Global Warming 101: What do we mean by "scientific"?

The Czar of Muscovy says (perhaps excessively) complimentary things about my climate science musings.  Me, I think that I've gotten more ranty and sarcastic over the years, and this is a Bad Thing.  As a service to my readers (and a tip of the шляпа to our Autocrat), I'm pulling some of the better of my (non-ranty, non-sarcastic) climate science posts.  


Plus, I'm on vacation and feeling lazy.  But srlsy, I have almost 300 posts in my junk science category - this is organizing (technically, it's what the medieval monks called glossing).


I'll do one of these a day for the next little bit.  Long time readers will roll their eyes, but it may be new to a bunch of y'all (well, anyone who wasn't reading me 3 years ago).  If you actually want to understand the science, rather than just the arguing, hopefully this will be a starting point.


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Falsifiable    (July 23, 2009)


Generally to be considered "scientific", something has to be falsifiable - where anyone can try to duplicate your observations or results. If there's no way that this can be done, then the thing cannot be held to be scientific. Carl Sagan used a typically accessible parable that illustrated this critical part of the Scientific Method:

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been  innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

[Lots of ingenious tests for the dragon's existence presented and explained away.]

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.

So the primary - perhaps singular - requirement of science is data. Access to data (to see if someone made a mistake or to compare it to a different set of data) is simply a given, if something is to be considered scientific. Otherwise, how is the hypothesis falsifiable? The assertions would be immune to disproof.

An interesting thing is going on in the Global Warming debate - one group of scientists (the global warmers) is refusing to release their data. Steve McIntyre asked the UK Meteorologic Office to send him their data, so he could check it:

You stated that CRUTEM3 data that you held was the value added data. Pursuant to the Environmental Information Regulations Act 2004, please provide me with this data in the digital form, together with any documents that you hold describing the procedures under which the data has been quality controlled and where deemed appropriate, adjusted to account for apparent non-climatic influences.

They said no. Their reasons were very, very interesting:

The Met Office received the data information from Professor Jones at the University of East Anglia on the strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released.

Well now. Leaving aside whether the University of East Anglia in general, and Professor Jones' projects in particular are publicly funded, doesn't this make it hard to analyze the public policy recommendations related to climate change? The Met Office heartily agrees:

We considered that if the public have information on environmental matters, they could hope to influence decisions from a position of knowledge rather than speculation. However, the effective conduct of international relations depends upon maintaining trust and confidence between states and international organisations. This relationship of trust allows for the free and frank exchange of information on the understanding that it will be treated in confidence. If the United Kingdom does not respect such confidences, its ability to protect and promote United Kingdom interests through international relations may be hampered.

Well, well, well.

So what can we say about any conclusions, recommendations, or reports issued by the UK Met Office, that are based on this data? They are unfalsifiable.

McIntyre is very unpopular indeed among the Global Warming set, because he focuses on their data. He's the reason that you never hear about the "Hockey Stick" any more - he found that the data was cooked and the computer model was buggy, in a way that produced the hockey stick shaped curve. How bad is the data? Some of it no longer exists:

In passing, I mention an important archiving problem. Pete Holzmann identified actual tags from the Graybill program. We found that 50% of the data had not been archived. Was this selective or not? No one knows. Graybill died quite young. His 21 notes were notoriously incomplete. Worse, when the Tree Ring Laboratory moved a few years ago, apparently they forgot to arrange for old samples to be protected. Their former quarters were destroyed. Some of the records were apparently recovered from the trash by one scientist but others are permanently lost.

This is what the IPCC's $50 Trillion recommendation is based on. RTWT. The situation isn't just worse than you think. It's worse than you can possibly imagine. And some of you have quite good imaginations.

The science is settled, you see, but no, you can't have the data. You can't even see what was done to quality control the data, because it might damage a government's ability to protect it's national interests.

Oops, gotta go. It's those darn Deniers, back on my lawn again ...

UPDATE: More on the UK Met office here.