One of the big problems with talking about what Chris Mooney has called The Republican War on Science is that, on the Republican side, the case against science is rarely laid out explicitly. On a whole range of issues (evolution, passive smoking, climate change, the breast-cancer abortion link, CFCs and the ozone layer and so on) Republicans attack scientists, reject the conclusions of mainstream science and promote political talking points over peer-reviewed research. But they rarely present a coherent critique that would explain why, on so many different issues, they feel its appropriate to rely on their own politically-based judgements and reject those of mainstream science. And of course many of them are unwilling to admit that they are at war with science, preferring to set up their own alternative set of scientific institutions and experts, journals and so on.
So it’s good to see a clear statement of the Republican critique of science from John Tierney in this NY Times blog piece promoting global warming “skepticism”. The core quote is
climate is so complicated, and cuts across so many scientific disciplines, that it’s impossible to know which discrepancies or which variables are really important.
Considering how many false alarms have been raised previously by scientists (the “population crisis,� the “energy crisis,� the “cancer epidemic� from synthetic chemicals), I wouldn’t be surprised if the predictions of global warming turn out to be wrong or greatly exaggerated. Scientists are prone to herd thinking — informational cascades– and this danger is particularly acute when they have to rely on so many people outside their field to assess a topic as large as climate change.
Both this quote and the rest of Tierney’s article are notable for the way in which he treats science as inseparable from politics, and makes no distinction between scientific research and the kind of newspaper polemic he produces. Like most Republicans, Tierney takes a triumphalist view of the experience of the last thirty years or so, as showing that he and other Republicans have been proved right, and their opponents, including scientists, have been proved wrong. Hence, he argues, he is entitled to prefer his own political judgements to the judgements (inevitably equally political) of scientists.
Of course, there’s nothing new about the general viewpoint, that science is just another type of ideological system. It was until recently, widely held on the left. But it’s now far more common among Republicans, where it is now the dominant fiewpoint. Some of its surviving leftwing adherents, such as Steve Fuller, have taken the logical step and joined the Republicans, notably in the Dover case on the teaching of Intelligent Design.
I’ll point out some of the more obvious problems with Tierney’s analysis. Of the three issues he mentions, only one (the “cancer epidemic”) involves a debate in which scientific issues were central. And most proponents of a “cancer epidemic” are non-scientists who see themselves in much the same light as the global warming skeptics Tierney is promoting. The most prominent single advocate of the “cancer epidemic” story is Samuel Epstein, who describes himself as the leading critic of the “cancer establishment” consisting of the American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute and mainstream scientific journals such as Science (also a favorite target of GW conspiracy theorists).
It’s clear that the notion of a “cancer epidemic” has never been supported by mainstream science. But, if you accept Tierney’s politicised view of science, it makes sense to lump ACS and NCI together with critics like Epstein. The scientific evidence produced by the cancer establishment has supported lots of restrictions on smoking, air pollution, the use of synthetic chemicals and so on, all of which are opposed by Republicans. In political terms, the more extreme position represented by Epstein helps the establishment defend themselves against rightwing critics.
Also noteworthy is the idea that when faced with a complex problem, the best thing to do is to fall back on your own prejudices, rather than, say, attempt a comprehensive investigation of all aspects of the problem.
Apart from Tierney, about the most comprehensive exposition of the Republican critique of science is Tom Bethell’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, part of the Regnery series of the same name. Here’s a summary of his position, arguing that scientists operating through journals like Science manufacture spurious problems to get research funding and that scientific research is fatally flawed because of its commitment to materialism.
Bethell has impeccable qualifications as a leading Republican commentator on science (gigs at the Hoover Institute and American Spectator, ) But I think some Republicans find he is a bit too thorough in his rejection of science, going beyond the standard topics (evolution, global warming, stem cell research) to reject relativity and embrace AIDS reappraisal.
The problem here is that Republicans are torn between a war on science and a war over science. What they would like is a scientific process that produced all the technological goodies of which they are enamoured, but could be constrained to the reliable message discipline expected of all parts of the Republican machine. Some of the time this leads them to engage in debate over particular scientific issues with a rather cargo-cultish attempt to mimic the trappings of scientific methods. At other times, they attack science more directly. But Bethell’s overt rejection of science, and embrace of obviously cranky ideas, gives the game away a bit too much.
John Quiggin 
It would be unfair to say that the right-wing blogosphere has contributed nothing to science. For example, it used to be a shibboleth of the left that the genus Rhinogradentia was wiped out by american nuclear testing in the pacific. A biologist in the US navy found other surviving species of Rhinogradentia, and the news was broken by Instapundit.
Morgenstern is getting a real run here, James :-).
Terje, when has it ever been about laws that “define who a business should hire”?
The simple fact of the matter is that until mid-last century, minorities were denied the liberty to seek jobs and engage in trade by many businesses (indeed, arguably most, in certain parts of the world). If the government is not going to stand up for the liberties of minorities, then who is?
As to whether the laws are still needed, sadly, the answer is probably ‘yes’. There are still a lot of employers out there that harbour irrational prejudices and, if there wasn’t the threat of legal action, would probably refuse to ever hire people with disabilities, or those with different coloured skin, or even women. The laws basically liberate employers from their prejudices, and nine times out of ten, after going ahead and hiring such a minority, their views change pretty soon enough.
As far as clubs/pubs denying access to heterosexuals – that’s less of an issue because the business in question is clearly catering to a minority in the first place. Personally I don’t believe it makes any sense for club to able to deny entry to someone on the basis of something that isn’t even obviously detectable, and I don’t think they’re doing themselves (or the gay rights movement in general) any favours by doing so. But it’s hardly very likely that anyone is going to threaten legal action against such an establishment on the basis that they were not let in for not being able to convince the bouncer that they were genuinely homosexual.
wizofaus,
While Terje can speak for himself, your response simply failed to address his point that in the USA moves towards more inclusive employment of minorities (women, blacks etc) from WWI onwards was driven firstly by the private sector; not the government. You also ignored his point about the adverse consequences of certain anti-discrimination laws.
To then simply respond – as you did – with a statement that things were bad in the past [true] and who can you rely on, if not the government, to implement anti-discrimination pracices is to fail to address ostensibly valid counter-arguments to your original post. So, in my view, you should go back and answer them (or demonstrate that they are not pertinent) or hold your spray.
Tom N,
My first thought on reading Terje’s comments about private employment was that it was essentially an exercise in post hoc ergo proctor hoc.
Black employment in the 60’s and 70’s probably didn’t decline because of equal wage laws but because they were disproportionately employed in menial jobs which were displaced by technology.
Tom, that government has been in the past responsible for perpuating discrimination against minorities doesn’t preclude it becoming the primary body for protecting the liberties of said minorities. My question is simply who else could do it? And at any rate, isn’t libertarian philosophy that the government’s job *is* to protect individual liberties? Surely that should include the liberties to engage in meaningful trade and employment?
Ian, I found an interesting author for you to read: Alexis de Tocqueville>/a>. I now have his book “Democracy in America”, but wiki has a good summary:
Ian, I found an interesting author for you to read: Alexis de Tocqueville. I now have his book “Democracy in America”, but wiki has a good summary:
That should have been “I now have his book … on order from amazon.”
Mugwump, first up, you might want to look for the free e-book of Democracy in America on Proejct Gutenberg.
Secondly, a couple of points about De Tocqueville.
1. He was writing at the virtual peak of the post-Napoleonic political repression. This coincided with one of the worst depressions in history so his views of Europe may have been somewhat soured.
2. While he uses the word “Europe” quite freely as though the continent were a single entity, his knowledge of society and politics outside France seems ot have been somewhat limited. Democracy in America is in large part a political polemic directed at the Bourbon Restoration.
3. His observations of America circa 1930 aren’t necessarily that relevant to America circa 1780-1790. Consider Australia circa 1960 and Australia today.
4. Even with all those caveats De Tocqueville is a fine and perceptive writer.
Negative rights. Not positive rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
It is not the job of government to tell business owners what they should do with their property and who they should enter into a relationship with. In fact government should be protecting freedom of association and protecting property rights.
“A negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another human being”.
Minorities do and should have the right not to be subjected to the discriminatory actions of business owners, i.e. refusing to hire or serve them purely on the basis of their minority status.
wizofaus,
Where in the world are talking about? Certainly “refusing to hire or serve them purely on the basis of their minority status” is not present in the US.
Why not look at truly discriminatory practices in Western Europe, particularly France, or throughout the Arab world?
Jack, it’s not present to a significant degree because there are laws explicitly preventing it.
Terje apparently is happy to live in a world where businesses actively discriminate against minorities. But if a government can’t even protect basic liberties of minorities, then I don’t see any point in having one at all.
It’s from a Brit, but for the anti-science position in all its gory (and conspiratorial) detail see David Henderson’s article in World Economics (Governments and Climate Change Issues
The case for rethinking; Volume 8 no.2)
Ian Gould Says: March 7th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Not really true. In fact the US massively increased the size of its low-skilled service economy (McJobs) in the past generation. But many black males missed out on this low-skilled job surge, because they were other-wise engaged in the Crack Wars, on welfare or in prison.
The grain of truth in what Ian said is that in the post-OPEC period Japanese technology and organization assaulted the US’s old Rust-belt automotive industry. This was mostly based in the North East which is which used to host a huge amount of black employment. During this time alot of US business went South in search of cheaper non-union labour.
The biggest cause of black unemployment over the past generation is the 12 million or so illegal immigrants coming in mainly from Mexico and Latin America. They depress wages for lower skilled (which often means black) workers which makes unemployment-welfare and crime a more attractive career option.
The latter option does not do much for your long term employment options or that of your children. Perverse liberal policy towards blacks has been the rule, rather than the exception, for much of the post-sixties period. As Jerry Pournelle remarked to me:
Things changed for blacks during the nineties when authoritarian conservative replaced liberalism as the guide of social policy. Authoritarian lawfare and tighter welfare policies greatly improved the social framework for black employment in the nineties. Which incidentally was a time of high-tech growth, further evidence contradicting Ian’s “increased technology=black unemployment” thesis.
“authoritarian conservative replaced liberalism as the guide of social policies” in the 90’s??
Care to point to some examples?
Terje, serious question for you – do you consider it the government’s job to protect my liberty not to be slapped across the face by my wife?
I don’t think this is the whole story. The only study I have read on the subject shows that except for the top dogs, drug dealing pays a lot less than minimum wage.
Purely anecdotally, I’ve observed that in areas where there are few Latino immigrants the McJobs are largely taken by blacks; where Latino density is high, they are largely taken by Latinos, to such an extent that for example, Spanish is the internal language spoken at my local McDonalds.
There are plenty of lower socioeconomic blacks where I live, so why is McDonalds staffed by Latinos? At the risk of raising hackles, the reason is work ethic. The uniformly black-staffed McDonalds I have frequented are not well run, and the staff often have slack and surly demeanor. So in neighbourhoods were there is a choice between the two groups, management is going to choose the more diligent workers.
Terje (say tay-a) Says:
Please point out where the skeptic argument refutations on this list are cocky or certain about AGW theory.
Or just plain wrong.
That link is to point 5 on that list: “Models are unreliable”. It shows two graphs, one with CO2 forcing removed from the models that fails to match the temperature record of the last 150 years, and one with CO2 forcing that matches the record. Conclusive? No.
The problem is that the models are tuned to match the temperature record by adjusting the aerosol content, because aerosols are a large unknown parameter so the scientists are free to set them however they wish. So that argument tells you only one thing: the models have a built-in positive temperature feedback from CO2. It doesn’t tell you about their predictive power, because the aerosol content could be further adjusted to account for more of the warming, while still leaving a large amount of the CO2 increase out.
This is the biggest problem with climate science as a whole: the statistical ability of its practitioners is mediocre at best.
Terje, if you want to see unjustified cockiness (combined with complete wrongness), you need only read mugwump at #71, which matches the tone of much of the delusionist anti-science literature, on AGW, passive smoking, AIDS revisionism and the rest.
It’s unclear whether mugwump is claiming that you can fit any history you like by tuning a single parameter (aerosol sensitivity) or that there is no evidence on the historical concentration of aerosols, so that this forcing can be tuned to fit the data. The first is obviously false, though it is the kind of claim routinely made by innumerate delusionists of the kind who say “global warming stopped in 1998”. The second is also untrue – aerosol concentrations can be measured directly, and other implications such as global dimming provide an independent check of aerosol influences.
But, the crucial point is whether you support science or not. If mugwump really believed the points he was making and had the abilities he claimed, he would be publishing his results in peer-reviewed journals, instead of announcing his personal superiority to “climate science as a whole” in the comments box of a blog.
John – my reference to cockiness covered both bases. And if you want to see the extent to which I tackle the carbon tax doomsdayers take a look at Catallaxy or ALS over recent times.
Wizofaus – if your wife slaps you in the face without just cause then my advice is to slap her back. It will be far more effective than calling the police or complaining to your local MP. Of course the role of the government should in my view extend to cover acts of domestic violence. However there are practical constraints so it’s best if the two of you can learn to be mature adults. Are you having marriage problems?
Terje, not at all, just curious that you appear to believe that it is the government’s job to protect my liberty not to be slapped in the face by my wife, but not to protect my liberty not to be discriminated against by business owners should I somehow wind up in a wheelchair tomorrow.
Wizofaus – the distinction is the use of physical violence by your wife versus a free choice by the business in question. Choosing not to employ people in wheel chairs is not a violent act. Making the later illegal changes little in any case because if I don’t employ some bloke in a wheel chair it is pretty hard to prove one way or the other why I made the decision. It may have been because I hate disabled people (which I don’t) but it could just as easily be because I didn’t like the attitude of the individual in question or that his eyes seemed too close together.
To be honest I do NOT find the anti discrimination act to be exceedingly offensive (except in so far as their is hipocracy such as in gay only bars okay, hetro only bars not okay). However employment quotas as used in the USA and in South Africa or legislated wage equalisation are offensive and damaging in my view. They actually erode goodwill and reinforce sterotypes and social stigmas. For marginal workers price regulation often leads to exclusion of certain races or minority groups in the form of unemployment.
wizofaus Says: March 9th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
“Three strikes and your’e out” and “the end of welfare as we know it”.
Neo-conservative social policy is (modernist) liberal social policy mugged by reality. It promoted bigger lawfare sticks to get the bad guys off the street. Smaller welfare carrots got the better guys onto the job.
All this would not have surprised your grandmother. Although it came as a great shock to post-modernist liberals, who are still reeling from the shock of having the likes of Pat Buchanan teaching them how to suck eggs.
Hi Mugwump 71: I disagree with you on your claim about tuning aerosols freely to get the temperature profile that scientists wish. Firstly there is observational and indirect evidence of historical aerosol levels. These data place some soft constraints upon the aerosol profiles. Secondly, scientists have conducted model experiments to see to what degree temperature proxy records can be matched by models for different aerosol profiles *using observed and other evidence for aerosol levels*.
In other words, scientists have explored to what degree aerosol profile can be adjusted within the imposed constraints and yet give a good numerical match to the known historical temperatures and proxies for temperature. For example:
Ammann CM, et al, PNAS 2007 Mar 6: 104(10) 3713-3718 “Solar influence on climate during the past millenium: results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System Model”.
This is all up-front and transparent. It turns out that the historical aerosol evidence, even with the uncertainties, sufficiently constrain the aerosol profiles that they cannot account for the late 20th century warming, unless CO2 effects are also incorporated.
It’s all interesting!
Terje, that’s thing though – why is violence the important discriminator? If my wife slaps me across the face every day for the rest of my life, I’m unlikely to be much the worse for it: I really don’t need the government to protect me from that, nor do I expect it to.
But if I wind up in a wheelchair, and businesses refuse to hire or serve me (because, for instance, their place of business is not suitable for wheelchair access), then the rest of my life is pretty much ruined. This is an area where the government is pretty much the only body capable of stepping in and passing regulation that ensure minorities (such as the disabled) get a fair go.
And yes, disabled people have successfully brought cases against employers proving that they were not hired largely on the basis of their disability, despite their disability not affecting their capacity to do the job at hand.
And plenty of businesses have been sued for not providing their services in a manner that was accessible by disabled users, and consequently changed their practices.
jack strocchi: “end of welfare as we know it” never really happened, despite all the rhetoric. Further, what has it got to do with authoritarian conservatism? “3 strikes and you’re out” was not a rollback of liberalism, merely a harsher punishment for already illegal activities. And further, there are serious questions as to whether the laws have really been as beneficial as many as claimed: for a start, expenditure on corrections doubled between ’94 and ’02. Surely if the law is producing less crime, expenditure on corrections should go down?
Three snarks for Muster Mark, Quiggin?
The latter, although I am not arguing for “no evidence”, just that there is sufficient lack of evidence to enable overfitting in the tuning.
I would if I had the time. But others are also doing the investigations, eg in relation to my point at #71:
Jeffrey T. Kiehl, 2007. Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L22710
Kiehl considers how the
yet those same climate models
He concludes:
Which was exactly my point.
Simply because the only unique quality that the government can ever bring to the table is its capacity to commit violence or to coerce with the threat of violence.
Terje, violence is no more an ultimate method of coercion than say, brainwashing, or hyponosis, or manipulation by mind-altering drugs. Further, I question that the threat of violence is the reason that most people obew the law most of the time. Yes, it’s there as an ultimate fallback, but how often has the government actually physically stepped in and forcibly closed a business down because it was discriminating against blacks or paraplegics?
Either way, I fail to see how the fact that violence exists as a ultimate fallback threat from government logically implies that the only job of the government is to protect its citizens from violence.
I suggested earlier that if your wife slaps you without provocation it would be appropriate to slap her back. You might instead decide to slap her when she forgets to mow the lawn. Now I wonder can you see any distinction between these two situations, between violence as a responce to violence and violence as a means to achieving other goals? In both cases it may be effective (she won’t forget next time) but effective is not the same as appropriate. Personally I think slapping your wife because she slapped you is substantially different to slapping your wife because she didn’t mow the lawn. Even if it is fair that she should mow the lawn (ie you did it last week) I don’t think violence is appropriate in such a situation.
Unprovoced violence and violence based coercion might on occasion offer a high degree of utility. However I don’t think we should institutionalise the idea or use it reflexively.
If most of the time most people obey laws for some reason other than the associated risk of sanctions then lets have “voluntary laws” and “enforced laws” to draw a clear distinction. Or lets just let social conventions and mores fufill the former function and have a lot less of the latter.
Mugwump, Kiehl directly contradicts you. He says uncertainty wrt aerosols is enough to give you the range of uncertainty routinely cited by the IPCC, which doesn’t include zero, as implied in your post. There’s nothing surprising here, and nothing to support your attack on climate scientists.
Terje, you’re avoiding the point. Ultimately, my point is that (unjust) discrimination is more harmful than many forms of violence, and that it’s appropriate for the government to focus strongly on discouraging the most harmful behaviours. To suggest that physical violence is the only form of harmful behaviour that governments should be trying to prevent is to draw an arbitrary and unjustifiable line.
Fortunately, no government does operate along those lines, and it’s hard to imagine that any government would ever do so.
As I said before, it is my belief in the importance of individual liberties that lead me to the position that governments must actively protect the liberties of disadvantaged minorities. There seems to be no rational case for believing that liberty of business owners to discriminate against minorities is somehow more important, and it surely contradicts what most people would surely consider a commonsense ethical framework.
“To be honest I do NOT find the anti discrimination act to be exceedingly offensive (except in so far as their is hipocracy such as in gay only bars okay, hetro only bars not okay).”
If there were a widespread phenomena of large groups of drunken gays going into bars with predominantly heterosexual clientele to abuse and harass them, I suspect we’d have straights-only bars in short order.
Quiggin, I didn’t imply the sensitivity was zero, nor do I even believe that.
If you haven’t already, please follow the link in my post at #71. There you’ll find the oft-repeated (erroneous) claim that because the climate models only fit the recent temperature record if you include CO2 increase, the models are reliably modeling the impact of CO2 on the climate.
The “paradox” discussed by Kiehl is that those very same climate models have widely varying climate sensitivities (1.5C-4.5C is the commonly quoted figure but in reality the range is much wider than that). How can they all accurately retrodict the recent temperature history with such widely varying CO2 response?
There’s almost no leeway in the CO2 history, but there is a great deal of leeway in the aerosol history (there are no standard datasets for aerosols). Kiehl argues the resolution of the “paradox” is that the climate modelers adjust aerosol forcings to counteract the model CO2 sensitivity in order to get an accurate fit between the model and the recent temperature history: “Many current models predict aerosol concentrations interactively within the climate model and this concentration is then used to predict the direct and indirect forcing effects on the climate system.“. He shows aerosol forcings vary by the same order of magnitude as the CO2 sensitivities.
The problem is that, in reality, the aerosol forcing has a value, even if it is unknown. So all models that rely on aerosol forcings that differ from reality (whatever that is) in order to correctly fit the temperature history cannot be correctly modeling the climate response to other forcings, including CO2.
This just one of many examples of basic errors in statistical methodology in climate science.
“This just one of many examples of basic errors in statistical methodology in climate science.”
Really?
Name and reference six.
Bonus points for any you can reference to someone not associated with the denialist movement.
Just one error of the calibre discussed above would be enough to discredit someone in other scientific fields. If the field is considered healthy with less than six such errors, it is in a lot worse shape than even I realized.
Before I muster your six Ian, how about you address just this one example, and explain why pointing out this error exhibits
, to quote Muster Snark.
Wizofaus – I was not trying to avoid your point I was trying to explain why I don’t agree with it. I accept that you think government intervention in the way of laws is warranted to stop private businesses discriminating on the basis of race, religion, disability etc. In general I don’t. The utility of violating liberty in this instance is not high enough in my view. However some interventions are clearly worse than others. I would rate the anti-discrimination act as borderline but I think legislated wage equality, racial and gender quotas and minimum wage laws are generally counter productive. In other words not only do they violate the liberty of the employer but on balance they usually deliver negative utility to the class of person they are trying to help (although not evenly so). You won’t find me raising a sweat to try and repeal the anti-discrimination act but you may do in regards to the others.
The key question in my mind is generally “who is this law intended to help, who does this law hurt, is it effective in it’s goal, is it worth it, is there a better way?” Too often laws (like government budgets) are judged on what they aim to achieve and not on what they actually achieve.
Non government ways to mitigate business based discrimination would include, marketing, educating, appeal to peoples better nature, naming and shaming and competition. A better government based strategies might include lifting the payroll tax threshold based on employee composition and abolishing minimum wages so there is a market even for workers deemed less desirable.
Terje:
What does this have to do with cockiness about AGW theory?
Mugwump, did it ever occur to you that the various models fit to the past not because aerosols have been fiddled with but because back-casting is a standard validation technique.
Only those models which are successful at backcasting get published.
Furthermore, data for the past is readily available whereas as contemporaneous data on which to base forecasting is hard to come by. (See recent revisions to NoAA temperature records for 2005). Additionally, even if models get similar results in backcasting they may have different assumptions built in around future tipping points and feedbacks. (For example, modellers may make different assumptions about changes in land cover and albedo due to future warming.)
You also seem to have failed to consider a key component of how climate forecasting models are typically applied. Because climate is affected by one-off effects such as volcanic eruption, most models build in a probability of such an event occurring each year. Even two runs of the same model will potentially give a different end result (especially for a relatively short period) because of the impact of volcanic eruptions.
Oh and Mugwump your quote about cockiness didn’t come from me.
Now about those six examples…
Ian, you are just plain wrong, as is Quiggin. Please read the reference I gave. In particular, consider the following quote from Kiehl’s paper:
Ian, you are just plain wrong, as is Quiggin. Please read the reference I gave. In particular, consider the following quote from Kiehl’s paper:
Those aerosol adjustments vary by more than a factor of 2 between the different models. Yet it is a matter of fact what the aerosol history is (even if unknown). So my original point stands: the fact that the models only fit the temperature record with CO2 included tells you little (if not nothing) about whether they correctly model the impact of CO2 on climate, because in order to get that fit the models must use widely varying estimates of aerosol forcing, none of which may in fact match the truth.
I know, I was quoting Muster Snark (Quiggin).
At this point, someone who claims to be pro-science would admit they are wrong and would start looking more deeply into the issues. Which are you Ian?
Quiggin?
Alternately someone who is pro-science looks for more data – got a link to either Kiel’s full paper or the abstract?
Paper is here
(abstract is free, paper will cost you $9)
I actually found that same link:
“Climate forcing and climate sensitivity are two key factors in understanding Earth’s climate. There is considerable interest in decreasing our uncertainty in climate sensitivity. This study explores the role of these two factors in climate simulations of the 20th century. It is found that the total anthropogenic forcing for a wide range of climate models differs by a factor of two and that the total forcing is inversely correlated to climate sensitivity. Much of the uncertainty in total anthropogenic forcing derives from a threefold range of uncertainty in the aerosol forcing used in the simulations.”
Funny there’s nothing in there about having uncovered the greatest scientific fraud of all time.
In case anyone wonders how Mugwump stumbled upon this, his posts are a close paraphrase from here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2475
And we all know how “scientific” climateaudit is.
Climateaudit includes this quote from Kiehl:
“These results indicate that the range of uncertainty in anthropogenic forcing of the past century is as large as the uncertainty in climate sensitivity and that much of forcing uncertainty is due to aerosols. In many models aerosol forcing is not applied as an external forcing, but is calculated as an integral component of the system. Many current models predict aerosol concentrations interactively within the climate model and this concentration is then used to predict the direct and indirect forcing effects on the climate system.”
In other worlds, Kiehl explicitly and directly contradicts Mugwump’s claim – aerosol concentrations are a product of the models – not externally imposed to produce the desired results.
Ian, I already quoted that passage.
Ok, one more time.
A) There is some (unknown) ground truth for historical aerosol forcing.
B) The values used in the models vary by more than a factor of two, hence most (if not all of the models) must be based on incorrect non-CO2 forcing.
C) Therefore, the fact that CO2 forcing is required for the model to correctly fit the temperature record tells you little (if anything) about whether they correctly model CO2’s impact on the climate, because the CO2 forcing in the model is being combined with an (almost certainly incorrect) non-CO2 forcing.
Note: it doesn’t actually matter whether the aerosol forcing is tuned so that the models correctly fit the temperature record (although if you believe it is not so tuned then I’ve got a bridge to sell you). All that matters is the CO2 forcing is being combined with an incorrect non-CO2 forcing, and hence any conclusions about the CO2 forcing are suspect.
I am not claiming to have stumbled on the greatest scientific fraud of all time. Only those who accept global warming as revealed truth would think that way. These are just elementary errors made by scientists without adequate statistical training. Many people (although not many inside the climate science community apparently) are aware of the poor statistical methodology of a lot of the science.