Judith Curry, a climatologist who left academia, writes about climate data, models, uncertainty, and the politics of climate science.
HN commenters split: some name it as an unbiased source on climate, while others see it as part of a politicized discourse.
I wasn't trying to convince you that it was part of such a campaign. Rather I was wondering which particular details swayed you, as a presumably impartial observer, to believe one side of the story rather than the other.
But since you ask, the main reason I feel like its part of a campaign is because the recently released emails have confirmed that there was indeed such a campaign. Before knowing that (which I think is a solid fact at this point) I probably would have thought that "intense media campaign" was too conspiratorial to be likely.
Separately, while I don't know the Guardian author's history and experience, I feel like the vehemence of her language and the viciousness of the chosen quotes is greater than that normally shown in a science story. Also, from previous exposure to Mann and Trenberth, I (rightly or wrongly) start with the assumption that they are more concerned with political message than presenting an unbiased scientific overview.
I liked that the first article you linked included a rebuttal from Pielke, and I found his links and counter-argument persuasive. But at this point I'm conscious of my bias toward his side of the story, and thus don't trust my assessment of this particular article. That's why I was asking you which parts you found convincing, so I could try to consider them specifically.
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The quoting of Judith Curry in the second article you linked is interesting. In 2007 she argued against Pielke's conclusions, but since then she…
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"…
> One point that it looks like Curry takes aim with more generally is the degree to which there is a consensus about global warming among scientists. She says that 97% of scientists can't believe in it because they haven't studied it or built their own models, etc -- they have "second order belief"
In the post below, her primary complaint about the 97% stat is that it doesn't specify the amount of climate change that those people attributed to humans: "After discarding the abstracts that were judged to have taken no position, Cook (2013) reported a 97% consensus that anthropogenic GHGs were causing global warming. However, three-fourths of that consensus was judged to be implied and more than 98% of the agreement was expressed non-quantitatively. Consequently, no widespread consensus exists in these abstracts that humans are responsible for most of the global warming; only that humans are responsible for an unspecified amount of global warming."
https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/20/what-is-there-a-97-consensus-about/
I think the 97% stat provides a useful opportunity for those of us who would like to get to truth of the matter but haven't studied climatology and have no interest in spending years studying the subject just to determine the truth of this particular issue. So much of the argument about the subject is "they're wrong, I'm right" followed by technical explanation that you cannot tell who to trust. But you can understand how the 97% claim was reached. It provides…
> Overpredict? According to what?
See, for example, here:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-climate-reality/
Note that this actually understates the overprediction, because the models whose average is shown included three sets of models that made three different assumptions about how CO2 would rise. But CO2's actual rise over the period where we're comparing models with data was about the same as the assumption of the "worst case" (or "business as usual") scenario, so that scenario is the only one that's relevant to the comparison between models and data. And when you compare just that sheaf of models with the data, the divergence between model and data is even larger.
For the reasons why the upper troposphere temperature comparison is more relevant than the surface temperature comparison (which is what is shown in the IPCC AR5), see the article.
> According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario.
But, as you note, the two anomalies are relevant to two different baselines. That means the comparison is invalid, not "not perfect".
> if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree
That's for future temperature change under the future best case scenario. It has nothing to do with past temperature change under the actual scenario that actually happened.
> See page 11
Those graphs…
John Bates has an extensive blog post describing his allegations on Judith Curry's well-known blog: https://judithcurry.com/2017/02/04/climate-scientists-versus-climate-data/
It was submitted to HN yesterday but got 4 points and 0 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13574012
Posts submitted to HN in the last month about the effort to back-up climate data from a suspected erasure by the Trump administration got 448 and 85 points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13488334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13487843
[EDIT]
Bates:
> I read with great irony recently that scientists are “frantically copying U.S. Climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump” (e.g., Washington Post 13 December 2016). As a climate scientist formerly responsible for NOAA’s climate archive, the most critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are unwilling to formally archive and document their data. I spent the last decade cajoling climate scientists to archive their data and fully document the datasets. I established a climate data records program that was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs), which accurately describe the Earth’s changing environment.
[EDIT2]
Rebuttal post by Peter Thorne, who was in Karl's group, although was not an author on the key…
This is actually an excellent illustration of how organizational incentives seep into data.
Imagine you have a historical temperature series record. You have an bureaucratic incentive to find and justify an argument as to why past temperatures should be adjusted downward, making the curve of global warming look steeper. You have no bureaucratic incentive to look for the opposite.
The result is that, overall, modern corrections adjust past temperatures downward -- what we'd expect if these biases exist. But this doesn't mean any specific correction is based on "fabricated" research. It's probably perfectly valid. It's just that downward corrections are more attractive to research, because they produce research that has a social impact that the field finds desirable.
(Edit: here's a picture of the net adjustments: https://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/)