Everybody remembers what happened when Lord Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates and I published our (what is physics is called) toy model of the climate. Global warming increased! Caused by apoplexy, over-heating, fuming, and ranting by the usual crowd of dimwits.

It reached the point where one incompetent or malevolent—there is no third choice—United States Senator calling on skeptics like myself to be prosecuted by the RICO act (see also this). Because why? Because tobacco, or something. The man is an ass.

In the frenzy, the world’s mean IQ dropped a full ten points. Only one group of actual scientists tried to take on the paper. Mark Richardson, Zeke Hausfather, Dana Nuccitelli, Ken Rice, and John Abraham wrote the response “Misdiagnosis of Earth climate sensitivity based on energy balance model results” and published it in the same journal our original paper appeared. We were allowed a rebuttal, which is the usual process, and which was (again, as usual) supposed to be published simultaneously with Richardson et al.

Well, you know how these things go. The Science Bulletin—the journal took a lot of heat for publishing us—put up Richardson et al. but misplaced our rebuttal, which will now show later. (Or you can download it here, in draft form, now; but, shhhh, don’t tell anybody where you got it. It’s a, the Lord be merciful, Word doc.)

Anyway the publishing, um, mishap allowed The Guardian to pee its pants: “Research downplaying impending global warming is overturned: A new study finds Monckton et al. (2015) riddled with errors.”

The author, Nuccitelli, like many, fails to distinguish between model fit and model predictions. (To be fair, Nuccitelli likely did not write the hyperbolic headline.)

Sure, GCMs can fit past data, more or less well. Any model can be made to fit past data! But you don’t show that fit and then claim the model works, that would be foolish. Right!?

Oh, wait. You do. That’s what classical statistics is all about: showing how well some data can be squeezed into a model, much like how the bodies of certain women in June (after a long winter) are squeezed into last year’s bathing suits. The thing can be done, but it doesn’t mean the results are good.

Thousands upon thousands—oh, some damnably large number—of papers showing how data can be squeezed into models are published yearly. How many of these models would make good predictions? Ask it another way: how many models are good, since the only test of true goodness is how well models make predictions of data never seen before?

Not too many, that’s how many.

Particularly compare the picture Nuccitelli has in the Guardian with the one displayed in the tweet above (or at this link). One shows fit, the other forecast. See how easy it is to fool yourself? (We discuss Nuccitelli’s picture in our rebuttal.)

Tell the truth, I’m sick of this whole business. I’m thisclose to never saying another word about climatology. What a dismal science, filled with untrained civilians (which includes sociologists, economists, etc.), all of whom have stronger opinions on the subject than any scientist, cowardly scientists, many of whom know damn well what is happening but who keep their mouths shut, bottom-feeding immoral politicians, whose only concern is self-aggrandizement, activists, unhinged, every mother-loving one of them, reporters, the worst of the bunch, because each thinks himself a crusading genius. The damage done to thought by this preposterous situation is incalculable.

Over twenty years I’ve made maybe a couple of thousand dollars from this field, but I’ve lost much, much more (my retirement “plan” consists in investing in lottery tickets). The work I’ve done has given me only grief. Try finding a job once you’re labeled a “denier”. The ignoramus who thought that one up needs to be first in line for the series of blanket parties which are long overdue our nation’s intellectuals.

Us skeptics are supposed to be awash in oil money. The next nitwit that says that to me better have a good dental plan. For decades I’ve had my hand out to oil companies—I have no compunction taking their money—but never a cent have I received. Not from them, and not from any company affiliated with them.

The monks—the only group which has a chance of surviving—who write the history of this period will never stop laughing.

Update We heard from the reviewers why our rebuttal wasn’t printed. There are “errors” we have to fix. Here is a sample they noticed.

Page 2 Line 46: “Appropriate caveats about the limitations ” is undefined and vague language. The crux of [13] is that the limitations reduce the accuracy beyond applicability, while [6] maintains strong conclusions drawn from this model. “Appropriate” is a matter of opinion in this case, and should not be included without merited justification. Page 2 Line 50-52: The claim that global temperature measurements are only accurate after 1979 is unsubstantiated. Please provide a citation. Page 3 Line 11: “Perform satisfactorily” is vague. Please refrain from subjective language.

All niggling (are we still allowed to use this word?) details, mostly copy editing. Because of the back-and-forth, don’t look to see official version of the paper above for a least a month.

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