In that particular blog post he mangled the latest IPCC report and the science that it is based on. Most of what he said was simply not an accurate representation of what IPCC does and the science used for the latest report. I expected better from someone who does climate research.
Sometimes I truly wonder if the so-called sceptics ever take the effort to do the bare minimum of research before they attack the IPCC. This time I wondered this thanks to the guest blog post “What would the IPCC have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming?” (archived here) that Anthony Watts deemed worthy to be published on his blog.
In this particular blog post Stephane Rogeau proposes two situations. One situation where the IPCC readily admits that the rapid warming is in part due to natural variability. And one where the IPCC uses this as evidence for the dire impact we humans are having on the climate.
This is the text that Rogeau says could be written by the IPCC if they would honestly write about it in their report:
Continue reading What The IPCC Would Write If There Had Been 12 Years Of Rapid Warming
My opinion of that letter from Tisdale is that it doesn’t accurately represent the IPCC and their latest release. There are a lot of reasons of why I hold that position and what I wrote for ‘No, Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped‘ gives a good introduction about his mistakes about climate models. I can also recommend the article ‘The new IPCC climate change report makes deniers overheat‘ by Michael Mann for a better understanding of how the latest IPCC report often is misrepresented.
When I started on my open letter to Tisdale I knew we would never reach any sort of agreement on his points about climate research or the IPCC. That’s why I focussed on the following in his letter:
Continue reading This Is Why You Can’t Reason With ‘Climate Sceptics’
My opinion is that you’re not accurately representing the IPCC and their latest release. The reasons for that are numerous, and if you want to get a better understanding of what I mean by that I can recommend reading ‘No, Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped‘.
But we will probably never reach agreement on that point so I’m not going to focus on it. However, what I am going to focus on is the following that you said in your letter:
On YouTube I found a couple of videos about the new IPCC report that I found interesting. Especially since in 3 of the 4 videos we have the scientists that worked on the report explain what is in it.
In the first video we have several scientists explaining the context and meaning of the slow down in surface temperature increases. It’s a good and short rundown on what is happening, why, and what this all means.
Ever since I’ve been aware of Piers Corbyn I’ve found him extremely confusing. Simply because what he says is so at odds with what we know in science, and because he’s very secretive about how arrives at his conclusions.
What I’m referring to are the weather predictions he makes via his company WeatherAction. What his company does is make long-term weather forecasts based on solar activity, the earth’s magnetic field, and the moon’s orbit. He calls it the Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique, or SLAT for short. He claims he gets a high rate of success with this technique and can predict the weather up to a year in advance; but I’m not convinced.
The problem is that what he uses for his predictions, like the sun, has at best a minor effect on weather and our climate. This is well known in the scientific community, yet he claims it has a big effect. But it’s also Corbyn that claims this high accuracy, there’s actually very little out there that hints at there being any skill to his predictions.
Continue reading Piers Corbyn: The UN IPCC And All It Stands For Must Be Destroyed
Although the article is quite hard to address as he barely mentions any sources for what he’s basing his claims and arguments on. And he does make a lot of claims about climatology and the IPCC.
To show I’m not taking anything out of context his entire blog post is quoted by me, with my responses to the point he’s making below the quote. I’ve kept my responses as short as possible, which means I’ll be referring you to a lot of other sites/pages for further information.
But before I begin I’d like to point out that any bolded or emphasized text in the quotes is by Dr Roy Spencer. I copied the text as is from his blog so that I don’t distort what he’s saying. That being said lets begin:
What the Cook et al. paper did was examine 11,944 abstracts from papers that were published from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses, which meant that 2,142 papers were also rated by their authors on their endorsement level. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. This was done to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in the rating system used and this seems to indicate that.
Continue reading 97% Climate consensus ‘denial’: the debunkers again not debunked
Several months ago Cook et al released a paper in which they analysed the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
What they did in that study is examine 11,944 abstracts from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
When they asked the authors of those papers to rate their own papers they again found that 97% stated that humans are causing global warming. They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. They did this to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in their rating system and this seems to indicate that.
For anyone who is aware of other studies that did something similar these results weren’t a surprise. As studies like Oreskes 2004, Doran 2009 and Anderegg 2010 showed similar results. It’s the very reason I just shrugged at these results and mostly watched everything play out from a distance. To me they just didn’t seem that interesting, or that they would generate a lot of controversy.
Continue reading Cook’s 97% Climate Consensus Paper Doesn’t Crumble Upon Examination
Andrew Dessler, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University, uploaded a good short video where he talks about how likely it would be that climate sensitivity is less than 2 degrees. It puts some of the more recent papers into context as to why they might be underestimating climate sensitivity:
My only nitpick about this video is that he didn’t mention that if you look at how our planet has reacted in the distant past a low climate sensitivity isn’t supported. If you do a review of these studies it shows that the climate sensitivity of our planet is somewhere between 2 and 4.5 degrees (with a few big jumps upwards, but those are the exception).
Continue reading Is The Climate Sensitivity Less Than 2°C?