U.S. Dept. of Ag report: Climate change is damaging America . . . now

Great Debates
141

[QUOTE=jshore]
Man, intention, you are pulling out ever more desperate cites to make your point. That one is prepared by Mark Morano under the auspices of the “Senator from Exxon” James Inhofe. I believe on the DotEarth blog one time, Ray Pierrehumbert was going down the list of those scientists for Mark…but I can’t find it now. At any rate, I think we would have to throw out way, way more than half of them.

Take the one that you have chosen to quote, Dr. Madhav Khandekar, I suppose he is better than most in that he is a former meteorologist for Environment Canada who apparently did work on some things related to climate…e.g., El Nino…but he is now retired and affiliated with the “Friends of Science” and the “Natural Resources Stewardship Project”. If I try to see what he has published recently (last 10 years) related to climate, here is what I find. It looks like he has a few articles in the infamous Energy and Environment, a paper in “Pure and Applied Geophysics” which seems to be way down the list of geosciences journals in terms of impact factor, and a paper in a journal called “Natural Hazards” that I haven’t even been able to find out much about. (There’s also something in the journal “Weather” that seems to be a letter to the editor.)

If Dr. Khandekar is an example of one of the “heavyweights” whom you speak of (and, frankly, by the standards of that Inhofe list, he probably is), I would hate to imagine what the “lightweights” look like!
[/QUOTE]
I send you a list of 400 actual quotations from various people with various qualifications, and invite people to read what they actually say.

You write back to complain about who created the list … oh, yeah, that’s real relevant.

Then you want to tell us about how Dr. Kandehar (who spent a lifetime studying the climate) might have OK qualifications, but you don’t like who Dr. Kandehar associates with … more really relevant stuff.

Call me back when you want to discuss the issues. I have absolutely no interest in your ad hominem arguments. I chose that list because there was plenty of meat in it, plenty of actual quotations for you to complain about. You have chosen to ignore that entirely, you want to tell me how Dr. Kandehar is “affiliated” with people jshore does’t like … wow, that’s real scientific.

Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn if you like the people Dr. Kandehar is “affiliated” with. I care what he says. And I don’t care if you find fifty people in the list that don’t pass the jshore test, because your test seems to be “who are their friends”, rather than “what do they say”. What kind of science is that?

w.

PS - I was interested in your claim that anyone can be an expert reviewer for the IPCC, because I’d not seen anyone listed as an IPCC “expert reviewer” without having credentials. Also, the IPCC make a large number of claims about the quality of their “expert review”, which made it doubtful that your claim could be true … so I looked at your citation.

It is a claim by Tim Lambert that anyone can be an IPCC reviewer, you just gotta ask …

which in turn cites a blog page by William Connelly, noted expert on re-writing Wikipedia pages, who makes the same claim.

Neither of them give any further citation for the claim.

However, it has gone all over the blogosphere, with commenters saying that their dog Fido could be an IPCC reviewer.

Finding all of these claims, and particularly the Lambert and Connelly claims, upped the odds that we were dealing with horseshit, so I continued to look. And in the IPCC Call for Nominations, guess what I find (emphasis mine):

[QUOTE=IPCC]
4. EXPERT REVIEWERS

Function:

To comment on the accuracy and completeness of the scientific/technical/socio-economic content and the overall scientific/technical/socio-economic balance of the drafts.

Comment:

Expert reviewers will comment on the text according to their own knowledge and experience. They may be nominated by Governments, national and international organisations, Working Group Bureaux, Lead Authors and Contributing Authors.
[/QUOTE]
“Call for Nominations” … “Nominated”. You catch that? Nominated. You depend on buffoons like Lambert and Connelly at your own risk, my friend. What they said is 100% wrong. You have to be nominated to be an IPCC expert reviewer, and even then not all of the nominees are selected. Here’s more from the IPCC, this is from the Working Group II Progress Report :

They spent a full six months just winnowing the list of Expert Reviewers, and you want us to believe that you just sign up and ask for a copy of the Draft and presto, you’re an “Expert Reviewer”? I call bullshit. Here’s a copy of the letter sent by the IPCC to a proposed reviewer (again, emphasis mine):

Don’t think Fido is likely to make the cut, you have to be first nominated, and then selected.

Depending on Tim Lambert and William Connelly just made you look very foolish, jshore. Think about that the next time their names come up.

My best to everyone,

w.

142

[QUOTE=intention]
Well, I’m not sure what the “usual ratio” of retired folks is. I find 16 in the list of 400, that’s 4%.
[/QUOTE]

Still not counting the Professors Emeritus, I see…

[QUOTE=intention]

I’m not sure what you have against geologists.

[/QUOTE]

I have nothing against geologists - I just don’t think one automatically counts them as climate scientists. For instance, Segalstad clearly does count, as a brief review of his publishing record shows. So does Ingolfsson.
But the onus is on you to show their relevance, not just to assume that because they are a geologist, they are qualified to speak on climate change.

[QUOTE=intention]

As to why we have geologists commenting on climate …

[/QUOTE]

Did you read my previous posts? I’m also trained as a geologist, and none of my geologist friends doubt the A part of AGCC. And why is that? Because they are not heavily invested in it not being true, not being glaciologists, or petroleum geologists. Yes, geology certainly teaches you to take the long view, but if there’s one thing my studies taught me, it’s that tipping points are real. Mud just sits there, then one little shock and SHLUMP! you have turbidites. Rock just sits there and add 0.1% more water and BAM! magma. Systems are sensitive to unexpected or unusual change which I believe the human element to be. Yes there’s Milanković, glaciation/interglaciation, blaah blaah - you don’t have to tell me about Hutton, either. But…the human element is new, and as the CFC debacle already showed, we can have notable effects on global systems.

By the same token, that’s why Ingolfsson’s polar bear argument falls down - in the past, climate changed, and polar bears moved South. Now, when they try that, they end up on the streets of our cities, and how tenable do you think that is?

[QUOTE=intention]

Not sure what the problem is with meteorologists, or how you do it in “The Mother City”.
[/QUOTE]

Meteorologists study the weather. You do know there’s a difference between “weather” and “climate”, right?
And “broadcast meterologist” = “TV Weatherman”. If I don’t trust those guys to tell me if it’s raining (and I don’t), why should I trust them over a global consensus of more-qualified folk? And no, “consensus” doesn’t equal “unanimous” - there’s room for 400 qualified dissenters, hell, there’s room for 4000, and I’d still say “consensus” until the dissenters actually come up with the papers that break down the other side’s arguments.

[QUOTE=intention]

Finally, I’m not clear why I’m supposed to list all of the climate related papers by the 400 people on the list … I’ll leave that to you, since you seem to be interested in the question.
[/QUOTE]

You miss the point - ad verecundiam is a fallacious argument, unless you can cite the significance and relevance of the cited authorities. And no, it’s not enough to do it for one or two of them when your opponent has already shown why others on the same list are not qualified authorities on the subject - like TV weathermen :dubious: . So it doesn’t matter that it’s a list of 400 people - you want to cite them as an authority, I’m telling you to prove they are. Not some of the, all of them. Otherwise, come up with your own vetted list, rather than the ones being passed around the blogosphere.

143

[QUOTE=intention]
Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn if you like the people Dr. Kandehar is “affiliated” with. I care what he says. And I don’t care if you find fifty people in the list that don’t pass the jshore test, because your test seems to be “who are their friends”, rather than “what do they say”. What kind of science is that?
[/quote]

intention, it is you who told us that these were “heavyweight climate scientists” or “well respected climate scientists”. So, I naively assumed that you meant these adjectives “heavyweight” or “well respected” to actually be meaningful in some way rather than just filler. However, there now seems to be no evidence that you do since you don’t seem at all interested in any method, such as looking at what they published where, to determine their standing. Perhaps you can explain what you meant by these adjectives? Does “heavyweight” refer to the fact that they are obese rather than to any standing they might have in the climate science community?

In regards to being an expert reviewer of the IPCC: It does appear it is a bit more complicated than Tim Lambert said, at least in some cases, but not much. Note one of the cites you quoted says:

In particular, note the words “all” in a and d. What this means to me is that, contrary to what you said about them selecting from amongst nominations, the IPCC take everyone who has been nominated by their governments and by “appropriate organizations”. Now, the questions become how the governments choose to nominate people and what are “appropriate organizations”. Here is a link from the U.S. government soliciting comments on the TAR and it looks like they took quite a broad view of who could contribute as an expert reviewer…in fact, it appears that they allowed anyone to participate (although it sounds like they tried to reserve the right to decide which comments to pass along to the IPCC).

As for “appropriate organizations”, I have not seen this defined anywhere but it appears that it will be interpretted quite broadly, given the IPCC policy for admitting observer organizations. So, for example, presumably any non-profit group such as an environmental group on the one hand or an anti-environmental group (such as the National Resource Stewardship Project) on the other will be able to nominate people to be expert reviewers. And, this makes sense if you think about it because if the IPCC did not allow this sort of thing then they could stand accused of simply not allowing skeptics such as Khandekar to participate.

Oh, and here is the solicitation to be an IPCC expert reviewer on their special report on carbon capture (with bolding added):

I appreciate your concern but I don’t think it made me look particularly foolish. Their claim that anyone can decide to be an expert reviewer may not be strictly correct in all cases…depending on the particular report and the policy of the country you are in in regards to how they choose expert reviewers…but it appears that they try to make the bar pretty low and, in particular, to allow a broad range of organizations the opportunity to choose expert reviewers so that, e.g., a group like the National Resource Stewardship Project can nominate Khandekar. So being an “expert reviewer” means that the IPCC, some organization, or some national government felt that you were an expert, but how the organization or government determines that is up to them (and seems to even include governments allowing anyone to decide to be an expert reviewer, as the U.S. government appears to have done for the TAR).

So, I would say that Tim Lambert and William Connelly did not make me look nearly as foolish as Peter Sciaky or your own comments on Briggs’ website have made you look.

My best to you and everyone else reading this thread.

144

After 142 posts the bottom line on it seems to be this.

There are three schools of thought on the theory of AGW

The first is that it’s happening, we’re causing it and we’re all doomed.
The second is that it’s happening, we don’t know WHAT’S causing it and we’re all doomed.
The third is it’s not happening, but if we keep doing what we’re doing, the omnipotent being in the sky will bring an end to the earth and our wicked, wicked ways causing us all to be, you guessed it, doomed.
I’ll tell you what.

If it’s happening or if it’s not, I don’t know, nor do I care. I will do what I can to help the earth, but it may not be enough, and if it’s not, there’s not a damn thing anyone on earth can do about it. If the earth decides to reclaim itself, there isn’t a carbon offset, cap or trade that will stop it from happening. You can deny it, you can shout it from the rooftops like your hair is on fire, in the end, it doesn’t matter. No one anywhere will take any of this seriously because the people who supposedly KNOW, don’t, and the people who THINK they know, or want it to be true can’t find evidence compelling enough to make joe six pack believe it enough to change, if that would even make a difference, which no one from EITHER side is convinced it would.

145

intention and jshore, (and everyone else), knock it off. If we have reduced this thread to niggling over the details of who has selected the better list of authorities from whom to cherry pick our data, then we have moved out of the realm of useful debate.
And the snide remarks and personal invective do not make it any more appealing.

[ /Moderating ]

146

[QUOTE=buttonjockey308]
The first is that it’s happening, we’re causing it and we’re all doomed.
The second is that it’s happening, we don’t know WHAT’S causing it and we’re all doomed.
The third is it’s not happening, but if we keep doing what we’re doing, the omnipotent being in the sky will bring an end to the earth and our wicked, wicked ways causing us all to be, you guessed it, doomed.
[/QUOTE]

Well, there are a couple of other possibilities, ehe? :slight_smile:

For instance, it could be happening (for whatever reason) but we aren’t doomed, simply need to adapt to changing climate (we really need to do this anyway as, well, the climate tends to be unstable usually regardless of if we are screwing with it or not).

It could be not happening (or a natural cycle) and we aren’t doomed.

Or, if we take the long view…it doesn’t matter. Sooner or later we are doomed regardless of what happens in the next few hundred years. Because in the next few thousands things will change and in the next few million they will REALLY change…and in a few billion the earth will be completely uninhabitable. So, unless we are prepared to spread out into the wider solar system/universe we are doomed anyway. And even if we DO somehow spread out, we are eventually doomed either when the Big Crunch happens or the Big Rip happens.

So, on review, maybe you are right…we are doomed. :wink: However, as we aren’t likely to see the heat death of the universe in my lifetime, it’s safe to say that it will be the problem for future generations.

-XT

147

tomndebb, thank you for the moderators caution against “snide remarks” and “personal invective”. I have been guilty of both, and to those at whom they were directed, in particular jshore and MrDibble, you have my sincere apology.

However, tomndebb, you misapprehend the nature of the discussion when you describe it as “niggling over the details of who has selected the better list of authorities from whom to cherry pick our data”. The discussion is about the dimensions of the “consensus” of climate scientists.

I had said that there were “dozens” of degreed tenured climate scientists who opposed the AGW hypothesis. I gave a list of 41 climate scientists of various disciplines, containing what I thought were 25 degreed tenured climate scientists.

Not good enough.

Some of them were retired degreed tenured climate scientists, and some were former degreed tenured scientists who had left academia. Not sure why they wouldn’t count, but I was OK with that.

So, I gave a list of 400 climate scientists who had spoken publicly against some part of the AGW hypothesis in the year 2007. Just that one year.

Not good enough. In addition to the previous sins, some of them were actually “affiliated” with other people. Plus the list was put together by someone who was affiliated with someone …

…

I’m easy with that … I’ve demonstrated that it’s not just 4 scientists (probably in the pay of Exxon) who disagree with some or all of the AGW/CAGW hypothesis. I’ve cited their ideas here , and I once again invite people to read them.

While the names and credentials of the authors of the quotations are of interest, the real meat of the article is in the direct quotations, in the ideas. However, I do not suggest that you believe them, that would be a bad mistake.

Instead, read them, and take a neutral stance on all of them – neither believe nor disbelieve them. Just take note that these are the actual words of climate scientists, of varying degrees of expertise and varying areas of interest, each declaring their own understanding of the climate situation from their own perspective.

tomndebb, again my thanks, and the same to jshore, MrDibble, brazil84, un-named co-conspirators, and lurkers everywhere,

w.

148

[QUOTE=intention]
While the names and credentials of the authors of the quotations are of interest, the real meat of the article is in the direct quotations, in the ideas. However, I do not suggest that you believe them, that would be a bad mistake.

Instead, read them, and take a neutral stance on all of them – neither believe nor disbelieve them. Just take note that these are the actual words of climate scientists, of varying degrees of expertise and varying areas of interest, each declaring their own understanding of the climate situation from their own perspective.
[/QUOTE]

This is what you are failing to grasp - people like me are not going to be convinced by people’s “words”, or “ideas”, or “understandings” or “perspective”.

We’re going to be convinced by their research. When they’re publishing counter-AGCC papers in reputable journals, when they’re going through peer review, when they have their own data, rather than just attacking other’s arguments in the non-science media or the letters page.

149

[QUOTE=intention]
tomndebb, thank you for the moderators caution against “snide remarks” and “personal invective”. I have been guilty of both, and to those at whom they were directed, in particular jshore and MrDibble, you have my sincere apology.
[/quote]

My apologies too. I will try to keep my tone and remarks more collegial.

As for the substance of the discussion, I don’t have much to add to what MrDribble said. I did just think of a way that I think is useful in looking at all this, which is the following: Opponents of AGW sometimes like to argue (incorrectly I would say) that the theory is not falsifiable.

So, following that logic, let’s take the hypothesis “There is considerable and significant scientific controversy remaining about the basic conclusions of AGW” (or something like that…one could quibble with the wording) and ask whether this is a realistically falsifiable hypothesis under the sort of approach that intention seems to have adopted: I.e., we completely discount the statements of scientific authorities like the NAS, the IPCC, AAAS, the councils of major scientific societies like the AMS, AGU, APS, etc. and look instead at whether we can find people, some of whom seem to have some sort of credentials in the field or some related fields, who still argue against it (without any particular regard to their standing in the field, how much they are publishing in the most reputable peer-reviewed journals in the field, etc.). I would claim that this sort of approach makes the hypothesis basically unfalsifiable in a realistic sense…I.e., as long as there is enough incentive for some people who want to keep the controversy alive, they will be able to. The analogy with the controversy surrounding evolutionary theory is again useful in this regard.

So, in other words, the reason why this hypothesis has remained in play is not because it is successful but only because those arguing for it have systematically argued against any realistic method by which it could be shown to be false. Once one allows them to do that, then they have won the argument because there is simply no conceivable way to show that their hypothesis is false.

My best to all involved in these discussions and the lurkers.

150

Hold on here, friends.

MrDibble says pay no attention to anything but peer reviewed science. Of course, like all scientists, he wants to decide exactly which peer reviewed science he will believe (certainly nothing by Christy or Lindzen or Douglass or Khandehar or Spencer or Ball or Gray or …).

jshore, on the other hand, says pay attention to the NAS, the IPCC, the councils of major societies like AMS, AGU, AND APS, and a host of other non-peer reviewed sources. (Please don’t bother telling me the IPCC has peer review, read Khandehar’s statement above about how much attention they pay to their reviewers … none. If you don’t believe Khandehar, I suggest that you read the reviewers comments themselves … all except you, MrDibble, because the reviewers comments are not peer reviewed so you should skip them …)

Me, I’m an omnivore, I read all of them – ideas and peer reviewed science, IPCC and NAS reports, the reviewers words, the RealClimate claims and the Climate Audit claims, what jshore said and what William Connelly said, there is something to learn from all of them. Then I make up my own mind … but that seems to be out of favor.

So, I’ll let you guys battle the “peer reviewed vs. non peer reviewed” issue out, I have no dog that fight. I read them all, and I’ve said what I have to say.

Best to everyone,

w.

151

intention: I can’t speak for MrDibble but I see no conflict whatsoever between what he says and what I say. Some of those sources that I mentioned may not be peer-reviewed sources but even when they are not, they are the elected councils of professional societies basing their opinions on the peer-reviewed research. Furthermore, NAS reports are peer-reviewed and, yes, the IPCC reports are peer-reviewed (and both are themselves reviews of the peer-reviewed literature).

You may not like how the IPCC reports are peer reviewed and you have the right to complain about the peer review process but I don’t think you have the right to simply define them as not being peer reviewed…at least if you want to be taken seriously. In fact, the IPCC reports are reviewed by a ridiculously large number of people (like 2000?). It does not surprise me that all 2000 of these people are not happy with how their comments are responded to. In fact, it would shock the hell out of me if this were not the case.

And, of course peer review is far from a perfect filter. If it were perfect, papers with glaring errors such as the Douglass et al. paper never would have gotten through…at least in its current form. Nonetheless, it does tend to weed out many of the worst errors and papers that are just polemics, at least at the more reputable journals.

152

That’s OK - you don’t have to care in the sense of liking me or what I say – it’s irrelevant to the issue at hand.

The existence of feedback is well-documented, although no-one knows what types of feedback will dominate in the future. It seems unlikely that you would disbelieve in positive feedback such as decreasing albedo from ice or release of methane, so can I assume you mean that you don’t think on balance that positive feedbacks will outweigh negative?

That seems a little more narrow than the dictionary definition of “catastrophe”

I’m using it in the sense of “extreme misfortune” rather than “ruin.”

Well, think about it – 450 ppm translates to a likely increase of 1.5 to 3.5°C with the likeliest outcome of about 2.5°C global average temperature increase (see Harris et al. 2006. Frequency distributions of transient regional climate change from perturbed physics ensembles of general circulation model simulations. Climate Dynamics v. 27, n. 4, 357-375.) We can agree that an increase of 1 to 2°C will not be catastrophic (although I don’t think the results would be ‘good’), but 1 to 2°C is already “in the pipeline” and couldn’t be stopped if we shipped all the oil and coal on the planet to the moon tomorrow. We’re looking at whether going over that 1 to 2°C is a bad thing or not, 1 to 2°C itself is a moot point.
So what do you think, will 450+ ppm lead to a catastrophe or not?

The answer to that question becomes important because, as I’m sure you know, a logical fallacy called moving the goalposts involves redefining a claim, and it’s important for anyone reading about “CAGW” to understand the difference between adding a “C” to AGW and moving the goalpost.

153

[QUOTE=intention]

MrDibble says pay no attention to anything but peer reviewed science. Of course, like all scientists, he wants to decide exactly which peer reviewed science he will believe (certainly nothing by Christy or Lindzen or Douglass or Khandehar or Spencer or Ball or Gray or …).
[/QUOTE]
I’ll pay attention to any peer-reviewed science you care to cite. Not names, actual articles. I never said I’d automatically believe what was said just because it was PRed, only that’s what it would take to convince me. So far, you haven’t exactly been citing the literature, just lists of people and their “perspectives”. Point me to a PR article (reputable PR article, none of this E&E vanity publishing stuff) that convinced you, and we can have a thread discussing just that one. On the merits of the science.
[QUOTE=intention]

all except you, MrDibble, because the reviewers comments are not peer reviewed so you should skip them …)

[/QUOTE]

:rolleyes:

154

[QUOTE=wevets]

The existence of feedback is well-documented,
[/quote]

Would you mind providing a cite and link for that? And please don’t just link to the entire IPCC report.

You can define it any way you like. It’s your question, not mine. You asked me the following question:

I just want to understand exactly what you mean by “AGW” before I answer.

Says you.

Not.

Sure. And I want to understand exactly what you meant by “AGW” before I answer your question.

155

[QUOTE=jshore]
intention: I can’t speak for MrDibble but I see no conflict whatsoever between what he says and what I say. Some of those sources that I mentioned may not be peer-reviewed sources but even when they are not, they are the elected councils of professional societies basing their opinions on the peer-reviewed research. Furthermore, NAS reports are peer-reviewed and, yes, the IPCC reports are peer-reviewed (and both are themselves reviews of the peer-reviewed literature).

You may not like how the IPCC reports are peer reviewed and you have the right to complain about the peer review process but I don’t think you have the right to simply define them as not being peer reviewed…at least if you want to be taken seriously. In fact, the IPCC reports are reviewed by a ridiculously large number of people (like 2000?). It does not surprise me that all 2000 of these people are not happy with how their comments are responded to. In fact, it would shock the hell out of me if this were not the case.

And, of course peer review is far from a perfect filter. If it were perfect, papers with glaring errors such as the Douglass et al. paper never would have gotten through…at least in its current form. Nonetheless, it does tend to weed out many of the worst errors and papers that are just polemics, at least at the more reputable journals.
[/QUOTE]
Bwa-ha-ha-ha, the IPCC report was reviewed by 2000 people? jshore, you crack me up sometimes, the stuff you believe.

Read the reviewers reports, read the review editors’ answers, and come back and see if you can tell us with a straight face that the IPCC report has received any serious review at all.

Because right now, you’re just parroting the party line without doing the necessary research. The IPCC wasn’t even going to reveal the review docs until David Holland forced their hand. More information here and here.

w.

PS - I’d need a citation to believe the NAS report was peer reviewed. Might have been, I just haven’t found it.

156

[QUOTE=intention]
Bwa-ha-ha-ha, the IPCC report was reviewed by 2000 people? jshore, you crack me up sometimes, the stuff you believe.

Read the reviewers reports, read the review editors’ answers, and come back and see if you can tell us with a straight face that the IPCC report has received any serious review at all.

Because right now, you’re just parroting the party line without doing the necessary research. The IPCC wasn’t even going to reveal the review docs until David Holland forced their hand. More information here and here.
[/quote]

Well, obviously, when you have this many reviewers, the process is going to be somewhat different than with a normal scientific paper where you have only one or two reviewers. As for revealing the review docs, the most common procedure in peer-review of scientific papers is not to have the reviews available to the public. So, the IPCC’s making them public makes it more open to the public than most.

As for those ClimateAudit cites, when a site that claims to be auditing science can spend over 500 comments in a thread basically ignoring the one poster (beaker) who knows what he is talking about with almost all the other posters reaching the wrong conclusion about something so basic that it really ought not to the the subject of serious debate in the first place, it might want to spend a little more time thinking about how it can improve its own procedures if it wants to be at all relevant in the climate science debate, rather than trashing everybody else’s procedures.

Well, here is the page discussing the review for the 2001 NAS report on climate change. (The report is admittedly now a bit dated but I assume the same basic procedure is followed in other reports.)

157

[QUOTE=jshore]

As for those ClimateAudit cites, when a site that claims to be auditing science can spend over 500 comments in a thread basically ignoring the one poster (beaker) who knows what he is talking about with almost all the other posters reaching the wrong conclusion about something so basic that it really ought not to the the subject of serious debate in the first place, …
[/QUOTE]

This is a bit of a hijack but it is a calculation that I have been meaning to do for several weeks and finally got around to (at least in an abbreviated way) this morning. This is another facet of the question of whether it is the standard deviation or the standard error in the modeling results that is the better thing to look at when comparing them to the actual climate data. As you know, I have already argued that, since the actual climate evolution includes both responses to external forcings and unforced variability, it is wrong to compare to the standard error of the model results because the models represent a whole ensemble of runs of the climate and thus there is an averaging over the unforced variability.

However, there is another aspect to this question which is, leaving aside the unforced variability issue, does the climate science community, e.g., as represented by the IPCC, expect that just the forced part of the climate is such that the standard error or standard deviations from the models give a better estimate of the uncertainty in the model predictions? I have always been quite sure that this community would not argue for the standard error…which would make the approach of Douglass et al. doubly wrong (i.e., there would be two independent reasons why they shouldn’t have used the standard error in their comparison).

And, I thought of a rather easy way to test this: The IPCC says that the equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely to fall in the range of 2.0 to 4.5 C, where by “likely” they mean an estimated 66%-90% probability. Hence, this corresponds to a statement made with somewhere between 1sigma and ~1.65sigma certainty. So, what we can do is look at the climate sensitivity for the 22 models that Douglass et al. used and calculate the mean and standard deviations and standard errors in the equilibrium climate sensitivities predicted by these two models. We can then compare this to that IPCC statement and see if the IPCC is reporting an uncertainty for the climate sensitivity that corresponds more closely with the standard deviation or the standard error.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out what the equilibrium climate sensitivities are for those 22 models. (I bet they are available somewhere on this website but damned if I can find it!) However, Kiehl (2007) does show the equilibrum sensitivities for 11 models, so if I assume that these 11 are at all representative, we can use this. The result I find is that those 11 models have an average climate sensitivity of 2.85 C with a standard deviation of 0.80 C and hence a standard error of ~0.25 C. So, even with only 11 models, we would get a 1-sigma result of 2.85 C ± 0.25 C or a 1.65-sigma result of 2.85 C ± 0.41 C if we assume that the standard error was the correct thing to use for the uncertainty. This is clearly significantly smaller than the range that the IPCC quotes for an uncertainty that is somewhere between 1-sigma and ~1.65-sigma. And, note that if the standard deviation for all 22 models of the model intercomparison project that Douglass used is similar to the 11 used here, then the estimate we’d get using that would be even smaller by a factor of ~0.69 [= sqrt(10/21)].

Note if we assume that the standard deviation is a better measure, then the 1-sigma result is 2.85 C ± 0.80 C and a 1.65-sigma result is 2.85 C ± 1.32 C. So, clearly the IPCC statement is much closer to what one gets if one assumes the standard deviation, not the standard error, provides a reasonable estimation of uncertainty. This is yet more evidence of how wrong it was for Douglass et al. to use the standard error rather than standard deviation in their comparison.

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jshore, this is why discussing this stuff with you is so frustrating. You don’t have whatever it takes to discuss the citation I gave, to the IPCC discussion on ClimateAudit.

So you cleverly replace my citation with your own citation to a totally different thread on ClimateAudit, then you rubbish that thread, in a marvelous combination straw man and ad hominem … dude, that thread has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE IPCC, why on earth are you discussing that? How 'bout some actual discussion of the topic, or is that too much too ask?

Your only comment about the IPCC is to laud them for being “open”, for revealing their reviewers comments … my friend, here’s their policy:

I’m glad that the IPCC revealing their reviewer’s comments impressed you so much. However, you must be easily impressed, since despite their stated policy requiring public archiving, it took a god-damn Freedom of Information Act request to get them to reveal the comments at all.

Call me crazy, but when the IPCC’s own policy says they have to put review comments into a public archive, but instead they were hiding them, and refusing polite requests to reveal them, and are finally forced to reveal them by a FOIA legal request filed by an angry citizen … after all that, I’m sorry, I don’t find the IPCC coughing up information in that manner to be impressive at all, to me it’s a disgusting display of anti-science … but the fact that you do find it impressive speaks volumes.

w.

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[QUOTE=intention]

I’m glad that the IPCC revealing their reviewer’s comments impressed you so much. However, you must be easily impressed, since despite their stated policy requiring public archiving, it took a god-damn Freedom of Information Act request to get them to reveal the comments at all.

Call me crazy, but when the IPCC’s own policy says they have to put review comments into a public archive, but instead they were hiding them, and refusing polite requests to reveal them, and are finally forced to reveal them by a FOIA legal request filed by an angry citizen …
[/QUOTE]

Note the word “on request” in that statement. The “open archive” part is unclear in my view since the interpretation that it is “open” to anyone would seem to contradict the “on request” part. Why would anyone need to request the comments if they were really open to everyone? I would think the archive statement more had to do with making sure the comments were not destroyed so that they would be available upon request. Here is an explanation of the IPCC’s past procedures and how they decided to modify them now:

[There…Since I discussed this stuff that you wanted, can we discuss the actual scientific point that I made or are you going to continue to evade discussing that, as you have consistently done over the past several weeks? And, it’s not like I am trying to discuss a piece of science that I have decided was interesting and wanted you to discuss. This is something that you brought up in a comment on the Briggs website and made reference to here on the SDMB.]

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
Would you mind providing a cite and link for that? And please don’t just link to the entire IPCC report.
[/quote]

Sure.

(Emphasis in original)
From Environmental Chemistry, by Baird and Cann, 3rd Edition, page 185.

I’ll leave it as an exercise we can discuss later to find the feedback effects of albedo and the positive/negative feedback of high vs. low clouds. Suffice it to say positive feedback does exist.

I have to go now, but don’t worry, I’ll address the rest of your post later.