Skeptics often accuse the media of being biased, arguing that a liberal bias in the media causes them to shortchange skeptical climate arguments. But in fact, the explanation may be simpler than any political bias. It may be just a bias and an incentive system in the media that rewards fear-mongering of all sorts. From the WSJ:
Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it’s probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.
Take “stranger danger,” the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the “Bewitched” and “Brady Bunch” costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.
That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)
Anyway, you’d think that word would get out: poisoned candy not happening. But instead, most Halloween articles to this day tell parents to feed children a big meal before they go trick-or-treating, so they won’t be tempted to eat any candy before bringing it home for inspection. As if being full has ever stopped any kid from eating free candy!
In what is becoming a continuing series, here is an article by economist Don Boudreaux on how economists are fooled into hubris by their computer models. It could have been written as easily about climate (emphasis added)
Ironically, however, one genuine sin committed by too many economists is the sin of public hubris — of posing as seers who can divine the details of the future economy, of fooling themselves and the public that economists possess greater knowledge than they really do.
In their papers and books (and now blogs), Keynesian economists model the economy with simple symbols, such as “C” for consumption spending, “I” for investment spending and “k” for the economy’s stock of capital goods such as diesel engines, steel mills and industrial chemicals.
Governments and private researchers gather data on consumer spending, on investment spending and on the market value of all the stuff called “k.” Economists plug these data into computer-based mathematical models filled with “C’s” and “I’s” and “k’s” and other symbols from alphabets both Latin and Greek. These models then spit out precise predictions.
Voila! exclaims the economist slathered in hubris. “See my multivariable model and my precise-to-several-decimal places predictions! I’m a scientist!”
In fact, he’s an alchemist. He is misled — by the intricacy of the equations on his computer screen and by the apparent concreteness of the data that he shoves into those equations — into thinking that he’s doing science. He is misled into thinking that these leaden, aggregated data from the past can be transformed into golden truths about the future.
Some of you may have seen this at my other blog, where I ran it by accident, thinking I was posting here. From the Thin Green Line, a reliable source for any absurd science that supports environmental alarmism:
Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person’s annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles.
Dealing with spam, however, accounts for more than a fifth of the average account holder’s electricity use. Spam makes up a shocking 80 percent of all emails sent, but most people get rid of them as fast as you can say “delete.”
So how does email stack up to snail mail? The per-message carbon cost of email is just 1/60th of the old-fashioned letter’s. But think about it — you probably send at least 60 times as many emails a year than you ever did letters.
One way to go greener then is to avoid sending a bunch of short emails and instead build a longer message before you send it.
This is simply hilarious, and reminds me of the things the engineers would fool the pointy-haired boss with in Dilbert. Here was my response:
This is exactly the kind of garbage analysis that is making the environmental movement a laughing stock.
In computing the carbon footprint of email, the vast majority of the energy in the study was taking the amount of energy used by a PC during email use (ie checking, deleting, sending, organizing) and dividing it by the number of emails sent or processed. The number of emails is virtually irrelevant — it is the time spent on the computer that matters. So futzing around trying to craft one longer email from many shorter emails does nothing, and probably consumers more energy if it takes longer to write than the five short emails.
This is exactly the kind of peril that results from a) reacting to the press release of a study without understanding its methodology (or the underlying science) and b) focusing improvement efforts on the wrong metrics.
The way to save power is to use your computer less, and to shut it down when not in use rather than leaving it on standby.
If one wants to argue that the energy is from actually firing the bits over the web, this is absurd. Even if this had a measurable energy impact, given the very few bytes in an email, reducing your web surfing by one page a day would keep more bytes from moving than completely giving up email.
By the way, the suggestion for an email charge in the linked article is one I have made for years, though the amount is too high. A charge of even 1/100 cent per email would cost each of us about a penny per day but would cost a 10 million mail spammer $1000, probably higher than his or her expected yield from the spam.
This article is eight years old, but it was just called to my attention. It does not once mention climate, and it is in fact about people flying flags after 9/11. But those involved with climate issues may well recognize the situation immediately:
The muting of open patriotism after the Vietnam era may have been a case of what social scientists call “preference falsification”: One in which social pressures cause people to express sentiments that differ from those they really feel. As social scientist Timur Kuran noted in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies, there are all sorts of reasons, good and bad, that lead people not to show how they truly feel. People tend to read social signals about what is approved and what is disapproved behavior and, in general, to modify their conduct accordingly. Others then rely on this behavior to draw wrong conclusions about what people think, and allow those conclusions to shape their own actions.
Oh, not always – and there are always rebels (though often social “rebels” are really just conforming to a different standard). But when patriotism began to be treated as uncool, people who wanted to be cool, or at least to seem cool, stopped demonstrating patriotism, even if they felt it.
When this happened, other people were influenced by the example. In what’s known as a “preference cascade,” the vanishing of flags and other signs of patriotism from the homes, cars and businesses of the style-setters caused a lot of other people to go along with the trend, perhaps without even fully realizing it, a trend that only strengthened with the politicization of flag displays in several 1980s political campaigns.
The result was a situation in which a lot of people’s behavior didn’t really match their beliefs, but merely their beliefs about what was considered acceptable. Such situations are unstable, since a variety of shocks can cause people to realize the difference and to suddenly feel comfortable about closing the gap.
That’s what the September 11 attacks did. This time last year, you didn’t see many American flags on cars in my faculty parking garage. The people who didn’t have them on their cars weren’t necessarily unpatriotic – but displaying a flag on one’s car was associated with particular political and social categories that aren’t especially popular on campuses. After 9/11,enough people started flying flags to make other people feel safe about doing it too. Now you can see a lot of flags on the cars in that garage. Have people become more patriotic? Maybe. But more likely they’ve just become more willing to show it.
Though it does not mention climate at all, it is the best explanation I have yet seen on why Climategate got so much run. After all, the actual science addressed in the Climategate emails mostly was about the hockey stick, which even if you ignore how bad the science is in the analysis, really does not prove anything about the effects of anthropogenic CO2 even if it were correct. And few of the things that were revealed in the emails about alarmist scientific practices and resistance to replication came as much as a surprise to those of us who have been following climate issues for a while. So at the time, I thought it was no big deal.
In retrospect, what Climategate did was to give the media a story that it was socially OK to run with. The social pressures against running an article about problems with alarmist science were enormous, but a scandal allowed them to make an end run around these social norms. Scandals and meat and potatoes for the news media, and they could run with the scandal story without feeling like they were getting a huge social black mark from their peers. And once the scandal story ran, it was the shock that allowed many silent doubters to see that in fact they were not alone and marginalized (as they have been told time and time again in the media) but actually a sizeable population.
Of course, none of this solves the problem of determining the Earth’s true temperature sensitivity to CO2 concentration, but it has opened the door for a freer debate.
University of Arizona will host one of eight regional climate-science centers to help the federal government study the potential effects of climate change on natural resources and the environment.
The Southwest Climate Center will bring together scientists from six universities to study a range of issues and offer guidance to federal resource managers through the Interior Department, which will oversee the regional center.
Jonathan Overpeck, co-director of the UA Institute of the Environment, will be the center’s principal investigator….
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday announced the selection of UA to host the center, which will receive an initial five-year, $3.1 million grant.
The University of Arizona climate department has distinguished itself in the past by running this fine temperature monitoring station, located between buildings in the middle of an asphalt parking lot:
More important to the selection than the UA’s staff actual ability to, you know, monitor the climate is likely Jonathan Overpeck’s impeccable credentials in the alarmist community. Overpeck was a coordinating lead author of the IPCC AR4 paleoclimate chapter, and thus had a leading role in promoting the hockey stick and attempting to make the Medieval Warm Period go away.
The powers that be that give out large grants certainly weren’t going to give the center to Arizona State, which had the temerity to actually have skeptic Robert Balling on staff (with Sherwood Idso as an adjunct professor) . If ASU wants any real climate cash, they likely will need to find a way to get rid of Balling under some pretext.
We can see that employing skeptics is very bad for business. After all, Exxon gave the ASU climate department $49,500, compared to 62 times this amount to UA from alarmists in Washington. Of course, we all know that the Exxon money was far more corrupting. ASU likely perverted science entirely for 49K, but UA would never do so for 3.1 million.
If you are young (I suppose 20’s or younger) and have been actively involved in some way as a climate skeptic in the Washington DC area, reporter Andrew Restuccia of the Washington Independent would like to talk to you. He is writing an article on young climate skeptics, I think. Drop him a note, he seems to be developing a hypothesis that skeptics are all crusty old dudes and showing him some fresh faces would help: arestuccia –at– washingtonindependent.com
I get irritated by the team-sport aspects of the climate debate, where we race to defend and attack certain work because it gives an answer we like or don’t like, rather than based on its methodology. I confess to getting sucked into this from time to time, though I have also tried to call BS on skeptical work I thought was misguided (e.g. the Virginia AG witch hunt against Michael Mann) and I respect folks like Steve McIntyre who are controversial without falling too often into the team-sports trap.
For this reason I want to cite an article by Anthony Watt in which he criticizes, rightly I think, a skeptic for pushing a fraud/cover-up story that simply does not exist. Ironically, the article occurs just days after Joe Romm, whose site would never tolerate the dissenting opinions in its comments section that Watt’s allows, generally equates Watt’s past work with the 10:10 video blowing up children. (more comments on the Romm post here).
It was good to see Joe Romm denounce the 10:10 film for the creepy propaganda piece that it is. But in his explanation, he inadvertently explains exactly the mindset that creates such disasters. He writes in part (emphasis added)
None of this excuses that disgusting video. But the difference is that those who are trying to preserve a livable climate and hence the health and well-being of our children and billions of people this century quickly denounce the few offensive over-reaches of those who claim to share our goals — but those trying to destroy a livable climate, well, for them lies and hate speech are the modus operandi, so such behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged.
Note the statement — “for those trying to destroy a livable climate.” Does he really think anyone, including skeptics like myself or Anthony Watt (who he specifically calls out) is trying to destroy a livable climate? By using the word “trying,” he is assigning a motivation. Skeptics, to him, are not working from different assumptions or readings of the science. They say what they say because they are motivated to destroy the climate.
I suppose I could play the same game, and say that through CO2 controls Romm is trying to impoverish billions of poor people in lesser developed countries by halting development, but I don’t think that is really his motive, and it would be grossly unfair for me to write. I think poverty is an outcome of what he advocates, just as he thinks an unlivable climate is an outcome of what I advocate, but I can distinguish between motives and assumptions, but he apparently cannot.
This attitude is EXACTLY what causes unfortunate actions like the making of the 10:10 video — it is only a small step from believing, as Romm says he does, that skeptics are “trying to destroy a liveable climate” to making a movie that jokes about killing them all (or, to be frank, to feeling justified in acts of eco-terrorism). Is anyone else getting tired of this working definition that “hate speech” is any speech by people who disagree with me, because I have the best interest of humanity in mind so clearly those who oppose me hate the human race?
I encourage you to watch my climate video and decide if folks like me are trying to thoughtfully decipher nature or are engaging in hate speech.
I guess it is unsurprising that Joe Romm goes to the kindergarten argument of “he started it,” arguing that the video is just the flip side of the stuff skeptics are doing all the time. I am not sure exactly what comparable films skeptics have produced that are similar, and the only example he can cite is Anthony Watt’s blog post comments on the shooting of an eco-terrorist. I did not even go back and look at Watt’s comments, but I generally think that lots of people are too gleeful when suspected criminals, who are innocent before the law, are gunned down by police.
Never-the-less, its seems a stretch to equate the offhand comments in real time of an independent blogger with a film involving probably a hundred people (including those who commissioned it in the 10:10 organization), commissioned in an official and thoughtful act (after all this had to be months in the works), and funded in part by the British government. I say stupid things in real time that I later wish I had moderated or not said at all. That kind of communications mistake is very very different order of magnitude from a two month project involving scores of people and presumably multiple reviews by a prominent organization. (Update: Iowahawk makes this latter point about the number of people who were involved in this movie and reviewed it without a peep of protest here).
I hope this fall to get back to active posting on this site, but in the interim, I could not miss a chance to comment on this:
I suppose one cold say that climate alarmism jumped the shark years ago. But they have certainly moved to a new level, one for which there is not even a term, in this video. This video has everything – the government school teacher politically indoctrinating the kids, followed by bloody gory death dealt out to the kids who refuse to toe the government line. I am not kidding.
When I first saw it, I was sure it was a skeptic satire, ala Jonathon Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal,’ and I am still afraid that this may be some elaborate put-on because the video and its message — that skeptics need to be killed — is so obscene. But apparently, according to this article at the Guardian, it is totally for real and includes contributions from some fairly prominent artists, as well as funding from the UK government and the 10:10 program (a plea to reduce carbon emissions by 10% per year, eerily with a name probably purposely similar to 9-11).
Our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign have given us the scoop on this highly explosive short film, written by Britain’s top comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis, ahead of its general release….
Had a look? Well, I’m certain you’ll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It’s also got a decent sprinkling of stardust – Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others. But it’s pretty edgy, given 10:10’s aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.
“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet? Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.
But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”
The latter claim is hilarious. Over the next four years, CO2 levels will likely increase, if they stay on trend, from .0392% of the atmosphere to .0400% of the atmosphere. I would love to see these so-called science-based folks demonstrate how the next .0008% shift in atmospheric concentration triggers the point-of-no return tipping point. In actual fact, the have just latched onto the round number of 400ppm and declared, absolutely without evidence, that this number (which the Earth has crossed many times in the past) will somehow lead to a runaway chain reaction.
Anyway, I have teased it long enough, here is the video. Beware — there is gore (no pun intended) here worthy of a zombie movie.
Wow, its sure good that the world has decided that skeptics are the mindless, thuggish, anti-science side of this debate, because if that had not already been made clear, we might think that key climate alarmism groups had lost their freaking minds. It will be interesting to see if this gets any play in the US media — my guess is it will not. Magazines are happy to spend twenty pages dissecting the motives of the Koch family in funding skeptic and libertarian causes, but environmentalists get a free pass, even with stuff like this.
Lubos Motl is all over this, and has mirror sites for the video if (or more likely when) the video gets taken down. This is one of those propaganda offers that are the product of an echo chamber, with a group of like-minded people all patting themselves on the back only to be surprised at the inevitable public backlash.
Ed Caryl has an good post correlating most of the measured warming in the Arctic with urban heat islands near key temperature stations. He goes on to show that 15 stations with heat island effects near the station show substantial warming, while 9 stations without such effects show little or no warming (in fact show annual temperatures amazingly correlated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO);
Here is what I do not like about his work, at least as I understand it — I would greatly prefer to see this work done on some sort of double-blind system. One group, without any knowledge of station temperature numbers, sorts the stations while another works on the temperature trends. This way there is no danger of the sorting decisions being pre-biased by knowledge of their characteristics (something that arguably happens all the time in dendro-climatology).
I will be on the radio today between 3-4 Arizona time (6-7pm Eastern time) talking about climate change. Folks in Arizona can find it at 1100AM or listen streaming here.
One of the defenses often used by climate modelers against charges that climate is simple to complex to model accurately is that “they do it all the time in finance and economics.” This comes today from Megan McArdle on economic forecasting:
I find this pretty underwhelming, since private forecasters also unanimously think they can make forecasts, a belief which turns out to be not very well supported. More than one analysis of these sorts of forecasts has found them not much better than random chance, and especially prone to miss major structural changes in the economy. Just because toggling a given variable in their model means that you produce a given outcome, does not mean you can assume that these results will be replicated in the real world. The poor history of forecasting definitionally means that these models are missing a lot of information, and poorly understood feedback effects.
With climate alarmists continuing to declare climate debate to be over and asking skeptics to just go away, we are reminded again why it is useful to have two sides in a debate. Few people on any side of any question typically are skeptical of data that support their pet hypotheses. So, in order to have a full range of skepticism and replication applied to all findings, it is helpful to have people passionately on both sides of a proposition.
NOAA’s Chuck Pistis went into whitewash mode on first hearing the story about the worst affected location, Egg Harbor, set by his instruments onto fast boil. On Tuesday morning Pistis loftily declared, “I looked in the archives and I find no image with that time stamp. Also we don’t typically post completely cloudy images at all, let alone with temperatures. This image appears to be manufactured for someone’s entertainment.”
Later he went on to own up to the problem, but not before implying at various times that the data is a) trustworthy b) not trustworthy c) placed online by hand with verification and d) posted online automatically with no human intervention.
This was the final NOAA position, which is absurd to me:
“NOTICE: Due to degradation of a satellite sensor used by this mapping product, some images have exhibited extreme high and low surface temperatures. “Please disregard these images as anomalies. Future images will not include data from the degraded satellite and images caused by the faulty satellite sensor will be/have been removed from the image archive.”
OK, so 600F readings will be thrown out, but how do we have any confidence the rest of the readings are OK. Just because they may read in a reasonable range, e.g, 59F, the NOAA is just going to assume those readings are OK?
This is really some crazy-bad science in a new study by Welch et al on Asian rice yields purporting to show that they will be reduced by warmer weather. This is an odd result on its face, given that rice yields have been increasing as the world has warmed over the last 50 years.
Now, it is possible that temperature-related drops in yields have been offset by even larger improvements in other areas that have increased yields, but one’s suspicion-meter is certainly triggered by the finding, especially since the press release on the study says that yields have already been cut 10-20% in some areas, flying in the face of broader yield data.
Willis Eschenbach dove into it, and found this amazing approach. How this passed peer-review muster is just further evidence as to how asymmetrical peer review is in climate (ie if you have the “right” findings, they will pass all kinds of slop)
First, it covers a very short time span. The longest farm yield datasets used are only six years long (1994-99). Almost a fifth of the datasets are three years or less, and the Chinese data (6% of the total data) only cover two years (1998-1999)….
But whichever dataset they used, they are comparing a two year series of yields against a twenty-six year trend. I’m sorry, but I don’t care what the results of that comparison might be. There is no way to compare a two-year dataset with anything but the temperature records from that area for those two years. This is especially true given the known problems with the ground-station data. And it is doubly true when one of the two years (1998) is a year with a large El Niño.
In fact, he goes on to point out that simultaneous to the two-year trend in China showing yields falling (I still can’t get over extrapolating from a 2 year farm yield trend) temperatures in China did very different things than their long-term averages might predict
For example, they give the trend for maximum temps in the winter (DecJanFeb) for the particular location in China (29.5N, 119.47E) as being 0.06°C per year, and the trend for spring (MarAprMay) as being 0.05°C per year (I get 0.05°/yr and 0.04°C/yr respectively, fairly close).
But from 1998 to 1999, the actual DJF change was +2.0°C, and the MAM change was minus 1.0°C (CRU TS Max Temperature dataset). As a result, they are comparing the Chinese results to a theoretical trend which has absolutely no relationship to what actually occurred on the ground.
Further, though Eschenbach only mentions it in passing, there likely is another large problem with the data. The researchers do not mention what temperature station they are using data from, but if past global warming study methodology is any guide, the station could be hundreds of miles away from the farms studied.
At least, that is, in Nepal. Willis Eschenbach has an interesting post looking into the claim that Nepal has seen one of the highest warming rates in the world (thus threatening Himalayan glaciers, etc etc). It turns out there is one (1) GISS station in Nepal, and oddly enough the raw data shows a cooling trend. Only the intervention of NASA computers heroically transforms a cooling trend into the strong warming trend we all know must really be there because Al Gore says its there and he got a Nobel Prize, didn’t he?
GISS has made a straight-line adjustment of 1.1°C in twenty years, or 5.5°C per century. They have changed a cooling trend to a strong warming trend … I’m sorry, but I see absolutely no scientific basis for that massive adjustment. I don’t care if it was done by a human using their best judgement, done by a computer algorithm utilizing comparison temperatures in India and China, or done by monkeys with typewriters. I don’t buy that adjustment, it is without scientific foundation or credible physical explanation.
At best that is shoddy quality control of an off-the-rails computer algorithm. At worst, the aforesaid monkeys were having a really bad hair day. Either way I say adjusting the Kathmandu temperature record in that manner has no scientific underpinnings at all. We have one stinking record for the whole country of Nepal, which shows cooling. GISS homogenizes the data and claims it wasn’t really cooling at all, it really was warming, and warming at four degrees per century at that
In updates to the post, Eschenbach and his readers track down what is likely driving this bizarre adjustment in the GISS methodology.
In my Forbes column last week, I discuss the incredible similarity between the computer models that are used to justify the Obama stimulus and the climate models that form the basis for the proposition that manmade CO2 is causing most of the world’s warming.
The climate modeling approach is so similar to that used by the CEA to score the stimulus that there is even a climate equivalent to the multiplier found in macro-economic models. In climate models, small amounts of warming from man-made CO2 are multiplied many-fold to catastrophic levels by hypothetical positive feedbacks, in the same way that the first-order effects of government spending are multiplied in Keynesian economic models. In both cases, while these multipliers are the single most important drivers of the models’ results, they also tend to be the most controversial assumptions. In an odd parallel, you can find both stimulus and climate debates arguing whether their multiplier is above or below one.
How similar does this sound to climate science:
If macroeconometrics were a viable paradigm, we would have seen major efforts to try to bring this sort of model up to date from its 1975 time warp. However, for reasons I have documented, the profession has decided that this macroeconometric project was a blind alley. Nobody bothered to bring these models up to date, because that would be like trying to bring astrology up to date.
This, from Arnold Kling about macroeconomic models could have been written just as well to describe the process for running climate models
Thirty-five years ago, I was Blinder’s research assistant, doing these sorts of simulations on the Fed-MIT-Penn model for the Congressional Budget Office. I think they are still done the same way. See lecture 13. Here are some of the things that Blinder had to tell his new research assistant to do.1. Make sure that there were channels in the model for credit market conditions to affect consumption and investment.
2. Correct the model’s past forecast errors, so that it would track the actual behavior of the economy over the past two years exactly. With the appropriate “add factors” or correction factors, the model then produces a “baseline scenario” that matches history and then projects out to the future. For the future, a judgment call has to be made as to how rapidly the add factors should decay. That is mostly a matter of aesthetics.
3. Simulate the model without the fiscal stimulus. This will result in the model’s standard multiplier analysis.
4. Make up an alternative path for what you think would have happened in credit markets without TARP and other extraordinary measures. For example, you might assume that mortgage interest rates would have been one percentage point higher than they actually were.
5. Simulate the model with this alternative scenario for credit market conditions.
6. (4) and (5) together create a fictional scenario of how the economy would have performed had the government not taken steps to fight the crisis. According to the model, this fictional scenario would have been horrid, with unemployment around 15 percent.
In the case of climate, the equivalent fictional scenario would be the world without manmade CO2, but the process of tweaking input variables and assuming one’s conclusions is the same.
I have followed Roy Spencer’s work for a while on trying to measure climate feedback effects from satellite data. In general, I give him Kudos for actually working on what is really THE critical problem that separates climate catastrophe from climate rounding error. It is good someone is working on this, rather than, say, how global warming might affect toad mating, or whatever.
I have never been totally convinced by this part of Spencer’s work. Again, I give him kudos for trying to isolate the effect of single variables in a complex system through actual observation, rather than the lazy approach of running experiments inside computer models of dubious accuracy. I am not convinced he has achieved this, but I must admit I have not spent a ton of time working it through.
On the positive side, though, MF10 have forced us to go back and reexamine the methodology and conclusions in SB08. As a result, we are now well on the way to new results which will better optimize the matching of satellite-observed climate variability to the simple climate model, including a range of feedback estimates consistent with the satellite data. It is now apparent to us that we did not do a good enough job of that in SB08.
Really? You shared your data, were criticized, and are modifying your approach based on this criticism? I thought from the study of the habits of mainstream climate scientists the correct scientific procedure was to 1) hide your data like it was Russian nuclear secrets; 2) prevent any opposing view from getting published; and 3) defend a flawed methodology by getting 10 of your friends to use the same methodology and summarize it all in an IPCC spaghetti graph.
