Perhaps if, as you claim, a computer model was derived only from observable and measurable physical phenomena, an undiscerning man might accept it as proof. However, that is not true. While climate models do incorporate those things, they also incorporate "parameterizations" [wikipedia.org] to allow for variables too complex to simulate.
So all somebody has to do to refute predictions of global warming is come up with a model using whatever parameterizations you like that remains consistent with historical data but does not exhibit substantial global warming in response to the amounts of CO2 released into the atmosphere by humans.
Yet oddly, nobody has managed to do this. Perhaps those parameterizations are not in fact as arbitrary as you contend, but rather tightly constrained by the physics and the historical climate record, such that every model that is consistent with the data ends up predicting global warming.
This truth about climate models should be obvious. If we can't accurately simulate fluid dynamics in general (much less in a two-phase system) how could we presume to simulate the climate, which is made up of fluids?
One might just as well argue that we should give up trying to pump fluids through pipes to deliver water to our homes and ship fuels across the world, because these involve fluid dynamics. Similarly, we should give up trying to design machines that fly through the air or move through the water, because these involve simulations of fluid dynamics. Or perhaps the task of making predictions about the behavior of fluids is not quite as hopeless as you imagine?
No, I meant what I said. No one would put forth a model that disagres with the data, therefore an agreement with the stastical result is a foregone conclusion.
If you are saying that every model that is consistent with the data necessarily predicts global warming as a result of CO2 released by man, then aren't you affirming that global warming must occur?
Chaos is a property of a system that frequently transcends scale (Self-similarity [wikipedia.org]), weather is an instance of climate, therefore if weather is chaotic, climate is chaotic.
This does not follow, there are many examples of phenomena that exhibit chaotic behavior at one scale and regularity at another. Turbulent flow of fluid through a pipe is one example, in which the instantaneous flow can be chaotic, while the flow averaged over long periods of time is quite regular. You have to actually model the specific phenomena to know. Climate models similarly exhibit chaotic behavior a short time scales (what we know as weather) and regularity at longer time scales.
Well, here's a problem already. Last I checked, climate sensitivity wasn't well known. Instead they were extrapolating from typical interglacial sensitivity which would IMHO be considerably greater due to the presence of considerable ice fields in the Northern Hemisphere.
Check again. You clearly failed to read read the paper I cited, which lists multiple bases for estimating climate sensitivity and the error limits on each.
Perhaps you misunderstand saturation. Only specific frequencies are absorbed by CO2. Only a certain amount of those frequencies are sent out by the sun. Once those frequencies are completely absorbed, no further absorption is possible, because no further frequencies of that sort exist.
While scientific errors are eventually corrected in the scientific literature, it seems that within the denialosphere no error ever dies. You are repeating an early mistake--one that was recognized and corrected half a century ago. The source of the error was the failure to properly consider transfer of energy among layers in the atmosphere.
What turns out to be critical is the altitude from which energy is radiated into space. Adding CO2 at higher altitudes has the effect of moving the effective altitude of radiation emission up to higher altitudes from which radiation is emitted less effectively, because it is cooler. Even if CO2 is saturated at lower altitudes, it will not be at the highest, so it is possible to A more detailed explanation is provided here
That's not a prediction, that's an ad hoc rationalization. If you see CO2 lagging, you assume that there was no "CO2 added directly to the atmosphere" (even though, no matter what the source, human, ocean, plant or otherwise, it's still "added"). If you see CO2 leading, you assume that the CO2 as "added directly".
It's not an assumption, it is an unavoidable consequence of the physics of CO2 absorption and solubility. Because there is a positive feedback between CO2 induced warming and release of CO2 from the oceans, it is necessarily the case that if they oceans are warmed by some factor other than CO2, then CO2 is increased after a delay--and if CO2 is directly added to the system, then temperature will increase later on. Since global climate models are physical models that incorporate the radiation absorption/emission spectrum of CO2 and the temperature dependence of CO2 solubility, they necessarily exhibit this behavior.
What skeptics are saying is that the data shows a correlation, but that that doesn't necessarily mean causation. You can't point to a computer model to prove them wrong because the way computer models are generated and validated guarantees they will agree with the statistical result
It sounds as if you imagine that global climate models are statistical models that fit historical correlations and extrapolate them forward into the future. This is not correct.
Rather, they are physical models. They model causal links, not statistical correlations. So if the model exhibits a correlation between two measures, such as e.g. temperature and CO2, it is because the fundamental physics--the spectral properties of CO2, the temperature dependence of CO2 solubility in water, etc. predicts a causal link which will result in a correlation. So to come up with a model that does not predict that increased CO2 will result in increased temperatures, one would need to hypothesize and model additional physical mechanisms that would limit or compensate for the warming effect of CO2, thereby reducing the magnitude of the correlation. However, to be credible, your model would have to remain consistent with the observed correlations seen in current and historical data, as well as the climate response to "natural experiments" such as volcanic eruptions.
You also know that CO2 has a maximum absorption limit, right? And that after that saturation point, it cannot possibly contribute to more warming, right?
However, CO2 is not saturated. Moreover, as you add more CO2 to the atmosphere, you increase CO2 at upper altitudes where CO2 is still below the saturation point.
Look, your big problem here is the lag time in the ice core record. CO2 increases lag temp changes by about 800 years. Not sure exactly what the world looked like 800 years ago since we only have proxy data, but there you go.
Not sure why you see this as a problem, as this is what the models predict. If something like increased solar radiation increases temperature, then CO2 rises as a response (due to decreased solubility of CO2 in warm water) and amplifies the increase in temperature, so the temperature increase leads the CO2 rise. On the other hand, if CO2 is added directly to the atmosphere, then temperature rises as a response (and amplifies the increase in CO2). So in this case CO2 leads temperature.
As far as these scientists and their statement, I agree with others here who've expressed the opinion that they're only hurting the pro-AGW camp. The best thing they could do would be to advocate for a full disclosure of all raw data and have it made available to anyone, and set up something like the X-Prize for anyone that can come up with a decently-working climatological model whose code and algorithms can be released publicly and tested by anyone willing to do so.
The notion that the code and algorithms for climate models is secret is an urban legend. Model algorithms are described in published scientific papers. Code for a number of models, as well as quite a bit of data, both raw and processed, can be found here.
Here is an independent group that is rewriting the GISTEMP temperature-reconstruction data as an open source project.
When people bring up the medieval warming period, they do it to point out "we don't understand very much at all about how global climate works". The logic being that if we do indeed understand it so little, that it's dangerous to spend a great deal of money and resources doing something that may not even have any effect, or may even make the effect worse, at the expense of our economy and lifestyle.
It is hard to imagine how producing less of a perturbation of climate by moderating our release of CO2 into the atmosphere will make the effect of CO2 worse. Certainly, if one honestly believes that we really don't have much understanding of how climate works, to the point that a substantial period of global warming could occur for no identified reason, one would rationally be even more reluctant to mess with climate by releasing large quantities of a "greenhouse" gas, particularly one with a long atmospheric residence time, such as CO2. The fact that the MWP is frequently cited as justification for doing less to control CO2 is a strong indicator that the people repeating these anti-AGW arguments are not really thinking them through, but simply exhibiting a knee-jerk reaction, embracing anything that appears to be a challenge to our modern understanding of climate physics.
That's not surprising, it certainly seems like a lot of anti-evolutionists are also in the anti-AGW battle.
Yes, this has been called "crank magnetism". People who are credulous enough to buy into one implausible conspiracy theory are very likely to believe in others. Anybody who has read the evolution or moon landing denial literature is likely to experience deja vu with respect to the kinds of arguments being employed by deniers of AGW.
I am a scientist, and I found the abuse of the peer review system to be an unforgivable sin. These people should be stripped of their PhDs.
A Ph.D. is a record of educational achievement, not some sort of professional license that can be taken away for bad behavior, even criminal behavior (of which none is in evidence, aside from theft of emails). I find it difficult that to believe than an actual scientist would talk about "stripping somebody of their Ph.D." But perhaps you were just reacting emotionally, and didn't mean it seriously. People do this, sometimes. It is likely that many of the email comments that have been interpreted as "abuse of the peer review system" were also words written in anger and not meant seriously. After all, the papers being discussed were in fact published, and even made it into the IPCC report. Which may be why two separate review panels have failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing.
Actually, if you look at the statistical distribution of estimates from the models and other constraints on climate sensitivity, the lower limit is pretty well known, so the likelihood that anticipated increases in CO2 will not produce dangerous warming is quite small. What is not well established is the upper limit. This article gives the confidence limits on warming derived from various sources, and explains why the upper margin of error is so much wider than the lower one.
Moreover, there are a number of possible factors that could make the consequences of global warming much worse, but which are not understood well enough to model. These include possible destabilization of ocean methane clathrates to release massive quantities of additional greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, and also destabilization of polar ice by mechanisms (e.g. ice sheet flow) other than melting (discussed here).
Better solutions would be "How can we rarefy carbon dioxide into elemental carbon and oxygen prior to sequestration?", because elemental carbon is inert, and stable over geological time periods.--- Yet I keep reading all these widely publicised "Lets bury it in a big tank in the ground!" proposals
The reason all of that carbon is oxidized to CO2 is that this reaction yields energy. There is no free lunch in thermodynamics. To reverse that reaction and convert it back to elemental carbon and oxygen, you have to take all of the energy that we get out of burning fossil fuels and pump every bit it right back into the waste products (plus some extra due to thermodynamic losses). So considering the full cycle, burning fossil fuels would not yield energy, it would cost energy.
It is thus understandable that there has not been much interest in exploring this strategy.
But they are not climatologist. I was told if they are not a climatologist i should not listen to them about climate science. Now your telling me i should listen to them only when they support a particular view point?
Climatologists are certainly the most qualified to evaluate climate science, and the notion that virtually all climate scientists in the world are engaged in a massive conspiracy to cover up fatal flaws in the current climate models in order to promote a political agenda is more than a little nuts.
Nevertheless, there are powerful and wealthy interests that stand to gain by convincing people that that is what is happening, and successful public relations strategies designed to create public doubt about the scientific consensus, originally developed by tobacco companies to distract the public from the evidence linking smoking and cancer, continue to be used today (indeed, some of the same spokesmen are involved). These people are expert at crafting plausible-sounding arguments designed to mislead nonscientists.
Other scientists, while not having the same level of knowledge of the details of climate science as actual climate scientists, do understand the nature of scientific evidence and how to evaluate it, and are qualified to distinguish real science from the sort of plausible-sounding bullshit that is used to mislead the general public. In particular, the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, and similar Academies of other nations, are the most experienced and critical scientists in the world, people who have actually made major scientific discoveries. So if you want somebody with no vested interest either for or against climate change research, and with the general competence to evaluate the evidence and judge whether the work in a particular field is legitimate or pseudoscience, these are the people to ask.
The planet seems to have a temperature range that acts as a strange attractor.
Weather seems to be chaotic, but there is little evidence that climate is. But if it would be very scary if true, because then a small perturbation--increasing CO2, for example--could initiate wild swings around that attractor, rather than the rather orderly and predictable behavior that current climate models exhibt. We certainly know that the planet has experienced temperature swings in the past that would be catastrophic if they happened today.
Yet nobody has managed to produce a climate model which is consistent with known physics, which is reasonably consistent with climate records, and which does not predict dangerous warming from the amount of CO2 humans are putting into the atmosphere. Considering that there are multiple wealthy interests that stand to lose financially from efforts to regulate CO2, and that would doubtless be willing to fund development of such a model, this seems kind of surprising, don't you think?
Hmmmm.... perhaps the notion that these models are poorly constrained and can be tweaked to do anything you want--an idea that seems to be widely held only by those who have never actually tried to create one--is a bit exaggerated?
Furthermore, it seems to suggest that the Earth can warm up several degrees and actually be beneficial for mankind in terms of increased growing seasons for many areas and increased food production in general. It sort of begs the question.... what are we worried about even if the global environment is warming up?
It is certainly possible that some northerly areas might benefit from longer growing seasons. On the other hand, the temperate areas that currently enjoy a near optimal climate, and that produce much of the world's food would be expected to suffer. So a country like Greenland might benefit, while the US would probably lose big. Since agriculture cannot shift from one region to another that rapidly, countries that currentl import large quantities of foods like grain may experience massive starvation.
IF the MWP (and the other warm periods that we can see in ice core data) was global then that pretty much falsifies the current climate models. Thus, there's no "added" problem you describe we should be afraid of.
It suggests the possibility that the models might be incomplete. It certainly does offer any kind of evidence that an increase in CO2 does not create global warming, which is based upon well-established physics. If the MWP was indeed global, it suggests is that climate might be far more unstable than current models propose, and that there is some other mechanism besides CO2 that could produce a high degree of warming. This is very frightening, because add that to CO2 and who knows how much warming might result? Current climate models do not predict runaway global warming (the deadly Venus scenario) in response to anticipated rises in CO2. But if climate is really as unstable as a global MWP would indicate, then all bets are off, and perturbation of climate is far more dangerous than climate scientists currently believe.
I'd trust that website a lot more if it wasn't owned by a company that was founded by Al Gore's former communications director.
You can play this kind of "n degrees of separation" game with almost anybody. But it's not a matter of trust. The website provides citations to the original scientific literature and links to the data. You can check it all yourself if you are interested enough to take the time to develop the expertise.
It's the catastrophic predictions based upon mystery models with hidden data that bothers me.
"Mystery models with hidden data" is an urban myth. Any publication has to describe the models and the data well enough for another scientist to reproduce it. Many of the models and much of the data is freely available over the internet.
A great part of the problem is that head smacking obvious issues like what caused the medieval global warming
The existence of a medieval global warming period seems to be an article of faith among opponents of global warming, even though the evidence that it was global rather than regional is much weaker (PDF) than the evidence for modern global warming. The oddest thing is that they seem think that the possible existence of some additional mechanism that is not understood whereby the earth could warm more than is expected from current global climate models models should make people less concerned about the possible consequences of modern global warming. If the medieval warm period was indeed global, it would argue that there is some additional mechanism that could add to or amplify the modern CO2 induced warming so as to cause global temperatures to shoot up even higher than projected.
Prior to the scandal. I'd like to see if they could muster the same numbers today. I'd bet a shiny penny that they couldn't.
Scientists tend to be less susceptible to media hysteria than the general public. Many have seen their own work misrepresented in the press. Also, scientists do not find anything particularly shocking about a scientist getting angry and saying some dumb things in an email--they've seen it happen live. They are more likely to pay attention to the fact that two separate review panels have already concluded that there is no evidence of falsification of data on the part of Jones or CRU. And CRU is just one of many research groups that have studied climate change, and other groups have replicated their major findings. Even if there had turned out to be some substance to the accusations, it would have little influence on scientists' opinions regarding the reality of AGW, which are based upon the entire body of data, not a single lab or personality.
Climate models are fairly tightly constrained, because they are not fits to arbitrary equations with lots of free parameters, but rather simulations of physical processes for which most of the critical parameters are fairly well known from other data. So the capacity to improve the fit by adjusting the variables is limited. A climate model also has to be consistent with historical (and what is known of prehistorical) climate data, as well as the climate response to "natural experiments" like volcanic eruptions. See here and here for explanation. Further information about the uncertainties in model projections can be found here (PDF)
And, ahem, absolutely, not even one, respectable scientist, anywhere, has come out and challenged some of the assumptions or ethics of the IPCC and Climategate mob.
Oh, scientists are a pretty contrary lot. You can probably find one or two who disagree about pretty much anything, no matter how well established. However, Dr. Curry seems to be mainly disagreeing with how the report was presented, rather than its conclusions, since she states "I don’t disagree with their conclusion about finding no evidence of scientific misconduct: I haven’t seen any evidence of plagiarism or fabrication/falsification of data by the CRU scientists. "
Nope. We are actually in a solar cooling phase, which is masking somewhat the increase due to CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, the solar cooling trend will eventually reverse, and we'll then have solar heating on top of CO2-mediated warming
The impact the rest of nature has astronomically outstrips the impact humans alone have.
Technically correct. The planet is estimated to be about 30 degrees C warmer than it would be if there were no natural CO2. The anticipated temperature increase due to man's emissions of CO2 is only a fraction of that, but still enough to be a serious problem.
These changes are only "unprecedented" if you describe "modern times" as spanning only the last few centuries. The planet has undergone more severe changes than any doomsayer has predicted - life, including human life, has done nothing but flourish.
Also correct. Current theory does not predict that global warming will wipe out humanity. But substantial sea level rises and changes in the climate in regions where most of the world's food is grown would be far more disruptive than in the prehistoric world.
Slashdot Mirror
So all somebody has to do to refute predictions of global warming is come up with a model using whatever parameterizations you like that remains consistent with historical data but does not exhibit substantial global warming in response to the amounts of CO2 released into the atmosphere by humans.
Yet oddly, nobody has managed to do this. Perhaps those parameterizations are not in fact as arbitrary as you contend, but rather tightly constrained by the physics and the historical climate record, such that every model that is consistent with the data ends up predicting global warming.
One might just as well argue that we should give up trying to pump fluids through pipes to deliver water to our homes and ship fuels across the world, because these involve fluid dynamics. Similarly, we should give up trying to design machines that fly through the air or move through the water, because these involve simulations of fluid dynamics. Or perhaps the task of making predictions about the behavior of fluids is not quite as hopeless as you imagine?
If you are saying that every model that is consistent with the data necessarily predicts global warming as a result of CO2 released by man, then aren't you affirming that global warming must occur?
This does not follow, there are many examples of phenomena that exhibit chaotic behavior at one scale and regularity at another. Turbulent flow of fluid through a pipe is one example, in which the instantaneous flow can be chaotic, while the flow averaged over long periods of time is quite regular. You have to actually model the specific phenomena to know. Climate models similarly exhibit chaotic behavior a short time scales (what we know as weather) and regularity at longer time scales.
Check again. You clearly failed to read read the paper I cited, which lists multiple bases for estimating climate sensitivity and the error limits on each.
Here it is again (pdf).
While scientific errors are eventually corrected in the scientific literature, it seems that within the denialosphere no error ever dies. You are repeating an early mistake--one that was recognized and corrected half a century ago. The source of the error was the failure to properly consider transfer of energy among layers in the atmosphere.
What turns out to be critical is the altitude from which energy is radiated into space. Adding CO2 at higher altitudes has the effect of moving the effective altitude of radiation emission up to higher altitudes from which radiation is emitted less effectively, because it is cooler. Even if CO2 is saturated at lower altitudes, it will not be at the highest, so it is possible to A more detailed explanation is provided here
It's not an assumption, it is an unavoidable consequence of the physics of CO2 absorption and solubility. Because there is a positive feedback between CO2 induced warming and release of CO2 from the oceans, it is necessarily the case that if they oceans are warmed by some factor other than CO2, then CO2 is increased after a delay--and if CO2 is directly added to the system, then temperature will increase later on. Since global climate models are physical models that incorporate the radiation absorption/emission spectrum of CO2 and the temperature dependence of CO2 solubility, they necessarily exhibit this behavior.
It sounds as if you imagine that global climate models are statistical models that fit historical correlations and extrapolate them forward into the future. This is not correct.
Rather, they are physical models. They model causal links, not statistical correlations. So if the model exhibits a correlation between two measures, such as e.g. temperature and CO2, it is because the fundamental physics--the spectral properties of CO2, the temperature dependence of CO2 solubility in water, etc. predicts a causal link which will result in a correlation. So to come up with a model that does not predict that increased CO2 will result in increased temperatures, one would need to hypothesize and model additional physical mechanisms that would limit or compensate for the warming effect of CO2, thereby reducing the magnitude of the correlation. However, to be credible, your model would have to remain consistent with the observed correlations seen in current and historical data, as well as the climate response to "natural experiments" such as volcanic eruptions.
However, CO2 is not saturated. Moreover, as you add more CO2 to the atmosphere, you increase CO2 at upper altitudes where CO2 is still below the saturation point.
Not sure why you see this as a problem, as this is what the models predict. If something like increased solar radiation increases temperature, then CO2 rises as a response (due to decreased solubility of CO2 in warm water) and amplifies the increase in temperature, so the temperature increase leads the CO2 rise. On the other hand, if CO2 is added directly to the atmosphere, then temperature rises as a response (and amplifies the increase in CO2). So in this case CO2 leads temperature.
The notion that the code and algorithms for climate models is secret is an urban legend. Model algorithms are described in published scientific papers. Code for a number of models, as well as quite a bit of data, both raw and processed, can be found here.
Here is an independent group that is rewriting the GISTEMP temperature-reconstruction data as an open source project.
It is hard to imagine how producing less of a perturbation of climate by moderating our release of CO2 into the atmosphere will make the effect of CO2 worse. Certainly, if one honestly believes that we really don't have much understanding of how climate works, to the point that a substantial period of global warming could occur for no identified reason, one would rationally be even more reluctant to mess with climate by releasing large quantities of a "greenhouse" gas, particularly one with a long atmospheric residence time, such as CO2. The fact that the MWP is frequently cited as justification for doing less to control CO2 is a strong indicator that the people repeating these anti-AGW arguments are not really thinking them through, but simply exhibiting a knee-jerk reaction, embracing anything that appears to be a challenge to our modern understanding of climate physics.
Yes, this has been called "crank magnetism". People who are credulous enough to buy into one implausible conspiracy theory are very likely to believe in others. Anybody who has read the evolution or moon landing denial literature is likely to experience deja vu with respect to the kinds of arguments being employed by deniers of AGW.
A Ph.D. is a record of educational achievement, not some sort of professional license that can be taken away for bad behavior, even criminal behavior (of which none is in evidence, aside from theft of emails). I find it difficult that to believe than an actual scientist would talk about "stripping somebody of their Ph.D." But perhaps you were just reacting emotionally, and didn't mean it seriously. People do this, sometimes. It is likely that many of the email comments that have been interpreted as "abuse of the peer review system" were also words written in anger and not meant seriously. After all, the papers being discussed were in fact published, and even made it into the IPCC report. Which may be why two separate review panels have failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing.
Actually, if you look at the statistical distribution of estimates from the models and other constraints on climate sensitivity, the lower limit is pretty well known, so the likelihood that anticipated increases in CO2 will not produce dangerous warming is quite small. What is not well established is the upper limit. This article gives the confidence limits on warming derived from various sources, and explains why the upper margin of error is so much wider than the lower one.
Moreover, there are a number of possible factors that could make the consequences of global warming much worse, but which are not understood well enough to model. These include possible destabilization of ocean methane clathrates to release massive quantities of additional greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, and also destabilization of polar ice by mechanisms (e.g. ice sheet flow) other than melting (discussed here).
The reason all of that carbon is oxidized to CO2 is that this reaction yields energy. There is no free lunch in thermodynamics. To reverse that reaction and convert it back to elemental carbon and oxygen, you have to take all of the energy that we get out of burning fossil fuels and pump every bit it right back into the waste products (plus some extra due to thermodynamic losses). So considering the full cycle, burning fossil fuels would not yield energy, it would cost energy.
It is thus understandable that there has not been much interest in exploring this strategy.
Climatologists are certainly the most qualified to evaluate climate science, and the notion that virtually all climate scientists in the world are engaged in a massive conspiracy to cover up fatal flaws in the current climate models in order to promote a political agenda is more than a little nuts.
Nevertheless, there are powerful and wealthy interests that stand to gain by convincing people that that is what is happening, and successful public relations strategies designed to create public doubt about the scientific consensus, originally developed by tobacco companies to distract the public from the evidence linking smoking and cancer, continue to be used today (indeed, some of the same spokesmen are involved). These people are expert at crafting plausible-sounding arguments designed to mislead nonscientists.
Other scientists, while not having the same level of knowledge of the details of climate science as actual climate scientists, do understand the nature of scientific evidence and how to evaluate it, and are qualified to distinguish real science from the sort of plausible-sounding bullshit that is used to mislead the general public. In particular, the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, and similar Academies of other nations, are the most experienced and critical scientists in the world, people who have actually made major scientific discoveries. So if you want somebody with no vested interest either for or against climate change research, and with the general competence to evaluate the evidence and judge whether the work in a particular field is legitimate or pseudoscience, these are the people to ask.
Weather seems to be chaotic, but there is little evidence that climate is. But if it would be very scary if true, because then a small perturbation--increasing CO2, for example--could initiate wild swings around that attractor, rather than the rather orderly and predictable behavior that current climate models exhibt. We certainly know that the planet has experienced temperature swings in the past that would be catastrophic if they happened today.
Yet nobody has managed to produce a climate model which is consistent with known physics, which is reasonably consistent with climate records, and which does not predict dangerous warming from the amount of CO2 humans are putting into the atmosphere. Considering that there are multiple wealthy interests that stand to lose financially from efforts to regulate CO2, and that would doubtless be willing to fund development of such a model, this seems kind of surprising, don't you think?
Hmmmm.... perhaps the notion that these models are poorly constrained and can be tweaked to do anything you want--an idea that seems to be widely held only by those who have never actually tried to create one--is a bit exaggerated?
The inhospitality of England to vineyards has been greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, the existence of a regional warm period in northern Europe is not really in dispute (PDF)
It is certainly possible that some northerly areas might benefit from longer growing seasons. On the other hand, the temperate areas that currently enjoy a near optimal climate, and that produce much of the world's food would be expected to suffer. So a country like Greenland might benefit, while the US would probably lose big. Since agriculture cannot shift from one region to another that rapidly, countries that currentl import large quantities of foods like grain may experience massive starvation.
It suggests the possibility that the models might be incomplete. It certainly does offer any kind of evidence that an increase in CO2 does not create global warming, which is based upon well-established physics. If the MWP was indeed global, it suggests is that climate might be far more unstable than current models propose, and that there is some other mechanism besides CO2 that could produce a high degree of warming. This is very frightening, because add that to CO2 and who knows how much warming might result? Current climate models do not predict runaway global warming (the deadly Venus scenario) in response to anticipated rises in CO2. But if climate is really as unstable as a global MWP would indicate, then all bets are off, and perturbation of climate is far more dangerous than climate scientists currently believe.
You can play this kind of "n degrees of separation" game with almost anybody. But it's not a matter of trust. The website provides citations to the original scientific literature and links to the data. You can check it all yourself if you are interested enough to take the time to develop the expertise.
"Mystery models with hidden data" is an urban myth. Any publication has to describe the models and the data well enough for another scientist to reproduce it. Many of the models and much of the data is freely available over the internet.
The existence of a medieval global warming period seems to be an article of faith among opponents of global warming, even though the evidence that it was global rather than regional is much weaker (PDF) than the evidence for modern global warming. The oddest thing is that they seem think that the possible existence of some additional mechanism that is not understood whereby the earth could warm more than is expected from current global climate models models should make people less concerned about the possible consequences of modern global warming. If the medieval warm period was indeed global, it would argue that there is some additional mechanism that could add to or amplify the modern CO2 induced warming so as to cause global temperatures to shoot up even higher than projected.
Scientists tend to be less susceptible to media hysteria than the general public. Many have seen their own work misrepresented in the press. Also, scientists do not find anything particularly shocking about a scientist getting angry and saying some dumb things in an email--they've seen it happen live. They are more likely to pay attention to the fact that two separate review panels have already concluded that there is no evidence of falsification of data on the part of Jones or CRU. And CRU is just one of many research groups that have studied climate change, and other groups have replicated their major findings. Even if there had turned out to be some substance to the accusations, it would have little influence on scientists' opinions regarding the reality of AGW, which are based upon the entire body of data, not a single lab or personality.
Climate models are fairly tightly constrained, because they are not fits to arbitrary equations with lots of free parameters, but rather simulations of physical processes for which most of the critical parameters are fairly well known from other data. So the capacity to improve the fit by adjusting the variables is limited. A climate model also has to be consistent with historical (and what is known of prehistorical) climate data, as well as the climate response to "natural experiments" like volcanic eruptions. See here and here for explanation. Further information about the uncertainties in model projections can be found here (PDF)
Oh, scientists are a pretty contrary lot. You can probably find one or two who disagree about pretty much anything, no matter how well established. However, Dr. Curry seems to be mainly disagreeing with how the report was presented, rather than its conclusions, since she states "I don’t disagree with their conclusion about finding no evidence of scientific misconduct: I haven’t seen any evidence of plagiarism or fabrication/falsification of data by the CRU scientists. "
Nope. We are actually in a solar cooling phase, which is masking somewhat the increase due to CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, the solar cooling trend will eventually reverse, and we'll then have solar heating on top of CO2-mediated warming
Technically correct. The planet is estimated to be about 30 degrees C warmer than it would be if there were no natural CO2. The anticipated temperature increase due to man's emissions of CO2 is only a fraction of that, but still enough to be a serious problem.
Also correct. Current theory does not predict that global warming will wipe out humanity. But substantial sea level rises and changes in the climate in regions where most of the world's food is grown would be far more disruptive than in the prehistoric world.