Tuesday, April 11, 2006

TechCentralStation

I see TCS has taken a shine to our recent paper. I'm not sure that I should be too pleased about that, given their record :-) I'm a bit surprised too, since although we rule out high sensitivity (with high confidence) we also rule out low sensitivity. This latter result was hardly mentioned in the paper, as it is not scientifically interesting (it was already widely agreed within a few tenths of a degree), but it does contradict what some at the sceptical end of the debate have said in the past.

To be honest, it would not be surprising if some at both extremes of the debate - the septics and the alarmists - try hard to pick holes in our work, as if it stands up to scrutiny, it would go some way towards pulling the rug from under their feet. Endorsement by TCS may encourage the latter faction, but I hope they will be willing able to judge the arguments on their merit rather than on their results. It remains to be seen how numerous and powerful they are anyway. I sometimes think I hear sounds of wagons being circled, but there are also grounds to hope that common sense will prevail...watch this space.

The TCS article's tagline on their homepage is "Good news on climate change you won't see from the IPCC." However, on reading the article, this comment seems to refer specifically to something else relating to scenarios, rather than our work. With the second draft of the IPCC AR4 having just been made available to reviewers...it's more than my job's worth to say what mention (or otherwise) it makes of our work :-)

2 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

Hey, I told you that you would become the poster-boy for the septics! So predictable...

As far as I can tell, Worstall is wrong on his reporting of SRES, in that Castles appears to admit that his revisions make little practical difference to the scenario range.

James Annan said...

The really worrying thing is how many more people are visiting via the TCS article than ever did from RealClimate :-(