Judith Curry sobre el estado de la bronca del clima

Me parece un gran artículo, especialmente sincero y ecuánime -aunque inevitablemente parcial, y muy de agradecer. Tengo tres pegas. 1) La aceptación por parte de Curry de la negación previa de lo que digan los científicos que hayan tenido financiación (del tipo que sea) relacionada con cierta industria. Es tan absurdo como este razonamiento que se puede hacer: Los climatólogos ganan más y son más importantes cuanta mayor alarma climática haya. Luego no me sirve nada de lo que tenga que decir un climatologo, incluyendo a Curry, puesto que tienen un sesgo. No vale. Todo el mundo tiene estímulos de un tipo o de otro. Y lo único necesario es que haya estímulos suficientes en ambos campos, y a partir de ahí contrastar los argumentos. Es exactamente igual que en un juicio. A nadie se le ocurre decir al abogado de la defensa ... ¡que le paga su defendido! Eso no inhabilita sus argumentos. 2) Su aceptación del uso del término "negacionista" para ciertos casos. Lo explicó una vez:

“I reserve the word “deniers” for people that are explicitly associated with advocacy groups that are politicizing this issue…”

Pero no es cierto, porque nunca usa el término "negacionista" para Al Gore, o similares, que es a quien más cuadra la definición que ella misma da. Luego es un término "ad hoc". 3) La ingenua pretensión de reconvertir a los científicos principales de su campo en gente debate abiertamente la ciencia, y juega con limpieza y transparencia. Es algo asó como Viejecita pretendiendo que Gorriarán o Díez debatan en público y en abierto la democracia en los partidos, especialmente en UPyD. Es imposible, porque se viene abajo el chiringuito.

La mayoría de la blogosfera escéptica ha reaccionado de forma parecida a lo que he expresado en #1. Todos con muy buenas formas y palabras, y agradeciendo el estilo educado de Curry, pero señalando que no se trata de un simple problema de imagen. Y es que las buenas formas como las de Curry sorprenden si vienen de dentro del alarmismo, porque son algo tan extraordinario como un cerdo comiendo comiendo con servilleta. O como el tándem Gorriarán / Díez explicando qué pasa con las denuncias al aparato que según ellos no se pierden, pero que según la cruda realidad tampoco aparecen. A destacar: 1. - La entrada de Lubos Motl en su blog, donde explica con su habitual claridad ...

Judith Curry determined that the recent scandals surrounding the climate science are just a problem with its image: the climate skeptics who used to be just shills for Big Oil and who could be dismissed - because Big Oil is bad and no one needs oil, anyway ;-) - were suddenly transformed because they incorporated many open source software advocates who fight against the evil commercial software industry (which is similar to Big Oil). It's the main change that occurred, according to Dr Curry. She thinks it's enough to repaint the makeup so that the good, left-wing people are on the side of the alarm and the skeptics become the bad "deniers" once again, so that the world is nice, simple, and black-and-white. Anthony Watts will surely help her to achieve this goal and the IPCC will return to the good old tracks, she thinks. ;-) (See my reply to her opinions.) (I am using my own words and simplifications to make her text more entertaining but if you read it, the essence of her proposals is the same.)

2. - La respuesta directa a Curry del mismo Lubos, en WUWT (si tiene réplica avisaré): Dear Dr Curry, I am afraid I disagree with most of the key conclusions and recommendations of your text. Trust is not something that can be repainted, damaged or cleaned, whenever necessary. For rational people, their trust in others is a result of the evaluation of their experience with these others – with their honesty, passion for the truth, ability to resist corruption, will to sacrifice themselves for others, and so on. The ClimateGate material contains objective information showing that it is unreasonable if not foolish to trust the people from the CRU and several other institutions. Because of pre-existing similarities between the CRU folks and other groups pushing the climate panic, including GISS, Met Office, Hadley etc., it is also reasonable to make a preliminary guess that the key people in most or all these institutions and others lack the scientific integrity – and sometimes basic human decency, too. You may claim that it hasn’t been proven that other climate scientists have done similar things. And I would agree. In fact, it is likely that many of them have not. But it is pretty unlikely that it is just CRU that is a bad exception. The dishonest behavior is clearly a part of the system. It would be completely foolish to deny the evidence for this proposition that the “Gates” have given us. So as long as people – including yourself – are forming their expectations rationally, they should conclude that it is likely that this kind of behavior has been universal in the field of “climate change”. I am totally puzzled by your assertions about a “monolithic climate denial machine”. Clearly, this term is meant to invoke negative emotions by 3/4 of its words (monolithic, denial, machine), and the remaining 1/4 (climate) arguably brings negative emotions, too. ;-) However, if you try to think what this term actually means, it means the same thing that there is a pretty much “consensus” among the sane people – I mean climate skeptics – about most of the key questions. It’s not perfect, but it’s analogous to the consensus among the “panic oriented” climate scientists. If your alarmed colleagues were talking about the alarmists themselves, they would surely talk about the “consensus”. When they talk about the same characteristic of the skeptics, they talk about the “monoliths” and “machines”. This is clearly an irrational propaganda meant to distort the opinions of listeners who are not able or willing to think about these things independently and neutrally. It has worked for years. But don’t expect it will work too well after November 2009. I find your statement that the people “trusted the 4th IPCC report” very bizarre, too. I have never trusted it and 99% of the people whose methods and knowledge about the topic I respect didn’t trust the IPCC process, either. The IPCC process has always been corrupt, unscientific, ideological, and most of us on WUWT – or at least those who have studied it for many years – have known it for years if not decades. The ClimateGate and other revelations just confirmed what was generally known to everyone who was not hiding his or her head in the sand. It’s great that many other people realized this fact, too. But they surely didn’t discover something that was completely new to everyone. You overestimate the role of someone’s being unpaid or outside of the Academia etc. It really doesn’t matter. These are technical details. What matters is the method, scientific ethics, and the agreement of the statements with the empirical data. Ross McKitrick is arguably a part of the Academia, after all. And so are many others. And there are a few others who are doing a similar work and who are being paid by various pro-market organizations. They are often not as skillful as the “spontaneously” chosen auditors that do the technical (e.g. statistical) work, but they usually have compatible opinions about the broader picture, and their work is being followed by many people. If you think that e.g. Marc Morano is still generally dismissed as an oil puppet or whatever by nearly everyone, you’re completely wrong. He actually has lots of visitors – ClimateDepot is a kind of DrudgeReport of the climate. The climate alarm industry has become a big animal and it does require a lot of work – and even some funding – to peacefully liberate the world from this monster. So far, this funding is an extremely good investment. Marc Morano does much more work in making the people aware about the climate issues than hundreds of people paid on the side of the “alarm”, so he surely deserves some salary. You wrote: “The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC is often blamed on…” Well, there is a simple fact that can be blamed for the “failure of public (and less so, policy makers – they usually jumped on the bandwagon) to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC”. Who should be blamed for the failure? Simply the fact that the IPCC reports are not the truth. More precisely, there are lots of “small truths” and “approximate truths” that no one would care about and that wouldn’t make the climate science relevant for the policymaking (and most people didn’t bother to read them because they don’t matter). And then there are the “big and catchy” statements that bring all the funding to the IPCC and climate science. But these big ones are not the truth. It’s that simple. Whatever example you choose, you will see that I am right. Melting glaciers for India China, sinking Netherlands, dying African agriculture, rainforests destroyed by the warmth, and so on, and so on – the regions mentioned in these scandals cover the whole world. Virtually all of the IPCC “big statements” are actually lies, and I am almost convinced that you must know that. You may put a more human face, such as yours, instead of Michael Mann’s unhuman face as the face of the climate science. But you won’t rebuild the trust in the IPCC if your predetermined plan is to keep all these lies as parts of the IPCC conclusions. One simply can’t trust in the people who end up with conclusions such as “Himalayan glaciers are going to melt soon” because these things are not true. Whoever has followed these “Gates” more properly has not only learned that big mistakes (and misinformation) have been done, but he also learned the right answers which can be obtained from the accessible evidence and that are vastly different than the IPCC report says. Many people have been fooled by this organized misinformation process but I don’t think that there will be too many people who will be fooled twice. Your plans for “dueling blogs” and “restoration of the trust” are apparently designed to keep the climate science important, and so on. But in that you case, you want to mask the main lesson of all these “Gates”, and the lesson is that if the data are evaluated and communicated honestly, it turns out that there is nothing too interesting happening about the climate, and the science is simply not that interesting. It is one of hundreds of scientific disciplines that are only important to an isolated ring of specialists. It should peacefully scale back from those $2 billion a year to those $200 million a year (in the U.S., to pick a major example) that we knew a decade ago. Anything else is just wrong – or unethical. In some sense, I find your attitude similar to the 1989 fall-of-communism opinions of the Czechoslovak reformed communists from 1968. Your proposals really don’t solve the “essence” of the problems with the IPCC and the dominant form of the climate science as we’ve known it in the most recent decade. The lack of integrity and the things that destroyed the trust after November 2009 are the same thing that you want people to trust again. It simply can’t work. Climate science has to return where it belongs, among legitimate scientific disciplines without distortions and irrational hype, and when it does so, it will inevitably look similar to what it used to be 20 or more years ago. It will be much more modest, too. It *is* modest and all the propositions that the climate science is more than modest were based on fraud and its political motivation. You can’t preserve these things while solving the “confidence crisis”. Best wishes Lubos. 3. - Y la de Willis Eschenbach: Willis Eschenbach (13:50:31) : First, I have to say that I admire Judith Curry greatly. She is one of the very, very few mainstream climate scientists to enter into a public dialogue about these issues. I salute her for it. Next, as is often my wont in trying to understand a long and complex discussion, I made my own digest of what Judith is saying. To do so, I condense each paragraph into one or a few sentences. Here is that digest: 1 I am trying an experiment by posting on various blogs 2 Losing the Public’s Trust 2.1 Climategate has broadened to become a crisis of trust in climate science in general. 2.2 Credibility is a combination of expertise and trust. Trust in the IPCC is faltering. 2.3 The scientists in the CRU emails blame their actions on “malicious interference”. 2.4 Institutions like the IPCC need to ask how they enabled this situation. 2.5 Core research values have been compromised by warring against the skeptics. 2.6 Climategate won’t go away until all this is resolved. 3 The Changing Nature of Skepticism about Global Warming 3.1 Skepticism has changed over time. 3.2 First it was a minor war between advocacy groups. Then, a “monolithic climate denial machine” was born. This was funded by the oil industry. 3.3 Because of the IPCC reports, funding for contrary views died up. It was replaced by climate auditors. The “climate change establishment” didn’t understand this and kept blaming the “denial machine”. 4 Climate Auditors and the Blogosphere. 4.1 Steve McIntyre’s auditing became popular and led to blogs like WUWT. 4.2 Auditors are independent, technically educated people mostly outside of academia. They mostly audit rather than write scientific papers. 4.3 The FOIA requests were motivated by people concerned about having the same people who created the dataset using the dataset in their models. 4.4 The mainstream climate researchers don’t like the auditors because Steve McIntyre is their arch-nemesis, so they tried to prevent auditors publishing in the journals. [gotta confess I couldn't follow the logic in this paragraph] 4.5 The auditors succeeded in bringing the climate establishment to its knees because people trusted the auditors. 5 Towards Rebuilding Trust 5.1 Ralph Cicerone’s says that two aspects need attention, the general practice of science and the personal behaviours of scientists. Investigations are being conducted. 5.2 Climate science has not adapted to being high profile. How scientists engage with the public is inadequately discussed. The result is reflexive support for IPCC and its related policies. 5.3 The public and policy makers don’t understand the truth as presented by the IPCC. More efficient strategies can be devised by recognizing that we are dealing with two groups: educated people, and the general public. To rebuild trust scientists need to discuss uncertainty. ["truth as presented by the IPCC? say what?] 5.4 The blogosphere can be a powerful tool for increasing credibility of climate research. The climate researchers at realclimate were the pioneers in this. More scientists should participate in these debates. 5.5 No one believes that the science is settled. Scientists and others say that the science is settled. This is detrimental to public trust. 5.6 I hope this experiment will demonstrate how the blogosphere can rebuild trust. Having made such a digest, my next step is to try to condense it into an “elevator speech”. This is a very short statement of the essential principles of an idea. My elevator speech of Judith’s post would be this. Climategate has destroyed the public trust in climate science. Initially skepticism was funded by big oil. Then a climate auditing movement sprang up. They were able to bring the climate establishment to its knees because people trusted them. Public and policy makers don’t understand the truth as presented by the IPCC. To rebuild trust, climate scientists need to better communicate their ideas to the public, particularly regarding uncertainty. The blogosphere can be valuable in this regard. OK, now what’s wrong with this picture? The biggest problem is in one of the core ideas. This is the claim that the problem is that climate scientists have not understood how to present their ideas to the public. Judith, I respect you greatly, but you have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. The problem is not how climate scientists have publicly presented their scientific results. The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this statement. In other words, the lack of trust is not a problem of perception. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in scientific papers. Codes and data are routinely concealed. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views. And most disturbing, for years you and the other climate scientists have not said a word about this disgraceful situation. When Michael Mann had to be hauled in front of a congressional committee to force him to follow the simplest of scientific requirements, transparency, you guys were all wailing about how this was a huge insult to him. An insult to Mann? Get real. Mann is an insult to climate science, and you, Judith, didn’t say one word in public about that. Not that I’m singling you out. No one else stood up for climate science either. It turned my stomach to see the craven cowering of mainstream climate scientists. The solution to that is not, as you suggest, to give scientists a wider voice or educate them in how to present their garbage to a wider audience. The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence was deafening. And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the guilt by your silence. And you still don’t seem to get it. You approvingly quote Ralph Cicerone about the importance of transparency … Cicerone?? That’s a sick joke. You don’t get it. You think people made the FOI requests because we were concerned that the people who made the datasets were the people using them in the models. As the person who made the first FOI request to CRU, I assure you that is not true. I made the request to CRU because I was disgusted with Phil Jone’s reply to Warwick Hughes request for data. Jones famously said: Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it? When I heard that, I was astounded. I thought, “Well, he’s gonna get his hand slapped hard by real scientists for that kind of anti-scientific statements”. So I waited for some mainstream climate scientist to speak out against that kind of scientific malfeasance … and waited … and waited. In fact, I’m still waiting. I registered my protest against this bastardisation of science by filing an FOI. When is one of you mainstream climate scientist going to speak out against this kind of malfeasance? It’s not too late to condemn what Jones said, he’s still in the news and pretending to be a scientist, when is someone going to take a principled stand? But nobody wants to do that. Instead, you want to explain how trust has been broken, and figure out more effective communication strategies to repair the trust. You want a more effective strategy? Here’s one. Ask every climate scientist to grow a pair of huevos and get outraged in public about the abysmal practices of far, far too many mainstream climate scientists. Because the public is assuredly outraged, and you are all assuredly silent … and that is extremely damaging to you. A perfect example is you saying above: Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this … For you to say this without also expressing grave concern about realclimate’s ruthless censorship of every opposing view is more of the same conspiracy of silence. Debate is not “alive and well” at realclimate as you say, that’s a crock. Realclimate continues to have an undeserved reputation that it is a scientific blog because you and other mainstream climate scientists are unwilling to bust them for their egregious flouting of scientific norms. When you stay silent about censorship like that, Judith, people will not trust you, nor should they. You have shown by your actions that you are perfectly OK with censoring opposing scientific views. The key to restoring trust has nothing to do with communication. Steve McIntyre doesn’t inspire trust because he is a good communicator. He inspires trust because he follows the age-old practices of science — transparency and openness and honest reporting of results. And until mainstream climate science follows his lead, I’ll let you in on a secret — I don’t want trust in climate science to be restored. I don’t want you learning better ways to propagandize for shoddy science. I don’t want you to figure out how to better inspire trust by hiding your unethical practices in new and innovative ways. I don’t want scientists learning to use clever words and communication tricks to get people to think that the wound is healed until it is actually healed. I don’t want you to use the blogosphere to spread your pernicious unsupported unscientific alarmism. You think this is a problem of image, that climate science has a bad image. It is nothing of the sort. It is a problem of scientific malfeasance and complicity by silence. The public, it turns out, has a much better bullsh*t detector than the mainstream climate scientists do … or at least we’re willing to say so in public, while y’all cower in your holes with your heads down and never, never, never say a bad word about some other scientist’s bogus claims and wrong actions. You want trust? Do good science, and publicly insist that other climate scientists do good science as well. It’s that simple. Do good science, and publicly call out the Manns and the Joneses and the Thompsons and the rest of the charlatans that you are currently protecting. Once that is done, the rest will fall in line. And until then, I’m overjoyed that people don’t trust you. I see the lack of trust in mainstream climate science as a huge triumph for real science. Fix it by doing good science and by cleaning up your own backyard. Anything else is a coverup. Judith, again, my congratulations on being willing to post your ideas in public. You are rara avis, and I respect you greatly for it. w. PS – a “monolithic climate denial machine”?? Puhleease, Judith, you’re talking to us folks who were there on the ground fighting the battle. Save that farrago for people who weren’t there, those who don’t know how it went down.

[...] Judith Curry, preguntándose como podían recuperar los alarmistas la confianza del público [-->]. Con lo que la mosquita muerta (© Viejecita) fue la primera en admitir, desde la ciencia [...]

Esto ya me parece de nota Plazaeme

Gracias por la traducción Plaza, aumenta mucho el nº de lectores. Hubiera estado bien traducir también los comentarios, pero bastante largo es ya el post de Juddith.

Bueno, pues a mi la señora, con todo su aspecto de mosquita muerta, de razonable y esas cosas, me ha caído de la patada esta vez. (Me pareció mejor la vez anterior que la trajiste). Porque lo que dice es que los de a pié no entendemos lo que dice el IPCC. Y lo que dice el IPCC, lo entiendo hasta yo. Lo cual no tiene por qué significar que me lo crea. También dice que el 4º informe del IPCC, fue poco menos que universalmente aceptado y aplaudido. Y los que le contestan le demuestran con datos que eso que dice no es cierto. Pero para mi, la madre del cordero es lo que dice Lubos ; que la ciencia del clima se la ha sacado de la proporción debida, y que debería volver a la importancia que tenía hace 20 años, (con muchiiiiiiisima menos financiación, y siendo una rama muy respetable de la ciencia, pero no una rama vital ), y que a todos estos calentólogos, se les nota demasiado el interés en seguir en el candelero. Y esta señora, con mucha educación, está queriendo que haya más debate, para que SU rama de la ciencia no vaya a verse relegada...(bueno, esto lo pongo yo, que Lubos es muy educado y discreto, y sabe decirlo mejor).

Aquí hay mucho nivel y cuesta seguirlo. Pero si lo que se quiere es que se vuelva a confiar en la ciencia, lo único que tienen que hacer los que investigan es dedicarse a hacer ciencia, a emplear el método científico, sacando las conclusiones que salgan. Es lo que ha llevado a la civilización hasta aquí. Aunque bien es cierto que la religión también ha movido el mundo, por lo que nos moveremos de todas formas. Y la solución para esto: invertir cantidades ingentes de recursos en educación en nuestros hijos. De tal forma que tengan más posibilidades de ser más libres. Pero incluso aquí falla: ya os he comentado que números uno de oposiciones (varias) se creen a pies juntillas el timo del calentamiento global. Me conformo con llevar la contraria -casi siempre con argumentos- a mi grupo de amigos del bar...