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Comments 48951 to 49000:

  1. Was 2012 the Hottest La Niña Year on Record?

    Dana @23:

    I was aware of the embedded link to the NOAA retraction. My recommendation is to post the text of it at the end of the OP as well. Not everyone follows links.  

  2. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    Hi, I have a related question to the climate sensibility.

    I am searching a reference on the thermal inertia of the Earth. If possible, I would like to have "pure version" not the convolution with the CO2 growth curve.

    I guess I could use the heat transfer rate to the ocean as a proxy and the mass of the ocean itself as a heat capacity, but I would like to know if something more formal exist in the scientific literature.

  3. The Great Disconnect: the human disease of which climate change is but one symptom

    If we do continue on this path to destruction, future scientists, eons from now, will locate our suicide gene in the rubble. Man will have proved to be hedonistic to the detriment of civilization.

  4. Climate science peer review is pal review

    Martin, in an ideal world where everyone is trying to advance the science, I agree with Jennings on his first and last statements.  This is not an ideal world.  There are people trying to get published simply so the publications can be used as an opinion-shaping tool.  Jennings probably doesn't have a lot of experience with the Tim Curtins of the world.  Publications of misleading and badly done studies can have serious consequences, because there is no accountability where the media is concerned.  None.  The scientific community ignored the allegations of climategate, and rightly so.  Those allegations were, however, extraordinarily damaging to the credibility of climate science as far as a significant portion of the public was/is concerned.

  5. Climate science peer review is pal review

    To Bob and you others. Thanks for the feedback. I dont mind falling into class 3 on this one. I repeat that peer review should be real - to help the authors. If by pal-review you all mean no-review - then we agree. But you can also get a paper reviewed by your "pals" and get some real help in getting it into a fit state to publish, so Pal review is a poor term to use. Since the identity of reviewers is normally unknown we dont know if they were just "pals" who nodded it through - on these or any other papers. So I remain sceptical about the claims that the papers were not subject to a peer review, or that they did not deserve to be published. (Sceptical science is not believing until you are convinced by the evidence).

    But I hear you all proclaiming that the de Freitas papers should never have been published because they were bad, and secondly that there was no real peer review, and they have since been refuted. I would remind you that Mann et.al's original "hockey stick" paper  was refuted on numerous well documented technical counts (M&M). These were not picked up in the peer review process. Now I would not suggest that that paper should not have been published.  I believe that all voices should be heard, and that the suggestion that some papers should never have been published is superfluous. In climate science there are few hard facts, and most conclusions will (or should) have to have a probability  attached to them. Often a different set of assumptions may give a different answer. So none of us should be so naive as to think we know the correct answer. At present we are working with hypotheses. When the correct answer has been established then all reputable scientists working in that field will agree because they will not find any real data or logic to disprove the point - and then they will have nothing to publish - even in 3rd rate journals.

    My point is with the purpose of peer review and how it is used in modern literature. And for this I dont need to judge if the numerous papers edited by de Freitas were bad or not - others will have done that in the normal course of the scientific debate in the literature I am sure. Others may uncritically assume that they are junk because sombody said so - thats not really my concern.

    Charles Jennings wrote in NATURE (a journal which is definately not 3rd rate):

    Whether there is any such thing as a paper so bad that it cannot be published in any peer reviewed journal is debatable. Nevertheless, scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.

    Given that many papers are never cited (and one suspects seldom read), it probably does not matter much to anyone except the author whether a weak paper is published in an obscure journal.

    http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05032.html

  6. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    doug @20 - fair criticism, but as surface dwellers, people do tend to focus on surface temps, and there are different groups in NOAA looking at surface temps and ocean heat content.  And surface temps are updated monthly, while OHC data are updated quarterly. 

  7. Was 2012 the Hottest La Niña Year on Record?

    John Hartz @22 - it has been.  See the first line.

  8. The Great Disconnect: the human disease of which climate change is but one symptom

    annienimad #1 - I like No One's Slave, No One's Master -

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06WfMzlKEtQ

  9. The Great Disconnect: the human disease of which climate change is but one symptom

    The environment wins when people rise to confront injustice. "The Tide" (protest song).

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Rm9uX9sPA

  10. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    Oops, I forgot to make my main point w/regard to magical thinking. Considering Terranova's question about labels, it seems reasonable to say that if one does not have to resort to magic (a conspiracy) to explain climage change then one isn't suffering from conspiracist ideation. Presumably that's true for the term "denier" as well; an alternative explanation grounded in and fully consistent with the world of facts isn't "denial." 

  11. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    "Conspiracist ideation" seems not so different from resorting to "magic" as a cognitive substitute for factual information. Here in the case of climate change, if we can't or more often appears the case won't confront facts, we invent a form of magic as an alternative explanation.

    Considering that physical evidence overwhelmingly contradicts "scientists and politicians are working in cahoots," perhaps instead this wishful thinking is magical interpretation of facts, a way of deriving comfort or absolution in a situation where we're reluctant to take on full responsibility. Is a magic conspiracy so different from saying it was "God's will" that a dozen people were killed when a bridge collapsed even when we know it was defective gussets that caused the collapse, that closer supervision of the bridge's constuction would have saved those lives?   

    The magical explanation (or "conspiracist ideation") seems the final refuge against personal responsibility, ineluctable in the case of climate change. 

    As the paper in question comprehensively explains, the great thing about magic for people seeking to duck ownership of their problems is that magic is a product of our imaginations and hence is entirely elastic and inexhaustible; magic can be adapted and grown to wave away any accountability whatsoever.  

    Great stuff, magic. 

  12. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    Leedsjon - an interesting post and description of your experience.

    I too wish I had a dollar - no, a dime, that'd still make me rich - for every time I have read that climate scientists are all in it together for the money, or as some lower tier of a planned future world government. However, the question I ask, and have done over years, to people advancing such ideas, is how do you organise such a thing? There are very many countries, with a great diversity of cultures, belief systems, political systems and so on. To coordinate the thousands of climate scientists distributed around these diverse places, even if one wanted to, in such a fashion would be.... let's just put it this way. It would be easier to line up a thousand sheep and get them to do a Mexican Wave!

  13. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    Dana:  ...quote from Trenberth in the OP is in response to Annan saying that warming has slowed over the past decade.  That's just not true if you include ocean heat content data to 2000 meters.

    Annan inadvertently taking his cue from NOAA, who do insist on making surface temperature their main message when communicating w/the public. "12th warmest year" etc., without proper clarification or prioritizing, or at least emphatically reminding us  that one year's surface temperature is irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. 

    Is it any wonder the public at large is confused, when NOAA on the one hand tells us that energy is relentlessly accumulating in the Earth system while the other hand NOAA loudly and repeatedly implies it isn't? 

  14. Was 2012 the Hottest La Niña Year on Record?

    Recommend that the text of NOAA's retraction be appended to the OP. 

  15. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    Terranova:

    Labels are a shorthand for observed behaviour, whether virtuous or vicious. IMO if the label accurately describes the behaviour, it can be applied. One would not shy away from labelling, say, a purveyor of Ponzi schemes as a fraud, nor from labelling, say, the person who - at risk to own life or health - rescues another person from drowning as a hero.

    Someone earning the label "pseudoskeptic" (my personal favourite label) earns it on account of engaging in what this new Lewandowsky et al paper defines as 'nihilistic skepticism' (*) on the one hand, and unskeptical credulity on the other.

    Someone earning the label "conspiracy theorist" earns it on account of engaging in conspiratorial ideation. Typically such ideation is also unwarranted on the basis of the available evidence.

    Someone earning the label "denialist" earns it on account of engaging in the techniques of denialism - appeal to fake experts, conspiratorial ideation, cherry-picking, logical fallacies, and impossible expectations/shifting goalposts.

    Hard as it may be to believe, the motives of the person so labelled do not need to nefarious for the label to be applied accurately. I for one am convinced the vast majority of people who would earn the above labels are entirely sincere. But, at the end of the day, the labels stick because of their actions, not their motives.

    If you're looking to be assigned a label, I for one would go with "made incorrect inferences from available data" based on your comment.

    (*) The specific passage from this paper is:

    Third, during its questioning of an official account, conspiracist ideation is characterized by "... an almost nihilistic degree of skepticism" (Keeley, 1999, p. 125); and the conspiracy theorist refuses to believe anything that does not fit into the conspiracy theory. Thus, nothing is at it seems, and all evidence points to hidden agendas or some other meaning that only the conspiracy theorist is aware of. Accordingly, low trust (Goertzel, 1994) and paranoid ideation (Darwin, Neave, & Holmes, 2011) feature prominently among personality and attitudinal variables known to be associated with conspiracist ideation. The short label for this criterion is NS (for nihilistic skepticism).

    I would characterize nihilstic skepticism, outside the context of conspiracist ideation, as doubt or skepticism of a claim that (a) is unwarranted based on the evidence available to support the claim, and (b) can be clearly or easily shown to be unwarranted.

  16. Temp record is unreliable

    To reiterate what others have said, without details of the source data we can only speculate. However the graph above does look rather different from this one:

    Source: here. Links to the source datasets are provided in that post.
  17. Climate science peer review is pal review

    MartinG:

    You can go on and on about wanting evidence, and not wanting to accept others opinions on the matter. To me, your statement "For good measure I must state that I haven’t read  the papers involved so I can’t comment on their quality." says that the next step you should take is to read the papers. At that point, I can see three possibilities:

    1) You have the background and knowledge to understand the papers and their methodologies, and feel that de Freitas' paper should have been published.

    2) You have the background and knowledge to understand the papers and their methodologies, and feel that de Freitas' paper should not have been published.

    3) You do not have the background and knowledge to understand the papers and their methodologies, and cannot pass judgement on your own. You will either have to accept a judgement from a source that you trust, or you will have to accept that you just don't know.


    Until you have read the papers, I will consider the default to be that you fall into class 3. You don't trust others judgement, and you just don't know.

    It is expected in a good journal that reviewers will fall into classes 1 or 2. A good reviewer will realize that (s)he falls into class 3, and will tell the editor "I don't know the subject well enough - you'll have to find another reviewer". Good editors like reviewers that tear papers apart - bad stuff will either get rejected or get revised. Mistakes still happen, but there are a lot fewer of them.

    Fake skeptics seem to manage to find poorer journals where reviewers end up in class 3. In "Pal Review", the major problem is that the editors and reviewers don't realize that they fall into class 3, and because they only trust their like-minded pals they continue with their confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Bad editors like reviewers that say "Hey! Great paper from Fred! I only had time to do a quick glance, but the conclusions are just what I like to hear! Publish it ASAP! Are we still on to do lunch next week?"

  18. A Climate Sensitivity Tail
    Tom asks,

     If Revkin cannot spend that half hour before writting on the topic, what is he being paid for?

    Revkin says:

    I'm saying my read is that analyses finding a sensitivity lower than 3oC are more likely to end up right, not based solely on the quality of the work, but the history of ideas. See my 1985 article on nuclear winterfor an example of how things can play out. (Things trend toward "nuclear autumn," although there are stillsome researchers seeing big climatic impactsfrom even a "small" nuclear war.)

     

    Apparently comparisons to an irrelevant selection of biased history is more important.


  19. 2012 Shatters the US Temperature Record. Fox, Watts, and Spencer Respond by Denying Reality

    For reference, NCDC debunked this myth before it was even born. Here's their comparison of the global mean temperature from the unadjusted and adjusted data:

    From this paper

  20. There is no consensus

     A useful example of the silliness of some of these polls/petitions is Project Steve, which is limited to people named Steve. It's about evolution, but it has over 1200 signatures now. Is it evidence? Evidence of what? Is there anything special about people named Steve that gives them increased credibility as "experts" in this subject matter?

  21. The Y-Axis of Evil

    There's a new Y-Axis of Evil graph up - over at WUWT Willis Eschenbach has just graphed Greenland ice loss over the next century (without, notably, considering acceleration from present rates) on a zero based scale. Which is just about as useful and deceptive as temperature anomalies graphed in Kelvin, not to mention completely neglecting the effect of that ice loss on sea level - which will eventually hit ~70 feet if the Eemian Period data on cryosphere response is accurate. 

    Just more of the same... sigh.

  22. There is no consensus

    Kevin, to reiterate; the article above points out that several studies have found 97% of climate scientists accept the evidence that the Earth has warmed, and that human emissions of greenhouse gases is the primary cause of that warming.

    Now, you wish to present as counter evidence that less than 0.2% of people in the US with a scientific qualification of any sort disagree.  In essence your argument boils down to the claim that:

    Less than 0.2% of people with a scientific qualification have expressed an opinion contrary to the consensus on climate change;

    Therefore,

    It is false that 97% of the scientists best qualified to assess the subject accept the concensus.

    Your argument needs only to be stated for it to be seen that it is false.

  23. Climate science peer review is pal review

    MartinG - Compare and contrast:

    You first stated: "I actually have no problem with what de Freitas did - he got his papers peer reviewed and published."

    and then: "If those papers were not subjected to a proper review then they shouldn’t have been there – no question - and the reviewers, and especially the editor did not do their jobs."

    You will pardon me if I point out the contradiction displayed in those statements. The papers were not subjected to a proper review, have been found to be junk under examination, and de Freitas did not do his job. 

    "For good measure I must state that I haven’t read  the papers involved so I can’t comment on their quality." - Enough said. 

  24. Dikran Marsupial at 00:52 AM on 8 February 2013
    Temp record is unreliable

    Kevin, climate4you is run by Ole Humlum, who has written a number of deeply flawed papers on climate science, so pointing out that the plot originates from climate4you rather than WUWT does not make it any more authoritative.  This doesn't mean that the plot is incorrect, but it is good cause to be skeptical.

  25. Temp record is unreliable

    Kevin:

    Thank you for returning to follow up. It has been my experience that commenters who post on multiple threads in short order with what appear to be leading questions or comments are engaging in "drive-by" commenting. One rarely sees them again (except, perhaps, for further drive-bys some months in the future). Since you have returned, I apologize for my viscerally hostile reaction.

    Further to the graph, posted on WUWT, that you have shared here, I guess my follow-up questions are:

    1. To what NASA GISS product are the shown adjustments applicable? NASA GISS model or the temperature dataset?
    2. What makes the adjustments illegitimate? Do WUWT or Climate4You provide any references to the literature suggesting NASA GISS has committed any serious methodological errors in making the adjustments?

    That adjustments have been made does not make them prima facie suspicious. Organizations and people re-evaluate past data using improved methods and make revisions as required (one example might be casualty figures from past conflicts, which are subject to occasional re-assessment - e.g. casualties suffered by the polities of the former Soviet Union during the Second World War). As far as I can see this is normally unremarkable behaviour.

    With regards to Hansen's beliefs vs his conclusions, the question is, what evidence is there that any of Hansen's personal convictions (such as those described in, say, his recent book) are inappropriately reflected in his published work? Certainly such a thing is possible, but it doesn't follow that it is occurring without some sort of substantiation.

  26. Dikran Marsupial at 00:37 AM on 8 February 2013
    Temp record is unreliable

    Kevin, to put that diagram into perspective, if you look at GISS LOTI, there has been abou 0.9 degrees of warming since 1911 (the lowest point on the WUWT plot), so the difference between GISS products accounts for less than 10% of the observed warming.  There is also the point that the adjustements made since 2008 are likely to have been made for good reasons.  If you want to know why "Hansen" (GISS != Hansen) keeps changing the temperature record, then I suggest reading the technical reports and papers might be a good start.

  27. Temp record is unreliable

    Kevin, assuming that the methodology of the graph is honest, what makes you think that the adjustments are dishonest?  If they were exactly reversed, would you still be complaining?  

    And what is the method for determining statistical significance in this case?  And is that the anomaly?  Or is that the absolute temp?  

  28. Temp record is unreliable
    Update: I accidentally took the 2008 figures from the land only dataset rather than the LOTI. The change in dataset completely undermines my earlier conclusions, and I apologize for the error. The actual adjustments differ in detail from those in the Figure displayed by Kevin, but not by a large amount. The table and links are now for the correct figures, but the comments should be ignored. Kevin @243, merely mentioning that the figure is from WUWT does not help us determine its accuracy. You need to list the source data. When I check the source data that I can access for 22nd July, 2008 and for 8th Feb, 2013 (today), I note that the annual temperatures for the twenty first century are as follows: ______2008___Current___Alteration 2001 48 52 0.04 2002 56 60 0.04 2003 55 59 0.04 2004 48 52 0.04 2005 62 65 0.03 2006 54 59 0.05 2007 56 62 0.06 Now, every one of those adjustments makes the first seven years of the twenty first century cooler than they were reported to be in 2008, yet your table shows every one of those years as have been adjusted to make them warmer. For convenience, I have only checked the years above, but at the moment every claimed adjustment on the graph does not even get the direction of the adjustment right. I see no reason, then, to trust it.

    I also note that, if there is in fact some version of Gistemp which does adjust those years as per the chart, then there the adjustments between that chart and 2013 at most merely restore the values to those of the July 2008 version, and in some years still represent an overall net cooling adjustment.
  29. There is no consensus

    Kevin, it would be delicious if you marked out the words of others with quotation marks.  

    You say: "To say that the science is over because of 97% agreement is a pretty arrogant statement to make."

    I agree. Now, whoever said "the science is over" is wrong.  To say that the basics of the theory of AGW are "settled," though, is right.  Settled doesn't mean concretized.  It just means that nothing is stirring it up.  The basics of AGW were settled over the last century.  There hasn't been a serious challenge to the greenhouse effect since Angstrom.  The effect has been demonstrated in lab, from satellite, and directly via ground-based instrumentation.  Working products have been made that rely on the same principles.  The other settled part of AGW is the "A" part.  There are no alternative theories where the source of the rise in atmospheric CO2 is concerned.  None.  And there is abundant evidence that it's us.  If you have an alternative that works, you'll be famous.

    You say: "I'm sure that there was greater than 97% consensus that Newton was 100% accurate prior to Einstein "proving" that there was more to it."

    This is a false analogy.  You're suggesting that the levels of evidence for the compared are the same.  Not even close.  There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people working in atmospheric and oceanic sciences.  The 97% figure was for a small group of regularly-publishing climate scientists.  How many people were working on gravity in Newton's day?  Even Einstein's day?  How robustly were the theories being tested?  If you want to see the weight of evidence--the consensus of evidence--see it here.  Or see it in the tens of thousands of publications that fill the reference sections of the IPCC ARs.

    You say: "All it takes is one falsification to make a theory wrong, to think that "WE" know everything about everything that goes into making our climate what it is is pretty ignorant."

    Who said we did?  Again, you build this strawman that says, "Climate scientists say they know everything!"  No one has ever said that.  It's funny: I argue with people regularly who condemn the IPCC for using words like "likely" and "high probability" and "medium confidence."  They want science to be absolute.  Science refuses to be absolute.

    Until you understand the evidence, it will be all too easy to read words like "settled" and "know" uncritically and mistakenly.  It is extraordinarily difficult to communicate the science to the public.  Everything is interconnected, and so everything needs to be properly contextualized.  The "16-year no warming" meme is just the latest great example of that.  The denial industry--and it is an industry, from Heartland to GWPF to SPPI and beyond--knows the difficulty, and they take advantage of it.  The focus on the words scientists use, ignoring the content of the message.  They take words like "consensus" and "settled" and spin them to make them look dishonest or anti-scientific.

    And then the public, Kevin, unaware of the game playing, does the heavy lifting by accusing the science and its defenders of being dishonest. Most of the people I discuss the issue with are not in the pay of the oil industry or one of the free market opinion-making organizations.  However, some are.  There are face-bots, or ideo-bots, created by these institutions solely for the purpose of engaging comment streams with a set of well-oiled memes.  These bots never come back to defend their comments.  There is nothing to hold them accountable for their misinformation and misrepresentation.  Yet there it is, and the public has no basis for deciding what's misinformation and what isn't.  

    This may explain why you get a strong reaction when you post an evidence-free accusation. It's in the standard playbook for paid denialists.  My advice to you is to use questions and refrain from accusations, unless you have the evidence to support them and you're willing to  defend that evidence (or change your mind if other evidence is brought to bear).

     

     

  30. Temp record is unreliable

     

     

    It would be nice if you could provide a reference to any change to 1930s instrumental data. But based on this thread and the "It's the Sun" thread I don't think we're going to see it.

    Actually, this is the "accuracy in the data" thread, not the Sun thread, so it is appropriate to discuss this.

    image

    This is from WUWT,

    Just because it is from there don't discount it out of hand.  It shows temp change since 2008 made to the record, it was originally from Climate4You.

     

    Hopefully the chart comes through, but anyway, it shows significant adjustments, so that should satisfy your need for showing what I was talking about.

     

    As far as changes in a direction that "support his belief," scientists don't have beliefs, they have conclusions.  It's deniers whose positions are founded entirely on beliefs.

    I disagree.  When it comes to Hansen, who has publically stated his beliefs, and his position, and done so in a manor that can not be confused with stating scientific knowledge or facts.  Otherwise, I would agree with you.

    See my other posts about appology regarding my smear/gothca impression - not intended.

     

     

  31. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    Terranova, labels work better for groups than individuals. If you are accurately reporting your views, then you are just someone who rejects the weight of evidence and expert opinion.

  32. Dikran Marsupial at 23:41 PM on 7 February 2013
    For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    @Terranova, I'm not sure why labels are important, it is the behaviour that is interesting.  Perhaps you could post on an appropriate thread the reasons why you consider the GHG contibution to be overstated, I'm sure there are many here who would be happy to discuss the science.

  33. There is no consensus

    OK, make that three threads where Kevin has dropped short, content-free comments in the "gotcha"/smear style.

    This kind of drive-by commenting reflects badly on you, Kevin.This wasn't a drive by, smear comment.  The gist of this thread is that there is a 97% "consensus", implying that 97% of Climate scientists believe the AGW theory.  I was pointing out a piece of evidence, one that has more participants than some of the papers that came up with the 97% figure, that disputes that.  To say that the science is over because of 97% agreement is a pretty arrogant statement to make.  I'm sure that there was greater than 97% consensus that Newton was 100% accurate prior to Einstein "proving" that there was more to it.

    All it takes is one falsification to make a theory wrong, to think that "WE" know everything about everything that goes into making our climate what it is is pretty ignorant.

     

    No gotcha/smear intended.  I do appologize that I came/come across as a gotcha smear type.  I do want to understand more about this, but dealing with people who think they have all the answers, and that if you disagree with them you are either

    1. in denial,

    2.  in the employ of "big oil" or

    3.  Ignorant

    gets old pretty quick.

     

  34. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    Albatross: you make some v interesting comments here which I agree with entirely. Speaking as on old Psychology graduate, I was fascinated to read this research and find it gels with my own personal experience of the skeptics/denialists/contrarian (whatever label you want to use here). Ironically, my interest in whole field of climate change, since it was pretty much outside field of my own expertise, was sparked off by a friend who turned out to be one of the skeptics. At first, I found his views interesting if not unusual - at the time (around about 2008 or thereabouts when the first big climate change conference @ Copenhagen was going on), there was a lot of media activity in UK about subject - which the BBC usefully synthesised into a kind of rough 'beginners' guide' for non-scientists if you like-which put people like me in the picture. Even then the science that was being reported seemed pretty comprehensive and, most importantly, settled. So, following the links in this guide to various scientific journals & publications, I tried to pass these on to my friend - only to be greeted by the ugly head of the conspiracy theory. eg you can't believe  a word of the article in ..New Scientist, Nature, National Geographic - or any of a thousand other scientific peer reviewed journals or popular science magazines, websites, reports from learned scientific research institutes etc - because the scientists are all part of the global conspiracy which Climategate proved to be true..etc etc etc. Further attempts followed to try to persuade my friend of the merits of the science - only to be dashed by reference to the same conspiracy theory. In the early stages of this 'debate', while I was fascinated by the volumes of scientific 'data' which my friend reproduced, there was 1 nagging doubt I had which became impossible to reconcile - for as a social science graduate trained in some of the basic philosophical schools of thought I was familiar and had some sympathy for the 'skeptical' approach - and the doubt was this. All other things being equal, and following the application of even the most basic law of averages, it is possible that a particular scientist or group of scientists, especially when grappling with a discipline as complex as climate change science which, on some levels, is still evolving and developing, may, in relation to a particular question or problem, reach a conclusion which is later found, in the light of newer research, to be incorrect. It may also be possible, in the extreme, that such scientists may simply have got the science wrong. Both of these potential outcomes are possible through the application of the skeptical approach. But how do we move, if we are being rational, objective investigators, from the position of 'scientist X got the science wrong' to  'scientist X is systematically lying to the world and fabricating his data in order to make vast sums of money and get rich very quickly by redirecting the focus of international research into the renewables industry' which is a basic precis of the Climategate 'scandal'? This is not a possible outcome of the genuine skeptical approach. At this point I started to consider, as this research shows, that there may well be a psychological dimension to all of this focused more on ideology than the rigorous evauation of empirical data (a.k.a. science).

  35. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    I am certainly not a conspiracy theorist.  The smoking-cancer, and HIV-AIDS links are obvious. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and humans have caused the levels in the atmosphere to rise.  That and other human activities have contributed to an increase in temperature.  I disagree with most of you on here on the amount of that contribution and what the future may hold.  

    What label do I get?

  36. For Psychology Research, Climate Denial is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

    Marco wrote: "...see WUWT with its guest post of Tom Fuller (who clearly hasn't read the papers, as neither claims most pseudoskeptics are conspiracy theorists)."

    Oi! Tom Fuller used to write AGW articles for Examiner.com... with the 'evil climate scientist cabal' (aka "the Team") playing a major role in suppressing the Truth with their Fake science. He is, himself, heavily invested in conspiracy thinking despite his endless claims of 'neutrality' and 'reason'. On one occasion I actually got him to admit that the 'climate scientists claimed that sea level would rise 20 meters in 30 years' myth was false by tracking down the supposed source and showing that it stated no time frame. Yet only a few months later he was back to repeating the same myth... having completely blocked his memory of acknowledging that it wasn't true.

  37. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    This item was recently covered on WattsUp With That?

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1214311

     

    I submitted a comment pointing out that there was not much difference between what Annan was saying and the IPCC position. My post appeared as the following:

    Philip Shehan says:
    February 1, 2013 at 3:29 pm

    [oh, shut up with your whining - mod]

     

     

  38. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    JasonB,

    There are some discrpenacy among probability distribution functions on Figure 2 based on the instrumental record, but all of them tend to point to the lower end of the sensitivity spectrum. I'm prone to trust sensitivity based on instrumental record rather than paleo, as there are significantly less uncertainties regarding both temp and forcing changes.

    It's true that there's no change in the warming trend, but, as Annan says in the comments, high-end sensitivities should show a gradual acceleration. He adds that "quite a sustained steadying, with the limited ocean warming and changes to forcing estimates all points in the same direction".

    I don't say that Annan is right, my point is that I don't think he's saying just the same as mainstream climate blogs, and that he is indeed suggesting a (slight) change in the way climate sensitivity is portrayed in scientific reviews. In fact, I think he is suggesting that the IPCC authors have a more critical approach when reporting about papers, but this is a different war.

    It's true that his statement is prone to controversy, but the denialist point that he is suggesting a sensitivity lower than 2 is easily debunked, and I think that this controversy may have the positive effect of attracting more climate scientists to the discussion put forward by Annan. :) Constraining sensitivity is an interesting issue.

  39. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    I also find Annan's post-2000 comment surprising.

    My 2-box+enso model (which has a number of limitations which I won't go in to here, but can at least address the question) using GISS forcings gives a TCR of 1.67 with the data to 2010/12, and 1.60 with data to 2000/12. That's a long way from being proof but does suggest that Annan's claim should not be accepted without significant supporting evidence.

  40. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    Jesús Rosino,

    I have a lot of respect for James Annan's statistical acumen and often read his blog, but the comment "the additional decade of temperature data from 2000 onwards [...] can only work to reduce estimates of sensitivity" puzzled me also.

    If the current instrumental record is a very poor constraint on climate sensitivity — which Figure 2 suggests is the case — then it's entirely possible for the additional decade of temperature data to have no effect whatsoever on estimates of sensitivity. Indeed, given the magnitude of the internal variability, how could it? There are plenty of ways of looking at the surface air temperature record that all show no statistically significant change in trend from earlier decades, so any study that concludes sensitivity is different just with the addition of the past decade must be automatically suspect, and that's not even taking into account the heat going into the oceans.

    As I said, it's puzzling.

    As for "...a high climate sensitivity [is] increasingly untenable. A value (slightly) under 2 is certainly looking a whole lot more plausible than anything above 4.5", it would be hard to craft a statement that would be guaranteed to excite the denialati even more. :-) It's practically begging to be taken out of context and misinterpreted. If I was a well known so-called "team member", I might be tempted to make such statements now and then just so I could point at all the idiots who misunderstood it afterwards.

  41. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    The following from Rohling et al 2012 also strongly suggests CS is around 3+


    Over 30 studies, looking at paleo climate from the last 10,000 years back to 420 million years ago. CS between 3.1 to 3.7

     

    An S value of 1 corresponds to a CS of 3.7. Not much tail there. And not much to  suggest low CS either.

  42. Dikran Marsupial at 19:34 PM on 7 February 2013
    Climate science peer review is pal review

    MartinG if you don't think that a published refutation is evidence that a paper shouldn't have been published, then you have a rather odd idea about what is considered evidence.  Note the problem isn't that "because many people disagree with the conclusions" (your downplaying of the criticism did not escape me) but that fundamental methodological flaws were identified with the work.  That is clear evidence of a failure of the review process as the reviewers should have picked up on them.

    Similarly if you think that the resignation of the EIC and five other editors, explicitly because of a failure in the review process is not evidence of a problem in the review process, then you have rather stringent views on what you consider "evidence"!  Editors (plural) do not resign without good cause.

    Nobody is claiming that peer reviews supports the validity of a paper, that is a straw man.  The claim is that a group of skeptics were exploiting a friendly editor to get work published that was not of a sufficiently high quality to get through the usual peer review for that journal.

    "It all depends if you are interested in using the literature to convince everybody out there that your ideas and conclusions are correct,"

    You mean like Soon being invited to testify before congress?  This is another straw man, and is just evading the issue of whether the paper was sufficiently sound to justify publication.

    So tell me, exactly what would you consider to be evidence that the paper should not have made it through peer review?

  43. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    shoyemore @12, I would say it is entirely the role of the science journalists to convey the science to the public.  It took me half an hour on googlescholar to determine that recent publications on climate sensitivity bracket a range between 2.5 and 3.5 C per doubling of CO2, with some outliers; and that portrayal of recent results as being predominantly in favour of low outcomes represents cherry picking.  If Revkin cannot spend that half hour before writting on the topic, what is he being paid for?

  44. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    Rob Painting #6,

    You are right. There was a lot of sense in what Annan wrote, but also a lot of drivel as well. He seems to have been stung somewhere along the way. I thought gavin Schmidt comment to Andy Revkin summed up matters:

    Indeed, the consensus statements in the IPCC reports have remained within the 1.5 – 4.5 range first set by Charney in 1979. James’ work has helped improve the quantifications of the paleo constraints (particular for the LGM), but these have been supported by work from Lorius et al (1991), Kohler et al (2010), etc. and therefore are not particularly radical.

    By not reflecting that, you are implying that the wishful thinking of people like Ridley and Lindzen for a climate sensitivity of around 1 deg C is tenable. It is not, and James’ statement was simply alluding to that. For reference, James stated that his favored number was around 2.5 deg C, Jim Hansen in a recent letter to the WSJ quote 2.5-3.5 (based on the recent Palaeosens paper), and for what it’s worth the CMIP5 GISS models have sensitivities of 2.4 to 2.7 deg C. None of this is out of the mainstream.

    Revkin complains the scientists have not "adequately conveyed the reality." Isn't that your job too, Andy?

  45. Climate science peer review is pal review

    What more evidence do I want??. Well, for a start I want some evidence. Come on guys – you are not going to convince anyone with a critical mind of anything with phrases like “pal review” is “no review” , and “ I consider  junk”. If those papers were not subjected to a proper review then they shouldn’t have been there – no question - and the reviewers, and especially the editor did not do their jobs.

    But the papers are not “junk” just because you say they are, or because many people disagree with the conclusions. As far as I am aware de Freitas still considers them legitimate, and we don’t have any evidence from the reviewers that they didn’t do a proper review. That the contents are attacked in subsequent papers by providing new (or old) scientific arguments proving that the original authors were in error – why that’s just great – that’s how the literature is supposed to work – an interchange of ideas until we reach a consensus. As long as there are well founded scientific questions to the subject – or to the established consensus we should welcome them and deal with them based on the science.

    That was the original point I made in this thread. A peer review cannot be used as support for the validity of a paper any more than the absence of a peer review proves that an article is bad. But I agree that all published papers should be subject to a peer review for the purposes of weeding out unsupported or unserious papers. Nor is a peer review by people in your own technical field that you know (pal review) necessarily bad. I would get my "pals" to peer review my next article without any bad conscience - just because I know they have my best interests at heart and will help me to improve the quality and validity of the paper. (but I would also invite a couple who had different ideas to pitch in.) It all depends if you are interested in using the literature to convince everybody out there that your ideas and conclusions are correct, or if you use it in a common search for the truth. I feel we should be looking at content and not get hung up with superficial jargon.

    For good measure I must state that I haven’t read  the papers involved so I can’t comment on their quality. 

  46. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    It's not a big deal, but I think that mainstream climate blogs have failed to convey the idea put forward by James Annan. In his own words, that:

    "the additional decade of temperature data from 2000 onwards [...] can only work to reduce estimates of sensitivity"

    I think that climate blogs have rather argued that recent data are just natural variability, and thus don't have any effect on long-term trends nor sensitivity.


    However, regarding the lower temp change since LGM (4K instead of 6K), an important fact is that the changes observed in deglaciation are anyway the same. So a warming of 4K caused impacts that we previously thought requiered a 6K-warming. In other words: impacts should be considered higher than before for any given sensitivity. Ken Hedlin puts it in a nice way over at Annan's blog:

    "Given that in your Dec. 21 2013 post, "How cold was the last glacial maximum", your conclusion was 4C colder, and that in your comment here ,you estimate a sensitivity of 2.5 - 3C, then with a doubling of CO2, we can expect a temperature increase of about 2/3 of the warming since the LGM."

     

  47. Dueling Scientists in The Oregonian, Settled by Nuccitelli et al. (2012)

    Richard:

    Further to your comment #76, you still appear to be missing the point by insisting that "This is a fundamentally different process Stefan [Rahmstorf] is describing as compared to the cool-skin phenomenon".

    Please provide a cite in the literature where he does as you claim. If you are extracting the quote you are going on about from a blog comment, the parsimonious explanation is that Rahmstorf is writing in a more colloquial manner (which happens from time to time on a blog, oddly enough).

    In addition, you & Steven Sadlow appear to make an error of scaling. The oceans are ~70% of the Earth's surface area and the lion's share of Earth's overall heat capacity (*). An "insignificant" change in cool skin temperatures, causing a slight energy imbalance (such that the ocean cannot shed energy as easily, therefore retaining it), can easily result in an enormous change in ocean energy content, especiallly if the energy imbalance occurs over, say, a 40+ year period.

    By way of example, NASA indicates the radiative imbalance at top-of-atmosphere is 0.8 W m-2 across the entire surface area of the Earth. It's not a big number in and of itself, but it means that the Earth retains (approximately) an additional 408 million Joules more than it radiates out to space, each and every second.

    (*) From the abstract of Schwartz 2007 ("Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth's Climate System"):

    The heat capacity of the global ocean, obtained from regression of ocean heat content vs. global mean surface temperature, GMST, is 14 ± 6 W yr m-2 K-1, equivalent to 110 m of ocean water; other sinks raise the effective planetary heat capacity to 17 ± 7 W yr m-2 K-1 (all uncertainties are 1-sigma estimates).

  48. Icy contenders weigh in

    Tom @6 and DSL @7

    Goddard is saying that curently global sea ice area is above average by 30,000 km2. If I was inclined I would spin this to show that NH-SI is gaining rapidly as well as show that SH-SI is not being lost as fast usual...both would discount AGW trends; that is if I was so inclined.

    Now obviously anything above an average would be of considerable interest but he is only looking at area and not volume/thickness or the multi year quality of SI. He is also, by making it a global SI metirc, equating SH-SI with NH-SI as though they had equal input into the system. 

    One part of what Tom mentioned that has me wondering is how the SI area can fluctuate so wildly on a day to day basis? 

    Sorry to wander away from the  topic but I really didn't  know where else to ask for  some input on Goddard's Gish.

    Why does they new posting box not redline spelling errors??...trust me I need the editor help.

  49. A Climate Sensitivity Tail

    (sarc) The correct answer to all political questions about TCR global sun-induced ozone recovery sensitivity (50% undefined or rather obscurely neglecting the modelling of bark beetles and their modelled 'black carbon' on ice sheets.)  here. :-). I'm rather surprised noone has proposed π since it would make calculations easier on this flat earth. (/Otherwise nice editor still missing the sarc tag)

  50. Icy contenders weigh in

    YubeDude, what is Goddard trying to claim?  That sea ice is recovering?  (Actually, it is re-covering in the Arctic, ha ha ha)  He'd do better to cherry-pick days 89-115 of the Arctic sea ice area, when, gasp!, the 10-year linear trend is positive!  (ignore the beast getting ready to walk in the door at day 158.  Keep combing over it, Steve!  There will be little rhetorically valuable gems from time to time -- just show em quick and sell em hard.

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