The (para)psychology of climate change research
In Ghostbusters, there were four types of researchers associated with parapsychology research: the complete fakes using it for personal gain (Peter Venkman), the inordinately gullible who believe anything (Ray Stantz), the completely incomprehensible theorizers (Egon Spengler) and the evilly hostile denier (Dean Yager). As badly as he was portrayed in the movie, Dean Yager was right: Venkman was faking his research, Stantz believed anything that came their way, and Spengler wasted university money building insane devices that would never work. If it hadn’t been a movie, Venkman would have gone on to write pop-psychology books, Stantz would have gone on to some menial job and wasted every paycheck chasing psychic rainbows, and Spengler’s devices would have gone deep into the pigeon-dance of insanity.
A long, long time ago, when such things still existed, a friend of mine took a parapsychology class at one of the California universities here in San Diego. The introduction to her textbook told the reader to take care when studying psychics. Some of them believe so strongly in psychic ability that they will fake their test results to help you believe psychic ability exists. Don’t hold it against them, their heart is in the right place, and they get so frustrated that psychic ability is harder to show in a laboratory setting.
Seriously. Discover that one of your “psychic” test subjects is cheating? That isn’t evidence that they’re a fraud. It’s evidence that they really are psychic. They believe so strongly in the cause that they’re willing to risk their reputations to prove psychic powers exist. By faking psychic powers.
I can’t help but remember that reading through the leaked e-mails—and especially the leaked software—in Climategate. The whole idea of leaked software in a field as important as global warming research is nuts. There should have been no reason to leak it: this software should have been made public as soon as any research that used it was published. No useful software is bug-free. Even if the researchers were completely unbiased and honest, minor bugs could have been misleading them. They still should have made their software models and their software available for testing.
Talking about faking results is not “an understandable defensiveness”. And when their data doesn’t match reality, they don’t need to come up with “a” reason, they need to come up with the reason. Something that’s testable, verifiable, and able to withstand public scrutiny.
If we spend trillions and destroy economies only to discover we wasted our effort trying to solve the wrong problem, it isn’t going to matter that the dishonesty was “understandable”.
Climategate
- Best Idea of the Day: Climate Change Futures Markets: Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight
- His argument appears to be that all research is done like this; if so, there’s no hope for trusting any of the data. But I did like this from the comments: “If we’d find these in deniers, then maybe it’s time we hack them and spread it around. We can’t afford to play games here, if the planet goes belly up ALL SENTIENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE is extinguished.” Real Church of Man stuff. For the record, I think a climate change futures market is a great idea—but the measurements need to be verifiable by the investors. As we’ve learned from these leaked emails, a futures market that relies on one side to report the data will be fraudulent.
- Climate change emails: plot or damp squib?: Matthew Moore
- “Do they show an understandable defensiveness on the part of leading scientists faced with ill-informed challenges from climate change nay-sayers, or something more worrying?”
- A few thoughts on Climategate: Michael Jennings at samizdata.net
- “The scandal here, is the pretense that this was ever not so. The careerist political side of this unit, mixed in with an unholy political alliance of Greens, Luddites, politicians with vested interests in Climate Change being real, managed to create an environment in which the normal competition and disagreement between teams of scientists has not been allowed to take place. To even suggest that climate scientists behave like other scientists and to ask them to fully explain their work, has been to be opposed to their noble efforts to save the planet. We have learned little in the last week that we should not have been already aware of, but perhaps now that it is out in the open, we can have a proper debate. This should hopefully be a relief, and if we are going to discuss policy for the whole world, it is required to be entirely out in the open.”
- Global Warming With the Lid Off
- “Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.”
- More about the CRU leak—how big arguments are won and lost: Brian Micklethwait at samizdata.net
- “Why the fuss is because of the vast, globe-spanning policy conclusions that have been plucked from these in themselves rather minor deceptions. The fraud revealed isn’t just in the fiddling of some numbers. There is also the faking of that precious scientific consensus that has so dominated public and official thinking about climate and climate policy during the last decade. The world is being sold a gigantic economic and political upheaval, backed by the claim that all this scientific rough-and-tumble, this slightly dodgy infighting, was in fact a blandly uniform scientific consensus.”
- One post without sarcasm or ridicule: Coeruleus at She Flies With Her Own Wings
- “Obviously, climate skeptics are not in any way terrorists but in this world where climate scientists are constantly under attack, they need to get the right message to the public all the time. If the Earth is taking a break from warming, they need to come up with a reason because the skeptics will try to tell the public every year that the Earth is not warming.”
Climategate software
- The End Of The Earth Is Coming, But Scientists Cannot Write Professional Quality SW!: AJStrata at The Strata-Sphere
- “Science and engineering and law are all adversarial systems which provide a crucible from which truth and real solutions can emerge. Failure to go through the crucible is not a trick—it is just failure.”
- Samizdata quote of the day: November 26, 2009: Brian Micklethwait at samizdata.net
- “From the file pl_decline.pro: check what the code is doing! It’s reducing the temperatures in the 1930s, and introducing a parabolic trend into the data to make the temperatures in the 1990s look more dramatic.”
- “Hiding” the Decline Might Have Been “Taken Out of Context,” But How Do You Explain This?: Ace at Ace of Spades HQ
- “This data wasn’t put in there because they decided for some odd reason that the real, raw temperature readings (but only through 1960!) should be re-added to the data set. It was put in there because someone did it one time and saw that it would give him the shape of the graph he wanted. And now they’re all doing it, though no one is quite able to explain why the hell they are.”
parapsychology
- Daryl Bem’s parapsychology-related sitelist: Daryl Bem at Daryl J. Bem
- A list of recommended websites “on Psi (ESP) and Social Psychology”. (I was a psychology major at Cornell while Daryl Bem was, as I recall, department chair.)
- Ghostbusters
- This is a very funny movie, and a very nice DVD. Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Bill Murray, and later Ernie Hudson kick ghost ass as New York City has supernatural troubles of “biblical proportions”.
- Parapsychology at Wikipedia
- “Many scientists regard the discipline as pseudoscience because parapsychologists continue investigation despite not having demonstrated conclusive evidence of psychic abilities in more than a century of research. In the US, interest in research peaked in the 1970s and university-based research is now slight, although private institutions still receive considerable funding.”
More cargo cult science
- Cargo Cult Science
- “When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.” Richard Feynman’s famous “cargo cult science”, adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Rescued from Donald Simanek’s home page.
- Rudyard Kipling: The Humility of the Plague Doctor
- Charts and graphs are not science. You can get charts and graphs with astrology and biorhythms. Computers can model scientific superstition just as well as they can model real theories. Bloodletting is superstition even if its done in the name of a computer model.
- The scientific creed
- If science is your religion, you have chosen the hardest religion of all. If science is your religion, you don’t prove yourself right. You prove yourself wrong.
- Should the government (and the CDC) fund research into gun violence?
- Government funded research has held back progress in reducing violence and preventing suicide.
- Did government funding help keep Flint’s water unsafe?
- When researchers rely on government funding to keep their jobs, it should come as no surprise that they aren’t eager to publish findings that reflect badly on those government agencies that fund them.
- Seven more pages with the topic cargo cult science, and other related pages
More Climategate
- Lord Christopher Monckton in San Diego
- I went to see the Americans Protecting Private Property Rights presentation by Lord Christopher Monckton about the economic and scientific fallacies of the anthropogenic global warming movement last night. It was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, mainly from the climategate emails and software leak.
- Coal in their stockings: climategate Christmas
- If unknown data tracks known bad data, it’s a good guess there’s something wrong with the unknowns as well.
- Climategate crashes Google?
- Google is claiming that, in order to provide the most relevant, objective results in Google News, they need to toss ones that people want to read and comment on. What?
- Google responds to Climategate-gate
- I’m guessing Google got a lot of questions about this; their response didn’t answer my question.
More global warming
- Climate priests cry wolf one more time?
- In science, if your theory’s predictions don’t happen, you need a new theory. In religion, if your beliefs predict something that doesn’t happen, you just keep moving that prediction further into the future.
- Can Californians drink a train?
- The meme goes that even if we’re wrong about global warming, the money spent will still make the world a better place. That is only true if you can drink a high-speed train.
- Cargo cult climate science
- When your real-world evidence contradicts your theory, that isn’t a boon for deniers; that’s a boon for you, because, if you are a scientist, that is how your scientific knowledge advances. Real scientists are embarrassed when they ignore real-world evidence in favor of a mere theory.
- Republican President must keep Roosevelt’s word
- Even if a future conservative president doesn’t believe Americans of Japanese descent are disloyal, says Irwin Stelzer, he should think twice before rescinding President Roosevelt’s Executive Orders. The President’s honor—and the nation’s—is more important than politics.
- Another victim of climate change: science reporting
- The needs of religious reporting are completely different from the needs of science reporting. Treating climate change as a religion is killing science reporting. If we’re not careful, it will kill science as well.
- 14 more pages with the topic global warming, and other related pages