One of the most encouraging trends regarding the discussion of climate issues is the emergence over the past six months of some new voices, such as Keith Kloor and Judith Curry, who we interviewed here recently.
Keith Kloor's weblog has become the new default neutral meeting ground, joining Bart Verheggen's and Lucia Liljegren's weblogs as places where advocates of the different positions can actually (sometimes) have a discussion on the differences between them.
There are hundreds of weblogs that focus on climate change, and literally dozens of us who make the rounds between them, searching for enlightenment or somebody to fight. Most of them have become too toxic to have anything remotely resembling a discussion, so it's really a welcome turn of events that Keith and Bart have joined Lucia as safe havens.
The recent media blast over Muir Russell's report was thankfully short-lived, and conversation is actually turning back towards science. At Lucia's weblog yesterday, a commenter asked for the strongest skeptical argument(s) against the consensus.
Although I'm not a skeptic, I ventured to speak for them, identifying atmospheric sensitivity as the biggest problem with the models, theories and experience of global warming.
What others would you volunteer? As my regular commenters include a number of true-blue skeptics, I don't want to speak on their behalf when they can do such a good job themselves.
Is it just me, just summer, or just hilarious that the best news story I have seen today concerns the Australian army's loss of a vehicle shortly after it received camouflage painting?
Comments
LOL, just like every other law that gets shot down, they just keep coming back until it passes. We dont have a pollution problem anymore, we shipped all that to China. It is just a scam to get more money from you all and control your behavior, havent we seen enough government controlled failures? Teach by example, not by making laws where it does nothing but limit your options of what you want and need to do. These jokers have no idea what they are doing first of all, secondly, they were already caught lying and skewing the numbers for political reasons, the fact they were 'exhonerated' means nothing, only that people continue to play politics.
The Science of Doom is a very reasonable Pro AGW person that accepts good discussion from all sources including skeptics.
Hi Tom,
I don't quite understand your comment that "The recent media blast over Muir Russell's report was thankfully short-lived".
The whole "scandal" about the CRU emails got tons of media exposure, much of it way out of proportion with the actual "crimes" imho. You wrote a book about it. Why is some relatively small media coverage for the M R report "thankfully shortlived"? Media exposure to the various allegations was much more intense than media coverage to the various exonerations (see e.g. Scott Mandia's blog).
Tom, for me it's not just climate sensitivity alone, but the fact that the putative range of sensitivities all err on the moderate to catastrophic warming side, when cooling scenarios via the very same (poorly understood) feedback mechanisms are distinct possibilities as well.
My biggest gripe and strongest argument, however, has to do with the foundational assumption of correctness of the corrected, adjusted, homogenized and "value-added" ground surface temp station data, and all of the foxes that are guarding those hens (about 90% of which have been thoroughly massacred in the US). Literally ALL of the catastrophic scenarios coming from models are based on artificial manipulations of the roughly 10% of the remaining stations, which include wildly suspect inferred temps where there are no stations.
In short, if warmalarmist were forced to rely solely on the satellite data alone, their models would be hard pressed to project any doom or gloom at all.
The hockey stick was unimportant, except as supporting evidence for the specious claim of 90% certainty that at least half of global warming was attributable to human CO2 emissions.
Forget about the 90% claim for a sec. The IPCC claims that up to half of global warming measured over the last century may be due to factors other than human CO2 emissions.
Is there even 1 model that is capable of attributing any of the warming seen over the last century to factors other than human CO2 emissions? I think not. Every scenario assumes all warming during the last century was either CO2 or measurement error.
C'mon mindless defenders of the alarmist position - tell me the models include aerosols and that accounts for something. You won't even believe how fast I ram that argument where the sun don't shine.
Hi all,
Steven, I don't think there's a serious problem in the land temperatures. I don't think they're good, by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think correctin them would make global warming go away. See satellite measurements.
Fran, I sympathize with your feelings, and agree with Wegman (and Oxburgh's criticism of CRU statistics). Where do we go from here?
Duncan, how do you add it up, then? 0.8 degrees C in the last century, how do you attribute it? What really happens next? I do not know, myself.
Bart, I should think you would be thankful that Russell's report is disappearing. It's not much in the way of an exoneration, and neither was Oxburgh's report. I think it's very much in your interest to drop it and just move on. On a brighter note, I hope you have everything planned for an enjoyable afternoon watching the match tomorrow...
Why does Anthony Watts claim disability from his parents cigarette smoking but considers AGW chemicals good for his bank account?
I went to the Army Surplus store the other day to buy some camouflage pants, but I couldn't find any ....
Sure it's sensitivity, and it has been all along. You can tell without knowing any science just by the sensitivity of the alarmists to discussion of sensitivity.
But why should sensitivity be a constant? Bet it varies.
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Steven,
Satellite and land based temps more or less agree, making your argument moot.
Duncan,
The hockeystick has nothing whatsoever to do with the attribution of 20th century warming.
Tom,
It's not so much that the report is an exoneration, but more my surprise that you don't want it to be dicussed much by the media, whereas you have discussed at great length for a long perdiod of time the allegations that are the topic of this report. I would think that you'd be interested in thsi report then as well, and would also like it to be discussed. If not, why did you spend all that effort discussing the same topic (i.e. the CRU emails)?
Oh yeah, I'll watch the game tonight... Hup Holland Hup!
Hi Bart,
Okay--I'd be happy to have that discussion. Because of the limitations of our comments feature, would you like to host it? I could do a guest post on it and you could post a rebuttal underneath.
Re: disappearance of camouflaged vehicle.
I had thoughts of camouflaging one of my cars and decided not to after considering that in a collision, the driver of the other car might be better enabled to make the case that he hadn't seen me.
I doubt the political or economic feasibility of significantly affecting climate variation by control of any of the presently supposed anthropogenic contributers.
Doing the politically possible is not much different from doing nothing - so maybe we should try to get a better handle on what the 1 to 2 degrees we seemed destined for in the next 80 years will actually do to us.
Tom,
The lack of quality of the science. The incompetence is an even bigger problem than the dishonesty and the hype. Briffa's single tree, Rahmstorf's silly stats bungle, Jones' China mystery, Mann's upside down proxy, the IPCC, CRU's Harry-read-me file. The hits just go on and on.
No transparency, no audits, no replication, bungled stats, disastrous computer code, no instrument calibration, wholesale violations of forecasting principles -- they haven't got a clue about the scientific method. Clinate science isn't science. It's more like voodoo.
The satellite tropospheric series overlap only at the end of the lengthy surface based series. The Hockey Stick's shaft and blade showed no recent natural warming similar to the present, thus helped in the attribution of present warming to man. Bart knew or should have known both these points.
This latest whitewash sank without much trace because the public senses its worthlessness. Alarmist consensus science, such as it is, will only prevail if we start warming significantly and continue to do so, and what is the chance of that given the oceanic oscillations in their cooling phases, and a quietly grinning Cheshire Sun?
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In an Aug 10, 2006 letter to Nature, authors Bradley, Hughes, and Mann (in that order) wrote that they had indeed been clear about hockey-stick uncertainties - that critics could cease and desist because they had said that there were uncertainties all along. I am happy to base my uncertainty and skepticism on this.
Where does this get us? It means we are much less certain whether any observed warming trend is man made or natural. I favor the view that global average temperature is itself a variable thing. That some decades, purely by happenstance, it trends one way and in others the other. That in some centuries global average air temperature is one number and in others another. It would be a much simpler experiment if we could believe that average temp is a fixed number, but that would be wishful thinking. The fact of the matter is that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age won't go away. The fact is that the MBH hockey-stick is uncertain.
It is junk - that is certain
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