The obvious conclusion is that the paper is no more than a conspiracy to try to smear climate sceptics. But you have to wonder who they are letting in to Oxford these days when they can make such basic schoolboy errors and be ignorant of the work of Cox.

Stewgreen and others.....

Out of curiosity, has the Royal Society ever produced a formal opinion on Cook's 97% Consensus? Cook, Lewandowsky and fellow collaborators still seem to quote it, as though it IS taken seriously.

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2016/02/the-grimey-science-of-conspiracy-theories.html

I've had an acknowledgement from ITV that the issue has been "fed back to the relevant teams". Nothing from McGovern yet though - perhaps anything that hasn't an .edu or .ac mail address goes to his spam folder. I don't have one of those.

I wonder if AF Neil might be interested in interviewing Grimes. He could do an excellent job.

On the surface, the concept that conspiracies have to be small to persist isn't a bad one. My first theory how to prove that Charles didn't kill Diana was that there was NO WAY the French would have passed up the chance to embarrass the UK monarchy if he had had her bumped off. In most cases of conspiracy there are too many people involved who could blow the conspirators out of the water. And do, the British governments haven't been able to keep a secret for ages.

But keeping something secret and getting away with something are different things. Many of the stinkers that governments get through aren't secret. Look at Cameron's dealings over the Brexit - everyone knows he's asked for nothing substantial and has got even less but there's every likelihood the country will vote to stay in the EU. If the public added up all the bad stuff from Europe, they'd have no reason not to leave but we don't do that. Not because it's secret but because it's huge, boring and the alternatives wouldn't be much different. The masters of red tape have been stitching us up for centuries and we let them. It's not a secret, it's just very, very effective.

A good example of where a secret isn't a secret are the cases of child abuse in the Catholic Church and the British entertainment industry. Given that there were jokes about both, long before the stories broke, people knew. Ironically they were both suppressed for the same reason, to protect the institutions and the good they do. The Catholic Church has a very long history of abusing people and generation after generation have turned a blind eye to what were very poorly kept secrets. Part of the reason is that it was genuinely unsafe to criticise something that big and that popular, particularly amongst the powerful. But most people rationalise the issue away themselves. They convince themselves that someone else will deal with the problem or that they’ve over interpreted what they’ve seen.

I can bet that there are pop stars abusing teenagers right now but not only do the colleagues of the perpetrator think it's ok, many of the victims will have gone willingly into their abusers arms. Only when their abuser is ugly and rich will they begin to question who was at fault. It’s important to note that even if victims are complicit in their abuse, it’s still abuse. This is just an explanation why people get away with obviously abominable things.

People are very good at rationalising bad stuff. History is littered with examples and none of them were secrets as such. Maybe the worst examples are known by only a few and wider groups only suspect but they deliberately don’t look deeper. Woven into the denial are the good things the bad thing brings. Germany has and still does think it can run Europe better than those countries run themselves. Jimmy Savile did raise a lot of money for charities. Certain celebrities brought pleasure to wide audiences. If you rock the boat, you lose the good stuff along with the bad. So don’t rock the boat.

And that brings us to the Climate Change Bandwagon. It’s not a secret. It’s a massive institution built across countries and cultures. It’s garnered support from places as far apart as the World Bank and Age UK. Kids are being indoctrinated to its basic dogma every single day. Nobody thinks what they’re doing is part of a plan, never mind a conspiracy. How many know what climate sensitivity is, let alone what the values are or mean? Even scientists don’t know much about the facts. Organisations like the Met Office might say that the public don’t want to be burdened by the sciency stuff but they’re not testing the theory either. I’m almost certain that the odd caveat they now add are purely there because of sceptic pressure.

When Lysenkoism collapsed under the weight of its anti-science reality, the promoters and supporters of Lysenko's consensus had the luxury of anonymity to hide behind.
Lew/Cook/Grimes/etc., etc., etc. live in the age of the internet. Their bilge and slime is well documented and recorded for posterity.
The entertainment value of watching those low lifes backtrack in the future makes what they do worth tolerating today.

From my little chats with some of you it is clear that a conspiracy view of climate science is common. If you think you don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, consider how most arguments here revolve around accusation - against scientists or organizations etc. In other words, people think scientists etc have an ulterior motive - a conspiracy. Perhaps you should try to go a week, or even a month, without questioning the motives of scientists. Just take their work at face value on the assumption that they are all well meaning (if misguided, in your view) people; criticize just their work.

Raff:

Is politics a conspiracy? Let's at least say that people like Figueres are quite open that their goals are political, and climate is just the means of promoting their politics.

Raff when does turning a blind eye to incompetence become a conspiracy? When does objecting to it become ideation?

It doesn't add up, Tiny, answer those questions yourselves. Do you think Figueres is leading a conspiracy? Do you think that when thousands of climate scientists ignore the work of a psychologist when a few loudmouth bloggers shout about it that amounts to a conspiracy? How many papers are written each year on climate that scientists need to read to keep abreast of the subject and how many do you think scientists should read that are out of their field? Is it reasonable that they should comment on some nonsense written by a psychologist too?

Not wanting to initiate a PLOS account, some technical observations which may (or may not) be useful.

Prof Tol does Grimes too much credit with reference to a (Cox) journal article. This paper would be a bad error in a first (full) probability course. You cannot write down just any function of time as the intensity function for a Poisson process and expect to get well defined probabilities. Basically intensity has to be additive over time intervals. The defence seems to be that it works if the intensity is constant. Well yes, but that is such a trivial 'theory' as to be pointless. The number of 'conspirators' is obviously important, if not in the way Grimes represents.

If people really must go down this path, conspiracies seem more like contact process models used to study epidemics.

I'm sure Jonathan Jones won't mind me repeating a few of his words which make for a good explanation of the mathematical error to a lay reader:

In medical terms the non-monotonic curves correspond to a situation where dead patients spring back into life if you wait long enough.

Martin Robbins points out at Little Atoms that Grimes uses a grand total of three (3) real life conspiracies as his data set.

Actually, it's worse than that because one of them, the PRISM surveillance program, hardly counts in the same category as the other two. PRISM originated from the United States National Security Agency (NSA). For those that weren't aware, the NSA is paid to do things secretly. For crying out loud, it's their job.

Then there's all the false negatives that may, or may not, exist. A conspiracy that is never exposed is, well, never exposed and so would not, and could not, be included in the data.

Grimes is another example of a Physicist chancing his arm at political psychology and sociology and proving only that he wasn't as good at Mathematics as he may have led his employer to believe. Now who else does that bring to mind?