How to talk to uncle Bob, the climate ostrich

Willard of Never Ending Audit recommended a video on climate communication in the comments at HotWhopper that deserves more attention. In the video George Marshall of talkingclimate.org explains how to talk to climate ostriches, for example by being respectful to climate ostriches. In the video, he is not talking to the fringe ostriches, however, but to the mainstream. Talking about the ostriches the way one talks when they are not in the room, makes the climate ostriches go mad in the comments. I would advice any ostrich with blood pressure problems not to watch this video.

The video is called "How to talk to a climate change denier" and halfway Marshall explains that that term is best avoided in a productive conversation. Furthermore, it is not about the oddish "debate" in the blogosphere, it is about talking to someone you know about climate change. This is why I rename the video to "How to talk to uncle Bob, the climate ostrich". Marshall offers the term "climate dissenter", I personally like "ostrich", it fits to these people denying that climate change is a problem in a wide variety of (conflicting) ways.

The conversations with family and friends are probably the most important discussions, while you might have the tendency to avoid them. You are more likely to convince your uncle Bob as someone who build his internet identity around refuting that climate change is a problem.

Quotes from the video

Are you struggling to find ways of talking to people who simply do not believe that climate change is happening. ... Do I fight it out with them? ... You just laugh it out and let it go. Actually that conversation is really important. The fast majority of people form their views from the social interactions with people around them, with their peers.

Common ground

Do not go into an argument, seek common ground. ... When you think of the times when you have been challenged. And someone has changed your views. Was that an argument that was won or lost? Did you ever at the end of a conversation with someone say: you know what, you were right all along, silly me, I was wrong all over, you are right.

Respect

Okay, I know it is hard to feel much respect for people that ...

They are forming their own views, they are expressing their own views. ... The easy option is to say. Climate change is a huge problem and then not to think about not, not to do anything about it. At least they are engaging. ... Let's respect that quality that they make up their own mind.

Hold your views

It is important that you own your views. Don't make it an argument about an "it". ... Don't seek to undermine their sources of information. That is another discussion about the "it". ... This is again going head to head about the "it".

Your journey

People form their opinions over time, it is a steady process of negotiation. ... So it is important you tell them about the process how you came to your views.

Fits worldview

There is no reason why climate change cannot be a matter of deep concern for conservative people, to traditional people, to old people. ... Try to find ways to talk about it in a way that it concerns about them.

Offer rewards

People who do not believe in climate change nonetheless have very strong values in other areas. They are people who have very strong interest in their community, in their family, in a social life. They'd love to be quite traditional in the sense that they have a very strong sense of identity. ... These are values to speak to.

Many (new) open-access journals in meteorology and climatology

9-minute video by PhD Comics explaining open access from WikiMedia.

The journal of the German language meteorological organizations, Meteorologische Zeitschrift, has just announced it will move to full open-access publishing in 2014.

[The] editorial board and editor-in-chief of Meteorologische Zeitschrift (MetZet) are pleased to announce that MetZet will be published as full open access journal from the beginning of the year 2014. All contents of this journal from then on will be freely available to readers. Authors are free to non commercially distribute their articles and to post them on their home pages. MetZet follows with this change the requests of many authors, institutions, and funding organizations.

This was a long term request of mine. MetZet has very high standards and publishes good work. In that respect it would be an honour to publish there. In the past it was even one of the main journals in the field. It published the first climate classification by Köppen. It has articles by Hann, Bjeknes, Angström, Flohn and Ertel. However, I did not publish in MetZet up to now because almost nobody has a subscription to it. Thus after getting through the tough review, who would read the articles had I published there? Now this problem is solved.

Other less well known "national" open journals are Időjárás - Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ) and the Journal of the Catalan Association of Meteorology Tethys. Also Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography and Tellus B: Chemical and Physical Meteorology have changed to open-access in 2012.

Then we have the IOP journal Environmental Research Letters and the new Elsevier journal Weather and Climate Extremes. Copernicus, the publisher of the European Geophysical Union, has many more open access journals. The most important ones for meteorologists and climatologists are likely:

• Climate of the Past (CP)
• Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP)
• Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (NPG)

[UPDATE. O. Bothe has written a more up to date list with open-access journals (October 2014)]

Bad journals

Not all open-access journals are good. Jeffrey Beale even keeps a list of predatory publishers and journals.

Does a body composition scale provide independent information? Two experiments: weight and age

Since the beginning of the year I have gained about 8 kg. Was that fat, muscle, water? Probably some of all. My body fat scale estimates that my body fat percentage has increased by about 3%, which would be 2 to 3 kg of fat.

The problem

My problem? My scale knows my weight gain and likely uses my weight to estimate my body fat percentage. If it would not use my weight to estimate body fat, why would it want to know my height (body mass index, BMI), age and sex? Part of the information on body fat likely comes from the currents send through my body by the scale, but another part from my weight or BMI. Thus my problem is, does the increase in body fat percentage tell me more than what I already knew, that I have gained 8 kg?

The experiment

Now luckily, my fitness studio has another instrument to measure body fat. It is attached to a computer and also wants to know my weight. But here, you have to type in. Thus with this instrument you can experiment.

The instrument has a infra-red sensor that has to be placed on your biceps. To compute your body fat, and a colorful page full of other probably highly reliable information, it uses your weight, height, age and fitness.

We made one measurement stating my real current weight and one stating my weight at the beginning of the year. The difference in computed body fat percentage: 3,3%! Almost to similar to the increase estimated by my scale to be true.

The interpretation

It is possible, I gained some fat and my waist did increase some. It is also possible that nothing happened fatwise, other places look more muscular nowadays. I guess all I know is that I gained 8 kg.

I guess this does not surprise scientists and engineers working on these measurement devises. The German Wikipedia even mentions this effect qualitatively. But I am not sure if all users are aware of this problem and we can now put a number on it. If your fat gain is less than a third of your weight gain, the measurement is too uncertain to determine whether there really was a fat gain.

Post Scriptum. We forgot one experiment. I would love to know what the estimate for my body fat percentage would be if I tell the computer I am a young man. I expect some age discrimination by the multiple linear regression equations used.

Post Post Scriptum. Thanks to Caro of Stangenliebe (Pole art fitness Bonn) for the measurement.

UPDATE. I realised I could do the experiment with my age using my own scale. My Soehnle scale has two presets. I set person 1 to my age (rounded to 42) and person 2 to an Adonis of 18 years. In all four measurements the Adonis has exactly 3.7% fat less. If only my age group would not be so overweight, my readings would be a lot better.

Reviews of the IPCC review

The first IPCC report (Working Group One), "Climate Change 2013, the physical science basis", has just been released.

One way to judge the reliability of a source, is to see what it states about a topic you are knowledgeable about. I work on homogenization of station climate data and was thus interested in the question how well the IPCC report presents the scientific state-of-the-art on the uncertainties in trend estimates due to historical changes in climate monitoring practices.

Furthermore, I have asked some colleague climate science bloggers to review the IPCC report on their areas of expertise. You find these reviews of the IPCC review report at the end of the post as they come in. I have found most of these colleagues via the beautiful list with climate science bloggers of Doug McNeall.

Large-Scale Records and their Uncertainties

The IPCC report is nicely structured. The part that deals with the quality of the land surface temperature observations is in Chapter 2 Observations: Atmosphere and Surface, Section 2.4 Changes in Temperature, Subsection 2.4.1 Land-Surface Air Temperature, Subsubsection 2.4.1.1 Large-Scale Records and their Uncertainties.

The relevant paragraph reads (my paragraph breaks for easier reading):

Particular controversy since AR4 [the last fourth IPCC report, vv] has surrounded the LSAT [land surface air temperature, vv] record over the United States, focussed upon siting quality of stations in the US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and implications for long-term trends. Most sites exhibit poor current siting as assessed against official WMO [World Meteorological Organisation, vv] siting guidance, and may be expected to suffer potentially large siting-induced absolute biases (Fall et al., 2011).

However, overall biases for the network since the 1980s are likely dominated by instrument type (since replacement of Stevenson screens with maximum minimum temperature systems (MMTS) in the 1980s at the majority of sites), rather than siting biases (Menne et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2012).

A new automated homogeneity assessment approach (also used in GHCNv3, Menne and Williams, 2009) was developed that has been shown to perform as well or better than other contemporary approaches (Venema et al., 2012). This homogenization procedure likely removes much of the bias related to the network-wide changes in the 1980s (Menne et al., 2010; Fall et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2012).

Williams et al. (2012) produced an ensemble of dataset realisations using perturbed settings of this procedure and concluded through assessment against plausible test cases that there existed a propensity to under-estimate adjustments. This propensity is critically dependent upon the (unknown) nature of the inhomogeneities in the raw data records.

Their homogenization increases both minimum temperature and maximum temperature centennial-timescale United States average LSAT trends. Since 1979 these adjusted data agree with a range of reanalysis products whereas the raw records do not (Fall et al., 2010; Vose et al., 2012a).

I would argue that this is a fair summary of the state of the scientific literature. That naturally does not mean that all statements are true, just that it fits to the current scientific understanding of the quality of the temperature observations over land. People claiming that there are large trend biases in the temperature observations, will need to explain what is wrong with Venema et al. (an article of mine from 2012) and especially Williams et al. (2012). Williams et al. (2012) provides strong evidence that if there is a bias in the raw observational data, homogenization can improve the trend estimate, but it will normally not remove the bias fully.

Personally, I would be very surprised if someone would find substantial trend biases in the homogenized US American temperature observations. Due to the high station density, this dataset can be investigated and homogenized very well.

AVAAZ petition to Murdoch to report the truth about climate change

AVAAZ is a digital civil rights organisation, whose petitions and actions have influenced many important political decisions in the last few years.

Because, the summary for policy makers of the new IPCC report is published today, they are now organising a petition asking Rupert Murdoch to report the truth about climate change. The petition just started; they already have half a million signatures after one day.

To Rupert Murdoch:

The scientific consensus that human activities are causing dangerous climate is overwhelming, yet your media outlets around the world continue to seed doubt and spread inaccuracy. Any journalism that does not first acknowledge the evidence that humans are causing this problem is dangerous and irresponsible. As concerned citizens we call on you to tell the truth about man made climate change and report on what we must do to solve this problem.

You can sign this petition here. Please spread the word.

NoFollow: Do not give WUWT & Co. unintentional link love

The hubris at WUWT.

Do you remember the search engine AltaVista? One reason it was overrun by Google, was that Google presented the most popular homepages at the top. It did so by analysing who links to who. Homepages that receive many links are assumed to be more popular and get a better PageRank, especially when the links come from homepages with a high PageRank.

The idea behind this is that a link is a recommendation. However, this is not always the case. When I link to WUWT, it is just so that people can easily check that what I claim WUWT has written is really actually there. It is definitely not a recommendation to read that high-quality science blog. To the readers this will be clear, but Google's algorithm does not understand the text, it cannot distinguish popularity from notoriety.

This creates a moral dilemma. Do you link to a source of bad information or not? To resolve this dilemma, and make linking to notorious pages less problematic, Google has introduce a new HTML-tag:

<a href="" rel="nofollow">Some homepage</a>.

If you add NoFollow to a link, Google will not follow the link and not interpret the link as a recommendation in its PageRank computation.

Skeptical sunlight

We are not the only ones with this problem. Many scientifically minded people have this problem, especially people from skeptical societies. Note, that here the word skeptical is used in the original meaning. From them I have this beautiful quote:

As Louis Brandeis famously said, "sunlight is the best disinfectant". Linking directly to misinformation on the web and explaining why it is wrong is like skeptical sunlight. ...

I think the correct way to proceed is to continue providing skeptical sunlight through direct linking. For one thing this demonstrates that we are not afraid of those who we oppose. In general they don’t link back to us, and that demonstrates something to casual readers who take note of it. ...

But while we are doing this we must be constantly vigilant of the page rank issue. Page ranking in Google is vitally important to those who are pushing misinformation on the web. It is how they attract new customers to their vile schemes, whether they be psychics or astrologers or homeopaths or something else. Even if we as skeptics are providing only a miniscule fraction of a misinformation peddler’s page rank, that fraction is too much.

Our links are probably the smallest part, but they may be important nonetheless. These links connect the climate ostrich pages with the main stream. Without our links, their network may look a lot more isolated. This is also important, PageRank is not just about links, but about links from authoritative sources.

If you search in Google using:

link:www.wattsupwiththat.com

You will find many pages linking to WUWT that most likely do not want to promote the disinformation, on the contrary.

Proceedings of the Seventh Seminar for Homogenization and Quality Control in Climatological Databases published

The Proceedings of the Seventh Seminar for Homogenization and Quality Control in Climatological Databases jointly organized with the Meeting of Cost ES0601 (Home) Action MC Meeting (Budapest, Hungary, 24-27 October 2011) has now been published. These proceedings were edited by Mónika Lakatos, Tamás Szentimrey and Enikő Vincze.

It is published as a WMO report in the series on World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme. (Some figures may not be displayed right in your browser, I could see them well using Acrobat Reader as stand-alone application and they did print right.)

Anthony Watts calls inhomogeneity in his web traffic a success

[UPDATE. Dec. 2013. The summary of 2013 of WUWT has just been released and the number of pageviews of WUWT has dropped. In 2012 WUWT had 36 million page views, in 2013 only 35 million. Not a large drop, but a good beginning. And it should be noted that a constant readership leads to reductions in ranking as the internet is still growing fast. Thus these number are a clear contrast to the increases in ranking that Anthony Watts announced below.

This confirms that WUWT does not only gives bad information on climate science. Let's hope more people will realize how unreliable WUWT is and start reading real science blogs.]

Success

Anthony Watts pretends to be beside himself with joy. WUWT has an enormous increase in traffic!! In his post Announcement: WUWT success earns an invitation to “Enterprise” he writes: "You are probably aware of the ongoing improvements to WUWT I’ve made. They seem to be paying off. Lately, things have been looking up for WUWT:" and shows this graph.



With such an increase in the quantity of readers, why care about quality? Thus suddenly it is no longer a problem that Wotts Up With That Blog (now called: And Then There's Physics) clarifies the serious errors on WUWT daily.

@CollinMaessen @wottsupwiththat His every post "Watt about..." is an attack on my name. But I don't care. Success is best revenge.

— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) August 7, 2013

Comments

The WUWT regulars are cheering.

JimS: Congrats, Anthony Watts. I see that your blog stats have arisen to the level that the AGW alarmists wished the temperatures would also arise to confirming their folly.

John Whitman: The extraordinary ranking of your venue is the best kind of positive energy feedback loop to increase stimulation of critical independent thinkers in every country. You and everyone of them can draw rejuvenating intellectual energy from it. Wow.

George Lawson: The AGW crowd will see this as another nail in their coffin! Almost as painful as this year’s Arctic ice melt.

Stephen Brown: Congratulations! I bet that the rise and rise of WUWT is causing a certain amount of underwear wadding amongst the Warmistas!

Increase?

But is the number of WUWT readers really increasing?

A first indication that this is not the case, is that Anthony Watts did not really write it explicitly. His post and the plot certainly suggest it and he did not correct the people commenting that clearly thought so, but Watts did not explicitly write so. That should make one suspicious.

A second indication is that Watts is very touchy about it. When Collin Maessen, as someone working in IT, pointed out to Watts on Twitter that, Alexa is not very reliable, the response is that Watts blocks Maessen on Twitter.