Yes, I meant the Schmidt post. Steve covers some old ground there, but he is a stats guy not a writer as such, so you may find our host's book explains it all ina more digestible way.

I have the HSI on Kindle - there are a few graphs, but not many, and you don't need to examine them in minute detail, since they are explained in the text. Footnotes go astray on my version, but it's not too confusing. Rememebr it only goes up until just around the time of climategate 1. Much has happened since.

Let us know your thoughts when you are done.

"Let us know your thoughts when you are done." and don't come back until you've read it! Just joking :-)

Hah, not at all. I think even if you do not find your position on the science altered by the book, you will understand the angry ones here better.

What do we want this blog to achieve?

Any sceptical climate blog is obliged to make a coherent, robust, scientific case that the standard position is wrong.

Its objective readers must decide if this is in fact happening.

@BBD

It doesn't work like that. We are the counsel for the defence - we do NOT have to solve the crime ourselves fingering a different culprit. We just have to show the gaps and inconsistencies in the prosecution case.

I start by asking why the prosecution keep on lying and exaggerating. If they have strong evidence they should present it and then shut up. Instead they mix lies and exaggerations in with their evidence. It's easy to find these lies and highlight them to the jury. A simple example is Al Gore's story about Pacific Islanders being relocated to New Zealand. This never happened - he just made it up. What else did he make up ? Why did he lie ?

It might help if we could collectively agree on what science is NOT settled, and push on that. Going over old suff that is pretty much proven beyond dispute is not helping.

Sceptics have a problem: they have no *robust, coherent scientific case* and yet they claim the standard position is wrong. Consequently, they are marginalised and frequently derided.

The only way out of this intellectual ghetto is to advance a robust, coherent scientific case that challenges the standard position.

The smarter readers here will recognise that this is true. This 'case for the prosecution' stuff is simply false equivalence.

Falsify the hypothesis. That's how it works.

BBD, there is no single unified case, we haven't done such a good party whip line as climate science. There is no single unified case within Climate Science either, but they've done a grand job of censuring and bullying and PR to make sure only one unified message gets out.

here's the standard case. bbd please correct if i missed anything or got something wrong

- there was no mwp
- recent warming is unprecedented
- some 19 century mathematicians/physicists figured co2 warms the planet
- co2 has increased recently
- we cant figger what else has caused warming which proves it's co2
- the arctic is melting
- the sea is rising
- gcm predicts rapid warming. the gcm models have been tested by checking they are consistent with the data used to constrct them
- 1800 climate scientists agree so who can doubt it (except deniers who are paid by bigoil)
- the temp records have been homogenised by prof jones who deleted the original data but the results are ok
- urban growth around monitoring stations has no significance
- the hockey stick has been reproduced by other studies so even if the calcs were wrong the result was right
- we don't know why tree proxies don't work for recent temps but that does not prove they are no good for the last 1000 years
- emails were taken out of context and anyway were stolen

TBYJ

There is no single unified case within Climate Science either, but they've done a grand job of censuring and bullying and PR

Oh come on. First, there *is* a single, unified case: GHG forcing heats the climate system including the oceans. Second, talk of censoring and PR is essentially nonsense. The scientific position stands up on its own. It's past time sceptics focussed on the full picture instead of trivial details. I include the Mannean hockey stick under the latter.

This is the problem: instead of a coherent and robust scientific counter-argument, sceptics have only the inconsequential trivia. Hence the intellectual ghettoisation of contrarians over the last couple of decades.

They have failed to make their case.

BBD,

GHG heating is NOT the unified case, because climate scientists cannot agree on the magnitude of it. And it's the magnitude of it which matters, not the existence of it (which isn't in dispute among scientists, skeptical or otherwise). Show me the one figure for climate sensitivity and I can show you one which contradicts it.

Just because a political organisation decides to pick one static figure from the maelstrom at one point in time does not make it physical reality.

Thank you for throwing the Hockey Stick under the bus, where it belongs. Suddenly, when it's obvious to everyone that it's crapola, you lot are keen to marginalise it. For years you were defending it to the death. We were right about it - you were wrong. You are only saying it's trivial now to hide your stupidity.

As for "cases" - this isn't a court of law. Nature is already making our case. No warming for 15 years, no sea-level rise, no increase in humidity, no missing heat in the ocean, stable arctic, stable antarctic. All of the models, even the 'catch-all' spreads, overestimated temperatures.

You people never learn. This is not a popularity contest. It doesn't matter who has been marginalised by which clique.

TBYJ

Equilibrium climate sensitivity is very likely ~3C (probably just under). Transient climate response is probably just under 2C. There is a pretty solid consensus around these numbers now. Sceptics deny this along with much else, I know, but it's still true.

As for 'never learning' and 'popularity cliques' I refer you to my previous comments. Sod popularity. Sceptics need to advance a *robust and coherent* scientific argument. Absent that, there is nothing.

Instead, you provide a typical Gish Gallop of misrepresentations. All wrong, as per. Mass loss from Antarctic ice loss continues apace. Mass loss from the GIS likewise. Multi-year Arctic ice is disappearing fast. SLR is subject to short-term variation and a very clear long term *upward* trend. Ditto temperature. Ditto ocean heat content. The multi-model mean is routinely misrepresented - projections are for a decadal *average* ~0.2C surface warming over the next few decades.

And once again - who cares about the HS? It doesn't make any difference to what is happening *now*. Once again, you have to stop obsessing about trivial detail and look at the bigger picture.

You don't need luck, Shub. You need a proper scientific case.

Good luck BBD.

I don't need it. There is a proper scientific case for AGW.

I agree BBD. There is.

TBY,
I wish you the very best of luck.

May 23, 2012 at 4:01 PM | shub>>>>

We seem to have seen the return of a couple of our most disruptive contributors, one of whom seems to have altered it's sign on name since last being banned.

DNFTT