to me of a comment by Foxgoose in Recursive Fury – my one citation in the annals of climate conspiracism! He looked like he believed me, indeed he appeared genuinely concerned. There is a vicious form of corruption here. Money and kudos – Royal Society grant etc – are I’m sure part of that. But I don’t claim to understand it.
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@Richard
“Believe it or not, but our friend Lew leads a triple life.”
Indeed, but not without contradiction and dissonance between these ‘lives’. See comment upstream on 16 Dec 17 at 12:40 pm. He is the best case to example some of the effects he’s previously described.
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Lest anyone be tempted to think of psychology as a reliable science (perhaps like particle physics or mathematics) this is good reading.
http://www.nature.com/news/replication-studies-bad-copy-1.10634
Psychology seems to be worse than other fields in terms of replication of findings in the literature.
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@ DPY
Liked this quote from your link –
“Many psychologists make on-the-fly decisions about key aspects of their studies, including how many volunteers to recruit, which variables to measure and how to analyse the results. These choices could be innocently made, but they give researchers the freedom to torture experiments and data until they produce positive results.”
sums up the problem across all research (and the BBC) today I think.
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Lewandowsky’s life is not triple but at least quadruple. He is also a part-time numerancer, or numerologist (numerology = “belief in the divine, mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events” – Wiki) since he has published two peer-reviewed papers and several articles proving that, given that a certain graph is convex (looked at from above, not underneath) it follows mathematically that the less you know about something, the more likely it is to be worse than you think. This is a mathematical truth, and therefore independent of the meaning you attribute to key words in the proposition, like “worse” “know” and “think.”
Lewandowsky poses a problem for those of us who believe that academics should have absolute freedom of expression. Perhaps we should turn our attention to the question of how the Royal Society distributes its gold medals for excellence?
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DFHUNTERDOUGIEH
“These choices could be innocently made, but they give researchers the freedom to torture experiments and data until they produce positive results.”
“sums up the problem across all research”
Why is it a PROBLEM?
One instance where it is a positive: finding geological resources. In the oil companies I worked for, decisions about whether or not to invest in drilling an exploratory well were based upon interpreted geological and geophysical data. A manager has numerous opportunities to kill off a prospect so the job of the geologist and geophysicist is to present the data in the most favourable light*. This might be considered by an outsider to be torturing the data, but no oil is found by condemning prospects. A good geologist/geophysicist interprets/tortures data favourably without ignoring negative indications: a good manager exercises good judgement in picking prospects that in their experience seem most favourable. He/she knows the interpretations are highly biased.
*one case that illustrates this perfectly was when I changed the geological nature of a hydrocarbon play from a reef (the larger the better) to porous strata draped over those reefs (the more and the smaller the better). When it came to presenting this revision to management I was astounded to see that the geophysicist had changed their interpretation of the seismic lines from a single large reef to a cluster of smaller ones (more favourable) with no additional evidence. And that was the “correct” thing to do.
The best science is highly biased.
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It’s not clear why, but…
After years of decline, Western Arctic Caribou Herd stabilizes
http://www.arcticnow.com/arctic-news/2017/12/19/after-years-of-decline-western-arctic-caribou-herd-stabilizes/
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Alas, with the robust health of polar bear populations, this was the caribou’s big chance to become a green icon and escape the monopoly employer who uses them only one night a year.
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Richard, wrong subspecies. The overworked subspecies from fennoscandinavia occasionally produces sports (individuals with glowworm genes in the nasal area), much prized by the monopoly employer. Interestingly children should listen for knee clicks rather than hoof sounds.
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Dfhunterdougie, “sums up the problem across all research (and the BBC) today I think.”
Just today? Do you have reason to believe it has changed? The problem is bad understanding or application of statistics, I think. See Andrew Gelman’s blog for ongoing discussion.
Alan, “The best science is highly biased.”
More BS.
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Ok Len. Suggest some science that you admire that shows no bias on the part of the researcher(s). Avoid discoveries made serendipitously.L
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Was the recent research that managed to reduce levels of huntingtin in patients with Huntington’s disease highly biased or was it not what you’d call the”best science”?
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Alan Kendall, Harvey et al 2017 demonstrates that the best funded climate science, is highly biased, and unreliable.
The big names of “Lewandowsky” and “Mann” coming so close together, would be seen in Astrology as having some doom laden warning, of troubled times ahead. I wonder if any other climate scientists have been looking to the stars, both near and far, for some idea about forecastjng.
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Len. Would you not say that the researchers who produced the treatment for gene splicing (to reduce the production of huntington) were biased in that they deliberately chose to focus on this particular treatment rather than any other (gene silencing for example). Out of all possible approaches they chose one (presumably either because they believed it held out the most promise, or because they had funding, which merely means someone else made that judgement). In other words they set out to prove their judgement correct and that is bias. This should not be considered a bad thing because, as I wrote, “the best science is highly biased”.
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Bullshit
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Len. Bullshit right back at you (I can’t be bothered to argue), and merry Christmas to you.
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Apparently the url for yorkblog js incomplete
It should be this http://www.yorkblog.com/hot/
It is a so calied “community blog”
http://www.yorkblog.com/community-blogs/
Community blogs are written by members of the York County community who are not staff members of the York Daily Record/Sunday News, or, in some cases, staff members writing outside of their Daily Record/Sunday News affiliation.
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Having both heard the frog and scorpion story, a frog and a scorpion trying to get to Baffin Island decide it woud be safer to call Uber and ask for a polar bear to run them across, because scorpions can’t swim, and frogs hate sea ice.
The bear shows up , and they agree on the fare, but as the bear is very thin and feeling peckish, he demands that they stop at Sealburger King and buy him a meal to fuel up for the trip. As the bear is finishing his flipper pie, he notices the scorpion’s sting, and asks him:
“Mr Scorpion, that’s a lethal weapon you’ve got there ! How do I know you won’t kill me if I let you climb on my back ? ”
” Chill, Mr. Bear- if I stung you I’d surely drown, and besides my word that I won’t sting you, I’ll ride on top of the frog so you’ll be safely out of stinger range.”
The frog nods in agreement, they climb on , and the bear starts swimming north. After half an hour, the bear starts to feel ill, but he hasn’t felt a sting , so he keeps on swimming.
After another half hour the bear howls in agony , dies of a heart attack and rolls belly up, the frog nimbly hopping around to the up side as the late bear capsizes.
“Well done, partner .”says the scorpion , texting Uber Heli’s to send a Sea Stallion to retrieve them and their prize, ” Pelt like this should be worth twenty grand in Calgary !”
” It’s a great racket” says his partner ” We can keep it up forever if we never tell anyone the scorpion and poison arrow frog story.”
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