Rosegate: Rose hides the incline

> Fantastic post I very much enjoyed it, keep up the good work.

Tim, this post is apparently spam. Bots are going around posting generic statements of agreement in various forums. Check the link behind the posters' name.

Thanks for this, Tim. I'm no expert when it comes to temperature graphs, but alarm bells rang upon seeing that concoction in the Daily Mail.

It seems Rose is GWPF's middleman. Definitely not a journalist.

And Curry doesn't cease to amaze me.

I have studied sufficient statistics and econometrics to understand what Judith Curry and the Daily Mail clearly do not â how to emphasize a lie, namely that global warming has stopped. This can only be shown by cherry-picking the data, the time-span used or, as in this case, both and doing it so skillfully that it is not detected. An impossible task, as many eagle eyed scientists have shown by pointing out that the Curry analysis relies on

â¢Using data for April 2010 based on reports from 47 stations only, compared with >14,400 stations used previously

â¢Ensuring that the data from the 47 stations is biased by selecting stations which are located in Antarctica only

â¢Ignoring available data from other stations

â¢Excluding data for the rest of 2010

â¢Fitting a line to data covering a period (8 years) which is statistically insignificant

â¢Claiming that the line proves no global warming over the period, and

â¢Accusing your Team Leader (Dr Muller) of hiding that claim

Why would Rose choose to ignore these shortcomings? Was he so poorly informed about the way in which the Curry analysis was carried out â the basis of her claim? Did he ever question Dr Curry on this aspect or on just how involved she was in the analysis of that data?

The kindest thing that can be said for Rose is that he fully relied on Dr Curryâs veracity but given his record, that would seem to be a verdict which stretches credulity.

Finally, why would a climate scientist who presumably joined the BEST project team because of her expertise and experience in statistical analysis of climate data make claims regarding that data which appear to be clearly unsustainable?

Dr Muller, who had for a long time openly declared his skepicism of anthopogenic global warming (AGW) and who led the BEST team has come to a quite different conclusion to that espoused by Curry. He has declared himself to be convinced by the analysis of massive amounts of data that AGW has been demonstrated.

LET'S SPIN AGAIN

Come on you deniers, backflip now
Yeah, you've got it Right!
Gotta spin that BEST, to the Right â you guessed!
We gotta do the spin and it ain't no sin

Come on let's spin it round, in an awful hurry
Yeah, let's spin it round, make it look the BEST
Blame it all on Muller â like Judith Curry
Yeah, let's spin again, acting 'unimpressed'

Yeah black is white and wrong is Right we say again
Oh you know Muller's 'hiding the decline'...
It's true that I'm a co-author, that's all too plain
So let's spin again - his findings don't match mine!

Come on let's spin it round, do a backflip Right now!
Like Tony Watts - his 'premises ain't wrong'!
He's spinning faster than a pulsar, somehow
Yeah let's spin again, deniers come along!

Yeah, black is white and wrong is Right we say again
We've never had the slightest shame before!
We'll spin it round like it's no drastic bummer
Yeah, let's spin again, then tiptoe to the door...

Curry is the kind of incautious patsy that Rose snacks on. She is unlikely to generate the incisiveness this misrepresentation warrants to really clarify her position,given her modus to date.

The deniosaurs have lost the battle over the global land temperature. Judith Curry's intellectual death spiral is testimony to that.

It would actually be sad if the consequences of her nonsense were no so serious.

What I'm waiting for now is for the diniers to start attacking the sea surface temperature record in earnest.

Who will be the first to claim that, in order to measure the sea surface temperature, scientists should follow the *same bit of water* around, otherwise it's like moving a land station around at random?

Or - how about this - who will be the first to argue that because some water sinks below the surface and some rises - upwelling and downwelling - that *there's really no such thing as the sea surface, so how can anyone claim to be able to measure it*?

The possibilities for stupidity are endless.

Zibethicus:

On the subject of spin, perhaps you were [thinking of this?](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUG1mo6vGqs)

After being on the receiving end of the typically dishonest thuggery of the denialist movement, I wonder if Muller is reconsidering the kind of company he plans on keeping.

Beware of the Jellyfish-hypothesis. A new paradigm?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-jellyfish-global-climate.html

No, an old one.

Why, for example, didn't these jellyfish have enough of an effect to stop the PETM?

Or is science just beyond your reach, olaf?

David Rose and Judith Curry hide the decline of their faculties -- poorly.

Relax Wow, I''m not into CJGW.

You're not into FARJSR either, olaf. Apparently you don't know what that paradigm is, either.

How did Jonas escape his prison? Oh, by sending his sockpuppet.

[I don't really believe that Olaus is Jonas's sockpuppet ... Jonas isn't nearly as stupid.]

Its always a nice and friendly ambience hear at Deltoid. By the way have you read Donna's latest epos:

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/11/01/un-climate-warnings-are-so-19…

What a nerve!

No, we hadn't.

Is there a reason to? I mean, if science isn't consensus, then why does it matter if there's no consensus? What point is it saying so?

Oh, and deltoid is a lot like Lothlorien. There's nothing to fear here other than what you bring with you.

"Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do."

Really?

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem3vgl/from:1996/mean:12/offset:-0…

In any trend line with added statistical fluctuation, there will be shorter-term ups and even downs (not just "pauses"!) Consider a stock market in a healthy economy (ie, not ours!) that keeps growing with ups and downs, like maybe a dip in October etc. So finding "pauses" at the decadal level is complete misdirection, shouldn't even get out of the gate as it were. Note that we can *see* that the fluctuations are basically decadal, it's not an "assumption" used as GOOJF card. Look for example at the graph at scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2011/10/another_hide_the_decline_momen.php , you see bigger dips in the past than now.

@ 14

OK class, time for your reading comprehension 101 exam! Study the paragraph below and then answer which of the following best summarizes the position of Noel Brown:

a) Noel Brown says that entire nations could be inundated by rising sea levels by the year 2000

b) Noel Brown says that governments must reduce CO2 emissions by the year 2000 to prevent the greenhouse effect from gathering enough momentum to cause inundation of entire nations at an unspecified later date

c) It doesn't matter what Noel Brown says because he is an environmental official at the United Nations and is therefore a watermelon communist seeking to impose a totalitarian world government

Remember, no part marks. Good luck!

Lets be honet, Judith Curry is just a perfect example of what happens when someone gets a really bad idea in their head, and refuses to let go of it, no matter how stupid it is.
Of course talking to the DM also falls under the heading of 'stupid'.

It's great fun to see the deniers twisting themselves in knots trying to get out of this one. Lets see what happens when Best says we are to blame - Delingpole's head will probably explode, Scanners style. So thats something to look forward to...

@ Tim re "Curry contradicts herself so often":

curryja | November 2, 2011 at 10:13 am | Reply

The Mail article had several quotes from me that were not provided in full context. I am working on a new post with a clarification.

So according to Curry Rose did misquote her, then he didn't, now they're not?

above:

they're he's

I note that the Australian this week has C-c/C-v'ed from other news media the story on Muller's new view of the land temperature data sets---it is just that it is a short article at the bottom left of a page in the "World" section of the paper, instead of screaming headlines on page one or page two. And, it doesn't have a picture of some old bloke at the beach...

No doubt the Oz will use this (modest concession) as evidence against any future claims that they are biased, inaccurate reporters of climate science.

For scientists, really bad ideas are
the ones that refuse to let go of _you_.

Touting monckton is a bit sad.

I mentioned some of christophers more bizarre pronouncements, you know, the ones thar scream 'CRANK', but Curry deleted it.

Apparently some scepticism is not welcome.

Hank:

I'm feeling like there's an "in Soviet Russia" missing from [your comment](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/rosegate_rose_hides_the_inclin…).

It also helps that she charts the monthly data rather than the yearly averages, which helps drown the whole trend with noise.

Curry has been in fine form the last few days; deleting her own comments and now editing them after someone has responded and pointed out the problem with her argument.

James Annan even popped in to remind Judith that her WGI critique is actually about elements in WGII. Curry has finally responded (I think Annan first raised this a year ago - but Judith thought he wasn't important enough to talk to........Monckton OTOH!!!!) with little more than evasion.

Grab some popcorn and go and watch!

Has Curry ever even remotely enforced her Blog Rules?

I'm curious.

Is anyone who actually visits Curry's blog archiving it as they read?

I don't usually go there, but Iwould love to see a record of what she's been censoring.

> Curry has been in fine form the last few days; deleting her own comments and now editing them after someone has responded and pointed out the problem with her argument.

Must have been taking lessons from John Cook of SkS.

Why's that?

Are your meds kicking in again, Dick..?

@20

I strongly suspect we will never see Curry's "clarifications".

Instead, she will seed several new "technical" discussion threads about, say, the Dragon Slayers or something like that, and then she will be "too busy" moderating another 1000+ comments to respond to the valid criticism of her own claims.

Tim Lambert!

"Must have been taking lessons from John Cook of SkS Anthony Watts of WTFUWT.

FTFY mate.

Curry has a new post up, entitled Pause (?).

It seems - to a layman like me - long on waffle and short on much else.

This statement made me blink:

Note that the short time scales considered here preclude determination of a statistically significant trend at the 95% confidence level, although lack of statistical signficance does not negate the existence of a pause as defined here.

So it's a pause Jim, but not as we know it.

@ SteveC, 35

This one jumped out at me:

"Santer et al. argue that âOur results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.â

So in this context, starting the analysis in 1998 is not unreasonable."

Can she even add?

Can she even add?

Delusion has a pretty powerful effect on people.

>So in this context, starting the analysis in 1998 is not unreasonable.

Failure in grade-school addition aside, does Curry not understand why "starting the analysis in [sic] 1998" is completely unjustifiable?

Is Curry actually in control of her intellectual faculties?

Seriously?

I'm just a layperson, and have nowhere the level of formal tertiary education Judith Curry has.

But some of what she says is pretty stupid, even by my lowly educational standards.

Sorry, got diverted while typing and came back to realise I missed something.

One of the principal points (as far as I understand it) of many people's objections to Curry's claims wrt her interpretation of the BEST data (including "There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasnât stopped") was they lacked sound statistical backing (see for example Tamino & Nick Stokes) - indeed, that selecting time spans as short as 10 years would almost preclude saying anything meaningful about trends simply because there is so much uncertainty. Following several pointed questions on that theme, Curry's response is to say that just because you can't call statistical singificance doesn't mean there isn't something there.

I mean, wtf? If this was Joe Blow on a media blog somewhere it'd be predictable (if not acceptable). But Curry is Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at GIT, not some numpty who failed year 10 maths.

@SteveC

This is a valid point in a way - just because you haven't met the standard for statistical significance, does not mean that you have shown that what you are testing for does not exist.

Two things fall out of this however.

a) The logical thing to do would be to expand your analysis in some way eg. by including more data, to show more conclusively whether the effect you are testing for does or does not exist - at which point it becomes obvious that Curry has advanced a self-refuting argument.

b) Curry has just demonstrated why everyone that ever hopped on the "Phil Jones says no warming since 1995" idiot train is wrong.

**Update** And the answer [from Curry is](http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/04/pause/):

>Note that the short time scales considered here preclude determination of a statistically significant trend at the 95% confidence level, although lack of statistical signficance does not negate the existence of a pause as defined here.

Tamino is, like me, [not impressed](http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/the-real-problem-with-the-global…).

@ Dave H

This is a valid point in a way - just because you haven't met the standard for statistical significance, does not mean that you have shown that what you are testing for does not exist.

Point taken. I think I let my astonishment at Curry's response swamp what little facility I have for clear thought.

The other criterion that Curry makes that me think "wtf?" to is that any trend < 0.17 â 0.2 C/decade is a "pause". So if the planet warms at 0.16C/ decade, that's not warming, it's ... err...

Tim,

especially since Curry's whole schtick has been about arguments being backed by credible and detailed statistical analysis.......now that's all irrelevant when she wants to argue some point.

I'd be amazed except that the one rule for scientists and another for Curry and her skeptics has been the MO for a while.

IMO there's something else afoot. There has to be.

Heh.

I was literally just over at Curry's and cottoned on to that quote of hers.

[This is what I said by way of response](http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/04/pause/#comment-133663). I reproduce it only for expedience - I don't think that she'd actually moderate it away:

Curry's statement:

Note that the short time scales considered here preclude determination of a statistically significant trend at the 95% confidence level, although lack of statistical signficance does not negate the existence of a pause as defined here

is curious for what happens when one presents it thus:

...short time scales... preclude determination of a statistically significant trend at the 95% confidence level, although lack of statistical signficance does not negate the existence of [warming] as defined here.

Remember Phil Jones' much lauded (by denialists) claim that there was "no warming since 1995"? Well, this is no different, except that Jones was prepared to use the convention and state explicitly that statistical significance was not achieved with 15 years, and therefore similarly prepared to not over-interpret data from short periods of time. The rephrasing of Curry in the preceding paragraph says exactly was Jones was saying.

Tellingly, Jones also noted (but was not quoted by the denial movement) that the probability of the 15-year period showing a warming trend that refuted a null hypothesis was 0.94, and further that another year would likely increase to significance the power to discern signal from noise. I'm curious to know what p-value Curry has determined her approach might produce, and also what the 1-β value of any such analysis would be.

Or to put it another way, compare and contrast...

Ethan Siegel [calls Curry out for **fraudulent** scientific claims](http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/11/exposing_a_climate_scie…), based in part on Tamino's analysis.

And in comments at Siegel's blog, he notes that Curry's site has a thread apparently *accusing others ([including Siegel, in comments](http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/10/disinformation-vs-fraud-in-the-climat…)) of running a disinformation campaign]*.

Rose thinks he is on a roll. This week he has a really thin [story](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2063737/BBCs-Mr-Climate-Change-…) that goes Hadley>CRU>£15000>BBC>climate change>scandal!!!!

Interestingly, the David Rose article I linked to in 49 has now vanished. It has also vanished from the GWPF website where it had been reproduced. Has Rose got The Mail into legal hot water?

[Lord_sidcup](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/11/rosegate_rose_hides_the_inclin…).

It works for me.

However, [just in case](http://backupurl.com/8sx2nx)...

Bernard

Yes, the article seems to be back now - apparently without any changes.

The BBC's Roger Harrabin (that's 'Mr Climate Change' if you're David Rose) has written a response to Rose's increasingly inhinged reporting.

[The flak's been flying again over BBC coverage of climate change](http://www.bbc.co.uk/ariel/15937222)