Friday, January 30, 2015

Mr. Jim Steele, Can you clarify your argument?


A) That wildlife biologists working in extreme conditions and over continental landscapes make mistakes?

B) Disputing that Anthropogenic Global Warming with it's profound changing climate driven landscapes alterations causes adverse cascading consequences for wildlife and eco-systems (read our biosphere) 

Can Mr. Steele come clean and explain what his fundamental thesis is?
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I have been wrestling with Mr. Jim Steele's YouTube "Climate Science Horror Story" talk to the IEEE for quite a while because it slammed right into my long-time {some call it} obsession with trying to grasp how people can so easily lie to themselves about something as fundamental as understanding and appreciating how our fantastic, beautiful, bountiful, wonderful planet Earth functions and how our society and we ourselves are damaging it.

Besides the YouTube talk Mr. Steele has a blog "Landscapes And Cycles" and his spiel is that local landscapes and natural cycles are ALL important and that we the people should disregard the global.  His talk ignores that natural cycles and wildlife dynamics operate within the biosphere which is dependent on our Earth's protective atmosphere… which regulates the conditions our biosphere inhabits.  

To me it seems that Jim and his public doesn't want to recognize that we exist within a "global heat distribution engine" and that as with any engine when we supercharge it with extra fuel/energy {just like at NASCAR} that engine will break loose.


What I find particularly confounding is that Mr. Steele's audience,... ok, let me call a spade a spade "The Republican/libertarian community" ...

This Republican/libertarian community also seems incapable of transferring the realities of "compounding  interest" onto down to Earth day to day realities of our life supporting biosphere. 

I'm thinking about all this because I've finally returned to focusing on my next "climate science horror story" installment which has been in the works seems like for-eeva.  What can I say, delays created by my own chaos and jobs and obligations, the inevitable delays caused by corresponding with a number of the scientists Mr. Steele singles out for scorn - then that most recent distraction Mr. Steele's own pathetic yet threatening WUWT Rage, which led to still more time spent on distractions and correspondences, hello San Francisco State University administration.

Now that I'm finally sitting here, back to fully focusing on Steele's 'penguin poop' presentation, I realized this all boils down to something very simple.  

Yes, there have been mistakes made within wildlife census studies - big tad-da I say.  Like those studies aren't incredibly difficult undertakings with mistakes inevitable.  

The real question is: do we want to learn from those mistakes as the scientists themselves are doing, or should we fabricate those "mistakes" into political bludgeons intent on destroying the important information being gathered?

Mr. Steele never hints to his audience that the scientific community is alive with informed skepticism and respectful, constructive arguments that bring flaws to the forefront of the discussion.  For instance, none of these "mistakes" Mr. Steele weaves into his high drama "science horror stories" went unnoticed within the community of knowledgeable experts.  

Worse, he never mentions that in the real world many of his proclaimed "climate horror stories" have the scientists' themselves questioning their own results, suggesting new research and methods and collaborations, while incorporating new scientific findings into their current endeavors.  Steele never cops to any of that.  Nah, he's too busy demonizing serious full time professionals.

But more to the point of what I'd like objective folks to ask Mr. Steele: 


Mr. Jim Steele what are the lessons you want us to learn?
 what are the questions you want us to ask ourselves?

A) That wildlife biologists working in extreme conditions and over continental landscapes make mistakes?

B) Disputing that Anthropogenic Global Warming with it's profound changing climate driven landscapes alterations causes adverse cascading consequences for wildlife and eco-systems (read our biosphere)

I suggest that Mr. Steele keeps jumbling up those two distinct issues as thought they were the same thing?  They are not.  What's up with that?

Can Mr. Steele come clean and explain what his fundamental thesis is?



2 comments:

izen said...

I suspect the thesis is that BECAUSE scientists make mistakes they will make mistakes that support any existing preference they have for an explanation.

The conclusion that can then be drawn, (badly) is that the prefered explanation is only supported by the wrong interpretation of the mistakes that are inevitable when data is collected under extreme conditions.
Or in the case of local historical temperature records, derived from data and proxies kept or formed for a very different purpose and to standards unrelated to the present application to long term global climate trends.

Thank you for the link and compliments on my blog-post about the -

http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=180.73,-41.14,1089

site.
I have been following it since it appeared, had been impressed with the N US wind speed work before. It is always worth a look at least every few days to see what is coming. It is sometimes at odds with other data sources and its predictions, or projections about the future just 3 days ahead have been... unsupported by events. But more often than not it gives a good sense of things if you scan up and down from jetstreams to surface. It can be interesting to scan around the globe and find developing storms. the link above shows(?) an area between Australia and New Zealand with complex stuff happening between the surface and a big jetstream bulge.
But I would go and look at what the real weather scientists say before taking the EARTHSCHOOL animation tool at face value.
But it is a beautiful face!
izen.

citizenschallenge said...

You're welcome, what can I say https://izenmeme.wordpress.com you've got a good thoughtful blog, worth sharing for sure - in fact I'm thinking I need to write up a post dedicated to it - but for now I've got Steele's penguin poop on my mind.

But more to the point of your comment Isaac Asimov wrote an excellent essay, "The Relativity of Wrong", that looks at the progress of science and different levels of being wrong.
http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2014/07/isaac-asimov-relativity-of-wrong.html
If you've never read it, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.