….and does Professor Judith Curry read Winds??<\/p>\n
Over at Climate Progress<\/a>, Professor Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, is getting slagged because she won’t tow the line.<\/p>\n Now there are about five different arguments that are made in this piece, and as I note below I’m just giving up on dealing with this issue any more.<\/p>\n But note this; my biggest problem with the warmists has been and continues to be three things:<\/p>\n 1) they take a potentially (possibly even probably) real problem and act like it’s an absolute truth; Let’s talk about 3) for a moment and then about 2).<\/p>\n Here’s someone (Curry) with pretty robust credentials in the discipline.<\/p>\n She steps off the reservation a year ago with her eminently reasonable “Manifesto” – published at Climate Progress. And now here’s Climate Progress talking about her yesterday:<\/p>\n Confusionist Judith Curry goes ‘wicked’ and mangles the work of Martin Weitzman Climate change can be categorized as a “wicked problem.”[Note<\/a>] Wicked problems are difficult or impossible to solve, there is no opportunity to devise an overall solution by trial and error, and there is no real test of the efficacy of a solution to the wicked problem. Efforts to solve the wicked problem may reveal or create other problems….<\/p>\n Xu, Crittenden et al. [Note<\/a>] argue that “gigaton problems require gigaton solutions.” The wickedness of the climate problem precludes a gigaton solution (either technological or political).<\/p>\n Judith Curry abandoned science this year<\/a>. She asserted I was “directly involved in Climategate”; James Annan explained “(S)He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense<\/a>“; William Connolley eviscerated a recent paper on Antarctic sea ice (here<\/a>), which notes, “The main problem with the paper is the uncritical use of invalid data”; and Bart Verheggen explained<\/a>, “Her unfounded allegations are insulting for the whole profession.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n One way humans make decisions, when there’s insufficient data, is by looking at the behavior of those who hold different positions. When I look at this kind of behavior – which isn’t designed to engage, advance human knowledge, or do anything except drive a heretic out into the darkness, it really doesn’t do a lot to improve my confidence in the people who are engaging in that kind of behavior.<\/p>\n In otherwards, warmists need to start acting more like Galileo and less like Urban VIII.<\/p>\n Finally, there’s my discomfort conceptually with the ways that they are attempting to drive “certainty” into climate arguments. Complex modeling tools are very useful in Mediocrestan, but – as the folks who brought us the recent financial Troubles have shown – not all that useful outside of it.<\/p>\n Things that happen inside “bounded reality” can be readily modeled and duplicated in a lab setting. Things outside simply can’t.<\/p>\n That’s the essence of Rittel and Webber’s claim, and that’s the perfect definition of a “wicked problem”. We’ve been saying AGW is a ‘wicked problem’ here for a long time.<\/p>\n Now because the models are weak, the problem is wicked, and the warmists are jerks, does that mean we just shrug? No, I think certainly not.<\/p>\n I can think of a bunch of sound reasons to minimize your emissions and to make that an area of emphasis – reduced dependence on ME oil, more secure infrastructure, local air pollution, etc. etc. Even just plain saving money. <\/p>\n
\n2) they generate that claim of absolute truth is ways that I find conceptually unsound;
\n3) at a root level, where there should be open discourse and what I believe ‘true scientific process’ to be, they act like cranks.<\/p>\n
\nNovember 17, 2010<\/b><\/p>\n