The Policy Lass

I don’t often have open threads as there is quite a lot of slippage in threads on my blog due to very open moderation policy. There are a number of issues around the climate blogosphere:

I note that McIntyre is bashing on about the UAE and the statute of limitations. WUWT is on about a visual discrepancy in ice extent. On that line of discussion — sea ice —  Tamino has a post up about Watts and sea ice extent that is worth reading,  Judith Curry has a post up about an “extended peer community” to which I say BALDERDASH! I am not Gavin Schmidt’s peer nor Michael Mann’s peer nor  a peer of Jones, nor Bradley nor Briffa nor any of the climate scientists who do the actual science and I challenge most of the rest of us who are not working scientists in the climate field and who do not have a science graduate education to claim they are their peers. To claim that a bunch of bloggers with little or no science background are “science peers” is hubris! You already know my view of Post-Normal Science —  I call it “Pseudo-Sort of Science… and apologies to Willard, but I don’t much truck nor trade with the post-normal post-modern crowd. DC has more interesting info up on the WR, and this time, about red noise, which according to McI and Wegman, the de-centred PCA mines for. Eli has a post up about Wegman, providing bunnies who are too lazy to read the Mashey Report a primer or “Dummies Guide”. Keith Kloor at Collide-a-Scape has a post up about denial and the abolition analogy that  has garnered some attention.

Have at it. I’ll discuss pretty much anything related.

I’ve been away from blogging for quite a while, but I still read the climate blogs with relish. There have been a number of issues raised that almost drew me back, but this one clinched it. This post is still in progress and will be added to over the next few days as I get time.

Since the posts at Deep Climate  on the Wegman report, the issue of plagiarism in the Wegman report has been brewing. The Mashey Report details a number of anomalies in the Wegman report, including instances of direct copying without adequate attribution, copying with slight changes without adequate attribution, to name a few.  Now, it seems that Bradley has raised the issue and George Mason University, Wegman’s employer, is formally investigating the claims.

Many blogs, including the usual suspects, have discussed DC’s posts, with the predictable denials and hand-waving on the part of lukewarmers, skeptics and deniers alike. Sure, they say, maybe Wegman did copy a lot of text without enough citation, but so what? Minor details. What counts is that the conclusions are still valid.

Now, McIntyre has a post up insinuating — dog whistling — that Bradley in turn copied and pasted a whole lot of material from Fritts. What is interesting and very sly is that McI does this under the guise of picking apart DC’s comment that Bradley’s work is “seminal” but I call BS on that. It’s clear that McI is trying to discredit Bradley by making it seem as if his copying text from Fritz is the same as Wegman’s poor scholarship.

Does McIntyre directly claim they are the same? No. He doesn’t have to. All he has to do is whistle.

I don’t have an appropriate image to use, but this came to mind from my former days as a student of social and political thought:

That is for Willard. 🙂

According to Dave Dardinger:

The point is that the DC complaint is that Wegman copied from Bradley 1999 without sufficient attribution. But Bradley 1999 copied from his 1985 book likewise without sufficient attribution. And the 1985 book copied from Fritts 1976 with proper attribution for the most part. So it would seem we have a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Pot and kettle is the repeated cry from the chorus. Continue reading →…

One of the main accusations made by skeptics is that the temperature record is unreliable. Besides their focus on destroying the hockey stick graph and paleoclimate reconstructions, skeptics/contrarians and denialists alike have insinuated and outright claimed that the record has been corrupted, biased outright or by default, via invalid adjustments, homogenizations, and by the drop out of stations over the years, the movement of stations, UHI effects, microsite effects, etc.

Here’s a selection of statements from the Watts and D’Aleo paper Surface Temperature Records: Policy-Driven Decepton that makes these accusations:

Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

and

Global terrestrial temperature data are compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once reported are no longer being used in data trend analyses.

and

Due to recently increasing frequency of eschewing rural stations and favoring urban airports as the primary temperature data sources, global terrestrial temperature data bases are thus seriously flawed and can no longer be representative of both urban and rural environments. [my emphasis]

Recently, several of these claims have been put to the test, and guess what?

If you read over at WUWT very often, you will see these accusations launched repeatedly at anyone who happens to expresses support for AGW. It’s part and parcel of the repertoire of skeptics/deniers/contrarians to undermine the consensus by casting doubt over the temperature record — after all, if the temperature record isn’t reliable, either out of shoddy science or outright fraud, how can anyone claim the globe is warming? Continue reading →…

The hockey stick controversy is what drew me to climate science and here I am, several years later, still watching the skeptic blogs debate it and trying to break it as if it is a proxy for the whole issue of global warming.

This recent paper by McShane and Wyner is a case in point.  In the greater scheme of things to do with global warming, the MBH98/99 papers and the graphic derived from it known as the hockey stick graph is relatively unimportant. It has attained a somewhat iconic status solely because of the controversy surrounding it and how skeptics have used and abused it to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. What we end up is round after round of face offs over the stick.

One wanders over to the skeptic blogs and finds that the hockey stick is still alive and well some 12 years later: a spectre haunting their dreams, with Michael Mann as the focus of their hatred — their whipping boy.  There were two other authors of that paper, but I never — never — hear anyone speak ill of Bradley or Hughes. Mann is the Man, the focal point of the skeptic/denier/contrarian’s hatred, loathing and fear. Continue reading →…

Judith Curry has co-authored a new paper published in PNAS titled “Accelerated warming of the Southern Ocean and its impacts on the hydrological cycle and sea ice”. You can read a copy at her website.

Hat tip to SteveF over at Rabett Run.

I obtained a copy of it (yeah I paid $10) and have read it through. Well, to be honest, I’ve spent the last few hours trying to work through it. While I’m interested in the study itself and what it finds about this question, I’m really more interested in the treatment of Curry and her paper by the denialist/ skeptic/ contrarian crowd. I’ve been watching the response on WTFIUWT and wow. Just wow.

More on that later.

As to the paper, it reviews and addresses the “the seeming paradox of the observed increasing total Antarctic sea ice area for the past three decades” and presents the results of model runs using two of the IPCC scenarios for anthropogenic forcings. Continue reading →…

Apparently, the hockey stick debate has been finally laid to rest, at least according to WTFIUWT.

This is why I refuse to label some people as “skeptics’ –  a true skeptic hasn’t  already decided and is now only looking for evidence to support their position. They don’t latch onto every new paper that comes out before it is even published and has been reviewed by the experts and assessed. The true skeptic waits and evaluates all new data before deciding. Continue reading →…