Climate scientists behaving badly – We have become used to them fiddling the data, such as hiding the decline, lowering historical temperatures, raising more recent ones, making the MWP and LIA disappear and fabricating the sea level numbers.

Now bullying is on the increase. We have seen smear campaigns waged against Willie Soon, Judith Curry, Lennart Bengtsson and others, but currently, it seems to be a daily event. Fourteen climate scientists have published a smear campaign against Susan Crockford. Now we are seeing a twitter attack on Dr Curry.

Climate scientists must be losing the argument if they are increasingly resorting to ad hominem attacks and bullying. This is not the scientific way and these people are a disgrace to the profession.

If it has been Peer Reviewed In Climate Science, it should be initialled accordingly.

Now that Mann and Lewandowsky have put their names to the Harvey et al defamatory and libellous drivel paper, it is about time that Climate Science distanced itself from purveyors of faked-up science.

Entropic Man, this has been suggested to you before. Who are you going to blame?

//Entropic Man, Phil Clarke & vvussell

//The message coming from those researching climate science is that they spend too much time trusting the computer models that were designed by their previous failures, that were based on Mann's fraudulent Hockey Stick.

Until 97% of Climate Science is discarded, no one is going to trust anything from climate scientists. It seems that Hillary Clinton doesn't, (surprise surprise she lied) though if elected, she may not turn off the financial taps as abruptly as Trump, it will depend on the financial incentives offered..

Someone needs to work out the 3% of climate science that is worth saving, and you seemed to have ruled yourselves and thousands of others out. It is a bit like the Remainers in the UK trying to dictate terms, or halt BREXIT, why should anyone listen to the opinions of those who are wrong, and can't accept it? As for the liars and scam artists that infest the cesspools of climate science, it will be interesting to see who they throw under a bus first.

Oct 19, 2016 at 12:57 AM | golf charlie//

Climate science, as I have explained above, under estimates important natural drivers. It also glosses over major uncertainties by ignoring them. I refer, for example, to molecular collisions being much more frequent than photon emissions or whether water vapour is a positive or negative feedback. We discussed many of these earlier in this discussion so I shall not repeat them here.

Climate science also bluffs its way with preposterous positions that would be laughed out of court in normal science. Models provide a good illustration of this.

Models are good research tools but their use in applications is normally strictly controlled. A model is validated when it is successfully predictive in every set of conditions that can be simulated, including hindcasting. This could be tested in climate science by choosing a series of actual time periods where start and end conditions are well documented.

Models that do not successfully give perfect predictions under all circumstances are deemed to have failed. Such models are discarded or re-programmed. They have no value in the application. Partially successful models are deemed failed. Failed models cannot be used in applications. Imagine engineering applications reliant on models which are not properly validated. It would be illegal.

For some reason, all of climate science and major policy making seems to be based on flawed models. Worse than that, they are based on ensembles of failed models. By definition, only one model can be correct. In climate science, I would put money on them all being wrong for reasons discussed in this and in my previous post.

But let us imagine that one model is right and passes all the tests. All the rest must be wrong. Some may give the same output by chance in a particular set of circumstances, but not for all other conditions. How can it be beneficial to produce an average of wrong answers?

If the average of wrong answers is closer to the answer they were looking for, that is a good result in climate science. But it a long way from real science.

Schrodinger's Cat, I am realistic enough to accept that the perfect Computer Generated Climate Model can not be produced. But they all seem to produce "warming".

Climate Scientists will blame the programmers, but they have only programmed in the garbage provided by the Climate Scientists. There is a consistent pattern of Climate Scientists being so consistently wrong, and Harvey et al really ought to help other Science Journals and Institutions join the dots for themselves.

Harvey et al have confirmed the blogs they do not want people to trust, and identified the blogs they want people to trust. Climate Science keeps getting things the wrong way around, and this time it has been authenticated by Peer Review

gc - follow the money. Journals that rely on climate publications for much of their income are not going to turn away the hand that feeds them.

Dec 8, 2017 at 7:20 PM | Schrodinger's Cat

Agreed! How many Climate Science journals were there when CB Radios were all the rage? I expect some of the expert journalists will evolve and become experts on belly button deoderant or something else we don't need.

Climate change has enjoyed massive funding for decades. How much warming can we expect? There is an equation for that here… What is the energy budget deficit? Trenberth’s work illustrates it there. Every aspect is covered in a multitude of papers.
The science is settled, the consensus is 97%, what could possibly go wrong?

“We understand a lot of the physics in its basic form. We don’t understand the emergent behaviour that results from it.” – William Collins.

Rather a lot is going wrong. Hard line warmists believe that CO2 is the climate control knob and the only possible source of warming. This is why there have been so many attempts to erase the Roman warm period and the MWP. In short, many climate assumptions are wrong. As a consequence, the models are wrong and almost every alarmist prediction has been wrong. “Our children will not know what snow is.”

They underestimated natural climate drivers like the oceans, the water cycle, clouds and the sun. Only relentless warming was possible. Then we had the pause. Now we are seeing new papers on all of these subjects. The science is not settled.

The truth is beginning to fight back. Those who resorted to smearing Dr Susan Crockford are now the focus of interest. A judge in Arizona has ordered the release of the ClimateGate papers there. Trump is setting up his team to investigate the science. Those who fiddled the Indian sea level records are being exposed. The great renewable energy initiatives are beginning to unravel as the costs and operational problems mount up.

So, what does the consensus of scientists say about this? Those who put their trust in what they were being told because it was peer reviewed are watching anxiously. Those who investigated for themselves are writing posts like this. Those who are getting desperate have resorted to ad hominen attacks. The main players continue to ignore all the challenges.

This may start to change. The temperatures seem to be at some sort of peak, reduced by the pause and boosted by El Nino. All the signs are that cooling may follow. The many solar cycles suggest this and ocean measurements agree. Several new papers report on a cooling phase. How will the climate scientists deal with cooling? Perhaps they will blame it on global warming.

"Several new papers report on a cooling phase. "

Name one?

New Tricks Zone has seven of them.

I am sure Climate Science will adapt from panic mode about warming, to panic mode about cooling. It is just natural variability, survival of the fattest etc, and has happened before.

Does the "Settled Science" allow a calculation of the ppm CO2 necessary to prevent a 2°C drop in temperature, or are the Computer Models not capable of producing a Cooling Scenario at all?

The models are programmed to link temperature rise to atmospheric CO2 concentration so, given that the CO2 keeps rising, I would guess that it would be impossible for the models to show cooling. The one exception could be massive aerosol concentration due to volcanic eruptions.

Climate scientists do not understand very much about natural climate drivers, having assumed for decades that they are of no importance. As we approach solar conditions last seen at the Dalton minimum they may have to refer to pre-climate change text books. The oceans are starting to cool now. I suspect that tiny changes in TSI (thought to be negligible by climate scientists) have a long term cumulative effect on ocean heat content.

Schrodinger's Cat, Climate Science simply "fixes" the GIGO of the Computer Models, without addressing the built in design flaws, including the obsession with proving CO2 is the temperature control knob.

I wonder whether computer programmers have raised queries about the assumptions they are required to programme in to the models, but have experienced control freaks constantly telling them not to fiddle with the settled science, but leave the comfortably settled Climate Scientists to fiddle with the GIGO controls instead.

It's still something of a mystery to me as to exactly how much the CO2 warming is programmed in. I was unable to find the specs of CMIP5 to see the restrictions imposed and the assumptions required. I still don't understand whether they just (effectively) look up in a table so much CO2 gives so many watts/m2. If so does it vary by time of day or latitude or is it just some stupid average? Is albedo fixed, or averaged?

As far as the ensemble problem is concerned, do all the runs on the spaghetti graph have the same adjustable parameters? If not, what's the point?

rhoda, do the computer models even have an "Off" switch for the effects of varying CO2 concentrations, or does that stop the models from varying at all?

If the dire consequences of Global Warming have been programmed in to todays crop of Computer Modellers from school age, it is unlikely that they would be capable of finding any design flaws, in their own work, or that of their mentors.

Climate Scientists have no financial incentive to find and/or fix problems in their own work either as this thread has demonstrated, and Harvey et al 2017 has proved with Peer Approval.

I don't know the answers to the questions posed. Entropic man has all the equations to hand. I can't be bothered doing that. If I remember correctly, the Beer Lambert law says that the absorbance is proportional to the log of the ratio of the start and increased concentrations. Then they have a relationship for the IR absorbance and temperature. There are other factors such as water vapour feedbacks and aerosol effects. The final temperature for a given cell in the atmospheric model will depend on these things plus all the fluid dynamics of the interactions between each cell, including wind, convection, etc. The system is complex but the climate scientists are convinced that CO2 is the dominant driver of warming so it is likely that this dominates the model calculations too as far as temperature is concerned.

The effects they don't understand and can't model have best guess values. When running ensembles, they must have differences. These could be start values, assumptions, weighting factors, etc. They could even be different model runs if the models permit some randomness in the options available..

These are my speculative responses but they hopefully give you some idea of how it works. If others out there have more insight please share it with us.

New Tricks Zone has seven of them.

Ah, I thought you meant a global cooling phase, not cherry-picked regional cooling.

My mistake.

Ah, I thought you meant a global cooling phase, not cherry-picked regional cooling.

My mistake.

Dec 10, 2017 at 2:52 PM | Phil Clarke

Is that the same mistake multiplied many times over that Mann used, and Gergis replicated, or is that something different?

Phil Clarke says it's all just local or regional. If that is not significant globally, that pretty much rules insignificant all paleo proxies. Unless some count and some don't, like cherry stones.

May I reccomend this online textbook. as a general purpose source of climate science information.

You might want to bookmark the contents page link.

For information on the design, operation and interpretation of climate models go to Chapter 3.

Rhoda

Different proxies have different coverage.

A single tree gives data for one location. Pollen analysis covers a few square miles around a peat bog. Oxygen isotopes in an Antarctic ice core may have come from anywhere in the Southern Ocean.

This is why it is good practice to combine data from as many different proxies as possible, especially on a regional or global scale. Shakun and Marcott used more than 70 proxies to estimate Holocene global temperatures.

Climate change is not a uniform increase in temperature. There will be areas which warm more rapidly than average and areas which cool. To show a global cooling trend you need enough studies to give global coverage. Seven local studies is too small a sample.

Schrodinger's cat

"The system is complex but the climate scientists are convinced that CO2 is the dominant driver of warming so it is likely that this dominates the model calculations too as far as temperature is concerned."

As you say, increasing CO2 is currently the dominant driver of global warming.

However you have the rest backwards. All the potential drivers are included in the models.

Observation and models agree that the other major variables such as albedo, solar insolation, orbital cycles etc are relatively constant, and therefore not driving temperature change. CO2 is the only one showing significant change and the only one driving. From that evidence comes the AGW consensus.

So some indeed count and some don't. My local/regional warming is your global warming. My local cooling is NOT your global cooling. My claim that the global average is meaningless is wrong except when it's right. Don't you see the way you are twisting logic appears partisan in support of a hypothesis which is severely lacking in certainty and comprehensiveness? The way believers cannot express any doubt or disclaim any of the more 'enthusiastic' claims of climate science is a sign to the rest of us that this is more faith than science.

Rhoda

I tend to think in terms of statistical validity.

I ask questions like

Does this information accurately reflect the behaviour of the whole system?

How much data do you need to distinguish between the short term variability and a possible long term trend?

This has nothing to do with my preferred outcome. I try to apply the same standard regardless.

I am insulted by your suggestion that I apply lower standards of evidence to outcomes that I would prefer.

Suppose you ask two people how long they waited at you local A and E. One had a cut finger and waited five hours. The other had a heart attack and waited five seconds. That is not a big enough sample to calculate the average waiting time. You need to talk to hundreds of people over a period of time.

A newspaper wanting to criticise the NHS would highlight the cut finger. A politician supporting the NHS would highlight the heart attack. Both would give a false impression.

On the specific topic of the seven papers at NTZ. They present seven studies that show local cooling and generalise to a claim that the globe is cooling. What NTZ do not say is that these are a small minority of the total number of studies, most of which show long term warming.

I trust that you disapprove of such cherrypicking, as I do.