Home/BlogThose aren’t my words — it’s the title of a 2005 article, brought to my attention by Cal Beisner, which uses probability theory to “prove” that “…most claimed research findings are false”. While the article comes from the medical research field, it is sufficiently general that some of what it discusses can be applied to global warming research as well.
I would argue that the situation is even worse for what I consider to the central theory of the climate change debate: that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere causes significant warming of the climate system. Two corollaries of that theory are that (1) the warming we have seen in recent decades is human-caused, and (2) significant warming will continue into the future as we keep using fossil fuels.
The first problem I see with scientifically determining whether the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to be true is that it is a one-of-a-kind event. This immediately reduces our scientific confidence in pinpointing the cause of warming. The following proxy reconstruction of temperature variations over the last 2,000 years suggests global warming (and cooling), are the rule, not the exception, and so greenhouse gas increases in the last 100 years occurring during warming might be largely a coincidence.
Twice I have testified in congress that unbiased funding on the subject of the causes of warming would be much closer to a reality if 50% of that money was devoted to finding natural reasons for climate change. Currently, that kind of research is almost non-existent.
A second, related problem is that we cannot put the Earth in the laboratory to run controlled experiments on. Now, we CAN determine in the laboratory that certain atmospheric constituents (water vapor, water droplets, carbon dioxide, methane) absorb and emit infrared energy…the physical basis for the so-called greenhouse effect. But the ultimate uncertainty over atmospheric feedbacks — e.g. determining whether cloud changes with warming reduce or amplify that warming — cannot be tested with any controlled experiment.
A third problem is the difficulty in separating cause from effect. Determining whether atmospheric feedbacks are positive or negative requires analysis of entire, quasi-global atmospheric circulation systems. Just noticing that more clouds tend to form over warm regions does not tell you anything useful about whether cloud feedbacks are positive or negative. Atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems involve all kinds of interrelated processes in which cause and effect must surely be operating. But separating cause from effect is something else entirely.
For example, just establishing that years experiencing global warmth have less cloud cover letting more sunlight in does not prove positive cloud feedback…simply because the warming could have been the result of — rather than the cause of — fewer clouds. This is the subject that Andy Dessler and I have been debating recently, and I consider it to be the Achilles heel of AGW theory.
After all, it is not the average role of clouds in the climate system that is being debated — we already know it is a cooling effect. It’s instead how clouds will change as a result of warming that we are interested in. Maybe they are the same thing (which is what I’m betting)…but so far, no one has found a way to prove or disprove it. And I believe cause-versus-effect is at the heart of that uncertainty.
A fourth problem with determining whether AGW theory is true or not is closely related to a similar problem medical research has — the source of funding. This has got to be one of the least appreciated sources of bias in global warming research. In pharmaceutical research, experimentally demonstrating the efficacy of some new drug might be influenced by the fact that the money for the research came from the company that developed the drug in the first place. This is partly why double-blind studies involving many participants (we have only one: Earth) were developed.
But in global warming research, there is a popular misconception that oil industry-funded climate research actually exists, and has skewed the science. I can’t think of a single scientific study that has been funded by an oil or coal company.
But what DOES exist is a large organization that has a virtual monopoly on global warming research in the U.S., and that has a vested interest in AGW theory being true: the U.S. Government. The idea that government-funded climate research is unbiased is laughable. The push for ever increasing levels of government regulation and legislation, the desire of government managers to grow their programs, the dependence of congressional funding of a problem on the existence of a “problem” to begin with, and the U.N.’s desire to find reasons to move toward global governance, all lead to inherent bias in climate research.
At least with medical research, there will always be funding because disease will always exist. But human-caused warming could end up to be little more than a false alarm…as well as a black eye for the climate research community. And lest we forget, possibly the biggest funding-related source of bias in climate research is that research community of scientists. Everyone knows that if the AGW “problem” is no longer a problem, their source of research funding will disappear.
Sometimes I get accused of being a conspiracy nut for believing these things. Well, whoever accuses me of that has obviously not worked in government or spent much time dealing with program managers in Washington. There is no conspiracy, because these things are not done in secret. The U.N.’s Agenda 21 is there for all to read.
The bottom line is that there could scarcely be a more ill-posed scientific question than whether global warming is human-caused: a one of a kind event, the Earth can’t be put into a laboratory to study, cause and effect are intermingled, and the political and financial sources of bias in the resulting research are everywhere.
So, when some scientist says we “know” that warming is human-caused, I cringe at the embarrassing abundance of scientific ignorance on display. No wonder the public doesn’t trust scientific predictions — just as suggested by the 2005 study I mentioned at the outset, those predictions have almost always been wrong!
Mr. Spencer. Source of this proxy reconstruction ???
It is not by chance from Greenland ?
The filename of the graph (Loehle-2000-years-of-temperatures.jpg) gives a big hint. The graph comes from “Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000 Year Global Temperature Reconstruction based on Non-Treering Proxy Data. Energy & Environment 18:1049-1058”.
The author subsequently did a comparison of it against an almost entirely different reconstruction. You can find it on Watt’s Up With That’s web site using the following URL (hopefully it won’t get auto-censored) :
wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/28/loehle-vindication
Just as an experiment (and maybe help non-techies…), I’m going to try posting a clickable link for the URL:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/28/loehle-vindication
I think I recognize this 2000-yr long proxy reconstruction. It’s from Loehle 2007 and 2008 in Energy and Environment. The nice thing about this reconstruction that it’s based on non-tree ring data. Loehle used 18 series from around the World, most of them in the NH.
1. The talk about the Earth in a lab are invalid with respect to much of the research the study is talking about because humans aren’t put in a lab and studied any more than the Earth.
2. The study is talking about specific research findings until they are followed up on or verified that is single independent original research studies. That isn’t an issue in the context of climate change research. The study isn’t talking about large picture ideas that have been built on based on over a hundred years of studies.
Spencer’s work (essentially single non-verified research studies) are what this study is about. Not larger scale topics that are the result of many studies done over decades.
In the first post instead of “climate change research” I should have more correctly stated the central themes of climate change research (e.g. increases in CO2 cause increases in global temperature).
Just like the study doesn’t suggest that central themes in biomedical sciences are incorrect (e.g. cancer can kill you).
Your central theme of climate science, “increases in CO2 cause increases in global temperature” has been falsified.
See http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateReflections.htm#20080927:%20Reflections%20on%20the%20correlation%20between%20global%20temperature%20and%20atmospheric%20CO2
And the central theme of cancer research has not been (e.g. cancer can kill you). It has been that we can find a cure for cancer. That too has proven false.
Hi Peter,
I don’t agree with your implication. I think Roy can easily push this idea even further. For example, consider this recent New Yorker article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all
From the article:
“The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
“But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon [the Decline Effect, is] occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.” [The article even gives examples in Physics.]
And at the conclusion:
“The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments [and, for Climate Science, I would add the GCM ensembles] define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.”
Now, the article is not that technical. For example, p-value is not mentioned. Nor is the term “Bayesian.” But be that as it may, IMHO, the article provides background for the argument that part of the problem climate scientists are having is that some are trying to “hide the decline” effect. 🙂
Roy is not one of those.
This will be the decade of global cooling as I have said many times on this website. If solar stays around typical solar minimum values or lower, and volcanic activity is above average especially in the high latitudes, this will keep the meridional circulation intact ,with an increase in earth’s albedo, due to more extensive snow cover.
If that goes as I think it might I expect this decade to be 2c cooler then last decade. If solar should be more then I expect, and volcanic activity less, then I will still be looking for cooler temperatures this decade, but how much cooler would be in large part a function of the items I mentione above.
At any rate co2 global induce warming due to humans, is the most STUPID theory I have ever come across as to why climate changes.
George Crews,
Read the actual examples. The findings fall apart pretty quickly. The verbal over shadowing problem showed up in less than 5 years, and it was the original researcher that showed the problem. In the example of symmetry, there were issues reported in 3 years.
For the details of climate change and work done by Spencer and Dressler these things are an issue. For the larger picture based on work going back 100 years, not so much.
The clarity of Dr. Spencer’s message is crystal. Without a belief in truth we have nothing.
I can’t help but think that the real concern is that global warming alarmism is that it is a symptom of something far more concerning: the fall of Western civilization. Respect for truth has been lost and that is far more concerning than global warming.
Meanwhile, nature will continue to have the last word. Meanwhile, the climate will continue respond to changes in solar activity and multi-decadal oscillations. Meanwhile, the predictions by Syun-Ichi Akasofu and others who foresee a continuation of the cooling trend that began a decade ago will last another decade — or, perhaps last 3 to 7 more decades.
Meanwhile, AGW True Believers will continue to believe and belief in the AGW hypothesis — even with a wooden stake driven through its heart by reason and logic — will continue to animate the IPCC’s climate porn, fearmongering and politics of fear.
And meanwhile, a small increase of about half a percent over the next 100 years (what Akasoku’s hypothesis describes as the recovery from the Little Ice Age) is the most global warming as can be expected or be hoped for. And then, there’s always the possibility of another ice age instead of continued global warming. It’s happened before.
Hi Roy,
If it is true that most published research findings are false, then it could be argued that most of the two recent papers published by yourself and Andy Dessler are false, viz. both!
It seems obvious to me that cloud feedback on solar forcing is negative, and solar forcing is effectively the only source of heat to the climate. Thus Andy is wrong.
However, your idea, that because clouds produce a negative feedback, we need not worry about the effects of increased CO2, is equally fallacious. It is well known that in the geological past the climate has been much warmer than it is today. How can this be possible if clouds produce a negative feedback. Would they not have prevented temperatures rising in the past just as they do today?
Above you state that global warming is “a one-of-a-kind event”, but we know that the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was caused by a sudden increase in greenhouse gases. Why did the negative feedback from clouds not prevent temperatures from soaring then?
Clouds are not the only phenomenon that affect planetary albedo. Ice coverage is another. When the Arctic sea ice disappears, melted by rising levels of carbon dioxide, then the global temperatures will rise until the cloud cover has increased to compensate for the loss of albedo caused by the melted ice sheets. The radiation at the top of the atmosphere must balance.
Most research findings on global warming are based on the concept that the greenhouse acts by re-emitting radiation back to the surface, but that is false. Carbon dioxide absorbs the heat radiated by the surface, and warms it. Enough CO2, then you have enough heat to melt the surface ice. That is how the greenhouse effect of climate change operates!
Cheers, Alastair.
we know that the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was caused by a sudden increase in greenhouse gases.
um … how do you KNOW this? As opposed to thinking it a plausible conjecture for this, that or the other combination of apparently, given the current state of the research, good reasons …
Interestingly enough the last two IPCC reports have stated that the previous warming periods were the CAUSE of an increase in CO2, because of release from the oceans caused by solar activity. This time is an exception, apparently. They’re much more willing to admit the effect of the sun on the climate in previous warming periods than this one but there is hope: every report has more detail and recognition of the sun’s impact. Perhaps by 2100 they’ll admit the sun is the primary driving force in climate change.
“there could scarcely be a more ill-posed scientific question than whether global warming is human-caused”
Speaking of ill-posed: The real question is not whether, it is how much is human-caused. Is it all or 0,1 degrees?
Do not care about the first poster. He is my countryman, a fanatical warmist trolling every possible forum.
“A second, related problem is that we cannot put the Earth in the laboratory to run controlled experiments on.” Do I recall someone saying “Yes, we can!” ? Christopher Game
Some scientists always get the results they want and, by and large, if they aren’t too honest or skeptical, they are happy with them. I don’t know what percentage of these scientists deliberately manufacture the needed results, but I suppose it isn’t trivial since academic success is defined by publications and grants leading to tenure, students, and deans surfeit with overhead. Scientists who work for government or other large corporations also must produce the expected results to succeed.
Global Warming is just an extreme example of this widespread phenomenon of the debasement of science, but no more extreme than Social Darwinism or Lysenkoism. I like to think that “at the length the truth will out” but as with the trolling Peter in this comment stream, there seem to be so many who even if they had eyes, would not see. The problems with AGW were well known even before AGW took off – but take off it did and failure after failure of model predictions, falsification of hypotheses, and disclosures of manipulation of data have not been enough to stop it.
This reminds me of the specious results of Moller on fluctuating asymmetry discussed in the New Yorker article that George Crews (see his comment above for link) points out. Some people did notice quickly that Moller’s results were too good to be true, but that didn’t stop him or his acolytes. Although I don’t know anyone who will touch his research now, the results have made it into text books and still have a loyal following among the credulous. Moreover Moller is unrepentant and has no problem publishing – although he has mostly moved into demonstrating the evils of pollution, a field where no one dares to criticized his results, AND – no surprise here – the effects of global warming on bird populations.
RE:”The graph comes from “Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000 Year Global Temperature Reconstruction based on Non-Treering Proxy Data. Energy & Environment 18:1049-1058?.”
1.Compare the number of proxy datasets used in each. For example, the Mann et al. “hockey stick” reconstruction used over 1200 proxies, whereas Craig Loehle’s used 18.
2.Look at the temporal coverage of the proxies used. Again using Loehle as an example, many of the proxies he used ended in the early to mid 20th century, and thus don’t incorporate the recent warming trend.
3.See which and how many of the proxies use tree ring data. The accuracy of tree ring proxies is something of a bone of contention. Loehle’s 18 proxies didn’t use any tree ring data. However, the Mann reconstruction shows essentially the same results with or without tree ring data.
Pavol:
The Mann Hockey Stick is a statistical artifact. Period.
Pavlov,
you ignore the statistics used that give emphasis to only a few proxies for the “blade” in Mann. The rest are only window dressing that help create the “shaft” through averaging!!
Wagathon:
“Without a belief in truth we have nothing.”
Indeed. Science, over the course of the 20th Century, became enamored of some (indeed interesting) ideas. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The idea of the observer being an integral part of the observation. Then ultimately, that nothing can be “proven”. This has been referred to as the death of “objectivism”.
The fact is that there is an objective macroscopic world. Despite randomness seemingly being deeply embedded in the microscopic world, the macroscopic world is, from observation, extremely deterministic – even including those pesky ideas of “cause” and “effect”.
The solar cycles are in the process nicely reminding us of these facts.
The money quote from the New Yorker piece:
“The situation is even worse when a subject is fashionable.”
AGW is not mentioned in the article, but I can’t help wondering if this is the signal for the start of the long walkback, and the right way to frame it.
Dr Spencer:
You provide an excellent essay. Thankyou.
Some respondents seem to think bias of published research papers is somehow deliberate. In a very few cases a bias may be deliberate (it was always thus), but such cases are very rare.
There are two main reasons why the great bulk of research papers are biased.
1.
It is much, much easier to get published any finding which supports a paradigm: something which disconfirms earlier work of peer reviewers is likely to get exceptionally severe scrutiny by the peer reviewers.
2.
Journals like to publish new findings of something whether or not that something has been found before, whereas journals are not keen to publish a finding of nothing although such a finding may be critically important (e.g. the importance of Michelson & Morley’s famous experimental finding).
Add to that the funding issues raised in your article (i.e. researchers are funded to research some things and not others), and the agregate of published research findings on any subject is certain to be biased.
Richard
My personal opinion is that you cannot PROVE anything with statistics. They are only useful to find areas that should be investigated in depth!!
If a study bases its conclusions only on statistical features it is incomplete. We are all aware that a gambler can occasionally experience LUCK against all normal odds. Why should this surprise us that research can also fall victim to similar excursions from statistical norms??
As was mentioned in the article, we rarely hear about all the research that comes up empty. This prevents us from seeing what the actual odds are that a particular study may simply be a statistical oddity.
“At least with medical research, there will always be funding”
That’s not necessarily the case, several problems have brought different fields out of the backwaters for example HIV did it for virology 2-3 decades ago while variant CJD has had extraordinary affects on Prion research funding. There is always motivation to keep your particular field as one of the major problems facing humanity.
(Before anybody reacts I do think tackling HIV infection is a worth while goal)
In more general terms I can;t help thinking leads us down the road that questions whether an objective science even exists. Science like history is written by the powerful. We’re in danger of throwing away science here.
If we add up the need or demand by:
A: Government sector
(a) more environmental regulations, certification, authorization + (b) more carbon and energy taxation + (c) sustaining budgetary needs of various climate/environmental offices and bureaucracies + (d) climate loans via foreign aid WB, ADB, etc. + (e) sustaining frequent and expensive global climate meetings
B. Business sector
(a) carbon finance, carbon trading + (b) subsidies to favored/crony power plants and electric vehicles + others.
A + B = trillions of dollars
Thus, AGW scare must continue.
The point nobody seems to care about is the following:
whether the earth is warming up at the moment, and whether that’s due to human’s emission of carbon dioxide or not, our reserves of fossil fuel are not endless, so what’s the problem with finding alternatives before the last drop is burned?
I find thát rather disturbing.
Oh, and besides that, I fully agree with Spencer stating that we can’t put the earth in a lab, and therefore we can never be sure about what’s going to happen, and therefore it’s not interesting whether global warming is our fault or not. We just better find a solution for the things we dó know that are happening, such as fossil fuels running out, and pollution of the environment.
Dirk
Global warming and alternate fuels are different issues. Alternate fuels must be developed and CO2 has nothing to do with it. We will run out of oil almost certainly before 2100.
Damaging our economy by raising energy prices greatly makes no sense even if you believe CO2 to be the magic villein gas the alarmists say it is, because chasing jobs to 3 rd world countries causes more CO2 not less.
I believe we should ignore CO2 and develop alternate energy including clean coal. We need to get out of being dependent on the middle east.
Dr. Roy,
I agree with every thing in your essay except your use of the Agenda 21 to excuse accusations of being a conspiracy nut- not that I am making that accusation. I went to the Agenda 21 link and found UN sponsored state government co-operation proposed in a number of different environmental and economic fields where states working together can make a positive difference. CAGW would be one example, if it were a problem, which I think it is not. I agree that all bureaucracies try to expand their power and scope, and that we should be skeptical of their claims that we need more of them, but the over-the-top, in my opinion, expressions of fear of big government and the UN is, to my ears, like the expressions of fear of global warming. While I don’t doubt the sincerety of most who hold those beliefs, I think there are partisan political agendas behind each of those alarms and attempts to create fear. And I don’t think we are well served in science or politics by fear mongering.
This lack of a control seems crucial to me. I don’t see how anyone can take seriously the agw crowd’s claims about CO2’s effects on the planet if there’s no control planet(s)
@netdr — and then there is coal,natural gas
I have first hand knowledge of lying in science and misrepresentation of data. My work and theories have been both plagiarized and blacklisted, even then I was able to publish in top draw journals and have received kind letters from the former US Surgeon General Dr.Jocelyn Elders, plus Noam Chomsky and others . See my website http://www.cancerfraudbadbiotech.com . More importantly the 2011 update wherein I discuss the OVERSIGHTS of the Climate debate.Read the material being sent to President Obama under the Obama letter index, C : Corruption read pages 34 to 56 on new diseases and evolution. Disprove them if you can, otherwise help by telling others to read the material. Global Warming becomes irrelevant because Climate Change has always occurred, and species have gone extinct with the changes. Disease control the rate of evolution and eliminating unfit species. Man with his pollution has TAGGED himself as an unfit species.This is what Climate Change is causing and you can draw all the graphs and charts you want, but if my hypothesis is correct, and any work good enough for Yale to plagiarize, must be good, then man only has 50 years before extinction and the Earth heals itself. So people, you must look at the issue head on, we are talking about the death of the human race in the proportions of bubonic plague type kill offs, but with out the fail safe built into that disease. Again, disprove the argument if you can : read it and advise President Obama.I have read so many posts on this subject and the leisurely attitude of everyone is hilarious, to the point of satire as if there is no reality in nature. Man’s hubris seems to have bypassed his sanity. Any ways , Climate Change is real, the effect is not what you grasp. Thank you. E.A.Greenhalgh
Thanks for the tip on Agenda 21, Roy.
-T
REPORT OF THE UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCE ON
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT*
(Rio de Janeiro, 3-14 June 1992)
Annex I
RIO DECLARATION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm
There have been numerous 1C-3C cycles over the Holocene period as Greenland and Antarctic ice cores show. How do we prove that the cycles have stopped in order to conclude that the current warming cycle is man made?
-T
http://www.whoi.edu/cms/images/dfino/2006/1/occi_abrclimate_wef_en4_19073.gif
” Man with his pollution has TAGGED himself as an unfit species.”
This is one problem with a public forum.
Indeed, man pollutes the atmosphere with every exhaled breath. So does every other Earth-bound living creature — in the air, on the land or under the sea — that must ingest oxygen to live. Then by those lights, can you name a single living species that is not unfit? Or are you thinking of some other planet?
Bob Paglee,
The difference is that Man is the only species which does this KNOWINGLY and is capable of doing something about it.
Since we are the only species with this awareness, it is incumbent upon us to do something about it. Otherwise we are nothing more than animals who are behaving entirely instinctively. I am sceptical about most of what is said about “climate change”, but this goes far beyond that, to the willful destruction of our planet and the other species we share it with. If we were doing this through ignorance, that might be an excuse, but we are aware of what we are doing and we have no right to assume the planet is ours to destroy at will.
Spencer does not realize the obvious problem with this statement: “I can’t think of a single scientific study that has been funded by an oil or coal company.”
Given that the major oil companies make at least $1 billion PROFIT each MONTH and stand to lose greatly if GHGs are regulated, there is money.
So why did they not come?
Obviously Roy has not been reading Rabett Run. Here are a couple of papers sponsored by your friendly “Fossil Fuel Industry” If you want to defend them, well YMMV, Eli got more.
# W. Soon “Implications of the secondary role of carbon dioxide and methane forcing in climate change: Past, present, and future”, Physical Geography, 28, 97-125 (2007).
M. Dyck, W. Soon, R. K. Baydack, D. R. Legates, S. Baliunas, T. F. Ball, L. O. Hancock, “Polar Bears of Western Hudson Bay and Climate Change: Warming Spring Air Temperatures as the `Ultimate’ Survival Control Factor?” Ecological Complexity, 4, 73-84 (2007).
And, of course, we also have the interesting question of what Western Fuels bought from Pat Michaels and the Chipper, and then, of course, there are cut outs like dear friends at Cato.
Thanks for the info. The data is very good. To begin a serious study.
I believe this quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle perfectly describes the state of the AGW argument.
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, A Scandal in Bohemia
Everything now is a result of Global Warming…er, Climate Change. Warmer summers, colder winters, more rain, less rain, lower test scores, increases in reality TV versus scripted TV…pick it.
REF: Greg says 1/25/11 at 12:12 PM
May I remind you, Albert Einstein formed a theory based upon the slimmest of clues in 1905. No experimental data was developed until the occasion of a total eclipse of the sun in the early ‘20s. I have no doubt however, that luck played a large role in the process.