I do wish this bloke would find another hobby, golf, bolls, tiddlywinks, anything.

Preferably it should be something he knows something about, so he could be good at it.

The peer review system is passable providing the scientists are ethical.

This was a reasonable expectation, prior to the activities of the Climategate group, whose purpose was to back the IPCC in its AGW fraud.

There is an email from Trenberth, to Foster, which sums up their approach to science, available thanks to the whistleblower on their activities, who posted hundreds of emails on the web.

“Incidentally I gave a copy [of the Foster et al. critique] to Mike McPhaden and discussed
it with him last week when we were together at the OceanObs'09 conference. Mike is
President of AGU. Basically this is an acceptance with a couple of suggestions for extras,
and some suggestions for toning down the rhetoric. I had already tried that a bit. My
reaction is that the main thing is to expedite this.”
Kevin Trenberth to Grant Foster, September 28, 2009

His haste is to discredit a study which shows that global warming is accounted for by natural cycles, so that the assertion that human emissions have an effect is left very little room to manoeuvre.

It is unethical to make an approach such as Trenberth made, and to gain an assurance that a study will be published in a prestigious journal.

One of the reviewers of the study, when Foster submitted it, pointed out that that it was not worded as a scientific study, but more a rhetorical declamation of a view. It was nevertheless published, and the study put forward to back up the original work, and to dismiss Foster’s effort, was stalled by the Journal.

This typifies the tactics of the alarmists. Their push is to control the contents of prestigious journals, and dishonesty infests their science.

Their actions are not cricket.

Someone posted a comment hat there is dishonesty on both sides of the debate, but I have yet to see dishonesty by the Realists. It is rife in the Alarmists.

Prof Rowan's effort to help with his cricket analogy has just further obscured the issue. Other posters have already made useful points about his sporting analogy so I will just talk about peer review, mentioned at the end of the article.

One of the very odd facets of this debate has been the insistence by scientists of peer review in forecasting. Peer review has a role in assessing papers for publication in scientific journals - a way of keeping down the scientific noise. As a system it has faults but basically its the only system anyone can think of for vetting papers.

But it has no role in forecasting and never did. The idea is to make a forecast and see whether it comes anywhere close to reality (see, we got something right for once), instead of saying that the forecast makes sense scientifically (as shown by the peer review) therefore it must be right.

I could say a great deal more but perhaps Prof Rowan by now will have come to appreciate the vast gulf between rhetoric and reality in this debate. A knowledge of cricket does not help.

an excellent article, but is anyone seriously debating this? only deniers have a problem with climate causing weather; the people you're arguing with have defined themselves inconvincible. real sceptics (which do exist) have a problem with model predictions, not some tin foil hat conspiracy of the observational record or the scientists reporting it.

leave the strawmen to burn and let the rationalists get on with debating risk.

Clownfish, you are on the ball (to use a cricketing term) with your reference to the recent Steig furore. Would you please quote a weblink for it.

The Spectator has a long analysis of the Steig furore here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/6705193/breaking-the-ice.thtml

Some pertinent quotes:

'The battle has implications far beyond Antarctica. It has exposed a real problem of bias in scientific journals.

'Nature’s original peer-review process had let through an obviously flawed paper, and no professional climate scientist then disputed it ... it took a group of amateurs, independent from conformist institutions and funding, to spot and correct the flaws. None of them deny that man is warming the globe to some extent; but they have grown increasingly frustrated by the distortion, exaggeration and sloppy methods being used to support a preconceived conclusion.

'All this fits a disturbing new trend in the scientific literature on climate. Papers that come to lukewarm or sceptical conclusions are published, if at all, only after the insertion of catechistic sentences to assert their adherence to orthodoxy. Last year, a paper in Nature Geosciences concluded heretically that ‘it is at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide’ (high sensitivity underpins the entire IPCC argument), yet presaged this with the absurd remark: ‘Earth’s climate can only be stabilised by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the 21st century.’'