Arguments
Here Are 3 Climategate Myths That Have Not Aged Well
Posted on 18 November 2019 by dana1981
This is a re-post from DeSmogUK
Excessive media coverage of an email hacking tilted the outcome of a critically important event against the victims of the crime. Sound familiar?
In 2016, it happened to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That was déjà vu for climate scientists, who seven years earlier had experienced a nearly identical chain of events leading up to the 2009 UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.
In summary: emails from the University of East Anglia in the UK were hacked, and many journalists assumed that where there was smoke, there must be fire. Even the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart jumped on the bandwagon, accusing climate scientists of trying to “trick you” based on a few selective, out-of-context quotes from the hacked emails (though he also later ripped the media for not covering the debunking of the Climategate myth). Commentators at the time were divided over whether this was a media storm, or just a storm in a very British teacup.
Nonetheless, the Copenhagen climate summit a few weeks later was widely considered a failure. That wasn’t only because of the hacked emails, just as another cache of emails aren’t the sole reason for the words “President Donald Trump” — but in both cases the media-amplified story played a significant role in shaping subsequent events.
Nine separate inquiries into the email hack exonerated the climate scientists, but came well after the damage had been done. And a decade on, many of the climate science denial myths that emerged from the email hack are still in play.
So, on the 10th anniversary of what came to be known as ‘Climategate’, let’s examine three of the key email quotes that so captured the media’s attention, and how the associated science has since evolved.
Spoiler: the deniers’ lies haven’t aged well.
The misunderstood 'trick'
One quote regularly mangled (most recently in a myth-filled Telegraph article, which was evaluated by the climate scientists at Climate Feedback as having “very low” scientific credibility) referred to using “Mike’s Nature trick … to hide the decline.” The ellipses mask that two separate issues were being discussed in this hacked email.
First, climate scientist Michael Mann’s “Nature trick” simply refers to adding temperature measurements from modern instruments to a chart illustrating indirect “proxy” temperature estimates (i.e., analyzing tree ring sizes) in the more distant past. The use of the word “trick” in the email was in the context of “trick of the trade,” not “tricking the audience.” If the latter were the case, the use of two different sources of data would not have been labeled as explicitly as possible in Mann’s scientific paper and subsequent reports.
Second, “hiding the decline” referred to the fact that indirect proxy temperature estimates from tree rings were known to be unreliable after about 1960. From about 1960 to 1990 they showed temperatures falling, whereas we know temperatures actually rose during that time.
Tree ring data matched other temperature records accurately prior to 1960 before diverging from the reliable instrumental record thereafter. Climate science research has linked this so-called “divergence problem” to increases in human-caused pollution in recent decades. The email in question was merely suggesting adding reliable instrumental temperature measurement data so that the chart being discussed didn’t end with a segment of data showing a “decline” that was known to be inaccurate. So, in fact, the “trick” was an effort to give as accurate information as possible (rather than the opposite, as was repeatedly alleged).
A related quote (also included in the Telegraph article) claimed that climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck asserted that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP).” This is a fabrication — Overpeck actually said, “I'm not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature.”
Overpeck was correct that the MWP is incorrectly referenced regularly. For example, the recent much-maligned Telegraph article went on to claim that the MWP (which roughly spanned the years 900 to 1300 AD) “was even hotter than today,” which is a relatively widespread myth. Numerous studies have reconstructed temperatures over the past several thousand years since Mann and colleagues published their paper in the scientific journal Nature in 1998. All have arrived at the same conclusion: that the MWP was at most a small blip in average global temperatures and that current temperatures are significantly hotter.
The most recent and robust such reconstruction was completed by a team of over 5,000 scientists from more than 100 countries contributing to the Past Global Changes (PAGES) 2k network, which produced the following chart of global temperatures over the past 2,000 years. It shows temperatures today rapidly rising above the historical record like the blade of a hockey stick.
Global mean surface temperature history over the Common Era (Pages 2k, Nature Geoscience, 2019)
Record ocean heat
Another oft-referenced quote comes from a stolen email from climate scientist Kevin Trenberth saying, “we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.”
As Trenberth has explained, this email referred to the fact that when it was written in October 2009, measurements of the amount of heat in the Earth’s climate system didn’t match what they should have been based on the overall global energy imbalance (more incoming than outgoing energy) measured by satellites. This discrepancy was due to the limitations of our observational systems, particularly in the deeper oceans — a limitation that at the time frustrated climate scientists like Trenberth.
Fortunately for Trenberth’s distress levels, measurements of the heat content of the oceans have improved significantly over the past decade, especially with more data coming from the Argo float network and its 3,000 buoys deployed in oceans around the world. In recent research, Trenberth and colleagues have now resolved his “travesty,” as heat measured in the oceans and other parts of the Earth’s climate system now match the global energy imbalance from satellite measurements.
The oceans absorb over 90 percent of that trapped heat — a vast and accelerating amount. A UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on oceans and ice from this year concluded that during the mid-to-late 20th century, the oceans absorbed an amount of heat equivalent to the energy of two Hiroshima atomic bombs every second. Since 1993, the ocean heating rate has gone up to five atomic bombs per second.
The denialists have engaged in a relentless disinformation campaign, using propoganda like in a war, where repeating disinformation often enough and people believe it. Its a manipulation of our understanding of human psychology. This is a ruthless deliberate campaign, and if anything it has been underestimated. Articles like this provide some good push back. Every little bit helps.
I made a blog post about the 'scandal that never was' some years ago - here if anyone is interested.
The real scandal ought to have been the hack, the distortion, and the campaign of deceit itself.
The careful deliberate deceiver Dr. Roy Spencer continues to present more evidence of how deliberately deceptive he continues to be.
His take on the 10th anniversary of Climate-gate opens with the following gem: "... the unfortunate truth is that fewer and fewer people actually care about the truth." He relates that to his set-up point that a believer of Truth would be a "...skeptic of the modern tendency to blame every bad weather event on humans".
He follows that misrepresentation set-up with a doozy of Fictional Tale built on his carefully selected bits of Non-Fiction. His New Fable makes the initial Climate-gate Fiction appear almost Non-Fiction (less Fantasy) by comparison.
It opens with the following Fantastically incorrect Fairy Tale claim.
"You see, it does not really matter whether a few bad actors (even if they are leaders of the climate movement) conspired to hide data and methods, and strong-arm scientific journal editors into not publishing papers that might stand in the way of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mission to pin climate change on humans, inflate its seriousness, and lay the groundwork for worldwide governmental efforts to reduce humanity’s access to affordable energy."
And his fans and the lovers of WUWT will fervently passionately belief the Fairy Tales. That is an expected result of developing a powerful personal interest in benefiting from an understandably harmful and ultimately dead-end activity like fossil fuel use.
Future generations cannot continue to benefit from burning fossil fuels, they are non-renewable. All the future generations get is the increased challenges and harmful results created by what the previous generations 'choose to continue to do'. That Non-Fiction cannot be acknowledged in the Fantasy-Fiction-Filled made-up minds of the likes of Spencer and Watts.
The Sustainable Development Goals are like Garlic or Sunlight to the Vampire-like fantasy beliefs of the likes of Spencer and WUWT.
Roy Spencer is in charge of a group doing upper atmosphere temperature analysis. If his group were the only group doing this there would be a good case to discontinue his funding, given the misleading comments, sour grapes comments, and straw men he comes out with in the quotes mentioned @comment 3. Anyway his comments are also completely unscientific.
Questions regarding Dr. Roy Spencer include:
It appears that the developed socioeconomic-political systems have become so corrupted by selfish pursuit of personal interest that Popularity and Profitability have been able to get significant control over "The direction of Thought". And that harmful selfishness is able to drive Thinking away from the pursuit of expanded awareness and understanding and the development of sustainable improvements for the benefit of the future of humanity.
The parallels between the Climategate e-mails and the Clintongate e-mails in 2016, from Russian Intelligence via Wikileaks, is spooky.
Coincidence?
No smoking gun, of course, but if the truth is ever allowed to emerge, it will be a strange and mysterious story.
shoyemore @6
Climate-gate and Clinton-gate also have a similar and sinister look when viewed from the perspective of the pursuit of expanding awareness and improving understanding of what is really going on and the application of that learning to develop sustainable improvements for the future of humanity (achieving and improving on all of the Sustainable Development Goals).
From that perspective both -gates appear to be harmfully successful misleading efforts by people with powerful interests that are understandably contrary to a sustainable improving future for humanity. Many powerful people today still support efforts to prolong the misunderstanding of Climate-gate without suffering any negative personal consequence. And they can maintain support for their ability to benefit more from fossil fuel use through other misleading marketing without penalty.
And, from that perspective, it also becomes clearer that harmful misleading powerful people also try to punish or threaten anyone who develops, or discovers and exposes, information that the general population really should be more aware of. Think of how people are sought out and persecuted for exposing truths that harm Private Interests, including hard to justify National Leadership Actions that are hoped to be kept Private or Misunderstood. Compare that to the efforts to find and punish the Climate-gate misleaders who have undeniably harmed the future of humanity.
From that perspective "Russia" becomes an inaccurate term of reference. Many people in Russia, potentially the majority, are not the problem. And "Right-Wing" is also an inaccurate term of reference. Many people with Right-wing beliefs, but potentially not the majority, are not the problem (same goes for religious people).
The appropriate reference is to 'the global collective of people who have developed powerful interests that are harmfully contrary to the development of a sustainable and sustainably improving future for humanity'.
Every nation and every political classification (including religions), has people in it who are part of that harmfully self-interested collective. However, within each identifiable group there are significant differences in levels of acceptance of harmful actions, actions that are contrary to expanded awareness and improving understanding of the corrections and new directions of development that are required to develop a sustainable improving future for humanity.
Identifying the people who are promoting harmful misunderstanding is what is important. And it is important to know that they can be trying to hide inside any identifiable group or nation. The hard part is helping groups (like Nations, Political factions, Religions) realize that they have been compromising their Brand Identity by allowing themselves to be misled, and that any perceptions of superiority relative to others that are developed that way are unsustainable.
Tragically, many people do not care very much about the future. They myopically have faith in their ability to maintain their beliefs. The most damaging people get angry when their developed beliefs and deceptions become indefensible. They fight harder to not be corrected, including making-up things like Climate-gate and Clinton-gate.
Not long after the email hack that became Climategate I had a discussion about global warming with my brother a self confessed petrolhead and realised I knew nothing about the subject. I went online and did some basic research and the subject of Climategate came up. It took me less than 45 minutes from logging on to realise that one side of the argument was being far from honest. I have no scientific knowledge beyond O level physics 50+ years ago but I could identify a liar when I saw one.
This lead me to various sites but SS in particular and with the help of John Cook, Dana and the many other brilliant people on the site I was able to become that boring old uncle always banging on about climate change, except I was the one telling my nieces nephews grandchildren etc to wake up.
The big thing I learnt from Climategate and subsequent research is that you have to be wilfully ignorant to be a climate contrarian. (perhaps coupled with a little mendacity).
Climategate has been investigated to death and the people concerned have been cleared of any form of scientific fraud. I must admit after first reading about climate gate I was immediately suspicious of the claims of wrong doing, because the idea of some climate conspiracy to fake data etc seems too far fetched to be plausible, so I had a closer look at a few articles and it was obvious the denialists took things out of context , and were being misleading. However I already knew about the hide the decline terminology, and anyone not already knowing this term would be justified in being a bit suspicious, and possibly saw the explanations as an ad hoc attempt to make excuses, even although they are robust explanations. The whole leak was damn rotten luck for the mainstream science community, but climate change has marched on and helped vindicate the scientists involved.
The thing is why would denialists be less than honest? It seems to me people are sometimes less than honest when they feel threatened in some way. For example whether it be they are afraid of having to change their lifestyle, give up things they like, pay money, or if their politics and world view feels threatened, or they feel caught out in some way, or are forced to admit to themselves they were sucked in by something ( a lot of denialists probably feel this way). Lots of reasons = lots of denialism.
To me Climategate is about the psychology and about the casual conversation within East Anglia, nothing more but nothing less.
Climategate is not about scientific fraud to me, I am aware of the quotes taken out of context as a cheap trick on the far skeptical side and I am aware that there is in general, some ferocity in the operating language of such an institute. I can also follow the antagonistic attitude to an extent, since the attacks by skeptics are not always fair and go on for decades now.
However, as an every man lay when you come in contact with these leaked emails for the first time, it makes you really wonder why there is such a severe hostility towards skeptics. And other sentences make you wonder why a cooling or hiatus is considered to be a problem, instead of a relief when it comes towards warming as a threat.
The language used in these emails is concerning, they are very political and extremely polarized to a point where it makes one wonder if it is still possible for the authors to keep a scientific neutrality.
As I am not sure if quoting emails is allowed here, I will not risk to quote any, if it is within the policy of SkepticalScience please tell me, then we could talk about some examples which highlight political thinking and involuntary confessions.
nyood @10
"However, as an every man lay when you come in contact with these leaked emails for the first time, it makes you really wonder why there is such a severe hostility towards skeptics"
The reasons for the hostility towards sceptics include the following:
1) the sceptics relentlessly mislead and cherry pick. Dont ask me for examples - read this website regularly.
2) the sceptics tie up working scientists with endless pointless information requests.
3) the sceptics verbally abuse scientists and have made death threats, particularly with M Mann, and naturally this in turn makes all climate scientists hostile towards sceptics. Why wouldn't it?
4) the sceptics relentless junk science.
This is more than enough to explain the scientists hostility towards sceptics, and if anything scientists have been very restrained and patient. As far as I'm concerned some of the sceptics should be in jail.
"The language used in these emails is concerning, they are very political and extremely polarized to a point where it makes one wonder if it is still possible for the authors to keep a scientific neutrality. As I am not sure if quoting emails is allowed here..."
Oh I'm happy to post a few from an article in Forbes, and that will be enough. We don't need too many silly lists distracting us all. I don't know if they are genuine. They are indicative of normal people dealing appropriately with difficult issues as anyone does. If they are political, its no more than any other organisation on this fine planet. There is nothing criminal, unethical or sinister, and numerous official investigations found no corruption of science.
You denialists make me laugh. You are the people with obvious political motives, mostly right wing, and with lashings of paranoia. But people with nasty suspicious minds and bad motives assume everyone is the same. News flash - we aren't all the same.
The emails:
“The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out” of IPCC reports, writes Jonathan Overpeck, coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s most recent climate assessment."
This is meaningless without background context. Its a selective quote. And professional people decide content all the time, theres no indication of wrong doing.
“I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause,” wrote Mann in another newly released email."
It helps to actually know something about Judith Curry then you would understand and commiserate with the scientists in question.
“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email."
Oh dear oh dear. Given M Mann has received death threats and packets of white powder in the mail, and endless abusive emails. I'm going to "cut him some slack".
Thank you for your view nigelj, it is confirming how polarized the debate is.
However, with the leaked emails that you quote in advance, you mention those which I agree on to be unproblematic with my sentence: "Climategate is not about scientific fraud to me, I am aware of the quotes taken out of context as a cheap trick on the far skeptical side.."
This email here by Tom Wigley might be a good quote that shows that there is concern about the antagonism amongst themselves:
"Dear Eleven,I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the IPCC “view” when you
9say that “the latest IPCC assessment makes a convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions.” ...This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a disservice. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed, balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.Your approach of trying to gain scientific credibility for your personal views by asking people to endorse your letter is reprehensible. No scientist who wishes to maintain respect in the community should ever endorse any statement unless they have examined the issue fully themselves. You are asking people to prostitute themselves by doing just this! I fear that some will endorse your letter, in the mistaken belief that you are making a balanced and knowledgeable assessment of the science—when, in fact, you are presenting a flawed view that neither accords with the IPCC nor with the bulk of the scientific and economic literature on the subject....When scientists color the science with their own personal views or make categorical statements without presenting the evidence for such statements, they have a clear responsibility to state that that is what they are doing. You have failed to do so. Indeed, what you are doing is, in my view, a form of dishonesty more subtle but no less egregious than the statements made by the greenhouse skeptics .... I find this extremely disturbing"
I have a couple of comments to add regarding the part: The most recent and robust such reconstruction was completed by a team of over 5,000...which produced the following chart of global temperatures over the past 2,000 years. It shows temperatures today rapidly rising above the historical record like the blade of a hockey stick.
This study is based on proxy and some real measurements, manly tree rings. Proxy measurements are not significant due to meassurment errors. Nobody has actually measured the temperature on earth with sufficient little error before about 200 years ago, therefore causality of a proxy and a model is just impossible. A statistically based study based on proxy is unsuitable because every single conclusion is insignificant by definition.
Nobody is questioning global warming, but the methods and conclusions drawn are highly questionable. Way to less data and physical understanding. Apart from high energy physics, about every physical and chemical processes possible (probably billions) are happening on earth, which may influence climate. It is just that simple, no conclusions have to be made without sound understanding. This field of study is extremly complex and statistically averaging data will only add confusion.
The authors of this study mention:"Our inferences on the multidecadal GMST variability for the Common Era are robust to all these permutations (Supplementary Figs. 17–20). Nevertheless, we cannot rule out biases due to errors in the individual proxy records and the unequal spatiotemporal distribution of proxy data (Supplementary Fig. 1). Warm-season-sensitive records from the Northern Hemisphere high and mid latitudes dominate the collection of proxy records21 , thus our results may be biased towards this region and season,..."
In science or in humans in general there is something as confirmation bias, which seems to be advancing due to the internet and social media...
Nyood,
You have chosen an interesting email to post.
Scientists always challenge each others findings. Your email is a clear demonstration of the fact that scientists challenge each other. In private communitcations these arguments are heated. After they are privately discussed the scientists with the best arguments publish them. After they are published they are challenged again. Only the very best proposed answers survive this constant challenge. Even then they can be later challenged if new information turns up.
It is also interesting that you pick an email where Tom Wigley is challenging Eleven and says Eleven is being too alarmist!! Are you arguing that scientists are exaggerating warming by telling other scientists to dial back their assertions??
Further, today in 2019, the scientific consensus is clearly that Eleven was correct and that the problem is critical and must be immediately addressed. So are you arguing that someone who was correctly arguing that we needed to take inmediate steps to avoid catastrophie, perhaps before it was a clear consensus, needs to be silenced??
My read of your email is that Tom Wigley was clearly completely incorrect. His approach has threatened civilization because it has led to delay in implementing required pollution control. The denier argument that somehow this email shows that scientists are exaggerating warming and the dangers it presents is the opposite of what this email clearly shows.
blub at 13 " manly tree rings"
That is at best a misrepresentation. I looked through the 47 pages of data listed by PAGES 2K here. I think you should do the same, count how many data series come from trees vs the total number of series, and give a percentage that will subtantiate the word "mainly", which is rather vague. In addition to trees, it includes lake sediments, marine sediments, boreholes, gacier ice, coral, bivalve, sclerosponge, speleothem and documents. The specific proxies for these sources vary. They are compared and correlated to verify validity. The publications explain calibration and validation methods. There are papers exclusively devoted to calibration and validation.
Following the link in the OP to the PAGES 2k paper leads to these other papers:
No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era
The aberrant global synchrony of present-day warming
As always, the overall weight of the evidence is what matters.
nyood @12, you are worried about the level of antagonism in the email? I have worked for several organisations and companies, and disagreements are common enough. The one you quote is polite so nothing to be concerned about. In this case someone is being picked up for letting personal views allegedly intrude, and shows the organisation is self correcting and thus avoiding group think. However like MS says Elven was ultimately proven correct, ironically. Your email is not a smoking gun, its not even a damp fire cracker, its a nothingburger.
nyood,
To me, your context for Climategate is incomplete and incorrect.
Prior to Climategate it had been fairly robustly established that the developed ways of living that relied on using fossil fuels needed to be curtailed far sooner than the natural response of the marketplace would do it (especially with misleading marketing failing to be effectively penalized).
The making of the "misleading claims regarding the illegally obtained emails" happened just before a major global leadership meeting. The timing reduced popular support for the required corrections and gave some Leaders a poor excuse to resist being Responsible Leaders on this very important issue.
After that tragic impact on global leadership, and the delayed corrections of how people lived, it was discovered and established that:
And that Context for Climategate does not completely present how damaging the initial cuplrits of Climategate and their parade of fans have been to the future of humanity.
As nigelj suggested some people deserve to be severely punished. I would include serious penalties for anyone today who still tries to play the Climategate card to dismiss or discredit climate science and the corrections of developed human activity that it has exposed are required. Climategate and actions like it reduced the required correction and produced the current and growing need for more rapid correction.
nyood @10,
It is very polarizing indeed to still see people still make claims like: "And other sentences make you wonder why a cooling or hiatus is considered to be a problem, instead of a relief when it comes towards warming as a threat."
The trend of the temperature record is undeniable. The existence of variations in the short-term rate of warming is abundantly clear. The skeptics harmfully abusing any period of slower temperature change to reduce popular support for the required Responsible Leadership Actions are definitely deserving of derision (not praise for relieving concern).
Refer to the SkS Escalator.
Hi Philippe Chantreau,
i used "mainly" for meaning more then 50% of proxy data is based on tree ring data, which you can look up in the supplementary data of this study. Sup.Figure 1 also depicts a world map locating the proxy data used and a graph showing the amount and type of proxy data used during a certain time period. You are entirely right by highlighting all other proxies used and I shoud have done this in the first place, but my arguementation was actually not that tree rings in particular are bad proxis, but that proxy studies in general are not confirmed or evident by statistical correlation or robustness and that the thought chain of doing so is unlogic. The practical scientifc method of this study is perfectly fine, but correlation is not causality or evidence at all. Therefore, there shouldn´t be any conclusion drawn from this study.
One fictional example may be a proxy study on a historical link betweeen vitamin c amount of apples and and apple tree ring information. Lets say there is instrumental data for the last 100 years on vitamin c amount of a couple of apple species and robust statistical correlation to tree ring size and color between species. Tree ring data of the last 2000 years is available so the authors develop a model which correlates statistically robust with this data. Does this mean that they have discovered the actual variation of vitamin c amount of apples for the last 2000 years and based on their statistically robust model may even project the development of vitamin c amount into the future? Statistically yes but causally no. Nobody has ever measured the actual vitamin c amount older than 100 years without error and could then find meaningfull error sources for proxies because there is not enough and no real data available. Further no change and influences of environmental factors can be causally linked to the past without instrumental data.
There are a lot of problems in science with this type of data, for example a couple of physicists published a breathtaking discovery that the speed of light is exceeded by neutrino particles just to refute their own study because they found a broken cable which was generating false data in their experiment. Data itself but even more data interpretation is extremly tricky even in controlled studies and it does not get better with proxy studies...
This is why causality always beats correlation and data and model quality always beats quantity.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that affirms one's prior beliefs or hypotheses. (Wikipedia)
You may have done this by highlighting several studies to me. Weight of evidence does not matter, but the question of quality and causality of evidence
One Planet Only Forever @18
You are missing the point. My concern was that the hiatus is considered to be something bad by some authors of the emails. It does not need any skeptic here, it is the authors themselfs, hence the terms pschology and political thinking.
So it is not about skeptics abusing the hiatus.
It is not about reasoning why the haitus happened.
It is about considering good news (less warming) as bad news.
Despite of all poralization one would hope that these scientists still want the best for humanity and not see cooling as a problem.
If skeptics wish that it will be colder, just because they are "more" right is demasking, almost childish.
If the IPCC wishes it will get warmer or stay hot, just because they will be right is demasking and reduces integrity.
Blub ,
in reading your posts #13 and #19 , it is not at all clear what point you are wishing to make. Please clarify !
Average readers here (such as me) are aware of data and correlations and causalities.
Basically, the climate changes when something causes it to change. And yes, there are many factors or drivers affecting climate ~ but the major ones are alterations of insolation / greenhouse gasses / aerosols. That is well known.
Are you saying that some confirmation bias is affecting your own views on climate?
So far, you have (in a general way) touched on abstract concepts and the difficulties of achieving valid scientific knowledge (such as the well-researched PAGES 2K studies) . . . but you have not actually given any empirical or logical disproof of the extensive PAGES 2K information.
Please be clear about the message you are trying to convey.
Nyood @20 ,
you are missing the point: that both the scientist group and the anti-scientist group are wishing it would get colder.
Clearly you are having trouble understanding the scientists' emails.
nigelj @16
T.Wigley was not proven incorrect, quite the opposite for two reasons:
1: His concern was confirmed with hundreds of emails of the following decade. Here are two more examples: M.Mann to E.Cook:
"I don’t in any way doubt yours and Jan’s integrity here.I’m just a bit concerned that the result is getting used publicly, by some, before it has gone through the gauntlet of peer review. Especially because it is, whether you condone it or not, being used as we speak to discredit the work of us, and Phil and his co-workers; this is dangerous. I think there are some legitimate issues that need to be sorted out ....I’d be interested to be kept posted on what the status of the manuscript is."
E.Cooks reply:
"Unfortunately, this global change stuff is so politicized by both sides of the issue that it is difficult to do the science in a dispassionate environment. I ran into the same problem in the acid rain/forest decline debate that raged in the 1980s. At one point, I was simultaneous accused of being a raving tree hugger and in the pocket of the coal industry. I have always said that I don’t care what answer is found as long as it is the truth or at least blood close to it."
And E.Cook to K.Biffa:
"Also, there is no evidence for a decline or loss of temperature response in your data in the post-1950s (I assume that you didn’t apply a bodge here)"
2. You state that Wrigley was wrong since it turned out he was hindering the 11 on their path to prove warming is manmade and a threat.
This is wrong to me, ten years ago we were estimating with a warming of 3°C, now we have come to the lowest threshold of 1,5°C. To me the explanoray power of the IPCC declines towards none.
I want to remind here that in my original post i was saying that climategate reveals the extent in which the thinking is political and strategical within the IPCC. Wrigley seems to realize this early on.
I do not want the IPCC to fight an information war for us. The emails show countless concerns, predominantly expressed by M.Mann towards skeptics publishing stuff in Natur, Science and alike.
The public and media perception of the global warming issue seems to be the dominant task for M.Mann.
The science itself is not in focus anymore, focus shifted towards: "What is the public thinking" and "How can we make our enemies look bad or hinder them from publishing".
This is evidenced by numerous emails where certain media is considered "on our side" while others are considered "lost" to the skeptics:
P.Jones to M.Mann:
"Writing this I am becoming more convinced we should do something ...I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A ClimaticResearch Unit person is on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch."
M.Mann replies:
"The Soon and Baliunas paper couldn’t have cleared a “legitimate” peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility—that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. And it isn’t just De Freitas; unfortunately, I think this group also includes a member of my own department... The skeptics appear to have staged a “coup” at Climate Research (it was a mediocre journal to begin with, but now it’s a mediocre journal with a definite “purpose”)."
I do not want such peolpe to advise our gouverments, can you understand that?
According to you and pretty much all alarmists, skeptics should be clowns, it should be easy to crush them in debates. There should be no reason to fear them this much. Ironically the fierce fight against skeptics makes them stronger, giving them meaning.
This happened over and over in history.
Hi Eclectic,
I am confused of the two responses to my post so far. In the first post I opened a discussion about this article showing Fig.1 of a reconstruction study on global temp variation of the last 2000 years for confirmation of the robustness of proxy studies on temp variation. I highlighted the basis of this study (proxies) and the authors own awareness of bias and proxy problems. In my point of view care has to be taken to use this study and proxy studies in general as an example for confirmation, evidence or "fact" on human induced global warming and I tried to explain difficulties of statistical based data interpretation in the scope of too few and error prone data and error prone modeling because of the physical complexity of climate.
You mention: "but the major ones are alterations of insolation / greenhouse gasses / aerosols. That is well known."
That is well known is actually an opinion of people. Newton mechanics was well known, statistically robust and widely accepted before instrumental experiemtation and data collection advanced leading to clarification and advancement into quantum mechanics. This is how physics works. Now, climate from a physical point of view is one of the most complex and abstract experiments ever made with an uncounteable number of physical processes influencing temperature over a time frame from pico seconds to thousands of years.
I personally would not draw any conclusions, facts, predictions or recomendations from the data and models present... This is why for me it seems that bias is present.
This 'deep understanding' by Tom Wigley being protrayed in this thread based on his 1997 e-mail is pure fantasy. The e-mail is presented upthread @12 with passages missing. A full presentation of the e-mail exposes a situation where Wigley's grand work is potentially being rendered obsolete by the call for 'immediate control' of emissions. Wigley's response is robust because that is how academics fire off at each other.
And to put this ancient interchange into context, the argument was how to time the reduction of emissions when the target is 550ppm(v) and the limit to global AGW was seen as +2.0ºC; thus whether it made much difference if BAU was allowed to run until 2000, 2010, or 2020 before emissions reigned them in. Today, we are marginally ahead of the BAU secnario set out by Wigley while 2020 is upon us with stricter limits to AGW now in play. As for Wigley's grand work, it rather fell from grace although Wigley did revive oit following COP15 at Paris - note that there is no longer any delay to emissions control mentioned in Wigley (2017) but that the scenarios show cuts immediate to 2015 and also only consider FF emissions.
Blub @24 ,
You are giving the message that your own bias is to not draw any conclusions from data and models. But how do you justify that bias?
Many thousands of climate scientists (with hardly any exceptions) have a bias in the direction of understanding and using the climate data from pyrometers and proxies. The information they produce is internally logically consistent, and (so far) has been pragmatically correct.
Likewise, the classical Newtonian mechanics provide a pragmatically correct usage for almost all human activities, and the Einsteinian and Quantum Mechanics corrections are not usually required. Are you proposing that we stop using Newtonian concepts? I suspect you are not really proposing that action.
Blub, we have to be practical.
Nyood at 23:"
Most of your post is simply repeating the arguments used when the climate gate emails first came out. These were all shown to be false many years ago. Your posts are just sloganeering old denier points.
You claim additionally
"This is wrong to me, ten years ago we were estimating with a warming of 3°C, now we have come to the lowest threshold of 1,5°C. To me the explanoray power of the IPCC declines towards none."
This claim is simply false and uninformed. The 1.5C threshold in the SR5 report was based solely on analysis of the "pause" data. The past 5 years of data have demonstrated conclusively that that analysis was incorrect. Getting all worked up and angry about false claims does not help to solve any problems. You are reading too many denier web sites who deliberately lie to you.
Currently the world temperature is 1.2C above pre-industrial. We are only at 410 ppm CO2 and doubling is 540 ppm. There is at least 0.5C warming in the pipeline. We are already far over 1.0C heating you suggest for doubling and are nowhere near doubling carbon.
The claim of low sensitivity was never very strong and it has been proven incorrect by the increase in temperature. Very unfortunately, recent modeling studies have found that the best fit is from models with sensitivities over 4.5C. Pray that those studies are incorrect since if they pan out we are already far past any reasonable threshold for disaster.
MA Rodger @25
You try to relativise the harsh critic by Wigley with the concluding sentence:
"Wigley's response is robust because that is how academics fire off at each other."
To me, you attempt to downplay the criticism here and putting the email in a larger context like you did with your post, does not change its explanatory power whatsoever.
The message of Wigley is crystal clear, alarmed and referring to general scientific principles and ethics and exactly the high responsibility we are talking about. Therefore, other users already tried to discredit Wigley himself as obsolete and dangerous, standing in the way of the 11; skipping your attempt of just downplaying the message of Wigley.
What Wigley foresees here is the onset of political thinking and acting, documented by numerous emails of the coming years. Wigleys apprehensions will be confirmed and peak with Mann´s Hockeystick.
This is another example from 2009 where uncertainty is expressed, but must never be admitted in public:
M.Mann to K.Trenberth:
"Thanks Kevin, yes, it’s a matter of what question one is asking. To argue that the observed global average temperatures of the past decade falsifythe model projections ..., as the contrarians have been fond of claiming, is clearly wrong. But that doesn’t mean we can explain exactly what’s going on."
T.Wigley continues:
"Kevin,I didn’t mean to offend you. But what you said was “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”. Now you say “we are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going”. In my eyes these are two different things—the second relates to our level of understanding, and I agree that this is still lacking."
Hi Eclectic,
how do I justify this "bias"? (don´t know if "bias" is the right word here). Physics is purely based on descriptive models, which means if you ask why is something happening the answer will always be because instrumental data from perfectly designed and controlled experiments made us develop a model which discribes experiment inside a certain framework and not we have developed a statisitcal relevant model where we can draw conclusion, opinion or facts, which have never been proven in a controlled experiemts with every influencing parameter is either observable or identified as an unobservable.
You mention: Likewise, the classical Newtonian mechanics provide a pragmatically correct usage for almost all human activities.
You are probably familiar with the development of quantum mechanics. One of the first experiments indicating the newton mechanics is not pragmatic but just plain incorrect in a lot of cases are experiemts on black body radiation. According to newton mechanics the radiativ spectrum from black body radiation should show a UV catastrophy, which just never happened, but could be resolved by a much more sophisticated model namely quantum mechanics. Ironically the EM radiation of our sun is described by quantum mechanical black body radiation. Apply newton mechanics and you would need a lot of sun screen here on earth ;) I just want to highlight how data and models are applied in physics and can be missleading if generalised or too complex or not well understood or error prone. In science if somebody claims something as fact or undisputable good scientists usally start to question, do experiments and very seldomly judge and not the other way around... as history has shown this process can take hundreds of years depending on technology, experiment and data available.
nyood @20
"If the IPCC wishes it will get warmer or stay hot, just because they will be right is demasking and reduces integrity."
I think you have just misinterpreted things a bit. The IPCC don't wish it to remain hot. Let me explain. The IPCC have always stated that the temperature trend going forwards will be a positive trend of largely increasing temperatures on 30 years plus timeframes, and out to 2100, but it will have periods of flat or slightly declining temperatures of about 10 years due to the intermittent effects of ocean and sunspot cycles. So the IPCC have always accepted there will be some small cooling periods.
The so called pause after 1998 had scientists puzzled, because it looked like it was lasting more than 10 years, and there was no obvious explanation at the time, thats all. It ended with the high temperatures of 2o15 - 2018, and has been explained by certain ocean processes and some bad temperature data that underestimated temperatures. If you look at any temperature dataset the pause is just a flattening off around 2002 - 2010.
Claiming these flat periods are desirable is a nonsense. They are just inevitable and there will probably be more, but they will be temporary because they are a natural cycle intruding on the underlying warming from greenhouse gases.
nyood @23, I hear you about Wigley but you are not seeing the bigger picture. He has ultimately been proven incorrect by the longer passage of time, so the obvious increasing temperatures since 2014, and the increasing levels of concern coming from the IPCC and most of the climate science community.
You are also again taking a few comments by a couple of scientists utterly out of context, and also assuming this somehow represents thousands of scientists and you just cannot do that. There is no rigour in your 'scepticism'.
Again the emails you list are no big deal as far as I'm concerned. Scientists argue and bicker like anyone, and will obviously not like some junk science being published. Of course they are political in terms of talking about processes and organisational issues, anyone is, and this is a far cry from letting personal party politics intrude.
You have no smoking guns, no fraud or serious errors, no party politics, nothing, so your comments look more and more like paranoia to me.
You say "This is wrong to me, ten years ago we were estimating with a warming of 3°C, now we have come to the lowest threshold of 1,5°C. To me the explanoray power of the IPCC declines towards none."
I assume you are talking about climate sensitivity. You are wrong. The IPCC has not said climate senstivity is at the lower threshold of 1.5 degrees, and you provide no internet link to where they have said that.
All the IPCC have said is climate sensitivity is somewhere between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees. Most published research is around 3 degrees, and the latest modelling also finds this. Papers finding climate sensitivity of 1.5 degrees have not been widely accepted and have flaws. Some relevant material:
skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htm
www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/new-climate-models-predict-warming-surge
"The Soon and Baliunas paper couldn’t have cleared a “legitimate” peer review process anywhere....I do not want such peolpe (Mann) to advise our gouverments, can you understand that?"
You say you don't want people like Mann advising governments, despite the fact he has exposed some real problems with the Soon and Balinaus paper and the peer review process at that point. You make no sense at all. You should be thanking Mann, not criticising him. It's his job to identify problems, as well as do research.
Sorry for repeating some stuff mentioned by MS @27. Missed that post somehow.
Blurb @19, tree ring proxy data is not based only on correlations between tree rings and temperatures. There is an understanding of why variations in tree ring growth relate to temperatures, ie causation. You seem utterly confused and incoherent.
NYood @28
"This is another example from 2009 where uncertainty is expressed, but must never be admitted in public"
I strongly disagree. Of course there will be uncertainties and scientists are not going to publish their every utterance, just like you or anyone wouldn't, but the IPCC reports openly admit areas of uncertainty and in painstaking detail and pedantry. Read the summary for policy makers.
It's the sceptics who have never admitted uncertainty about their sceptical positions, and who have the most politiciesd processes, eg The Heartland Institute promotes climate scepticism and is a right wing political think tank, that tries to influence processes and other organisations. There are many similar organisations eg the GWPF. You cannot get more politicised than that, by any definition of political.
Blub @20, just because something could be wrong doesn't mean it is wrong, so prove the greenhouse effect is wrong by submitting a research paper, and stop filling up this website with sophistry. Even Einsteins theories may have some problems in them because they can't be reconciled with quantum theory, but they are good enough to do all sorts of reliable calculations. So it is with climate models. They are not perfect, everyone knows that, but they are good enough to be taken seriously, especially given whats at stake.
Now I perfectly understand why alarmists are getting more and more heat from all kinds of movements. Not even one reply was actually based on sound understanding of science or refering to my content instead nothing but insults and mantra like repetition of empty arguements like:
Many thousands of climate scientists (with hardly any exceptions) have a bias in the direction of understanding and using the climate data from pyrometers and proxies. The information they produce is internally logically consistent, and (so far) has been pragmatically correct.
what do you even mean by logically consisten? statistcal robustnes? What is pragmatically correct? These are empty phrases. Thousand of people agree on thousands of things everyday in this world. This is not proof of anything.
So it is with climate models. They are not perfect, everyone knows that, but they are good enough to be taken seriously, especially given whats at stake. = OPINION
Give me 10-100Million dollars and i will design a model which will show that cimate correlates with anything you want it to correlate...
Nigelj mentions: "There is an understanding of why variations in tree ring growth relate to temperatures, ie causation. You seem utterly confused and incoherent."
Actually you seem confused... Now for the third time: my arguementation was actually not that tree rings in particular are bad proxis, but that proxy studies in general are not confirmed or evident by statistical correlation or robustness and that the thought chain of doing so has no logic or causality. You do not seem to comprehend.
This discussion is a waste of time. Good luck
[DB] Sloganeering, ad hominems and inflammatory rhetoric snipped.
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nyood @20,
Others have already provided accurate responses.
I wish to add my own 'improvement of the awareness and understanding' to help you appreciate the accurate context and perspective.
You claim I missed the point of your comment because your "... concern was that the hiatus is considered to be something bad by some authors of the emails. It does not need any skeptic here, it is the authors themselfs, hence the terms pschology and political thinking. ... It is about considering good news (less warming) as bad news. Despite of all poralization one would hope that these scientists still want the best for humanity and not see cooling as a problem."
The reason for concerns by climate scientists regarding short-term less rapid temperature rise (hiatus) or short-term cooling is that the they are only short-term events in the temperature data. However, each one is claimed by the worst of the skeptics to be proof that the warming has ended and the science is wrong.
It is almost as bad to try to claim that concerns about any of the many short-term reductions in the rate of temperature rise due to added CO2 in the atmosphere are wrong because 'cooling is Good'.
The Escalator I pointed you to in my earlier comment should have made that clear. Either it was not obvious to you, or you never checked it out. To be clearer, in the escalator it can be seen that at the end of each 'hiatus or cooling event that you claim everyone should be thrilled to see', there is a dramatic step up to the start of the next 'hiatus or cooling event that you claim everyone should be thrilled to see'. Can you see how anyone more aware and understanding of what is really going on would not be Thrilled?
Sustainable Cooling would indeed be Good. But the science is clear that that will only happen if the levels of CO2, and other human generated ghgs, in the atmosphere are reduced. And the reduction of CO2 is almost certain to only happen when the use of fossil fuels is ended.
And until the use of fossil fuels is ended the CO2 and other ghgs will continue to increase. And the science is clear that a 1.5 C total warming is the point beyond which the climate impacts can be very severe. Even a 2.0 C warming is likely to be very hard on the future generations.
And as michael sweet has pointed out there has already been more than 1.0 C of warming with the CO2 only at 410 ppm (a 140 ppm increase from pre-industrial) but is currently rising at more than 20 ppm per decade.
Any claim to see "A cooling trend in the temperature data" without a reduction of CO2 is "Claiming False Hope" (now and in the past), and deserves the be corrected. And promoters of the harmful fictional claims deserve to be ridiculed if they persist in unethically resisting becoming more aware and better understanding.
blub @36,
"Give me 10-100Million dollars and i will design a model which will show that cimate correlates with anything you want it to correlate..."
I believe you could try but you would unlimately not be able to sustain any perceptions you create that do not actually match or reasonably explain the robust diversity of observations and information that is available.
Dr. Roy Spencer has repeatedly tried to get 'his interpretation of satellite data to indicate temperatures in the atmosphere, not at the planet surface' to prove that global average surface warming is not happening the way the climate science has determined it most likely is happening at the surface. He has had to correct his interpretation many times when the results of his way of interpretting the data failed to make sense. But he persists in trying to make-up any possible claim that warming is not occurring, or is not significant, or is beneficial even those everyone with increased awareness and understanding of what is going on 'actually knows better'.
Hi One Planet Only Forever,
thanks for your kind reply.
You mention: "...you would unlimately not be able to sustain any perceptions you create that do not actually match or reasonably explain the robust diversity of observations and information that is available."
Have you ever considered that this "robust diversity of observations and information" is actually not as robust as you say? And if so wouldn`t the first part of your sentence also aply to WMIP5 models?
Can you elaborate on what actually "robust diversity of observations and information" means in terms of physical causality of climate change?
[DB] Sloganeering snipped.
Blurb @36
"Now I perfectly understand why alarmists are getting more and more heat from all kinds of movements. Not even one reply was actually based on sound understanding of science or refering to my content instead nothing but insults and mantra like repetition of empty arguements like:"
Actually alarmists seem to be getting less and less heat from denialists. Even The Heartland Institute is pulling back a little bit.
Calling your comments incoherent is not an ad hominem. It's a simple fact they are hard to read and decipher.
"So it is with climate models. They are not perfect, everyone knows that, but they are good enough to be taken seriously, especially given whats at stake. = OPINION"
No its not opinion. The implications of climate change for the planet are well documented in the last IPCC report. If you want to arge that its an opinion whether they are serious fair enough, but that doesnt make the science or modelling an opinion. However its hard to see on what basis why any sane person would try to argue climate change is not serious.
"Give me 10-100Million dollars and i will design a model which will show that cimate correlates with anything you want it to correlate..."
It would be a junk model and would likely not be published and would certainly be ridiculed. Denialists have published a few curve fitting models like this and they have not fared very well.
"Nigelj mentions: "There is an understanding of why variations in tree ring growth relate to temperatures, ie causation. You seem utterly confused and incoherent."
No you are quoting me selectively. I said "tree ring proxy data is not based only on correlations between tree rings and temperatures. There is an understanding of why variations in tree ring growth relate to temperatures, ie causation. You seem utterly confused and incoherent."
"Actually you seem confused... Now for the third time: my arguementation was actually not that tree rings in particular are bad proxis, but that proxy studies in general are not confirmed or evident by statistical correlation or robustness and that the thought chain of doing so has no logic or causality. You do not seem to comprehend."
Your two different criticisms both imply tree rings are bad proxies. You are just stating your opinion about proxies with no supporting evidence, just an empty assertion. Proxies have their uses an nobody claims they are highly accurate, thats why they have quite large error bars. Start with looking up tree ring proxies on something like wikipedia below.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendroclimatology
The logic and causality seems obvious enough, here is part of the picture:
"Dendroclimatology is the science of determining past climates from trees (primarily properties of the annual tree rings). Tree rings are wider when conditions favor growth, narrower when times are difficult. Other properties of the annual rings, such as maximum latewood density (MXD) have been shown to be better proxies than simple ring width. Using tree rings, scientists have estimated many local climates for hundreds to thousands of years previous. By combining multiple tree-ring studies (sometimes with other climate proxy records), scientists have estimated past regional and global climates."
blub @39,
Review the Most Used Climate Myths on this site (top of left hand side).
Also review the "links by Arguement" under "Resources".
There are plenty of robust examples of "What is not causing the warming". Many of them also are robust examples of "What is not causing the increase of CO2".
Robust evidence indicates what is not happening, as well as indicating what is actually happening.
"Give me 10-100Million dollars and i will design a model which will show that cimate correlates with anything you want it to correlate..."
Sure. Go to FF companies and put your case. Coming up with an alternative model that excuses them would be fanastic. Of course, FF companies have massive modelling resources themselves (I worked for years on basin modelling) but for some reason choose to spend money on what is politely called PR, rather than trying for an alternative model.
Frankly you are just demonstrating how little you know about how climate models are constructed.
As far as I can see, since the science is doesnt say what you want to hear, you are frantically trying to find excuses for disbelieving the science but are unable to show any actual evidence. Ie you are indulging in motivated reasoning, not critical thinking. Can you think of evidence that would change you mind? If you cannot, then your beliefs are based on your values and identity, not on reason and observations. This is not the site for you. "You cannot reason a person out of a position they were not reasoned into".
Blub, oops apologies for calling you blurb. A typo. Hopefully you can see the funny side of it.
Nigelj @43 = Blub or Blurb ?
Tch, tch, tch . . . please leave the humorous comments to the good Blub.
He is doing very well with the levity & logical legerdemain. Rather than argue any sort of coherent case against AGW, he prefers to deflect into a sophist's jungle of Ultraviolet Catastrophes, Post-Modern Nihilism, Vitamin-C in apples, and the astounding suggestion that the world's climate scientists are ignorant about QM & black body radiation. Goodness me, what next?
I am chuckling as I wait for Blub to explain how String Theory disproves Global Warming by CO2/greenhouse.
Please get some knowledge on CONFIRMATION BIAS!
All you do is bullying and i am getting moderated? strange site...
nyood @28,
I fear you rely on the commentaries of climate change deniers rather than the source documents they cherry-pick from.
Tom Wigley was taking issue with Kevin Trenberth in 2009 not 1997 (1997 also the date of the hockeystick work) and it was an entirely civilised and understandable interchange (although the actual e-mail thread does suggest that there was some history to the interchange).
Wigley argued that the global temperature evolution 2000-10 could be explained by ENSO, volcano & solar variation (as per Foster & Rahmstorf 2011) but this was not entirely what Trenberth was saying (note the CERES reference). Then Trenberth responds pointing this inexactness out with perhaps allusions to some past interchange.
I fail to see how this 2009 interchange in any way relates to uncertainty in climatology being kept private, unless it is within the febrile mind of a climate change denier.
This will be my last post on this site in hope of igniting some critical thinking.
If modelling of complex physical processes is robust why don´t we haven´t already predicted high temperature superconducting materials on which we could transfer energy without loss?
Why were we not able to model plasma confinement for the last 60 years to enable nuclear fusion which would enable abundant cheap energy?
Why are there no models to predict stock market moves accurately?
Why are we not able to model even solar cell processes accurately?
Are robust models accurate?
Blub @47 ,
. . . and why haven't we invented anti-gravity yet?
. . . and why not a cure for every cancer?
. . . and biological regeneration to give humans a 1000-year lifespan?
. . . etcetera.
Blub ~ when you have ignited some critical thinking in yourself , then perhaps you will see your way clear to actually discussing the topic of this thread. Rather than hand-waving and discussing confirmation bias (without insight).
I'm not sure what "critical thinking" blub @47 expects.
Of course, stock market prices are not goverened by physical processes and I have no inkling of the meaning of his terms "robust model" and "accurate." The remaining examples he provides appear to concern a mixture of issues regarding modelling problems or limits to scientific knowledge. I don't see how GCMs relate to any of this, again assuming that is the concern expressed. And that said, you don't even need a GCM to demonstrate GHG-induced Climate Change. I consider the argument set out by the commenter up-thread (all eight comments extant and snipped) appear to be simply arguing that there is no ontological truth, something which is philisophically correct but scientifically flat wrong.
Blub;s latest post here seems to be a variant of "you don't know everything, so you know nothing", which allows him/her to reject anything that science has established that goes against his/her desires to believe (or disbelieve). If science can be wrong, then it must be wrong when it disagrees with blub.
...and of course confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, etc. only afflict other people, not blub.