Tuesday, 20 September 2016

Global Warming goes viral


Honey, I broke the graph. Again.

How the temperature has risen the last years is amazing.


Attention grabbers



The modern currency is attention.








Understanding climate change







A longer perspective



I hope you did not miss the mouse-over text:
"[After setting your car on fire]
Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.




Mitigation sceptics


David Archibalds' prediction from 2006.

Pierre Gosselin of the German blog No Truth Zone in 2008:

Don Easterbrook in 2001.

Christopher Monckton prediction in 2013.

Normal science




Related information



Temperature observation problems in WWII and the early instrumental period

Early global warming



Tuesday, 13 September 2016

Publish or perish is illegal in Germany, for good reason

Had Albert Einstein died just after his wonder year 1905 he would only have had a few publications on special relativity, the equivalence of mass and energy, Brownian motion and Photoelectric Effect on his name and would nowadays be seen as a mediocre researcher. He got the Nobel prize in 1921 "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", not for relativity, not for Brownian motion. This illustrates how hard it is to judge scientific work, even more than a decade afterwards, much less in advance.
Managing scientists is hard. It is nearly impossible to determine who will do a good job, who is doing a good job and even whether someone did a good job in the past. The last decades science managers have largely given up trying to assess how good a scientist is in most of the world and instead assess how many articles they write and how high the prestige is of the journals the articles appear in.

Unsurprisingly, this has succeeded in increasing the number of articles scientists write. Especially in America scientists are acutely aware that they have to publish or perish.

Did this hurt scientific progress? It is unfortunately impossible to say how fast science is progressing and how fast it could progress. The work is about the stuff we do not understand yet after all. The big steps, evolution, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, have become rare the last decades. Maybe the low hanging fruit is simply gone. Maybe it is also modern publish-or-perish management.

There are good reasons to expect publish-or-perish management to be detrimental.
1. The most basic reason: The time spend writing and reading articles the ever increasing number of articles is not spend on doing research. (I hope no one is so naive as to think that the average scientist actually became several times more productive.)
2. Topics that quickly and predictably lead to publications are not the same topics that will bring science forward. I personally try to write a mix because only working on more risky science you expect is important is unfortunately too dangerous.
3. The stick and carrot type of management works for manual labor, but for creative open-ended work it is often found to be detrimental. For creative work mastery and purpose are the incentives.

German science has another tradition, trusting scientists more and focusing on quality. This is expressed in the safeguards for good scientific practice of the German Science Foundation (DFG). It explicitly forbids the use of quantitative assessments of articles.
Universities and research institutes shall always give originality and quality precedence before quantity in their criteria for performance evaluation. This applies to academic degrees, to career advancement, appointments and the allocation of resources. …

criteria that primarily measure quantity create incentives for mass production and are therefore likely to be inimical [harmful] to high quality science and scholarship. …

Quantitative criteria today are common in judging academic achievement at all levels. … This practice needs revision with the aim of returning to qualitative criteria. … For applications for academic appointments, a maximum number of publications should regularly be requested for the evaluation of scientific merit.
For a project proposal to the German Science Foundation this "maximum number" means that you are not allowed to list all your publications, but only the 6 best ones (for a typical project, smaller projects even less).

[UPDATE. This limit has unfortunately now been increased to 10. They say the biologists are to blame.]

While reading the next paragraphs, please hear me screaming YES, YES, YES in your ear at an unbearable volume.
An adequate evaluation of the achievements of an individual or a small group, however, always requires qualitative criteria in the narrow sense: their publications must be read and critically compared to the relevant state of the art and to the contributions of other individuals and working groups.

This confrontation with the content of the science, which demands time and care, is the essential core of peer review for which there is no alternative. The superficial use of quantitative indicators will only serve to devalue or to obfuscate the peer review process.
I fully realize that actually reading someone’s publications is much more work than counting them and that top scientists spend a large part of their time reviewing. In my view that is a reason to reduce the number of reviews and trust scientists more. Hire people who have a burning desire to understand the world, so that you can trust them.

Sometimes this desire goes away when people get older. For the outside world this is most visible in some older participants of the climate “debate” who hardly produce new work trying to understand climate change, but use their technical skills and time to deceive the public. The most extreme example I know is a professor who was painting all day long, while his students gave his lectures. We should be able to get rid of such people, but there is no need for frequent assessments of people doing their job well.

You also see this German tradition in the research institutes of the Max Planck Society. The directors of these institutes are the best scientists of the world and they can do whatever they think will bring their science forward. Max Planck Director Bjorn Stevens describes this system in the fourth and best episode of the podcast Forecast. The part on his freedom and the importance of trust starts at minute 27, but best listen to the whole inspiring podcast about which I could easily write several blog posts.

Stevens started his scientific career in the USA, but talks about the German science tradition when he says:
I can think of no bigger waste of time than reviewing Chris Bretherton’s proposals. I mean, why would you want to do that? They guy has shown himself to have good idea, after good idea, after good idea. At some point you say: go doc, go! Here is your budget and let him go. This whole industry that develops to keep someone like Chris Bretherton on a leash makes no sense to me.
Compare scientists who sets priorities within their own budgets with scientists who submit research proposals judged by others. If you have your own budget you will only support what you think is really important; if you do A, you cannot do B. Many project proposals are written to fit into a research program, because a colleague wants to collaborate and apart from the time wasted on writing it, there are no downsides for asking for more funding. If you have your own budget, the person with the most expertise and with the most skin in the game decides. This while they call the project funding, where the deciders have no skin in the game, competitive. It is Soviet style planning; that it works at all shows the dedication and altruism of the scientists involved. Those are scientists you could simply trust.

I hope this post will inspire the scientific community to move towards more trust in scientists, increase the fraction of unleashed researchers and reduce the misdirected quantitative micro-management. Please find below the full text of the safeguards of the German Science Foundation on performance evaluation; above I had to skip many worthwhile parts.

Recommendation 6: Performance Evaluation


For the individual scientist and scholar, the conditions of his or her work and its evaluation may facilitate or hinder observing good scientific practice. Conditions that favour dishonest conduct should be changed. For example, criteria that primarily measure quantity create incentives for mass production and are therefore likely to be inimical to high quality science and scholarship.

Quantitative criteria today are common in judging academic achievement at all levels. They usually serve as an informal or implicit standard, although cases of formal requirements of this type have also been reported They apply in many different contexts: length of Bachelor, Master or PhD thesis, number of publications for the Habilitation (formal qualification for university professorships in German speaking countries), as criteria for career advancements, appointments, peer review of grant proposals, etc. This practice needs revision with the aim of returning to qualitative criteria. The revision should begin at the first degree level and include all stages of academic qualification. For applications for academic appointments, a maximum number of publications should regularly be requested for the evaluation of scientific merit.

Since publications are the most important “product” of research, it may have seemed logical, when comparing achievement, to measure productivity as the number of products, i.e. publications, per length of time. But this has led to abuses like the so-called salami publications, repeated publication of the same findings, and observance of the principle of the LPU (least publishable unit).

Moreover, since productivity measures yield little useful information unless refined by quality measures, the length of publication lists was soon complemented by additional criteria like the reputation of the journals in which publications appeared, quantified as their “impact factor” (see section 2 5).

However, clearly neither counting publications nor computing their cumulative impact factors are by themselves adequate forms of performance evaluation. On the contrary, they are far removed from the features that constitute the quality element of scientific achievement: its originality, its “level of innovation”, its contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Through the growing frequency of their use, they rather run the danger of becoming surrogates for quality judgements instead of helpful indicators.

Quantitative performance indicators have their use in comparing collective activity and output at a high level of aggregation (faculties, institutes, entire countries) in an overview, or for giving a salient impression of developments over time. For such purposes, bibliometry today supplies a variety of instruments. However, they require specific expertise in their application.



The rules that follow from this for the practice of scientific work and for the supervision of young scientists and scholars are clear. They apply conversely to peer review and performance evaluation:
  • Even in fields where intensive competition requires rapid publication of findings, quality of work and of publications must be the primary consideration. Findings, wherever factually possible, must be controlled and replicated before being submitted for publication.
  • Wherever achievement has to be evaluated — in reviewing grant proposals, in personnel management, in comparing applications for appointments — the evaluators and reviewers must be encouraged to make explicit judgements of quality before all else. They should therefore receive the smallest reasonable number of publications — selected by their authors as the best examples of their work according to the criteria by which they are to be evaluated.

Related information

Nature on new evaluation systems in The Netherlands and Ireland: Fewer numbers, better science

Episode 4 of Forecast with Max Planck Director Bjorn Stevens on clouds, aerosols, science and science management. Highly recommended.

Memorandum of the German Science Foundation: Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice. English part starts at page 61.

On of my first posts explaining why stick and carrot management makes productivity worse for cognitive tasks: Good ideas, motivation and economics

* Photo of Albert Einstein at the top is in the public domain.

Sunday, 4 September 2016

Believe me, the GOP needs to open itself to rational debate

Major Tom (Coming Home)
Peter Schilling

4, 3, 2, 1
Earth below us
Drifting, falling
Floating weightless
Calling, calling home

Second stage is cut
We're now in orbit
Stabilizers up,
Runnning perfect
Starting to collect
Requested data
What will it affect
When all is done?
Thinks Major Tom

Back at ground control,
There is a problem
Go to rockets full
Not responding
Hello Major Tom.
Are you receiving?
Turn the thrusters on
We're standing by
There's no reply

4, 3, 2, 1
Earth below us
Drifting, falling
Floating weightless
Calling, calling home

Across the stratosphere,
A final message
Give my wife my love
Then nothing more

Far beneath the ship
The world is mourning
They don't realize
He's alive
No one understands
But Major Tom sees
Now the light commands
This is my home
I'm coming home

Earth below us
Drifting, falling
Floating weightless
Coming home
Earth below us
Drifting, falling
Floating weightless
Coming, coming
Home, home

Much better German original
Major Tom (Völlig Losgelöst)
Peter Schilling

...Völlig losgelöst
Von der Erde
Schwebt das Raumschiff
Völlig schwerelos

Die Erdanziehungskraft
Ist überwunden
Alles läuft perfekt -
Schon seit Stunden

Doch was nützen die
Am Ende
Denkt sich Major Tom

Im Kontrollzentrum
Da wird man panisch
Der Kurs der Kapsel der
Stimmt ja gar nicht

"Hallo Major Tom
Können Sie hören
Woll'n Sie das Projekt
Denn so zerstören?"
Doch, er kann nichts hörn'
Er schwebt weiter...

...Völlig losgelöst
Von der Erde
Schwebt das Raumschiff
Völlig schwerelos

Die Erde schimmert blau
Sein letzter Funk kommt:
"Grüsst mir meine Frau!"
Und er verstummt

Unten trauern noch
Die Egoisten
Major Tom denkt sich
"Wenn die wüssten -
Mich führt hier ein Licht
Durch das All
Das kennt ihr noch nicht
Ich komme bald
Mir wird kalt."

Völlig losgelöst
Von der Erde
Schwebt das Raumschiff
The Grand Old Party has created a monster and now it has turned on them.

It would be tempting to simply call the monster Donald Trump, but the unnamed monster has many aspects: Trump, conservative media, anti-science, rejection of adult debate, corporate corruption, climate change denial, racism, fear.

One reason to call the monster Trump would that Trump has taken the syndrome to such extremes. A second is that Trump made many prominent conservatives realize that the monster threatens their party. This threat becomes visible in the list of positions Trump is able to sell that are far from Republican and Trump has started attacking conservative politicians directly.

To solve the problem the GOP will have to return to rational debate, rather than ending every second sentence with "believe me". Conservative readers, did you notice that "believe me" did not work when you thought you should believe me? It is just as stupid coming from your side. Give people reasons to accept what you are saying.

The GOP had rational debate in the past, like non-US conservative parties do. What makes rational debate hard is that US politicians now take position based on what the donors want. The incoherent mess a politician then has to defend cannot be defended rationally. Rational debate thus needs to be replaced with misinformation. To make the misinformation palatable politicians need to stoke fear to suppress critical thought and fuel tribalism.

John Ziegler, a nationally syndicated conservative talk show host, points to the role of conservative media in this. Initially conservative media was a comfortable way for conservative politicians to spread their talking points without getting critical questions. To increase market share conservative media has convinced its followers that other information sources are biased against conservatives. Ted Newton, former communications adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said:
That now makes it hard for conservatives to contain Trump and point out his lies. The term "lie" may not even be appropriate for Trump. To be a lie you have to be aware that what you are saying is wrong and for a conman like Trump right and wrong are irrelevant, what counts is whether a message sounds convincing.

When what Trump finds convincing does not fit to the GOP platform, its politicians cannot point to fact-checkers or The New York Times because conservatives have been convinced these sources are lying. Reinforced by Trump tweeting about "The failing New York Times" or the "the disgusting and corrupt media".

John Ziegler naturally searches for the problem in conservative media:
"We've ... reached the point, I say, we've left the gravitational pull of the rational Earth, where we are now in a situation where facts don't matter, truth doesn't matter, logic doesn't matter. ...



I am not sure how much purging specific persons would help. The system needs to change. The media is nowadays financed more and more per view, per click. This pushes the system to scandal and rubbish, to emotion, fear and exaggeration. Europe benefits enormously from a public media system, that may be more boring, but normally gets the facts right and this forces other media sources to also deliver higher quality.

The population also has an important role in keeping the media and politicians honest by doing their due diligence, giving feedback and selecting credible sources. I think twice before I click on a link to a Murdoch publication because every click converts misinformation and vitriol into cash. Due diligence is hard in a culture where people have little time for citizenship because of the stress society produces and a focus on working long hours over working effectively and creatively.

John Ziegler, conservative radio host

There is a movement to newspapers, magazines and video news and entertainment that is supported by members. This will lead to more partisanship and a splintering of the media landscape. Still, members will likely be people interested in quality. Thus hopefully the partisanship will be limited to having a clear point of view and finding certain stories interesting, but the facts will be right. If the quality is right that would be progress. If the quality is right, the splintering of the media does not have to lead to a splintering of society because there would be a common basis that makes communication possible.

Next to the [[Fourth Estate]], the media, also science is important for creating a foundation of knowledge that makes civilized debate possible. I would call Science the Fifth Estate. This role of science is as important as sending people to the Moon or designing a non-sticking frying pan. Physicist and philosopher of science John Ziman focuses on this aspect when he argues:
Objectivity is what makes science so valuable in society. It is the public guarantee of reliable disinterested knowledge. Science plays a unique role in settling factual disputes. This is not because it is particularly rational or because it necessarily embodies the truth: it is because it has a well-deserved reputation for impartiality on material issues. The complex fabric of democratic society is held together by trust in this objectivity, exercised openly by scientific experts. Without science as an independent arbiter, many social conflicts could be resolved only by reference to political authority or by a direct appeal to force.
I would expect that it is no coincidence that modern science and nation state were born at about the same time and larger nation states only came up when science had spread. You need to be able to talk with each other.

Anti-science sentiments in the USA are thus worrying. We should also not freak out. Scientists are still one of the most trusted professions and even the enemies of science typically claim to be friends of Science. In Canada even literally. This shows how strong science still is culturally.

Still when scientists speak truth to power, it is worrying how easy it is for US corporations to hit back, via think tanks, FOIA harassment and bribing politicians. Republican politicians are the best investment for corporations because conservatives tend to follow the leader more. Corporations are not charities, those campaign contributions are investments with high rate of return. Also for the sake of the economy corporations need to compete on the market again.

The New York Times reports that congressional Republicans are unwilling to help communities in Florida to cope with the consequences of sea level rise and block the Navy from adapting to the ongoing changes. When America is invaded during high tides, I hope that Republican congressman Buck of Colorado will repeat his claim that the military should not be distracted by a "radical climate change agenda". There was a time when national defense was one of the highest priorities of the Republican party, now corporate brides make them weaken national defense and ignore communities in need. Even communities in swing states.

The good news is that Republican voters are just as fed up with the corrupting influence of money on politics as Democrats. The bad news is that the current politicians got into their positions because they are good in finding donors and do not want to disappoint them. Still begging for money is no fun and many politicians got into politics for good reasons. So together with some people power, it should be possible to reduce the influence of money.

Accepting the money and misinforming your constituents gives a short term boost, especially for the incumbents. In the long term you cannot do anything without trust and you lose contact with the ground.

The American political system is more vulnerable for bribery because the voter does not have much choice. If the special interest can convince party A that they can also convince party B with a generous contribution, there is no downside for any of the parties.

Furthermore, because of the two-party system your vote nearly never matters. That makes it less motivating to pay attention what happens and whether politicians do a good job. If no one is looking, it is less dangerous to do the bidding of the donors rather than the voters. Here the crisis in the media also returns because less journalists also means that less people are looking.

Thomas Jefferson

I prefer parliamentary democracies, but if you want to introduce more competition between the parties within the district system used in the USA, you could introduce Preferential Voting, like Australia does. Here the voters are required to indicate their first preference, but they can also indicate the order of preference of the other candidates. Free-market Republicans could thus vote for Gary Johnson as first preference and vote for Trump or Clinton as second preference to make sure the vote does not go wasted. Similarly Bernie Sanders supporters could indicate Green party candidate Jill Stein without the risk of this causing a Trump catastrophe.

Time is running out for the Republican party. If the best case scenario for American and the world comes true and Trump is defeated a discussion about the future of the Republican party will break out. NBC News sees four options:
1. The Republican Party remade in Trump's image,
2. Refined Trumpism (Trump without the bigotry),
3. The Party Establishment Wins and
4. The Stalemate.

Without a return to rationality, this process is going to be very messy. I will not call it likely, but I would not even be surprised if the Republican party would fall apart like the [[Whig party]] did over slavery. The GOP did not have a real leader for years. The party spans a broad coalition, many groups of which have radicalized suffering under a black president, but because their politics were limited to blocking everything, there was hardly any discussions about the political program. Add to this the frustration of losing and bad future prospects due to demographics, which Trump made a lot worse, and you get a dangerous situation, especially when you cannot negotiate and debate rationally.

The GOP meddling in private lives of consenting adults, their xenophobia and anti-science stance will make their demographic problems with young people below 45, science enthusiasts and non-whites larger and larger. There is no need for that. What people do in their bedrooms could just as well be seen as a private affair than as something the Washington should police. Immigrants are on average quite conservative and most would likely vote conservative if the conservatives would not reject them. Conservative parties outside of USA embrace science, scientists used to be proud conservatives and in Europe a large part of the faculty, if not the majority, is conservative.

A debate is not possible when the only response to inconvenient facts is "Lying Ted" and insults. Already the body language of the Trump supporter indicates that he will defend Trump no matter the argument. The same attitude I encounter when I visit the mitigation skeptical blog Watts Up With That. They are determined not to have a productive debate.

Related reading

Joshua Green at Bloomberg wrote a very favorable bio on Breitbart's Steve Bannon: This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America

Washington Post on the 2013 Republican National Committee’s Growth and Opportunity Project report: GOP autopsy report goes bold.

Media Matter on the new book "I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How To Clean it Up": New Book Explains Media’s Role In Today’s Toxic State Of Public Discourse

Sykes on Morning Joe: GOP Made Itself "Hostage" to Trump

National Review: Conservative Scams Are Bringing Down the Conservative Movement


Charlie Sykes: Have We Created This Monster? Talk radio and the rise of Donald Trump

Conservative media reaches a large audience: U.S. Media Publishers and Publications – Ranked for July 2016

* Caricature at the top, Donald Trump - Riding the Wrecking Ball by DonkeyHotey used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

Dinosaur Birthday Cupcakes by abakedcreation used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.