Friday, March 12, 2010

Climate debate: opinion vs evidence

You haven't had much climate science here recently, mostly because all that's been in the news relating to climate science, well...isn't actually anything to do with climate science really. Maybe I'll comment on some of it eventually. But in the meantime, why not read this article, which is the sort of thing the press ought to have more of IMO:

ABC The Drum Unleashed - Climate debate: opinion vs evidence

Update - in a similar vein, mt weighs in on Sarewitz - I'll change the date on this post to push it to the top.

9 comments:

sidd said...

Hi,
I wonder if you would comment on the preprint at
"http://economics.huji.ac.il/facultye/beenstock/Nature_Paper091209.pdf"

The claims seem to be that 1) GHG radiative forcing is 'stationary in second differences' and temperature and solar forcing are 'stationary in first differences,'

2)the trend in GHG forcing is independent of the trend in temperature

I suspect this is irrelevant, since if i were to measure the current through, and voltage across a diode biased in the exponential region, I is exponential and V, linear. I could not however conclude that the two were unrelated.

Or am I all muddled as usual...

sidd

David B. Benson said...

sidd --- Rabett Run has a thread up on that nonsense preprint.

James Annan said...

Thanks David, I was also going to point to the Rabett.

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/idiots-delight.html

It's just stupid numerology. This stuff may have some value if we were simply given time series and knew nothing of the physical reality. But note that when analysing and attributing climate change, climate scientists consider things in much more detail than just the global mean temperature. The spatial pattern of warming is also a telling signature.

EliRabett said...

Nick Stokes has something better, and James may recall something endless and similar on sci.environment.

Hank Roberts said...

paging James:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/up-is-down-brown-is-green-with-apologies-to-orwell/comment-page-2/#comment-166761

Mark said...

James, is there a response to the latest Schwartz et al paper? It's making the rounds. One poster accused you of not responding. I referred him to your last response in 08, but that brought more criticism and low ball sensitivity claims on 1.9 at the highest.

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2009JCLI3461.1

"1) Annan and Hargraves 2006 found a climate sensitivity distribution of (1.7, 2.9, 4.9) not the 3C cited. Their paper came under criticism of how they handled the Bayes’ theorem at the center of their analysis (SV Henricksson Climate of the Past Discussions Sept 2009). Contrary to Dr Schwartz, there has been no response to the criticism."

This discussion is a dot earth. I'm an RC regular.

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/on-the-causes-of-climate-deadlock/?sort=newest#preview

James Annan said...

I commented on the latest Schwartz paper here (which I found through a search on "schwarz")...

As for the Henriksson thing, that is only a submitted manuscript! After getting one very lukewarm review (and no positive one), the editor has offered them the chance to revise. We shall see what happens. There is a lengthy discussion available here including my comments. I have not ruled out a formal reply, but the open review system may make this superfluous.

(Of course it goes without saying that Henriksson directly contradicts Schwartz - the former is arguing for a higher upper limit, not a lower one - but consistency is hardly the strong point of the average skeptic).

Mark said...

Thanks James! I shall refer to it. Consistency is definitely not a skeptic concern!

HVAC Man said...

That's a good topic for debate. I could not however tell that the two were unrelated.