Just a quick post to highlight that the Zharkova et al. paper, that I’ve discussed in a couple of previous posts, has now been retracted. The retraction notice is here. There’s a Retraction Watch post, which also includes a link to an author response. The authors who’ve objected (which is not all of them) seem to be suggesting that the editor’s interpretation of what they were saying in the paper was not a fair reflection of what was being said. This is slightly odd, given that both my email exchange with the lead author, and the lengthy discussion in this Pubpeer thread, suggests that the editor has correctly interpreted what was said in the paper.
In addition to the above, there is a New Scientist article by Adam Vaughan, and Gavin Schmidt has a new Realclimate post asking [w]hy are o many solar climate papers flawed?
I’m always a little uncomfortable about suggesting that papers should be retracted. I think it should mostly be because of some kind of scientific misconduct; we can still learn from papers that end up being wrong. We also have to be careful of papers being retracted because what they say is inconvenient. However, in this case the error is so fundamental that there is little value in such a paper being part of the literature. As far as I can tell, the journal went through a fairly rigorous re-evaluation of the paper and decided that they had no confidence in what was being presented; even the authors’ response to the updated reviews had basic errors, as Michael Brown points out in this Retraction Watch comment. I think the retraction is the correct outcome.
...and Then There's Physics 
I don’t pretend to understand the implications of this, but I thank you anyway for reminding me of one of my favourite scenes from The Big Bang Theory…
Reblogged this on Symptoms Of The Universe and commented:
I’m reblogging this post (from … and Then There’s Physics) about the welcome retraction of a fundamentally flawed paper that received a lot of media attention last year . What worried me, and still worries me, is that different sub-disciplines (let alone disciplines) seemingly have very different cultures when it comes to the question of retraction of papers: https://muircheartblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/sloppy-science-still-someone-elses-problem/
Pedantry,
Yes, very good.
Now it will become the next bigly yuge cons piracy theory ever known to humankind. All done with absolutely zero math skills required or presented on the part of the three authors or their supporters. Kind of like flat Earth science.
I placed a challenge on RealClimate for anyone to try to debunk the Nature Scientific Reports paper on the lunisolar influence on natural climate variability. It essentially contradicts the consensus, so unlike the silly Zharkova paper is actually meaningful. Will anyone bite on this one?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/03/why-are-so-many-solar-climate-papers-flawed/#comment-759224
Realclimate has a new post on this. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/03/why-are-so-many-solar-climate-papers-flawed
Thanks Pendantry! That embodies the complexity of human silliness.
Speaking of which, unfortunately the NYTimes has a paywall, but I think this is useful (to my fellow atheists, please give it a rest; best to use religion rather than dismiss it, it’s a fact of life).
GSM cons piracy theory follows in 3, 2, 1, …
Valentina Zharkova’s Work Retracted FOR NO REASON
https://www.thegrandsolarminimum.com/valentina-zharkovas-work-retracted-for-no-reason/
Really sort of painful to see this kind of stuff in public. Trumpkin level of rhetoric, that is.
It is truly depressing to see the rise of climate denial across the board. They have more or less taken over a big part of Quora where I used not to see them much. People who make money with clicks are having a field day with their moneymaking efforts regardless of what is honest and right. (Facebook is a much bigger offender, but Quora is symptomatic of all the small places being invaded. The NYTimes is another example where a much bigger share of commentary and “picks” are coming from denial and pro-Trumpers.)
Very good – this is a straightforward resolution of an example of what is a really a very minor, if tawdry, aspect of modern science – the abuse of publication by individuals who choose to disregard the element of “self-review” that’s a normal part of most scientist’s psychology. Most of us would be mortified to publish something substandard that they and their coauthors hadn’t checked to death for flaws.
I would be great to think that the University(ies) from which this stuff emanated might make a serious investigation of how something like this could be published. Would be interesting to know what they think and if they actually care!
The good thing is that this indefensible stuff is now actually undefendable. At least one of the authors (the main one I think) engaged in a major rear-guard action of justification, and from an outsider’s point of view, this can be made to appear to be simply some sort of “scientific dispute”. That game can’t be played now and that’s the actual benefit of this retraction. From the point of view of the “progression of science” published junk doesn’t actually matter that much since it’s easily recognised as such. Politically (broadly speaking) it matters a little more and that’s why it’s good to see this “officially” marked as unacceptable and substandard.
Just reading the pubpeer thread its clear even for a layman, that Zharkova is talking utter nonsense
What amazes me is the academic institution she works for allows this
Full disclosure, i have 5 children, 2 currently at University (one graduating in June from Edinburgh, one first year at Manchester) the other three soon too apply
Why would you spend good money at institutions associated with flat earth science (Zarkhova comments re the seasons will undoubtedly find its way into the flat earth scientific liturature)
Kids pay good money to go to universities, i would strongly advise my children from attending institutions that allow themselves to be associated with this psuedo scientific crap
An_older_coder,
One of your children chose their university wisely 😉
Good job and congratulations.
I kind of liked the closing remarks of this post …
Paper That Blames The Sun For Climate Change Was Just Retracted From Major Journal
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-paper-that-blames-the-sun-for-climate-change-has-been-retracted
“In remarks to retraction website Retraction Watch, Zharkova protested the retraction of the solar movement study, claiming that it was an attempt to reduce the importance of the paper, and the authors’ scientific standing.
But the level of criticism from the scientific community suggests that the horse had already well and truly bolted.”
ATTP.
Well I’ve just had an interesting exchange of emails with [redacted],
It helped me to understand why the summary curve as shown in Figure 1a (dark blue line) …
is different from the summary curve as shown in Figure 3a (cyan line) …
for the same common era of 1-2200 CE (the curves should be identical).
This has rather serious implications for the construction of their baseline magnetic field curve from the summary curve as shown in Figure 3a (dark blue line) and Figure 2b (cyan and dark blue lines) …
But 1st, it is time for a music interlude …
This seems yet another example of a gremlins&leprechauns paper:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/fixednum.php has a good list of false arguments, of which some might be called “gremlins”
1 “It’s the sun”
14 “It’s cosmic rays”
20 “It’s Urban Heat Island effect”
21 “It’s a 1500 year cycle”
32 “We’re coming out of the Little Ice Age”
50 “It’s Pacific Decadal Oscillation”
63 “Solar Cycle Length proves its the sun”
etc incl my favorite:
115 “It’s satellite microwave transmissions”
Gremlins magically produce exactly the warming attributed to greenhouse gases, but are:
a) Nonexistent
b) Well-measured to have minimal effects
c) Are cherry-picked intervals that happen to have correlations over short periods
But that’s not enough. “Leprechauns” are needed to magically & exactly nullify the well-known effects of greenhouse gases, somehow disproving well-measured absorption/emission spectra of molecules in the atmosphere and canceling conservation of energy.
Somehow promoters of gremlin effects always forget they need leprechauns as well.
(No slight to leprechauns, I’d be glad if some existed to turn down greenhouse effect for a while.)
Indeed John. The missing process that cancels out known GHG physics almost exactly is the dog that never barks in these investigations. I presume those particular detectives never think to look for that dog because, whether they admit it or not, even to themselves, they are in denial of known GHG science.
Coincidentally and timely, from the same stable; The aberrant global synchrony of present-day warming
Quelle surprise (my bold).
From the Nature Geoscience commentary, with link to a companion paper:
ATTP (might need to repost due to font scaling issues).
As I mentioned before, the following plots undermine the so-called other leg of Zharkova (2019), that being the 1000-year FIR boxcar (or moving average) of their own summary curve to obtain what they call their baseline magnetic field (see Figures 1&3 above) …
Original digital time series (Figure 1) provided by [redacted].
In the main text, ATTP says: “I’m always a little uncomfortable about suggesting that papers should be retracted. I think it should mostly be because of some kind of scientific misconduct;”
“Scientific misconduct” is probably another one of those terms that means different things to different people. (Another blog post where comments can fly past each other as people argue while using different definitions?). Having read the posts here, some of the linked stories, and the discussion at PubPeer, my opinion is that the forceful, belligerent, abusive, incomprehensible, and obstinate arguing by Zharkova in defence of an obviously wrong result comes pretty damn close to “scientific misconduct”.
Of course, that behavior is not actually part of the paper itself, which needs to be judged on its own merits. They all form part o the bigger picture of the trustworthiness of the author’s work in general, though.
In the choice between “Zharkova’s reputation is being trashed by Zharkova”s work and actions”, vs. “Zharkova’s reputation is being trashed because people are pointing out the issues in Zharkova”s work and actions”, I know which I would think is the root cause of the problem.
BL,
Right now, I prefer Hanlon’s razor, but it is a really close call, as in, can they really be that stupid when it comes to very basic data analyses. There is a reason that I posted Thick as a Brick above.
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out
My word’s but a whisper your deafness a shout
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think
Dave said :
The silent dog is an explainer for why scientific discoveries are often overlooked for years. To take the Zharkova case, she is obviously searching for solar variability impacting the Earth’s temperature variability but is struggling to come up with a plausible mechanism. The concept of aliasing came up and so I started a twitter thread, with Scott McIntosh from NCAR providing interesting guidance regarding the “large yellow energy source”:
Aliasing in the guise of solar modulation may in fact be hiding a mechanism that is not as obvious as a barking dog. Many people have heard the Holmes barking dog story so I included it in this blog post from last year: https://geoenergymath.com/2019/10/24/autocorrelation-in-power-spectra-continued/
EFS:
There is a difference between being “really that stupid” and being abusive in your discussions with others. I can’t see anything but malice in some of the attacks on the PubPeer thread.
BL,
It could all be associated with poor societal grooming or heritage. Call it low social IQ. English as a 2nd or 3rd or … language. Some people are inherently thin skinned. I actually laughed out loud at most of her comments, because, well because they were actually funny, they weren’t meant to be funny, but a keen sense of humor helps a lot in matters such as these.
Maybe you should call the Internet Police? Their number is +1 666 666 6666 🙂
Dave_Geologist:
Indeed DG, denial is a term of psychological art for a “primitive” cognitive defense mechanism:
I interpret that to mean those who are in denial, of AGW or other painful thoughts, do not admit it even to themselves. OTOH, there are some who propagate climate science denialism in the public sphere, who almost certainly do admit it to themselves, and are deliberately exploiting unconscious denial and other cognitive drivers in their audience. Dr. Mashey has in fact developed a detailed taxonomy (fig. 2.5) of diverse motivations for climate science denial. IMO it’s a valuable aid to understanding. Thanks John!
1) Of dogs not barking: if people saw fine film “Knives Out”, did you catch the two-way homage to Sherlock Holmes of dogs that crucially did or did not bark in night? We can argue mapping to CO2 vs solar.😊
2) See also Dr Zharkova’s Pubpeer #37, where she approvingly mentions Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Patrick Moore, Henrik Svensmark and Murry Salby (tagging him as UK-has he moved from AU?)
“Wikipedia deletes The List of Scientists who are Skeptics of the “Consensus”
Seems to be a common thread here.
What was Zharkova’s crime?
Poor English.
Poor science.
Or disputing the consensus?
Something to ponder.
Killing the messenger does not kill the message.
Mal
Yep, but try the newer version, which was cleaned up & more added a few months later:
https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/crescendo%20climategate%20cacophony%20v1%200.pdf#page=14
Dr Zharkov seems to fit TEC1-TEC3 (Field pseuo-science, maybe with some TEC6 Ego thrown in.
What was Zharkova’s crime angech? Bad manners.
Her scientific error? (not a crime) Undergraduate-level error in her Sun-Earth distance calculation. Combined with failure to spot that her Sun-Earth distance did not average to 1.0 A.U., or if she did, to recognise that there was therefore a fundamental problem with her calculations. That’s more of a schoolgirl error. Like not only proposing a new theory of gravity but insisting, against observations, that its Earth-surface acceleration is 9.23 m/s2. Then failing to see her error when it was repeatedly and politely explained to her.
And the dog-that-didn’t-bark missing piece of her hypothesis. Unless she denies well established physics and chemistry, we should be warming at twice the actual rate if she’s correct. Unlike the IPCC-quoted models, which match observations within error bars, that puts the complete version of her hypothesis, sans GHG-driven AGW denial, well outside error bars. A gross mismatch which totally invalidates her hypothesis. To rescue her hypothesis, she has to completely dismantle all the physics, chemistry and geology of the existing theory, layer by layer, and provide alternative explanations for everything from why heat-seeking missiles work to quantum chemistry and Ice Ages. Not jut ignore it. Or find the dog that didn’t bark. And explain why it’s not barking now but it did bark during Ice Ages, the PETM, the end-Ordovician, the end-Permian, the Neoproterozoic snowballs, in the lab, at CERN, and during major volcanic eruptions. Oh, and also fix the calculation error. Trouble is, fix that and she predicts we should be warming 1% faster than standard climate models predict, so her effect is lost in the noise and irrelevant.
“What was Zharkova’s crime?”
Poor science, quite clearly.
And I would not put it beyond the Editor to have taken into account (without wanting to mention it) the several examples of apparent scientific misconduct by Zharkova, for example stealing graphs from others and representing them as her own, and denying Usoskin access to the data against Sci Rep rules.
Thanks Mal and John. I had the 1.0.1 version already.
Angech zharkovas paper was factually incorrect, it got criticised as a result. Had prof Zharkova been more reasonable in her defence of her work, it would only have been the message that was criticised not the messenger.
I guess if I could not find a way to defend the paper no one could!
except the authoress.
Looks like blog peer review can be worthwhile after all.
EFS asks “Maybe you should call the Internet Police?”
You seem to be under the illusion that I want to stop Zharakova from behaving the way she has. I am perfectly content to let her make a fool of herself at PubPeer and any blogs she chooses to comment on. She is welcome to as much rope as she wants. I think it is extremely useful that she makes it perfectly clear what sort of person she is.
BL,
“You seem to be under the illusion that I want to stop Zharkova from behaving the way she has.”
Definitely not so. Strawperson even. I do believe in free expression though, Do you?
“I am perfectly content to let her make a fool of herself at PubPeer and any blogs she chooses to comment on. She is welcome to as much rope as she wants.”
OK. Whatever.
“I think it is extremely useful that she makes it perfectly clear what sort of person she is.”
And that would be? Here, let me help you there with my own strawperson. A female in a largely male dominated field. Not an excuse mind you, just a fact of life.
> Seems to be a common thread here.
Common only to those who disagree with you about climate change?
EFS: “ I do believe in free expression though, Do you?
Yes,I do. So why did you introduce the Internet Police to the discussion? Did you actually have a point to make?
EFS: “A female in a largely male dominated field.”
And I am all for equal opportunity. If Zharakova were a man, I’d still think that her comments on PubPeer represent a terrible way to treat other people. And I find that it is very useful to know that someone is like that. Much prefer to see that up front than to have to figure out that someone who acts politely in public is really a nasty person hiding behind a friendly public persona.
FYI, I think the work you did on figuring out what was wrong with her science was very well done.
I’m not quite sure what Bob and EFS are actually arguing about?
BL,
Well 1st, thank you.
All I can say is that we all wear different masks at different times. So, for example, I was The Joker, as in, it was meant as a joke, that IP stuff.
ATTP,
I’m fine and I hope BL is fine. If I’ve offended anyone, then all I can say is I.m sorry.
dikranmarsupial:
That’s a nice summary of the issue. One presumes Dr. Zharkova has motives for defending her work, but science depends on intersubjective verification, in the recognition that your peers have less incentive to fool themselves about your work than you do. It sounds to me like she simply doesn’t accept that she could be fooling herself. That’s a common cognitive bias, underlying much of the volunteer AGW-denial we see. Scientific training and peer discipline are supposed to get us past it, however. Zharkova is only embarrassing herself by disputing the retraction of her paper.
angech:
There may be hope for you yet, Doc.
ATTP: “I’m not quite sure what Bob and EFS are actually arguing about?”
I wasn’t sure, either. From EFS’s latest comments, it seems like a misunderstood nuance. I think we’re both fine now.
John Mashey:
OK, John, thanks for making the distinction.
Hopefully, the relevant section of this GSM nutbar video discusses mpee domain going offline …
[Mod: deleted non-working youtube clip.]
The main staff page for Zharkova is still up …
https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/z/professor-valentina-zharkova/
But the http://mpee.northumbria.ac.uk/ domain tree now requires a username and password. For at least the last two days, lower parts of that tree returned a 404 error (e. g. http://mpee.northumbria.ac.uk/staff/slmv5/kinetics/news.php which was where all those updates of Zharcova’s were posted), so I sort of suspected that something was up.
I do have a question for ATTP, if you are still reading this thread, so ATTP are you out there?
Well neither of those YouTube links (with start/stop points) worked (please delete those broken video links/post). I think the text is sufficient in my1st post on this (you all probably don’t want to see anything from that GSM website anyways).
EFS,
Yes, I’m out here.
ATTP,
I’ll quote just one sentence from this GSM nutbar website which is a direct quote from Zharkova:
https://www.thegrandsolarminimum.com/valentina-zharkovas-work-retracted-for-no-reason/
“Now you can find our paper here and on the archive 2002.06550 until we publish it again.”
That so-called revised draft (v2 now, which still has the Watts per second error for TSI, mind you) is here …
https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06550
So my question is this, I’d expect some form of stovepipe(s) (military lingo for silos or chains of command, internal to any (or most) organizational structures), where anything submitted for publication goes through some formal chain of command at most/all unis?
Not trying to censor, and/or if one really tried hard enough, I’d expect some sort of end around that would skirt/avoid the formal internal review processes (chain of command) at any uni?
That last one was not really a question, just trying to think outside of the so-called box (if there is one) of academic discipline. TIA
EFS,
There is generally no internal review within universities. If someone is part of a more formal collaboration, then you might need to get approval from your collaborators (in the case of very large collaborations, there can be a formal publication process). However, I don’t think there is ever any internal review within universities involving some kind of management.
ATTP.,
Thanks. I only ever worked for the USACE (US Army as a civilian), there was an installed internal review process for anything above say a graphical presentation/talk. (e. g. anything past say an abstract+PPT presentation). I would expect most managers to only be able to do a form of technical writing review though, at least that was my experience.
I don’t believe that this paper could ever be repaired, but I also have no doubts about this paper being published elsewhere pretty much as is.
What would really be rather funny though, would be the authors citing the retracted version into this draft or future publications of theirs.
For comparison, when I was at Bell Labs (1973-83), review for external paper worked like this:
MTS (Member of Technical Staff) writes paper,
Sent up management chain,
Supervisor(SV)
Department Head
Director
Executive Director1 (who manages 1000-1500 people)
ED sends to EDs of 2 other divisions, who send paper down till get to someone who can review.
Reviews come back up over to ED1, then down chain to MTS.
Reviews could be blunt. I was a SV, one of MTS was really negative on paper, I agreed … and my ED copied me in note he sent, of form “Dear X, once again our folks say a paper is bad & I agree.”
If anyone did a paper with interesting statistics, good chance it would get reviewed by John Tukey & co. A bad review coming through whole management chain = bad career move… so of course sensible people tried hard to get feedback before this.
Following this process, regular peer review seemed easy.
For the professoriate at universities the review is obtained externally via the editor of the peer-reviewed publication. Graduate students usually submit to their research professor first, but not always at CalTech and schools of similar quality.
Obviously everything I published in industry needed review. Usually by partner companies as well, and if it involve reproducing things like sections of well log, the owner/operator of the well and in countries where they’re not automatically published after say, five years, the government regulator. Although in OPEC countries that would usually be delegated to the state oil company*, who were a partner anyway. Ditto conference talks and slides. And I needed permission to be an editor or conference organiser. Most of that was for confidentiality/trade secrets, but there would also be technical review and I’m sure anything that reflected badly on the technical or scientific competence of the company’s staff would be stopped or sent for a rewrite.
I also worked for a government agency, and there everything had to be reviewed in a very formal process, because in a sense everything that comes out is The Word Of God. There was a real flurry when you had to provide the answer to a PQ (Parliamentary Question)! Self-generated/spare time publications were technically reviewed, again for reputation reasons.
My PhD work (all published after I’d left and was in employment though) was all reviewed by my supervisor(s), and one was a co-author on a couple of papers. We did disagree on one fundamental point (two of his 100% students were on my side and we jointly published our interpretation, while he published his with an occasional collaborator). In a sense we were both right, although I’d say I was more right 😉 . New techniques and data showed it was more complicated than we thought, and he was right for the first stage whereas we were right for the second. But pretty much all the evidence except for a mix of hunch and argument-from-incredulity was about the second stage, which all but wiped out the first, certainly for the technology of my day. In retrospect, I suspect that his 30 years’ experience enabled him to intuit something that was later confirmed by evidence he didn’t really have at the time.
* Norway was an interesting one because in the 80s NPD delegated their technical side to Statoil, who often had a conflict of interest but said they had Chinese Walls in place. I remember one meeting though where we had a cross-border field with an equity dispute with the Norwegian operator and were also applying to the UK and Norway regulators for field development permission. I’m sure I saw the same Statoil person sitting in on both tracks! NPD now have their own technical teams, I suspect following some nasty incidents after which they decided Statoil shouldn’t mark its own homework. They (and the UK) also rely on their geological surveys for support. There’s an interesting one – a water injector breach to seabed – where NPD’s engineers agreed with Statoil as to the cause but the survey, NGU, did not (NGU were right). Both views were published: Norwegians are very blunt. In oil industry lore, Norwegians and Dutch rank above Germans for bluntness. In the UK, I suspect disagreements would have been papered over in public.
Ruh Roh!
VALENTINA ZHARKOVA’S GSM website is up an operational …
https://solargsm.com/
We will, we will, CRUSH you! We will, we will …
Notes: “an” above should be “and”
That anthem is from their POV, not mine (or ours hopefully).
Their paper is bound to be published in the … wait for it … any minute now ,,, getting really close … here it comes … Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics!!!
Has global warming already arrived?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364682618305030
A twofer. The satellites are better than thermometers of course – despite not measuring temperature and what they do measure not being at surface. And UAH is the One True Record, despite a decades-long litany of errors.
Returning to my Norway anecdote above, in a sense they were both right – NPD for the proximate cause, NGU for the ultimate cause. But my Root Cause Analysis training always said we should look for the ultimate cause. The people on the ground probably know the proximate cause already. Where NPD were wrong was in denying that Statoil were injecting into the wrong formation, which was a geological call which is why I know NGU were right (not because they said so, but because they published the data and I was competent to interpret it). A small tank rather than a big tank. The NPD response leads to “start from here, but monitor more carefully”. The NGU response to “don’t start from here: it’s the wrong place and you’ll soon have to stop”.
But wait, I thought that … got real boring but … wait for it …
Scientists Reach 100% Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0270467619886266
Previous post paper at …
Click to access globalwarmingarrived.pdf
Should I be skeptical of one, or the other, neither or both?
Dave_Geologist says:
“A twofer. The satellites are better than thermometers of course – despite not measuring temperature and what they do measure not being at surface. And UAH is the One True Record, despite a decades-long litany of errors.”
–
Much truth is written in jest.
DG
What would you rather have to use?
An extensive decades long recorded examination of the earth from space or the thermometer network.
No extra prize for saying both.
–
Could there be some other reason to to deny the obvious choice to a scientist like yourself?
What could it be?
Again everyone here knows the answer but stubbornly refuse to look in the mirror.
–
Temperature measurements of the ground from space (ie AIRS) have only been available from 2003 but so far they seem to match thermometers.
I’m sure that comes as a relief to the skeptics who were worried about possible problems in thermometer data.
Yes and of course Carl Mears was clear:
“I consider [surface temperature datasets] to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!). “
Ben –
> I’m sure that comes as a relief to the skeptics who were worried about possible problems in thermometer data.
Good one.
Angech “What would you rather have to use?
An extensive decades long recorded examination of the earth from space or the thermometer network.”
Both, taking into considerations the advantages and disadvantages of each source. I also wouldn’t rely on one analysis of the MSU satelite datase (e.g. UAH, RSS etc) or one analysis of the instrumental record (e.g. BEST, HadCRUT, GISS etc).
If you conclusion depends on the choice of the dataset, then it isn’t robust to “structural uncertainties” and you should be circumspect about promulgating it.
I suspect we have covered this one before….
angech, as a scientist the obvious choice is to use the dataset which actually measures the thing we want to measure. Not the one which indirectly infers it from a measurement of something else thousands of feet above the place where the thing we want to measure exists. A second obvious choice would be to use the dataset which measures the same thing in the same place at the same time each day, and doesn’t require sometimes-wrong orbital corrections to determine what time of day the satellite measurement was made. If I was going to use that indirect dataset I’d use the version calibrated by the satellite experts, RSS, not amateurs who have made dozens of documented errors (UAH), and who AFAIK have stopped putting their calibrations out for peer review. The third choice would be to use a robust technology which has centuries of calibration behind it, rather than a new one with a short record and a history already of calibration errors, even by the experts RSS, due to orbits not being where they were expected to be. The fourth choice would be to choose the one which has best, although still imperfect polar coverage, especially when thermometers and multiple lines of independent evidence tell us the poles are warming the most, the north in particular. The fifth choice would be to avoid anything by a self-professed fundamentalist Christian who has asserted that his religion trumps science (for him) in all circumstances, and who publicly claims that his religion tells him AGW can’t be real. The issue is not that he is a Christian, but that (in his mind) it would be blasphemy for him to accept the reality of AGW. Since, famously, the easiest person to fool is yourself, that raises a huge red flag where his religious beliefs conflict with science. All the more so when they conflict with a huge scientific consensus, including an alternative analysis of the satellite data by actual satellite experts.
” Again everyone here knows the answer but stubbornly refuse to look in the mirror.”
Any more irony and that comment would undergo a core-collapse supernova.
DM thank you for giving your view and scientific perspective,
“Both, taking into considerations the advantages and disadvantages of each source. ”
I fear you are spot on with your comments. I have the dubious honor of being tone deaf musically and socially , aware that I apparently have more than one large blind spot but I think I can see the irony.
–
DG I think you have summed up the Satellite v Thermometer debate as most would see it here.
–
I am not sure that religion and science are mutually exclusive the way you have put it. Roy is one of the actual satellite specialists. It is not his religious beliefs that conflict with alternative satellite data, it is his his actual satellite data.
I cannot for the life of me think of a passage in the bible that says that AGW cannot be real.
The Pope, who is sort of an authority on the Bible and fundamentally the essence of a Christian even though he is not a fundamentalist Christian says that Global Warming is real.
I think his argument on AGW, which is somewhere on his site, is along purely scientific lines to do with cloud cover uncertainty.
I think he is an extremely strong advocate for the GHG theory like yourself, just he has different views on ECS.
“Any more irony and that comment would undergo a core-collapse supernova.”
Perfect.
“I cannot for the life of me think of a passage in the bible that says that AGW cannot be real.”
The usual one is the one about the flood where God says that *he* won’t flood the earth again, which is taken as meaning there can be no substantial sea level rise due to climate change. I can’t remember chapter and verse, but of course it doesn’t mean God won’t stop *us* from causing such a flood if we chose to be so stupid.
I suspect that a lot of the religious opostion to climate science may be founded in “prosperity theology”, which essentially suggests that bad things only happen to bad people. I mention this as we are frequently told that to communicate effectively it is good to understand people’s values and beliefs. As a Christian, I rather disagree, hard to explain the book of Job in that light, or the tower of Siloam thing, about which Jesus said “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way?”
Motivated reasoning is not only applied to science, it is human nature and affects us all on pretty much every topic that is important to us.
RE: UAH and RSS
I suspect that the planetary boundary layer (PBL) has a lot to do with the differences between the LT time series and the GMST time series. Also, the following equation for UAH is a feature, not a bug …
LT = 1.538*MT – 0.548*TP + 0.01*LS
So that, for instance, the coefficients add up to one, although there is no immediate theoretical reason that I can think of as to why the coefficients must add up to one (conservation of MSU’s?). So that leaves us with even a bigger problem of using the MT as the lowest directly observational so-called mean layer height. And it even looks good in graphical form, those empirical coefficients, so that they must be right
…
LT = 1.538*0.07 – 0.548*(-0.01) + 0.01*(-0.34) (degrees C/decade)
LT = 0.10766 + 0.00548 – 0.0034 ~ 1.535*MT ~ 0.11 (degrees C/decade) 😦
Yeah, that must be right LT is approximately 1.5 times MT. And their claim appears to be something along the lines that MT is directly proportional to GMST, or some such.
“~ 1.535*MT”
should be …
“~ 1.538*MT”
in my last post.
angech –
> I am not sure that religion and science are mutually exclusive the way you have put it. Roy is one of the actual satellite specialists. It is not his religious beliefs that conflict with alternative satellite data, it is his his actual satellite data.
[…]
I think his argument on AGW, which is somewhere on his site, is along purely scientific lines
++++++++
How many times, do you think, you’ve posted comments at this site (and others) where you asserted that scientists (you don’t agree with) are biased in their investigation of the evidence of climate change?
My guess is in the hundreds.
Oops, now that I’m back on computer. Some here may ahve recognized name of Carl Mears, but some may not. I’ve met him, good guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Mears,
i.e., key RSS guy, one of those who kept finding bugs in UAH.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Satellite-record-vs-thermometers.htm
“Satellites don’t measure temperature. As Carl Mears of the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) satellite dataset and Ben Santer wrote,
they are not thermometers in space. The satellite [temperature] data … were obtained from so-called Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs), which measure the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules from broad atmospheric layers. Converting this information to estimates of temperature trends has substantial uncertainties.”
“As Carl Mears of RSS has said,
I consider [surface temperature datasets] to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!).”
Of course, Heartland Institute for years absolutely took UAH seriously over ground stations (but then, wrote that Joe Camel was innocent & secondhand smoke no problem).
https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/fake2.pdf#page=108
I think the fact that you can directly measure the surface temperature (much of the time) with IR from satellites (AIRS), and it agrees with thermometer measurements very well makes the whole RSS/UAH thing less interesting.
Or at least, it reinforces the point that the interesting data from RSS/MSU is trends in atmospheric temperatures, not ground temperatures, which they are a bit rubbish for.
“I think he is an extremely strong advocate for the GHG theory like yourself, just he has different views on ECS.”
and how many times do I have to tell you not to ascribe views to me. I am not a “strong advocate of GHG theory” – if I am an advocate of anything in science it is rational and dispassionate evaluation of evidence and theories.
Roy is one of the actual satellite specialists. It is not his religious beliefs that conflict with alternative satellite data, it is his his actual satellite data.
Sure Angech. That’s why he was a signatory to this:
We believe Earth and its ecosystems – created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.
Angech wrote “Roy is one of the actual satellite specialists. It is not his religious beliefs that conflict with alternative satellite data, it is his his actual satellite data.”
Apparently angech doesn’t know that all of the satellite datasets are different analyses of the same msu measurements. Roy doesn’t have any actual data, just different views on how it should be adjusted.
Anyone who cares about satellites (UAH, RSS, NOAA, etc) vs ground stations really needs to study
https://www.skepticalscience.com/Satellite-record-vs-thermometers.htm
including the list of corrections to UAH, the flowchart for processing, and the uncertainty graph.
See also Ben Santer/Carl Mears’ 2016 commentary, i.e., two experts with great track records:
https://skepticalscience.com/Response-Data-or-Dogma-hearing.html
Actually, the satellite datasets that are not just different analyses of MSU are quite interesting, in my opinion… as far as I can tell the only reason to use MSU products for surface temperature is to get a longer data series.
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aafd4e
Roy Spencer blog yesterday on GHG. Seems reasonable and rational.
“Once again I am being drawn into defending the common explanation of Earth’s so-called “greenhouse effect” as it is portrayed by the IPCC, textbooks, and virtually everyone who works in atmospheric radiation and thermodynamics.
To be clear, I am not defending the IPCC’s predictions of future climate change… just the general explanation of the Earth’s greenhouse effect, which has a profound influence on global temperatures as well as on weather.”
Ben: agreed … except an issue is the everlasting claims by the clueless that UAH series are The One Series to Rule Them All.
” … except an issue is the everlasting claims by the clueless that UAH series are The One Series to Rule Them All.”
except when the RSS trends are lower ;o)
angech, I cannot for the life of me think of a passage in the bible that says that AGW cannot be real either. They usually quote the promise to Noah, saying God would never send another Flood like that one, but ISTM that doesn’t says He’ll save us from our own folly, nor that He wouldn’t send a smaller flood that doesn’t overtop Mount Ararat. Nor can I think of a passage in the bible that says that evolution by natural selection, across not just within Kinds and including humans, cannot be real. Nor can the Pope. Lots of fundamentalist Christians (and Muslims and Jews) think they can, however. Including the Cornwall signatories. I explicitly made the point that’s it’s not the Christianity per se, it’s the specific subsets of beliefs held by a particular subset of Christians that a particular subset of scientific knowledge, including AGW, conflicts with their religious beliefs and that for them, in those circumstances, religion trumps science. When you come up with an answer contrary to mainstream science which just happens to avoid conflict with your religious beliefs, William of Ockham would probably have suspected motivated reasoning (had the term been current in his day).
Spencer’s involvement with the instruments makes his publications (and especially his social media/advertorial stuff) all the more questionable. He knows what they measure and knows it’s not surface temperature. And lots of the problems over the years (not just in UAH) have been about the satellites not being where they thought they were at the time they thought they were. That’s a different area of satellite knowledge: orbital dynamics, drag etc. And how to cross-calibrate with other sources absent direct 3D location measurements. Those choices, and the conflation of things you’re measuring with things you want to measure, gives a lot of scope for fooling yourself.
Yes, I saw the blog post angech. His problem is the non-barking dog. I believe in 2. I believe in 2. But I don’t accept 2 + 2 = 4; rather, 2 + 2 – x = 0. We just can’t find x. Or explain why it’s -4 today yet has very clearly been a long way from -4 on numerous occasions in the past, in fact on every single occasion that’s been investigated. In his case I presume that’s not a problem. x is The Invisible Hand Of God, not a silent dog.
Ah! Got it! All those previous occasions were before October 23, 4004 BCE.
Dr Spencer was a co-author of the Cornwall Alliance’s 2009 “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” which includes the following passage:
We believe Earth and its ecosystems – created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.
We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.
Which is literal climate science denialism.
Their more recent statements (as much as I’ve bothered to look) have moderated (?) to more of a free marketeer flavor under a cloak of Christian theism which is probably been the reality all along. That is to say that one reasonably could argue his free market tendencies influence his faith as much as the other way around.
dikranmarsupial:
Arguably, “prosperity theology” is an outgrowth of dominion theology, a reference to Genesis 1:28 (KJV):
In 1967, a founding document of the late-20th century environmental movement appeared in Science magazine: The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, by historian Lynn White. White blamed our heedless exploitation of natural resources on a self-serving interpretation of that biblical injunction:
IOW, God gave us fossil fuels to help us be fruitful and multiply. Surely He wouldn’t attach any hidden or deferred costs to them? We all know where that presumption has lead.
Dominion theology is contrasted with stewardship theology, in which God enjoins us to care for his creation. Many Christian environmentalists are as devout as Roy Spencer is, but would never sign the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming. That doesn’t necessarily motivate them to voluntarily internalize all their private marginal climate-change costs, however. And they’re still dualists, believing that humanity is apart from nature.
COVID 19 provides a good example, IMO, of an important aspect of how (some) people approach the risk of climate change.
When the risk was more abstract, “deniers” like Trump basically said “It’s natural variation” by comparing COVID 19 to the seasonal flu.
Now that the threat has become less abstract, Trump declares a national emergency (interestingly enough, largely informed by modeling).
Man made God in his own image. Pretty much sums up all that is Christian. How else does one take the abstract concept of God, and make it real and concrete, but to give it human form. As.the quotes from Mal Adapted suggest, we essentially anthropomorphized God, to be touched, to be heard, to be seen, to smell and to taste.
@Mark B
thanks for posting my exact thoughts
“Their more recent statements (as much as I’ve bothered to look) have moderated (?) to more of a free marketeer flavor under a cloak of Christian theism which is probably been the reality all along. That is to say that one reasonably could argue his free market tendencies influence his faith as much as the other way around.”
Or not.
I notice Zaragoza is commenting over at the opposition on a repost of Roy’s work.
Sigh.
Everett F Sargent:
Yep, Xenophanes came up with that around 540 BCE:
The Hindu pantheon, OTOH, is mostly anthropomorpic but includes elephant and monkey images. It seems that like our physical traits, human cultural elements are subject to random variation and selective retention.
Dave said:
That’s admittedly a weak spot in modeling. How many climate models are using the NASA JPL ephemeris data as a calibrated forcing? On the geophysics side of things, definitely.
Mal, I do recall reading that the Celtic tribes (yes I know it was a shared culture, not an ethnicity) were into nature gods rather than “personality” gods, but since the written records come from their enemies (the Romans) or people who considered them barbarians (the Greeks) there may have been an element of propaganda in that. “Those primitives, praying to the storm to make it stop. Whereas we civilised people know you should be praying or making offerings to Neptune/Poseidon.”
“Pretty much sums up all that is Christian. ”
Mal, indeed. The point I was making was that people cherry pick and misconstrue the bible in order to suit their (political) position just as they do with climate science – it is human nature/cognitive biases. There are a couple of passages that you can construe as supporting dominion/prosperity theology, but there are plenty that more or less explicitly refute it. … and yet it propagates anyway (particularly in cultures that especially encourage individualism and financial power).
“Surely He wouldn’t attach any hidden or deferred costs to them?”
you mean in the same way that there are no hidden or deferred costs involved in sex? ;o)
Well, I was born and raised as a Catholic, eight years of Catholic parochial school even. So fifty tears a lapsed Catholic, in that time I’ve only been in a church twice, my sister’s funeral in 1977 and mom’s funeral in 1994. Both times, oh boy, getting your foot in the door really opened my eyes to all that is Catholic.
IMHO, Christians, in general, sans Catholics, are an order (or two) magnitude(s) worse.
Religious tolerance was a key enlightenment value, it is a pity that we have regressed since. Prejudice of any sort is a bad thing. IMHO.
EFS:
Nice 8^). Maybe our browsers need a lapsūs linguae checker!
Hmm, I’ve just been reading about the European wars of religion. It’s hard to say whether Catholics or Protestants were “worse”. OTOH, the current Pope espouses stewardship theology. IMHO, Catholics who act accordingly are “better” than other Christians.
“Catholics or Protestants were “worse”.”
people were/are “worse”, other people were/are “better”
(BTW neither Catholics nor protestants are homogeneous in their beliefs or practices)
The problem with the “better” ones is that generally their lives go unrecorded and their “betterness” unacknowledged. Should we judge Islam on the basis of IS? No.
(BTW neither Catholics nor protestants are homogeneous in their beliefs or practices)
(You could say that again)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megachurch
At one point, I had to tell my direct boss to stop inviting me to their house of worship as I considered that (interjecting ones form of belief unto others) a form of workplace harassment. But we have large screen TV’s, pool tables and Christian rock.
“interjecting ones form of belief unto others”
Perhaps we need a workplace ban on Richard Dawkins as well? ;o)
“Christian rock”
I can sympathise with that (although “chacun a son gout” and all that, but some gouts take a bit more chacuning than others ;o)
Richard Dawkins is not a good person. What I mainly object to is any form of authoritarianism. I also am not a member of anything, that I know of, other than the human race.
I told one of my very few friends, just a few weeks ago, that if everyone suddenly were to live as I do, that there would be a global economic collapse and then COVID-19 showed up.
EFS:
For political reasons, I agree it should be considered workplace harassment. When there’s no power imbalance involved, however, it’s hard to draw a bright line between harassment and neighborly welcoming. About a year ago I moved to a property that adjoins a non-denominational Protestant church, with which I share a driveway. The church has no pastor, but is led by a committee of senior congregants. I’ve really only spoken with one of them. He has twice invited me, in friendly-neighborly fashion, to join them for worship services or social gatherings. I’ve declined as politely as I could. It would be churlish to object! Who doesn’t want to be welcomed by one’s new neighbors, individually and in groups?
I tersely and matter-of-factly disclosed my atheism to Larry, but I can’t really tell him I think the belief system that draws the church together is a container of figurative feces. I now smile and wave at the folks when I see them, which is at least every Sunday, but avoid engagement. Yet I can’t escape the feeling of being judged 8^(. Honestly though, that’s my problem, not theirs! “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”
MA,
I’m agnostic. I’ve lived in the so-called heart of the Bible Belt (Vicksburg, MS) since December 8, 1983. One of my (very old, as in it has been awhile since we last spoke) friends claimed to have seen Jesus (they mentioned this on several occasions, best that I can remember now). The next door neighbor is Old Testament big time. I even pray with others when in group settings, mainly so as not to be disrespectful, but also because praying is non denominational, heck even pagans do so, or so I’ve been told.
I believe in live and let live. So that, I went just a bit above my pay grade in some of my previous comments above.
Don’t worry, WUWT are on the case…
“Their model used principle components analysis (PCA, of Mann hockey stick fame) to find TWO magnetic flux components (so much for THE principle component) collectively explaining only 67% of their insolation data.
That seems an overt admission of poor fit statistics, which should have been flagged by peer reviewers. ”
Someone appears not to understand PCA…
dm.
Yes, I’ve been watching. VZ is writing a purported chapter for the so-called NIPCC report. Also has an opinion piece in something called Temperature.
The Watties are all concerned with Nyquist and WE even chips in to claim victory. Deniers vs Deniers.
I’m waiting on a so-called peer reviewed journal that is willing to publish that nonsense pretty much as is, my money is still on JASTP.
Oh and the author of that thread needs to go read the entire PP/ATTP threads as they score a very big goose egg for originality (extrapolation from just 2-4 solar cycles to over 100,000 years in the past, or even the next solar cycle, was already well covered in those comments).
I think this has reemerged due to VZ though as there are newer PDF’s floating about with that name on them.
WE “I pointed this out a couple months ago on a site I can’t remember where newly published papers are discussed. I actually went and got the ephemeris measurements and pointed out that her numbers were simply incorrect. So I’m very glad that it went this way.”
If he means the pubpeer discussion, it is interesting that he fails to mention that he was by no means the first to use the ephermeris data to point out the error, or that others had already explained the error in detail by other means. Rashomon…
… correction: he may have been the first to use the ephemeris data if he used more than one anonymous login name, however he certainly wasn’t the first to point out what the problem was and why the numbers were wrong.
dm,
I certainly don’t want to claim anything … but … I think I was the 1st one to mention JPL and ephemeris (both here (2020-08–8) and at PP (I used JPL 1st at both and comment 15 used the actual word before anyone else, I mentioned JPL in comment 14 at PP (2019-07-09)).
I can’t lay claim to this though as it is a very simple distance calculation using the Pythagorean theorem or Euclidean distance, so that it is those two, Euclid and Pythagoras, and later on Kepler, who might lay claim to such a novel idea as to make a distance calculation between two points in space, given a time series such as the JPL ephemeris.
Old, retired and no bucket list also helps.
“(2020-08–8)” should be “(2019-07–08)”
EFS thanks for that, I just wanted to be careful with my criticism (even if I seems I didn’t need to be in this case ;o)
Unsure how relevant but Euclid never worked with numbers, just doing geometry. Some two centuries later
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
worked out the diameter of Terra and to amazing accuracy given the resources of the time.
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Hello everyone,
I realise I am years late to the party, but I have only just been made aware of this topic. Since English is not my native language, please excuse any mistakes.
Though I‘m a physicist, I‘m in no way an expert in this specific field. I read through a lot of stuff (the original Zharkova paper, the pubpeer discussion, the first blog on this website, several other papers) and I think I got the gist of it, although I don‘t have enough deeper knowledge to grasp all the details.
To my understanding, one of the central points of discussion was that the SIM simulation data used in the paper to explain TSI changes reflects only the sun‘s motion relative to the solar system‘s barycentre and not the sun-earth distance, which would be the relevant quantity for TSI. You did some JPL Ephemeris simulations to show that the sun-earth distance does not change due to SIM, so essentially, the earth orbits the sun while the sun moves around the SS barycentre, taking the earth with it.
However, during my online research, I stumbled upon this newer publication by Prof. Zharkova
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/75534
and I would very much like to know what your opinions on this are, since I got the impression that you are capable of leading a scientifically sound discussion and I am no expert.
If you already commented on this elsewhere, I‘d appreciate a referral.
Thanks in advance and best regards
CL
Well, this lovely paper is