Thank you Nathan Myhrvold!
I’ve detailed some of my misadventures at Real Climate.org, the sometimes insightful but usually activism-masquerading-as science water cooler for folks who buy the notion that human-caused global warming (aka “AGW”) is on a rampage that is increasingly likely to end with the destruction of global civilization as we know it.
My greatest frustration at RealClimate is the bizarre comment moderation policy, which effectively squelches most informed dissent in favor of “supportive” comments from the regulars. My reasonable comments have so often been zapped out that I don’t post there anymore – it’s a waste of my time (and theirs!) to compose a thoughtful reply only to have it reviewed by a climate scientist who takes some offense by people less interested in parroting the party line than questioning some of the nuanced, globally warmed interpretations of proxy data.
But I digress…
Enter Nathan Myhrvold and the fun new book “SuperFreakonomics”, which was the subject of RealClimate’s spurious attack piece of the week by Raypierre:
The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid.
Now, it’s one thing to make a case that a bunch of whacky bloggers or frothing-at-the-mouth fools like Glenn Beck don’t understand the issues surrounding Global Warming, but it is ridiculous to make this case against a guy like Myhrvold who has both the business credentials and academic ones to suggest he’s very well informed. He was Microsoft’s Chief Tech Officer and he is the founder of the globally respected “Intellectual Ventures” think tank. He’s also got the academic chops to debate these issues thoughfully: Master’s degrees in Geophysics/Space Physics and in Mathematical Economics and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics.
Here’s Myhrvold’s reply which includes this real nugget of wisdom:
One of the saddest things for me about climate science is how political it has become. Science works by having an open dialog that ultimately converges on the truth, for the common benefit of everyone. Most scientific fields enjoy this free flow of ideas.
The good news is that some good scientists who do NOT have a political agenda are (finally) starting to speak out forcefully when attacked by those who do. The end game is already obvious because reason tends to prevail over ranting. We should soon soon see the alarmist rhetoric die down in favor of real discussion of real issues, and as we do let’s tip our hats to Nathan and others who are willing to simply state the obvious, regardless of the political implications of doing that.
Grameen Foundation – Microloans WORK
The Grameen Bank was the simple but brilliant innovation in poverty fighting by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize along with the Bank he founded. The Grameen Bank provides very small loans to women in developing countries who then start businesses and almost alway pay back the microloans with interest.
Microloans have proven to be one of the most effective poverty fighting instruments ever, and continue to lift families out of the conditions faced in much of the developing world. I’ll be giving to this cause and I hope you’ll consider doing so as well!
Politicians are NOT CORRUPT. Deal with it.
(clarification: I’m talking about the USA here )
As a stark raving political moderate I often find myself incredibly frustrated with the tribal thinking that characterizes most of the political debate. Most of the claims by even moderate left and moderate right about politicians (and others supposedly corrupted by money concerns) are simply garbage.
Politicians are generally honest, hard working people who have sacrificed lucrative professions and wealth in favor of their public service. This is true on right and left, middle and fringes. There are reasons to fault them on many ideological grounds and debates about that are one of the great parts of our great system, but the idea that money is at the root of a politicians actions is just a nonsensical point of view. Many don’t need money anyway as they are wealthy already: Kerry, McCain, Bush, Cheney, Kennedy, etc etc.
However many more have foresaken wealth in favor of service to the country. We should honor them for that even as we might disagree aggressively with policies or ideas. We should not rant nonsensically about how they are corrupt / evil / lying / undermining the world. Leave that job to the whackos.
The funny thing is how the debate is generally so partisan in this respect. Liberals insist Cheney was a big war profiteer even as he gave his Halliburton options money to charity. Far from profiting, Cheney’s decisions cost him dearly in terms of money. As much as I never have agreed with Cheney’s massive defense spending policies or approaches to anti-terrorism I’d hardly call him corrupt. Or take Obama, who appears about as clean as you can be after years of dirt digging and conspiracy theorizing. Yet detractors rant on nonsensically as if he’s got a freezer full of cash in the Whitehouse.
Exceptions? Sure there are some, but generally the “corruption” cases in the USA are hardly the scandals many make them out to be. A favor here or there or some freebies valued at a few thousand. One does not have to condone this to understand that it represents very little systemic threat to our great system, especially because corruptions charges here are taken so seriously that you can easily end a political career with even minor transgressions.
This aversion to corruption is a very good thing, absent in many parts of the world, and it is in part what makes our system so honest and robust. Though unfortunately it does NOT make our spending efficient because as I’ve noted ad- nauseum here, political spending is NOT optimal spending and our honest, hard working politicians spend WAY TOO MUCH on way to many things.
—————- more ranting follows but the point is above ————–
When GW Bush was in power I’d argue with left wingers to make the obvious case he was not a crazy religious nutcase hell bent on the destruction of our gentle planet. Now with Obama I have to make the obvious case to right wingers that he’s not a crazed manchurian communist out to destroy western civilization as we know it.
It’s tiring to see smart people get so wrapped up in stupid ideas about how the world works and even more tiring to see how the process seems to infect people so predictably. Hardly a peep from the cultural conservatives as the Bush policies of overspending ravaged the economy but now they seem to think Obama invented deficit spending. Yet liberals – who should be crowing like crazy about how we’re starving future generations with reckless spending and absurd eco-mitigation dramasl, now sit on their hands watching Obama proceed in very similar ways to GW Bush.
The standard rhetorical reply to my insistence that most pols are honest is “you are naive”, but in fact the foolish “corrupt politician” idea comes from something called ”the naivete of the skeptic”, where a foolishly skeptical worldview poisons otherwise clear thinking and diverting attention to supporting facts only and dismissing counter arguments.
Misguided Environmentalism – Don’t let it happen to YOU!
When ideology gets in the way of feeding people, everybody needs to start shouting “Stop the Madness”. Try it, it’s cathartic.
Mega-philanthropist Bill Gates is no longer busy with Microsoft. Instead, he’s one of the key people spearheading the largest and best funded effort in history to bring better health to hundreds of millions in the developing world. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already saved over a *million people* with their international health efforts and they are on track to save tens of millions more.
Speaking at a Food Prize conference last week Gates observed that misguided environmentalism – specifically the fight to ban genetically modified foods – threatens to thwart some very innovative food programs.
I cannot agree more emphatically although I have to be less diplomatic than Gates, because it’s imperative that we stop paying so much attention to the incoherent rantings of those who oppose such innovations on the basis of their non-hunger-focused principles rather than because they have studied the science and the cost benefit relationships that often make this type of agriculture so compelling.
Too many who claim to be promoting environmentalism are busy with agendas that are often at odds with basic human needs. The concept of ”sustainability” is invoked far too often now as an excuse to disparage business practices and promote questionable actions rather than address the real and optimized long term needs of planet earth and the human race.
Genetically Modified Food: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food
Gates on this issue: http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN1530051720091015
The importance of the Green Revolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
CES 2010 at Technology Report
Over at the tech blog Technology Report we’ll have a lot of coverage leading up to and through the CES 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
A big thanks to the Aria Resort and Casino and Vdara Hotel. These amazing new properties in the Las Vegas CITYCENTER Project are sponsoring our CES 2010 coverage this year and into the show in January.
Aria will open in December and along with the Mandarin Oriental Hotel the Aria will feature the world’s most advanced guestroom technology along with CityCenter’s incredible WiFi footprint that covers the entire campus with broadband thanks to thousands of antennas and WiFi access points.
Over at Technology Report I’m going to feature a “First Timers Guide to CES” focused on people who have never been there and also some tips on how to find out the party and event schedules. CES is one of the world’s largest conferences and even in these troubled economic times I’m sure that Las Vegas will be rockin’ with some amazing technology and events at the January 2010 CES.
For more about this please head over to Technology Report’s CES 2010 coverage, starting …. now!
Is Climate Science on trial again?
The climate debate is entering a new state of confusion that will at least bring some of the fascinating technical issues into the popular press. The first time this happened was during the congressional hearings featuring the “Hockey Stick” debates where critics suggested that some key math and research supporting “unprecedented global warming” was seriously flawed. Although leading statisticians agreed with the critics the situation is probably best characterized as a stalemate with both sides claiming vindication and little change in the way others have addressed the issues at hand.
The technical issues sound obscure but they impact every man, woman, and child on earth in almost incalculable ways because many nations are preparing to forego a lot of GDP in the interests of climate mitigation, and this has substantial economic consequences.
I do believe in warming and believe it’s human caused. However I don’t think we can afford to do all that much about it and also don’t think the consequences are nearly as severe as advertised. Therefore I’m not reasonably called a “climate skeptic” .
Many bright people are skeptics however and everyone should resent that they are called “climate denialists”, a bizarre term used to conjure up images of the ignorance and malice of holocaust denial.
I am concerned that climate science, especially with respect to mathematical modelling and long term temperature reconstructions, has been compromised by egos and cognitive biases. I don’t think climate science has been compromised enough to reasonably suggest that human caused warming is “unlikely”, but it’s been compromised enough to suggest climate alarmists, rather than the unfairly branded “denialists”, are the ones often standing on thin ice.
Here’s a comment I tried to post at RealClimate.org but it appears to have been rejected:
It’s unfortunate to see so many insults and tired talking points rather than *key issues* such as:
Is Yamal robust?
Why does proxy selection in papers like Yamal, Kaufman seem to include more proxies with stronger GW signals than a randomized proxy selection process?
Why isn’t there a randomized proxy selection process or at least a well structured one as was suggested (but appears not implemented) in the Kaufman Arctic lakes study?
Why does it take so long to properly archive data and why is there a single shred of resistance to totally transparent archiving of source code and data?
To what degree is observed global warming the product of human activity?
To what degree is the modern warming trend unprecedented?
Role of the Medieval Warming Period and why is there so much disagreement about temps at that time? (another proxy selection issue!) Simply asserting that these questions “have been answered many times” isn’t only wrong and insulting, it’s counterproductive if you sincerely want to challenge the growing mainstream view that climate science has been compromised by cognitive biases and ego. I’m staying open to your insistence that the science has not been compromised at all and McKintyre is just a slinging mathematical mud, but posts like this don’t provide much support for that idea.
When Climate Scientists ATTACK
After a few years following some of the technicalities of discussions about global warming I’m glad to report that there’s FINALLY a really nice guantlet thrown and accepted by the authors of two of the key blogs in the discussion, Climate Audit and RealClimate.
Generally both blogs tend to discuss many of the technical issues in a way that makes it hard (for me at least) to identify clear and specific points of contention where somebody without a degree in math could conclude “this is wrong”.
However the latest round of attacks should lead to a richer discussion than usual regarding one of the key technical points of contention in climate – climate proxy selection and validity. Proxies are things like tree rings, ice cores, or sediment patterns that allow a reconstruction of past climate. If the proxies used in key studies are poorly representative of climate realities, as Climate Audit often suggests and RealClimate always denies, climate scientists have more than a little’ ’splainin’ to do.
However the shoe’s on the other foot if ClimateAudit’s concerns are more along the lines suggested by Real Climate’s PhD and NASA crew:
… the conflation of technical criticism with unsupported, unjustified and unverified accusations of scientific misconduct. Steve McIntyre keeps insisting that he should be treated like a professional. But how professional is it to continue to slander scientists with vague insinuations and spin made-up tales of perfidy out of the whole cloth instead of submitting his work for peer-review? He continues to take absolutely no responsibility for the ridiculous fantasies and exaggerations that his supporters broadcast, apparently being happy to bask in their acclaim rather than correct any of the misrepresentations he has engendered. If he wants to make a change, he has a clear choice; to continue to play Don Quixote for the peanut gallery or to produce something constructive that is actually worthy of publication.
Now THAT is some hot science commentary that you can really sink your teeth into! Who ever said climate science was technical and boring – it’s almost a contact sport….. Gentlemen, put those Hockey Sticks UP!!
Got Stats?
This is a cross posting of an article I wrote over at Technology Report about internet marketing:
One of the cornerstones of good internet marketing is knowing your statistics, and you’d think with all the elaborate, inexpensive and free measurement and analytical tools everybody would have a great sense of how their sites stack up to the competition.
But you’d be wrong.
In fact even many large companies are struggling with high quality analysis even as the tools get better and the measures s-l-o-w-l-y are reaching some level of standardization. For most small companies metrics are, literally, more misses than “hits”. Webmasters routinely report or misinterpret or misrepresent website “hits” as viable traffic when hits often are simply a measure of the number of total files downloaded from the site. Graphics or data intensive websites can see hundreds of hits from a single web visitor.
Even when the analysis is good the reporting is often opportunistic or manipulative, and it’s often done by the same team that is accountable for the results. This is a common problem throughout the business metrics field. Executives are well advised to have independent auditing of results by unbiased parties for any business critical measurements.
Consider learning and using analysis packages like Google Analytics – a brilliantly robust and free tool provided by Google to anyone.
A while back Peter Norvig, one of the top search experts over at Google (also a leading world authority on Artificial Intelligence), published a little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics were with regard to website traffic. (Thanks to Matt Cutts for pointing out the Peter paper.
The results here demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.
Although this is just an anecdotal snapshot indicating the problem, and perhaps Alexa is better now, I’d also noted many problems with comparisons of Alexa to sites where I knew the real traffic. 50x seems to be a spectacular level of error for sites read mostly by technology sector folks. It even suggests that Alexa may be a questionable comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you probably don’t need Alexa anyway.
Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A larger, and excellent comparison study by Rand Fishkin over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:
Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.
It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons. Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Fishkin told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with the log files he reviewed. My own experience with Analytics have not been extensive but the data seems to line up with my log stats and I’d continue to recommend this excellent analytics package.
Narrow Focus
Jumping down the rabbit hole of the Climate debates is always very interesting but it’s also very frustrating to watch many brilliant (as well as stupid) and well-informed (as well as ignorant) people avoid each other because the blog environments are not civil enough to encourage quality discussion of really intriguing issues. Great examples of the challenge of discussing science in blogs are my two favorite “watering holes” for the active discussion of climate science: RealClimate.org and ClimateAudit.org
At both, intelligent and provocative posts often lead to “supportive” commentary from the allies of the blog but also ferocious attacks on critics of the initial post. This makes for interesting comments and reading if you can handle the emotional / intellectual heat, but I think the overall chases away the two very important groups who participate in blogging: the huge number of casual observers looking for answers to complex questions and the small number of authoritative voices who study a particular complex topic.
Even as a seasoned blogger who rarely wants to back down from discussion points I find it very frustrating to bounce back and forth hoping my reasonable comments will not be moderated (a major problem at RealClimate, and not much of a problem at ClimateAudit) and hoping that critics will be treat researchers with the basic respect they deserve (lack of respect is a huge problem at both ClimateAudit and RealClimate, where PhD science authorities are routinely accused of incompetence (mostly at ClimateAudit) and reasonable criticisms are dismissed casually as “nonsense” simply so they do not need to be addressed properly (mostly at RealClimate).
Increasingly blogs moderate reasonable comments because they don’t fit the political agenda of the blog and I still think this is anathema to quality discussion. Others (like Joe Duck) pretty much allow any comments that are not obscene, spam commercial, or racist so a single person can wind up dominating the conversation, chasing others away.
I’m rethinking my policies about how to manage commentst because it’s good to hear from more pe0ple. Howevert I’m not going to be snipping or moderating anybody anytime soon. I think Steve McKintyre of Climate Audit might have the right idea which is to push some comments to “unthreaded” if they are off the topic of the post. This leaves free speech intact while keeping a few people from dominating the whole comment show.
Final note is that I prefer to err on the side of giving everybody their full voice and I plan to continue doing that here.
Photo and Text Credit: NASA Hubble.
This is NOT a collage, but one of the new striking images from the Hubble Space Telescope. These galaxies are a cluster. Question: Estimate how many creatures as bright or more intelligent than humans live in the area defined by this picture?
The first identified compact galaxy group, Stephan’s Quintet is featured in this stunning image from the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope. About 300 million light-years away, only four galaxies of the group are actually locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. The odd man out is easy to spot, though. The four interacting galaxies (NGC 7319, 7318A, 7318B, and 7317) have an overall yellowish cast and tend to have distorted loops and tails, grown under the influence of disruptive gravitational tides. But the bluish galaxy at the upper left (NGC 7320) is much closer than the others. A mere 40 million light-years distant, it isn’t part of the interacting group. In fact, individual stars in the foreground galaxy can be seen in the sharp Hubble image, hinting that it is much closer than the others. Stephan’s Quintet lies within the boundaries of the high flying constellation Pegasus.
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