My point was that it was uncertainty in the data rather than the models that were the concern. Everything you posted has confirmed I was correct. So, can we finally agree on that?
I missed that. What flaws completely undermined Mann’s claims? Where did they accept that M&M were correct? They were not.
As the data record today is much fuller and richer than it was in 1998, a lot of those data concerns no longer apply.
And the answer to my other question apparently is that yes, you’re still hung up on a decades old paper like a dog with a bone, unable or unwilling to look at the current state of affairs. I find that to be a real shame, and I suggest you won’t get to the truth of climate change by refusing - as you are - to look at the data. Willful blindness is not a generally accepted approach to truth finding.
Please look at my post above to Rhis about moving the goalposts. The “trick” is pure nonsense as anyone who has looked into the emails knows. It has been thoroughly investigated and shown to be bunkum.
Instead of fixating on the past, and cherry picking absurd claims, it would be a better use of your time and mine if you actually take a look at the current state of what is known about climate change.
Or not.
Personally I find data, facts and modern science useful. It seems I’m in a minority.
"My only point is that I find it hard to take seriously someone who claims to have found serious holes in climate science but hasn’t bothered to rigorously write them up and publish them, or engage with the actual climate scientists whose work they believe is wrong. Perhaps you’re right, and it’s because he is quoting others work and not his own. Still, to cherry pick a small handful and ignore the vast field of study seems unlikely to give a balanced view. And that brings me back to the first point I made which is that if, based on the work of a few others, he’s saying that the main thrust of climate change is false then he’s certainly wrong.
As I’ve also said, even if I’m being too harsh with Rancourt, his technique is one that is definitely being used today by actual paid shills and other stooges. These people tend to avoid actually engaging with the science in a serious way and write more for public consumption where it is much easier to mislead folks who know nothing of the subject and are unable to see the claims for what they are. These days I find that approach suspicious immediately."
Pontius, there’s quite a lot of negative language there, considering that you yourself (and, erm, myself ) have not engaged with anything Rancourt HAS written. How do we know he hasn’t investigated these ‘holes’ rigorously, or what the engagement has been like? I would expect he has been rigorous in any physics work he has done on climate change, but with regard to its relevance in the wider context of a complex mix of specialties there is still room for much uncertainty. Real science is a bit of a jostle. The last thing I’d want to see is every unwelcome new angle frozen out by vested interests (commericial or academic) and personal hostility. I’d much prefer for people to acknowledge there are other (perhaps minority) viewpoints and approaches. Covid has shown the dangers of so-called ‘Science’ operating by ‘consensus’ that isn’t voluntary - especially if it then runs away with itself.
"Perhaps, as you say, he doesn’t feel as strongly about the subject as the FLCCC do about theirs. Perhaps he’s not as expert on the subject as the FLCCC are in theirs.
Neither of those two reasons incline me to give this guy any more credibility. "
If we’re not going to read him it hardly matters what we give him…we’re just making guesses. Mine is that he’s a possible source of doubt, and in no way a shill.
Oh no, I’ve just had that dreaded message from the system - it thinks we should just get a room! Or something like that…
Cheers
a. If you are incapable or unwilling to see that the data you are using is too meagre and uncertain to support your statements then you are either delusional or incompetent.
b. both reports pointed to mathematical flaws in the modelling - nothing to do with the data.
c. Wegman pointed to additional errors made by Mann, originally raised by McIntyre and McKitrick, and North confirmed he had no problem with McIntyre’s work.
I gave you the link to all this above:
it’s a 2006 congressional report that is not paginated so you have to either read the whole of it ( which I did) or you could page search on specific names.
Wegman expressed doubt about the safety of so-called supporting papers and their peer reviewed process - so the concerns up to July 2006 obtained. McIntyre has maintained throughout until late 2021 that no subsequent papers have answered the points he made. Also whatever happened after McIntyre’s paper does not erase the damage done by the Mann claims about his hockeystick and the use and abuse of that icon by the bureaucrats at the IPCC and the politicians like Gore. To repeat - first out with new “information” sticks and is hard to replace with better information , per Dan T Gilbert.
"Understanding the Climategate Inquiries Ross McKitrick
September 2010
49
Conclusions
Where do matters now stand? Returning to the five issues raised at the start, we can say that the evidence
points to some clear conclusions.
The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC and WMO reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers. The divergence problem was concealed by deleting data to “hide the decline.” The panels that examined the issue in detail, namely Muir Russell’s panel, concurred that the graph was “misleading.” The ridiculous attempt by the Penn State Inquiry to defend an instance of deleting data and splicing in other data to conceal a divergence problem only discredits their claims to have investigated the issue.
Phil Jones admitted deleting emails, and it appears to have been directed towards preventing disclosure of information subject to Freedom of Information laws, and he asked his colleagues to do the same. The inquiries largely fumbled this question, or averted their eyes. Despite being asked by Parliament to conclusively resolve this issue, Sir Muir Russell did not attend the interviews with Jones and, as reported in UK media, his inquiry did not ask Jones if he had deleted emails.
The scientists privately expressed greater doubts or uncertainties about the science in their own professional writings and in their interactions with one another than they allowed to be stated in reports of the IPCC or WMO that were intended for policymakers. Rather than criticise the scientists for this, the inquiries (particularly the House of Commons and Oxburgh inquiries) took the astonishing view that as long as scientists expressed doubts and uncertainties in their academic papers and among themselves, it was acceptable for them to conceal those uncertainties in documents prepared for policy makers.
The scientists took steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work. This point was accepted by the Commons Inquiry and Muir Russell, and the authors were admonished and encouraged to improve their conduct in the future.
The inquiries were largely unable to deal with the issue of the issue of blocking publication of papers, or intimidating journals. These ended up being subjective, he-said-she-said disputes, and in some cases the documentation was too sparse. But academics reading the emails could see quite clearly the tribalism at work, and in comparison to other fields, climatology comes off looking juvenile, corrupt and in the grip of a handful of self-appointed gatekeepers and bullies.
There remain two other questions needing to be addressed:
Is the IPCC a reliable source of information on climate change? In light of the answer to
question 3, and the findings of the IAC that fundamental reforms are needed, the answer is that, even if one assumes that the existing problems did not compromise the validity of previous IPCC reports, as of the present, the IPCC should be viewed as unsound until and unless fundamental reforms are implemented. It has become tendentious and conniving, and its review process is compromised.
Understanding the Climategate Inquiries Ross McKitrick
September 2010
50
Is the science concerning the current concerns about climate change sound? Many people, starting with the members of the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, had hoped this question would be answered during the inquiry process, and there is a frequent refrain in the media that the investigations affirmed the science. But the reality is that none of the inquiries actually investigated the science. The one inquiry supposedly set up to address this, namely Lord Oxburgh’s, actually operated under a different remit altogether, despite multiple claims by the UEA that it was a science reappraisal panel. Sir Muir Russell’s team had no mandate to assess CRU scientific work, though they nonetheless ventured into making superfluous claims in support of the conventional view. The IAC made clear that they were not investigating or commenting on the scientific issues. The House of Commons inquiry and the Penn State inquiries were also too limited in focus to examine the scientific issues. Consequently none of the inquiries addressed the question. Climategate raised legitimate doubts on enough specific issues to put into question the process by which climate research is done and presented to the public. Over the course of the five reviews, a few complaints were investigated and upheld, such as the problem of data secrecy at the CRU and the misleading nature of the “hide the decline” graph. And the IAC leveled enough serious criticisms about the IPCC process to substantiate concerns that the organization is unsound for the purpose of providing balanced, rigorous science assessments. But many other concerns were left unaddressed, or slipped through the cracks between the inquiries, or were set aside after taking CRU responses at face value. The
Muir Russell inquiry was particularly frustrating in the way it kept restating and shuffling the allegations until they were rendered into either innocuous or irrelevant terms, at which point any findings they did offer were largely beside the point. The world still awaits a proper inquiry into climategate: one that is not stacked with global warming advocates, and one that is prepared to cross-examine evidence, interview critics as well as supporters of the CRU and other IPCC players, and follow the evidence where it leads."
re the last sentence it appears the World is still waiting 12 years later!
Let’s read 12 cherry picked climategate emails - see if the “stain continues” as of September 2019:
"Background
On November 19, 2009, a whistle-blower downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University, United Kingdom. Posted on a Russian server, these documents were soon accessed by websites around the world.
These e-mails were a subset of confidential communications between top climate scientists in the UK, the United States, and elsewhere directly involved with surface temperature data sets, the “Hockey Stick” global-temperature reconstruction, and the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Branded “Climategate” by British columnist James Delingpole, the communications gave rare insight into practices ranging from unprofessional to fraudulent. Bias, manipulated data, admissions of doubt, dodging transparency (and freedom of information requests), and efforts to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered. Richard Nixon might have blushed.
Quotations: A Dirty Dozen
Whole books have been written on the subject, such as A. W. Montford’s Hiding the Decline. The establishment continues to claim that it was just dirty work by “climate-change deniers” inflated by “media outlets hostile to global warming.” A ten-year retrospective by BBC, “Climategate: 10 Years On, What’s Changed,” is biased to the extreme, excluding viewpoints questioning climate alarm and then-and-now bias.
But words are words, sentences are sentences. The emails cannot be taken back. Here are but twelve excerpts from the Climategate trove that speak for themselves.
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.” [Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, September 22, 1999]
“Keith’s [Briffa] series…differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).” [Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, September 22, 1999]
“…it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]….” [Michael Mann, June 4, 2003]
“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.” [Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, November 16, 1999]
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were….” [Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, December 20, 2006]
“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming…. The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” [Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Lead Author, October 12, 2009]
*“If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip….” [*Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, to Phil Jones, September 28, 2008]
*“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.” [*Phil Jones, email to Warwick Hughes, 2004]
*“I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act.” [*Phil Jones, February 21, 2005]
*“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…. Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.” [*Phil Jones, May 29, 2008]
*“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.” [*Phil Jones, May 12, 2009]
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” [Phil Jones, July 8, 2004]
A Turning Point
“Climategate was a turning point,” Professor Judith Curry remembered, where “pronouncements from the IPCC were no longer sufficient.” She continued: “Institutionally, Climategate triggered the formation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which has become quite influential in UK climate policy and to some extent internationally.” Furthermore,
The skeptical climate blogosphere has thrived and expanded, largely triggered by Climategate (Climate Etc. was triggered largely by Climategate). Whereas the ‘warm’ blogosphere for the most part has waned (notably RealClimate), with the exception of Skeptical Science. It seems that most of the ‘action’ on the warm side has switched to twitter, whereas skeptics prefer the blogosphere.
The growth of the technical skeptical blogosphere (pioneered by Steve McIntyre) has challenged traditional notions of expertise, i.e. credentials and sanctity of journal publications, through Climate Audit’s blogospheric deconstruction of many publications, particularly related to paleo proxies.
And today:
While the technical skeptical blogosphere seems to have provided the motive for the Climategate ‘hack’, the technical skeptical blogosphere has thrived, and many of these sites are followed by the media and decision maker.
Conclusion
The skeptics of climate alarmism continue to be ostracized. Such ideas as the positive effects of carbon dioxide, and benign, even beneficial, warming (natural or anthropogenic), are verboten. Even the happy middle ground of global lukewarming is not to be entertained. Alarmist science settled, there is to be no debate.
But reality bats last. Climate alarmism is exaggerated, the latest stanza in the litany of Malthusian scares intended to check industrial capitalism and cede power from the people to government/intellectual elites. The political failure of climate activism will continue to shine critical light on climate science in general and Climategate in particular."
I don’t know much about Rancourt but it looks very clear to me that he was hassled out of his Chair at Ottawa for his political views, but he behaved in some very clearly unacceptable ways that were quite enough to seal his fate.
His views on climate, and on how power/money shapes science, are of a piece. But they are views/opinions. Charles Fort:
When we come upon assurances that a mystery has been solved, we go on investigating.
As PP says, Rancourt hasn’t done the work, and his arguments about power-knowledge have been explored much more extensively by people like Ioannides (sp?), Foucault, Ivan Illich, Ian Hacking, Jeff Schmidt, and no doubt lots of others. So to my way of thinking he’s not someone to take particularly seriously outside of his field of physics.
Empirical science is corrupted, reproducibility of research is far too often a problem, and £$¥ plays a massive role. Money is to be made by developing more sustainable ways of living, but that doesn’t of itself invalidate all the work being carried out in that direction. I’ll bow to superior knowledge in that area and keep in mind Pascal’s Wager.
Thanks PP. Just a quick thought in reply, won’t be the biggest item in your current postbag . Why should the format be a barrier to engagement. Plenty of fake or fraudulent covid papers were nodded straight into regular formats in journals despite peer review, and did untold damage.
The religion comment is interesting. Climate science isn’t a religion per se. Neither is vaccination, nor is the wearing of covid masks. But people can behave in a way that is very reminiscent of an oppressive religious regime. You can have what is essentially one side of a scientific issue, pushed on people with a ‘religious’ type zealotry. It’s not at full strength yet in climate science (or rather, the prevailing view of climate science) but it’s shaping up to get there.
It’s that zealotry towards inflicting your belief on others that should be criticized - a comment that applies to religion too.
There is a hypocrisy in all the zealotry too. In covid it’s in suppressing and ignoring treatments. In climate change it’s in the politics - still no calls for reducing energy use. Car sales continuing to rise etc.
Cheers for the engagement.
Evvy
It does. But if religion is viewed as a set of practices rather than a set of beliefs we can start to get somewhere. Generally that’s not the case, and the Branch Covidian understanding of Science exemplifies this. Science, of course, being a method too.
Hi @KarenEliot , I really only started looking at AGW at the start of this thread so I’m a complete novice. In a way this means I haven’t had to fight off years of competing views and propaganda - it was the same with covid.
From the videos Rancourt put out I got the impression that his research papers on AGW were mainly restricted to his knowledge of physics which he used to calculate radiating elements of the earth. This is because for planets it is impossible to run any meaningful experiments. He seemed to make sense and his calculations have been published for the world to criticise and pick apart for years.The one critic I heard thought he didn’t go far enough in denouncing the official settled science version.
Interesting quote from Forte clearly not a supporter of any settled science.
Maybe I like Rancourt because he explains in words I can understand plus I generally support the underdog. I see he reached a satisfactory settlement with Otawa uni so maybe there were faults on both sides.
Thanks CJ. Well if you’re right then I can’t see on what basis this is not part of ‘the work’ on climate change. Scientists need to attend to the basics at the outset, and flag any possibly meaningful uncertainties - and omissions - that could undermine the validity of their results. Possible drawbacks can’t be allowed to disappear by default, or by consensus.
Just as ‘the work’ on vaccine effectiveness has not been done until early treatments (and of course adverse events) have been properly assessed.
I don’t expect that climate scientists* have acted with the same level of dogma as vaccinologists - because the political imperative and urgency hasn’t been as strong - but we need to be mindful that new incentives on climate change are exploding. This is not a time to be glossing over serious omissions from the early days - if that’s what they are.
Rancourt didn’t just develop physics-based models for virus transmission taking into account humidity - he reviewed the literature on mask effectiveness, particularly the randomized controlled trials. His credentials and backgound were ideal for this, or about as good as anybody else in a diverse field. Of course, someone else can come along and form a different view of the same studies, as Johnson did. On mask effectiveness, as in the ancient science of vaccine wonderfulness, there is a ‘scientific consensus’ which when you look more closely is a strangled ‘consenus’ among scientists mainly under direct employ or influence of western governments or corporate masters.
If you want to get at the truth, the overviews have to be overviewed. People of significant stature should not be finessed off the stage by subjective objections. After all, we didn’t throw out the work of these people in ‘Climategate’ who were found to be deliberately deceiving the public.
@PontiusPrimate and @CJ1 - thanks for this debate between the two of you, it’s been very informative to see both sides. (It’s a credit to this forum, in my view). Without this kind of digging, we’re left with pure guesswork!
Cheers
*The asterisk was an autonomous hand reaction to having to talk about ‘consensus’ without real knowledge of how this was evaluated, when political forces - including academic fear - operate to suppress dissent. The majority of GPs seem to support vaccination, but nothing about the effects, concerns (and of course options for treating covid) comes down their usual channels. And they are required to support it! So there’s one meaningless ‘consensus’.
Hi @Evvy_dense , for those who prefer the written word this was one of Rancourt’s I liked although a lot of the links from youtube are gone!
cheers
ps reference the new incentives on global warming exploding I heard a rather lengthy podcast from Whitney Webb and Charlie Robinson covering some of this and a lot more:
Thanks CJ. Looks a good place to start with Rancourt.
I don’t know Robinson but Whitney Webb is bound to be enlightening, not always in a happy way. I’ll need to make the time for this one.
thanks for the long reply. I’ll digest it at length and give you my responses to the points that you raise. It will take some time, and I will fit it in around the other things that I’m currently doing.
I may be delusional (I’m back posting on 5F for a start!), and I’ll leave my competence for others to decide, but good to know how strongly you feel about it
Let’s stick with the data issue for a bit longer, as I can see that, despite my efforts so far, this remains a tricky subject.
All measurements in science come with some degree of uncertainty. The aim is to understand the level of uncertainty and then draw conclusions that are in keeping with the data that you have recorded. Remember the Lancet study of the Iraq death toll? People got similarly confused by the error bars on that study, and started to claim it was useless as the error bars were so large. That’s what you are doing here. As it turned out, the Lancet paper was likely quite accurate, and Mann’s has also turned out to be. Despite the initial uncertainties in the data. Large error bars don’t necessarily mean that the model or the conclusion is wrong.
Mann clearly indicated the error bars in his data. He also indicated the statistically most likely line through that data. His conclusions are aligned with the data he printed. The uncertainty was large, but the conclusions were plausible, given the data. We have discussed this several times already.
In brief, then (and once again), the data did support the conclusions. The only question was the level of certainty that could be given to those conclusions. The line that Mann drew through the data was the most likely one, based on the stats. Add that to the fact that there are other lines of evidence that seem to be pointing in the same direction, and you can see why someone could say that the results are plausible, but the uncertainty is large. This is perfectly normal in mathematical modelling.
Incidentally, if we had started the temperature record from the 1400s or so, then the data record is much richer, so much so, that the certainty in the result goes way up. All the uncertainty in the data were contained in the period 900-1400 AD.
What difference would it have made to say that the 1990s were the hottest decade in the last 500 years, rather than the last 1000 years? Does that materially change the fact of global warming?
Finally, on the subject of data, there are a lot more data sources today than were available when Mann wrote his original paper. We now know that not only was Mann correct in his analysis, but recent researchers have pushed it back a further thousand years, so it looks like these years are the hottest in the last 2000 years. With significant certainty these days.
We have already discussed this. This was an actual positive contribution that McIntyre made. He suggested a possible error, it was looked into and determined not to be significant. This was actually a nice example of the scientific method at work, in my opinion. The errors you are referring to are around the centering of the Principal Component analysis that was used to build the proxy timeseries. This has been looked at multiple times over the last 15 years and has been shown (multiple times) to not be a serious defect in the model. It doesnt materially change the result.
In fact others have replicated the hockey stick graph without using the PCA technique at all, and have got the same results. Wegman and McIntyre were both worried for nothing.
Where does this leave us?
1 - the uncertainty was in the data not the model. Specifically in the first 500 years (900-1400 AD). Despite the large uncertainties in the data (at that time) Mann’s chart represented the statistically best fit line through the data. In the subsequent decades this data record has been patched up and enriched to the point that we now know a lot more about hte temperature record. So far there has not been a single reconstruction of the data record that substantially disagreed with Mann’s original work - he was correct.
2 - the supposed errors in Mann’s work that you are referring to have been shown to not be significant. The centering of the principal components turn out not to be that significant, and techniques that avoid the problem by not using PCA at all have shown the same result.
This looks to me like no errors remain (unless there were other errors separate to the PCA?) and the initial patchiness of the data has since been filled in, so that problem has gone away too.
I’ll leave the discussion of “climategate” for another post. That is a subject in itself and worth considering separately.
The format is important because it provides a framework for a critical examination of the points raised in a way that is maximally likely to help move the subject forward. The problem with the Covid papers was the opposite - formal peer review was suspended or massively accelerated, data was hidden or simply made up, etc. We should hold the Covid studies to the same standard that we hold the climate studies to. And we should hold Rancourt to the same standard too.
Quite. Climate science isn’t a religion at all. It’s based on far and away the largest set of recorded measurements and scientific scrutiny of any discipline I can think of. Rancourt is being massively hypocritcal here, as he lines up with the Christian Right to discredit global warming. It’s quite obvious who the religious zealots are, no?
Not much argument from me on the covid science. Except to say that I think it’s getting better (it could hardly get worse!) as time goes on…
I should have said “if Mann is incapable or unwilling …” I’m sorry if this came across as referring to you I didn’t mean that.
I detect a lot of slippage from your original statements on the technical arguments - you said McIntyre was wrong now he made a positive contribution but its a possible error that is not significant. The comments of Wegman and McIntyre referred not just to the proxies but also the mathematical flaws in the statistical analysis and these still obtain today even using alternative techniques, it appears, according to McIntyre.
In addition overall Rancourt’s work is supported recently by Prof. Dr. Hermann Harde here: http://hharde.de/index_htm_files/Opinion-Draft-Law%20-%20Reduction%20GHG%20Emissions.pdf
hat tip @Everyman
A fundamental point in addition to the above problems is that the IPCC and Mann et al have been working in accordance with the terms of reference of the IPCC which prevents them from looking at anything else except “Anthropogenic” climate change - the fix has been in place from the inception of the IPCC.
not really. He was wrong, but in stating his case he forced the subject forward. Now we know he was wrong - that is his contribution. This is what I was suggesting Rancourt should do.
Yes, Principal Component Analysis. They were wrong about whether that is a problem - it’s not. Were there other methodological problems? I didn’t see any.
I’ll be clearer, to avoid accusations of slippage:
McIntyre Is Wrong
He is wrong. As is Wegman. There have been several studies since then which have showed this - science moves on. Just as you are wrong in your interpretation of the error bars which I have tried many times to clarify and which you are still ignoring.
Incidentally, I read the linked article by Rancourt - oh my god. What a steaming pile of … well, I probably shouldn’t finish that.
No wonder he won’t try to write a peer reviewed article. So much wrong in so few words… I’m back to thinking he’s a charlatan and a shill. It’s hard to be so wrong by accident.
Rancourt goes straight into the garbage with Monckton. Really, these are very poor specimens to be getting your information from.
I think the problem is that Rancourt reckoned some of the assumptions (or foundational calculations) of the climate change school were completely wrong and could be shown so by physics. He’s written up what he says is wrong:
It’s perfectly accessible. Looks mostly physics - doesn’t look like rocket science but a lot of physical concepts put into relatively uncomplicated equations (I assume it’s not a summary of something more fiendish) and arranged in the form of a scientific argument. It’s well capable of being understood and answered by folk working in that area, I’m sure.
He clearly calls for responses showing where he is wrong (see below*).
It looks like it’s not been published in a journal, but to me there are a number of possible reasons why this could be. Incidentally (or perhaps relevantly) Rancourt’s professional life was turned upside down by what looks like a witch hunt where for example, unknown to him he was ‘diagnosed’ by a hired psychiatrist he had never communicated with. This went on for almost a decade. He was flung out of his office.
Without knowing any more I wouldn’t lay blame as to why his substance wasn’t answered - but if the corporate interest is anything like he says, that would be par for the course, if he’s right.
Or he may have had difficulty getting accepted. Peter McCullough struggled to get published on covid and he has hundreds of publications.
So I must disagree with your claim that the apparent absence of a published paper is any more important than the apparent failure of the climate scientists to respond to what should be an easy challenge for them. I think you’re wrong to assert blame on one side for the ‘engagement gap’ and I think you should have more than that for such a confident dismissal of a guy who is qualified to make the challenges he has made and who seems to have sacrificed his career for a couple of points of principle. Incidentally, professors being forced out when they set up against powerful interests is commonplace.
Where has Rancourt aligned with the Christian right - or do you just mean their politics aligns with his scientific results?
I hope to leave it there as we’re really only on the fringes of an adhom issue (and as I think the covid scene might indeed be getting worse), to progress further I think we’d need to see some engagement between Rancourt and his opponents, or we’d (but not me ) need to get into the physics. Or the way they are modelling it. Not my scenes, Mann
“Yes, Principal Component Analysis. They were wrong about whether that is a problem - it’s not. Were there other methodological problems? I didn’t see any.”
As I understand it both Wegman and North agreed on
the mathematical error of using a biased centering for Mann’s hockeystick and ** 2. agreeing with McIntyre about Mann’s flawed choice of proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them. North in the congressional inquiry: " Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods."
“McIntyre Is Wrong. He is wrong. As is Wegman.”
So you are challenging the accuracy of one of the leading authorities of the time in the US on statistical analysis, Dr. Wegman. Was he right at the time of his statements on oath to Congress or was he wrong at that time? Don’t forget that I regard the original Mann paper to be the source of much of the public’s misinformation and to have the greater influence.
“There have been several studies since then which have showed this - science moves on.”
1. Are these studies made by associates of Mann or his co-authors or are they clearly independent and unbiased? Do they comment on the accuracy of the original paper by Mann et al? 2. Who funded these several studies? 3. Many would like to move on from awkward questions there were never really settled and Science certainly is not settled in most areas, imo.
“Just as you are wrong in your interpretation of the error bars which I have tried many times to clarify and which you are still ignoring.”
I don’t recall commenting on error bars. But here is North’s view on Mann’s error bars in the congressional inquiry :
" . The papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues in 1998 and 1999 were, to my knowledge, the first attempts to assign statistical error bars to a large-scale surface temperature reconstruction. As noted in our report these error bars provide an indication of how well the reconstructed temperatures match observations during the “calibration period,” but they do not represent all of uncertainties inherent in reconstructing surface temperature from proxy data. The actual uncertainties in the reconstruction would be somewhat larger, and difficult to quantify." Clearly Mann’s error bars don’t cover his backside completely - the actual uncertainties would be somewhat larger and difficult to quantify - and so we come back to "plausible " work - work that is so uncertain that does not qualify for even the lowest possible level of confidence!
re Rancourt:
“No wonder he won’t try to write a peer reviewed article. So much wrong in so few words… I’m back to thinking he’s a charlatan and a shill. It’s hard to be so wrong by accident.
Rancourt goes straight into the garbage”
I wonder if you could be more specific - just looking at the physics I see a lot of detailed study questioning the so-called “settled science” do you agree on anything he says?
You don’t comment on the more recent views of Prof Harde’s which like Rancourt’s analysis questions key assumptions of the “settled science on AGW”, do you accept anything he says?
so I’ve looked through the article by Rancourt linked by CJ on the “gargantuan lie”. I can safely say that Rancourt is not an honest broker on this subject. This answers the question as to why he won’t try and publish a peer-reviewed paper on the subject. He belongs the garbage with Monckton and other bad-faith deniers. I’m done thinking about him.
I had thought he was wrong from the get-go, but this article confirms that not only is he wrong, but he is deliberately misleading, and therefore I’m back to thinking he’s a charlatan or a shill. I won’t bother with his mask discussion either as I just don’t see the point .
A shame, but then not a surprising one.
Thanks for the chat. Look forward to chatting about more constructive issues.
A short reply to round off, as I’m aware this isn’t the main show
Just to be clear - this is the paper detailing Rancourt’s criticisms, from my previous reply:
Isn’t this what you were insisting what Rancourt should have produced?
Certainly it is, technically, a physics paper, which he put out to his opponents asking for a response.
It is what you called for - it’s just not in your preferred medium. (I suggested many reasons for that).
This represents where we reached in the constructive direction.
Maybe you found something heinous in a blog post - to me that represents a step back from the evidence (we can probably find overreach from anyone in that kind of arena) and quality standard you led the discussion with.
You don’t share it - you have his deep dark secret, and I have his technical paper that has not had a response or rebuttal that I could find.
I have seen that paper and even referred to it above as his single unreviewed, unpublished contribution. Sadly, I don’t think it changes much, as it is pretty clear from his writings that he’s pushing a political agenda and is happy to mislead in order to do so.
Thanks for the video light entertainment - I’ll check it out!
) have not engaged with anything Rancourt HAS written. How do we know he hasn’t investigated these ‘holes’ rigorously, or what the engagement has been like? I would expect he has been rigorous in any physics work he has done on climate change, but with regard to its relevance in the wider context of a complex mix of specialties there is still room for much uncertainty. Real science is a bit of a jostle. The last thing I’d want to see is every unwelcome new angle frozen out by vested interests (commericial or academic) and personal hostility. I’d much prefer for people to acknowledge there are other (perhaps minority) viewpoints and approaches. Covid has shown the dangers of so-called ‘Science’ operating by ‘consensus’ that isn’t voluntary - especially if it then runs away with itself.
