The public-scientist disconnect

Do public opinion polls have something to do with science?
You say 'How did we let this happen?' - were you in charge? Did you have a group helping you? Were you elected or appointed?
Dude- get a clue- waving your 'we, we' and opining on opinion polls is not science - it's politics. The IPCC always is a political body, never a scientific one.
You are right now doing politics, not science.
Here's some science:
Cause precedes effect - always and invariably.
With defective epistemology you can't even hope to do thinking much less science. Semiotics is the best you can master and opinion is the height of squalorship you will achieve.

But that doesn't make it any less baffling.

What's hard to understand? Most of the mainstream news coverage and nearly 100% of the paid messaging is from the denialist perspective.

As far as Joe Public is concerned, that is the consensus position. For historical comparison, have a look at the public view on smoking and cancer: for a very long time, the public had no real doubt that smoking caused cancer, but thought that the scientific jury was still out.

Your infantile arrogance sounds a lot like a certain someone in DC who can't fathom that "the dumb ole folks" just might be smarter than you are. 96% of practicing climatologists eh? That's a damn thin slice of the world's scientists. A thin slice with a blatant self-serving agenda I might add, blindly following a politically driven leadership group with nasty skeletons under every rock that is turned over. Any guess on how many highly trained and competent scientists exist in the world that are similarly educated and operate in related fields that are perfectly capable of reviewing and analyzing a data sets as to statistical trends? Do you really think there exists a positive outcome to pushing a premise that the climate scientific method and a set of temperature data (wow - sooooo complex) is beyond any other type of scientist to fully grasp, so much so, that it can't possibly be comprehended by anyone but your hand-selected list of believers and needers? Hide the decline baby! Delete the data! That's the way to do it.

Not to even mention all of the "common sense" aspects surrounding the 3 ppm CO2 hoax. Regardless, sticking your nose in the air, and dismissively waving your hand doesn't change the 80 pound gorilla of reality in the room that is blowing up the AGW scam right now.

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant âglobal warmingâ in the 20th century.
2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.
3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.
4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.
5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.
8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.
11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century âglobal warmingâ.
12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.
13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.
14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC âchaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.â
15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

Yeah, that's why the slope of the two trend lines are so different, alright

"Regardless, sticking your nose in the air, and dismissively waving your hand doesn't change the 80 pound gorilla of reality in the room that is blowing up the AGW scam right now."

Explosive 80 pound reality gorillas are terrifying, man. I shudder even to envision such a thing.

Poonts 1-3 are slanderously wrong.
Point 4 is mistaken, and irrelevant.
point 5 to 7 are wrong,

Awww, sod it. The entire post is wrong. Where on earth are you getting these lies from?

How did we let this happen? Easy, the answer is all over this page.

Scientist is not a job title or description but science is a way of thinking, perhaps practiced by a few technicians, technologists and researchers.

Science should be about skepticism, falsification and the null-hypothesis. It is not a body of knowledge subject to corruption for the falsification of one datum.

If it is not falsifiable then it is not science. A statement so qualified as to be tautologically true is a trivial statement of reality.

Der Hog Hozer #3:

96% of practicing climatologists eh? That's a damn thin slice of the world's scientists.

Lol, perfect illustration of the denialist attitude. 'Sure, maybe 97% of the relevant experts think it's happening, but there's a whole lot more people who have degrees in unrelated fields, what about them?'

I am now a sceptic. Sorry

To say that "global mean temperatures are rising", if you mean over the last 100 years, is not a statement that is in dispute by even the people you often deride as "denialists".

This mundane fact is not the cause of the controversy. It is the magnitude of the rise in mean global temps, the cause of the rise, how much of the rise is attributed to CO2, and what the future rise due to CO2 will be that is in dispute.

Simple answer - most people don't believe anything about predictions of future doom. Religion has saturated this market.

People believe they'll go to hell if they have an affair, but they do it anyway. This is the exact same thing. Preaching doom and gloom may work temporarily, but very few people actually end up changing their life - we're all immune to such tactics.

To say that "global mean temperatures are rising", if you mean over the last 100 years, is not a statement that is in dispute by even the people you often deride as "denialists".

What a load of crap. The most publicized attacks on climate science these past months are on the basic notion that temps are, actually, rising.

What a dishonest person you are, Lance.

@guthrie:
D'Aleo and Watts (and E.M. Smith). You know, those guys who don't even understand temperature anomalies and gridding, and thus think that removing a number of Canadian measuring stations will yield warming ("Canada is really cold!").

Dunning and Kruger would have a field day with these people, although they may actually fall into a class of their own...

What's even more fascinating is that there is a substantive percentage of Americans who would probably be willing to undertake many of the changes needed to adapt to global warming, but who specifically don't believe in global warming. I can't find a good study that quantifies precisely how large this number is, although there are some that indicate it. I've argued in the past that we may be more effective working with those people than some of the Americans who believe in climate change - and believe it is totally someone else's problem. I think that while denialism has to be addressed, in some ways the fixation on everyone believing the same thing as a way of getting to a particular set of ends is probably wrong. Focusing on the ends might be more productive.

Sharon

"bbb b b bbbb bbut you're full of crap"

typical Don Baccus level of trolling intellectualism.

Dude, you're getting boring.

Those figures are remarkably similar to the percentage of the American who don't believe in the theory of evolution. It would be interesting to see what the overlap between those who deny evolution and global warming as a Venn diagram.

It would suggest that the problem is a general lack of understanding & mistrust of science especially when mainstream science happens to conflict with a religious belief or indicates that a continual increase in your carbon footprint might have consequences.

@Marco
"You know, those guys who don't even understand temperature anomalies and gridding, and thus think that removing a number of Canadian measuring stations will yield warming ("Canada is really cold!")."
First off I'm from Canada and lots of the highly populated portions of Canada are no more cold than lots of the US. Most of the population of Canada live within a few hundred kms of the US border. The point they are trying to make is that high latitude (far north) stations have been dropped. Typically the farther north (higher latitude) you go the colder the average temperature. If you remove those data points and substitute in data points from farther south (lower latitudes) to infill the grid you will bias the data towards a warmer average.

And that, Phyllograptus, is exactly where they show their complete ignorance. The "infill" of the grid are ANOMALIES. Deviations from the long term mean.

Example:
Whether you take 15+2, or -10+2, the increase (anomaly) is +2. The infill is the +2, not the 15/-10.

As Gavin Schmidt on Realclimate has noted several times, there is a strong long-range connection in anomalies. You can make a gridded map and slowly drop stations, and you will see that you'll have to throw out a LOT of stations before you start to see changes.

Phyllograptus, you're missing a couple of important point here:

firstly, the analyses are based on anomalies (ie. each data point is calculated relative to the long-term average at that location), not absolute temperatures. this means that missing data from stations in very hot or very cold locations doesn't disproportionately affect the final result, since they're all of a similar magnitude regardless of location.

secondly, polar regions are warming particularly fast. so leaving those stations out will underestimate the trend, rather than exaggerate it, as shown in this post: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/01/kusi-noaa-nasa/

so their entire argument is *wrong*. either they're too ignorant to be talking authoritatively about the topic, or they're just being outright dishonest.

Lance, why do you think you're sufficiently expert to challenge the climate consensus, when you haven't paid your dues? When you've put as much time and effort into this as the experts contributing to the consensus, you'll be one of them. Until then, you're just advertising your ignorance every time you post.

@Marco
I understand your point about gridded maps. Yes if you have many stations within a grid cell and the range of the variable you are measuring is small then what you have is a homogeneous grid cell and therefore dropping stations will not effect the overall value assigned to the grid block
@ligne
Makes a similar point to Marco. However, whether the value in the grid block is an absolute temperature or a value of difference from mean doesnât really matter. As long as the data points within the grid block have a small data range the entire grid block can be considered homogeneous and dropping individual readings will not impact the overall outcome.

However that is not what they are contending is happening. If you look at the maps of the distribution of the sample point stations, what they contend is that there was already a very sparse data coverage of sampling points across the entire northern higher latitude area. In essence only a couple of data points exist for any particular grid block on the map in northern high latitudes As stations were dropped from this area, ENTIRE grid blocks were emptied of sampling points. However to make a map, these grid blocks do require data. So these now empty grid blocks are then assigned offset stations to infill the missing data in the grid block. The offset stations were from southern, lower latitude stations that by default are typically higher average temperature stations. Therefore an artificial warming (larger deviance from average) is now assigned to the higher latitude grid. This then makes the second point @ligne makes regarding warming in the polar regions a self fulfilling situation as now the current temperature from a southern grid block is being used to calculate the variance from the long term average of the original northern latitude grid block, which then simulates rapid warming in polar regions.
So dropping stations from well populated, homogeneous grid block is not that big a problem. Dropping all stations from grid blocks and then assigning data from offset southern latitude grid blocks, potentially and likely big problem.

re: phyllograptus...and they weighted earlier measurement periods in the opposite manner. Just coincidence surely.

I canât see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow â even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !â

âIâve just completed Mikeâs Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keithâs to hide the decline.â

âThe fact is that we canât account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we canât. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.â

âIf anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.â

The offset stations were from southern, lower latitude stations that by default are typically higher average temperature stations. Therefore an artificial warming (larger deviance from average)

Wrong, as has been pointed out that's the point of using anomalies.

When people point out your errors in an honest effort to educate you, it is extremely impolite to respond by repeating the exact same error.

They're not doing what you and the rest of the denialsphere imply they're doing.

You're acquiring mockpuppets, dhogaza -- quite an honor! Hozehead apparently thinks the hacked CRU emails reveal something nefarious. It's doubtful it's receptive to reality, but just in case, I'd like to draw its attention to this post (h/t Hank Roberts) about how real scientists do real science.

@dhogaza
The stations from high latitudes have been dropped. Therefore the grid points are now empty. Where do you calculate an anomaly from now when you have no data?

And what makes you think there is no data Phyllo...?

no, i'm afraid you're still misunderstanding. it's anomalies all the way down.

temperature anomalies are relative to the average conditions *at that given point*. i see where you're coming from -- if they were to infill a cold location with absolute temperatures from a warmer location, they'd create artificial "warming". but since they're using anomalies, that's not a problem.

take another look at Marco's example. say you don't know the anomaly for the cell with -10 baseline. if you filled in the missing data-point with "17", you'd get absurd levels of warming. but if you fill it in with -10 (the anomaly baseline) + 2 (the anomaly), you get -8, which is much more reasonable.

hopefully you should now also see that infilling from anomalies at lower-latitude stations *cannot* show enhanced warming at higher latitudes. at best, you'd expect the same anomaly throughout. thus why i said it would more likely underestimate.

(hope i've made myself reasonably clear, but it's late and i've had a long day. please ask if you still don't understand, and i'll have another crack at it.)

Ligne REALLY?

Fail

I believe we are screwed!

Das ist nicht Wissenschaft. Das ist Theologie.

Das schönste Glück des denkenden Menschen ist, das Erforschliche erforscht zu haben und das Unerforschliche ruhig zu verehren

FWIW, the post by "Dhogaza" above is not from me.

@dhogaza
No what is extremely impolite is your dismissive attitude when you obviously cannot even follow simple logic nor understand simple data analysis and processing. We had a similar situation in an earlier discussion in which you were similarly rude and wrong regarding how changing a baseline would impact the look of a graph. See link below if you have forgotten.
http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/where_the_ipcc_went_wrong…
In that instance case the authors of the IPCC reports recognized amongst themselves exactly what I was discussing but you could not seem to understand. In one of the hacked emails Phil Jones & Neil Plummer & David Jones discuss the exact issue I was bringing up in that post. And no Iâm not pointing out anything conspiracy like, its just routine conversation between them discussing how if they alter the baseline it will confuse people like you and make the anomalies look less positive
See text of email below but here is the relevant part.
âNeil
There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC
AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change
of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than
before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global
warming will be muted.â

I have purposely removed the portion email address of Jones, Parker & Plummer after the @ so I am not publishing their email details.

From: Phil Jones
To: "Parker, David (Met Office)" , Neil Plummer < >
Subject: RE: Fwd: Monthly CLIMATbulletins
Date: Thu Jan 6 08:54:58 2005
Cc: "Thomas C Peterson" < >

Neil,
Just to reiterate David's points, I'm hoping that IPCC will stick with 1961-90.
The issue of confusing users/media with new anomalies from a
different base period is the key one in my mind. Arguments about
the 1990s being better observed than the 1960s don't hold too much
water with me.
There is some discussion of going to 1981-2000 to help the modelling
chapters. If we do this it will be a bit of a bodge as it will be hard to do
things properly for the surface temp and precip as we'd lose loads of
stations with long records that would then have incomplete normals.
If we do we will likely achieve it by rezeroing series and maps in
an ad hoc way.
There won't be any move by IPCC to go for 1971-2000, as it won't
help with satellite series or the models. 1981-2000 helps with MSU
series and the much better Reanalyses and also globally-complete
SST.
20 years (1981-2000) isn't 30 years, but the rationale for 30 years
isn't that compelling. The original argument was for 35 years around
1900 because Bruckner found 35 cycles in some west Russian
lakes (hence periods like 1881-1915). This went to 30 as it
easier to compute.
Personally I don't want to change the base period till after I retire !
Cheers
Phil
At 09:22 05/01/2005, Parker, David (Met Office) wrote:

Neil
There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC
AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change
of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than
before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global
warming will be muted. Also we may wish to wait till there are 30 years
of satellite data, i.e until we can compute 1981-2010 normals, which
will then be globally complete for some parameters like sea surface
temperature.
Regards
David
On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 21:58, Neil

No what is extremely impolite is your dismissive attitude when you obviously cannot even follow simple logic nor understand simple data analysis and processing

OK! You're right! Not just me, but those scientists doing the work! They understand nothing!

I'm sure everyone's convinced, now ...

b b b b b b b b bbbbut peer review. PEER REVIEW!!!

IPCC and EA style!

BWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA

With 3146 individuals completing the survey,
the participant response rate for the
survey was 30.7% somehow becomes "more than 96% of working climatologists". More enhanced data by a warmer nutjob.

Phyllograptus, you've been going on at least two months misapprehending how anomalies work. This can only be called willful ignorance at this point.

"How did we let this happen?"

You take a problem that a normal person can't feel, touch, sense, understand, or see happening and you tell them this thing is going to have a near term catastrophic end to the world.

To solve this problem, you specify a tremendous amount of money must be spent immediately on what is effectively a liberal environmentalist agenda of energy adaption.

When asked how do you know this, the answer is basically "trust us, we are climate scientists and everyone agrees, there is no doubt".

Do you understand how a normal person might smell a scam here?

I'm not arguing the facts here, I'm answering your question of why the public is distrustful.

Now when someone gets curious and starts investigating, you find a very arrogant and condescending attitude from many to anyone who doubts this, hasn't made up his mind, or doesn't believe the whole package, predictions and all. Not just this site, every site where this is discussed.

There is a lot of uncertainty with AGW, and anyone who has studied this knows it. There is plenty of room for doubt.

Tom Scharf - there's no room to doubt that most of the warming in the last 30 years is our fault. WE've had popular science versions of the science in the media for nearly 20 years now.
But since your post is mostly straw man there isn't much more to be said.

@Tom Scharf "There is a lot of uncertainty with AGW, and anyone who has studied this knows it." Yes, in detail.
No uncertainty about the basics.
We can debate whether the aftermath of AGW is bad, worse or catastrophic. We can debate wether 4/5 of himalayan glaciers will vanish until 2035 or 2350 or 2500 - they will probably vanish. We can debate the rise of sea levels - whether 1,2,3,4,5 or 6 meters until 2100 - they will rise nonetheless.
Our species has a lot to loose by waiting.
So it IS important to know why public opinion is lagging behind.
And it IS important to reason how we can connect back science to public opinion.

@Imback
Anomalies? Apparently I don't understand them. At least thats what other posters keep telling me. Of course, thats all they say. Its all about the anomaly and the anomalies. No one else has tried to explain what that actually means. It just a little dogma statement they keep repeating. Its all about the anomaly. But why don't you try to explain what you actually mean rather than just parroting a term you only partially understand. Please enlighten me as to what anomalies mean.

@Phyllograptus:
Anomalies are deviations from a baseline.

Thus, when something is warmer by 2 degrees compared to a set baseline, the anomaly is 2 degrees. This is regardless of the actual value of the baseline.

Phyllograptus, i tried to explain it here: http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2010/01/the_public-scientists_dis…

before that, Marco tried here: http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2010/01/the_public-scientists_dis…

please state which bits you don't understand (give an example of how you think it works, if you think it'll help). but you can't say no-one has tried.

@Marco & @ligne
Thanks for your legitimate expressions of helpfulness.

And Marco, couldn't have said it better myself.
In case you were wondering I was being facetious with Imback. Yes Marco & ligne that is exactly what anomalies are in this context and I do understand that. It is however not the issue I was discussing. When I have some time I will try to write a MUCH more precise explanation of what I was trying to bring across as it obviously did not come across to lots of people.
An earlier discussion in which I was involved in was all about baselines, anomaolies, and the impacts on visual perception of a graph by changing baselines. The link is included in my response to @dhogaza

How does one go about getting a degree in climatology?

a lesson in Fun With Anomalies.
(Free to those not willfully covering their ears.)
(I've had a drink, so forgive my insouciance; let the evidence speak for itself.)

Let's look at the GISS annual mean land surface temperature anomalies for the last decade --
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&mon…

Look at Canada and Siberia. Note that temperature anomalies generally tend to increase with latitude. Also look at the zonal mean line plot. Again temperature anomalies increase with latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. So what might happen if many high-latitude stations disappear and their anomalies were replaced from lower-latitude stations? In general, the replacement anomalies would be cooler than the real anomalies, wouldn't they? Actual global warming would be underestimated then, wouldn't it?

Let's change the baseline somewhat --
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&mon…
-- and you get more or less the same story. The zonal mean line plot changes in detail but not in its general shape. OMG! Actual global warming might be underestimated!

Fortunately for us earthlings, probably not enough stations have been dropped to make a big difference. And as stated above by Marco, and evidenced by these plots, "there is a strong long-range connection in anomalies." Thanks for your attention.

How did we let this happen?

Did anyone let it happen? We could consider the social changes that have led to a distrust of government, science, medicine and what have you that would explain it all. Or we could apply Occam's razor.

Two thirds of us are complete idiots.

The Right-Wing political machine has made it their plank to oppose any claim of global warming. And it is an old plank too, can't remember when they were willing to accept that the earth was warming.