The zealots picked the term global warming because THAT is what their science predicted. Al Gore and Michael Mann's oh so inconvenient hockey stick graph was the entire point of CO2 forced AGW. The switch to climate change was to a much more convenient and totally flexible scapegoat. Climate change allows the zealots to blame any and all weather anomalies on CO2. Drought? CO2! Flood? CO2! Snow? CO2! Heat? CO2. Cold? CO2! The entire northern hemisphere in a deep freeze? CO2! The arrival of the long overdue next glacial epoch? CO2! Anything and everything is evidence of CO2 forced Climate Change.

By the way ... The use of our intelligencia's acceptance of the AGW theory reminds me so much of the old Oxymoron joke ... Army Intelligence was the punchline.

For those non-zealots that wonder and open-mindedly seek truth and want to do a bit of research ... Check out the NASA/GISS trimming of the 6000 thermometer site database down to 1500 since 1990. They sites they eliminated were almost all from colder high latitude sites both extreme north and extreme south, colder high altitude sites such as the entire country of Bolivia, and colder rural sites all over the world. The sites they kept just happened to be warmer low latitude, low altitude, urban sites. And they dare to compare these new post 1990 warmer 1500 sites to averages developed using the older colder 6000 sites. And then have the nerve to tell us that the last two decades were the warmest two decades on record.

Not one thermometer in the Yukon or in the North-West Territories or in Bolivia or in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Caliifornia is being used ... Not one. Only ONE thermometer for the entire Earth north of the Artctic Circle. And we are supposed to believe these zealots after cherry-picking sites like this? Scientists are usually hungry for data ... a good scientist seeks out all available, relevant and pertinent data, and bases his science on the data. With NASA/GISS, they pick the data they like and discard the rest.

Still not convinced? Find out why the 3000 ARGO buoys all doing ultra-accurate temperature profiles of the oceans ... The buoys deployed a dozen years ago were not used at all for the first five years of their deployment. The buoys were all lying! They were not showing the heat that the scientists KNEW was in the oceans. So the ARGO data was recalibrated to make it warmer! And even then NASA/GIISS would only use 5 year running averages of the ARGO data even though they have hourly updates available as the buoys pop up and transmit new data almost continuously via satellite. We used to say, "It's a damned poor craftsman who blames his tools for his failings." Climate scientists who blame their thermometers for failing to find the heat they need to support their theories are damned poor craftsmen.

W

What About The Faked Data? To the anon poster at 00:20, you wrote that "Deniers are the most evil people who have ever lived..." yet in your long post, where you let us know that you came out of MIT, you make no mention of the recent revelation that NOAA eliminated the coolest 75% of the temperature monitoring sites and replaced them with interpolated values from the remaining heat island locations that were allowed in the sampling, and that this is the authoritative data upon which the study you hang your hat on is based. Didn't they teach you anything about integrity of data while you were at MIT? Remember GIGO - "Garbage in, garbage out"? Round out your education at icecap.us and ponder the fact that twice before in the last 150 years, the world of science has issued warnings that the icecaps are melting and the earth will become uninhabitably hot. I think the key here is that scientists are far more prone to group-think than they care to admit, and they are even more loathe to admit that fame and fortune can easily warp how the data appears to them - put those two realities together and you get easily bought science (just look at Medicine) and over the decades, the big money went into proving the CO2 theory. And for your information, I come from a family of scientists - two of which are somewhat famous - all of whom I love dearly - and I studied environmental science and geology during my University years, I switched to communications, but have followed the issues ever since and brushed up with a couple of semesters of chemistry just a few years ago - I make a real effort to keep up with the sciences, particularly global warming. I was really relieved when the issue took off a few years ago and it was only in the last year or so did I come to the conclusion that the science was just not there and there has definitely been widespread fraud and deception in the science itself - the thwarted FOIRs widespread regarding the original data, climate modelling programs and parameters and adjustments alone was a major red flag - if these numbers are to be believed, why won't the modelers publish the raw data, the programming and the variables for all us to see if we can reproduce the results and what assumptions they had to make to get those numbers? It has all the earmarks of a large con. You can call me a 'hardcore conspiracy nut' but please address the conspiracy to deceive the world with falsified data that is in black and white and gets bigger by the day - you were conspicuously silent on that in your 'deniers hate life' post. So, what about the elimination of the coldest 75% of the temperature monitoring stations by NOAA and the resulting several degree rise in reported temperature as compared to what it would have been had they showed us all the data, Mr. There Are No Conspiracies?

"The suggestion that scientists would fake data or manipulate data collection for financial gain doesn't even pass the laugh test." - thatpageguy. Well, read it and weep instead: S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former founding Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. He is author of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate (The Independent Institute, 1999). Here is an ecerpt from his recent article: "In addition, I noticed that the proxy data to which I had access showed no surface warming (tree-ring data of Jacoby et al (Fig 16 in HTCS) and ice core data of Dahl-Jensen et al]. I tried very hard to obtain more proxy data but was not successful. For example, I noticed that Michael Mann’s infamous hockeystick graph did not extend beyond 1979 and suspected that his proxy temperatures diverged from the instrumented surface results. Yet when I wrote to Mann about post-1980 proxy data, I received only a brusque negative reply. Thanks to ‘Climategate’ we now know, what I had then suspected, i.e., that Mann and Jones were engaged in a scheme to “hide the decline [in post-1979 proxy temperatures].” Sounds like intentionally falsified data to me. Scientists are human, and organizations rot from the top down. To read the whole article, go to icecap.us Feb 10th post in the left column.

"There is little point in attempting to persuade stubborn people..." - Chris. Chris, please pay attention - I started out as a true believer - going back to the '70s when I was an Environmental Science major - I celebrated when Gore's campaign got traction - supported his campaign, being a lifelong third generation Democrat. Then I realized that I was wrong in swallowing the AGW theory - that I had been conned. The evidence I have posted her is prima facie evidence that widespread fraud occurred in putting together the data and graphs and models upon which the entire case for AGW is based, and while it is not proof that man has no effect on climate, it is certainly proof that the central part of the scientific case for AGW was fabricated by liars in at least two pivotal data sets. So, the question is, do we abandon other serious environmental problems known to be true (dioxins, mercury, gmo crops, real air pollutants, nuclear waste, persistent organo-halides, habitat destruction) in order to pursue the remediation of a problem that we now know was 'proved' using falsified data on many counts and by suppressing the peer review process itself. My God, talk about denial. And what's with this "To, conservatives, it is vital they disprove climate change..." - I worked on Obama's campaign - gave him $1,500 and let his campaign workers stay in my home - attended Dukakis rallies, worked on Kerry's campaign and local dem campaigns. And Conservative vs Progressive doesn't mean anything to me anymore - the whole Right/Left paradigm has fallen apart in my eyes, I now see it for what it is - we have a one party system that is in the service of Big Banks and Global Corporations, and while we bicker about some issues that have artificially been divided into two poles, they rob us blind and we are starting to live like slaves to our debt. And back to 'oil companies fund deniers' - If coal is put out of business, what will be the net affect of any anti carbon legislation on the profits of oil and gas companies, oil and gas, as you know, is lower carbon fuel than coal by comparison? Don't get me wrong, I don't like coal because burning it emits mercury and particulates - that's what we should be 'sequestering' - not CO2 - and it is much, much more expensive to trap CO2 - lots of money to be made on all those retrofits - not to mention the 'carbon credits' and the retooling of everything else. BTW, Roger Revelle, former director of Scripps Oceanographic Institute - the Founding Father of the AGW theory - recanted it in his later years, only to be denigrated by Gore as having become senile. The bandwagon/gravy train was already rolling and they didn't need him anymore. By that point it became politics - and by now, it is a Religion - it stopped being science a long time ago.

They're coming out of the woodwork more and more as time goes on...
People who don't have a clue how science works, and how mathematical analysis works, and how statistics works suddenly become experts because they see something (most often tied to the Heartland Institute, but not always) that tells them it's a fraud. We get the folks majoring in science in college that magically become climatology experts too, having specialized and reviewed all the research and having done some independent research also?
Then there are others that decide that because "cap-and-trade" is a scam then catastrophic climate change must be a scam, for them I prescribe reading "Shock Doctrine". This backward logic would also support the Haiti earthquake being a scam because the US government sent the military in to protect US business interests in the country... so the earthquake must be a scam because US businesses are using the US government to protect and further their ends? Yes, cap and trade is a scam, and it's scams exactly like that that "Shock Doctrine" exposes.
If you're going to fight something, fight cap-and-trade. You obviously don't have the qualifications to judge the facts regarding global warming (catastrophic climate change) because although there are minor disagreements among the EXPERTS regarding pieces here and there, they are in overall agreement. They also manage to get their conclusions through peer review into the journals time and time again, while there has yet to be a concrete denial make it into the credible journals.
You may think that because you can read a thermometer you're qualified to draw climatological conclusions, but it takes more than that. It also takes more than figuring out that some thermometer readings were thrown out of the data. If you actually understood the process and understood climatology thoroughly you would likely know the answer, but understanding the reasons behind the why's doesn't seem as important to you as concluding it's all a 'scam', and since all the real money is coming from the denial side you'll certainly have plenty of fodder to support your conclusions.

For David, I assume that I'm misunderstanding your meaning, as the ability of air to hold moisture bears a direct relationship to the air's temperature. The warmer air is, the more gaseous water it will hold.
Environmental Science Major, what is the reason given for the choice in temperature readings to be kept and to be discarded? Do those reasons hold up to credibility? And doesn't it trouble YOU that while scientists generally don't make a lot of money and don't stand to make much from global warming support it, while the most profitable company in the history of the human race stands to lose a huge amount of profit should global warming be true, and it and it's ilk are pouring millions of dollars into denial? We are dealing with an interaction of science, politics, and profitability here, and once you get to the other two from science the only meaningful trail to follow is to follow the money. The one (rather doubtable) "spoiler" here is nuclear energy, standing to make a great deal of money on the other side of the equation, but short of ready cash to bolster their side of the argument.
What troubles me is that there's suddenly 100 times as much "fake" science produced with money from hydrocarbon companies than real science, replete with conspiracy theories by the dozens, so that a discerning individual finds it almost impossible to locate the credible sources amongst all the "noise", and what troubles me is that the deniers seem to insist on pointing out individuals like Al Gore as some kind of "proof" of fraud. If deniers had any concrete evidence of an alternative they wouldn't need to scapegoat a messenger.
Also it takes more than a PhD to impress me, because I know ExxonMobil has many PhDs working for it, and many of them are employed (and unethically willing) to find whatever results their employer instructs them to, and I've seen many PhDs discuss their conclusions about catastrophic climate change when their PhD is in largely unrelated fields without expertise in climate analysis in modeling, they know they're not qualified to make the blanket statements they make, yet they do.
Lastly, without having to concern ourselves about the "discarded" readings and what was behind that, how does the choice of the readings used in the calculations affect the result? Near as I can tell the conclusions are not drawn from particular temperature readings, they're drawn from temperature reading variations over long time scales, so placing them in areas that are low-lying and perhaps heat sinks is irrelevant because if they're heat sinks they were so 100 years ago and will continue to be in another 100 years. This is a fairly easy conclusion for even a non-scientist, and I'll accept it unless you have some strong scientific evidence demonstrating it's invalidity.
Now I'll go out on a limb here (as a "non-scientist") and note that carbon dioxide is relatively heavy in relation to other prominent atmospheric gases, and also note that the tops of many mountains on this planet are above the greatest mass of atmosphere. It seems reasonable to me then that changes in the thermal processes of the atmosphere would affect these areas the least, and it would also seem that since the carbon dioxide will tend to settle lower in the atmosphere due to it's weight it would contribute to the thermal processes of the atmosphere to a greater degree at lower altitudes.
Things like this make me highly suspicious of the deniers, because they fix on things like throwing out numbers that by their nature are less relevant to the subject of study. Once you have your PhD, if you work in a field using large numbers of statistics you'll throw numbers away too, because the science requires it, and if you're doing real research you won't be throwing them away because it's required to reach the conclusions your employer desires.

Certainty is a fool's errand when it comes to many of the natural sciences... You'll remember a half century of "This DNA encodes our protiens, the rest is meaningless stuff that gets thrown away" suddenly turning around and the stuff that was "thrown away" is actually what makes each of us unique.
Although I'm not a "scientist" per se and certainly not a PhD I do have a pretty good understanding of what science is (and is not) and I use that understanding to analyze what I read- I'm extremely skeptical of everything and the motto "believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see" becomes me. I'd like nothing more than to move over to the denial side (and forgive the term but I can come up with no other as applicable, in itself denial can be legitimate or illegitimate) but the "pro" side of the issue has reasoning and data that can overcome my skepticism while on the "against" side I have yet to find data that overcomes that skepticism. Here in the comments we have reports by the BBC, once credible but in recent times not so much so, and I've seen more than one cite to the Examiner in posts in recent articles, and the Examiner is at best on a par with the New York Post and sometimes leans toward being the National Enquirer of the UK, and thus my skepticism remains.
If the theory of catastrophic climate change appeared to be a result of "cap and trade" schemes I'd be more skeptical of it, but it shows all signs of being the result of scientists studying climate and the atmosphere and changes in them over time and reaching a conclusion where the main motive was scientific understanding, not money. I've been around a long time and my memory says the possibility has been discussed since the '70's and I don't recollect the 1st "cap and trade" discussions until at least a decade after that, when they began being used to limit emissions of other pollutants and clearly demonstrated the scam underneath them.
Thus I have a lack of a clear sinister motive on one side of the argument along with a great deal of scientific evidence, much of which I understand, and a clearly sinister motive on the other side along with a great deal of "evidence" that consists of attacking anything and everything claiming science but not providing any solid science to disprove the "pro" side. If an amateur like me can find huge holes in most of the "it isn't true" arguments then they aren't solid science.
And as Mikel says, "motive". On one side it's not clear, on one side it's blatantly clear. I remain a skeptic, but I'm far more skeptical of one side than the other, and the stakes are high enough that prudence demands I speak up for the issue.
I'll leave you with this: If cap-and-trade were the parent of global warming, wouldn't ExxonMobil etc. be working on exposing the connection between the two instead of leaving that entirely alone and attacking the science? That alone is a solid piece of evidence in the case we all must solve.

The close resemblance between the deniers and the creationists is not coincidence. They both base their beliefs on faith, not reality, and both therefore have to deny what is obvious in or else suffer from some severe cognitive dissonance. Thus both groups use the same tactics of imagining conspiracies, claiming the opposition is doing it for money, distorting the data, finding fraud where none exists, postulating nonsensical, unsupported explanations, and so forth.

To start off with, the actual physical evidence is just too great to be denied, so they ignore it or actually DO deny it. Examples are the increasing summer melt of the Arctic ice cap, extra generations of butterflies during the summer, earlier dates of ice breakup on lakes and rivers in the northern US and in Canada, sightings of Mediterranean birds in England, increasingly rapid loss of ice from the Greenland ice cap and the Antarctic ice cap, northern movement of insects and small mammals as the years go by, the upward movement of plants and insects in mountainous areas, increased wind strength and rainfall of storms over the north Atlantic, retreat of mountain glaciers over the whole world, melting permafrost, changed bird migration patterns so more temperate birds are overwintering in their summer locales than normal, vector borne diseases occurring further north than usual... But instead of addressing the obvious which is right in front of them, they prattle about missing data points, purloined emails (which are then distorted beyond recognition), and so on.

It is just about the same as someone claiming that a house isn't on fire because the thermometer in the garage says that it is 110ºF. Meanwhile the flames are all around him in the living room. If he were the only one in danger, it would be ok, but he continues to spray gasoline everywhere so everyone else has to suffer as well.

Clarification: I in no way believe that climate scientists are in on a vast conspiracy engaging in conscious fraud - I think something much more subtle is happening here. It is that there is key data that is corrupted and that legions hang their hats on that data. It is also that it is normal for the culture in any endeavor to be highly influenced by a majority mindset, and that a majority can be cultivated through selective funding over a long period of time. And history is replete with broad erroneous beliefs. To anon 22:51's statement "It is extremely rare for a branch of hard science to be completely wrong on as large a scale as you claim the climate scientists are, at least in recent times." I submit that it is easy - look at Western medicine. How is it that over and over again, drugs that were thoroughly tested in $230M FDA trials turn out to be killers? These are instances where there is some 'problem' that legions of people in positions to observe just can't or won't see, and it is hard to believe that a great measure of this problem didn't arise because up until just two years ago, there was no limit on how much stock an FDA drug approval board member could own of a company (or competing company) making the drug they are voting on. Marcia Angell, former editor of NEJM: "... The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." I question your assertion that climate science, with the dual hairball problem of even making the measurements, compounded by the hairball problem of trying to come up with a 'program' that approximately predicts the behavior of a spectacularly chaotic system with large numbers of impossible to quantify inputs, in non linear equations as pointed out earlier, is a 'harder' science than medicine. I will grant you that there is plenty of unsubstantial material on icecap.us - you have to monitor it and pay attention to the left column where the scientists are published and then view them with a skeptical eye. Go to the archives there and read: "Annotated Bibliography of Peer Review Papers Addressing Aspects of Greenhouse Warming- to 2007 (July, 2009)"

By Dr. Madhav Khandekar, retired Environment Canada Scientist, IPCC Reviewer, on Friends of Science

The first thing that sticks out in that paper is that the Mann hockey stick graph, that still pops up, is wholly discredited.

I also have two friends who are Geologists - one of whom is benefiting financially a great deal from the
CO2 scare, as he is involved in coal bed methane - getting methane (the lowest carbon fossil fuel) from a coal bed (coal is the highest carbon fuel) using bacteria, while the other is a University professor.
Both of them have looked at the science behind the
AGW theory and have suggested that it is 'bs'. Geologists tend to take a longer view of the
Earth's environment. Granted, it's just a couple of people, but this idea that there is some kind of concensus of scientists is truly bogus.

Hall Of Mirrors describes us sitting here suspecting the other of being a shill. Please note that I am aware of the Heartland Insitute's having many agendas, many of which I definitely do not agree with. But they didn't write the reports I am interested in, they simply posted them on their website. To keep focusing on the Heartland Institute rather than address the report in question amounts to essentially an ad hominem attack. Yesterday's posting was interesting - from Les Hatton, Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He’s a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community - his studies include critical systems analysis. This fellow has declared the IPCC's most recent claim that storms have become stronger to be false. Now before anyone here jumps up and down and says 'he's just a meteorologist and not a climatologist' please note that this refers to IPCC's claim that the weather patterns are corroborating their model - that the weather has already changed to match their prediction of stronger storms. I submit that his expertise is precisely what is required to comment in this area. I don't see the Heartland Institute's 'fingerprints' anywhere in this story - maybe you can help me out - I don't want to be deceived. Is Hatton in the pay of Exxon?

ESM, medicine is not a hard science, and psychiatry is very “soft”. As I said, this is an important distinction that many people don't understand. Drug trials and clinical research are also very soft. So much relies on subjective evaluations, such as asking people to rate how depressed they feel, or the amount of pain they feel on a scale of 1 to 10. One person’s 10 could easily be another person’s 2. The number of people in the trial can affect the results, and if stringent measures are not taken to eliminate as much subjectivity as possible (such as the double-blind technique and taking into account factors besides the drug that could affect the results), even trials with large numbers of people can be pretty useless. Climate science, on the other hand, is based on objective measurements, such as temperature, gas concentration, analyzing ice cores with spectrometers, and so on, not on people trying to measure their own feelings. Besides, a drug company performing trials on its own product (or even a single organization like the FDA doing trials) can hardly compare with scientists from many countries, with many employers, using different techniques, almost all coming to the same conclusions. Drug effects are not tested and measured in a myriad of different ways, as paleoclimatologists have measured past climate features. Tell me the last time the vast majority of scientists all over the world in a particular field of HARD science was as wrong as you think the climate scientists are. I think you'll find it has not happened in a very long time. And you’ll find that it is even more rare for many subsets of the same field, using different methods, coming to the same conclusion. I still maintain the chances of this are extremely small.

But I agree that we should not rely on the models that try to predict the future. They are not “soft” in the same sense clinical trials are, but you are correct that they don’t yet include enough of the complex aspects of climate, such as many of the known feedbacks that occur, and there are almost certainly unknown factors that they don’t include. James Hansen doesn’t think we should rely on them either, even though he helped create at least one of them. They are useful tools for getting an idea of what might happen in the future, but if that was all the climate scientists had, I’d be very skeptical too. I trust the paleoclimate data much more. After all, what better predictor could there be than what actually happened in the past, in the real world, with all of the known and unknown factors automatically included? The fact is that when you run the models backwards, the best ones do a fairly good job of “predicting” the general shape of what actually happened. But the changes are often not as extreme or quick as what actually happened when large climate changes occurred in the past. The models also have not predicted how quickly changes have been happening in the last few years. I think we should ignore all the models for now, and maybe use them later, after they are refined and prove themselves over a period of time. Instead, let’s rely on what actually happened in the past and what is happening right now. We know how quickly GHG levels have been increasing, and we can use different scenarios to predict how quickly they might rise in the future (depending partly on how much effort is put into reducing GHG emissions). Use the relationship between temperature and GHG level in the past to predict the future. Unfortunately, when you do that, the picture looks worse than what the models predict. That is the primary reason why Hansen paints a scarier picture than the IPCC. The IPCC relies far too much on models, which have been shown to be too optimistic. I’m not saying the paleoclimate data is completely perfect. But pretty much all of it points to the same general conclusions, conclusions that the deniers claim are completely wrong, by using illogical logic and often various forms of dishonesty.

One very common flaw in denier reasoning is taking one thing and extrapolating it to the entire field. Using the problems with models and applying that to the entire field of climate science is one example. The Mann hockey stick graph is another. It is a very good example of taking one piece of paleoclimate evidence and implying that since it had a problem, everything else must also be wrong. That is terrible logic, if you know the entire story. What happened, from what I have read, was that Mann and others gathered the data from several different ways of measuring past temperatures. One of those methods was tree ring data, but there were several others. Most gave pretty much the same results up until the recent past, when the tree ring data diverged from the others. Fortunately, it diverged during the time when we had direct temperature measurements, so it was easy to see that the tree ring data did not reflect the true temperatures in recent years, while the other methods did. What I think they should have done was to simply drop the entire set of tree ring data. But I guarantee you that if he had done that, deniers would be using that as proof that he was hiding parts of the data. It truly doesn’t matter what you do in a situation like that – the deniers will always find something “wrong”. What he decided to do was to basically leave out only the recent tree ring data, the part that diverged for unknown reasons, and he may have replaced it in at least one graph with actual temperature data. He didn’t keep this a secret, as some deniers claim (see quote below, for example). But here is the important point that you will never hear a denier include (talk about bias!): If he had left out all of the tree ring data, the results, based on the other methods of measuring past temperatures, would have been pretty much the same. That’s why I don’t think there was anything wrong with what he did. There was no perfect solution, but I think leaving out all the tree ring data would have been a little better than what he did. So this is a red herring, and nothing more, from what I’ve been able to gather. The reason you don’t know this may be that you never bothered to find out what the climate scientists themselves were saying. Here is a quote from http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/JonesMannROG04.pdf:

“During the most recent decades, there is evidence that the response of tree ring indicators to climate has changed, particularly at higher latitudes and more so for density than ring width measurements [Briffa et al., 1998a]. One suggested source for this behavior is ‘‘CO2 fertilization,’’ the potential enhancement of tree growth at higher ambient CO2 concentrations. Though it is extremely difficult to establish this existence of this effect [Wigley et al., 1988], there is evidence that it may increase annual ring widths in high-elevation drought-stressed trees [Graybill and Idso, 1993]. Recent work making use of climate reconstructions from such trees has typically sought to remove such influences prior to use in climate reconstruction [Mann et al., 1999; Mann and Jones, 2003]. Other factors have been suggested as possible explanations for apparent anomalous tree ring/climate relationships [see Briffa et al., 1998a], including the changing seasonality of the climate itself [Vaganov et al., 1999; Biondi, 2000; Druckenbrod et al., 2003]. The potential existence of such nonstationary relationships introduces an additional caveat in the use of tree ring data alone for climate reconstruction, since changes in environmental factors in the past could have introduced similar, unknown changes in tree ring response to climate.”

Thanks for the tip about where to find the better pieces on icecap.us, and especially a specific piece to read. I’m glad to see you admit that some of the stuff there is “unsubstantial”. (I’d use a harsher description for what I’ve read there.) I will definitely check it out.

By the way do you realize that if you judged that site the way you seem to judge climate science, you’d be saying the entire site was hogwash? Really, think about it. You have problems with models in general and with one of the many different ways of measuring past climate. I’m sure there are other things that bother you too, but the point is that you concluded from a few items that the entire field is completely wrong. If you had only read the articles on icecap.us that I read, you might conclude, as I did, that you couldn’t trust anything on the entire site. But instead you try to take the good and reject the bad. Can you do the same with climate science too? If the article you mentioned is good, I’ll go back and try to find some other good science on icecap.us. But I ask that in return you look at what some of the best climate scientists are saying. Look at their data, look at their conclusions, and judge them fairly. I would suggest you read two books: “The Long Thaw” by David Archer is the best explanation of the history of climate, especially CO2 levels and temperature, plus the known cycles like solar and orbit, that I have read so far. The second book is “Storms of my Grandchildren” by James Hansen. He doesn’t try to simplify things too much, bringing up many of the complexities and problems involved, but he explains how he deals with them. I thought it was pretty amazing how he found ways to get around some very thorny problems. I don’t completely agree with everything he says in the realm of policy, but in general most things he says in that area make a lot of sense to me too. For example, he doesn’t think cap and trade will work and calls for a carbon tax or fee, with a full dividend distributed equally to each person or family. That would remove the temptation for anyone to profit significantly from the transition, the way financial firms can with cap and trade, and it makes the process much more efficient and effective. The only people who would make a profit from fee and dividend would be those who reduced their emissions more than the average, which would generally be the less-well-off.

But you are totally missing my point, ESM. You were responding to my challenge to name the last time the vast majority of scientists in a field of hard science were as wrong as you say the climate scientists are, and the example you gave was not of a hard science. So I gather you can’t find any good examples. Neither can I.

I read the paper you pointed me to, by Madhav Khandekar. There were a few parts that bothered me on first reading, but in order to better evaluate what he said, I’d need to read at least some of the papers he lists and summarizes, which will take some time. One thing that bothered me was when he talks about the hockey stick graph and cites people who re-analyzed the data to get a different curve than Mann got. I don’t know enough yet to say whether these people did a better job than Mann, but what I do know is that tree ring data does not reflect the recent, measured rise in temperature well. Until we can say why this is so and take it into account, I think we should discard all the tree ring data, not merely try to re-analyze it. It would have been much better to say what other methods of measuring past temperatures show, and I wonder why he didn’t say anything about all the other methods (sediments, coral reefs, and several others). Could it be because their results aren’t to his liking?

On page 7 he says, “What is of interest here is that the earth’s mean temperature changed significantly from the MWP to LIA and back to the warm period in the first half of the twentieth century during which the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has remained essentially unchanged.” That is OK so far. But then he says, “The earth’s temperature history of the last 600 years appears to be driven more by natural variability than by anthropogenic GHG variations.” Do you see what he did there? He left out the most recent 60 years, which is when virtually all the human-caused global heating has occurred! If you do that, of course the changes are mostly due to natural variability. Is he intentionally trying to mislead us?

I was very surprised by the quote from Prof. Wallace Broecker on page 24, because I have read books where he was interviewed, and he never seemed to be a global warming denier. On the contrary, he warned that climate changes of the past have often been abrupt at a time when most people assumed the changes in the future would be gradual, and models showed gradual changes for the future. So I did a little research and discovered that Khandekar misquoted Broecker. Here is how Khandekar portrayed the quote:

“My lifetime study of Earth’s climate system has humbled me. I amconvinced that we have greatly underestimated the complexity of this system. Global climate change predictions are mostly mental masturbation in the final analysis”

And here is the actual quote:

“My lifetime study of Earth's climate system has humbled me. I'm convinced that we have greatly underestimated the complexity of this system. The importance of obscure phenomena, ranging from those that control the size of raindrops to those that control the amount of water pouring into the deep sea from the shelves of the Antarctic continent, makes reliable modeling very difficult, if not impossible.”

Note that Broecker was talking about the models here, not about predictions in general, such as those based on paleoclimatologic evidence. I also have reservations about models, but I think we should take very seriously what has happened in the past, and use that to help us predict possibilities for the future. This is what Broecker believes too, from what I’ve read. Another mistake is that Khandekar said this was from “a recent paper” and says it was from GSA Today (2007). It was from GSA Today, but the date was 1997. So he was talking about the models from 10 years earlier, which I’m sure were not as good as in 2007. Here is Broecker’s paper:

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/BroeckerWS1997.pdf.

I haven’t read it completely yet, but I think you’ll find that if you do read it, it will show he doesn’t agree with Khandekar in many respects. For example, in the very first paragraph, he says, “If the major climate changes of glacial time came as the result of mode shifts, can we be certain that the werming will proceed smoothly? Or is it possible that about 100 years from now, when our descendants struggle to feed the 15 or so billion Earth inhabitants, climate will jump to a less hospitable state. It is difficult to comprehend the misery that would follow on the heels of such an event!”

I also think I found where Khandekar got his quote, and this makes me think he didn’t even read Broecker’s paper:

http://www.sepp.org/Archive/weekwas/2007/January%2027.htm

As you can see, Khandekar used the first two sentences from the original quote, then inserted a comment from the author of the web page. It’s very clear to me from the web page that the “mental masturbation” comment is not a part of the quote. The quote is in italics, followed by naming the paper it came from, and below that comes the comment from the web page author, which is not in italics. Even if you assume Khandekar didn’t catch that, and I find that hard to believe, at the very least he should have put “….” where he removed part of the quote.

And guess what – the author of the web page seems to be Fred Singer, a relatively famous global warming denier. What a surprise!

This makes me doubt the honesty (or at least the competency) of Khandekar. I thought I’d see if I could find out anything about him, such as whether he had any ties to the fossil fuel industry. It turns out he does:

http://www.desmogblog.com/madhav-khandekar

Now, that doesn’t mean he has to be biased, but it should be at the very least make you skeptical about his conclusions and willing to investigate them before accepting them. I also found this interesting post with some interesting comments:

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/04/madhav_khandekar.php

I was going to try to find out if the articles he used really were peer-reviewed as he claimed, because I read a few years ago that there were no peer reviewed papers during a several-year period that denied the existence of global warming or that is was mainly caused by human activity. But the person who wrote the above web page did it for me, and just as I expected, at least some of the papers were not peer-reviewed.

If this is truly the best paper you can come up with from icecap.us, then I’m sticking with my first impression that it is nothing more than a propaganda site, and the people who run it care nothing about the truth. I may read it more carefully later and look at some of the references, if I can find them. But right now I’m thinking why should I even bother. Still, if you want to name another good paper, I’ll read it with a critical eye. It would be best if you learned to do that yourself though. Google is a good tool for that.