"But the fact is that if it hadn't been for the blogs the [report] couldn't have been scrutinised, assessed or possibly validated BY ANYONE."

That's called an 'assumption' - its not a "fact", despite your use of capital letters. If I look over my wife's shoulder and see a mistake in her PhD thesis, does that immediately make me an expert in homocide law? I don't think so. You don't seem to have anything new to add so I think our dialogue ends here.

Faustino: "an Castles has been a global leader in this field for decades" ... "No one in CSIRO or BoM will have remotely comparable credentials in statistics."

I'll grant that Mr. Castles was a top-level bureaucrat in the area of statistics back up until 1994. However ...

Googling around at statistics conferences proceedings and peer-reviewed statistics journals over the years, his name is consistently absent. Don't you think that that people with actual PhDs in mathematical statistics and climate science might have better credentials?

Furthermore, according to Wikipedia and Sourcewatch, he publishes papers for the 'Lavoisier Group', a secretly funded group with strong links to the mining and fossil fuel industries.

According to the same sources, he has appeared at events for the 'Institute of Public Affairs' and 'Centre for Independent Studies' - both fossil fuel industry funded. The IPA is also funded by the tobacco industry.

And he uses Andrew Bolt's blog as a serious supporting reference .. hmm.

Faustino, it is not unusual for most people to assume like yourself ..".... our reactions to the inputs we perceive control our behaviour." Most people in fact interpret behavior as if it were caused by events outside an organism acting on a mechanism that merely responds. It is only when we think of control that the true picture emerges. By not recognising a control process when you see one, many people i feel have become drastically misled by some side-effects of control.

As a young boy i was, for some reason, particularly sensitive to the concept of control ... like was i in control of myself or was something/someone controlling me? It became pretty apparent that if i wanted to be a good golfer i needed to control perception big time. i.e. My score card became the measure of my control of perception ... hence our control of the inputs we perceive, is our behaviour.

Many years later i came across the work of William T. Powers who seemed to be speaking the same language. People, if interested, can google him for some interesting reading on the subject. Incidentally this control of perception is not just limited to humanity but to all living organisms.

Dare i say, anyone interested in financial markets would be completely blind not be familiar with behaviour as the control of perception. I can suggest a reading of Warren Buffett as a means to help out. With climate it is much the same ..... as many of my OLO posts attest.

exterminator: I wonder how relevant is public validation given that their expertise(s) aren't in relevant disciplines?

I think this is an important and relevant question. How much confidence would we have in validation of fortune-telling by fortune-tellers? How about company information from companies? Climate models from climate scientists? There are recognized benefits of being outside a discipline. Major works projects deliberately set up independent validation (sometimes called hold-points) in order to protect all concerned.

In my study, one model, the Japanese miroc_h, had similar return period (or drought frequency) to observations over most areas. So progress is possible I believe. But in my view the validation methods in the DEC report were inadequate, or absent. As Penny Whetton, leader of the Climate Impacts and Risk research stream at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research said in Assessment of the use of Current Climate Patterns to Evaluate Regional Enhanced Greenhouse Response Patterns of Climate Models:

"However, a model that performs well for a target variable, season and location, may perform poorly for another variable, season or location, in which case model processes would be suspect."

The remedy for models failing validation is for the DEC report team to be sent back to the drawing board.

Sams the Sophist,

Having read this exchange, what a despicable display. It's hard to know where to start. You engage in the exchange, and only when you have been pummelled, and I mean pummelled, had shreds torn off you, rings run around you, flogged (Penrith and Melbourne did better in their repsective codes on the weekend than you did here), instead of being gracious, you revert to talking about Dr Castles in the third person asnd throw the smear around like a petulent child who says, well you were never my friend to begin with. (I "love" "your" "use" "of" "quote marks" "when" "you" "say" "absolutely" "nothing" "of" "substance".) If you had no repect, why did you question him in the first place? I think Castle had the generosity to engage a mediocre thinker and cowardly weakiling like yourself, and this is your response. You contradict yourself and make it up as you go along (eg study 'drawn upon" and then study highlighting a "gap"). You patronize with comments about understanding the academic process (I've googled too, Castles was previous head of Aust Academy of Social Sciences so I think he may have some idea). WHat have you done dweezil? Even with CAPITALS, you miss the point and talk about you wife's Phd in homicide law, whicvh living with you, may come in handy in the future. You have some infatuation with PhDs and peer-review, but when you actually meet authority you act like a child and show your insecurity, throwing mud and running away. If you are in some sort of old people's home for dementia, then I appluad the staff for letting you contribute here as some sort of distraction and I wish you all the best. Otherwise, you are an embarrassment.

Well said Dogstarr - couldn't have summed it up better. Talking to a mate who got his PhD in the early 80s, he says they are literally giving away Phd's these days. Phd's today show a poor standard of analysis, are full of grammatical errors and lack proper statistical analysis. He says people are not choosing to do PhD's and University are getting desperate. Just because Sams says he has a Phd only proves to me he knows a lot about nothing. It certainly doesn't mean he has a higher authority than anyone else to comment on climate science.

I read a lot of articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and a fair percentage are not worth the paper they are published on. And I blame the reviewers of those articles. IMHO I reckon the peer-reviewed industry is a cosy closed shop between fellow scientists to assist each other to share in the gravy train of public funding.

Tragedy the reason why there were so few PhDs in earlier generations was that until about 1965 you couldn't undertake PhD studies in Australia. In the good old days supervisors were paid by the number of students who started PhDs and some were appalling managers of people, teachers and supervisors and I suspect a few were protective of their turf and so not inclined to see students pass, in fact, PhD completion rates used to be 6% of those who started.

PhDs are almost mandatory in some fields like microbiology, agricultural science and largely irrelevant in other fields like IT. I imagine climate scientists usually have PhDs and as they say "No ticket, no start".

Climate scientists are confident that they have good modelling for southern Australia and they know it is drying, the modelling for northern Australia is not as well developed and the outcomes are less predictable. Do you want to discount the predictions for southern Australia while you wait for modelling to be completed for northern Australia or do you want to start ameliorating the effects now.

The owners of coal mines and oil companies want continuous growth in product demand to maximise their profits they believe they are rich enough to cushion themselves from the effects of global warming. The Bush ranch in Crawford Texas is a survivalists dream having its own water supply, power supply, solar passive dwelling etc.