Simon, you said I’m “reactively not honest” (whatever that means) and that I engage heavily in sophistry - the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving - and then claim that you didn’t really call me dishonest. Bah!

You made these claims against me, so justify them. Give some examples or admit that you cannot.

- an example of my “sophistry”
- an example of me killing a debate
- one “point of truth” that is so obviously true that I should concede but which I have instead drowned in drivel.
- one example of my lack of 'candour'.

"I can’t be bothered" isn’t really good enough. You could be bothered enough to make those accusations, now stand by them with some examples.

Chandra - in case you missed my question to you on the "Psychology of Climate belief/dis-belief" discussion thread:

//
"What is your best evidence that model predictions don’t work?"

Wrong way round - what is your best evidence they do work? Like the coin flipped out of view - how do you demonstrate that guessing its outcome correctly isn't chance? How many correct guesses do you need to show predictive power? How does each incorrect guess impact on that confidence? What is your model for model success?

Mar 25, 2014 at 9:23 PM | Unregistered Commenter not banned yet
//

Please could you answer? Thanks

thinking scientist, you don't know already?

thinkingscientist asked you to give your understanding of the definition of “climate science”; the rest of your post is just confirmation of your wriggling; you are like a worm on a hook, and no matter how hard you struggle, you cannot get off it. As Martin A has intimated, you do seem to seriously suffer from confirmation bias; you would be doing yourself a big favour in working hard to eradicate – or at least control – that.

This is the reason I suspect that you are a junior researcher for a minor politician; you appear to deliberately choose to misunderstand quite clear comments, and offer very poor-quality evasive replies. You have a long way to go to become a Sir Humphrey.

Chandra: flattered as I am by your liking me to 007 (anyone else in my field would look at my descriptions and say, “meh…”), you do make it obvious that you did not read past the second paragraph, and even those two were not read thoroughly.

From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.

Chandra.

I do not usually care to reply to your interventions but your 2.42pm question is of a different order and I am provoked. My reply will embrace your question and related matters.

1. All my contributions to this blog are typed into a word file (with RANT in the title!) and copied into Bishop Hill's contribution box. The 'From the Ecclesiastical ... ... ... mind' tag is already there, so part of the answer to your question about my purpose in including it is to save myself the trouble of deleting it or fiddling with complex copy procedures.

2. All the foregoing in the context of more weighty considerations:

3. Notwithstanding copious arguments to the contrary, I find it helpful to know who I am listening to or whose writings I am reading. My understanding of what I hear or read is dependent upon the identity of the source. Whether or not this demonstrates some sort of failure on my part does not interest me - I merely report it as a fact. Thus, it irritates me that the Bishop Hill platform does not automatically enter the contributor's name at the head of his contribution, and I frequently have to scroll down to the bottom of a contribution to discover whose it is before reading it or, I fear, passing on. I have always supposed that I am ordinary and that my feelings about any number of things will be much the same as those of the average man in the street, blogger, or whatever, and so I seek to provide readers the same information that I would wish were automatically provided by Bishop Hill. So thus the reason for an identification at the head of my contributions.

4. Next to the details of the identification. Names do not reveal much. Who is Chandra, or Ecclesiastical Uncle, Richard Drake, Geronimo or etc? They say almost nothing about what sort of person he is, how old he is, who paid his wage, what sort of work he does or did and etc, which are matters that inform ME about the writer and the way his contribution should be understood. So, apart from a name, actual or pseudo, I include background information.

5. I think I am a vulnerable person - in a way that will not be readily appreciated by the average blogger. (Imagine I am criminal on the run!) Accordingly I use a pseudo-name. In the words that follow I provide a description of my past in what I hope is enough detail to inform any reader about what I am likely to mean by any particular word, but, except for a priviledged few who my be privy to the codes I use, in insufficient detail to identify me.

So there!

Ecclesiastical Uncle
As a result of your header I usually read your postings, like many others I only read Chandra's when excerpts are copied into replies by other more rational contributors

Chandra

May I please ask you to read the following?

It's the resignation letter of Professor Hal Lewis formerly of the APS.

Please.

Don't misinterpret or speed read and please keep in mind some very good advice you have had from commentators in this thread.

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer "explanatory" screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people's motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don't think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Radical Rodent / Thinking Scientist, I didn't answer because the question seemed fatuous, but if you must have a definition, climate science is the scientific study of all aspects of climate. Happy now?

Andy Jones, what is the significance of the letter to you? You have the opinions of a physicist who has no apparent knowledge or experience in climate science and you impart to them great value just because he is or was a distinguished physicist. He's just another false authority.

I tried Chandra.

I really did. Never mind.

I hope you will be able to forgive yourself in the years to come.I assure you you are forgiven from me anyhow. I understand you more than you realise.

When the penny does drop I guess you won't feel able to grace these pages after that which is a shame as you really don't strike as a bad sort at all. Should you ever want to expand your mind please engage (I hope you have read The Allegory of the Cave and one day understand it)..

Paradise Lost comes to my mind.

I'll see you around I'm sure.

Andy

I am in agreement with your Toy-boy, Chandra. Few, if any, on here hold any rancour or bitterness towards you, just exasperation at your insistence on misreading almost every comment. You may have considered the question of your idea of the definition of “climate science” as fatuous, but it is of great importance to us, so that we may have a fuller understanding of what you understand by it. Alas, it seems, very little, and it would appear that you have every intention of keeping it that way.

While my summation of my own understanding on the previous page may have been off-puttingly verbose, you might at least have tried to offer some constructive criticism on where I have erred, rather than just dismiss it in such an off-hand manner. Such dismissal, as well as your eagerness to pounce on every perceived insult (no, there is no way that it could be read that you should be considered one of the choir in Martin A’s comment, nor of your mendacity; I suspect that everyone else reading would have seen that as a slight upon Monty, most certainly not you) has to lead me to conclude that you are not here to learn by debate, but to harangue.

Radical Rodent

has to lead me to conclude that you are not here to learn by debate, but to harangue.

Simon Hopkinson
Yes and yes.

Mike Jackson,

> You are "just another false authority".

No, you don’t understand the concept. I am authority to no one, neither do I try to be.

> Why don't you simply follow your own
> advice and shut the f*** up on subjects
> you don't understand

As if you understand anything any better. The obvious answer is f*** you!

Andy Jones, look at it from my perspective. You would all treat with disdain any comment I made on the basis that it was supported by James Hansen. I’d have people complaining of arguments from authority or some such. Yet Hansen is as accomplished a scientist as your Hal Lewis and has as much experience in climate science as anyone. Yet you expect me to be impressed by letter from Lewis despite his complete absence of experience in climate related work. I don’t understand why my lack of a ‘wow’ response should be the last straw for you. How could you have expected any different?

Radical Rodent, it can indeed be upsetting when one spends the time to write a long piece of prose and it is ignored. As your long post began, “As you are all arguing…” I didn’t think it was directed just at me. And I have to admit that I only skimmed it and didn’t feel it worth dissecting. However, if you want the gory details:

> I rely upon my own basic observations
> as the greatest authority to refer to.

As I indicated before, I find that statement ridiculous. I didn’t think it worth commenting further on your analysis after reading that.

> Point 1): this increase … has been to the benefit …

Possibly true.

> That this has occurred outside of natural
> variability has to be questioned…

Questioning is usually good.

> Point 2): most of the changes are of limited area

I doubt that is true. Think of the deforestation for agriculture and the changes that global agriculture has brought about. Think of current day deforestation. Think of the massacre of Bison herds and native indians in America. Think of the destruction of once bounteous fisheries. Think of pollution of lands and rivers, eutrophication of seas. etc

> While environments can be changed,
> “The Environment” cannot be damaged.

Doesn’t really mean anything unless you define “The Environment”

> Point 3): … Is there any historical reference
> to base any catastrophic scenario upon?

Climate has changed drastically in the past, that is probably what you are looking for.

> the human contribution to the observed
> increase in CO2 is considered to be a very
> small proportion (circa 3%), so how can it
> be a given that a reduction in human
> emissions will result in a lowering of the
> concentration?

CO2 levels have increased by 40% in 150 years. I don’t recognise your 3%.

> Also, the idea that CO2 is the driving factor
> in the temperature of the planet is contradicted
> by the “thousands of climate scientists” onto
> whose word you cleave, Chandra, who insist
> that it is, yet explain away the present “hiatus”
> as “other, unknown factors”.

There’s lots of discussion of a ‘hiatus’ including that it doesn’t exist. But I think everyone who knows about the effect of CO2 agrees that without CO2 in the atmosphere the planet would be cold and that increasing CO2 will raise temperatures. Like people here say when they are not denying a role for CO2, “it is all about sensitivity”. There are other things that influence temperature but they don’t change the basic role of CO2.

> To question the idea of cAGW: there may be GW,
> but is it because of A? And, is it necessarily going
> to be c? Unlikely, in both cases.

Nearly everyone who have studied it concludes that AGW is true. Whether is it CAGW and for which populations it would be catastrophic are still unknown risks.

> … hype … fear … poor people giving already-rich
> people their money…

That your views align so strongly with the interests of powerful resource extraction industries makes me reject your supposed concern for the plight of the poor either in the UK or in the developing world. I just don’t buy it and neither does anybody else I imagine.

> That many of the politicians who are involved
> with the hype are also beneficiaries from the
> “solutions” must also raise some questions.

Questioning is usually good.

> Which brings us back to Monty and the BBC, …

If ‘sceptics’ stick to expression of honest scientific scepticism then I doubt viewers or scientists would object to their being on TV.

> Ultimately, there has to be the question: … fear,
> control etc

Questioning is usually good. But it can become farcical.

Simon Hopkinson
Come on give me some examples of my sophistry and lack of candour. And tell me an obvious truth that I “drowned in drivel”.

> I'm under no illusions; I'm here mainly to
> learn, [from those] who are willing to impart
> their wisdom.

Trouble is those who have wisdom to impart are afraid of correcting your and other’s errors because it goes against the spirit of not correcting a fellow sceptic. You can write tosh the whole day and nobody is going to put you right. So you can’t tell the tosh from any true wisdom that by chance might appear.

Chandra, if you ever want to talk again (rather than just "headbutt") please do just that when you see me here and around. I still do not think you are a "troll" in the Monty mold (he certainly was one...but just as trapped within his own paradigm as I guess many of us are..Just a little more tortured by it).

I would hope that you've already spotted that I have an extremely irreverent and whimsical view on life and existence.......I take very little indeed either too seriously or to heart.

The offer of a dialogue outside of this forum is still there.

You take care now. Can you just as an aside please confirm whether you are a chap or lass.? This is for my own future reference when I respond to your contributions here in future or especially when commenting to someone else here about a contribution you have made. It allows me to feel I'm being more respectful to you at least.

Ta.

Andy

Martin, ta.

Indeed.

A case of "unknown knowns" I suppose.

Makes the world more interesting anyway.

A

P.S. Prof Happer is another very interesting person as well. He retains such a calm lucidity even in the face of overt stupidity and calmly tries to dispel the myths of those he debates with. Quite lovely to watch the style actually.

Professor Lewis was Chair of a US Defense Science Board task force that evaluated the possibilty of 'nuclear winter' - climate change that could result from nuclear war. This involved computer modeling of climate scenarios.