Of course climate scientists are scientific, but they, like the rest of society have a broad spectrum of personality types. It is natural if you sincerely believe that you have a scientific theory that's correct to look askance at a bunch of oicks untrained in your topic telling you it's wrong. Even more horrid if they are a bunch of non-progressive right wing oicks. And worse again if said oicks are challenging your predictions and continue to be proved correct. But that doesn't make them non-scientific.

I suppose from a strictly narrow view of the philosophy of science they could be said to be non-scientific because they've come up with the theory that all swans are white and instead of looking for black swans they're constantly looking for white swans. Indeed if a black swan does turn up, which they do on a regular basis, they either try to shoot it, or, claim that it still doesn't disprove the theory that all swans are white. That behaviour is to be expected among a group of people who have developed a scientific theory that requires huge increases in the price of energy and world government to implement the solution to the problem they've identified. The price of being wrong in such circumstances is huge. So they will cling on for as long as they can.

It would appear that such thinking isn't confined to the climate science community. We have had a discussion on here about whether humans caused the increase in CO2, with a "physicist" claiming it is incontrovertible that the increase was caused solely by human beings burning fossil fuels. Well that could be true, but looking for black swans turns up the fact that ocean degassing of CO2 occurs around 800 years after a rise in atmospheric temperature - which makes sense. Michael Mann's gallant efforts in trying to "get rid of" the medieval warm period having floundered, we are safe in the knowledge that we had a medieval warm period some time between 900 and 1300AD, which is almost exactly 800 years ago. To me it follows that if what we have observed in the CO2/temperature records is true, then we should have expected CO2 to rise in the atmosphere some time between 1800 and 2000, and it did.

This particular black swan has, of course, been raised before, and supposed to have been batted away by the change in C13/C12 ratio however there are a number of reasons why this can also happen because of natural changes in CO2 as Dr. Spencer has pointed out over at WUWT.

Of course some of the increase in CO2 will be because of fossil fuels but the mystery, to me at least, is why the increase in CO2 remains at 2ppm/annum when human emissions have increased exponentially over the last 50 years. Surely, if humans were making a significant impact on the CO2 in the atmosphere this exponential increase would have had a significant impact on the CO2 content of the atmosphere? But it appears not. Why is that?

Martin A. "But behind this mask of ultraconfidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism."

To be fair to anyone with NPD, we all have ways of coping with our own inadequacies, it's just that this particular person is visiting them upon the denizens of this blog. As irritating as it might be to see someone who clearly thinks, or at least gives the impression that he thinks, he's a superior human being. he is ,in fact, more to be pitied than scorned.

His ambition is to get into the SkS gang and be a "big player" in the climate debate, that he should have such low aspirations, or that he believes SkS are big players is more reason to pity him.

Did I mention the pseudo politeness?