Andrew_FL (Comment#13556) May 13th, 2009 at 9:30 am

“The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence, and as the explanation grows into a definite theory his parental affections cluster about his offspring and it grows more dear to him…As this parental affection takes possession of the mind, there is a rapid passage to the adoption of the theory. There is an unconscious selection and magnifying of phenomena that fall into harmony with the theory and support it, and an unconscious neglect of those that fail of coincidence…

When these biasing tendencies set in, the mind rapidly degenerates into the partiality of paternalism. The search for facts, the observation of phenomena and their interpretation, are all dominated by affection for the favored theory until it appears to its author or its advocate to have been overwhelmingly established. The theory then rapidly rises to the ruling position, and investigation, observation, and interpretation are controlled and directed by it. From an unduly favored child, it readily becomes master, and leads its author whithersoever it will…

When the last stage has been reached, unless the theory happens, perchance, to be the true one, all hope of the best results is gone.” ~ T C Chamberlain

When one is wedded to the hypothesis of dangerous warming, you naturally want to use only the hypothesis tests which will fail to reject it. So the confidence intervals today are ginormous. In other matters they maybe narrower, whatever suits the need.

Granted, this doesn’t mean that Gavin or his hypothesis is wrong, but it is one explanation for why he likes the tests of models he is doing.

Nasif Nahle (16:36:47) :
Jeremy (11:09:53):
I fear that bogus research is unfortunately becoming all too common everywhere (not just Climate science). Many professors publish as many as five papers a year.
Yes, you’re right, although climate science is under beholder scrutiny due to its constant violations to the scientific methodology. Paleontologists, geologists, physicists, astronomers, biologists, etc., are suffering also of “viral modelitis”.
Almost all arguments on biodiversity’s depletion are coming from models, not from nature.
Corals bleach, honeybees’ colony collapse disorder (CCD) and frogs’ population collapse, for example. When a scientist in his/her five senses have assessed the problems, that scientist immediately finds the misguiding side of modelitis. On honeybees’ CCD, for example, biomodelers said it was a problem derived of anthropogenic global warming; when investigated consciously the problem, biologists found it was a quite common acute paralysis virus disease which caused a pandemic. This kind of pandemic among honeybees’ colonies has been happened many times before humans drove cars.

Thomas Jefferson

Mike Ramsey (16:30:25) :
I have been wondering where all the scientist are hiding. I was taught that scientist should be skeptical. For example, triple check that you don’t have a systemic error in your own experimental setup. Don’t believe results until independently replicated by others.
When I look at published scientific papers on climate, I don’t see scientist as much as I see apparatchiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik).
Has the education of our scientist totally collapsed?
When I look at what the press (e.g. BBC) publishes on climate, I am reminded of what Thomas Jefferson wrote long ago.
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” –Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
I wonder if the main stream press has been concentrated into too few hands and that those hands have lost their regard for “truth or to what should be like truth”.