Climate Audit

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy.

Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on.

On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas"…

I've followed Steve McIntyre for awhile, and it is in fact shameful, damning, and unscientific how ardently climate scientists have fought to keep their data from him when he has requested it to check their models. The problem seems to be particularly acute among the old guard of the profession. Seeing the other side of the conversation doesn't add a whole lot, we already knew what bastards they are.

For those who haven't checked out Steve's work, look at http://www.climateaudit.org/ . But be warned, if you're looking for politics over numbers, he will put you to sleep. And the server is getting hammered at the moment. But please book mark it and go back later. His blog is an important piece of the internet, what we all thought the internet could be before lolcats disillusioned us.

It doesn't surprise me to see a lot of people here coming to the climate scientists' defense. They are, after all, a popular and respected group in society at the moment. But when you cherry-pick data, create unreproducible models, and then refuse to share your data with other people, you ought to lose a little bit of that respect. We will get precisely the quality of science we enforce, which at present is any quality of science the authoritative voices in the area chose to give us.

When Steve has been successful at obtaining the data he wants, he has been able to find flaws in various analyses. If you come from a scientific perspective, that ought to be great news! Independent confirmation or…

The study you cite is neither predictive nor evidence based. It is a speculative, after the fact explanation: "We used computer-generated simulations to get this research result. I hope that in the future we'll be able to verify this result with real data through a long-term ice thickness measurement campaign." ( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050630064726.htm )

That doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. But it is not evidence, nor is it conclusive. There is simply no reason to believe Powell's explanation over the explanation I cited in my previous comment. The NASA explanation is based on actual observation rather than computer simulations.

The climate is so complex that you can always come up with an after the fact explanation. The only way to judge science is either a) by the predictions it makes or b) following the chain of deductive reasoning. Predictions are not really possible with climate science in the short term because there are too many variables. So that leaves b). I have not studied the science behind sea ice changes closely. But many of the global climate models have been subjected to egregious tuning: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2475

Given what we know about CO2, hard to see how it could be otherwise, but not worth arguing over.

The effect of CO2 on temperature is both a) logarithmic and b) non-cumulative. For models to predict a levels of warming that are actually alarming, the models must include feedback loops. No one knows…

> And here is a recent climate paper by Gergis which was retracted after the blogosphere found flaws while attempting to replicate their work:
> http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/10/more-on-screening-in-gerg...

The link is to a website that clearly has the agenda of "anti-climate-crisis" and is run by a guy named Steve McIntyre, who, surprise surprise, appears to be from the mining and minerals exploration business, either as a finance guy or lawyer or both, per his own words here:

"Previously, I spent about 35 years in the mining and mineral exploration business. During the last 20 years of this, I worked in the micro-cap exploration business and have a great deal of practical experience in dealing with prospectus and securities issues from the company point of view. Concepts like audit trails, due diligence and full, true and plain disclosure become second nature when you work in such an environment.
............
For McIntyre, undertaking this project has required an unpaid leave of absence from his career in mineral exploration financing, at the cost of over a year’s foregone earnings so far."
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Wikipedia: "Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian mathematician, former minerals prospector, and semi-retired mining consultant (...) In 2011 he became Chairman of the Board of Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc."

Thus, probably a shill, and/or somebody with a financial incentive to hold his views, combined with a lack of relevant expertise. Bad combo. And unlikely to be…

You ask good questions, and raise good points. Since one can't read all the primary sources, how can you decide who to trust? In this case, I don't think there is a simple and logically defensible answer. Normally, your best bet would be to trust that the recognized experts in the field probably have it right. But I think Climate Science is so politicized at this point that unless you can sit down and have a beer at a backyard BBQ with those experts, anything you read is more likely to be well-calculated propaganda than the experts' true beliefs. The data presented in the papers is largely true, but the ancillary spin is so strong that it's hard to know what to conclude without a close reading of the entire paper. And even then, the choice of which papers are published in which journals makes it hard to know how much weight to put on what.

So you ask why to trust Willis Eschenbach. For me, I trust him because I've been reading his comments on ClimateAudit.org for well over a decade, and I've never seen him attempt to mislead. He's occasionally wrong, and but readily owns up to his errors. My impression from reading him over many years is that he's a smart guy who believes what he's saying, knows a lot about the field, has no obvious conflicts of interest, and does his best to be accurate.

I don't feel like the SkepticalScience.com post you linked to treats him fairly. Since that post considers him together with McIntyre, the best answer I can provide is that…

Well, the "auditors" are called denialists and attacked from many sides -- even though they are the only ones who publish full source code, push for raw data release, and actually try to replicate results. We are making $100T decisions on the basis of $1M papers and closed datasets.

Regarding retraction, I think this is pretty unambiguous

http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/

Dear Stephen,

I am contacting you on behalf of all the authors of the
Gergis et al (2012) study ‘Evidence of unusual late 20th
century warming from an Australasian temperature
reconstruction spanning the last millennium’

An issue has been identified in the processing of the data
used in the study, which may affect the results. While the
paper states that “both proxy climate and instrumental data
were linearly detrended over the 1921–1990 period”, we
discovered on Tuesday 5 June that the records used in the
final analysis were not detrended for proxy selection,
making this statement incorrect. Although this is an
unfortunate data processing issue, it is likely to have
implications for the results reported in the study. The
journal has been contacted and the publication of the study
has been put on hold.

This is a normal part of science. The testing of scientific
studies through independent analysis of data and methods
strengthens the conclusions. In this study, an issue has
been identified and the results are being…