Seth's Blog

Anysley Kellow is a professor of political science at the University of Tasmania. In an interview five years ago, he said, about global warming, “we’ve got a much broader range of choice to respond to a problem that is much more uncertain than certain people who are pushing the issue would have us believe.”

As in a protection racket, the people trying to scare you benefit from you being scared:

I did a study of electricity planning, including here in Tasmania, the good old Hydro Electric Commission in the old days—and the logic was much the same; they would produce forecasts of [hard-to-meet] future demand which were then taken as immutable, and then they would try and justify particular policy responses to those. In the case here it was with hydro dam construction.

I learned about Professor Kellow’s work from a comment about status-trading among scientists. I wrote to him to ask what work of his was being referred to. He replied:

I think the reference is just to my 2007 book (Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science), where I write about the shrinking size of groups which possess expertise, the effect of the communications revolution in establishing close networks of cooperation, and the effect of this on quality-assurance processes like peer review. The prevailing paradigm then becomes a ‘club good’ from the defense of which all members benefit (in status, grant success and career advancement).

The problem is exacerbated by some of the circumstances revealed by Climategate: not just pressure on editors, and influence in being IPCC lead authors, but peer review in climate journals where submitting authors nominate reviewers, the identity of authors is known to those approached to referee papers, and so on. I am so accustomed to double-blind peer review that I found it hard to believe that this was a common practice.
When we add this to the lack of disclosure of raw data and code, we have serious reliability problems underlying science upon which we are basing very costly policy. We know in social science research the potential for subjective factors to obtrude into data manipulation even when researchers do not consciously mean for this to happen, so we often see data preparation and analysis performed by independent teams, and emphasise transparency, disclosure of methods, double-blind peer review, and so on.

That’s a good point about single-blind peer review. I agree, it should all be double-blind, no exceptions. In psychology authors don’t know the name of reviewers but reviewers know the names of authors. You can request double-blind review but then your paper enters the review process with a “paranoid” label attached.

Kellow interviewed about Climategate.

QUESTION: When the green bean jumped off a tall building, what did it become?

ANSWER: Red bean.

QUESTION: When the banana jumped off a tall building, what did it become?

ANSWER: Eggplant.

QUESTIONER: For Spring Festival, a farmer wanted to kill a donkey or a pig. Which did he choose?

LISTENER: I don’t know. The pig?

QUESTIONER: Congratulations, the donkey agrees with you.

Joel Voss, a postdoc at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, studied himself to measure the capacity of associative memory:

No previous experiments on humans have investigated the capacity of associative memory. I describe the first relevant data, which I obtained by systematically probing my own capacity during 58,560 memory trials for picture—response associations (approximately 1 year of testing). Estimated capacity was on the order of several thousand associations.

A few thousand is the number of characters a well-educated Chinese person knows.

Google “Climategate” you get 31 million hits. “Obama” returns 40 million. Yet mainstream media, such as the New York Times, have said little about it. The New Yorker has said nothing about it. Given so much interest, that will change.

Some of my prior beliefs — that empirical support for the view that man has caused global warming is weaker than we’re told, that bloggers are a powerful force for truth — are stronger. But here are a few things I didn’t think of until now:

1. The truth leaks out before it gushes out. Laurie David’s children’s book — its egregious mistake, her blithe dismissal of that mistake — is an example of the truth leaking out. In the Ranjit Chandra case, little facts implied he was a fraud long before this became utterly clear. An example is the claim in one of his papers (published in The Lancet!) that everyone asked agreed to be in his experiment.

2. Teaching is even better done via scandals than via stories. The number of hits for Climategate is an indication of how much people are learning from it. As I blogged earlier, they’re learning a lot about science. A mere story about science would never attract so much attention. I should think more about how to use scandals to teach stuff. When Nassim Taleb is scathing about this or that, he has the right idea. Spy was the perfect example. It taught me a lot about New York City.

3. Jane Jacobs was wrong. Or at least missed something very important. In Dark Age Ahead, her last book, she pointed to a number of disturbing signs. One was the rise of crappy science. She was quite right about that  — as scientists have become more professional they have become more status-oriented and less truth-oriented. She didn’t foresee that the Internet would be an enormously powerful corrective force, as is happening now. Climategate is a (relatively) small example of even bigger force: the rise of the power of sophisticated amateurs/hobbyists. Who, unlike professionals, with jobs and status to protect, have complete freedom. The first big example was printed non-fiction books, as I blogged earlier (which are written with great freedom, usually); but now the Internet provides another great outlet, much faster, cheaper, and more accessible than books, for independent thought.

In 2007, Laurie David, producer of An Inconvenient Truth, ex-wife of Larry David, and self-described “global warming activist,” published The Down To Earth Guide to Global Warming, a book for children. It contained a graph showing the very strong correlation over time between carbon dioxide levels and global temperature. The point was that carbon dioxide controlled global temperature. But there was a problem: The graph was mislabeled. The function labeled “carbon dioxide” was actually the temperature function. Correctly labeled, the graph showed that carbon dioxide changes followed temperature changes. Which meant that the temperature changes had caused the carbon-dioxide changes, rather than the other way around — which was one of the book’s main points.

David’s reaction to the mistake?

Thanks guys! We will correct the illustration in the next edition. We’re happy to learn that that was the only question SPPI had about the entire fact-filled book!

As if it’s trivial.

Moral: A sign of things to come.

More The fact that a producer of An Inconvenient Truth, the movie that arguably won Al Gore a Nobel Prize, could (a) make such a basic mistake and (b) dismiss it as trivial is the ladies-who-lunch equivalent of the fact that Jones and other CRU scientists were scared of a New York Times reporter.