"I think you have a poor understanding of scientific publishing"

There's scientific publishing, then there climate science publishing, which tends to be a little dramatic and leans toward the alarmist side, for the benefit of those journalists I'm sure who just need a little teeny bit of guidance on how to absorb the message Drowning polar bears anyone, rising sea level on Tuvalu with pics of natives up to the knees in water .. please, give us a break, no scientists of the climate variety called BS on any of that, so are complicit)

I read the climategate emails, I reckon I have a pretty good handle on how it works in climate science.

If climate science publishing was the same as the rest of scientific publishing, then why have the CRU people, through various set piece reviews, been "exonerated", by people who all have vested interests no less?

Climate science appears to be very shallow and there seems to be the overwhelming stench of corruption in the sector, and how did the IPCC end up with so many activists on their panels? Are they climate scientists now, because they worked on the IPCC?

how terribly grubby .. climate scientists must be so proud of their "colleagues".

I remain, skeptical .. regardless of what you think

From the link to Enting's critcism of Plimer it seems that while his analysis appears like a scholarly rebuttal of Plimer a lot of his statements are nit picky, pedantic and just plain wrong. For example, he defends the Hockey stick graph which is a well known manipulated piece of pseudomathematics. We now know tree ring growth is affected by many things other than temperature, a fact which Mann either didn't know or simply left out deliberately. Enting fails to take this simple but salient fact into account while supporting Mann.

I shall now deal with the "hotspot issue." I had forgotten about that episode.

Around 2008 Douglass et al published a paper in International Journal of Climatology (IJOC) in which they claimed the "hotspot" did not exist. Websites frequented by sceptics hyped their findings.

Douglass et al used radiosonde data which meteorologists use for weather forecasting. The data is in a sense "smoothed out" for weather forecasting. The "homogenised" data serves the purposes of short term weather forecasting.

However in the "homogenization" process the fine structure of the data is lost. As I always point out a poor statistician is someone who would drown in a lake with an average depth of six inches.

The Douglass' paper's critics point that the author's did not use the raw radiosonde data, they used the homogenised data.

Here is a link to one paper that addresses these issues.

Assessing Bias and Uncertainty in the HadAT-Adjusted Radiosonde Climate Record

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2007JCLI1733.1

Here is the point.

I know I am not in a position to decide whether Douglass et al or their critics are correct. And, putting bluntly, I don't think any OLO poster is either.

Under these circumstances a rational person says, "I don't know. I'll have to await further developments."

Other people choose to believe the papers that suit their point of view. It's called "confirmation bias."

rpg

IJOC is a peer reviewed journal about climatology. It published a paper that attacks an aspect of climate science. That rather gives the lie to your theory that climate journals will not publish contrarian papers.

The Acolyte Rizla

A RISE of 1 degree Kelvin is the same as a RISE of 1 degree Celsius. However I should have typed Celsius rather than Kelvin. It was a slip of the (word processor) pen.

A lot of the scepticism here seems to be based on the belief that all climatologists are ratbags and scientists in the world's peak scientific bodies are easily fooled.

Perhaps instead of browsing your favourite websites you should all get out and meet actual climatologists.

Steven,

"A RISE of 1 degree Kelvin is the same as a RISE of 1 degree Celsius."

No, it isn't. A rise of 1 Kelvin is the same as a rise of of 1 degree Celsius. There is no such thing "1 degree Kelvin".

Steven would you please answer my question: why is your methodology not one of appeal to absent authority? What you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that AGW must be right, otherwise why would so many professional scientists be saying it?

Bugsy
Wow - bitter personal insult. We are amazed at the rationality of your argument.

Steven
Let's suppose, very much in your favour, that there is a tendency to temperature increases that is whatever the IPCC or the AGW establishment says it is. And let's say that, as a matter of natural science, a group of professional entomologists has found that there is a tendency for butterflies' wings to grow larger.

Okay. So what? At best, all you've established is a tendency of temperature increases. If you agree that you are unable to establish that it has any further significance to public policy, please say so, and we can all agree that it's irrelevant except as a speculation on a matter of natural science, like the butterflies' wings.

But if you say it is significant as a matter of public policy please say so and address the following.

Firstly, you need to establish that the downsides are worse than the upsides. Prove it. If your proof involves ecological or economic consequences, please admit that, in your own terms, climatologists are not competent to pronounce on that, or no more than anyone else.

What do you say will be the ecological difference? And how do you know?

And what do you say will be the economic or human welfare difference? To whom? When? And how do you know? What discount have you applied for futurity? Why?

Secondly, if policy action is intended to improve the situation, what reason is there to think that it can do that? What data are you using to account for the human values involved both now and in the future? Why is that better than the data set being used in the absence of policy?

Otherwise it seems you have mistakenly adopted the following non sequitur: "*Because* temperatures might be showing a tendency to rise *therefore* government should do something" in an attempt to stop it, even though you have shown no reason why temperatures shouldn't rise, and no reason to think government can do better rather than worse.