Followup: Anti-Global Warming Story Itself Flawed

The Bad Astronomer writes "As posted earlier on Slashdot, a Forbes Op/Ed claims there is a 'gaping hole in global warming' theories, based on a recent paper. However, both the Forbes article and the paper on which it's based are themselves seriously flawed. The paper has been excoriated by climate scientists, saying the model used is 'unrealistic' and 'incorrect,' and the author has a track record of using bad models to make incorrect conclusions."

Comments

Re:Evidence?

[uncadonna]

We should demand some actual evidence of "wrongness".

.

Fair enough. Here you go.

taking the words of people whose careers depend on it

Phil is an astronomer. And methinks you are a troll.

Re:The paper disclaims its own results

[Geoffrey.landis]

and by saying that it is not possible to track this function, this blows a hole in the previous theories.

No, it doesn't blow any holes in previous theories because none of the previous theories use correlation coefficient of the random variations as a means to calculate the feedback parameters. It's a new technique.

It's actually a kind of clever way to try to back out the feedback parameters out of the random noise in the data set. It's rather a pity that they say it doesn't work, but that's the way it goes-- not everything you try works. Basically, they're saying that the radiative feedback should be instantaneous, while the non-radiative feedback will lag the forcing function, so if you look for the lag part, this will tell you about the non-radiative feedback. But, unfortunately, they don't have a good physics-based model of how much the non-radiative feedback will lag by-- in essence, they have to have the problem solved already in order to solve it.

In any case, though, the paper conceded the basic premises of anthropogenic global warming right from the start: what it's trying to analyze is how strong the effect is, not whether it is there. Even if their technique worked, it would tweak the model, not "blow holes" in it.