http://jhubert.livejournal.com/181274.html

It’s your choice not to read this particular paper (and all the others). It’s also your choice to vent forth with an opinion, despite your wilful ignorance. It’s my choice to be rude to people who think they have a valid opinion on a scientific subject when they admit they don’t read the literature.

You want to know about all the evidence for feedbacks? It’s all in the literature. You can find it if you want to. But I know you don’t want to.

Let’s see. The F-word. Stupid. Bloody. Moron. Bloody. The language of a responsible and respectable “scientist”. Who appears upset that he’s been caught out making stuff up.

I’m not at all aggrieved that journals keep their contents private – but until the evidence is published somewhere I can see it, I’m not going to accept it. If I told you that I had a marvellous proof that AGW was false, and you could see it for only $500, would you pay up? Or would you simply accept that whatever I said was true, if I was a suitably august authority? Like I said, it’s not the fact that the journal article is pay-per-view, it’s the fact that the information isn’t promulgated elsewhere. It’s the fact that the only place you can apparently find it is by playing the endless game of hunt-the-reference among the journals.

All you have to do is to provide a short summary of the observational evidence and the chain of reasoning by which it is determined that feedbacks have to be large and positive, and that there are no inconvenient unquantified negative feedbacks like clouds cancelling them all out. I know that there is no such proof. Prove me wrong if you can.

Nobody can keep up with everything published in a field, even professionals. They rely on their social networks to hear about the important stuff, about what is worth paying attention to. I’ve read plenty of papers, and I most definitely have been trained in science, but you think not having read this one paper renders me entirely unqualified to comment? Certainly, there’s no sign that you’ve read it either, which would seem to render you unqualified too, wouldn’t it?

Your doctor example is very good, though. It explains the difference between being rational, and following the scientific method. When an immediate action is forced and insufficient information is available, then it is rational to use fallacious reasoning like appeals to authority and correlation implying causation to come to a decision, but it is not scientific. Fallacies are so commonly believed because they do often increase the odds of making the right decision, but they’re still fallacies. It is not unreasonable for a politician to listen to the experts. But they do so as a politician, not a scientist. The scientific method is founded on rejecting these fallacies, and only accepting experimental evidence. Nullius in Verba. On Nobody’s Word.

Science was founded in the rejection of the authority of the Church and Aristotle and the other classics. Prior to that, they believed that the path to knowledge was to listen to the experts and take their word for it. Scholarship was about how much you had memorised, how many books you had read, whose student you had been. And then people like Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and Newton came up with a new approach. Appeal to Authority was recognised as the fallacy it is, and rejected. It is still in use elsewhere, but not in science. It is, as much as anything is, the very opposite of science.

To follow your medical analogy – it is not the patient who is making an appeal to authority, but someone claiming to be a doctor. “I’m prescribing leeches for your condition… How do they work? That’s explained in Galen, you know… Yes, I know it’s in Latin… No, I won’t translate, and no I don’t know the precise explanation – but it’s Galen. If it wasn’t true, you wouldn’t have had thousands of doctors all across Europe following it for the past five hundred years, would you now?”

You claim to be a scientist, and then have the outrageous medieval effrontery to try to justify the Appeal to Authority to me?! Ha!

Oh, and how you miss the point. Don’t believe my interpretation of the science. Don’t believe anyone’s interpretation of it. Read the science yourself, you fool, and interpret it yourself, if you’re capable of understanding it. If you’re not, then refrain from having an opinion. There is no reason why climate science should be simple enough for morons to understand. If it would take impossible amounts of time and money for you to get to grips with the science, shouldn’t that tell you that the science is beyond you and you’d be better off leaving it to people for whom this is not the case?

Listen, I was ill recently. I went to the doctor and explained my symptoms. He gave me some medicine. It would have taken me impossible amounts of time and money to research my condition myself. All the medical journals require subscriptions and medical text books are ridiculously expensive. Even if I had researched it all myself, I could easily have come to the wrong answer through my lack of specific training. So, I trusted the doctor. This was a wise decision, the remedy was appropriate, and I am in good health now. You seem to be of the opinion that lack of training in science doesn’t matter at all, that you could understand all the science, if only those bastard journals would give everything away for free. Do you not see that your position is slightly ridiculous?

I’ve read a fair amount of the literature. But I’m not going to pay money to read one particular paper that I’m almost certain will tell me nothing I don’t already know. I’m pretty sure that if the paper contained anything as important as solid evidence that the feedback was large and positive, that the zealots would have made sure to get the information out there. We are supposed to believe they think this is a planetary emergency, that they are desperate for us to take urgent action, but they won’t let anyone see the evidence without paying?! No, if this was real the peer-reviewed original might be in a pay journal, but there would be lots of other explanations of the science out there as part of the persuasive effort. Instead, all you get are people telling you there’s masses of evidence, and we should be persuaded by it, but none of them can actually show you any. They tell you it’s in the IPCC report, except the IPCC report just asserts it and refers you to a paper, which refers you to another paper, which doesn’t seem to mention it. Or makes errors which, if you point them out, you get told that’s an old paper they’ve “moved on” from and there are plenty of other lines of evidence. You spend your entire time chasing through the labyrinth looking for “the evidence” while they’re busy changing the political world.

I thought when you first posted the quote and I couldn’t get to the paper that you probably hadn’t read it either. Every time I ask what’s in it, and every time you fail to tell me, but simply repeat the assertions or tell me I should ‘go read the literature’, I become more and more sure of that. You’ve taken a quote without context and drawn grand conclusions on your interpretation of it, and now you can’t back it up.

I find it interesting that you’re now saying that nobody who hasn’t read all the literature can have views worth having on the topic. Does that include Al Gore, politicians, environmentalist NGOs, the media, and virtually all of the other busybodies now telling us how to run our lives? You seem quite happy that they should make decisions based on defective understanding. What you’re effectively saying is that people either have to devote impossible amounts of their own time and money becoming initiated and accepted, or they have to trust the United Nations funded intergovernmental ‘scientific’ Authorities without question. This is, quite simply, Authoritarianism. Nullius in Verba, I say. The Emperor has no clothes.

Why should I believe your interpretation of the science? Why should I think your views are worth having? You have been swift in the past to present us with other scientific snippets and explanations when it suited your case, why is it that after five separate requests for the evidence for there being large positive feedback, that you still can’t present it? What sort of evidence are your views based on?

Your understanding will always be limited if you refuse to read the literature. And if you don’t even bother to try to learn for yourself it will be limited further. Why do you think your views are worth having when they are merely based on your own interpretation of other people’s interpretation of the science?

The sensitivity is simply the ratio between the relevant input and the output. If ice ages are caused by heat distribution changes rather than changes in the total, then trying to figure out whether the cause is sufficient by looking at the global average is clearly the wrong thing to do. Little wonder you find you can’t explain ice ages, if you’re looking at the wrong variable.

I specifically said it wasn’t comparable, and the only conclusion I drew was that it was “a massive perturbation”. Since the poles get about half their heat from the tropics, I expect you would be able to argue for a factor of two difference between global and local sensitivities – if those terms have any meaning – I’ll leave that to you. But I’d still be interested to see an accounting of why a 100 W/m^2 change at the boundary of the ice sheet wouldn’t be sufficient to make it grow.

Since you’ve read and understood all the “ample evidence documented in the literature”, this should be a simple matter for you to summarise.

However, if you don’t want to, or aren’t able to, I don’t have a problem with that.

(And yes, I know what the 100 W/m^2 is – as I explained in the second paragraph of my first post. So?)

But perhaps even if you had access to the papers, you wouldn’t be reading them in the right way. It doesn’t look like you’ve read the IPCC reports, which are freely available and which would answer a lot of your questions. You certainly haven’t read the Roe paper properly, and you wonder about the difference between the 100 W/m² referred to therein, and the 4 W/m² from doubling CO2. Can I suggest you carefully read the caption on Figure 1 in the Roe paper, to find out exactly what the 100 W/m² figure is.