RealClimate have at long last broken their vow of silence on Stern:
"In conclusion: Stern gets the climate science largely right, though he strays on the high side of various estimates and picks the high side to talk about in the summary. This high-end bias lends the Review open to charges of "alarmism"."If they'd wanted to pick a fight they could probably have been a bit more critical but I'm not going to quibble with that.
8 comments:
You're not going to quibble? I'm disappointed...
If I'd wanted to pick a fight I could probably have been a bit more critical :-)
Oh go on, attack. It will be dull otherwise.
Well it seems a bit bland compared to your own blog posts. Why don't you have a go at it yourself? :-) Mostly I'm just relieved I'm not a lone voice barking in the wilderness. With people like Mike Hulme weighing in I'm happy to take a back seat.
I noticed one of the comments on RC comparing Stern to Lomborg. I've not read Lomborg (or even all the details of Stern) and attempting a quantitative comparison of who is worse is probably futile. But maybe it is a reasonable point to make.
For starters, Lomborg is a complete fraud. Plenty of other septics have written books, but the key to Lomborg's fame was the claim that he had once been an "environmentalist." That was his publisher's idea, I suspect.
Regarding Mike Hulme, he's in desperate need of an editor (and a fact-checker, but that's comparatively minor). To all appearances, RP Jr. finally got to someone.
Steve,
You seem to have been reduced to mere narkiness recently, especially in respect of RPJr. It's disappointing. Winter blues perhaps?
Yes, clearly what I need in my life is a little more anoxia. :)
But you're right, the snarks about RP Jr., however well motivated they may be, aren't achieving much. Besides which, I believe the futures market on liver in Boulder has already been cornered. In all sincerity, I believe that his contribution to the climate change debate is incredibly counter-productive, but in that case I should express those views to the appropriate Congressional committee staffers. They can find other folks to invite for the science policy angle, e.g. Andrew Dessler.
"Counter-productive" depends rather on what you are trying to produce :-)
Getting back to RC on Stern, I see that someone has managed to interpret it as "RC says Stern got the science right" (first comment on this post). Is that really the take-home message that you wanted to convey, William?
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