From Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog, some strong advice.
UPDATE: Dot Earth on the debate.
If you want to know why Steve McIntyre has a large following and the respect (often begrudging) from many professionals, you need look no further than his latest post on the Yamal controversy. Some people won’t like his tone and others won’t like how his work is used and spun in the political process. All fair complaints, but they are largely a side show to the substantive issues.
And so long as Steve is delivering detailed, systematic and devastating substantive arguments — and yes this post is all three — he will continue to have a following and earn respect (however begrudging).
Anyone coming to this fresh who compares McIntyre’s latest dissection with the recent screed from Real Climate will come to a similar judgment, I’d guess.
I stand by my unsolicited advice to McIntyre that he needs to publish his work in the peer reviewed arena if he wants to have his work accepted and included in the mainstream scientific discourse. Meantime, those professionals, such as the guys at Real Climate, who want to do public battle over scientific issues on the blogs had better step up their game, because no matter how much the blog chorus gets whipped up about the tribal aspects of the debate, fair minded people observing events are going to come to a very different conclusion, like it or not.
The strangest part of the RC “hey ya! (mal)” post is where they show Kaufman et al. without Yamal. What do they think they show with that? The blue line is almost hidden below the red CRUTEM3 line, but if you enlarge the graph, here’s what you see:
1) The longest warm period in the Arctic EVER since 0AD was the roman warm period.
2) The MWP in the arctic did only get close to the roman warm period in the 100 first years or so (which was just when the Vikings went to Greenland)
3) There was a mid-20th century warming which for a very short time reached the heights of the Roman Warm Period, but the Arctic is now (or in the latest couple of decades) not that warm anymore.
4) The only thing that is “unprecedented” about the 20th century warming is the relative amount of warming since its onset in the mid-19th century, but that’s only because the Arctic was recovering from the little ice age, which was the absolutely coldest period of these two millennia. The additional warming from 2000-year mean levels and up is not exceptional, it’s comparable to the onset of the latest part of the roman warm period and the medieval warm period.
So, Kaufman without Yamal essentially shows us that the recent warming is just a recovery from the little ice age, which was the last part of a 1300 year long downward trend since the roman warm period (with just a little warm interlude in the MWP). If the trend was supposed to continue, we might be approaching a real ice age by now, and if AGW has stopped that, as was said by the media at the release of the Kaufman et al paper, then maybe AGW is our friend: It might be a win-win situation! If sceptics are right there’s no, or only benign, AGW, if the doomsayers are right that there IS significant AGW, but it’s not our doom, it just saved us from freezing to death 😉
I most assuredly am NOT Tom P – just an interested observer.
Tom P (01:39:35) :
You don’t have to give me a moment by moment update.
Rare footage of Steve vs Gavin!!
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2670719/Thug-humiliated-on-internet-video.html
Which one do you think is Gavin?