Thursday, August 19, 2010

Judy's Tribe

Or maybe not. Bob Ward in the Guardian brings word that

Climate sceptics mislead

the public

and that one of the newer propaganda farms, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a creation of the Lawson clan,
has commissioned an investigation into the three official inquiries about the messages.

These inquiries, by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, an independent panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh, and an independent review led by Sir Muir Russell, largely cleared climate researchers of allegations of misconduct or fraud, but criticised a lack of transparency over data and methods.

However, the foundation dismissed the findings of the inquiries and commissioned Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science and Bishop Hill blogger, to investigate how they were conducted.

Ward, points out some of Montfords best didles, noting that, among other things, Andrew has an excellent memory hole

he claims that "senior climatologists have sought to undermine the peer review process and bully journals into suppressing dissenting views".

Montford tries to justify this assertion in his first chapter by highlighting the "difficulty in getting into print any result that went against the idea of catastrophic global warming".

He claims that a paper by Shaopeng Huang and co-authors on proxy temperature reconstructions from borehole measurements "never appeared in print" after being rejected by the journal Nature in 1997 because it showed that the medieval warm period had higher temperatures than today.

However Montford strangely neglects to tell the reader that the rejected paper was revised and published in the same year by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and that the authors published other papers in Nature in subsequent years.

Furthermore, Montford neglects to mention a later acknowledgement by Huang and his co-authors that their 1997 work had excluded readings from the upper 100 metres of boreholes, and so provided "virtually no information about the 20th century". They noted in a paper in 2008 that when all of the borehole data are considered, the global average temperature today is shown to be higher than during the medieval warm period. However, Montford simply omits awkward truths like this which would get in the way of his conspiracy theory.

But in important news, the Guardian also notes that washing up in the dishwasher is about as good as doing it by hand as long as you air dry

The carbon footprint of doing the dishes:
Almost zero CO2 by hand in cold water (but the plates aren't clean)
540g CO2 by hand, using water sparingly and not too hot
770g CO2 in a dishwasher at 55°C
990g CO2 in a dishwasher at 65°C
8000g CO2 by hand, with extravagant use of water

Eli chomps his carrots raw. Ms Rabett inquires about paper plates.

14 comments:

Horatio Algeranon said...

"Given such glaring inaccuracies and misrepresentations in his book, it would perhaps be wise to treat with some scepticism Montford's assessment of the validity of the inquiries into the hacked email messages." -- Bob Ward

Might also be wise for those recommending the book to actually read it first. ~@:>

chek said...

Might also be wise for those recommending the book to actually peg their nose, put on sterile gloves, do some background research then re-read it first.

Hope you don't mind that I corrected that somewhat Horatio,

Stephen said...

I initially misread the title of this post as "Judy's Tripe".

Marco said...

Perhaps this is where Judith picked up her "Some people were getting their papers rejected because they disagreed with the IPCC."
http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2010/08/judith_curry_on_antarctic_ice_climategate_and_skep.html

Seriously, she should be ashamed of all her vague, unsubstantiated accusations. One can only hope she looks back in the near future, and wonders how she could have been so enamored with the deliberately deceptive narrative of the Montfords of this world

guthrie said...

Oh no, Montford got a chemistry degree from the same university I did, and lives in my city of origin. The shame!
(Mind you one of our lecturers is a creationist, although he never let it show in his lectures, but he is always enthusiastic for sighing himself professor x in petitions in support of creationism)

Oh, and he's an accountant. Do we have a case of projection here?

Anonymous said...

Montford, just one more self obsessed jerk, who can't win on facts alone, so he has to manufacture a circus and tell some porkies.

guthrie said...

Maybe he doesn't understand the issues?
Or possibly he never learnt how science works when at St Andrews, I know I only got a bit of it? Certainly we didn't get any philosophy of science when I was there, it would have been helpful.
Or he's a dunderheid. So many possibilities, when we ignore evidence we can speculate wildly!
Just like in his book...

guthrie said...

Ah, I get it. Montfords defence of his book when attacked by Ward include such wonderful points as:

"In other words, it is entirely possible that the journal was threatened and HvS didn't like the paper."

Hmm, way to go, making insinuations. He then seems to think that comments such as these:
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid
themselves of this troublesome editor.

...or this one from Mann:

I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

=----
are evidence of bullying, whereas anyone who accepts that the paper in the journal was mince would say that these are signs of attempts at academic quality control...

You see what happens when amateur conspiracy theorists get on with the job.
Some of MOntfords posters are suggesting suing Ward - if that happens we can all spend a few days happily pointing out Montfords errors so as to prove that he has a history of misrepresentation.

Anonymous said...

Years ago I realized a couple of things about Conspiracy Theorists:

1) They never want to get at the truth behind a conpiracy for the same reason the Philosophers Union in Hithchikers Guide didn't want the answer to the ultimate question. They would then be out of a job.

2) They will not go after a real conspiracy, they only go after conspiracies that they are very sure don't exist. Real conspiracies can get you killed. The fake ones are much safer.

carrot eater said...

Eli,
We're all aging. Someday we'll need to have our carrots boiled to a mush.

Fastidious Bunny said...

I dispute the assertion "(but the plates aren't clean)," and posit that water temperature has very little to do with cleansing efficiency when using modern detergents on average dinner ware. That is, provided that "cold water" means tap temperature, not ice cold, and that detergent is used. (If detergent isn't used, then I daresay near-boiling water would be required.) I wash dishes in "cold" (usually not below ~55F) water, partly as a nod to the carbon footprint, and I don't recall ever noticing an observable difference between that and the warm water case. As a related aside, the public appear to have a misconception about water temperature as it relates to hand-washing, for example. The common advice to 'wash your hands with soap and warm water for at least 30 seconds' mentions warm water not because it is more efficacious. Rather it is because people are more likely to go the entire 30-second duration if the water is warm. The temperature itself has no effect on cleansing, unless possibly the hands are covered in mechanic's-type grease.

Anonymous said...

Why on earth need the water be cold?

We've had solar hot water for 20 years. As long as we don't do anything silly like running the dishwasher or washing machine after dark we use hot, hot water, not lukewarm or "hand-hot" for everything. (Not after dark? So the tank doesn't refill with cold water and set off the automatic electric heating to get back up to temp overnight.)

Go solar hot water, even if you can't afford the whole solar power thing.

MinniesMum

Fastidious Bunny said...

Well, Minnies, if you have an elegant answer for converting a single apartment in an apartment building to solar hot water, I'm all bunny ears. Not every rabbit lives in a free-standing dwelling or a condo with an adaptable layout :)

Anonymous said...

Slightly over a year ago, Bob Ward told us this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/jul/01/bob-ward-exxon-mobil-climate

RR Kampen, NL.