A little commentary on Judith Curry’s attempt at bridge building seems in order. First, it’s impressive that she took the time to make the effort and stick her neck out a bit, she is one of the few climate scientists who has begun to come to grips with the breadth of the problem created. For her efforts she was uniformly blasted across blogland, the advocates at RC wouldn’t even post her article despite being involved in the development. Climate fraudvocate, Joe Romm tore her up as hard as he could. Willis Eschenbach, wrote an excellent piece at WUWT on the matter which I encourage everyone to read and Lucia has her own take on how to fix the science. None of our commentary was particularly gentle.

In Willis’s excellent post (which had a rant quality only a focused outraged mind can achieve) he let loose with these fine paragraphs of insight.

Because we don’t want scientists who are advocates. We’re not interested in scientists who don’t mention their doubts. We’re sick of your inane “simplified dramatic statements”. We laugh when you cry wolf with your scary scenarios. Call us crazy, but we want scientists who are honest, not scientists who balance honesty and effectiveness. You want trust? Get honest, kick out the scoundrels, and for goodness sakes, get a clue about humility. Because the truth is, climate science is one of the newest sciences. The truth is, we know little about the climate, we’ve only been studying it intensely for a couple decades. The truth is, we can’t project the climate of the next decade, much less that of the next century. The truth is, we have no general theory of climate. The truth is, we don’t know if an average temperature rise of a couple degrees will be a net benefit or a net loss. The truth is, all of us are human, and our knowledge of the climate is in its infancy. And I don’t appreciate being lectured by infants. I don’t appreciate being told that I should be put in the dock in a Nuremberg style trial for disagreeing with infants. You want to restore trust? Come down off your pedestals, forsake your ivory towers, and admit your limitations. And through all of this, be aware that you have a long, long, long climb back up to where we will trust you. As Lincoln warned, you have forfeited the confidence of your fellow citizens, and you will be damn lucky if you ever get it back.

It’s very difficult to follow that kind of quality. There is so much truth to what he wrote and so much wrong with what climate science is.

Climate science is in it’s infancy and the quality of many of the primary scientists is low in relation to other sciences. Some of the most famous climate scientists have the weakest grasp of data and math. If you read other sciences, it becomes pretty obvious. Read an SPIE optics paper sometime. The hand waiving nonsense of the climate community is second to none. The team is singularly UNqualified to talk down to us. One battle I had with Eric Steig occurred when he said perhaps I should take his matlab class in response to a request for code. Last month, four of us have submitted a paper which dramatically improves on his result and simultaneously expands the science. In part because of that, I’m not allowed to comment at Real Climate even about the simplest matters.

I had never met anyone who believed themselves qualified to ignore my own opinions prior to climate science blogging. Most people think I can keep up ok, and most of the readers here are the same way themselves. These same people clip Roman M’s (a statistics professor) comments from their threads when he writes about statistics. Ryan O, who is the primary author of our recent antarctic paper actually shut down a real climate thread in under 12 hours, – not by spamming – but by making two or three difficult points. Where is the contention in statistics that cannot be discussed. It is only when you imagine nefarious objectives that it becomes apparent why the “scientists” will not allow discussion of serious and reasonable scientific issues.

Climate scientists are not qualified to lecture the rest as though we are children, the fact that they would consider it says a lot about their mental state. It fits very well with my view of a certain political group that favors enlightened control over our freedom and our environment. Like many of you, in my 41 years I’ve met brilliant janitors, stupid engineers, medical doctors who were clueless, amazing lawyers, salesmen who were artists with people, the list is long. Without reservation, climate science is one of the weakest professional groups I’ve run across. I’m supposed to say that because it’s an evil skeptic blog, but the long time readers know that I only write what I believe and I’m guessing there won’t be much disagreement.

We are not fooled by your false papers including, sheep and fish shrinkage, global gravity change, coral bleaching, increased hurricanes, drought, rain, bad temperature data, glacier melting, mashmatic proxy temperature reconstructions, false economic prosperity from green jobs, malaria, starvation, acidification, multi-millennia CO2 longevity, positive feedback without evidence, climate models projecting out a century, Antarctica melting. It’s BULLSHIT!! BTW, I do believe in the warming effect of CO2.

The truth is, They don’t know what the future will bring any more than we do. They don’t know dammit, so stop lying and telling us you do. But that is not the real problem.

The real problem is that far too few from the climate community have the guts to stand up to the bad science and say — BULL!! When Ben Santer proves models are correct and ignores the most recent 10 years of data — you know the same data that has the decline — and says YUP MODELS ARE GOOD. Where is the outrage? Where is the demand for accuracy? Where is the honesty? I wrote 3 separate replies to Judith Curry prior to her recent article, I deleted them all in favor of a fourth. When she called the errors in Mann’s work minor, I about went ballistic.

When Steve McIntyre’s correct paper that refutes Santer’s work is blocked from publication even though it uses the same methods and data — except he didn’t bother to clip the last ten years OF MEASUREMENTS off. Where is the outrage!!

What is wrong with this picture? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’LL TELL YOU WHAT IS WRONG, Their funding depends on it as not-too-subtly-implied by Ed Cook below. [My bold]

From Ed Cook — Who also believes in CO2 warming — on the bullshit of paleoclimatology papers.

1) Describe the past work (Mann, Briffa, Jones, Crowley, Esper, yada,

yada, yada) and their data over-laps. 2) Use the Briffa&Osborn “Blowing Hot And Cold” annually-resolved

recons (plus Crowley?) (boreholes not included) for comparison

because they are all scaled identically to the same NH extra-tropics

temperatures and the Mann version only includes that part of the NH

(we could include Mann’s full NH recon as well, but he would probably

go ballistic, and also the new Mann&Jones mess?) 3) Characterize the similarities between series using unrotated

(maybe rotated as well) EOF analysis (correlation for pure

similarity, covariance for differences in amplitude as well) and

filtering on the reconstructions – unfiltered, 20yr high-pass, 100-20

bandpass, 100 lowpass – to find out where the reconstructions are

most similar and different – use 1st-EOF loadings as a guide, the

comparisons of the power spectra could also be done I suppose 4) Do these EOF analyses on different time periods to see where they

differ most, e.g., running 100-year EOF windows on the unfiltered

data, running 300-year for 20-lp data (something like that anyway),

and plot the 1st-EOF loadings as a function of time 5) Discuss where the biggest differences lie between reconstructions

(this will almost certainly occur most in the 100 lowpass data),

taking into account data overlaps 6) Point out implications concerning the next IPCC assessment and EBM

forcing experiments that are basically designed to fit the lower

frequencies – if the greatest uncertainties are in the >100 year

band, then that is where the greatest uncertainties will be in the

forcing experiments 7) Publish, retire, and don’t leave a forwarding address



Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I

almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will

show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year

extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we

believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what

the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know

with certainty that we know fuck-all).

Some climate scientists are sharp enough to know the truth. They KNOW dammit!! Yet they subject us to this endless march toward an evil, anti-prosperity ‘green’ world. If climate science want’s trust, the rejection of bad papers must start immediately. They have got to realize that we’re not going to stop soon.

We are coming for you, and the god of physics and has our backs.

NO consensus.







