Just a short note about an article in the Skeptical Inquirer on the subject of "Judging Authority" and the necessity of critical thinking.
Living well requires that we be able to evaluate our environment rationally. Simple things, like crossing the street, shopping, eating, and listening to our doctors, involve three skills: critical thinking, evidential reasoning, and judging authority. Many people, including previous authors writing for the Skeptical Inquirer (Lett 1990; Wade and Tavris 1990), have discussed the first two of these. Here I focus on the last of them, judging authority, but I must revisit the other two first because they are central to it. These same skills are fundamental to scientific reasoning as well, since the ordinary person and the scientist both need to understand our personal or scientific surroundings. Indeed this short article is an outgrowth of material I present to science students first learning the methods of science, but this should not discourage the nonscience reader, for science and everyday life are far closer in function than most would suppose.
Continue reading →
Briffa’s temperature reconstruction from Tornetrask (northern Sweden) tree rings is a staple of multiproxy studies, used in Bradley and Jones [1993], Hughes and Diaz [1994], Jones et al. [1998], MBH98, MBH99, Briffa and Crowley and Lowery [2000], Briffa et al. [2000], Bradley, Hughes and Diaz [2003], Mann and Jones [2003], Jones and Mann [2004]. Briffa makes an ad hoc "adjustment" to the MXD chronology which has a dramatic impact on the relation of 20th century and medieval levels of the chronology, which then affects all downstream multiproxy studies. Continue reading →
Mann has recently provided some inaccurate information on his treatment of bristlecone pines. Continue reading →
Today we passed 100,000 hits since this site started on Feb. 7. On Feb. 14, after a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, we got just under 4,000 hits. We’ve just passed 4,000 hits today with slashdot traffic. New slashdot readers specifically interested in the MBH98 dispute should try the Categories tab at right to pull out MBH98 topics. Specific discussion of realclimate responses is in the older posts Errors Matter #1, Errors Matter #2, Errors Matter #3 and Was Preisendorfer’s Rule N used in MBH98?
The work of McIntyre and McKitrick has been mentioned on slashdot (after an interminable wait, it seems)
theidocles writes "The ongoing debate over the ‘hockey stick’ climate graph has an interesting side note. McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code and it’s written using the well-known R statistics package (covered by the GPL). Mann, Bradley & Hughes, the defenders, described their algorithm but have only released part of their source code, and refuse to divulge the rest, which really makes it look like they have some errors/omissions to hide (they did publish the data they used). There’s an issue of open source vs closed source as well as how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose – should they be allowed to generate ‘closed-source’ solutions at the taxpayers’ expense?"
This was sent to me by Ross McKitrick, a man who knows how to ruin an Englishman’s afternoon with a single e-mail.
The Canadian Government, fresh from doubling its estimate of how much the Kyoto Protocol will cost the Canucks, and without a clue as to what to do about crashing the Canadian economy mitigating the effects of future climate change, has sent these materials out to the proud educators of those lucky young Canadians of school age, in order to frighten them with a ludicrous extrapolation from only a few years’s data, all the way to the year 2100.
Apparently there’s some nice big posters to go on the walls and everything. Just in case the kids get too rowdy, they are to be put in front of it and told "this is your future unless you behave!"
That’ll teach ’em. It’s the climate science version of "tough love"
Continue reading →
There are many regional proxies from around the world that do show the existence of a warm period (warmer than today in most places) called the "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Climate Optimum" roughly from 900-1350AD and a "Little Ice Age" roughly from c.1450 to 1850AD.
Amongst the strongest evidence of this is a study done by Dr Lloyd Keigwin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in 1996. The study was done in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda, and involved an area of sea bed which had a very high rate of sedimentation (paleoclimatologists like such areas because they can produce high resolution sedimentary information) and a particular species of plankton called Globigerinoides ruber.
Continue reading →
In human behavior, when people have stated a position that they believe to be true, they are subsequently loath to admit error, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To be wrong, is in a sense, to sense shame or failure.
But the fact is, we’re all wrong from time to time. We’re all human and make mistakes in our reasoning and our understanding. I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting that I was wrong about something, that I am wrong now about things that I currently believe, or that I will be wrong in the future. Human history is replete with demonstrations of clear error and mistaken reasoning.
The true error is never to admit that fallibility, especially when it comes in an area with which you are most skilled and most recognised. You have a reputation to maintain, a professional dignity to uphold. But reputations are destroyed, not because of mistakes or errors, but because of the inability to admit error and mistakes. For an example of this sort of phenomenon, see the works of James "The Amazing" Randi in such books as "Flim-Flam", or look at what happened to the scientific careers of Pons and Fleischmann or Jacques Benveniste.
Continue reading →
The coverage of the hockey-stick story continues in Germany. Continue reading →
Thanks to a couple of readers, who’ve pointed out both a discussion of the "Hockey Stick Row" and its inclusion as a question fo the week.
The question of the week was here
A row erupted this week over the so-called "hockey stick graph". What does this graph purport to show?
A: The bending of an "ideal" hockey stick under varying degrees of pressure
B: Temperature variation in the northern hemisphere over the last 1,000 years
C: Damage to the human ear drum caused by noises of varying volume
Continue reading →
Climate Audit 
Slashdot: McIntyre & McKitrick (2005) and open source science
The work of McIntyre and McKitrick has been mentioned on slashdot (after an interminable wait, it seems)