Slashdot Mirror
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."
If you actually read the paper and not the incredibly hyped press releases, the paper basically disclaims the validity of its own results. Note the following paragraph, immediately before the conclusions:
Our preliminary work on this issue suggests no simple answer to the question. We conclude that the fundamental obstacle to feedback diagnosis remains the same, no matter what time lag is addressed: without knowledge of time-varying radiative forcing components in the satellite radiative flux measurements, feedback cannot be accurately diagnosed from the co-variations between radiative flux and temperature.
The entire paper is about to trying to analyze the feedback from the co-variation between radiative flux and temperature-- this sentence basically says that, in their analysis, the analysis cannot be done accurately.
Basically, the paper does not "blow holes in global warming"-- what it does is say that this particular technique is not able to accurately discriminate the feedback function.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This guy is a professor at the (not very rigorous*) institution I did my undergraduate work at. (This is the "University of Alabama in Huntsville", not the larger and better-known University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.) I don't remember him specifically, but I know there was a cadre of anti-global-warming "climate scientists" there with a politico-religious axe to grind and who were pretty clearly not doing science for knowledge's sake.
It's notable that if you google this guy's (Spencer's) name, the first couple hits are to "www.drroyspencer.com/".
Nobody that I know who is actually a prominent scientist tries to pimp their public persona to this degree, or (tellingly) makes a big deal about the title "Dr."
*They really do have shitty academic standards. I graduated summa cum laude with a BS in physics, yet had never written $\vec x$ (we never did formal vector algebra), and wound up having to take four "remedial" undergrad classes at the Univ of Arizona where I am finishing up grad school.
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
Now, perhaps this fudging of the data wasn't malicious (in fact, I'll argue that it was done with the best of intentions), and perhaps some of the fudges actually have a reasonable rationale that we can agree upon - but let's not pretend that there is a magical thermometer we can stick in the air, and get the current Global Average Temperature (much less a magical thermometer we can read from 1000 years ago to do the same thing). At best, this is a field over-reliant on proxy data, and *everyone* should be skeptical of that sort of weak science.