Matt RIDLEY on GLOBAL WARMING GUERRILLAS

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The global warming guerrillas

MATT RIDLEY
Spectator
WEDNESDAY, 3RD FEBRUARY 2010


Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.

It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner. By contrast, it has so far attracted little attention that the leaked emails of Climategate include messages from reporters obsequiously seeking ammunition against the sceptics. Other emails have shown reporters meekly changing headlines to suit green activists, or being threatened with ostracism for even reporting the existence of a sceptical angle: ‘Your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists,’ one normally alarmist reporter was told last year when he slipped briefly off message. ‘I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

So used are greens to sycophancy in the television studios that when they occasionally encounter even slightly hard questions they are outraged. Peter Sissons of the BBC: ‘I pointed out to [Caroline Lucas of the Green party] that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions... Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC — the BBC! — should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.’


the rest of the article here
www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/5749853/the-global-warming-guerrillas.thtml

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Philip Stott says

... Matt Ridley’s article could well become a classic in pin-pointing the moment when the democratic internet wrested elements of legitimacy from both the mainstream media and from science itself.

This is truly the Day of the Blogger. It is precisely why I have blogged: “to ensure that the mainstream media cannot exclude critical voices which deserve to be heard.”

It now appears that bloggers are becoming a Fifth Estate, a new, and vital, balance in the realm of politics, correcting and curbing the failures and excesses of the Fourth Estate, the press, which is too frequently subservient to the forces of the State, and of their wealthy, and often ruthless, proprietors.

This is why it is absolutely necessary that the internet remains free and open to all. This is why some newspapers need to apologise, such as The Times for its shameful editorial on “village idiots”. Above all, this is why Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband should be ashamed of, and apologise for, their recent attacks on the critics of climate-change science.


web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times.html

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Latest essay on Anthropogenic Global Warming from Matt Ridley.

The Perils Of Confirmation Bias
Posted on Monday 8 October 2012

The philosopher Karl Popper famously made the case that the distinguishing feature of a scientific theory is that it is falsifiable. Scientists set out to shoot down each other’s theories and only when they fail does a hypothesis become an accepted scientific fact. For some time it has been clear that is not how most climate scientists operate.

The modus operandi of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) has been to accumulate evidence to champion rather than challenge a hypothesis, namely that rising carbon dioxide levels will in future cause dangerous climate change.

A good example is the IPCC’s claim that only models that incorporate high-sensitivity carbon dioxide-induced warming countered by aerosol induced cooling can match (or “hindcast”) the recent upward progress of global average temperatures. The problem with this is that different models use different values of assumed cooling from aerosols. That is to say, the cooling effect of aerosols has been picked so that it fills the gap between observed and expected warming. The modellers are therefore in effect saying: we observe warming of X, we predicted warming of X+5, so there must have been cooling of 5, therefore our prediction is correct.

Or, to quote one of the papers that examined this issue:

“These results explain to a large degree why models with such diverse climate sensitivities can all simulate the global anomaly in surface temperature. The magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing compensates for the model sensitivity.”

Once an empirical estimate of aerosol cooling is used instead of an assumption, the models’ performance is poor (see Penner et al 2011).

Many sceptical scientists have objected to this kind of confirmation bias, but their objections have met with little interest from journalists or from the leaders of science academies. Climate scientists deny the charge, saying they are properly sceptical about their own hypotheses. Actually, a much stronger argument they could use is that they are behaving no differently from other scientists. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is a long catalogue of carefully selected facts in support of natural selection. Bohr, Einstein, Wegener, Mendel, Rutherford and Hawking all won great scientific renown while pushing, rather than trying to falsify, an idea.

How is it possible for scientific theories occasionally to fall, and science to remain honest, if scientists champion ideas rather than challenge them? The answer, obviously, is that scientists challenge each other.

Every important new idea in science is “replicated” or tested by another team than the one that put forward the idea. And it is this process that has gone missing in climate science. It is unreasonable to expect a climate scientist to seek evidence against his favoured hypothesis; but it is not unreasonable to expect governments to back the partisans of other hypotheses: that man-made climate change may be real but not dangerous because of lack of positive feedbacks; that it may be less powerful than some natural causes of change; or that there are negative feedbacks that reduce the effects of man-made warming.

Instead of this, anybody who champions one of these hypotheses is often accused of “denial” or of not “believing” in climate change, and frequently subjected to a surprising level of abuse.

Climate scientists and their media champions equate such scepticism with scepticism about, say, the theory of evolution. Yet evolution is an explanation of facts; dangerous man-made climate change is a prediction about the future. Theories about the future are always less reliable than theories about the past. I can have confidence that the reports that it rained last Tuesday are true, while doubting the forecast that it will rain next Tuesday. Besides there are many examples of scientific orthodoxies that brooked little dissent in their heyday and yet were often wrong, such as behaviourism and Freudianism. In one case, the parallel with climate science is uncomfortably close. In the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics was a theory about future danger, based on prediction, demanding short-term pain for long-term gain and insisting that its tenets were beyond reasonable challenge.

I explored the problem of “confirmation bias” in science and its application to climate science in particular for a series of articles originally published in The Wall Street Journal. These are reprinted in this pamphlet. In essence, the argument is that confirmation bias is to be expected in climate science as in any science, but that a monopoly focus on a single hypothesis is not. For the health of this science, governments should fund groups that intend to explore alternative hypotheses about the likely future of climate as well as those that explore the dangerous man-made climate change prediction. Only then will that theory be properly tested.