John A has briefly come out of retirement and set up a CA bulletin board, see here for prototype – which I’m hoping will resolve some blog operating issues. The Bulletin Board presently has 4 main forums and provides for threads within a forum like other boards. I can see a couple of advantages to this.
The big problem for me right now in managing the blog is the huge discrepancy between where I stand on proxy issues and physics issues.
In the multiproxy area, at this point, I’ve become expert in the discipline. I know exactly what’s new and what isn’t new and more or less where each new study fits. When I was at AGU, I was flattered and pleased by the familiarity and interest of several leading paleo-ocean scientists in the blog; they said that they read the blog regularly, got ideas from it. A few dendros were even very friendly. So to some extent, the blog has established a technical niche based on my personal knowledge of the data and methods. Yes, I need to write up articles to collate many of the observations made here, but the regular audience has got a pretty good idea by now of what one can expect and not expect from proxy reconstructions.
For general readers, in a way, the very success of the criticisms of the millennial proxy reconstructions has caused them to lose interest in the topics. (On a personal basis, I haven’t lost interest in them as there are many interesting academic issues that I find intriguing whether or not they “matter” to climate policy.) Even if the Hockey Stick is wrong (as one Energy and Commerce Committee member put it – even if Mann had never been born), AGW is still an issue. Arguably the focus in IPCC TAR on the Hockey Stick distracted them from trying to present the real arguments to the public.
However, in the physics area, I’m not expert. I’ve got some thoughts, but I’m not intimately familiar with the literature, the methodology. Readers here want to know how you get to 2.5-3 deg C from doubled CO2 – step-by-step through radiation, atmospheric physics, radiative-convective models, GCMs, whatever. No missing steps. So do I.
Any scientist from another discipline attempting to understand these things from first principles starting from IPCC is, in my opinion, going to be very frustrated, as the paper trail, if it exists, is hard to find.
I think that the way that I do things can be help general readers understand some of the physics issues. I start with IPCC, try to determine the provenance of their results, working backwards through the literature. In my opinion, this is a logical way to do things although it takes time. As noted elsewhere, I think that IPCC has been horrendously negligent in failing to provide a proper exposition of these topics. (I’m not criticizing the use of cartoons per se – don’t have any problem with cartoons; quite the contrary, I’m a big believer in cartoons as distilling the essence of a point. I’m critical of the seeming disconnect between the cartoons and any documented provenance.)
I’m not in a position to wade through GCMs, but I think that there is a useful approach via the radiative-convective models, which are intrinsically interesting in a mathematical way. In addition, my own hunch is that the salient CO2 issues should be identifiable through 1-D radiative-convective models and that the 3-D models probably introduce a myriad complications irrelevant to the CO2 issues. I think that I can see a path towards picking away at how 4 wm-2 is arrived at, how feedbacks work etc.
Unlike many readers here, I’m not the sort of person who assumes that specialists are wrong. I presume that they are right. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile for general readers to understand the arguments. While specialists like to mystify their specialties, I’m firmly of the belief that things that are well understood can be explained. If you look at the details of calculations, you sometime notice problems. I was surprised at the error-proneness of the Mann corpus; I certainly didn’t expect to find what Eli Rabett describes as such as “garbage can” of problems, but there it was. I would be very surprised if there was a similar garbage can in the greenhouse physics. But I see no harm in trying to work through whatever calculations that I can.
Now the blog management problem for me is that any such thread seems to open the floodgates for many readers who have their pet theories about what’s wrong with climate models, their own opinions which are all too often much too angry for my liking. In my opinion, many of the most active posters here on these issues fail to spend nearly enough time understanding how the conventional argument works and far too much time trying to prove their pet theories. I have a hard enough time trying to understand the conventional arguments, so I really am uninterested in trying to understand alternative theories until I understand exactly how the conventional argument works.
I get very frustrated when the blog seems to get turned upside down by these commenters. It’s not that the topics aren’t important; they are. But the noise level becomes far too high. Perhaps a bulletin board structure will enable me to distance myself enough from these comments so that I become less frustrated by them.
Many climate scientists get very frustrated at mischaracterizations and misunderstandings of what seem to them to be elementary issues in climate science. In my opinion, they have only themselves to blame for IPCC’s failure to provide an adequate exposition (and for what it’s worth, long before AR4 was scoped, I suggested to someone familiar and involved with scoping that they provide such an exposition. So it’s not like I’m criticizing them after the fact.) As I;ve mentioned before, they should start looking in the mirror a little more rather than blaming others.
Anyway, as a form of blog management, I’m proposing to move discussion of physics-based issues to a Bulletin Board and not to permit blog comments on physics topics anymore.
This may have another advantage. When I get interested in a topic, I tend to write notes to the blog. Often, as we’re seeing right now, the notes are inter-related, which then creates a chaotic situation for someone wanting to comment and no one can really keep track of things. A forum-based mechanism might allow better for this. I’m mulling over how blog comments and bulletin board comments might inter-relate and would welcome ideas and suggestions.
Climate Audit 
44 Comments
Steve:
May I suggest that you advertise here for a blog-management helper, to do the day-to-day software-rassling that (I gather) John A. used to do.
There are quite a number of other software issues at the blog that would be nice to address, if you had someone with the time, skills and inclination to do so. I would fail miserably on items 2 & 3… 😉
Best wishes,
Pete Tillman
—
What do people mean when they say the computer went down on me?
–Marilyn Pittman/ Kate Nepveu
The link to the forum has been fixed. It is http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3
May I suggest a link to both the forums and the wiki somewhere among the links indexed on the left? Maybe under weblogs and resources?
I think the forum layout would work out very well. People who wish to pointout, what they believe are valid thought experiments and so on, could go to untreaded and not get lost in the very long threads.
Why not do an Essay Archive. Everynow and again someone could compile a mini-review which covers a topic, proof read by all comers and posted so as to stop rearguments.
Good idea. In fact, wading through some of the threads – and looking at off topic postings (even made a few myself), I was thinking you needed something like a forum. One advantage of a forum is that, anyone can start their own thread. That means, people with a particular hobby-horse can start their own topic rather than always trying to ride it into every other discussion.
phpBB makes it easy for people to start their own threads – it’s also quite easy to move threads and split threads when needed. The only down-side is that phpBB3 forums are a real spam magnet. Watch your bandwidth costs rise.
I can also see how, it is in your own interest, to try and keep the signal-to-noise ratio of your blog as high as possible.
Please don’t be too anal about “pet ideas” on the new forum. It’s enough that such free form discussions are now shunted off of the blog onto a side bar forum. There are very few places in the blogosphere to discuss this stuff and lots of pent up frustration. By providing a place, using a good forum tool as you have, you are filling an unmet demand. Thanks.
personally, I’d hand a axe to bender and let him prune the threads
Perhaps the new forum font size could be increased to match the one here? It is somewhat harder for these old eyes to read without making use of the ctl-scrollwheel option.
Climate Audit has grown so much over the years that I often wonder how Steve McIntyre has time to read and moderate all the comments and also do auditing work.
Climate Audit has become far and away the premier global warming skeptics blog even if Steve isn’t a true skeptic. This is very valuable work even if it doesn’t pay well. The payoff will come when the rights to the movie are sold. 🙂
And how many acknowledgements of the blog are there in the literature?
Says something about the culture of science these days.
Re Reid #10:
Actually, I think Steve is a true skeptic. The fact that he believes that AGW could be happening is immaterial. He is merely asking that the those attempting to set or influence policy do so based on science that withstands critical examination.
By doing so, he is expecting that experts are both knowledgeable and honest; that policy be based on tested and audited studies; and effectively that the climate science community realize that when they seek to modify the climate, that it really has moved from the world of science to the world of engineering.
The engineering study due diligence world view is, in my opinion, the most significant contribution he has made to the field.
I think the introduction of a side forum can provide some ad-hoc structure to the unthreaded threads, better support the newcomer’s urge to ask questions about what is known, and in the end be used to increase the value of the Climate Audit brand.
Steve, I understand your frustration at having to deal with all the stuff that you are only peripherally interested in, and having to protect the reputation of your blog in the face of some nutty ideas and facetious comments that get posted here.
I think the Bulletin Board idea is a good one.
Regarding post #1 by Francis, my own best-known work is a correction of an error made years earlier by the great Max Born. I certainly didn’t start out by disbelieving his paper, but in the end it was necessary to do so to resolve a scientific conflict.
All of the information from both the BBoard and the Blog is stored in a database. That information can be pulled into any view the end usr desires. The key is the ability to mark posts. Posts already have some markings. Select any from posts where postauthor=anthony watts. By adding a relevance button to each comment in the posts, a blog author could mark the comment in the database then retrieve: select any from posts where postauthor=anthony watts and postrelevance=high. With relevance stored in the database that query would pull all comments marked as relevant in posts authored by anthony watts.
I’m using some pseudo sql for to be more understandable.
Web pages could be written seperately from both the bulletin board and the blog that create whatever views are desired. Only imagination limits the way data can be viewed.
This is all addressed to the Big Zamboni, so I’m not really thinking about this from the commenters perspective (I’m looking at you, Bender) .
Finally it’d only take 5 seconds to change the Google Code for search to default to the CA radio button. Just move the checked attribute of the input tag. Some typos in this. Preview is killing me. Runs off the screen. Sentence fragments. Done.
9, I don’t know what browser you’re using, but try ctl+.
SteveMc and JohnA. Could I suggest that one of the plug in “search” facilities would be more useful than the standard search. See:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=search
Steve McIntyre – could it be possible the the CA brand is growing to such an extent that you no longer have the resources to meet the demands of the blog? Maybe you should be looking for a way of buying in expertise to deal with Thermo etc. in a way that would really get people’s attention.
Just imagine a physics thread moderated by Feynman…
Larry,
Thanks for trying to help, but I was only suggesting it to make the two sites consistent in the amount of screen real estate consumed by equivalent text. Since the sites are linked and the forum is just getting started, why not make the readability of the text equivalent without need for adjustment? Some may wish to page back and forth between the two sites.
I find ctl-scrollwheel easier than taking my hand off the mouse to use the the + or – key. 🙂
I am afraid I must disagree with you Steve. I do this for purely selfish reasons. Few can fully appreciate the daunting challenge to manage proper the Science Blog of the Year. I think most of the regulars know that it must be a 30 hr/day job. One need only peruse the volume of material accumulated thus far. It can be overwhelming for a veteran let alone a newbie.
NEVERTHELESS, I happen to like the current format. It is comfortable. Like an old faded t-shirt. I like the dynamic interplay even when sitting back to lurk. I like that I can visit several different threads discussing different topics. It is true that there is a lot of cross contamination, which is confusing and sometimes frustrating, even for a lurker. It is the nature of the beast, I think. And, I have to admit, in my own twisted sense of comedy (Here’s Johnny! Steve Mosher), watching you dance from thread to thread plowing the road can be rather sporting at times. As I said, truly selfish reasons.
A forum sounds like a bunch of Unthreaded threads running thousands of comments long with less continuity. Then again, perhaps it will draw experts to each discipline helping to guide the wayward. Perchance it is my fear of change. A wise man once said, I embrace change. You go first.
The suggestions of help, is something you must consider. I suspect there is a healthy crop of enthusiastic U of T student volunteers who could drop by and give you a hand. Their pro bono assistance would look good on a resume. They might aid in research, editing, and run the odd errand. They might silently manage the threads, a snip here, a snip there, keeping discussions on topic. Contributors would learn quickly to keep on topic. I know, thats rich coming from me.
Anyway, that is my two pence worth of poppycock.
Bob Foss,
On Firefox (and Netscape) you can set a minimum font size in your preferences. That will ensure not blog you visit shows too small a font size. I use it; I never want to deal with 9pt font. I set the minimum font to 14pt.
Every now and then, some inept web designers make forms that require me to reset this before I can fill out the form. I reduce the font for that page, fill out that form and then browse away at my preferred font size.
I signed up for the new tool, but I am worried-southwestern-midwestern-southern-USAian English is hard enough for me–being required to write and read British English may be a problem.
And I agree that you shou should spend some of the vast oil company sums to hire a horde-herder. http://www.neatorama.com/2008/01/10/ducks-redux/
I am all for whatever works best for SteveM. I would like to see him attain whatever status he aims for in the scientific community.
I admit to some trepidation that without his spiritual influence the new bulletin-board forum will degenerate to a lower signal-to-noise venue. While it may be hard to believe at times, I think that most of the commenters try to restrain themselves so as to preserve the blog’s credibility and follow Steve’s vision of a serious and focused discussion. In other words, if you think the threads get unruly now, wait until people have carte blanche to indulge themselves because “it’s only the forum.” Perhaps the ecology will develop differently, however; I know that I am gradually forming judgments (as mostly a lurker) about whose comments are most often worthwhile for my understanding.
In any case, I’ll be curious to see how it turns out.
Steve,
I have been reading on this site for several months and wanted to thank for your approach to the blog and the issues of auditing the climate space. I am not an expert in the field, I consider it extremely important, and I have been frustrated \ disgusted by the poor quality of thought and conversation on almost all other information sources. Your methodology of starting from basic principles and statements and digging into the provenance of each makes it possible for me to follow along with your discoveries on a way that makes great sense to me; possibly because I also have significant auditing experience from both sides. At the same time, the comments and discussions tend to flesh out the basic findings. I have found that within a short time who the “fixed theory’ posters are. Being able to discount them while learning from the high quality science posters is a major improvement over the newsgroups and single issue blogs.
Steve,
I guess the gist of my comment was that the “audit” formula of re-examining the source literature (or just even trying to locate it!…) is a very valid one, even for “mainstream” scientists. OTOH, trying to overthrow all of climate science with one’s own pet theory is quite a bit more ambitious. I support the idea of moving the “pet theories” to a forum.
#11 David, the scientific institution has to have it’s own rules, for scientific progress to proceed in an orderly fashion. The scientific journals are an important part of the process. It’s far from being perfect, and most scientists acknowledge the many shortcomings of the publication system. But one blog ain’t going to change this overnight. That the blog exists, and that mainstream scientists read it is already an accomplishment. OTOH, if it becomes an anarchic forum for everyone’s pet theory, it will lose its standing.
#13 Max Born!… that’s cool…
Since the peer review system is used in essence to winnow out the junk science (and perhaps some legitimate science can on occasion go with it), I have to agree with Steve M’s stance and priorities on analyzing the published literature first. Taking that winnowing process a step further it would make sense that an idealized operating and neutral IPCC (with regards to paper reviews) would provide the logical starting point.
What I find fun and a good learning experience at CA is analyzing climate science papers and the IPCC reviews of these papers and learning to do it not by any out of hand rejection of these works but accepting them for the facts that they present (or fail to present) and then attempting to determine how strong the evidence and analyses are for the conclusions drawn and looking at alternative explanations using the same set of facts. Along the way one can learn some statistics and climate science or, at least in my case, learning how much I did not know about the science and my deficiencies in statistical analysis of time series.
I have also found of late that after writing a post and before posting if I imposed some self-censorship, I will have satisfied my personal interest of putting into words my thoughts on a subject without cluttering the band width for others.
RE 19… Glad you liked that one.
My prediction is that the BBS will flourish and die. Fundamentally people come
here to post because they want SteveMc to ‘audit’ them, or UC or Bender or JeanS
or David Smith, or doctor curry, yes even JEG. I would hazrd that some people
come here because they like being zambonied. It’s called exploring the boundaries.
as the BBS becomes anarchy, it will get pretty damn boring, because anarchy is boring.
White noise.
So, when the BBS dies, the great unwashed will come back and the “problem” will return.
I find the attempt to control “brand”, message, meaning, fascinating. It’s impossible
of course, but there are strategies to reduce divergent behavior. Brand extension is one.
The BBS is a brand extension, but it lack one key brand ingredient.
Let people guess what that is
@Steve moscher– I think to make the BBS take off, Steve needs to place a link to the BBS in the sidebar, or do something so people posting in unthreaded know to transition over to the BBS.
SteveM, did you try the method I suggested for posting the “real” comment numbers in comments? I’m doing that at my blog even though I don’t Zamboni things.
re 27. That is not the key to success. Most people here don’t understand brand
because they don’t work with it everyday. very quickly and without thinking
write down the top 5 ideas people or associations that come to mind when you
consider this blog. Quickly now, top 5.
I registered at the forum, but never got a confirmation mail sent to my email address. I have not yet tried to log in again, but was of an understanding that I needed to click a confirmation link in an email sent to my account. I will try to login again and will report out.
Well, looks like I automatically got registered. A-OK!
I’m not getting the activation email.
I haven’t received the verification email, either. Singed up the first or second day of the post. I used a different email than I use here. Could that be the problem?
I believe that John A is waiving the email confirmation step. Just register and you are in.
I got registered, but was not notified. Maybe it just takes awhile.
>> My prediction is that the BBS will flourish and die.
My prediction is that CA will slowly die, because the audience interested in the soap opera between SM and the team is small and this stuff will get boring. Even more so as the political issue fades.
>> Fundamentally people come here to post because they want SteveMc to ‘audit’ them, or UC or Bender or JeanS or David Smith, or doctor curry, yes even JEG.
I don’t think that’s it at all. I thing people want to learn, interact, and have their ideas about science discussed and/or correcteded by various smart people and SteveMc and bender have had very little to contribute to that.
Social communities are very difficult to foster and maintain.
Steve: As Keynes, said: In the long run, we’re all dead.
re 35.
“My prediction is that CA will slowly die, because the audience interested in the soap opera between
SM and the team is small and this stuff will get boring. Even more so as the political issue fades.”
I’m sorry gunnar. I now pray for global warming to unfreeze the block of ice between your ears.
There are many types of readers here. I will list some.
A. Aerospace geeks.
B. Instrument Geeks.
C. Stats Geeks.
D. Weather Geeks.
E. Botony Geeks
F. braying mules.
and others, but one reader I think should stick out in this list.
“>> Fundamentally people come here to post because they want SteveMc to ‘audit’ them, or UC or Bender or JeanS or David Smith, or doctor curry, yes even JEG.
I don’t think that’s it at all. I thing people want to learn, interact,
and have their ideas about science discussed and/or correcteded by various smart people
and SteveMc and bender have had very little to contribute to that.”
Gunnar, do you understand the concept of Own goal? or Pwning oneself?
“Social communities are very difficult to foster and maintain.”
especially when……
[ self snip]
There should be a place where I can just have fun with a straightlines like the above.
Kinda like the batting cage at the minature golf place.
The political issue will intensify as the earth cools. A braying mule told me so.
=============================
What’s missing from BBS is Steve. This site will grow as more people see the tide start to turn, not against AGW in itself but against bad science. Steve will become the heroe for a while, and rightly so.
Personally I love the having the buliten board addition to this site. It gives me a place to lay out my thoughts in a more organized fashion. Then when time is right I can reference the correct thoughts from this blog.
No comments at the moment. Just trying (again) to see whether my attempt to leave a reply works! If so, proper comments later.
I have a lot of trouble with the search. Again, always play pretend and imagine myself a scientist using this blog as a tool. First, the issues. This text box allows text to disappear off my screen in IE 6.0. My search inside the page doesn’t always work (Cntrl+F). Finally,
Search is horrible.
I could write code that would allow posts to be ranked or marked by the Zamboni by importance. It seems that even so much as a hide or bookmark flag would be useful. Again, I’m thinking from Steve’s view, at the comment level. I don’t care much if the rest of you get any use.
My search algorithm is on display here: http://www.pronetric.com Don’t search for “the” because I haven’t corrected for that yet. I get little traffic, naturally. But, I do drill down to the paragraph level.
Search on this blog should return results at the comment level and provide better context in the search results.
I could easily construct such tools outside blog itself. In other words, tools that are seperate pages that don’t appear on the main blog, and I’m sure it’s a simple matter to back up the db for this blog. phpmyadmin?
Anyway, this is my third time volunteering technical help. I apologize. I promise not to bother again.
How about searching here:
http://projectlogos.org instead. I hope everyone had a happy Valentine’s day.
Re 41,42
No response at http://projectlogos.org
I’m with you on the search function. I’m not sure why Steve hasn’t taken you up on your offer. The on-site search box is very untrustworthy, and direct Google searches not a lot better. This is a serious issue.
Steve?
TIA, PT
Could you try it again? Search for philosopher. Notice how I return the entire paragraph.
The word is then linked to the specific work AND the paragraph in the work where the term/s are found.
It’s on Tennessee State University, so it’s flaky. I’m using a home made algorithm, so it’s probably
slow. But since CA is stored in a database, I could use an optimized SQL query to return the results.
But I can understand Steve’s reticence. He may not trust me since he doesn’t know me. I suppose I
could get Chuck Blackburn to email him. Hey may be happier with the bulletin board up. He could be busy
and not have time to manage the changes. Or it may be all of this or something else. Squash?
My textarea scrolls off screen which is why I’m putting in the crazy line breaks.
Is this forum dead?
I’m also looking for the like to the wiki that use to exist.