Neverending Audit

Digs from the auditing sciences, a mind framing game that sustains curiosity, anger, and powerlessness.

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Start Here

Genesis. This project started in November 2009, after reading the website Climate Audit, CA for those in the know. A few months before, I was looking for hockey sticks, and stumbled upon an intriguing controversy. I started to read the blog, as Bender implored. Without any mention of hockey, this project may never have existed. Without Bender too.

Purpose. The main intention is to study how climate bloggers and commenters talk past each others. An hoi polloi always looks silly, but some aspect of it matters. Framing minds is an important business, so important in fact that this is what these discussions are really about. Politics, politics, politics.

For the sake of illustration, let's repeat what I said. The main intention is to study how climate bloggers and commenters talk past each others. An hoi polloi always looks silly, but some aspect of it matters. Framing minds is an important business, so important in fact that this is what these discussions are really about. Politics, politics, politics.

One can immediatly see that well-chosen repetition has an impact.

Scope. The project explores the audit metaphor. Its author, Steve McIntyre, is only one of its characters - the Auditor. The Auditor's practices illustrate the concept of audit.

Limitations. Being a tumblog, the project is composed of fragments, speech patterns collected in a non-linear way. No scientific question has been harmed in the making of our neverending audit.

Acknowledgments. My sincere thanks to my Fantasy Draft for their inspiration. My utmost respect to my honorable ClimateBall opponents, among all Bender. My eternal love to my soul mate.

Dedication. I dedicate this project to my grand-mother, who died of lung cancer.

For a general introduction, see the entries under the NeverendingAudit tag.

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Our motto.

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Collections

Eight collections divide the project, each with an eponymous tag. Would they be chapters they'd contain sections.

NeverendingAudit introduces to the overall project.

TopEpisodes groups the best auditing episodes.

FantasyDraft lists my favorite commenters.

AuditingSciences outlines a new genre of scientific endeavour.

PhilosophyForBloggers overviews relevant philosophical topics.

rhtrcs illustrates various forms of online violence.

GamingTheory offers an explanation for contrarian concerns.

AnArtwork collates series of related works of art.

Cf. Index for the tags list.

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All quiet on the Western Front

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**Is It Raining There?**, by Roger O'Donnell

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But we've never ended.

Harold Pinter, perhaps thinking about audits.

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Colophon

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The Only Losing Move is Not to Play

My next project.

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What if we create a better world for nothing?

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The NA Collection

This collection contains the following sets:

StartHere, the preface;

NeverendingAudit, the introduction;

Collections, the division;

Kind Words, words from kindred spirits;

FavoriteEntries, what you should read if you can't read all;

CannedResponse, responses to infrequently asked questions;

OpenProblem, questions that our audit has not solved;

HowTo, a series on how to do auditing things with words;

ZeVeryBest, snapshots from the best auditing episodes;

AuditingTees, pithy sayings from the Auditor.

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Top Episodes

This collection showcases the best auditing episodes. It is divided by the following sections, listed here in somewhat chronological order:

Top24

TheKyotoFlames

BartonHearings

DemingAffair

EngineerilyDeriving

RememberYamal

TiljanderConsensus

TheMiracleWorker

Antarctica

The WegmanHoax can be seen as the audit to end all audits.

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Introduction

Entries about the project's main problems and methods. For a preface, see Start Here.

Auditor Beginnings

Do Audits Ever End?

Discursive Patterns

Figuratively Speaking

Why Am I Doing This?

A Bit More than Technical Details and Data Analysis

Dressing up Alinsky’s Tactics as Science

Contemporary Sophistry

How Can Auditors Lose?

Why Nicknames?

Which Willard?

Where's Williard?

Does CA Censor?

What About MikeM?

Who Damages Most?

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Read the blog, dimwit.

Bender, coming back from the swimming pool to recall the imperative that prompted my neverending audit.

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Neverending Tags

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Why this Constant Scapegoating?

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

http://vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook/rules.html

Mann Jones Schmidt Trenberth

Do you get it now?

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What about MikeM?

Dear ClimateBall friends,

I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about MikeM. All right, here is how I feel about MikeM:

If when you say MikeM you mean the devil’s statistician, the Twitter scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of the poor children of developing nations; if you mean the evil climate scientist that topples the auditing man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against his stance.

But, if when you say MikeM you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ClimateBall character that is discussed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean AGU cheer; if you mean the stimulating climate scientist that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the climate scientist which enables a man to magnify his joy, his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that climate scientist whose book pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for his stance.

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Arthur Sees the Problem

[In a post attacking (for a rare time) James Annan, Arthur Smith notices that the Auditor hopes to discuss at an engineer-level a very different beast.]

What’s the corresponding situation with climate? It’s definitely not an engineering discipline at this point – we’re still in the frontiers of science. But some of the components are there, or at least close.

First is the CO2 radiative forcing effect. There are a large variety of ways to parametrize the atmospheric layers, even with our apparently pretty good knowledge of the radiative physics. Chapter 10 of IPCC AR4 WG1 goes into the projection issues in some detail, with section 10.2 in particular looking at radiative forcings. Table 10.2 shows the forcings for doubled CO2 from a variety of different models: there is some residual uncertainty but the average is 3.80 W/m^2 forcing, with standard deviation 0.33 W/m^2.

Now a nearly 10% standard deviation in a key number is pretty good for science, but it’s pretty abysmal for engineering – perhaps the first clue that we’re not talking about engineering here!

Second is the temperature response to forcing. Assuming the forcing is small, the response should be linear in the perturbation; the question is what is the ratio. James Annan gives the mean Stefan-Boltzmann response, which would be fine if the Earth were uniformly at the effective temperature and the total greenhouse effect was small. But it’s not (though not bad as a very rough approximation – Annan perhaps thought an engineering account would be happy with 50% error-bars…). You have to take into account the range of present temperatures and atmospheric layers to get an accurate response temperature; this is roughly Moeller’s calculation of 1966 referenced at Spencer Weart’s site:

Möller, Fritz (1963). “On the Influence of Changes in the CO2 Concentration in Air on the Radiation Balance of the Earth’s Surface and on the Climate.” J. Geophysical Research 68: 3877-86. http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Radmath.htm

Moeller’s number for the bare response to doubling CO2 was 1.5 K. This is under the assumption of no water-vapor response (no increased evaporation and latent-heat effect either). The error-bars on that should be at least the 10% standard deviation in the pure radiative number (so 1.35 K wouldn’t be unlikely).

Adding in the water-vapor response is where you actually have to go to the detailed climate models. Contrary to Steve M’s claim above, the climate models these days don’t “assume constant relative humidity”, they calculate physical processes at sea surface/air boundaries and look at the resulting water vapor, temperature, and other numbers for the different atmospheric layers in the grids.

But of course that’s getting into the modeling business – if you don’t believe any of them, there’s not much point discussing further, because the only other way to get to the bottom of the water vapor response is to run the doubling experiment and see what happens…