David -

This is a textbook example of what I'm talking about. You've chosen to hang your hat on a good paper by a terrific group of scientists which is one of a number of papers out there right now coming to different conclusions.

Given that there is no clear consensus in the literature as a whole, one has two choices: do what you have done, which is pick the horse you think is going to win, or do what your fellow GristBlogger Andrew Dessler suggests, which is to look for a clearly articulated consensus view, as articulated by an expert panel (in this the WMO has stepped into the breach), which says:

"A consensus of 125 of the world's leading tropical cyclone researchers and forecasters says that no firm link can yet be drawn between human-induced climate change and variations in the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones."

You're free to cherry-pick a particular paper that supports your view if you want, but in so doing you lose any moral authority to criticize the other guys when they do the same. And they do it an awful lot more than your side does. That's why this seems to me like such an ill-advised tactic.

In this case, though, I'm not sure it's even a very good cherry-pick. That's why your criticism of Roger Pielke Jr. is a little cheap, given that he's only pointing out the obvious, which the Daily Camera reporter should have noticed for herself: this paper is about attribution of sea surface temperature change, not hurricane intensity. The paper's final paragraph makes that abundantly clear. Roger's not disputing what the scientists said. He's merely pointing out to the reporter what the paper actually says.

I'm curious as to how you were confident enough about what Wigley meant to insert the parenthetical phrase you did into his quote. It wasn't there in the original, and the following paragraph (not to mention the paper itself) suggests to me that Wigley was more likely to have been talking about sea surface temperature in the quote you cite, not hurricanes.

Whatever. As a journalist, I'd certainly never insert a parenthetical like that into a quote unless I was darn sure that's really what the speaker meant.

Quickly:

I'm not cherry-picking, it's Al Gore (and many, many others working on this issue) who are cherry-picking; I'm just offering a qualified defense of them. I personally think the whole hurricane issue is a diversion. But there's cherry-picking and cherry-picking. This is not one isolated study -- there's a sizable group of scientists working in this area that think the evidence of a connection is strong. There's a real division in the scientific community about this. The cherry-picking the "other side" does is in service of trying to refute settled IPCC conclusions. Choosing sides in this debate is not trying to refute IPCC conclusions, it's simply drawing conclusions before the balance of evidence meets the IPCC's conservative standards. It may sound like semantics, but I think it makes a difference.

Like I said, I'm perfectly content to wait for the IPCC to make up its mind. The case for action against global warming has a thousand and one justifications -- even some that have nothing to do with warming itself -- so I don't need this additional one. It's just that the easy imputation of "extremism" to Gore and other advocates, and the comparison of them to the denialists, rubs me the wrong way.

As for the parenthetical -- I may have been hasty about that. I'll look into it later today. Right now I'm trying to type with two kids hanging on my arm, demanding I read them "Good Night Gorilla."

www.grist.org

I'll repeat: as you soon as you defend the use of cherry-picked arguments by your side, you've lost the authority to criticize the other side for their cherry-picks.

Your repeated appeal to the "denialists" is a straw man. There are many much more reasonable skeptics - the John Christy's and Petr Chylek's of the world - whose arguments cite outliers of exactly the same sort Gore cites on hurricanes. These people are using outlier science to discredit the consensus. They're pointing to the same sort of uncertainties you're describing on the hurricane question. As soon as you defend the legitimacy of Gore doing what he did on this question, you lose your most potent argument - the IPCC-style consensus - against the Christy's of the world. You sanction, instead, the sort of gridlock that Sarewitz so ably describes.

We'll just have to agree to disagree about whether Christy's attempts to "discredit the consensus" are equivalent to Gore's (and Wigly's, and Emanuel's, etc.) willingness to draw conclusions where there is no official IPCC consensus.

One thing we certainly agree on: these arguments over science are conducive to deadlock. I doubt many people outside the scientific community care about the science as such. What the public cares about are two questions: Should we be concerned about climate change? And what should we do about it? The IPCC consensus, with or without any mention of hurricanes, is more than enough to offer a Yes to the first. So it's the second we should be talking about.

www.grist.org

Dave Roberts writes, "So said Tom Wigley -- one of many people at NCAR with more expertise and peer-reviewed papers in the area of hurricanes and climate change than Roger Pielke Jr.,..."

So I follow the wonderful hyperlinks to Roger Pielke Jr.'s and Tom Wigley's publication lists (that Dave Roberts provided), and I see:

Roger Pielke Jr.:

Pielke, Jr., R.A., Gratz, J., Landsea, C.W., Collins, D., Saunders, M., and Musulin, R., 2007. Normalized Hurricane Damages in the United States: 1900-2005. Natural Hazards Review, (submitted).

Höppe, P. and R.A. Pielke, Jr. (eds.), 2006. Workshop on Climate Change and Disaster Losses: Understanding and Attributing Trends and Projections, Final Workshop Report. Hohenkammer, Germany, 25-26 May.

Pielke, Jr., R.A., 2006. Seventh Annual Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture: Disasters, Death, and Destruction: Making Sense of Recent Calamities, Oceanography, Special Issue: The Oceans and Human Health, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 138-147.

Pielke, Jr., R. A., C.W. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, R. Pasch, 2006. Reply to Hurricanes and Global Warming Potential Linkages and Consequences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 87, pp. 628-631.

And Tom Wigley...

...ummmmm...I don't see anything that mentions hurricanes, tropical cyclones, or anything like that.  Of course, the publications are only from 1990 to ~2000 (i.e., they're not current to 2006 or 2007).

Dave, why don't you list the peer-reviewed papers on hurricanes and climate change that Tom Wigley has authored...particularly the ones where he is listed as a primary author?  Or the workshops where he has served as an editor, or performed similar duties?

Mark Bahner

Santer BD, Wigley TML, Gleckler PJ, et al., 2006. Forced and unforced ocean temperature changes in Atlantic and Pacific tropical cyclogenesis regions. PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 103 (38): 13905-13910.

From the abstract:
'Model "20th-century" simulations, with external forcing by combined anthropogenic and natural factors, are generally capable of replicating observed SST increases. In experiments in which forcing factors are varied individually rather than jointly, human-caused changes in greenhouse gases are the main driver of the 20th-century SST increases in both tropical cyclogenesis regions. '

Yoshimura J, Sugi M, Noda A
Influence of greenhouse warming on tropical cyclone frequency
JOURNAL OF THE METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN 84 (2): 405-428 APR 2006

Why don't you folks who cite studies as if they were pawns on a chessboard step aside?  The upper strasphere is geting colder.  The lower troposhere is warming.  The Arctic is melting but the Antarctic is not.  So somebody is going to tell me that some IPCC thingy about global warming is the be-all-end-all in the world.  Try real words, phrases, sentences, and logic next time.

I am even more clueless as to why one would link the "global warming" thing with hurricanes.  There is not one shred of data or information that could lead a rational person to believe that increased atmospheric temperatures caused hurricanes that worse in intensity, coverage, and destruction.

What really bothers me is how people tend to glorify hurricanes such as Katrina, which didn't even hit New Orleans and had calmed down to a nice 100 MPH before coming ashore and dying out.  Other hurricanes such as those over the Bahamas several years ago blew 110-140 for three consecutive days.

To say any of this was fueled by Global Warming is pure bull.  Intensity, duration, rainfall, pressure, fetch, swell, surge, areal coverage and all those factors must be taken into account.  By nature they are random events which cannot be predicted, no matter what Dr. William Gray says.  

The one thing Dr Gray would agree with is that the link between GHG and hurricanes is silly in the extreme.  Put that in your IPCC pipe and smoke it.

Onward through the fog

The more important question (to me at least) is what action might be both broadly supported across political divisions and robust to the reality of  scientific uncertainty?

Indeed. I suspect you and I will disagree about the answer to this question, but you're right that it's the appropriate focus.

For the record, I very much doubt Gore thinks we can dial back hurricane damage in the short term by reducing emissions. He's not an idiot. Nor do I think he says otherwise.

His concern is how to educate and motivate people to demand political action on this problem. There are very few aspects of climate change that trigger human affective responses. It's an extraordinarily difficult problem for a communicator. It's easy to carp about how he does it, but I've yet to hear any of his wonky critics propose a better strategy. I've heard plenty about policy, mind you, but not about how to make it happen. Anyway, I hope to post about that soon, and leave the science quibbles behind.

Thanks for dropping by.

www.grist.org

I'm pretty sure that cherrypicking is ALWAYS a misrepresentation of the science.  If it weren't, it wouldn't be cherrypicking.

I guess our disagreement might boil down to our views on the "excess of objectivity." While an excellent debating point, I just don't see that it actually exists anywhere.  

Regards

Go ahead Roger.  Next big hurricane season.  Put their minds at ease.  Tell them the record hurricanes are just a natural cycle.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Dr. Pielke, your first statement was categorical: "'cherrypicking' of science is not a misuse." This statement invites controversy, because it is clearly wrong.

You could say that this statement has the virtue of simplicity, but it is a false simplicity. (What's the H. L. Mencken quote? "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.")

Now, if you were less categorical--and frankly, more transparent--you could say, "What's perceived as cherrypicking is not necessarily an abuse of science." But that would be uncontroversial (and if I were being cynical, I'd point out that it wouldn't gain you as much attention).

I think what I'm getting at, Dr. Pielke, is that I hope you're not merely seeking controversy for its own sake. Because these are important issues. And these little public, socratic sidetracks can throw off a lot more heat than they do light.

One more thing: Obviously, the social sciences and political sciences both use the word "science." And I'm sure there are rigorously empirical aspects to them. But we're now a full 150 years past Auguste Compte, and we know that study of human institutions and behavior is not always as tidy as the study of physical things. When it comes to solid, tangible things it's comparably easy to make neat categories, and state things categorically. But neat, Aristotelian categories are often harder to apply to human institutions, habits, etc. And it can be unwise to try to force them to fit.

And I think a perfect example of such a force-fit is saying categorically "Cherrypicking is not science abuse. So all you denialist think tanks go have a field day."

Here in this thread are classic statements about the use of science, that show that the posters have no idea about what science actually is.

The deep knowledge,..or just how this theory interacts with all these other theories, ie the integration of scientific facts and theories, is usually not even dreamt of by onlookers.

It is this deep knowledge that always remains hidden to the public, and your concept "cherry picking", is just the outcome of a scientific dissertation presented to the public.

For the public there can only be water skiing ...too much information is not good for digestion, and sending the populous back to school is totally impractical.

The gulf will always remain... just one reason why a scientist is never understood.

Scientists are not always correct, more so in this age of toxic pollution, however the only way to question them is through an analysis of fact fitting..... theories are just models.