Tamino (Open Mind) is a pretty good blog, but I hadn’t realised until recently just how scary the denialists find it. As a case in point, I commented at NoTricksZone, who had said:
the GLOBAL WARMING STOP has been extended yet another month, now at 17 years and 9 months… Earth to Warmworld. Earth to Warmworld…do you read me? Come in, please. Is anyone out there?
Well, that’s a challenge, so I answered it:
Hello. Will http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/by-request/ do?
I thought that was just an opening gambit, and we could have a possibly, maybe, vaguely interesting back-n-forth. But no! It was much better than that. Links to Tamino are forbidden, and my comment was replaced1 by
[snip, Foster is an ‘undesirable’ who cannot be trusted with statistics]
After a bit, though, even that wasn’t enough, and the snip got rewritten to:
[snip, Foster is an ‘undesirable’ who cannot be trusted with statistics…Winston, please see Kevin Marshall comment below]
I’m sure Tamino will be delighted to learn that his posts are too dangerous for the inhabitants of NTZ to be allowed to see.
Notes
1. I won’t trouble you with the full refs and webcite’s here; see http://stoat-spam.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/ntz-global-warming-stop-older-than-1997.html for the gory details.
wmconnolley: scienceblogs.com/stoat archive 
Funny how that works. When people post pseudoscience comments on sites devoted to actual science, they get criticized. When folks try to post science on pseudoscience sites, it gets deleted.
Some folks find the truth downright terrifying.
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You should have linked in his textbook on statistics….
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NoTricksZone is merely reposting Monckton without trying to understand the bit of basic ignorance that is in that WUWT post. As I have tried to comment (but do not expect to get posted):
Christopher Monckton misses out one important point – RSS data is not surface temperatures! They are upper air (troposphere) temperatures.
Then he rather foolishly compares his graph of one set of troposphere temperatures to the IPCC conclusion from all of the surface temperature datasets!
The actual science from RSS is http://www.remss.com/research/climate
“Over the past 35 years, the troposphere has warmed significantly. The global average temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.13 degrees Kelvin per decade (0.23 degrees F per decade).”
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“the GLOBAL WARMING STOP ”
Heh. Deniers, not having been chased by a bear for awhile, conclude the woods contain no bears—and certainly do not care to be contradicted by the likes of Tamino.
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NTZ: is there some reason to take Pierre Gosselin seriously regarding climate? Since some rely on NTZ, perhaps he should become better known.
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Ah, you got the Gosselin treatment too? Something similar happened to me when I tried to have a sensible discussion at NTZ. Gosselin is afraid of a lot of things (except being dead wrong of course, that seems to be fine). I find his censoring crusade especially funny from a libertarian constantly lambasting the media for, well, censoring. My advice would be to just stay clear of this guy, unless you want to be held responsible for his impending heart attack 😉
@John: while NTZ itself does not seem to have a lot of readers, he is being the main channel from German denialism into the Anglosphere, so he does have some influence.
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Oh, just remembered I wrote an article on NTZ in 2013 (in German): http://blogs.klimaretter.info/skeptikerblog/2013/01/23/pierre-gosselin-nobrainzone/
I took part in his bet that it’s going to cool during the 2010s, so at least some of his money will make itself useful at a charity in some years…
Here’s the section where he censored me, same pattern: http://notrickszone.com/2011/08/31/der-spiegel-global-warming-now-causes-sea-level-drop-through-weather-shifts/#comment-46927 – the following attempted dialogue between Motl + me is kind of interesting 🙂
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As with Watts, snip snip is the sound of self inflicted lobotomy.
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I just found this photo of Tamino on a wanted poster:
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“is there some reason to take Pierre Gosselin seriously regarding climate?”
Of course there is. Here is a man who once “dreamed of becoming a meteorology” , and knows that nothing untoward is happening to the climate, because weather happened when he was a child.
Who better to trust?
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Thanks njp, now I understand
Back to seriousness:
Both from experience and from discussing this with clinical psychologist friends:
1) People vary greatly in their comfort with and ability to handle uncertainty.
2) Some people have no problem with it, try to calibrate it, reduce it and explain it. Steve Scheider was terrific and tamino is really very good as well. At the risk of an inverse-Godwin, Feynman noted his comfort with uncertainty.
At one extreme, people see little black-vs-white, mostly shades of gray, confidence intervals, probabilities that aren’t 0 or 1.
3) But for people at the other extreme, that worldview is *terrifying*, because *certainty* is needed. Of course, some may talk of uncertainty (around climate), but that usually seems a cover for absolute, unbending certainty that no actions should be taken, ever.
Sometimes people can flip from some certain viewpoint to the exact opposite without ever occupying the middle. One of my psychologist friends told me of a case where a patient could make such flips, back and forth, over a few days.
Thus, to some folks, tamino *is* truly frightening …
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John Mashey,
If you want to understand the psychology of the deniers, I think understanding the “hierarchical individualists” is as helpful as understanding need for certainty.
” If identity-protective cognition is at work, there’s no reason to believe that white hierarchical individualist males will be uniformly more “risk dismissive” than other people.
They’ll be that way only with regard to private activities the regulation which poses a threat to activities essential to their cultural status. Where regulation itself poses such a threat, they should worry about the risks that such regulation poses. Moreover, if we can find private activities that threaten their cultural identities, their stake in securing regulation of them should motivate them to be risk sensitive in regard to those activities!”
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/6/10/what-are-fearless-white-hierarchical-individualist-males-afr.html
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Sigh.
That RSS TLT graph from WUWT and/or Lord Monckton just keeps doing the rounds. The trend line is an obvious cherry-pick.
I doubt that most of the people who show it know the difference between the surface air temperature and the TLT air temperature which appears to be from around 0 to 10 km (ignoring the bits of the north and south pole it excludes).
The RSS people even offer a little browser that makes the trend clear:
http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
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I’ve had the “Tamino is a liar” line thrown at me when referencing his material before. When you have no counter-argument, deny, deny, deny…
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RSS TLT is an outlier. Even Roy Spencer has problems with it:
[Although S & C are hardly unbiased: they are effectively competitors of RSS -W]
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WMC
If Spencer and Christy think that the RSS TLT product is biased cool, that’s good enough for me 😉
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> model, which does not quite match reality.
But NASA’s AQUA isn’t exactly trolling a thermometer on a long cable either; it’s models all the way down, or most of the way.
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+1
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Is there a climate blogger out there somewhere who’s writing up this sort of thing? I find
https://data.noaa.gov/dataset/noaa-fundamental-climate-data-record-fcdr-of-amsu-a-level-1c-brightness-temperature-version-1-0/ (August 2013)
“This dataset contains Level 1c inter-calibrated brightness temperatures from the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (AMSU-A) sensors onboard six polar orbiting satellites (NOAA-15, -16, -17, -18, EUMETSAT MetOp-A, and NASA Aqua) spanning from 1998 ….”
[Is there anything desperately exciting to track? In the old days the UAH vs RSS fight was exciting, and the satellites showing cooling made the septics all agog, but since the corrects got rid of that it doesn’t seem to be so much fun any more -W]
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but then there’s this sort of thing:
“… UAH Global temperature up slightly in September
Posted on October 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts
UAH V5.5 Global Temp. Update for Sept. 2012: +0.34 deg. C
By Dr. Roy Spencer
As discussed in my post from yesterday, the spurious warming in Aqua AMSU channel 5 has resulted in the need for revisions to the UAH global lower tropospheric temperature (LT) product.
Rather than issuing an early release of Version 6, which has been in the works for about a year now, we decided to do something simpler: remove Aqua AMSU after a certain date, and replace it with the average of NOAA-15 and NOAA-18 AMSU data. Even though the two NOAA satellites have experienced diurnal drifts in their orbits, we have found that those drifts are in opposite directions and approximately cancel. (The drifts will be corrected for in Version 6.0)….”
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John Mashey,
“But for people at the other extreme, that worldview is *terrifying*, because *certainty* is needed.”
Ah, you mean children and idiots…
Thanks for the chuckle William.
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Isn’t tamino being plagiarised regularly by some other blogger (I forget the details)? If my memory proves correct it may be a way to get his posts on to NTZ by a side door…
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Willie, do you believe your ban from commenting at WUWT was because your posts were too dangerous for the inhabitants of WUWT to be allowed to see, or was it because you’re an obnoxious troll ?
[Because I’m too dangerous. http://stoat-spam.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/wuwt-why-climate-change-doesnt-scare-me.html -W]
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Chris:
“Ah, you mean children and idiots… ”
If only that were the only population for which this were true.
Quite seriously: scientists, statisticians and skeptics in general, i.e., folks comfortable with uncertainty, may not appreciate just how terrifying it is to some people. This may be relevant to outreach and the forms of explanation.
re: removal of Aqua: Spencer *removed* spurious warming data?!? That sounds like:
Hiding The Incline
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But Blueshift, obsessive regulators are enemies of liberty, property and the life of the mind.
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> obsessive regulators
Obsessive immortal corporate profiteers are more dangerous — much worse.
Thank goodness for obsessive regulators. If they weren’t obsessive they’d be — what?
For example — just one — you might believe that asbestos has been regulated successfully.
Nope:
“… th”… the asbestos industry, to establish new markets, is promoting the use of asbestos in low-to-middle income countries, particularly in Asia, and has created lobby organisations to achieve this goal.
In spite of the scientific evidence and calls to end all use of asbestos by many organisations including the World Health Organization, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the International Commission on Occupational Health, the International Social Security Association, the International Trade Union Confederation and the World Bank, the use of asbestos is increasing in low-to-middle income countries.
There is little awareness in these countries of the risk that asbestos poses to health; in addition, safety regulations are weak to non-existent.
If unstopped, this continued and increasing use of asbestos will lead to a public health disaster of asbestos-related illness and premature death for decades to come in those countries, repeating the epidemic we are witnessing today in industrialised countries that used asbestos in the past….”
Click to access 01.JPC-SE-Position_Statement_on_Asbestos-June_4_2012-Summary_and_Appendix_A_English.pdf
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I read Tamino for a while about a year ago — possibly during the Marcott paper release which went down in flames — and found that his vaunted math was quite pedestrian and not applied to the salient issues. So I don’t go there anymore, and those who praises Tamino go off into the “pedestrian” cubbyhole. Did you say Tamino is “scarey”? Ha ha.
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NZWilly is wrong on all points mentioned.
And it is true that I have no car…
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Well, NZWilly, tamino has extended his arctic sea ice extent forecast to 2014 here:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/arctic-sea-ice-minimum-forecast/
Given your lack of respect for his work, I find this graph interesting:
Which shows that through 2012 Tamino’s forecast methodology ranks 2nd. While WUWT’s predictions rank dead last, just for comparison purposes.
Tamino’s not always right, but as a professional statistician he’s not often wrong. I’d say he’s wrong about as often as Watts is right …
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NZWilly:
Are you referring to this paper by Marcott? Google Scholar turns up 96 citations so far — not bad for going down in flames. Are you an expert yourself (I’ll settle for either a CV or some citations to your publications in the peer-reviewed literature), or a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
[http://www.homebuilt.org/cmdrdata/jokes/06/0268.html -W]
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Drat. this paper by Marcott et al.
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I just read the joke William linked to in comment #31. LOL!
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#23
False claim about Marcott13, in which exactly no serious errors of any kind have been found. False claim about Tamino, demonstrated here wrt M13.
Tamino neatly demonstrates that the contrarian claim that M13 cannot tell us that modern warming is exceptional during the Holocene is false.
Which is one reason among many why contrarians dislike him and pretend that he is biased or of limited ability or both.
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Sorry that was a response to #28, not #23
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> I read Tamino for a while … — and found …
Question being what exactly did you find? Some guy’s opinion? Or did you do some arithmetic on your own? I’ll guess not, since you haven’t published it or made it public online. Refutation welcome. Intelligent criticism always is.
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Attempting comment from my handheld.
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Hi folks.
DFTT.
Thanks.
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Of course, these days UAH outwarms most other records in recent history.
Not that there’s any statistical significance in that.
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(A) Tamino, exposed as a brazen liar, his Central England hockey stick having been promoted by his cult followers back when I started publicizing the alarm-falsifying CET data set, so I had to delve into the unstated details, and boy was it ever misleading, pulling Phil Jones into the mix too:
This bluntly confirms that: “Foster is an ‘undesirable’ who cannot be trusted with statistics”
(B) Your link is in reference to Cowtan & Way, a bizarre Frankenstein “study” that used satellite temperature records as a statistical tool to add virtual ground thermometer data to the mostly uncharted arctic, thus pumping up the global average temperature. There’s a Science 101 problem though, which you are well aware of in a way that makes both yourself and Foster scammers, that the satellite data used itself *falsifies* this claim of a sudden recent warming spike.
“I have no idea how one deals with this– to be candid, McIntyre or Watts in handcuffs is probably the only thing that will slow things down.” – Robert Way in the exposed secret forum of John Cook’s site.
(C) Intellectually disowning dishonest players is not done out of fear, but out of disgust.
[“Intellectually disowning” is your Orwellian phrase to mean “censoring”. Come on, be honest, call a spade a spade -W]
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NikFromNYC
According to McIntyre, you have ascribed that quote to the wrong person. McIntyre quotes this as being “Albatross, and in the thread (which you can search for) Way is defending McIntyre.
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NikFromNYC:
“(A) Tamino, exposed as a brazen liar, his Central England hockey stick having been promoted by his cult followers back when I started publicizing the alarm-falsifying CET data set, so I had to delve into the unstated details, and boy was it ever misleading, pulling Phil Jones into the mix too”
Ah, right, temperature records from 1660 are as accurate, in your view, as what is taken as the modern instrumental record, so anyone who concentrates on the latter rather than the former is “misleading”.
“The earliest years of the series, from 1659 to October 1722 inclusive, for the most part only have monthly means given to the nearest degree or half a degree” …
Hmmm, then again, maybe not.
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NikFromNYC:
No doubt you’re a better judge of the Cowtan and Way paper than the expert reviewers and all the working climate scientists who’ve praised it. What peer-reviewed venue have you published your criticisms in, again?
Also, while Dr. Connolley may be aware of the “Science 101 problem” you reference, I’m not. Can you explain it to me yourself, in detail? TIA.
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> Cowtan and Way
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/coverage2013/series.html
Click to access update.140106.pdf
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Re #33
I have been telling that joke for years, but the protagonist is Henri, the famous French freedom fighter flying ace, and it always gets a laugh. Except in France, strangely…
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