The danger of junk science

[Wonky3]

From Longform.org

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/...degarrett/

HOW JUNK SCIENCE SENT CLAUDE GARRETT TO PRISON FOR LIFE


It is only recently that some states have begun to take steps to address the consequences of junk science in arson cases, Hurst said. Texas is an unlikely leader. Largely thanks to the furor over the Willingham case, the state fire marshal is doing something unheard of: he is reviewing old arson cases, in collaboration with the Innocence Project. In Tennessee, where there is no Innocence Project, old convictions as a whole remain unexamined. The Tennessean has found that fires deemed to be arson have dropped precipitously in the past 10 years.

This is a LONG read. But fascinating in many ways, and illustrates how dangerous "junk science" can be.
We are living in a time when science is shedding light on the realities we can accept. Climate change, evolution, behavioral differences and so many other things are being seen "in the light of day" and dogma once held to be truth is being debunked.

BUT...

We must be alert to the practice and understanding of "good science", and be able to discriminate by reading peer reviewed information that supports real proven outcomes.

[SFLiberal]

Flashback: Meteorologist Anthony Watts on ‘adjusted’ U.S. temperature data: ‘In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data’
http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/01/10/m...s-of-data/

‘Breathtaking’ adjustments to Arctic temperature record. Is there any ‘global warming’ we can trust?

by James Delingpole7 Feb 20151562
Here’s a Video that you absolutely must see.

Not, I hasten to warn you, because it’s exciting, well-produced or informative; rather, because of the fascinating light it sheds on the debate about global warming in general and also, in particular, on the ongoing controversy about whether organisations like NASA and NOAA are playing fast and loose with the world’s temperature data sets.

According to the video’s creator and star, Dr Kevin Cowtan, the latter suggestion is a nonsense. Using charts of South American and global temperatures, he painstakingly refutes suggestions by Christopher Booker and also (though tragically I don’t get a mention) by me that there is anything suspect, let alone corrupt or fraudulent, in the adjustments that NASA and NOAA have been making to the raw temperature data from weather stations around the world.

If you stumbled on it by accident on YouTube I think you’d be quite persuaded. Cowtan’s tone is soft and reasonable; the science, as he presents it, seems to stack up: a) there are perfectly valid reasons for these adjustments, to do with homogenising the raw data when it looks out of kilter with neighbouring but possibly more accurate weather stations, and with the changing nature of measuring equipment and b) the adjustments are, in any case, minor – altering the raw data by no more than 3 per cent.

When you Google “Dr Kevin Cowtan” he appears reassuringly neutral in this affair. He works in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York, his current speciality being X-ray crystallography. A proper scientist, then, with no dog in this fight. Or so it looks until you scroll down a bit and see that his other area of research is “climate science.”

My climate science research focuses primarily on problems which are relevant to the public understanding of climate science. With my colleague Robert Way I have been investigating biases in historical temperature record from weather stations. Our primary work concerns temperature change over the past two decades. The main temperature record providers show a slowdown in the rate of warming over this period, however when biases in the temperature record are taken into account, we find that part of the slowdown disappears.

I am also involved in climate science communication, and am contributing to a massive online course run by the University of Queensland. I can offer undergraduate projects in this area for students who are interested to develop science communication skills.

So, not a neutral party after all then, but someone who depends for part of his livelihood on the lavish funding available in academe for those who promote the climate “consensus.” Perhaps, in the interests of full disclosure, he might have mentioned this detail on his YouTube biography. But I mean that only as a very mild and largely inconsequential criticism. What matters is not what Cowtan does for a living (“the motive fallacy”) but whether or not he has got his facts right.

And according to this counterblast from Dave Burton – a US computer programmer, sea level specialist and IPCC expert reviewer on AR5 – he hasn’t.

Burton’s key point is this: where Cowtan claims that all NOAA’s adjustments have done is increased warming by a modest 3 per cent, in actuality they have increased it by 35 per cent. So, far from Cowtan’s assessment that these adjustments are “inconsequentially tiny”, they are in fact quite massively distorting.

Might it be that they reached such wildly different conclusions by using different data? Er, no. Burton reached his conclusions by creating a spreadsheet with decadal data digitized from the exact graph used in Cowtan’s video.

Now I appreciate that in the context of the broader climate debate this might seem a trivial dispute. But I’ve been at this game long enough to be able to assure you that these faux rebuttals like the one offered by Cowtan are absolutely integral to the ongoing survival of the alarmist ‘consensus.’

As far as the warmist propaganda machine is concerned it really doesn’t matter two hoots whether or not Cowtan has got his facts right. What matters is that whenever the inconvenient subject of doctored temperature data crops up again, the alarmists have their ready-made get out. From a proper actual scientist. So he must know – right?

You can be sure that, if it hasn’t already, Cowtan’s dodgy rebuttal video will soon be linked to by the usual warmist sockpuppeteers in the comment threads below every relevant article. What none of them will mention, of course, is the Burton counter-rebuttal to the Cowtan rebuttal. Integrity has never been these people’s strong point. It’s winning the propaganda war that counts.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the case for a fraud trial against the climate data record gatekeepers seems to be getting stronger and stronger.

Paul Homewood, the blogger who noticed the discrepancies with the Paraguay temperature records, has now turned his attention to the Arctic region. His conclusion after studying the charts before and after is that the scale and geographic range of these adjustments is “breathtaking.”

In nearly every Arctic station from Greenland in the West to Siberia in the East, the data has been adjusted to make the warm period in the 1930s look cooler than it actually was. This, of course, has the effect of making the Twentieth Century warming look much more dramatic than the raw data would suggest.

Will this scandalous apparent evidence-tampering ever get much coverage in the mainstream media? It certainly ought to. Think about it: if Homewood (and Anthony Watts and Steven Goddard, et al) are correct, then what it essentially means is that the entire global warming scare has been sold to us on a false prospectus.

But it won’t, of course, because the mainstream media – in large part, at least – remains wedded to the Man Made Global Warming orthodoxy and therefore only really likes to run stories that prove how totally wrong, evil, and swivel-eyed climate change deniers are.

For example, this story in Nature, which sought to explain away one of the most embarrassing problems the warmist camp has been suffering of late: the abject failure of their fancy computer models to have predicted the planet’s failure to warm since 1998.

According to the lead author of this widely reported study, one Jochem Marotzke of the Max Planck Institute, it dealt a fatal blow to the sceptics’ case that the warmists’ computer models were a waste of space.

Unfortunately for Marotzke, his case has now, in turn, been demolished in this article by Nic Lewis.

Professor Gordon Hughes, one of the statisticians who reviewed and confirmed Lewis’s findings has commented thus:

“The statistical methods used in the [Marotzke] paper are so bad as to merit use in a class on how not to do applied statistics. All this paper demonstrates is that climate scientists should take some basic courses in statistics and Nature should get some competent referees.”

Damning indeed.

But here’s a prediction. The rebuttal won’t receive nearly the coverage that Marotzke’s original inept paper did.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/02/...can-trust/

[bbqboy]

Douchebag.

[SFLiberal]

Who cares if there are no facts to back up the claims that man is causing climate change?

At a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, Senator Jeff Sessions grilled EPA chief Gina McCarthy and left her unable to justify her money grab, showing that she could not explain whether climate change models were correct or not.

The full transcript of the amazing exchange follows:

SESSIONS: I think EPA this year should be flat spending, or at least no more than 2.5 percent increase, you’re proposing a 6 percent increase. I mean, where does the money come from? Are you proposing to break the limitations?

McCARTHY: It is part of the president’s proposal, which is not going to buy into the bad policy of sequestration, but he’s designed the budget that can accommodate this. Senator, the one thing I want to say—

SESSIONS: Inflation rate in the United States is about 2 percent, so you want to have a three times the inflation rate increase in spending. I would suggest that when we go to our states, the group we have the most complaints about from our constituencies, whether it’s highway people, farmers, whether its energy people, is the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s an extraordinary overreach. You are apparently unaware of the pushback that’s occurring in the real world. I just want to tell you, I’m not inclined to increase your funding 6 percent above. So now you say that we’ve got a crisis and there are dangers out there. Let me ask you this: There was an article by Mr. Lomborg, who testified before the Budget Committee, from the Copenhagen Institute, and he quotes along with Dr. Pielke, from Colorado, that we’ve had fewer droughts in recent years. Do you dispute that?

McCARTHY: I don’t know in what context he’s making statements like that but I certainly can tell you about the droughts that are happening today.

SESSIONS: No, no, no, no. You can’t – I’m not arguing to you today that you are wrong about global warming because we have a cold spell. I’m asking you what are the data, don’t you know the worldwide data about whether or not we are having fewer or less droughts?

McCARTHY: I’m happy to provide it, but I certainly am aware that droughts are becoming more extreme and frequent.

SESSIONS: Are you aware that the IPCC has found that moisture content of the soil is, if anything, slightly greater than it has been over the last decades in their report? Are you aware of that?

McCARTHY: I don’t know what you’re referring to Senator, but I’m happy to respond—

SESSIONS: You need to know, because you’re asking this economy to sustain tremendous cost and you don’t know whether or not the soil worldwide is more moist or less moist?

McCARTHY: I don’t know, I don’t know where your cost figures are coming from, but if you take a look at—

SESSIONS: The IPCC. Second: what about hurricanes? We had more or less hurricanes in the last decade?

McCARTHY: There have been more frequent hurricanes and more intense. In terms of landing— those hurricanes on land, I cannot answer that question; it’s a very complicated issue.

SESSIONS: It’s not complicated about how many have landed; we’ve had a dramatic reduction in the number. We’ve had a decade without a hurricane class three or above.

McCARTHY: But sir, the scientists are not really considering that number to be significant. The subset is so small that you’re looking at, that you’re taking issues in science out of context. It’s not my job to be—

SESSIONS: Are you asserting that you have evidence that we have greater hurricanes around the world in the last decade than the previous decade?

McCARTHY: I am asserting that I have plenty of evidence, factual evidence from scientists who know this issue, that climate change is happening, it’s real, it’s happening now, and we need to take action to address it.

SESSIONS: Well, of course the climate is changing, Ms. McCarthy. I just asked you—you have been saying that there are more storms. Will you submit within a few days, it shouldn’t take long, to show we’ve had more storms in the last decade?

McCARTHY: I am able to submit all the science that we have. When you say we, what are you talking about? The U.S.?

SESSIONS: The world. The world.

McCARTHY: I am happy to submit the full breadth of science that we have behind climate; we’ve submitted it on many occasions, we’ll do it again.

SESSIONS: The full breadth of science? I’d just like some numbers. Would you acknowledge that over the last eighteen years, that the increase in temperature has been very little and that it is well below, as a matter of fact, ninety percent below most of the environmental models that showed how fast temperature would increase?

McCARTHY: No, I would not agree with that, sir. A one-degree temperature is significant. I don’t know what you’re looking at.

SESSIONS: No, no, no, no. I am asking you, is it below the models, or above the models?

McCARTHY: I do not know what the models actually are predicting that you’re referring to. There are many models.

SESSIONS: The head of the environmental—

McCARTHY: And sometimes it’s going faster, and sometimes slightly slower than the model predicts, but on the whole it makes no difference to the validity and the robustness of climate science that is telling us that we are facing an absolute challenge that we must address both environmentally, economically from a national security perspective, and for EPA, from a public health perspective.

SESSIONS: All right. Carbon pollution is CO2, and that’s really not a pollutant; that’s a plant food, and it doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases. Let me ask you one more time: Are you asserting, just give me this answer; if you take the average of the models predicting how fast the temperature would increase, is the temperature in fact increasing less than that or more than that?

McCARTHY: I cannot answer that question specifically.

SESSIONS: Mr. Chairman, I would just say, this is a stunning development, that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who should know more than anybody else in the world, who’s proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in costs to prevent this climate and temperature increases, doesn’t know whether their projections have been right or wrong.

[bbqboy]

Since projections are by definition in the future I'd say she gave the correct answer.

[tvguy]

Douchebag.

Too late to introduce yourself