Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Watt's up with Pat Frank?

And now for your scheduled return to the climate blogosphere wars. I haven't missed it at all. Pat Frank has posted a rather tedious pile of blether on WTFUWT which mentions me, albeit tangentially. Well, maybe a bit more than tangentially. The story, such as it is, is that he submitted a paper (which apparently has been rejected 6 times already by different journals) to GMD where I'm an editor. I took on responsibility for dealing with it, which was a fairly simple task as the glaring error in the manuscript is not really that well hidden. A bit of googling confirmed that several others had already seen this and dealt with it appropriately, so rather than waste the time, effort and good-will of hard-pressed reviewers I summarily rejected it. There followed the inevitable appeal which was sent to Jules (dealing with appeals happens to be one of her specific roles as an Exec Ed) who passed it on to fellow Exec Ed Didier Roche due to the obvious conflict of interest. He has upheld the appeal but not before several more rambling screeds appeared, and the blog post, and several hundred comments.

I'd suggest the comment thread for general entertainment purposes, but I defy anyone to wade though it all (never was it more true that comment threads on blogs are a write-only medium). A couple of sane voices did their best to uphold my honour but the vast majority is just boring vacuous idiocy. Sigh. Are there not any interesting sceptics around these days?

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

One interesting thing about Pat Frank is that in a recent exchange with the preternaturally patient Nick Stokes over at WUWT, he stated that "Statistical averages are of dimension (property average)/(unit averaged). The average height of people in a room is meters/person, not meters."

And he is, or was, a physicist. Amazing.

James Annan said...

I must remember next time I try to compare the average height of a giraffe to the average height of a human, that it cannot be done because the units are incompatible.

Fernando Leanme said...

If you want to compare the average height of a giraffe to the average height of a human you would have to argue giraffe and human are dimensionless. Or something like that.

Anonymous said...

Are there not any interesting sceptics around these days?
No, I can't think of any. If anything, it does seem as though the whole blogging landscape has become a bit boring. I think that might partly because the "skeptical" blogs have gone so bonkers that it's not really worth even bothering.

reasonablemadness said...

Are there not any interesting sceptics around these days?
Where there ever interesting sceptics around in the last 20 years? Sceptisim about the basics of climate change may have been interesting in the 1960s (and probably not even then), but since then only nut-jobs will argue against the fundamentals of our scientific understanding.

And the hardcore denialosphere like on WTFUWT is far away from even agreeing about those basic science.

James Annan said...

Maybe it's just rose-tinted specs on my part, but for various reasons I was thinking of Steve Schwartz recently and although he might not like the label of sceptic it was actually quite interesting to explore the reasons why his time scale analysis failed. Chylek was another. This Frank guy though is just a nutter who's so far off the Dunning-Kruger scale that it's impossible to even communicate meaningfully with him.

Everett F Sargent said...

y = a*sqrt(t) and y' = a/(2*sqrt(t)) You can take powers of 10 for t (say 1e-307, 1e-306, ... 1e307, 1e308 (double precision range that Excel can handle)) and plot both y and y' on a log-log plot, where you get a great big X).

Of course y' = infinity at t = 0 (largest propagation of error occurs for small t).

Code for numerical proof ...

program odrw
integer*4 i,j,k,sum,times(8)
real*4 number(0:99999999)
call random_seed
open(7,file='1D_Random_Walk.txt',status='unknown')
open(8,file='1D_Random_Walk.dat',status='unknown')
do j=0,199999,10000
call date_and_time(values=times)
write(8,'(9i8)')j,times
write(*,'(i9)')j
do k=j,j+9999
sum=0
call random_number(number)
do i=0,99999999
if(number(i).lt.5e-1)then
sum=sum-1
else
sum=sum+1
endif
enddo
write(7,'(i6,1x,i6)')k-j,sum
enddo
enddo
close(7)
close(8)
end program odrw

You can deal with a (constant) and i = t (where i = t = any fractional positive real value) after the fact (this one goes 1e9 integer steps into a 1D random walk (only tracks final step distro), takes ~48 hours per instance (on my CPU) for 2e6 random walks (change conditional to +1 or 0 (sum does not change) to mimic a one sided binomial distro, I probably should do this as it reduces the integer arithmetic by one half).

There are several ironies involved here, PF has been pitching this idea for almost a decade now (Skeptic article written/published in early 2008 (Shermer of RAAM infamy)), doesn't apply this error into his own linear model of historical GMST evolution vs forcing time series, does not appear to understand the concept of bias offsets and their contribution to the total rmse calculation (file that one under all models are wrong but some are useful) and given a chance to reach equilibrium, that these models would approach an asymptotic solution.

It is as if he were integrating weather and not bothering to describe the climate in the form of statistical moments and distributions.

I might also say that I don't know what I'm talking about, so whatever.

Everett F Sargent said...

1e9 should be 1e8 and 2e6 should be 2e5.

I can't even count. :(

Steve Bloom said...

Yet more proof, a if we needed it, that wrongness is exponential. (Sorry.)

I thought Frank was some sort of chemist?

Appeal upheld meaning...? In US usage that would mean Frank gets his review, but perhaps you meant the other thing?

Schwartz and Chylek, but no Nic? Sad. (Although now that you're back, will you be doing something on his latest?)

What's the cat situation these days? This is still the internet, you know, notwithstanding the dearth of coherent "skeptics."

Anonymous said...

Maybe it's just rose-tinted specs on my part, but for various reasons I was thinking of Steve Schwartz recently and although he might not like the label of sceptic it was actually quite interesting to explore the reasons why his time scale analysis failed. Chylek was another.

Yes, there's clearly a difference between being wrong in some kind of interesting way, and being wrong in some trivially obvious way. The latter seems to now be the norm, unfortunately.

James Annan said...

Yeah I could have mentioned Nic Lewis though I'm a bit bored of the same old same old about priors. Which I have dealt with before.

Steve Bloom said...

Same old same old is the answer I expected, and will suffice. Just wanted to be sure.