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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
they accuse the other side of operating from a hidden 'socio-political agenda'.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

Yeah, Ken, that's about what I expected. Ignore the question of how consecutive those ice layers are. Don't even acknowledge the assumptions about sedimentation rates to get those ocean floor samples. Then insist that only the human time frame matters anyway, to distract from the stench of what you stepped in. About what I expected, but you are like the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special; it just doesn't feel right without your contribution.

Enjoy.

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This problem just points to the fact that scientists - in any field - are human, and subject to the same pressures and desires that all human flesh is
subject to.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata


Fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online

A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday...

Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Penn State University, who is quoted in the batch of released emails described the release as "truly pathetic".

When asked if they were genuine, he said: "Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad."

He said, the people behind the release were "agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can't contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change.

The original download site for the release has changed, but Climateaudit has updated links and is in the process of setting up a searchable database (under construction). The complete file is over 170 megabytes. Here are some snips.

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate theuncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary [...]

I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about "Subsequent evidence" [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been an increase in knowledge - more evidence. What is it?

Hence the AR4 Section 2.7.1.1.2 dismissal of the ACRIM composite to be instrumental rather than solar in origin is a bit controversial. Similarly IPCC in their discussion on solar RF since the Maunder Minimum are very dependent on the paper by Wang et al (which I have been unable to access) in the decision to reduce the solar RF significantly despite the many papers to the contrary in the ISSI workshop. All this leaves the IPCC almost entirely dependent on CO2 for the explanation of current global temperatures as in Fig 2.23. since methane CFCs and aerosols are not increasing.

I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!

Somehow we have to leave the[m] thinking OK, climate change is extremely complicated, BUT I accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.

We don't really want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written[...] We'll have to cut out some of his stuff.

Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions - bad politics - to one about the value of a stable climate - much better politics. [...] the most valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as possible

What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They'll kill us probably [...]

Although I agree that GHGs are important in the 19th/20th century (especially since the 1970s), if the weighting of solar forcing was stronger in the models, surely this would diminish the significance of GHGs.[...] it seems to me that by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from the sun alone.

If the tropical near surface specific humidity over tropical land has not gone up (Fig 5) presumably that could explain why the expected amplification of the warming in the tropics with height has not really been detected.

[tropical glaciers] There is a small problem though with their retreat. They have retreated a lot in the last 20 years yet the MSU2LT data would suggest that temperatures haven't increased at these levels.

He's skeptical that the warming is as great as we show in East Antarctica -- hethinks the "right" answer is more like our detrended results in the supplementary text. I cannot argue he is wrong.

It is interesting to see the lower tropospheric warming minimum in the tropics in all three plots, which I cannot explain. I believe it is spurious but it is remarkably robust against my adjustment efforts.

In Norway and Spitsbergen, it is possible to explain most of the warming after the 1960s by changes in the atmospheric circulation. The warming prior to 1940 cannot be explained in this way.

Is the PCA approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems to me that in the case of MBH the answer in each is no

I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly can not be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.

One problem is that he [Mann] will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not know where his estimates are coming from.

["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor tests we've applied.

So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long suspected us of doing [...]

Basic problem is that all models are wrong - not got enough middle and low level clouds.

And finally, this last one is my personal favorite:

Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

Step right up folks, welcome to Big Top. Cotton candy! Popcorn! Clowns! Elephants! Acrobats!

K.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

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This problem just points to the fact that scientists - in any field - are human, and subject to the same pressures and desires that all human flesh is
subject to.

The problem I see with the case you've mounted thus far is this: There is no methodology beyond criticism or dispute. Scientists are human and subject to human flaws like the rest of us. These points are valid.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

But they add up to a case where you're criticising ALL science. It seems difficult to me to use this line of argument to condemn a single area of science or to contest findings selectively. It's a big task to use this line to propose that Science X is "bad" and Science Y is "good".

There's a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

No, Ken. I figure you are making it up, getting your info from someone else making it up, or in the very best case, relying on models where they guess-timated whatever was needed to produce the desired result. It's as reliable as Charlie Brown feeling frustrated and hopeless.