My problem is that without a dialogue with these students on specific issues it is difficult to determine the reasons behind the dislike of CA and it would also make me hesitate, no make that refuse, to pass judgment on the motives or thinking of the students.

I would agree with that.

Dr Curry has taken worse here, especially early on, and IMO has benefitted by it. I appreciate that aspect about her.

I would definitely agree with that. We were just discussing yesterday how much CA or any other blogging atmosphere helps you “fine tune” your critical thinking skills, as well as the ability to defend research.

Thanks, Joel.

The title of this post is “To Browsing Undergraduates”. I’d be a bit pissed too at first glance. This was a screw-up on Steve M’s part, no doubt. If he reads this I’m sure he will realize the error.

Dr Curry has taken worse here, especially early on, and IMO has benefitted by it. I appreciate that aspect about her.

FYI, to the rest of you, GT is ranked about 3rd or 4th in the US for engineering schools. It is no small feat to get accepted into a grad program there.

Good luck on your studies, Angela.

There are confounding factors in manufacturing processes and people still work to make them better.

I must have missed all the posters here that are firmly in the “we’re against working to make science better” camp.

There are two problems with your comment.
The first is that Mann and others seem to be the ones resisting working to make science better not the people here.
Second, and more important, prior to any meaningful knowledge of the scope of these confounding factors the world is being asked to turn itself inside out economically based on the rudimentary and almost undoubtedly highly inaccurate climate projections produced so far.

Angela F. in response to:

Kenneth Blumenfeld’s students had a different reaction than the Georgia Tech students.

Says in part:

I just wanted to make the distinction that the students you are referring to from GaTech are not undergraduates. Ill revisit what Dr. Curry said a few times in the Report Card:

I agree that there may be “maturity” issues here but that those issues have a bearing on the final conclusions of either group of students I have my doubts, since I didn’t see any confirmation in Blumenfeld’s student reactions to the RC and CA debate of preferences for what goes on here, only that they wanted RC to get more down and dirty with the CA heretics on AGW and the HS. Being undergraduates they might express their feelings with a more live or die by the home team attitude that requires them to get more down on the home team when it fails them. In the end, I view both groups as probably not having much of a liking for what goes on at CA.

My problem is that without a dialogue with these students on specific issues it is difficult to determine the reasons behind the dislike of CA and it would also make me hesitate, no make that refuse, to pass judgment on the motives or thinking of the students.

Kenneth Blumenfeld’s students had a different reaction than the Georgia Tech students.

Now let’s hear something from those students!
Comment by jae

I just wanted to make the distinction that the students you are referring to from GaTech are not undergraduates. Ill revisit what Dr. Curry said a few times in the Report Card:

Student #1 is a 2nd year graduate student, slightly older and with a mature and broad perspective; student #2 is a recent Ph.D. awardee with good knowledge of statistics.

I, as well, have already received my BS in meteorology.

Im not sure that this necessarily changes the way you could read this post, but I think its important to understand the backgrounds of the “reviewers” at hand. There is a solid background in science/statistics there.

thanks.

sure there are confounding factors. But there are also confounding factors with consumers and marketing science exists. There are confounding factors with human lives and accidents and insurance and actuarial science exists. There are confounding factors in manufacturing processes and people still work to make them better. Etc. Etc. Etc.

The problem is not with the confounding factors. As you point out, these exist everywhere, including all the sciences.

The problem is the extreme reluctance of the AGW crowd to put realistic uncertainty estimates on their historical reconstructions and their forecasts based on these confounding factors. Here’s an example.

James Hansen et al., in the abstract of their “smoking gun” paper “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications” that was supposed to “prove” AGW, say the following:

Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing humanmade greenhouse gases and aerosols among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85 ±0.15 W/m2 more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space.

Now, your average journalist reading this, or even your average scientist, would assume that the “±0.15″ is some kind of an uncertainty estimate regarding the model results … but it is no such thing. It is the difference they obtained from five model runs, which means nothing. Nowhere in their paper do they offer any kind of error bars or confidence interval for their model results,

This, of course, may be related to the fact that their model results compared to actual data have a 95% confidence interval of ±1.0 W/m2 … which is not only more than nine times their quoted error, but is larger than their result as well.

And when errors or confidence intervals are quoted, most of the time they are only expected statistical errors in a reconstruction, or differences in model runs as in the example above, rather than an estimate of the actual error (results vs. reality). This practice, intentional or not, isvery deceptive, particularly to the media.

That lack of error bars or confidence intervals in the overwhelming majority of AGW studies is the problem, not the confounding factors.

w.

When the main remaining tactic of your “opponents” is to deny the existence of an argument (oh, it never mattered anyway), doesn’t that mean that at least in that niche, that the “debate is over” (so-to-speak of course)??

“JUST BECAUSE WE’RE BEREAVED DOESN’T MAKE US SAPS!!!” — Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski