Is it reasonable to be a global warming skeptic?

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dvdjs said:
This idea is incorrect and reveals a lack of understanding of how projections can be made in ways that do not involve propagation from some initial condition.

If I have more time I will tak a look at Spencer in greater detail. I think that it is interesting that he assigns zero to a selected year. Given that the yearly fluctuations are of the same order similar in size to the overall short-term trend, this seems like a very, very bad idea.

Has Spencer’s critique gotten much play in the scientific literature?
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A good explanation of why the climate models are useless can be found here:

I don’t know how much play Spencer’s work has gotten in the literature. He did it back in 2014. Seems like it would be pretty easy to replicate.
 
iggypkrebsbach said:
AGW is defined in the Introduction as the proposition that “human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW”. That was their research question. Its in the paper.
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Yes, it was the question that drove the research. But it was not stated as the definition of “Endorse AGW.” But as I said, I am perfectly happy to settle with 87% as the correct figure from the “more tepid” researchers.
 
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MonteRCMS said:
They reported that now we are getting too much ice.
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If you click through the biased analysis of realclimatescience.com to the primary sources they cite, you will see this story is no big deal. For example, the story about arctic sea ice in 2012 vs 2017 is based on an increase in arctic sea ice area in September. Despite this increase, the 2017 ice edge is well within the median ice edge for the period 1981-2010. So the reversal is not so dramatic as to reverse the long term trend.

Then there is the commentary on the Greenland surface ice which they say is supported by a guest post in carbonbrief.org. But if you click through to https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-greenland-ice-sheet-2017 you get a much less biased version of the story. I prefer primary sources to secondary analyses.
 
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iggypkrebsbach said:
I don’t know how much play Spencer’s work has gotten in the literature. He did it back in 2014. Seems like it would be pretty easy to replicate.
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The issue is his work is taken seriously by people in the community. This “article” without a doi is not data-based. But he also publishes serious papers. HIs foot print is not much to speak of. Its one of those things you will recognize from the PNAS paper. People active in the field have a very very strong consensus behind the idea of AWG; those who disagree publish very little in the field.
 
iggypkrebsbach said:
Any serious reader of the Cook paper knows that the category 2 and 3 papers, which comprise 95% of the 4,000 papers expressing an opinion, are silent
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Correcting my post at 100. The endorsing categories without quantification were 2 and 3, not 6 and 7.
 
dvdjs said:
The issue is his work is taken seriously by people in the community. This “article” without a doi is not data-based. But he also publishes serious papers. HIs foot print is not much to speak of. Its one of those things you will recognize from the PNAS paper. People active in the field have a very very strong consensus behind the idea of AWG; those who disagree publish very little in the field.
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Hi dvd,

The data for Spencer’s graph are the predictions by the climate models versus two temperature sets, the IPCC’s favored HADCRUT4 and Univ of Alabama Huntsville (Spencer’s satellite dataset). So I don’t know what you mean when you say the article isn’t “data-based.”

That the PNAS paper shows that proponents of the CO2 theory publish more than skeptics is not surprising. There are more of them, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect on the truth of CO2 theory of global warming. It is also known that the field has become highly politicized. Publication by skeptics is suppressed. Thanks to the climategate emails we caught IPCC bigwigs doing exactly that.

Finally, we also know that in many of these studies skeptics’ papers simply aren’t counted. Cook et al 2013 was notorious for this. Same with Oreskes’ earlier paper.
 
iggypkrebsbach said:
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iggypkrebsbach:
Any serious reader of the Cook paper knows that the category 2 and 3 papers, which comprise 95% of the 4,000 papers expressing an opinion, are silent
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Correcting my post at 100. The endorsing categories without quantification were 2 and 3, not 6 and 7.
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Do you conclude that from the description that Cook gave for levels 2 and 3? It seems to me reading Cook’s description that they do imply endorsement of AGW.
 
iggypkrebsbach said:
The data for Spencer’s graph are the predictions by the climate models versus two temperature sets, the IPCC’s favored HADCRUT4 and Univ of Alabama Huntsville (Spencer’s satellite dataset). So I don’t know what you mean when you say the article isn’t “data-based.”
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I meant that it is not included in databases of scientific literature such as Web of Science, Scopus, etc.
 
iggypkrebsbach said:
That the PNAS paper shows that proponents of the CO2 theory publish more than skeptics is not surprising. There are more of them, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect on the truth of CO2 theory of global warming. It is also known that the field has become highly politicized. Publication by skeptics is suppressed. Thanks to the climategate emails we caught IPCC bigwigs doing exactly that.
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It is revealing: the is a difference of opinion with people working productively in the discipline are the weakly productive, gadflies, and passers-by. Not all opinions are of equal merit.
 
dvdjs said:
It is revealing: the is a difference of opinion with people working productively in the discipline are the weakly productive, gadflies, and passers-by. Not all opinions are of equal merit.
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I think you intended to say that the opinions of people working productively in the discipline have greater weight than the opinions of those who are weakly productive, are gadflies, etc.

You can be assured that Roy Spencer is working productively in the discipline.
 
dvdjs said:
I checked him out in Web of Science. The reality: not so much.
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So you think volume of citations is more important? When you do his kind of work with NASA, it’s not publish or perish.
Roy Warren Spencer (born December 20, 1955)[1] is a meteorologist,[2] a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite.[3][4] He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.[3][4]
He is known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society’s Special Award
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Pretty much. It’s why so many skeptics love this issue and toss their self-proclaimed logic and, well, skepticism to the wind and get bogged down in the same logical fallacies they spend hours on refuting on things like social justice or (in their minds) religion.
 
LeafByNiggle said:
Do you conclude that from the description that Cook gave for levels 2 and 3? It seems to me reading Cook’s description that they do imply endorsement of AGW.
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Hi LBN,

Neither Category 2 (Explicit endorsement without quantification) or Category 3 (Implicit Endorsement) quantify the level of endorsement. Therefore the most we can infer from papers put in these categories is that they endorse the proposition that humans are causing some warming. They are silent on whether we are causing most of the warming.

Again, Cook et al defined AGW for us at the outset. AGW = the proposition that we are causing most of the warming. This corresponds precisely with their Category 1 level of endorsement. They never redefined AGW after they consolidated the categories “to simplify the analysis.” They called the combination of 1-3 “Endorse AGW”. What is AGW? The proposition that we are causing most of the GW. But the 95% from Cat 2 and 3 don’t quantify the human contribution to GW. No matter, say Cook et al. We are going to treat them the same as Cat 1 which does quantify.
 
Making stuff up.

Spencer is well known and has great credentials and experience.

Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.

Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.

Dr. Spencer’s first popular book on global warming, Climate Confusion (Encounter Books), is now available at Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com.
 
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iggypkrebsbach said:
Hi LBN,

Neither Category 2 (Explicit endorsement without quantification) or Category 3 (Implicit Endorsement) quantify the level of endorsement. Therefore the most we can infer from papers put in these categories is that they endorse the proposition that humans are causing some warming. They are silent on whether we are causing most of the warming.
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OK.
Again, Cook et al defined AGW for us at the outset. AGW = the proposition that we are causing most of the warming.
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Again, Cook did not define that as “endorsing AGW”. He stated that phrase in the introduction as the impetus for the study. It is wrong to make more of that wording than that. The levels of endorsement (not Categories) were defined independently of that Intro. It is more appropriate to use the definitions and examples given explicitly than to take a phase from the Intro and decide to apply it to one of the levels of endorsement.
 
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Yes, volume of citations (normed to the discipline) is a very important measure of impact within a field.
 
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