In an interview with the Boston Globe, Raymond Bradley said that the hockey stick is built like an “outhouse”.
Bradley told the reporter that he’d built his outhouse out of brick – fancying himself, I guess, as the academic equivalent of the Third Little Pig.
No one has ever accused the Team of statistical sophistication and Bradley’s present distinction of reconstruction validity according (presumably) to the broad outhouse categories of brick, sticks and straw is perhaps an improvement on past statistical standards.
Most CA readers know that the MBH outhouse was actually built of bristlecone pine from the high and dry US southwest – the outhouse shown at left also coming from the high (9126 feet) dry US southwest (hike described here.)
The more recent Mann et al 2008 was built at least, in part, out of mud. While the part using mud may well have been built robustly, it was also built upside down. A definite disadvantage when the outhouse is put to use.
Update: Jeff Id reports the two-level outhouse shown in the following picture. As in MBH98-99, calibration is done on the upper level and verification on the lower level, with the verification statistics finding their own level. The canonical hockey stick shape is robustly derived from the altitude of the Team member as he climbs up the stairs in order to do his calibration.
Climate Audit 
46 Comments
Like an outhouse in that it stinks.
Does the climate-science community not repudiate Mann et al because they are so intimately linked together?
Their conclusions and data (not to mention their ethics and morals) are so conspicuously errant that there must be some movement towards a distancing from the source of the scat.
The outhouse collapsed, but people keep using it. That makes for a REAL mess!
The hike link is giving me only the picture.
Article describing the hike is
“dragged into politics” ??!!
Hmmmm. More like “riding to the sound of the guns” of politics. Perhaps the reason for the divergence of opinion on the science of world’s climate is due to his spending too much time in a looking glass world.
“When I use a word,it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
A brick outhouse with a timber roof is a good idea, however if you make the walls out of timber, and the roof out of brick, implosion is likely, and claims you used brickwork in the original construction are not going to impress people.
The good news is that the model used in building the outhouse pictured above is still indicating that the outhouse was perfectly conceived.
Hughes is playing the victim card as others involved in the ClimateGate fiasco have done. For example, it was used by Jones among others in their argument that FOI requests were being used to divert clever scientists from their important work.
Tolstoi explained the intellectual blindness in Hughes’ position many years ago when he said,
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Tim, thanks for that. It’s time we had a bit more Tolstoy around here. The epic quality, but with a fox’s grasp of the detail (if you follow Berlin in seeing the novelist as a fox who longed to be a hedgehog). We need both of those. As for our host, it’s like a cross between Leo Nikolayevich and Perelman. Hilarious.
Check out the set-up of skeptics in this quote of Bradley in the Boston Globe article Steve links to:
——-
Despite his initial horror at being dragged into the public arena, Bradley recognizes that the battle will be won or lost there. He said, “We have to take on global warming as a political issue. Scientists need to stop self-flagellating if they can’t convince Rush Limbaugh and his followers. Let’s go for the other 60 percent who will listen. Right now, that’s basically a Democrat and left group. [. . .]”
——-
This raises a number of issues that I find interesting and/or disturbing. One of the biggest ones for me is that it seems Bradley is trying (in a seemingly underhanded and unfair way) to give newcomers to the debate the impression that argument was started by the skeptics. We of course know that the argument was started through the pushing of junk science and false information, and the intransigence of the pushers over a period of years — their unwillingness to admit errors that must by now be obvious to everyone who takes a serious interest in these matters.
snip
RTF
The upside down outhouse is still statistically superior to the two level.
Is that an ocean front one to account for rising sea levels?
Is that the restroom at your company, Jeff? 🙂
Well Pat, for some reason I often think my office is on the lower level. Poor engineering IMO.
When I meet other corporate owners at trade shows, sometimes I break the ice with ‘right at the bottom of the pile with me’. It usually is well received.
Did they rent out the basement suite?
Strangely, the journalist did not ask Bradley about his well paid Fritts transcription service.
I wonder if he wanted to say “built like a brick shit house” and realised that it was literally true.
Any structural engineer will tell you it matters not one jot how the superstructure is built if the foundations are inadequate.
Some time ago I met a French Canadian who was practising his English at a marine station in New Zealand:
“he was built like a shit brick house” he said
Now I know what he meant.
I don’t care what they make it out of. It still stinks.
Regardless of what the building is made of, an outhouse is nothing more than a hole in the ground where people dump crap.
The symbology is too rich.
Great post, Steve!
Of course Bradley deserves credit for a truly hilarious metaphor. I guess he is finally admitting that the hockey stick involved unorthodox techniques and materials — about time!
I think he forgot the mortar …
I guess if we want to develop the hockeystick as an outhouse/brick shit house further, should we mention that “forcing” is relevant to both?
Not to be too picky, BUT, the Three Little Pigs built residences, NOT Outhouses. As has been mentioned, outhouses are still full of excrement, just like Bradley’s Hockey Stick. A Freudian Slip by Bradley per chance? I believe Mann has been more careful and not worn his slip in public, only in publicized e-mails and certain private computer file folders.
I love his claimed surprise at being dragged into politics. He creates, with Mann, a false POLITICAL SLEDGEHAMMER, incidentally making previous paleo scientists look like fools, and then claims to be surprised that he is dragged into politics.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
One of the drawbacks of the brick outhouse is that it can’t be moved as is occasionally done to wooden ones. It just remains, full of _______!
Raymond Bradley should just let Mann do the all talking. I guess they had a tiff though. Isn’t Bradley the one that said about Mann, “excuse me while I puke?”
Maybe that is why they cannot “move on”.
Sundance, yes the model will always match the outhouse no matter how many observations have to be adjusted or by how much!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Is this the one he meant?
http://www.jldr.com/ohcement.html
Didn’t Chris Mooney say that 4 climate scientists were building hideaways to survive the coming climate crisis? If Bradley is building an outhouse, it seems that he is one of those scientists.
Anyone have a link to the Mooney story?
It seems to be Greg Craven who said it (see http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/18/agu-fall-meeting-part-iii-an-open-letter-from-greg-craven/)
He says:
“It might surprise, and hopefully disturb you, to hear that in my short time at AGU, I discovered four scientists who are already creating some form of survival retreat for their family, and they told me there are many more. But they are all too scared of being ostracized in the scientific community if they speak of it. It struck me that they aren’t even “in the closet” yet. They still think they are isolated freaks of nature, ashamed to share what they truly feel.”
Showing that these guys really ‘believe it’, where ‘it’ is hard to specify exactly but sure is catastrophic. Whatever shortcuts (at worst, deceptions) are uncovered in the science this must be kept in mind. It’s not a scam in the most facile sense. Noble cause corruption some call it, though I’ve never gone that far. Jeff’s two-level outhouse has become my model.
The funny thing is that somebody who is built like “brick **** house” usually has an abundance of natural curves. And the curves BALANCE. So if the MWP Bumps were balanced with the modern Bumps, well you get the idea
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brick%20House&defid=2107398
I’ll stop with that since …… oh nevermind
totally Off topic.
making simple R packages on windows
http://stevemosher.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/making-simple-packages-in-r-on-windows/
10 easy steps. err kinda.
Anyway, steve, it should work for you and others. Write if you have any trouble.
Later I’ll dive into the details of incorporating C code or fortran ( I think chad likes this)
he Roman I got your Note. I actually Met Hadley this past Monday. He gave a lecture on interactive R graphics that he is working on. very nice stuff. I use a bunch of his stuff.
Clearly, Bradley is trying to gin up interest in his book.
One statement caught my eye:
“Inhofe put out this anti-IPCC report and coupled it with a call for 17 scientists to be indicted. It got on the front page of every newspaper.’’
I could find no verification of this, even on green websites.
Sorry for this but being brought up in the “back to back” streets of Northern England where each house had a brick outhouse (very polite description) at the end of the yard we were regaled of tales of how during the night in the bygone years the “Muck Men” would pull their cart down the “entry” between the houses and shovel out the “privies” (brick outhouses). There was even a school yard song:-
Muck Men, Muck Men, toilers of the night
Muck Men, Muck Men, with barrows full of sh*te
Straw on the wheels so not to make a sound
Sorting out the yellow from the brown
That’s my recollection, the web finds:-
http://www.harmonieii.co.uk/caving/they%20words/muck.html
Sadly I am forced to think as to who the modern day “toilers of the night” maybe.
Did you hear the one about the constipated climate ‘scientist’?
Worked it out with a pencil?
Bradley’s “brick outhouse” analogy fits most of climate science perfectly. It’s a repository for inferences based on crappy data. And what really stinks is the flow of dollars it attracts in a spree of wasteful spending.
Mountains in Australia do not rise higher than 7,310 feet, so we use gravitational priciples and send it downwards in the famous “long drop”. There have been several photographic and descriptive books on the Australian Dunny, with the earliest, I think, being:
Dunnies, dykes and longdrops / Douglass Baglin, Yvonne Austin
Book Bib ID 1332676 Format Book, Online – Google Books
Author Baglin, Douglass, 1926- Edition 1st ed. Description Auckland, N.Z. : Beckett-Sterling ; Brookvale, N.S.W. : Child & Henry Publishing, 1984. 55 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm. ISBN 0908676107 Subjects Outhouses – Pictorial works.
Feom Wikipedia, we have this 1960s photo. pre-sewerage, of lines of dunnies in Brisbane, showing how thorough we were in replicating experiments. Wiki also gives the origin of “dunny”, “thunderbox”, “long drop”, “dyke”, “crapper”, “bog” and other synonyms.
Once again, the NH and the SH might have to be treated as discrete cases (of crap).
Worked it out with a hockey stick.
Odd that ‘hockey sticks’ turn up in lots of other proxies which aren’t associated with tree rings (glacier length records, ocean floor foram records, permafrost temperatures, borehole records, ammonium concentrations from tropical ice cores, sediment fluxes to valley bottoms). Maybe they exist after all?
I would have compared the Hockey Stick to a stool you might find in an outhouse, given its propensity to bend in compliance with more recent reconstructions…
From the Bradley interview linked above it is rather obvious that Bradley is and has been very much the advocate/scientist. That he plays the politics well is evident in his attempt to portray the scientist/advocate as a victim and state that scientists must now become advocates for the cause. In other words, these scientists have been quietly going about their businesses, and have been pulled into the debate unwillingly – and apparently forced Bradley to write a book about it.
Washington politicians can indeed be pompous and overbearing in their hearings, but I think all that does is allow scientists like Bradley to avoid discussing the details of the evidence and change the subject to their being victims. Why would a scientist refer to a works of theirs as being robust like a brick outhouse? That is a metaphor expected of a politician with no content.
Funniest post ever, many thanks!
2 Trackbacks
[…] descended into a joke, still thinks it relevant. Despite the thorough kicking it has been handed by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Raymond Bradley has defended this disgrace to science. ‘Scientifically, […]
[…] […]