I have also started another thread that Judith has said she will respond to, called “Trust and Mistrust”. Take a look.

All the best,

w.

Without a doubt, the best summary and presentation I have ever read.

Thanks Willis. Thank you very much. Wonderful!

Surely 600+ comments have covered everything. Brave, maybe. Opportunist maybe. Still Delusional, no doubt.

Big OIl, Denial machine, Scientific unamerican, Poor communication.

Good Grief!

A more frank observation of the above would be that warming scientists lost sight of science itself. On the forefront of discovery, there is no road map to keep anyone on track. If a scientist loses impartiality, that which appears to be mere adjustments or “corrections” of theory may in fact be the delusions of self projection.

Very well stated indeed.

stephen richards (08:17:35) :

I can’t think of a more disgusting way to make me turn away than to call me a denier. Not only does it offend in its origins but it also offends in its inference that a scientist would deny anything. That is to say that as a scientist I am a total failure. THAT DISGUSTS ME.

I rather like Dr. Richard Lindzen’s position, he says that he is a denier – not a skeptic. If you call him a skeptic, it implies that the AGW crowd has raised valid points, but that he has reservations about certain aspects of the debate. That’s not the case however, there is nothing valid about climate change hysteria – he denies it in it’s entirety.

Pizote Sonrisa (08:21:11) :

Credibility and Trust!!

Science doesn’t rely on these concepts. Sounds like an effort to get back into the emotion-lotion-feel-good wagon driver’s seat.

Spot on!

Interesting post – based on the the number of “I”s in a few paragraphs, it’s clear that you are actually Barack Obama, there can’t be two people on the planet that are that ridiculously narcissistic.

Dude, we are interested in science, interested in you? – not so much.

Gee Eric you write a post that starts out fairly open-minded (there are many topics that being open minded about isn’t a good thing), but then mixed politics with science, and blew it. Politics and science mixing is very close to the root cause of problems we are discussing here

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are political commentators, and no doubt their viewpoints are shaped by that, it goes with the turf. However, I haven’t heard either just make stuff up, they have only raised legitimate issues that fit their viewpoint, I don’t see a problem there, other than the fact that they didn’t start out “unbiased”

As for Palin, she has been quite consistent, There has been a slight warming, but she isn’t convinced that human’s are to blame, or that the “solutions” proposed are the correct approach in any case. She has never made AGW an issue and only addressed it when others tried to nail her on it.

She is only giving an honest (and correct) response to specific questions, and yet you term this “pure political blood-lust and pandering”, pot meet kettle.

I’ve seen official tables showing that CO2 production has been down substantially (about 5% or so IIRC) in the US due to the Great Recession. It’s down in Europe too for the same reason, no doubt.

How about a little math: 95% of 2 = 1.9

So the variation in the CO2 rate of change is not accounted for by economic decline.

IsoTherm (09:12:26) :

davidmhoffer (07:50:31) : “When I see a sceptic make a mistake, the heat from other sceptics is often worse than from the warmists. ”

David that is absolute rubbish and you know it. I’ve been on boards with people talking complete nonsense and not a word was said against them so long as they were cheering the right team>>

Sensible posters often shrink from correcting over-wrought members of their team because such persons don’t take criticism well (impersonally) and can’t get the point. What’s needed is a thumbs up/down voting mechanism on posts to convey negative feedback and show where mainstream board opinion lies. Ideally such a voting mechanism would allow votes on two topics: content and tone, because often only that is at fault.

“The paranoia and hatred evident in so very many of these comments should be warning to Dr. Curry that she’s preaching to the incorrigible, if not the deaf.”

No, the tone of the comments correctly matches the disdain that logical people feel for the behavior of the alarmist scientists. Given the enormous stakes involved, the conduct of these scientists is immoral. It is ridiculous to pretend that we are only debating academic facts, these scientists are involving themselves in political issues that affect the freedom and prosperity of mankind, and they didn’t “play it straight” in the slightest. If justice has anything to do with right and wrong, these acts would be criminal (actually some were), and we wouldn’t be discussing “rehabilitating” these scientists until after they had repaid their debt to society. Given the potential damage, they couldn’t live that long.

“Does Dr. Curry not agree that these two findings fall into that category?
1) There has been recent global warming and
2) it’s primarily anthropogenic.”

1)Actually there WAS warming that ended about a decade ago, and it was quite similar to other 30 year warming ( and cooling) trends in the recent past, that had nothing to do with mankind. 2) There is no evidence at all that it is anthropogenic. Temperature and CO2 concentration don’t correlate at all, do the math. AGW shouldn’t be seriously debated again unless some extraordinary evidence is produced.

As anyone who has looked into the science knows, the direct effect of doubling CO2 concentration is very well known, it’s about 1 degree C, you don’t need models to calculate that. The entire theory of AGW is based on the concept of positive “water vapor” feedback to that slight warming. Actual real world measurements by satellite indicate that the feedback is negative, and we won’t even get the lousy 1 degree C, we will only see about about half of that.

The only place that positive feedback exists is in the climate models, which are fantacy worlds. If there is positve feedback in the world you live in, you ain’t livin’ in the real one.

All of which goes back to my comment to Dr. Curry, if you want credibility back, then let’s stop dodging the issue. AGW depends entirely of feedback, as long as alarmists stick their heads in the sand and refuse to address Dr. Spencer’s work, they aren’t interested in real science, they are actively avoiding it. No credibility for them – period.

Therefore scientists need to do everything possible to make sure that they effectively communicate uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity, and provide a context that includes alternative and competing scientific viewpoints.

Given the complexity of the climate and the uncertainty of our understanding of it, the calculation of risks and probablilities is currently impossible. Nonetheless, competing scientific viewpoints maintain that they have some kind of (necessarily partially qualitative) overview of the general situation.

So what is the context which includes them all? The blogosphere?
What process provides the quality assurance for the ideas, theories and policy suggestions which come out of the various competing blogs?
It has been said that decisions about the funding of scientific research amount to choices about what we are going to remain ignorant of, as much as choices about what we are going to find out about.

Can the relative popularity of the blogs help provide a clue as the direction the funding streams should be channeled to?
The democratisation of science? It’s our cash after all.

Now that we’ve had $80Bn of the public’s money spent on co2 research, can we not demand that more funding be diverted to those other theories and hypotheses which popular acclaim show the public feel worthy of further investigation?

Since Judith feels that competing theories should be put on a level playing field, in order to provide “context”, she must surely agree. Perhaps the fact that she mentioned carbon dioxide not a single time in her entire essay shows the times really are a changing.

And ocean acidification? That’s due to climate change. So to darkly predict that the other side will from a ‘failed’ climate change justification to *that*, seems, I dunno, kinda clueless?

Good question. Price supports?

“Worries about unintended consequences of this global effort, including the Copenhagen debacle, show that the world recession may not be strong enough to prevent futher attemps at implementing this alleged third industrial revolution. Science and engineering lobbies, as well as regulators, have much to gain. If climate change fails as justification, other threats may have to be used. Ocean acidification and peak oil spring to mind.”

Good call. See: http://thedailybell.com/851/Elite-Rewind:-Green-Best-for-Jobs.html

Excerpt from above link: “The amount oil available is expected to peak over the next 25 years (and probably much sooner), with catastrophic effects on economies that still rely on it. And that is to ignore the risks from climate change.” – UK Telegraph

And her eminently quotable diss of soundbites like ‘the science is settled’ and “the debate is over” will surely come back to bite her. No scientist who uttered those words — whether it be in climate science, or in evolutionary biology, the other field where ‘denialists’ are vocal, politically connected, and pestiferous — ever meant that *every* question has been answered, or that there is no room for debate on *any* of the science, or that ‘settled’ means ‘eternally immune to new contrary evidence’. With those provisos (obvious to scientists but too often glossed over in online shouting), surely we can say that *some* important findings of climate science, as in other fields, are indeed ‘settled’ by the bulk of evidence in their support, and won’t be seriously debated again unless extraordinary contrary evidence is discovered.

Does Dr. Curry not agree that these two findings fall into that category?
1) There has been recent global warming and
2) it’s primarily anthropogenic.

Of course there are many unsettled details. But are not the *big* ‘unsettled’ questions mainly, what does these two findings mean for the future, and what can we do about it?

> Careful reading of AR4, WG1, in toto but especially Ch. 9, demonstrates that the IPCC not only has no strong evidence for any of Kutz’ points, but in fact has found no actual evidence whatever for any of them

It was asked to demonstrate what percentage of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. WG1, Ch2 cites Andres et al., 2000 (among several others).

So when you say that they actually present no evidence whatever this is hyperbolic and untrue on its face.

You may say you *question* the evidence, but you have to provide a rationale for doing so. Such a rationale would be best backed up with contradictory research that falsified the citations in this chapter. Bob Kutz at least admitted that such research exists, but stipulated it wouldn’t count if he didn’t have access to all of the data.

While we are at it, why don’t we work on restoring trust in the Khmer Rouge as a political party in Cambodia. Sure there where some mistakes made, and some people acted in a misguided way, but they had only the best intentions.

It’s really difficult to put aside the fact that pro-warming Climate Scientists circled the wagons and took a united stand. They enabled anti-capitalist political activists, numerous wealth tranfer schemes, and damn near took a big chunk of American’s freedom and prosperity away. Personally I’d like to see them all shipped into lifelong exile on a remote island in the Maldives.

However, if you are interested in trust, let’s have a though and honest evaluation of Dr. Roy Spencer’s work on climate sensitivity. Frankly that’s where the rubber meets the road vis-a-vis alarmism. When Climate Scientists start addressing the questions raised by his work, we can begin believing they are slightly interested in the truth, rather than creating propaganda.

Until they do we know otherwise.

If climate scientists are serious about trust, they need to understand that those who have facilitated the exreme alarmism (Jones, Hanson, Mann, Schmidt, etc) can’t ever be rehabilitated, and must be purged. For some individuals, trust can never be restored.