Is it important that climate scientists are "careful scientists"?

Yes, climate scientists are careful. I guess this is one of the reasons why all the points you raised have already been carefully considered and can rationally be explained.

I have a lot of respect for Chick Keller although I have to say that his understanding of climate science does leave a little to be desired. Bear in mind, he isn’t a climate scientist and is skeptical of the mechanics of global warming – hence his work on the collisional deexcitation of absorbed infrared by CO2 (a very interesting theory but fatally flawed).

Keller makes several points, one concerning possible errors in the proxy records due to timing errors. I could explain the science behind this and the correlation between instrumental and reconstructed records but instead let’s look at the maths.

He refers to a 50 year error within a 100 year time frame, for reasons of simplicity we’ll assume this means the error is at the beginning or the end of the 100 year period and there’s no overlap with the time frame under investigation �� so there’s two possibilities.

In cancelling out the real-world scenarios we’ll again assume there are only two possibilities – implied warming cancelling actual cooling and visa versa – again, two possibilities.

The probability of such events occurring across the 1000 year time frame is 1 in 4,194,304. In reality of course, the probability will be very much higher as I’ve only ascribed four possible scenarios. If the likelihood of such an outcome as Keller describes had a probability of 1:15 for example, then the overall odds of his hypothesis being correct are 1 in 9 trillion. Even 1 in 15 is being generous.

In reality of course, all climate scientists (and all other scientists, statisticians, mathematicians etc) are well aware of attenuation and whenever a trend appears to be developing or declining, factors such as attenuation and amplification are considered from the outset.

In fact, the global temperature record does show this very phenomenon and there are times when a warming episode has been cancelled out by a cooling one (and visa versa). We only need to go back 21 years to find one such example – the Pinatubo Effect, prior to that we find in the mid 20th century the temperature record levels out due to sulphate and BPM emissions cancelling the underlying warming.

The exact same thing is happening right now. As the Asian nations become rapidly industrialised they’re churning out the emissions that caused dimming 40 to 70 years ago. It may well be that over the coming years the Asian Brown Cloud causes enough absorption and reflection of sunlight to cancel out the warming – it all depends how much worse the situation gets before they implement cleaner technology.

As for Greenland and Australia – they’re incomparable. Greenland experienced quite significant warming culminating about 1000 years ago with an average temperature about 2°C warmer than at present. The main factor was the more westerly drift of the North Atlantic Current, this was enhanced by warming experienced over much of the Northern Hemisphere that was related to increased total solar irradiance and Arctic oscillations.

In a way you can get away with saying that “recent warming is not unusual” but you have to keep it in context. Greenland has warmed faster than it is doing now but for reasons entirely unrelated to global warming. These are isolated incidents specific to a particular region and caused by known factors. The present warming affects the entire planet and there’s only three things that have the capacity to do this – the Sun, the Oceans and the atmosphere.

The Sun has reduced solar output so it can’t be that, the oceans cause changes over short periods of time so it’s not them either. Therefore, by process of elimination, it must be the atmosphere.

Of course, we didn’t need to eliminate anything to know it was the atmosphere. Common sense dictates that of we emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere then it will warm up.

All in all Mike, everything you mentioned has already been carefully considered – many times over, in many different ways, by many different people.

Ah yes, Mike’s favorite pastime, nitpicking of settled science and what-ifs right at the tangent of the envelope. After 150 years of science it’s more in the realm of common sense at this point.

We know that carbon dioxide is the primary climate modulator. You may not believe it but what you believe is not relevant because you are not a pre-eminent paleo-climatologist, and neither are any other AGW disbelievers.

There is only one relevant question - Where is the alternate theory that explains why the release of gigatons of fossil carbon in the space of 150 years, carbon that was laid down over hundreds of millions of years, will have no impact?

You can’t do that and so you are reduced to rhetoric.

However, the more egregious fault is allowing your political inclinations inform your scientific viewpoint.

An infinitely more rational view would be to assume that the release of geologic quantities of carbon in what amounts to a geologic instance will likely have an impact of geologic proportions.

The question has been what-iffed to death, and the objections of you and your ilk have moved beyond legitimate skepticism and into the realm of criminal negligence.

Your conscience tells you are saving the world from charlatans, but your ego and narcissism have got the best of you. You're like a free energy crank, alone in his garage, trying to save the world.

Who has more legitimacy Mike, a crank alone in his garage or all the scientific organizations of the world? Only a delusional crank would believe the former.

I don't find this question particularly interesting, but I do want to comment on a few things:

"If recent warming is not unusual, then the worry about AGW would drop dramatically."

It is unusual in that it is caused primarily by anthropogenic CO2. Of course, the "worry" you're speaking about isn't due to the warming we've already seen, but the warming we will see if CO2 continues to rise so rapidly. Whether the warming seen over the past century is unprecedented or not has no bearing on the potential dangers of unabated CO2 emissions, especially given the fact that modern civilization was built upon a particular set of climatic norms, with even small deviances having dramatic consequences.

Trevor

"I have a lot of respect for Chick Keller although I have to say that his understanding of climate science does leave a little to be desired. Bear in mind, he isn’t a climate scientist and is skeptical of the mechanics of global warming – hence his work on the collisional deexcitation of absorbed infrared by CO2 (a very interesting theory but fatally flawed)."

Can you provide any evidence that Dr. Keller is skeptical of the mechanics of AGW? All his published work which I was able to find seems to show the opposite, and I seem to recall Keller publicly debating Fred Singer, a very vocal "skeptic", on this very issue.

And can you provide a link to Keller's "theory", and describe why it is flawed? I couldn't find anything on it, but on it's face the statement isn't very controversial -- in the lower atmosphere (below about 50km), collisional deexcitation of CO2 is far more prevalent than radiative relaxation (orders of magnitude in troposphere). I did find an email discussion/debate between Keller and several "skeptics" on Jon Daly's website where the topic was mentioned in passing amongst a larger discussion of AGW, but nothing on any theory.

Furthermore, I would love to see you hash out your probability calculations in more detail, as your discussion seems confused, and my mathematical intuition is instantly skeptical of your "1 in 9 trillion" probability. The 50 year timing error Keller speaks of is, in simplest terms, about the uncertainty in the timing of a particular temperature determined from proxy. This, of course, is not the only, nor necessarily largest, source of uncertainty in reconstructing temperatures, and most forms increase dramatically the further back in time we go. I would say that a comparable rate of warming to today could be hidden fairly easily in the uncertainty inherent to reconstructed temperatures, but perhaps your calcs can prove me wrong?

People are use to be indoctrinated by politicians who have easy explanations, feasible, simple solutions for everything without any effort for the people who just have to make a cross in a circle. That this is not reality and politicians suppress not only deviating opinion but also deviating facts and information is known by the people. However those depending to have some government and being i n the tragic situation not to know what is kept away from them have to hope that those they vote for are less criminal.

Science lives from discussion and the open market of ideas. Every scientist having a new theory is dreaming to have the next Nobel Prize but scientists also know that their own bias is steering them to neglect certain details or shortcomings which could make their theory less revolutionary and eligible for multiple Nobel awards. Therefore scientists seek the discussion, they need the ones calling them idiots and their theories "absurdities", (The 8 liberties of Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter were called "The 8 Platitudes" by a contemporary scientist). Without that discussion Science would neither move nor progress. Those discussions in the end lead, after hundreds of "revisions" to an accepted theory. How this necessity of revision is misunderstood by the public is seen how so called "Holocaust Revisionists" are treated. That those are the true scientists and the others insulting Revisionism and mislabeling Revisionists as "Deniers", including reckless pseudo historians driving this band wagon, commit one of the most severe atrocities of scientific misconduct is not clear to the people who confuse scientists with their own corrupt leadership.

That different valuing of opposite opinions must be understood by people who must change including the politicians who deceive them. Not the scientist has to be calmed down but the demagogues.

<<Is it important that climate scientists are "careful scientists"?>>

It is as important as having YA users not cherry pick selectively released climategate emails from 2001 and take stuff discussed there as the global scientific understanding (or lack there off) of climate science.

<<Given the discussion in the above email, how can that NASA statement be justified b comparing a 5000 year period to a 100 year period?>>

Easy. The cherry-picked 'discussion' in the cherry-picked email which in turn was cherry-picked from a large batch of hacked emails only contains a (very) small part of the WHOLE discussion. (for starters, we don't know Michael Mann's answer as the cherry-picking hacker did not release it). NASA's statement on the other hand is the result of the OUTCOME of that and many other scientific discussions on multiple climate related issues, right up to the present day.

I can also cherry-pick earlier statements by you and make it appear you have an entirely different opinion on climate change than you actually have. Shall I do that and then endlessly post quasi surprised 'questions' here on YA about your 'obvious contradictory statements'?

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, investigated several key issues that sceptics claim can skew global warming figures and found they had no meaningful effect on world temperature trends.

Researchers at the Berkeley Earth project compiled more than a billion temperature records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world and found that the average global land temperature has risen by around 1C since the mid-1950s.

This figure agrees with the estimate of global warming arrived at by major groups that maintain official records on the world's climate, including Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), and the Met Office's Hadley Centre , with the University of East Anglia , in the UK.

"My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly sceptical," Richard Muller , a physicist and head of the Berkeley Earth project, told the Guardian.

"Some people lump the properly sceptical in with the deniers and that makes it easy to dismiss them, because the deniers pay no attention to science. But there have been people out there who have raised legitimate issues," he said.

In the Berkeley Earth project, Muller sought to cool the debate over climate change by creating the world's largest open database of temperature records, with the aim of producing a transparent and independent assessment of global warming.

The initial reluctance of government groups to release all their methods and data, and the fiasco over emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in 2009, gave the project added impetus.

The team, which includes Saul Perlmutter, joint winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, has submitted four papers to the journal Geophysical Research Letters that describe their work to date.

I really have no idea what you're trying to ask here. Are you asking why they would compare rates of warming if they are during different time periods? Is this similar to the whole argument about 10 or 15 years being much too short a time period due to various oscillatory 'noise' patterns to find a trend? If this is what you're attempting to argue then find me an oscillation that exists on the time scale of 130 years or so that deals with increases in specific greenhouse gas absorption frequencies, particularly the band centered at 667cm^-1, while other frequencies such as those within the atmospheric window remain relatively untouched. I don't think you're looking at the whole picture but are attempting to pull apart each little piece of the puzzle in a manner in which they will not fit together.

JimZ: Find me an oscillation or natural variation, with data, that can explain the current warming at the frequencies explained above that does not include greenhouse gases.

"Given the discussion in the above email, how can that NASA statement be justified b comparing a 5000 year period to a 100 year period?"

The above quote completely summarizes your attitude toward science. Proposing that comparing short-term statistics with longer term trends in the same variable needs justification is a rhetorical appeal to ignorance. You post propaganda, not questions.

"Climate scientists" must be careful scientists, because only truth is important, not politics.

If so called scientists do not open up their work for peer review, including showing all of the data and calculations, they are hiding something. Since their work is hidden then they can lie. It happens all the time. They have reason to lie - they get money if we believe their lies.

What would have been great is instead of crapping on about some old emails, you focussed only on the scientific point you raised about the greenland/aussie data. Personally I can't see why this is a contradiction and don't understand why you think it is. So if you want to discuss something actually scientific, can you please clarify what you meant by that paragraph? If you aren't interested in discussing science, then by all means don't bother with this and go back to the climategate stuff which you clearly enjoy a great deal. But I'd like to get a bit deeper on that if you are inclined.

EDIT: well it's been 20 hours I guess you aren't interested in discussing the science. Surprise.