In that case, there shouldn’t be any further objections to my qualifications.
Sorry, I guess I missed the part where you provided cites for your position. Could you point it out?
Sorry, I guess I missed the part where you asked me for them. Can you point it out?
I really don’t think that the current pissing contest is useful to the discussion.
My apologies, I’ll stop.
You want me to provide a cite that shows that climate scientists stay up-to-date with their research? Research scientists read peer-reviewed material in their respective fields; it’s what they do. It’s part of the whole research process. This is like asking me to provide a cite to show that medical doctors keep informed of new/developing diseases and conditions.
Maybe you were under the impression that I was saying that climate scientists have read all (or the vast majority of) the peer-reviewed articles on AGW. I’m not making any such claim. I’m saying that climate scientists read a heck of a lot of peer-reviewed articles on climate science, which is why their opinion matters more than that of your everyday Joe.
LilShieste
intention: What the heck does “peripheral” mean? You citing one polemical source and I am citing scholarly papers, one of which (contrary to your mischaracterization) deals directly with the question of whether MER or PPP is the better choice. The other argued that whichever is chosen makes little difference.
This sort of logic betrays your own biases more than anything else. In fact, it could be that they chose MER because of these reasons mentioned in the source that I quoted above:
My guess is that if the IPCC had chosen to use PPP based numbers, which have much more ambiguity associated with them, then there would be people now who are arguing that the set of PPP numbers they chose was incorrect in some way. In other words, the IPCC is essentially damned either way.
This statement is incorrect. The IPCC AR4 report says that it is “very likely” (>90% chance) that the majority of the warming since the mid-20th century is due to greenhouse gases:
The problem with this whole line of reasoning is that it incorrectly categorizes the two possibilities as human-caused or “natural fluctuation”. A more useful categorization is to consider the categories to be caused by human forcings, caused by natural forcings, and caused by internal variability of the climate system. So, the issue becomes not so much whether the current warming is statistically different in trend from the warming in the earlier part of the warming but how one can explain each warming.
The warming in the early part of the century is understood not as being due to internal variability in the climate system but rather due to natural forcings, namely an increase in solar irradiance coupled with an unusually quiet volcanic period (with a small contribution from rising greenhouse gases too). However, the current warming cannot be explained in this way. In fact, I believe that the best estimates of natural forcings over the past ~30-40 years is that they are negative.
Here is a quote from the IPCC AR4 report (summary for policymakers) regarding our current understanding of the climate changes prior to the second half of the 20th century:
You miss the point which is that the people who are best able to evaluate the state of the science are the scientists in the field. The understanding of this, which has been vital in advancing our societies, is precisely why governments have had the foresight to set up bodies like the IPCC or, on the national level, the National Academy of Sciences in order to provide the policymakers with the best information about the current state of the understanding of the science.
You make all these nice statements about deciding whether or not “the hypothesis is predictive, replicable and consistent with the observations or it is not”. We don’t disagree here. Where apparently we disagree is with who we have determine this. As near as I can tell, you just want to leave it up to people arguing on messageboards or some such thing.
So, why don’t you enlighten us about what actual process you think should be used to decide if “the hypothesis is predictive, replicable and consistent with the observations or it is not” since you clearly seem very happy to just ignore or discount all of the processes that we currently have in place to do that.
Sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. The “extraordinary claim” that I mentioned is not, as you seem to think, the fairly unremarkable idea that incorrect theories over time get replaced by more correct theories. Rather, the “extraordinary claim” is the position that I described earlier as follows:
I.e., the “extraordinary claim” is this notion that mainstream climate science in general, and the official bodies that summarize its views such as the IPCC and the NAS, have somehow lost the ability to self-correct serious flaws in scientific procedure, and consequently are simply not to be trusted when it comes to drawing scientific conclusions that can be used for policy guidance.
Well, this does appear to be a widely held position among many AGW skeptics, but I didn’t go so far as to attribute it specifically to you or to any other individual AGW skeptic on these boards.
However, intention, I can see why jshore would think that you personally are espousing this position, based on comments of yours like this one:
Those are some pretty strong assertions about what you appear to consider massive levels of ignorance and lack of honesty “infecting” the mainstream, overwhelmingly supported, research-backed majority views of an entire scientific discipline.
You state that you’re “not claiming that a whole field of physical science has been corrupted”, but frankly I find it hard to see much difference between that position and what you apparently are claiming.
Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it. 
I shouldn’t snark, though, because if you do stick to this resolution then maybe jshore will have some time to answer my climate science questions for a change! 
I did not cite “one polemical source”. I cited the fact that the PPP is recommended by the globally accepted National System of Accounts, which says:
Since the IPCC is concerned with the relative volumes of energy used by the countries, this is directly relevant.
I cited the fact that the National System of Accounts was accepted by the Statistical Commission of the United Nations at its 1993 session.
I cited the fact that the National System of Accounts has been recommended for use by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) since 1993.
I cited the fact that the National System of Accounts, as well as the PPP, is used by:
• the UN itself, in all its branches (with the exception of the IPCC)
• the World Bank
• the European Union
• the International Monetary Fund
• the OECD
PPP is also used by the Asian Development Bank, and the World Health Organization, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and hey, guess what, every other major monetary agency on the planet. That’s the point of having international accounting standards, like the “National System of Accounts”, so everybody’s in agreement about standard methods of accounting.
So the bad news, jshore, is that going up against the National System of Accounts, and its acceptance by the United Nations, and the World Bank, and the EU, and the IMF, and USAID, and everybody else … in the face of that, whatever paper you, or I, or anyone chooses to cite is peripheral. It’s a done deal. Since the IPCC scenarios are concerned with “measures of the relative volume of goods and services concerned”, PPP measures have to be used.
Which is why the IPCC is not scientific — they don’t follow the generally accepted scientific principles of accounting, any more than they follow the generally accepted scientific principles of statistics.
w.
PS — funny how when I cite papers that are not peer reviewed, they are worthless, but when you cite two unreviewed papers to support your PPP argument they are “scholarly” … you’ll have to teach me how to do that, how to convert papers from worthless to scholarly.
PPS — One of the funniest comments I’ve read on the question is this one:
Did the IPCC really write its “summary for policymakers” before the rest of the report was done?
Did a respected pro-AGW climate scientist really refuse to release his data on the ground that it might be used against him?
Is the IPCC really using a non-standard accounting method that happens to enhance its estimates of AGW?
I’m not sure if intention is making an extraordinary claim, but there certainly does seem to be some extraordinary evidence floating around.
Actually, you cited Ian Castles claiming what was recommended and providing a certain small quotation from some document whose context remains unclear. It is not clear to me in what context the U.N. is talking about certain accounting methods being preferred. It is certainly not at all clear that they are talking about doing so in any issue dealings with possible scenarios for future economic growth, for example. The IPCC emissions scenarios are not accounting procedures…they are something quite different.
I would hope that you would understand the difference between this and what you claim to have cited but it seems to be lost on you.
Well, if you can’t understand the difference in tone between the two papers that I linked to and your quote from Ian Castles, there is little that I can do to help you there. I’ll give you a little hint: Usually, a paper that talks matter-a-factly about the different advantages and disadvantages of different approaches is a little more scholarly than a screed that lambasts someone for taking a certain approach.
As for whether those two papers were peer-reviewed, they both in fact were, appearing in the journal Climatic Change, see here and here. I honestly have no idea how respected a journal this is but I am sure that it can’t possibly be worse than Energy and Environment.
Actually, here is a list that shows various rankings of journals. Climatic Change seems at least reasonably decent by these rankings. I couldn’t find any listing for Energy and Environment.
Could you point to that list again, jshore? dank je.
Your polite way of pointing out, “you forgot to include the link dummy!” 
Here it is.
My bad. The citations you gave had no indication that the papers had ever been published. I was not surprised when you revealed where they were published.
Since you don’t know how respected a journal Climatic Change is, here’s a clue. Stephen Schneider is the Editor-In-Chief of Climatic Change. So I fear we don’t know how many lies he feels are justified in the journal … we only know he thinks that lying in a noble cause is perfectly fine, and that the only question is striking the proper balance between honesty and effectiveness.
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer scientists who are honest regardless of the cost. The fact that the authors decided to publish in a journal whose editor thinks dishonesty is permissible if the cause is noble means something to me, but YMMV.
w.
True or false, you purposely mis-represented what I said in order to form a straw man to knock down? Go ahead and report away.
No I am not. Someone unversed in the basic tools of science can’t take anything meaningful away from a journal article. You are claiming that I’m saying that since no one has a complete, 100% understanding of every variable of climate science then it’s impossible for anyone to understand. Your assertion is wrong, and as I said before I suspect you understand that.
Here’s more from the System of National Accounts (emphasis mine):
Since the IPCC scenarios explicitly forecast both GDP and GDP per capita by country, this clearly calls for the use of PPP.
There is also a very interesting analysis of the question by the UK Select Committee on Economic Affairs here.
Their conclusion? That the IPCC should use PPP rates. To quote from the analysis:
w.