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That's the fourth time you've accused me of being dishonest, and of not really being a scientist. I tried to tell you twice that economics involves people who have free will but radiative physics involves molecules which don't have free will (unless you're a pantheist, I suppose) but you haven't even peripherally answered that point, and I've long since lost interest.

Your reading of AR1 yet again misses the point that climate models are dynamical, not empirical. So the entire reason for giving different scenarios is to account for uncertainty in human pollution, solar activity, volcanism, etc. As Gavin pointed out, the projected forcings assumed in scenario B were actually slightly too high compared to reality, so scenario B is a slight overestimate. But that uncertainty is compartmentalized away from the GCM uncertainty.

If you want to take a shot at defending the mistakes in An Inconvenient Truth, let me know.

Huh?

I'm now convinced that you're just playing a cynical game to see how much of my time you can waste. I've archived all of your statements in this article, so I'll simply let my readers decide if you called climatologists deceitful hacks who make bullshit claims, aren't really scientists, just make themselves feel better by calling each other scientists and holding "science-y" conferences even though they can't falsify their hypotheses because their error bars "so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong." Maybe they'll agree with you that these are just strawman arguments which you didn't actually make.

Obviously, this conversation is a waste of time. Let's just agree to disagree, okay?

>>That's the third time you've accused me of being dishonest.

We'd never even talked about the Phil Jones issue before, so your attempts to avoid answering it (because you'd answered it before) were indeed dishonest. You've now answered that question, but there's three to go. Just a short paragraph answer to each one please - I won't call you dishonest for not thoroughly referencing your summary, but I will if you keep saying you've answered them before, because I'd never *formulated* them in summary before.

As to your strawmen arguments:
"You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are"

Uh, no. Since you've ostensibly read my posts before, you know that I was very careful to say that I don't think that people like RC.org are generally deceitful, but rather politically biased (yes, "hacks"), shooting withering attacks on anyone that disagrees with them, and yet giving free passes to people like Al Gore or Phil Jones. Occasionally I think climatologists' arguments are wrong (like RC.org and your stance towards Watts), but overall I don't think there's any great conspiracy to invent AGW or anything like that.

Since you like to reference my posts mirrored on your own website, you should see that I've said this repeatedly, even in the post you quoted above:
http://dumbscientist.com/archives/abrupt-climate-change#comment-1537

If you want to take a shot at defending the mistakes in An Inconvenient Truth, let me know. RC.org was borderline lying on some of its points on the movie.

In any event, you shouldn't take offense at being lumped in the same category as economists, in terms of observation, modeling, and prediction, economics is the closest field to climatology. The point I was trying to make is that if climatology is science, the economics is science. If economics is not science, then climatology is not science. Or to put it another way, I think we need new labels for a category somewhere between hard science and social science.

"Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?"

No... but referencing the Salem Hypothesis (a reference to Creationism) *was* insulting. I don't mind if you were offended I lumped you into the same category with economics, but I think the field is closer than you might think.

"Second, you mentioned the "0.3C per decade" prediction from emission Scenario A, but you've repeatedly [dumbscientist.com] ignored Scenario B which Hansen himself called "more plausible" in 1988."

That's great, but I'm not talking about Hansen88, but AR1, which focuses on Scenario A. It's possible this was done to scare politicians into action, but when one reads it, the +0.3C increase appears to be the best guess.

"You accuse Gavin Schmidt of being a bullshitting deceitful hack who isn't really a scientist."
"It's interesting that you claim physicists who study the climate are inflating their error bars in a blatant attempt to avoid falsification"
"...which obviously means he's deliberately inflating them to avoid falsification."

You wanted to know which statements were strawmen? These are some more.

You've missed my point repeatedly on error in predictions, so I'm not going to bother repeating myself again. (See how annoying that is, when someone does that?)

I can argue the same way as you. I can strawman your arguments, give extensive reasons why the argument (that you didn't make) are wrong, and then shut up when you present your points in a clarified manner.

Another programmer has a similar habit of accusing me of making strawman arguments. She also didn't bother to mention what arguments she was talking about. Yet again, I'm blockquoting your statements for the entire purpose of avoiding the construction of strawman arguments. I'm intentionally quoting the "language" you use (which isn't a distraction as you claim because I'm not telepathic; your language is the only way I can discern your position.) So far the most specific "strawman" examples you've presented is the fact that you were using "proven true" sloppily. Okay, that's one sentence out of a dozen pages, and that was really all I meant by that sentence anyway. Next you murmured something to the effect that you "bloody well understand what error means" but I don't have the foggiest idea what you meant. Your error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical... among other mistakes which would be inexplicable for someone with a graduate or undergraduate (?) degree in physics.

That's why I'm doubting your honesty. Believe me, man, I understand about writing papers, but you seem allergic to actually answering anything I actually say.

I'm only allergic to answering the same questions repeatedly. The whole point of discussing something in written form is so that I don't have to tutor the entire planet individually. And that's the second time you've accused me of being dishonest, on top of saying that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, that I'm not even really a scientist, and probably more examples that I'm repressing...

Here's a quick one that you can answer in one sentence (or more, if you'd like): do you think Phil Jones acted appropriately?

Answering this question with any rigor would require finding a dozen links. But of course I've already criticized the closed-source culture in many different fields of science, emphasized that I'm endangering my scientific career in my naive commitment to open source/science principles, and compiled an extensive list of open source climate codes and data.

So of course I think data and code should be shared freely. And yet I don't share your obvious contempt for Phil Jones. I don't have time to link everything now, but here's the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle, in a type of harassment that reminds me of the Lenski affair. Then one of the FOIA requests that Phil Jones DID fulfill was used to try to get one of his colleagues arrested because some crackpot thought he'd found evidence of fraud.

What he did was wrong, but you've omitted most of the story and tried to imply that climatology is unique in its closed source attitude. I can only assume you haven't been reading Nature regularly for the last 6 months, because this very topic was explored in that timeframe.

I hate to leave this unlinked, which is why I wanted to wait until I get back from Asia.

Most all of your links are to your own website, which abuse the nice, nested comment threads here on slashdot and flatten them.

I tried nesting the comments deeper, but the comments became too narrow. I like nested comments too, but I haven't figured out how to increase the nesting level past 3 without severe readability problems.

I can argue the same way as you. I can strawman your arguments, give extensive reasons why the argument (that you didn't make) are wrong, and then shut up when you present your points in a clarified manner.

Another programmer has a similar habit of accusing me of making strawman arguments. She also didn't bother to mention what arguments she was talking about. Yet again, I'm blockquoting your statements for the entire purpose of avoiding the construction of strawman arguments. I'm intentionally quoting the "language" you use (which isn't a distraction as you claim because I'm not telepathic; your language is the only way I can discern your position.) So far the most specific "strawman" examples you've presented is the fact that you were using "proven true" sloppily. Okay, that's one sentence out of a dozen pages, and that was really all I meant by that sentence anyway. Next you murmured something to the effect that you "bloody well understand what error means" but I don't have the foggiest idea what you meant. Your error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical... among other mistakes which would be inexplicable for someone with a graduate or undergraduate (?) degree in physics.

That's why I'm doubting your honesty. Believe me, man, I understand about writing papers, but you seem allergic to actually answering anything I actually say.

I'm only allergic to answering the same questions repeatedly. The whole point of discussing something in written form is so that I don't have to tutor the entire planet individually. And that's the second time you've accused me of being dishonest, on top of saying that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, that I'm not even really a scientist, and probably more examples that I'm repressing...

Here's a quick one that you can answer in one sentence (or more, if you'd like): do you think Phil Jones acted appropriately?

Answering this question with any rigor would require finding a dozen links. But of course I've already criticized the closed-source culture in many different fields of science, emphasized that I'm endangering my scientific career in my naive commitment to open source/science principles, and compiled an extensive list of open source climate codes and data.

So of course I think data and code should be shared freely. And yet I don't share your obvious contempt for Phil Jones. I don't have time to link everything now, but here's the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle, in a type of harassment that reminds me of the Lenski affair. Then one of the FOIA requests that Phil Jones DID fulfill was used to try to get one of his colleagues arrested because some crackpot thought he'd found evidence of fraud.

What he did was wrong, but you've omitted most of the story and tried to imply that climatology is unique in its closed source attitude. I can only assume you haven't been reading Nature regularly for the last 6 months, because this very topic was explored in that timeframe.

I hate to leave this unlinked, which is why I wanted to wait until I get back from Asia.

Most all of your links are to your own website, which abuse the nice, nested comment threads here on slashdot and flatten them.

I tried nesting the comments deeper, but the comments became too narrow. I like nested comments too, but I haven't figured out how to increase the nesting level past 3 without severe readability problems.

I can argue the same way as you. I can strawman your arguments, give extensive reasons why the argument (that you didn't make) are wrong, and then shut up when you present your points in a clarified manner.

Another programmer has a similar habit of accusing me of making strawman arguments. She also didn't bother to mention what arguments she was talking about. Yet again, I'm blockquoting your statements for the entire purpose of avoiding the construction of strawman arguments. I'm intentionally quoting the "language" you use (which isn't a distraction as you claim because I'm not telepathic; your language is the only way I can discern your position.) So far the most specific "strawman" examples you've presented is the fact that you were using "proven true" sloppily. Okay, that's one sentence out of a dozen pages, and that was really all I meant by that sentence anyway. Next you murmured something to the effect that you "bloody well understand what error means" but I don't have the foggiest idea what you meant. Your error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical... among other mistakes which would be inexplicable for someone with a graduate or undergraduate (?) degree in physics.

That's why I'm doubting your honesty. Believe me, man, I understand about writing papers, but you seem allergic to actually answering anything I actually say.

I'm only allergic to answering the same questions repeatedly. The whole point of discussing something in written form is so that I don't have to tutor the entire planet individually. And that's the second time you've accused me of being dishonest, on top of saying that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, that I'm not even really a scientist, and probably more examples that I'm repressing...

Here's a quick one that you can answer in one sentence (or more, if you'd like): do you think Phil Jones acted appropriately?

Answering this question with any rigor would require finding a dozen links. But of course I've already criticized the closed-source culture in many different fields of science, emphasized that I'm endangering my scientific career in my naive commitment to open source/science principles, and compiled an extensive list of open source climate codes and data.

So of course I think data and code should be shared freely. And yet I don't share your obvious contempt for Phil Jones. I don't have time to link everything now, but here's the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle, in a type of harassment that reminds me of the Lenski affair. Then one of the FOIA requests that Phil Jones DID fulfill was used to try to get one of his colleagues arrested because some crackpot thought he'd found evidence of fraud.

What he did was wrong, but you've omitted most of the story and tried to imply that climatology is unique in its closed source attitude. I can only assume you haven't been reading Nature regularly for the last 6 months, because this very topic was explored in that timeframe.

I hate to leave this unlinked, which is why I wanted to wait until I get back from Asia.

Most all of your links are to your own website, which abuse the nice, nested comment threads here on slashdot and flatten them.

I tried nesting the comments deeper, but the comments became too narrow. I like nested comments too, but I haven't figured out how to increase the nesting level past 3 without severe readability problems.

Oops. The reason I usually just provide links rather than quotes is that I've been stressed out so badly by school that I haven't kept my computer up to date (probably why I can't access Wikipedia...). Another result is that I can't copy text from PDFs reliably without doing a LOT of editing, which takes even more time away from what should be the most important activity in my life. In this case, I screwed up while editing that last quote. It will eventually be fixed at the permanent version of this comment.

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Responding as AC to keep moderation. This is khayman80, aka Dumb Scientist.

... the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it. They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.

Huh? The article doesn't mention angry climate scientists, and I don't see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you're being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied you were a non-physicist... just because you don't have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison, I regularly call myself a non-biologist without feeling insulted because I recognize that my degrees say "physics" and not "biology". I've also said that I'm not good at chemistry, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "chemistry". I've also said that "I'm not a professional programmer, so I may have missed something that a computer science PhD would consider obvious" because I recognize that my degrees don't say "computer science". I've also said that I'm not an astronomer, because I recognize that my degrees don't say "astronomy". I've also said that I'm no cosmologist, because I recognize that I didn't specialize in cosmology in grad school. Do you think I've repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?

But if you're describing angry climate scientists that you've met in real life, then I don't know why they'd get angry. You're just innocently pointing out that they're bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren't scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they're frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can't imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate "scientists" have something to hide...

(There's probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who's genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)

What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms ...

As MobyDisk said, the p

Given the number of error sources listed in just this paper alone, along with the fact that half the changes went undocumented, it would make me even more dubious of the temperature record without having empirical data to verify it. ... To go back to my original point, somebody needed to get out there and do the legwork that Watts did, and provide empirical confirmation. ... When I said back in my first post in this long thread that RC.org was on the bullshit end of the surface station data, this was precisely the point: empirical data trumps statistical filtering (especially with something so complex). Dismissing a source of empirical confirmation data, because you don't like the guy's political views, is the bullshit end of the argument.

Yes, as my previous quotes showed, half of ~6,000 "statistically significant changepoints" were already recorded in the metadata. As in, scientists had already documented ~3,000 changes to surface station site characteristics.

The Menne 2009 paper refreshingly takes the opposite approach even while reinforcing your point that the longitudinal data is much more important. It even cited Pielke as a source of criticisms about the temperature record.

Notice that they're referring specifically to surfacestations.org, and they mention it only to quote several studies showing that Watts is making a claim that has already been considered and rejected. I'm referring to that website and wattsupwiththat.com. And note that I've already agreed with Pielke when he makes sense.

That's why I've said the satellite data makes the issue moot moving forward; unless something goes tragically wrong the environment around a satellite won't be exposed to any of the confounding factors that impact surface station data.

Like I said, I don't understand that subjective preference, but to each his own. I've already talked about problems unique to satellite data; it's useful (which is why my research centers on satellite data) but introduces new problems and suffers from a very short time series relative to the surface instrumental record.

Given the number of error sources listed in just this paper alone, along with the fact that half the changes went undocumented, it would make me even more dubious of the temperature record without having empirical data to verify it. ... To go back to my original point, somebody needed to get out there and do the legwork that Watts did, and provide empirical confirmation. ... When I said back in my first post in this long thread that RC.org was on the bullshit end of the surface station data, this was precisely the point: empirical data trumps statistical filtering (especially with something so complex). Dismissing a source of empirical confirmation data, because you don't like the guy's political views, is the bullshit end of the argument.

Yes, as my previous quotes showed, half of ~6,000 "statistically significant changepoints" were already recorded in the metadata. As in, scientists had already documented ~3,000 changes to surface station site characteristics.

The Menne 2009 paper refreshingly takes the opposite approach even while reinforcing your point that the longitudinal data is much more important. It even cited Pielke as a source of criticisms about the temperature record.

Notice that they're referring specifically to surfacestations.org, and they mention it only to quote several studies showing that Watts is making a claim that has already been considered and rejected. I'm referring to that website and wattsupwiththat.com. And note that I've already agreed with Pielke when he makes sense.

That's why I've said the satellite data makes the issue moot moving forward; unless something goes tragically wrong the environment around a satellite won't be exposed to any of the confounding factors that impact surface station data.

Like I said, I don't understand that subjective preference, but to each his own. I've already talked about problems unique to satellite data; it's useful (which is why my research centers on satellite data) but introduces new problems and suffers from a very short time series relative to the surface instrumental record.

Given the number of error sources listed in just this paper alone, along with the fact that half the changes went undocumented, it would make me even more dubious of the temperature record without having empirical data to verify it. ... To go back to my original point, somebody needed to get out there and do the legwork that Watts did, and provide empirical confirmation. ... When I said back in my first post in this long thread that RC.org was on the bullshit end of the surface station data, this was precisely the point: empirical data trumps statistical filtering (especially with something so complex). Dismissing a source of empirical confirmation data, because you don't like the guy's political views, is the bullshit end of the argument.

Yes, as my previous quotes showed, half of ~6,000 "statistically significant changepoints" were already recorded in the metadata. As in, scientists had already documented ~3,000 changes to surface station site characteristics.

The Menne 2009 paper refreshingly takes the opposite approach even while reinforcing your point that the longitudinal data is much more important. It even cited Pielke as a source of criticisms about the temperature record.

Notice that they're referring specifically to surfacestations.org, and they mention it only to quote several studies showing that Watts is making a claim that has already been considered and rejected. I'm referring to that website and wattsupwiththat.com. And note that I've already agreed with Pielke when he makes sense.

That's why I've said the satellite data makes the issue moot moving forward; unless something goes tragically wrong the environment around a satellite won't be exposed to any of the confounding factors that impact surface station data.

Like I said, I don't understand that subjective preference, but to each his own. I've already talked about problems unique to satellite data; it's useful (which is why my research centers on satellite data) but introduces new problems and suffers from a very short time series relative to the surface instrumental record.

So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability. Economics is actually the closest parallel to climate science ... I'm perfectly well aware that people in the field have adopted the title of scientists for themselves, in order to achieve a patina of respectability, but everyone has been doing that these days. ... it certainly doesn't meet all the criteria of a real science ... the semi-scientific schools of inquiry, like climate science and economics.

First, I've already pointed out that this economics comparison is ridiculous. Second, I've already pointed out that I've worked in both experimental optics and a field which is more related to climate science, and I don't agree with your assessment that the fields have differing levels of intellectual rigor. Second, this assertion that climate scientists can't perform experiments to test hypotheses has been made before. A similar assertion was made about modern cosmology, but as I point out it could just as easily be aimed at forensic science, astronomy, paleontology, etc.

If you think the consensus that climate science isn't science by the philosophy crowd bothers you ...

Citation needed. Notice that the person who preceded you wasn't so much a representative of the philosophy crowd as he was a representative of the creationist crowd.

So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability. Economics is actually the closest parallel to climate science ... I'm perfectly well aware that people in the field have adopted the title of scientists for themselves, in order to achieve a patina of respectability, but everyone has been doing that these days. ... it certainly doesn't meet all the criteria of a real science ... the semi-scientific schools of inquiry, like climate science and economics.

First, I've already pointed out that this economics comparison is ridiculous. Second, I've already pointed out that I've worked in both experimental optics and a field which is more related to climate science, and I don't agree with your assessment that the fields have differing levels of intellectual rigor. Second, this assertion that climate scientists can't perform experiments to test hypotheses has been made before. A similar assertion was made about modern cosmology, but as I point out it could just as easily be aimed at forensic science, astronomy, paleontology, etc.

If you think the consensus that climate science isn't science by the philosophy crowd bothers you ...

Citation needed. Notice that the person who preceded you wasn't so much a representative of the philosophy crowd as he was a representative of the creationist crowd.

The Watts research is case in point. He went out and did legwork that everyone else was ignoring. Unless you're actually claiming it's better off not knowing the quality of surface stations, he made a contribution. But the papers you reference, and your own statements on here, show your amazing reluctance to ever grant a single scrap of credit to the guy.

Yet again, it's the "everyone else was ignoring" clause that I'm disagreeing with. Watts isn't the first person to repeatedly survey stations in person, as riverat1 and I have been saying over and over. Notice that the emphasis is on correcting for undocumented changes. That is, scientists long since recognized that even their labor-intensive survey efforts would miss changes to the site quality, so the last decade has seen additional steps above and beyond repeated surveys. Watts isn't the first person to examine stations in person, he's just the first person to become an internet celebrity by claiming he is.

Climate science is closer in practice to economics than any other field. So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability.

Radtea made a similar argument, which I've already pointed out is ridiculous.

To use your own words, it's like a modified Salem Hypothesis that lets non-physicists like climate scientists think that their hand-waving is a legitimate form of argumentation, whereas everyone else is an anti-scientific nutjob. It probably comes from their field being only tenuously considered a science. Yes, yes, I've read http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, and as someone who as actually studied the philosophy of science, in graduate school... RC.org is wrong, again.

You're not the first "graduate student of the philosophy of science" to say these things. And it's really odd to see you label me a non-physicist. My physics B.S. is in physics, with a research emphasis on experimental optics. I went to graduate school planning to focus on quantum teleportation (that presentation and review paper was part of my physics M.S. defense). It's only in the last 4 years that I switched from optics to studying Earth's time-variable gravity field using GRACE k-band satellite ranging measurements (which got me interested in the physics of the climate). I realize that you think that "I don't fucking know what I'm talking about" but I'm curious as to what you think qualifies someone to be a physicist?

You're not familiar with the Gettier paradox then. I'm tempted here to just quote a bunch of papers on it to show you why you're wrong, without ever saying why, just to show you why your method of argumentation is so poor. But I'll just leave it up to you to research it and figure out for yourself why this claim is fallacious.

Again, you're not the first person to change the topic from "how many independent empirical data sources have been shown to be consistent with dynamical climate model ensembles" to something like "Is justified true belie

The Watts research is case in point. He went out and did legwork that everyone else was ignoring. Unless you're actually claiming it's better off not knowing the quality of surface stations, he made a contribution. But the papers you reference, and your own statements on here, show your amazing reluctance to ever grant a single scrap of credit to the guy.

Yet again, it's the "everyone else was ignoring" clause that I'm disagreeing with. Watts isn't the first person to repeatedly survey stations in person, as riverat1 and I have been saying over and over. Notice that the emphasis is on correcting for undocumented changes. That is, scientists long since recognized that even their labor-intensive survey efforts would miss changes to the site quality, so the last decade has seen additional steps above and beyond repeated surveys. Watts isn't the first person to examine stations in person, he's just the first person to become an internet celebrity by claiming he is.

Climate science is closer in practice to economics than any other field. So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability.

Radtea made a similar argument, which I've already pointed out is ridiculous.

To use your own words, it's like a modified Salem Hypothesis that lets non-physicists like climate scientists think that their hand-waving is a legitimate form of argumentation, whereas everyone else is an anti-scientific nutjob. It probably comes from their field being only tenuously considered a science. Yes, yes, I've read http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, and as someone who as actually studied the philosophy of science, in graduate school... RC.org is wrong, again.

You're not the first "graduate student of the philosophy of science" to say these things. And it's really odd to see you label me a non-physicist. My physics B.S. is in physics, with a research emphasis on experimental optics. I went to graduate school planning to focus on quantum teleportation (that presentation and review paper was part of my physics M.S. defense). It's only in the last 4 years that I switched from optics to studying Earth's time-variable gravity field using GRACE k-band satellite ranging measurements (which got me interested in the physics of the climate). I realize that you think that "I don't fucking know what I'm talking about" but I'm curious as to what you think qualifies someone to be a physicist?

You're not familiar with the Gettier paradox then. I'm tempted here to just quote a bunch of papers on it to show you why you're wrong, without ever saying why, just to show you why your method of argumentation is so poor. But I'll just leave it up to you to research it and figure out for yourself why this claim is fallacious.

Again, you're not the first person to change the topic from "how many independent empirical data sources have been shown to be consistent with dynamical climate model ensembles" to something like "Is justified true belie

The Watts research is case in point. He went out and did legwork that everyone else was ignoring. Unless you're actually claiming it's better off not knowing the quality of surface stations, he made a contribution. But the papers you reference, and your own statements on here, show your amazing reluctance to ever grant a single scrap of credit to the guy.

Yet again, it's the "everyone else was ignoring" clause that I'm disagreeing with. Watts isn't the first person to repeatedly survey stations in person, as riverat1 and I have been saying over and over. Notice that the emphasis is on correcting for undocumented changes. That is, scientists long since recognized that even their labor-intensive survey efforts would miss changes to the site quality, so the last decade has seen additional steps above and beyond repeated surveys. Watts isn't the first person to examine stations in person, he's just the first person to become an internet celebrity by claiming he is.

Climate science is closer in practice to economics than any other field. So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability.

Radtea made a similar argument, which I've already pointed out is ridiculous.

To use your own words, it's like a modified Salem Hypothesis that lets non-physicists like climate scientists think that their hand-waving is a legitimate form of argumentation, whereas everyone else is an anti-scientific nutjob. It probably comes from their field being only tenuously considered a science. Yes, yes, I've read http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, and as someone who as actually studied the philosophy of science, in graduate school... RC.org is wrong, again.

You're not the first "graduate student of the philosophy of science" to say these things. And it's really odd to see you label me a non-physicist. My physics B.S. is in physics, with a research emphasis on experimental optics. I went to graduate school planning to focus on quantum teleportation (that presentation and review paper was part of my physics M.S. defense). It's only in the last 4 years that I switched from optics to studying Earth's time-variable gravity field using GRACE k-band satellite ranging measurements (which got me interested in the physics of the climate). I realize that you think that "I don't fucking know what I'm talking about" but I'm curious as to what you think qualifies someone to be a physicist?

You're not familiar with the Gettier paradox then. I'm tempted here to just quote a bunch of papers on it to show you why you're wrong, without ever saying why, just to show you why your method of argumentation is so poor. But I'll just leave it up to you to research it and figure out for yourself why this claim is fallacious.

Again, you're not the first person to change the topic from "how many independent empirical data sources have been shown to be consistent with dynamical climate model ensembles" to something like "Is justified true belie

Ok great. But his politics don't matter, unless he's lying about the surface station data. Are you saying his surface station data is wrong? That's the only thing that matters. I haven't seen anything that says it is, but I could be wrong. In regards to the verification, what I mean is that the fact that his good stations agree with the national average shows his selection process is probably a good one, since it matches satellite temps.

What surface station data? Anthony Watts has a blog filled with photos and a history of failed journal submissions. I'm not disputing his politics. I'm saying that he clearly implied that the "best" 10% of stations would show global cooling (or stagnation) whereas the "bad" 90% of stations contaminated by the UHI would show an even bigger increase. When someone actually checked this, it turns out he was wrong. Seriously, read Menne et al 2010, linked previously but I'll give it one more shot. Scientists hadn't ignored any of the issues Watts implies. They'd actually checked the time series in quite a few interesting ways. Watts simply didn't do a thorough literature search before making his wacky claims.

I'm not an AGW denier. By no means am I claiming that. I only take exception when people overstate a threat, or ascribe global warming to whatever news item of the week it is. Back when I was living in SF, pretty much everything was ascribed to global warming on the local news.

I've made a list of all the nonsense I'd seen from the Greens. What utter rubbish. I've still got things to add to that list, too, I just can't divert time away from school...

In terms of the error bars, I just find it amusing that they're so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong. Being off by 30-50% over twenty years, for example, is considered acceptable. My own personal prediction is that by 2100, the temperature of the earth will be somewhere between the surface temperature of the sun, and absolute zero. Even though I'm confident this will play out, I'm still waiting to pick up my Nobel Prize, unfortunately.

They're smaller than the error bars you can get using the most sophisticated approach that can be solved using a paper and pencil. Decreasing the error bars further will require better understanding of cloud formation and aerosol interactions, faster computers, raw data at higher spatial and temporal densities, and a better theoretical understanding of the turbulence that is currently extremely difficult to model such as the oscillations ENSO, AO, AAO, NAO, PNA, AMO, PDO, MJO, etc.

Radtea already asked what would be necessary to convince me that our emissions aren't responsible for at least the majority of the warming since ~1970, as measured using 20 year smoothing to account for our current limitations.

Ok great. But his politics don't matter, unless he's lying about the surface station data. Are you saying his surface station data is wrong? That's the only thing that matters. I haven't seen anything that says it is, but I could be wrong. In regards to the verification, what I mean is that the fact that his good stations agree with the national average shows his selection process is probably a good one, since it matches satellite temps.

What surface station data? Anthony Watts has a blog filled with photos and a history of failed journal submissions. I'm not disputing his politics. I'm saying that he clearly implied that the "best" 10% of stations would show global cooling (or stagnation) whereas the "bad" 90% of stations contaminated by the UHI would show an even bigger increase. When someone actually checked this, it turns out he was wrong. Seriously, read Menne et al 2010, linked previously but I'll give it one more shot. Scientists hadn't ignored any of the issues Watts implies. They'd actually checked the time series in quite a few interesting ways. Watts simply didn't do a thorough literature search before making his wacky claims.

I'm not an AGW denier. By no means am I claiming that. I only take exception when people overstate a threat, or ascribe global warming to whatever news item of the week it is. Back when I was living in SF, pretty much everything was ascribed to global warming on the local news.

I've made a list of all the nonsense I'd seen from the Greens. What utter rubbish. I've still got things to add to that list, too, I just can't divert time away from school...

In terms of the error bars, I just find it amusing that they're so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong. Being off by 30-50% over twenty years, for example, is considered acceptable. My own personal prediction is that by 2100, the temperature of the earth will be somewhere between the surface temperature of the sun, and absolute zero. Even though I'm confident this will play out, I'm still waiting to pick up my Nobel Prize, unfortunately.

They're smaller than the error bars you can get using the most sophisticated approach that can be solved using a paper and pencil. Decreasing the error bars further will require better understanding of cloud formation and aerosol interactions, faster computers, raw data at higher spatial and temporal densities, and a better theoretical understanding of the turbulence that is currently extremely difficult to model such as the oscillations ENSO, AO, AAO, NAO, PNA, AMO, PDO, MJO, etc.

Radtea already asked what would be necessary to convince me that our emissions aren't responsible for at least the majority of the warming since ~1970, as measured using 20 year smoothing to account for our current limitations.

Now, if you're claiming that Watt is a crackpot and making up all of his surface station data, that's another thing entirely, but since his results correlate with other datasets... it's weird form of verification for him.

I'd been reading Anthony Watts's websites for years before Kyle and I discussed surfacestations.org last year. He acts like a serious crackpot on his other site wattsupwiththat.com, but clearly tries to keep a lid on the crazy when writing surfacestations.org.

Taken together, both sites make it clear that Watts believes climatologists are incompetent and/or engaged in a massive conspiracy. He ignores the multiple independent proxies and wind studies which back up the instrumental temperature record. He implies that the urban heat island effect is responsible for the rise of instrumental temperature record because 90% of stations are "poor quality" according to him. So scientists take the 10% of stations that are "approved" by Watts, and its time series is very similar to the time series of all stations. Furthermore, the abstract of the Menne 2010 paper I've already linked pointed out that the bias was "counterintuitive" to Watts's preconceptions. This is not a verification of Watts in any sense.

James Annan claims that the date (1990) was cherry picked as a minimum. ... Or to put it another way, because the article I linked to was accurate, there's very little reason in debunking a guy trying to debunk it. If you think I'm wrong, please let me know. ... I just flipped through some of the other predictions from the impact report of AR1. I'll have to do some research to see how they've turned out. ...

That's not how I read James Annan's series of three articles. He seemed to mainly be criticizing Pielke's sloppy statistics. I've previously described this in many places, but the best I can find at the moment is here. Again, the analyses I've linked take proper ensembles of the AR1 models, updated with actual emissions and other forcings, and analyze the results with an understanding of the statistical limitations imposed by the need to average out weather noise. I don't see any evidence that Pielke actually did any of this, which is probably why he hasn't gotten any of these rants published in a reputable journal.

... Scroll down to the Hansen analysis. It's basically saying what I'm saying, that the prediction was wrong, statistically speaking, or at least on the outer edges of the lower boundary. Whereas I was probably a bit too harsh on it, RC.org is characteristically too weak.

Again, I think the stratospheric water vapor issues I've previously linked and the inherent unpredictability of turbulence like ENSO are enough to explain most or all of this difference.

Sure, if you make your error bars large enough, you can always be right. =)

Even the "large" uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970. Even though the two curves have wide error bars, they don't overlap. What other objective measure should we use to determine when the error bars get "small enough"?

Care to send me the link to your presentation?

I've recently been threatened with a lawsuit on Slashdot, so my commitment to anonymity is stronger than ever. I don't want to end up like the CRU scientists. But I've described my

Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.

As I've explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:

The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.

... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.

What article?

The same one I've been linking for a while now.

For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.

I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"

In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.

Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses, I guess there's no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor's links again. There's also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.

It's important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.

All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.

But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the r

Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.

As I've explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:

The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.

... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.

What article?

The same one I've been linking for a while now.

For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.

I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"

In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.

Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses, I guess there's no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor's links again. There's also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.

It's important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.

All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.

But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the r

Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.

As I've explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:

The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.

... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.

What article?

The same one I've been linking for a while now.

For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.

I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"

In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.

Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses, I guess there's no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor's links again. There's also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.

It's important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.

All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.

But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the r

Did I mention it to begin with? No. So don't get angry when you bash on someone for not having graduate credentials in a related field, and they turn out to.

Don't mistake my disappointment in the (lack of) intellectual rigor of most non-scientists as anger. It's an emotion much more akin to sadness. And the point of my modified salem hypothesis was that computer science isn't really all that closely related to the radiative physics of the atmosphere. In my opinion, computer science should probably be called "algorithm engineering" in an attempt to emphasize the difference between it and the "natural sciences". The "standard" Salem hypothesis is similar and (as far as I can tell) very descriptive of reality; my only modification was that of generalizing the statement somewhat.

My current point is that a staggering number of crackpots stress the amount of time they've spent independently studying an idea, missing the fact that they have no objective way to determine if this "study" has actually enabled them to solve serious graduate physics problems because no one's ever graded their homework or exams. It's important to stress that this kind of independent verification is a critical part of the educational process.

I wasn't bragging, and if you read my original post, I'm encouraging people to do their own research instead of just reading what they should believe online. I can't believe anyone would disagree with that.

No, but I disagree with your assessment that Real Climate are bullshitting deceitful hacks, for reasons that I've explained at length in my article.

FWIW, I believe in AGW, and think it's a serious problem. Does that sound like a crackpot creationist to you? No? Oh, I guess you don't fucking know what you're talking about, do you?

Indeed, I just remembered that I asked people to mod up one of your previous comments. But I also disagree that "the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves, with their predictions historically overstating global warming" for similar reasons as Ambitwistor in his reply to your comment.

I have a Master's degree in computer science; my master's thesis was on the modeling of seawater.

Another example of the modified salem hypothesis.

But beyond that, I actually do my own research, and know how to eliminate crackpot theories better than Al Gore, who uncritically reported several false stories in an Inconvenient Truth.

Let me guess, the crackpot theories you've eliminated happen to be the ones that my previous comment showed are accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists who actually study these topics for a living?

Note that my article starts with the sentence "... this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smug politician's alarmism."

Later in the article, during my conversation with Jane Q. Public: "... the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.

So I've already listed several points that Al Gore got wrong in his silly little movie. I'm also amused by nonscientists who think Al Gore is relevant. He's not a scientist. He's a smug, pompous, washed up politician. If you seriously want to learn about the science behind abrupt climate change, stick to peer-reviewed journal articles and stay away from politicians like Al Gore.

I have a Master's degree in computer science; my master's thesis was on the modeling of seawater.

Another example of the modified salem hypothesis.

But beyond that, I actually do my own research, and know how to eliminate crackpot theories better than Al Gore, who uncritically reported several false stories in an Inconvenient Truth.

Let me guess, the crackpot theories you've eliminated happen to be the ones that my previous comment showed are accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists who actually study these topics for a living?

Note that my article starts with the sentence "... this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smug politician's alarmism."

Later in the article, during my conversation with Jane Q. Public: "... the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.

So I've already listed several points that Al Gore got wrong in his silly little movie. I'm also amused by nonscientists who think Al Gore is relevant. He's not a scientist. He's a smug, pompous, washed up politician. If you seriously want to learn about the science behind abrupt climate change, stick to peer-reviewed journal articles and stay away from politicians like Al Gore.

That's because breathing CO2 just recycles CO2 that's already in the biosphere. Digging miles into the earth to burn fossil fuels releases CO2 that hasn't been part of the biosphere for tens of millions of years. As I've repeatedly explained, fossil fuel use can be causally linked to the skyrocketing CO2 concentration through the C-12/C-13 isotope ratio (among other techniques).

Oddly enough, the National Academy of Sciences is aware that humans exhale CO2. Imagine that.

But think of the Plants!

Without all that Co2 we'll be suffocating our children's crops. :P

That's because breathing CO2 just recycles CO2 that's already in the biosphere. Digging miles into the earth to burn fossil fuels releases CO2 that hasn't been part of the biosphere for tens of millions of years. As I've repeatedly explained, fossil fuel use can be causally linked to the skyrocketing CO2 concentration through the C-12/C-13 isotope ratio (among other techniques).

Oddly enough, the National Academy of Sciences is aware that humans exhale CO2. Imagine that.

Natural atmospheric CO2 can be created with any kind of Carbon atom, but fossil fuels will only create C02 with C-12 atoms (since the C-14 atoms would have long decayed). So if we find out that recently the atmospheric concentration of C(14)02 to C(12)O2 is different than the concentration of atmospheric C-14 to C-12, then we can determine the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere that is created by burning fossil fuels.

Close. Volcanic eruptions would also emit CO2 that's low in C-12 because volcanic carbon was also underground for a long time. So it's necessary to compare the relative abundances of C-12 and C-13 (both stable) to distinguish volcanic eruptions from fossil fuel emissions.

ready up on it some.. the moon's moving away from us is the transfer of energy from the rotation of the earth slowing down into potential energy of the moon in earths gravity well. if we are to siphon off energy some/all/maybe more.. then we would be slowing/stopping/reversing the moon's accent from earth

No, he's right. Consider an Earth that's a perfect, frictionless sphere covered in a superfluid ocean. This idealized scenario has no friction, and the resulting tidal bulges would be directly under/opposite the Moon.

In reality, the coastlines and bathymetry of the liquid water oceans exert a drag on the tidal bulge. Because the Earth spins in the same direction as the Moon orbits, the tidal bulge is dragged ahead of the Moon. This asymmetry exerts a torque on the Moon which speeds it up and thus moves the Moon away from the Earth. This drag also slows down the Earth's rotation which preserves conservation of energy, as you correctly say.

But harnessing tidal energy is equivalent to increasing drag on the tidal bulge, which will imperceptibly move the tidal bulges farther away from the line connecting the Earth and Moon. This will increase the torque on the Moon and hasten its rise, exactly as PMBjornerud said.

Dear Science Community ... after arguing myself blue in the face with my right-wing relatives that environmentalism transcends politics and just because I like clean air and a healthy earth, doesn't make me a commie, publishing a single report that wildly contradict previous findings makes it practically impossible to defend you. ... Simply leaving the conclusion of the report at "Sorry guys, you know how we told you that we were all going to die if we don't outlaw sulfate aerosols? Yeah, well, we were wrong, and it turns out now we're really fucked up" is just like throwing handfuls of painkillers at Rush Limbaugh's mouth.

Dear BonquiquiShiquavius,

The LA Times and NPR aren't part of the scientific community. They reported on a book written by Eli Kintisch who is a journalist who writes about science. Also not really part of the scientific community.

I don't think geoengineering is a viable solution, so I don't care to read Kintisch's book. But in the article he seems to be repeating the well known facts that aerosols cool Earth's surface and have a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere than CO2. This doesn't "wildly contradict previous findings"-- I've been explaining for years that these nuances are described in detail by the IPCC AR4 WG1 report.

Sincerely,

A dumb member of the scientific community

My point is that science is a variation of what is called "Byzantine game theory". Mixed in with the earnest scientists are scientists who for whatever reason aren't generating earnest science. The proper Byzantine game has players who are deliberately deceptive. I use the term more loosely. Those defecting scientists could be, as my example implies, deliberately falsifying data. Or they could merely be heavily biased (which I think is the current problem, key parts of the science like past estimates of temperature are owned by heavily biased sources).

Then there is the problem of heavy dependency. For example, it doesn't make much sense to speak of thousands of papers concluding that the Earth is the warmest its ever been (as some have done) in hundreds of thousands of years, when the fact is that these estimates apparently come from four sources, the CRU, in the US NASA's GISS and the NOAA, and as I gather, some group in Japan. That apparently is it, no matter how many papers are published on the matter.

Two of those groups, the CRU and the GISS had in the recent past leaders who demonstrated heavy bias (Phil Jones who used to be head of the CRU and James Hensen who is current head of the GISS) and recently issued papers with a very aggressive take on climate (a CRU paper in the Fall of last year claimed a 6C rise in temperature by the end of this century, the GISS issued a paper that claims (less than three months into 2010) that 2010 will be "nearly certain" to be the warmest year since the GISS started collecting data.

This dependency is insidious. For example, while I was reading up on how the "hockey stick" was corrected (a paper by Michael Mann and Phil Jones around 2000, CRU-sourced research), I noticed in the previous link two things. First, the original people (plus some other authors) are claiming that their original work worked in a 2005 paper. The "independent confirmation" cited there however turns out to use the 2005 paper. So we have a hidden dependence on the same people who came up with the hockey stick mistake in the first place. This doesn't mean any of the work is incorrect or that the link above is the definitive study of corrections to the original Mann and Jones work. But it is a warning sign in my view. The science is not as sound as it should be and it is confusing serious scientists in the field.

The only other person to respond to you was too harsh. Your idea is "out there" and probably wrong, but it's not obviously wrong. It's even an interesting thought experiment. The same thing occurred to me during my undergrad in 2004, and the story is here. Long story short: normal matter in parallel universes wouldn't explain the Bullet cluster observations mentioned elsewhere on this page.

... I have yet to find an independent estimate backing the Mann-Jones estimate. ...

The futility of these conversations is depressing and frustrating.

Thanks for that comment. It inspired me to post a snippet of a similar conversation I had months ago, with your links and some others added:

Is it right, however, to lump together those who are skeptical of evolution with those who are skeptical of AGW, particularly CO2-driven AGW ?

Creationists confuse religious faith with falsifiable science. Among the general public, climate-change contrarians (and your average Greenpeace/PETA loony) confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science. In both cases, scientists are much less likely to agree with either claim, and that likelihood decreases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field. That's probably why both groups tend to accuse the scientific community of conspiracy and/or widespread incompetence.

At my blog, the following statement is both legible and has popup titles describing why that link was chosen. Here it is without the links first: "And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational levels."

And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational lev els.

Thanks for that comment. It inspired me to post a snippet of a similar conversation I had months ago, with your links and some others added:

Is it right, however, to lump together those who are skeptical of evolution with those who are skeptical of AGW, particularly CO2-driven AGW ?

Creationists confuse religious faith with falsifiable science. Among the general public, climate-change contrarians (and your average Greenpeace/PETA loony) confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science. In both cases, scientists are much less likely to agree with either claim, and that likelihood decreases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field. That's probably why both groups tend to accuse the scientific community of conspiracy and/or widespread incompetence.

At my blog, the following statement is both legible and has popup titles describing why that link was chosen. Here it is without the links first: "And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational levels."

And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational lev els.

Thanks for that comment. It inspired me to post a snippet of a similar conversation I had months ago, with your links and some others added:

Is it right, however, to lump together those who are skeptical of evolution with those who are skeptical of AGW, particularly CO2-driven AGW ?

Creationists confuse religious faith with falsifiable science. Among the general public, climate-change contrarians (and your average Greenpeace/PETA loony) confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science. In both cases, scientists are much less likely to agree with either claim, and that likelihood decreases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field. That's probably why both groups tend to accuse the scientific community of conspiracy and/or widespread incompetence.

At my blog, the following statement is both legible and has popup titles describing why that link was chosen. Here it is without the links first: "And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational levels."

And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational lev els.

Thanks for that comment. It inspired me to post a snippet of a similar conversation I had months ago, with your links and some others added:

Is it right, however, to lump together those who are skeptical of evolution with those who are skeptical of AGW, particularly CO2-driven AGW ?

Creationists confuse religious faith with falsifiable science. Among the general public, climate-change contrarians (and your average Greenpeace/PETA loony) confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science. In both cases, scientists are much less likely to agree with either claim, and that likelihood decreases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field. That's probably why both groups tend to accuse the scientific community of conspiracy and/or widespread incompetence.

At my blog, the following statement is both legible and has popup titles describing why that link was chosen. Here it is without the links first: "And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational levels."

And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational lev els.

If the decay can be caused by something outside of our backward light-cone, it is for all practical purposes acausal, and always will be, unless you believe time travel is possible. I don't, personally.

I also think that time travel is likely to be impossible. You're probably aware of this, but others might be interested to hear that FTL automatically implies time travel, unless a preferred frame exists... which wouldn't exactly conflict with special relativity's predictions but certainly would cast doubt on the elegance and universality of the principle of relativity.

I just thought that was really cool when I first heard about it. Warp drives automatically double as time machines, as long as you have fairly powerful "normal space" delta-v capability. Then it further worsened my suspension of disbelief during scifi shows where scientists hop around the galaxy in spaceships and then act surprised when they find a time machine. Even more disappointingly, all the time machines involve additional technobabble (above and beyond the already established FTL: slingshot around the sun, wormhole through solar flare, blah blah reverse polarity blah), when I've described a fairly simple maneuver in the first comment that can send almost any FTL ship in any show back in time.

As promised, I copied most of my comments to Dumb Scientist but removed your words and replaced them with paraphrased versions attributed to "Someone".

As usual, I've removed your insults in an attempt to make this look like a more civilized conversation, and to focus on the science. Specifically, I removed the part where you interpreted "I just haven't seen any papers that fit this (obviously fraudulent/ridiculous) description" as though I meant "I [Jane] am the only one who could have made a "fraudulent or ridiculous description".

I really did just mean that I haven't seen any papers that look extremely questionable (your words) or ridiculously incompetent (my words... which seem pretty similar). In fact, the situation you've been describing sounds so serious that it implies scientists are outright frauds. All I meant is that I haven't seen such ridiculous and fraudulent papers. I've repeated that exact sentiment multiple times throughout our conversation, so I'm puzzled as to how you immediately jumped to a more sinister interpretation that's inconsistent with the way I've used those phrases in the past.

Maybe if you'd asked me what I meant instead of (among other things) calling me a stupid, insufferable, hypocritical asshole... I might have been inclined to apologize for any vagueness in my statement. I will anyway, though: I'm sorry for any confusion my statement could have caused. I'll try harder to be less ambiguous in the future.

The conversation as posted on Dumb Scientist also doesn't draw attention to the contrast between these accusations (which really doesn't seem like it could possibly be misinterpreted) and reality. Like I said in my reply to your previous accusations, that's because I'm much more interested in discussing physics than humiliating people.

Have a nice day.

As I've explained, climate is the global average over at least ~20 years. That's a limitation of modern science; raw data simply isn't dense enough, and not enough decadal oscillations can be simulated precisely enough to meaningfully talk about "climate" on a shorter timescale. Trends of 8-9 years are probably under the noise floor, and (as I explain in that link) it's important to remember that just because CO2 is the most significant forcing, that doesn't mean other forcings are completely insignificant.

Because of this limitation, climatologists primarily use hindcasts through proxy records to validate the models, among other techniques. Making a prediction and then waiting 20 years to see if it comes true isn't practical, so few peer-reviewed papers tend to ask "Hey, what did that model 20 years ago predict?" But these analyses are informally performed and they seem both honest and generally positive to me. You can verify this yourself by downloading the GCM source codes and global temperature data in the sources listed here. Remember to smooth over at least 20 years, and compare the projected emissions used to the actual values. (Most projections give several "scenarios" where CO2 emissions change differently to account for uncertainty in future human behavior.)

As I've explained, climate is the global average over at least ~20 years. That's a limitation of modern science; raw data simply isn't dense enough, and not enough decadal oscillations can be simulated precisely enough to meaningfully talk about "climate" on a shorter timescale. Trends of 8-9 years are probably under the noise floor, and (as I explain in that link) it's important to remember that just because CO2 is the most significant forcing, that doesn't mean other forcings are completely insignificant.

Because of this limitation, climatologists primarily use hindcasts through proxy records to validate the models, among other techniques. Making a prediction and then waiting 20 years to see if it comes true isn't practical, so few peer-reviewed papers tend to ask "Hey, what did that model 20 years ago predict?" But these analyses are informally performed and they seem both honest and generally positive to me. You can verify this yourself by downloading the GCM source codes and global temperature data in the sources listed here. Remember to smooth over at least 20 years, and compare the projected emissions used to the actual values. (Most projections give several "scenarios" where CO2 emissions change differently to account for uncertainty in future human behavior.)