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| 2004/10/15-16 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:34145 Activity:very high |
10/14 Yet more global warming fraud. Is Dan Rather also
an atmospheric scientist?
Global Warming Bombshell
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo_muller101504.asp
This story was posted over a year ago, several times.
\_ This is the *exact same bullshit* that you've already posted 10 or
20 times; "analysis" by an oil company businessman (not a
scientist) which, surprise surprise, shows what the oil companies
want. His objections have already been answered many times over.
-tom
\_ I don't think you are familiar with the author of the article
or paper in question. This leads me to conclude you are
not interested in science but in political agendas. Enjoy
your fantasy land.
\_ I am quite familiar with McIntyre and McKitrick, because
you've posted references to their crap numerous times before.
You know, the crap that was rejected by peer review, and now
is seized upon by global warming naysayers as definitive
proof of...something. (The paper doesn't say that global
warming doesn't exist, in fact its conclusion is that the
data being analyzed is essentially correct for this
century). This leads me to conclude that you haven't read
the source papers or the arguments against it. -tom
\_ Do you deny putting random data into Mann's model
produces hockey stick shapes? Because that is exactly
what they've shown. The rejection from Nature was
because their paper was 'too technical'. What a joke.
\_ I would refer you to Mann's refutation, except you've
already decided to ignore it. In any case, what
difference does it make? McIntyre and McKitrick agree
that global warming is happening. -tom
\_ What refutation - 2 paragraphs in Nature?
Mann does not address the issue above. I've
also read the entire correspondence between
Mann and M&M, in which Mann comes off as
arrogant, deceitful, and all around very
suspicious. I also agree that the globe has
warmed during the 20th century, primarily
during the first half. This has nothing to
do with the fraudulent nature of Mann's paper
or sound science. You expect countries to
adapt entire economies on this kind of science!?
Unbelievable and disgraceful.
\_ using statistics to determine whether there is a trend
in global warming produces answers that only expert
statisticians can evaluate and understand. when a statician
says "the probability of a trend is X" he really implicitly
adds on "according to my model." there is a huge number of
design decisions involved in statistical analysis. these
design decisions are based on value judgments such as
whether a certain trend should be linear, whether a certain
variable is gaussian, etc. different judgments of this kind
can yield drastically different results. Statistics is
still black magic, and it is no substitute for applying the
good old fashioned precautionary principle. Statistics is
only significant if most stistical methods employed come up
with the same answer. So far, this has not been the case
with global warming. it's a total tossup.
\_ Then there's the fact that you can't use statistics
to figure out causal links, unless you either
(a) make causal assumptions to begin with, or
(b) do not only statistics (i.e. observations and
inference), but empirical science (i.e. experiments)
as well. -- ilyas, causal guy
\_ that's not true. there are rigorous definitions
of causality that permit statistical determination.
for example, look at Judea Pearl's book 'Causality'.
such definitions are intuitively appealing and more
rigorous than classical definitions of causality
that go back to Hume. my point above is that all of
statistics should be treated with suspicion, including
causality. however, assessing causlity is not
significantly more difficult to determine than
correlation (compared to the scope of the issues
i'm raising with stats).
\_ Heh. You should read Judea's book more carefully.
For Judea, the graph embodies the causal assumptions.
Without the graph you just have the joint, and no
causality can come out from just the joint unless
you can experiment. Causality and statistics are
fundamentally different. Statistics is the
study of 'observations,' causality is the study of
'immutable laws,' or if you like of 'stability.'
Causality cannot be determined from just numbers,
because almost any set of numbers has multiple
consistent causal explanations (see 'identifiability
problem'). If you think determining causality
is a subset of statistics, ask any statistician
what he thinks about that. -- ilyas
\_ Fascinating. Muller was my Physics 7C professor, and has done
some pretty interesting stuff (he was AFAIK the first to suggest
the cometary impact model for dino extinction, but didn't follow
up. His mentor Louis Alvarez was more interested and George
Alvarez--a geologist--did the follow-up to find the iridium
layer, etc.). Unfortunately, I now think he's a bit of a nut:
http://www.richardmuller.com
\_ http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/01_Springtime.htm
Need I say anymore? This guy is a partisan.
\_ Or a good evaluator of Bush's character.
\_ Dan Rather is a 5-minute expert on everything.
\_ Dan Rather is the Big Burrito! -- Dan Rather #1 fan |
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| www.richardmuller.com The early Gno stic Christians (probably including Mary Magdalene and the Apostle Thomas) believed that the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden was the greatest triumph of mankind! A classic history written in 1 863, scholarly but highly controversial, since Renan (even though he remained a devout Christian) argued that the resurrection of Lazarus was purposely faked by Jesus. Alan T Waterman Award "for highly original and innovati ve research which has led to important discoveries and inventions in div erse areas of physics, including astrophysics, radioisotope dating, and optics." He is the author of the nonfiction book, Nemesis, and coauthor of The Three Big Bangs. |
| muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/01_Springtime.htm Technology Review Online February 7, 2002 In the next few months, spring will return, we will pay our taxes, and th e United States will attack Iraq. The seasons have always returned, with perhaps a few exceptions when asteroids and comets slammed into the Ear th. Taxes are often listed among those things considered "inevitable." My prediction is not based on hearing three jackals howl in the night, or on the fact that Mars and Venus are flirting in the heavens; it's based on what I consider to be a clear vi sion of some recent political and technological events. After I review t he facts, I think you will share this vision with me. At the end of the war , United Nations inspectors visiting Tarmiya, Iraq, found a huge facilit y containing over a hundred calutrons or parts of calutrons. Calutrons were invented by Ernest Lawrenc e in the early 1940s, and he named them after "Cal"the nickname for the University of California at Berkeley, my school. His idea was to use in dustrial-scale mass spectrometry on the isotopes of uranium, and perhaps separate enough U-235 to be able to make an atomic bomb. By 1945, Lawrence's calutrons (massively insta lled at Oak Ridge, TN) had separated enough U-235 to make one weapon. A bomb based on U-235 c an use a "gun" style configuration, and this was considered so reliable (and uranium was so difficult to separate) that no test was needed. The famous "first atomic bomb" tested at Alamogordo, NM, by contrast, was a plutonium bomb. Such a bomb requires implosion, a very tricky business, and it was not clear that it would work. The uranium bomb built using calutrons, never tested, was first used o ver Hiroshima, destroying the city and its population. A few days later a plutonium bomb, a copy of the Alamogordo bomb, did the same to Nagasak i Why were we shocked to find calutrons in Iraq? The inspectors were looking for centrifuges, for laser separation, for diffusion plantsin other words, for some mode rn method of preparing nuclear material. Apparently, nobody guessed that Saddam Hussein would revert to the simplest, most reliable method, the one that had worked for the United States in its desperation five decade s earlier. Saddam had constructed facilities, at an estimated cost of $8 billion, to build a bomb that didn't require testing. According to official values released by the US Government , a critical mass of plutonium is about 6 kg. They haven't released the value for uranium, though many popular values are stated on the Web. But 6 kg of plutonium, less than a half a liter in volume, will clearly mak e a bomb. The facility was destroyed before it could be come truly productive, before it produced a critical mass. As part of the cease-fire agreement, Iraq was to allow ongoing inspection s by UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission. Those visits continu ed until August 5, 1998, when Saddam abruptly terminated all inspections . If you want to put a benign interpretation on this, you could argue that Iraq felt that its rights as an independent country had been denied, and that the UN had no right to inspect its facilities. Those who are more wary of Iraq say the end of inspections was the inevitable consequence o f good detective work by UNSCOM. These skeptics say that the inspectors would never have been allowed to find the nuclear weapons plants Saddam was building; all they could do was get close enough that Saddam would e ject them. After that, it would be up to the President and the US mili tary to do the rest. It is useful to remember the character of Saddam Hussein. He is the man w ho ordered that Kuwait be set on fire, with the expectation that it woul d burn for decades. It was done out of vengeance, out of hatred, out of a viciousness that even today i s hard to believe. Do you believe that Saddam has stopped developing nuclear weapons? The impli cation is that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Others qu estion the assumption that Saddam is guilty simply because he refuses in spections, saying that this is denying him due process. You know 3,000 people were killed by terrorists with no warning, with no demands, just out of the blue. You know that Saddam was once, a few years ago, caught in the process of trying to build an atomic bomb. You know that he ejected t he inspectors over three years ago. Can you take the risk that Saddam is not developing nuclear weapons again? The horror of September 11 was gr eat, but it was nothing compared to the potential devastation of a nucle ar explosion. Of course, you (Mr or Ms President) will first demand that inspections resume. It has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with past grievances (Iraqi agents allegedly tried to assassinate Geo rge W Bush's dad when he was visiting Kuwait in 1993). It has nothing t o do with the reports from Iraqi defectors (they could be lying). It has to do solely with the responsibilities of the US President, as he (an d many US citizens) perceive them to be. It is as predictable as the coming seasons, and as taxes. |
| www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo_muller101504.asp Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science a lso advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. W hen solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by th e fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place. In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wr ong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), publis hed by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleag ues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for c enturies during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 ye ars ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an inc rease in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. Unfortunate ly, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activi st frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlie r column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortuna tely, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficul t to pursue. But now a shock: independent Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ros s McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the comput er program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original pu blications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known a s principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program n ot do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken. This improper normalization procedure tends t o emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppres s all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitri ck created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. T his method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, aft er the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to t est procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into t he Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape! That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the sa me effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathe matics. Let me digress into a sho rt technical discussion of how this incredible error took place. In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) d ifferent data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean o f zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average aroun d that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each da ta set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, ea ch data set is normalized over its complete data period; for the global climate data that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was t he interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do tha t Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time perio d 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this proc edure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very h igh variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. |