David Latimer
Your response to my request for further detail concerning "parallel universes" is inadequate.

Regarding “maybe get a patent or two out of the public funded research to retire on.”

Yep, it all depends on the timing of the patent and whether it can be construed to be associated with “public”, funds, regardless that they came from a public source.

However, you have deflected from the real point I asked

You will recall I described a cycle of events.

Your response to those events were “This is not scepticism. It’s a parallel universe!”

I asked you to prove my skeptical scenario wrong.

You have not proved my views are from “a parallel universe” at all.

So come on, you made the comment, defend your own words and reputation, prove I am wrong and no scientist has ever applied for funds following the cycle of events I described.

And before you try to prove me wrong,

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/280/5370/1685b
http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=95
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/329/7471/922

All suggest that what I described happens frequently and often.

I await your apology.

The critique that Castles refers to gets the science badly wrong. See:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/01/khilyuk_and_chilingar_the_gift.php

"the old 0.07 figure, which is by the way correct (see John Hunter link above)"

Nowhere does John Hunter say this figure is a correct statement of sea level rise.

So when someone says

"the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year"

they should actually have said

"someone has claimed that the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year, they may or may not be right, but that's what they claimed"

BTW, quoting something out of context is usually intended to create a different meaning from the "in context" meaning. Not much point otherwise.

"The .9 mm long-term figure is in line with sea level rise over the period of the 20th century, showing no indication of acceleration due to global warming"

Aside from the fact that it takes a long time to get an accurate measurement of rate of rise from tide guages let alone acceleration, how do you know that this 0.9 mm/year is not due to acceleration from before the 20th century?

Tim, you claim that you didn't say he "disowned" his study. So how do I interpret these comments: "But Peiser has at last admitted that he was wrong: he now says 1 out 928. And he's wrong about the last one, since it wasn't peer reviewed." Peiser doesn't admit only 1 out of 928, as his response to my email indicates.

In any event, I found one in 1994 which disputes the "consensus", and you ignore it.

The issue here isn't solely whether Bolt is right - he's obviously wrong on a number of points - but whether both you and Gore are. Your responses appear to lose sight of this point. It's quite possible for all three of you to be wrong.

I'm also interested in your post about my political affiliations. You'd have to be pretty bad at research if you couldn't find out my Liberal Party past. As my author biog says "Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is a writer, and a former vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party." Check it out at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=3. In fact the reason why people pay attention to my views on politics is for this very reason.

I'm also interested as to why you should think that membership of a political party somehow obliges members to promulgate the party line; not to mention why you would misrepresent the Liberal Party's position - as far as I know it is not opposed to AGW, and in fact the Federal Government specifically endorses it.

It fascinates me why people like you try and align the arguments about science with politics - possibly a case of psychological projection?

Col Rouge:

I had a look at the links you provided (unfortunately, I couldn't accesss the science mag article, as I don't have a subscription). Cases of science fraud are nothing new, although the case of Henrik Schon, once the "golden boy of condensed matter physics", is one of the most extreme cases (along with a certain Korean geneists).

However, I note that the 2001 IPCC report (which is largely a glorified literature survey) had more than 2500 authors from 120 nations and industry. The report went through a review process taking more than a year, and is returned to governments for review before publication, including the US and Australia. There it is circulated through relevant national acadamies, uni's and the general public for review.

Famous contraian Richard Lindzen is a chapter lead author, and Fred Singer is a reveiwer.

"Many authors will attest that these are among the most extensive review processes that are carried out for any scientific document"

from
www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/the-ipcc-assessment-process.html

also, check out

http://www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm

As such, it would be a very, very, very grand conspiracy for a fraudulent research to pass through this reveiw process. Really, alomst everybody would have to be in on it, from the CSIRO, the the US national acadamey of science, to BP and Shell Oil (who have endorsed the IPCC).

I'm all for conspiracy theories, but I think AGW being a stunt to get public research funnds is going a bit far. You also ignor the plethora of industry funded contraian research. There is considerable evidence that exxon mobile, for example, is heavily funding research that agrees with their view. The Royal Society recently asked Exxon to stop sponsoring such research.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1876538,00.html

You can't claim such a vast conspiracy of both government and industry scientist, while silumtaneously ignoring a large body of evidence that the opposite is happening.

Chris O’Neill,

Why do you keep going on about the 0.07 figure when I admit it is possibly meaningless? John Hunter’s paper aims to discredit this and other figures showing a negligible sea level rise at Tuvalu. If the 0.07 figure cited by Bolt was of questionable veracity he would have challenged it directly. Instead he debunks the low figures through statistical analysis. In so doing he concludes that tide gauge records for Tuvalu lack significance owing to the brief observation period. This means that Lambert’s 5 mm figure is also meaningless (it resulting from a similarly short observation period).

It’s understandable for layman Bolt to cite the 0.07 mm figure without qualifying it. There is no excuse, however, for scientist Lambert not qualifying the 5 mm figure he cites.

Regardless, a 2002 presentation to the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project offers the following:

“NTF Australia (NTFA), established in 1989, operates as an autonomous unit of Flinders University and is the national facility responsible for the collecting, analysing, archiving and disseminating tide and sea level information and predictions for Australia.”

The main objectives:

“To identify long period sea level changes, with particular emphasis on sea level rise due to climate change.”

“To detect increases in the rate of sea level rise as predicted by the IPCC scientific assessment.”

Amongst the conclusions:

“On average, global relative mean sea levels have risen between 1 and 2 mm/year over the last century and there has not been a detectable acceleration due to climate change.”

“Relative mean sea levels at Funafuti in Tuvalu have risen by just under 1 mm/year in the period 1977 to 2000.”

http://www.bom.gov.au/pacificsealevel/presentations/Suva_mitchell.pdf

So, scientists looking for AGW induced sea level change didn’t find it.

Bolt gets it right; Lambert gets it wrong.

Lambert has posted two responses since my "yes" or "no" question went up. He refuses to answer because he knows he's wrong. End of story.