Bishop Hill notes this interesting bit about Gavin Schmidt and Dana Nuccitelli, and rather than try to rewrite the excellent dry wit in a few sentences going on here, well I’ll just let you read what he said at Bishop Hill:
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Gavin Schmidt, a much misunderstood character in the global warming debate, has demonstrated his good faith and honourable intentions by issuing a denunciation of Skeptical Science.
Earlier today Gavin and I exchanged some tweets about the use of means and modes in climate sensitivity studies. Gavin’s thoughts were as follows:
@aDissentient @micefearboggis Comparing the mode to previously reported means is a sleight of hand.
I was slightly confused at first, as I was unaware of anyone who had done such a wicked thing. However, having now read Dana Nuccitelli’s post about Nic Lewis’s paper at Skeptical Science I can now see that Gavin calls out scientific malfeasance whereever he sees it. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the Nuccitelli piece:
One significant issue in Lewis’ paper (in his abstract, in fact) is that in trying to show that his result is not an outlier, he claims that Aldrin et al. (2012) arrived at the same most likely [i.e. the mode] climate sensitivity estimate of 1.6°C, calling his result “identical to those from Aldrin et al. (2012).” However, this is simply a misrepresentation of their paper.
The authors of Aldrin et al. report a climate sensitivity value of 2.0°C [per the paper, the mean] under certain assumptions that they caution are not directly comparable to climate model-based estimates. When Aldrin et al. include a term for the influences of indirect aerosols and clouds, which they consider to be a more appropriate comparison to estimates such as the IPCC’s model-based estimate of ~3°C, they report a sensitivity that increases up to 3.3°C. Their reported value is thus in good agreement with the full body of evidence as detailed in the IPCC report.
A sleight of hand indeed. I will not hear a bad word said about Gavin at my blog. 🙂
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Interesting situation. I wonder if he and Nuccitelli will talk?
@ur momisugly Roger Edmunds says:
April 19, 2013 at 12:46 am
CAGW is doomed. People are dead. Killed. No outs.
I don’t see any intention of sarcasm here so I’m going to address this at face value.
Did you see that ‘debate’? There was none. It was a farce.
Gavin behaved like a petulant, timid schoolboy. It was more a playground scenario:
“yes teacher, I’ll tell you what the nasty bully is saying and I’ll tell you why it is all lies but please don’t make me sit at the same table as him because if he’s allowed to look me in the eye and subject my story to scrutiny then I may just pee my knickers.”
It just distracted from what was being said. Gavin could probably debate quite well if prepared. He’s no fool. I believe he’ll not debate because he knows that there are now a multitude of serious questions that can’t be answered in a manner which favours his team’s religious dogma.
Here, let me help you.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/TVEyesMediaCenter/UserContent/80680/1767920.2030/FBN_03-28-2013_21.43.24.wmv
Oh and in addition it would appear that to many, this, and the original post are like the International Space Station.
Waaay over your heads.
I think the British nature of this particular sarcastic humour has caught a few of you out.
Must be the way he tells ’em!
The criticsm is directed at Lewis’s “sleight of hand,” not at Dana N’s ignorance of it. Both Dana and Gavin rebut Nic’s paper, but for different reasons. BH’s ‘craftiness’ is also a sleight of hand, because Dana N’s criticism doesn’t depend on whether Lewis used mean or mode.
Bishop Hill is twisting the sense of the discussion by drawing paralels that aren’t really there. That’s why he had to insert his own words into the quote to make it work, that’s why he puts the smiley at the end of his post, and why Anthony refers to the dry wit. Don’t confuse a contrived bit of sarc with actual criticism.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Think pointman got it right…this is not the time to be nice with Gavin or the rest of them http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/the-difficult-kind/#comment-4879
Alex Heyworth says:
April 18, 2013 at 10:35 pm
Louis Hooffstetter says:
April 18, 2013 at 5:37 pm
…..Suddenly he’s a reformed skeptic? Yeah, when the Pope converts to Judaism.
IIRC, the first Pope was a Jew.
Indeed, and the fifth.
“vukcevic says:
April 18, 2013 at 3:09 pm
Gavin is a good guy, he accepted my early posts, even kinda defended me from attacks by Grant Foster and Daniel Bailey, but unfortunately his sense of humour isn’t what I assumed it to be. One little cartoon and most my RC contributions are off to his ‘Bore Hole’, btw, where all of the best sceptic post’s end-up anyway.”
Ah yes, I remember Daniel Bailey (And others). It was he who demanded I prove there have been glacial and inter-glacial periods on this rock. It was at this point where I ended my use of Sks.