Lifted from the Weasel King
Apr. 16th, 2013 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll
If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel."
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no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 07:02 pm (UTC)As someone who has worked on data analysis that affected real people's lives (postal rates and budget analysis) I wince in sympathy at making an error.
However, I'm now a programmer, and we QA stuff before releasing it. And I would think that before you drew a conclusion that would make so many people suffer, you'd double check it.
So what that tells me is that there's a real lack of empathy in people who are working on policy.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 07:27 pm (UTC)Rather than being some glib reflexive right-wing spraint.
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Date: 2013-04-17 12:13 am (UTC)Then, some years ago, Spencer and Christy realized that when correcting for longitude drift of the observing satellites off their sun-synchronous orbits, they'd used the wrong sign. Putting in the right correction brought the results well within the error bars of the models. I think that was the moment Ron Bailey of Reason magazine decided global warming wasn't a hoax.
Right now, we're in an interesting situation: global temperature has been flat for several years and is scraping the lower edge of model error bars. An open possibility is that the climate sensitivity to CO2 has been calculated a litle high based on some transient effect that is now over. Or we could be in the middle of some transient effect that is holding temperatures down. Of course the contrarians insist once again that it means it's all a hoax and the sensitivity is zero, or effectively zero. I haven't heard any believeable mechanism as to how this could be, and I think I've heard this tune before.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 01:15 am (UTC)(Which is in most respects good news; we might not already be past the point of no return for large-scale agriculture.)
We still shouldn't expect any kind of nice linear year-on-year response to forcing. We're going to get something rather lumpy.
I'm finding the models' ability to take the "warmer arctic ocean, warmer water off Labrador" and predict the band of cold air across Eurasia this winter just past pretty convincing that they're, on the whole, on to something.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 07:55 pm (UTC)Actually we can't. Uncertainties in our estimates of paleoclimatic forcing plus uncertainties in paleotemperatures give a wide range of possible senstivities.
Volcanic eruptions are also hard to use. There's a strong sublinear relation between sensitivity and resulting temperature change in these transient forcings. Or to put it more concretely, double the sensitivity does not mean nearly double the resulting temperature change for something like Pinatubo. Thus estimates of this kind wind up with a long tail, which is why early statistical work circa 2000 could not rule out with 95% confidence sensitvities as high as 10 C.
I don't work in this field any longer, but my guess is that temperatures are being kept at the low end of predictions becuase China and other countries are systematically underestimating their aerosol production. An atmospheric chemist of my acquaintence said he couldn't reconcile the data for pacific aerosol counts except by doubling the Chinese numbers.
William Hyde
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Date: 2013-04-18 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 09:31 am (UTC)Which is sort of holding off the raising of the average global temperature, but isn't all that good in itself.
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Date: 2013-04-17 08:05 pm (UTC)Where the heat is going.
What happens if you remove things like el Ninos.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 07:46 pm (UTC)There is no way to invert the microwave signal from the surface and atmosphere to give the temperature of a specific level. There will always be bleed-through from other levels and the surface. Of course they tried to account for that, but they did it badly, very badly indeed. At a seminar at Texas A&M a graduate student pointed this out, only to be dismissed by the speaker, one of Christy's co-authors.
As I recall they were incorporating more of a stratospheric component than they expected, as as the stratosphere is cooling, naturally this reduced the warming they got at 500 mb.
They also failed to account for changes in the orbit of the satellites.
So, three mistakes, more or less elementary, all making the results look more like the ones Christy wanted (1). That's more than suspicious.
(1) Christy's a religious type and has some ill-concieved idea that God won't let the planet get too hot, or something. He's been quite open about this - but not when talking to scientists.
William Hyde
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Date: 2013-04-17 07:34 pm (UTC)I'll pass on your joke to the IPCC people I know. They'll be amused to know that some people think they get any salary at all from IPCC, let alone a generous one.
William Hyde
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Date: 2013-04-17 02:30 am (UTC)It is now too cold for them to grow.
ADDED:
The complete unconcern of Netherlands land-creation project engineers with regard to supposed "rising sea levels" will no doubt be met by more handwaving.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 03:15 am (UTC)I ask this with complete sincerity: Is this a joke? The Netherlands are indeed concerned with sea levels, and even more with the extreme weather patterns that are the more pressing result of climate change. The recent history of relative complacency is due largely to the Maeslantkering, which went up in 1997 and can in theory protect the country against more than the 30-inch rise in sea levels the Dutch government is planning against (http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/4374), so they feel they're good. Meanwhile Rotterdam, where my mother was born, is planning to climate-proof itself by 2025 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8362147.stm).
In other words, the Netherlanders are "unconcerned" not because they don't think there's a problem, but because they think they can handle it, since they've been doing this kind of thing so long.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 09:41 am (UTC)That's the danger we're most worried at the moment, unexpected flash floods, wetter winters more prone to flooding, having to find ways to make room for more frequently swollen rivers.
Luckily, there's a plan for this.
But this does eats billions of euros and not every low lying country prone to flooding is rich enough to pay for these measures. What about Egypt, or Bangladesh, or Louisiana?
"Amundsen cut trees"
Date: 2013-04-17 12:23 pm (UTC)I /think/ he's suggesting that there were trees in Antarctica. Which would be insane, because there haven't been trees in Antarctica since the Pliocene. Or maybe it's some other expedition? Or some other explorer?
It's sort of interesting anthropologically, I guess.
Doug M.
Re: "Amundsen cut trees"
Date: 2013-04-17 03:29 pm (UTC)Re: "Amundsen cut trees"
Date: 2013-04-17 04:44 pm (UTC)Re: "Amundsen cut trees"
Date: 2013-04-18 11:33 pm (UTC)After all, one Norwegian's the same as another--and they're all just Swedes with holes in their heads.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 01:08 pm (UTC)It's been measured as rising, about 20 centimetres over the 20th, but keep in mind that the ocean isn't flat and that amount of rise isn't evenly experienced everywhere. There isn't any controversy about "sea level is increasing". (There's a little argument about how much is more water in the ocean and how much is warmer-water-has-a-higher-volume, but only a little and only as a side effect of how annoying measuring mean sea level is in the first place.)
Arguing that Antarctica getting colder disproves a net global warming trend is pretty silly; Antarctica sits there in the middle of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, AKA the West Wind Drift. More energy in the atmosphere = faster winds = stronger current = greater climate isolation for Antarctica. This is expected and part of the global models.
Antarctica getting _warmer_ would be a serious challenge to the anthropogenic climate change predictions. Colder is expected.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 08:15 pm (UTC)[1] Which only get you a few thousand data points a week as the floats surface to transmit.
[2] The graph starts as the ocean is entering the high portion of the cycle and ends as a low portion ends.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-21 04:58 pm (UTC)You sound exactly like a creationist.
People who care more about truth than their religion, on the other hand, do not claim that there's nothing to discuss.
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Date: 2013-04-23 09:22 pm (UTC)People who don't LIKE what the conclusion says are welcome to find their own data to add to what we got, and try to get the whole mess to agree with a different conclusion. But they don't get to +ignore+ portions of what we got and say "Look only at this subset of the data! This proves our conclusion!".
tl;dr - Discussion is ongoing. Nothing's tilting the conclusion away from "sea level is rising" OR from "sea level has already risen". Some people don't like that and are very loud about not liking it.
--Dave
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Date: 2013-04-17 04:48 pm (UTC)Just as a pleasant reminder, I live beside the Northwest Passage, so statements regarding the Arctic which are trivially proven false or misleading by me looking out the window will be relentlessly mocked. Possibly for years.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-21 05:58 pm (UTC)Then we're on the same side.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-21 10:44 pm (UTC)Over the last decade and a half, my own eyes have seen significant (even just to me) changes in climate from when I arrived in terms of ocean freezing and breakup, significant variations in standard weather patterns, and changes in vegetation and animal patterns (namely southern species moving north). Talking to the people I live alongside, the alterations are even more pronounced.
A few years ago we had an elders conference asking for information on climate change they'd observed, and one made a comment about "the sun coming up in a different place" than it used to. That seems absurd until you recognized the context that he wasn't talking about calendar dates, but dates based on seasonal changes. If you used the time the lakes froze enough to travel, or some other such measure, then yeah, the sun *is* coming up at a different place because the seasonal events aren't happening at the times they used to.
More recently, elders have been talking about how the weather patterns are significantly less predictable (storms are blowing up at times of year they previously never did), and they've been completely befuddled about animals now appearing because there's no oral record of those animals ever being in areas before.
So, yeah, climate change is happening. Deal with it.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 03:12 am (UTC)Why it's being sold with a "LOL math error" soundbite, I'm not sure.
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Date: 2013-04-17 05:05 am (UTC)Getting them because you added wrong, that's funny.
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Date: 2013-04-17 06:07 am (UTC)I do agree that the article says two deliberate selections and one mistake, all pointing in the same direction. Makes you wonder if it was an actual mistake.
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Date: 2013-04-17 07:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 01:03 pm (UTC)I think if you wanted to generalise one of my reviews, it would be "your conclusions aren't statistically justified by the data and reference 8 doesn't say what you claim it does". I might be at the nitpicky end of the scale, of course.
I spoke to an editor once who told me he divided his reviewer list into default acceptors and default rejectors. All papers were sent to one reviewer from each list, with the exception of papers authored by members of the default rejector list, which would go to two reviewers from the default rejector list.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 02:28 pm (UTC)-
The last set of peer-reviewer comments I received (still in press, not one of the things listed in my link) largely fell into three categories:
1) A request that we include a more thorough analysis of the video footage (there was no video footage, and nowhere in the paper were the words "video" or "camera" even mentioned).
2) A request that we add an "additional" statistical test that was already included in the paper.
3) A request that we add another statistical test: this one wasn't in the paper already, because it was mathematically nonsensical to even try to analyse the data that way.
Plus, of course, the usual demands that we add citations to half a dozen papers of limited relevance that were obviously written by the reviewers themselves (I've even had this made in reference to papers that were not yet published at the time of the review).
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Of course, not all reviewers are alike, and I'm sure that you're one of the good ones. But, IME, that makes you rather exceptional.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 04:31 pm (UTC)Citation requests like that are shameful. Sure, we rely on being cited, but that's no way to get the citations. I asked an author a while back to add a reference which was so relevant & important that it made me question the quality of their lit search, never mind their knowledge of the field; the practice you describe is so depressingly common that I bet they think I'm one of the authors, which I'm not. Did you add them, or did you argue they weren't really relevant?
no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 08:03 pm (UTC)I've only ever had one paper refused publication, and that was when I was trying to get something deliberately controversial (but true...) into a high-profile journal. In that case, the three reviewer responses consisted of one "wonderful, publish immediately!" and two "kill it with fire".
no subject
Date: 2013-04-19 02:48 am (UTC)Even though this was the first paper I'd ever reviewed, I was not kind.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-19 09:45 am (UTC)Best I find to be dispassionate and detailed about papers like that; heaping abuse on it just riles the authors and causes stress for the editor.
I once made the mistake of recommending a paper be rejected for a similarly huge flaw (in my view) and not going into all the other problems with it. A revised version came back 6 months later with a work-round of sorts for the main problem, and a load of other issues still there because all the reviewers thought the main issue would be enough to get it rejected on its own.
Science!
Date: 2013-04-18 02:04 am (UTC)Since the study has now been shown to actually show pretty much the OPPOSITE of this, we can now wait for a new Paul Ryan budget that takes the ACTUAL effect into account.