Your methodology is all wrong. The article at the top of the page is not about science, and doesn’t pretend to be science. Successive trolls and sceptics have brought their preconceptions along and attacked the science. But this is not a science blog. If you had a sensible coherent challenge to the science you would take it to someone who could evaluate it fully.

Your suggestion that what people eat for breakfast has no bearing on the validity of their data (and hence their credibility in climate science) is the usual climate denier practice of making an irrelevant statement to advance an ignorant argument.

As for which side is producing the hard evidence, you aren’t really a decent judge of that since you need it pointed out to you why it matters whether Alexander Davidson has PhD or not. Alexander Davidson says so himself in post #100.

For the record, one of the climate sceptics on this webpage falsely claims to have a science PhD.

Your position is founded on the dogma of ignorance ,irrelevance,and dishonesty which is why I agree I’ll never be able to persuade people like you.

But that doesn’t mean people like you are right.

Your expert is linked to political activism sponsored by oil money. You can quote him to your heart’s content but ultimately this ought to be a search for truth, rather than a search for scientists who will tell you what you want to hear.

Your response to Alexander Davidson is so pathetically typical of that of the fanatical, scientifically-illiterate, CAGW enthusiast… Straight to the ad hominem, always “play the man, not the ball”.

Whether it’s “Mr” or “Dr” Davidson is immaterial. Why not try reading the papers that he cites (always assuming that you can understand them – and if you can’t, you have no authority to pontificate on the subject)?.

So your claim to have a PhD cannot be verified. And there is no Alexander Davidson PhD on google or findaphd.com. There is no point in evaluating what you say about the science because your credentials don’t check out.

I realise you feel that what you have written above is important but I’ll skip over it thank you, because , if there is any scientific value in it, those ideas ideas will prosper , but in this context they are being presented by an obvious fake doctor fantasist.

His new paper analyses 61 year’s data: http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B74u5vgGLaWoNDFjODAwMWMtNmNmYS00NDhmLWI3NjItMTE0NGMwNWMxYjQ2&sort=name&layout=list&num=50

The data show no significant change in greenhouse gas optical thickness, the fundamental cause of AGW. Water vapour concentration has fallen as CO2 increases. The mechanism has to be through weather systems. Other scientists have pointed out the fall of stratospheric water vapour concentration. The Univ. of Alabama and MIT groups are publishing satellite data proving the negative feedback that the above paper predicts. There may be a very low perhaps zero amplification factor. The implication is that most if not all recent warming has been natural.

For a good analysis of the pros and cons, see: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/my-global-warming-skepticism-for-dummies/

My PhD was at one of the three top UK institutions in the ’70s. I’m not going to give any personal details but if you want to confirm my ideas, rope in a physicist.

In summary, many IPCC models assume much of the difference between predicted AGW and reality is man-made cooling via clouds: aerosols reduce droplet size, more droplets = more optical scattering, more energy to space. However, the theory [Twomey, 1974] only applies to thin clouds. The modellers applied it to thick clouds apparently without appreciating that was an extrapolation, fine if there was experimental verification, but that’s not the case.

So, the predictions in AR4 are unjustifiable: the models are wrong, they’ve been wrongly calibrated or both. It needs to be sorted, soon.

Ive done a couple of internet searches for your name and PhD and haven’t found any reference to you. Can you tell us the name of the University that awarded your doctorate, the year, the title of your doctoral thesis , anything to help verification. Thanks.

Here’s the Kiehl reference: Geophysical Research Letters, VOL 34, L22710,doi:10, 1029/2007GL031383, 2007. The models depend on an assumed cooling effect via polluted clouds for which there is no evidence. Kiehl is one of the main modellers: when he is worried the rest should be too. The variation of the assumed cloud cooling is so wide as to be laughable even if it were justifiable.

I worked for 20 years on technologies to counter global warming, should it accelerate, and I’m very annoyed that the modellers did not do their job! That they all agree in public is irrelevant because science does not weigh votes. The key is the climate sensitivity. In their GRL paper last year, Lindzen and Choi estimated it to be 0.5 K compared with the 3 K [temperature rise for doubling [CO2]], the central IPCC projection. There are other groups coming to the same conclusion.

In 1988, Lindzen warned the modellers that their assumption of high positive feedbacks via clouds wasn’t experimentally verifiable.. Many other serious scientists, e.g. Lovelock, are openly contemptuous of the claimed ability to predict the behaviour of a chaotic system up to a century ahead, particularly when the lack of confidence in key parts of the physics is an order of magnitude higher than the claimed precision of the model outputs!

The problem is that you have to have a good hard science PhD to understand the vastness of the subject; I do and what I have identified is a key error made 50 years’ ago in the optics of cloud aerosols – an approximation was made which is far too simplistic and no-one in climate science had the wit to think that what they bet the farm on in 1996, when the models were shown to be wrong, had no credibility. It’s called science – bad science will be outed.

I haven’t said the BBC have such a policy. I’ve drawn attention to a couple of egregious examples, further reasoning can be found in my blog.

You say “Far better to go for the scientific jugular.” The only opposition to the science is better science. You quote conspiracy theory, a bit of conjecture and a view that makes no pretence to be impartial . It can’t be evaluated because you provide no references. But it’s irrelevant here anyhow. The verity of AGW does not boil down to the ill-informed opinion to be found on internet message boards. There is a huge scientific consensus and there has been since at least the early 1980s. The mainstream media report an entirely different story. I rely on the work of Dr. Naomi Oreskes , and reccomend you read her new book “Merchants of Doubt”

By 1996 it had become clear that the climate models, based on assumed high AGW, over-predicted temperature rise by a large amount when hindcast to real data. The decision was taken to assume a large cooling effect via man-made pollution, directly and indirectly via increased cloud albedo. The former had long been proven. However, the latter, a tenet of climate science at the time but with little general proof, had to be proven.

The research has shown no such effect. There is no difference between cloud albedo in the polluted Northern and the unpolluted Southern hemispheres. The theory used to justify the claim only applies to thin clouds. If you read the literature, insiders probably knew this long before AR4. One, Kiehl, write a paper on the corrections: the data are damming. His co-worker in one of the ClimateGate e-mails, pleaded how the models weren’t predicting reality. Either the models are wrong, they’ve been calibrated wrongly or it’s both.

Now the control on access to journals has been exposed, contrary views are being published. A new consensus is emerging. It seems quite likely that AGW has been responsible for about a quarter of recent warming with the rest from natural processes, probably astrophysical . If true, the main premise in the IPCC models was wrong from the start.

On the 9th April, the Presidents of the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences published a letter in the FT eulogising climate science but adding the need for more research on ‘feedback processes’. I think the mainstream scientific establishment has pulled the choke chain on those in climate science who had threatened the reputation of science in general. About time too.

PS this kind of fight is common. A previous example was the ‘phlogiston theory’ of heat. It took over a century to establish the truth and in so doing, the modern science of quantitative chemistry was born.

Is it the case that the BBC issued its staff with guidance on the BBC “line to take” on Global Warming

Hidden agenda? Good grief

I have a simple philosophy.

It serves me well.

Whatever you say is wrong.

You are a controversialist and a complete utter fool.

You only read one side of the discussion, and refuse, with that certaintity that all Libertarians have, that, whatever you say is right.

The evidence that stacks up against you never effects your arrogant idea about self, or selfishness.

For that is what all libertarians are, children that believe that their own fairy tales will protect them from reality. For Devil’s Kitchen, it hasn’t worked too well.

So, go away and grow the fuck up.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies-divergence-problem.htm

So you would have believed the expert (at the time) consensus that the earth was flat, that thalidomide was safe

Yes, of course I’d have believed the expert consensus on these two; I’d have been right to do so, and a non-scientist who disputed them without first understanding the reasons for the expert consensus would have been an idiot.

that nuclear power would be too cheap to meter, that by now the biggest problem facing humanity would be excessive leisure time

These are more complicated, as they’re not actually claims about science. In both cases, the science was right, but the economics was wrong: nuclear advocates underestimated the cost of the engineering required to reduce risk to a socially acceptable level; leisure time theorists failed to understand the human capacity to want more and more random stuff that we don’t really need rather than taking time off.

that the ice age was coming

Yay denialist fiction! The idea that there was ever a serious expert consensus (rather than the ravings of a few cranks) that the ice age was coming is simply made up.

the “millenium bug” would see planes falling out of the sky, we would all die of flu last winter etc etc etc ?

The Millennium Bug didn’t cause major problems *because* we invested major resources into fixing it. On the flu, there was only ever a small possibility that the flu pandemic would reach the death rates seen in previous flu pandemics, and nobody outside of tabloid-land pretended otherwise – however, a small possibility of something that *kills 5% of the population* is still worth preparing for…

This doesn’t make sense when tree rings are the main proxy for estimating what temperatures were in the past and are crucial to the evidence that underpins the whole AGW argument.

Simple question.

Answers please.

OK, let’s assume we agree that there has been over the last 35 years a strong warming trend. If we examine the known factors which affect our climate and decide that we can explain that trend by pointing to a particular cause AND there is reason to believe that this factor will continue to have an influence in coming years then it is reasonable to assume that the trend will continue and we can extrapolate accordingly.
However, that is different from simply saying that because we have had a warming trend for thirty odd years we must assume that we can extrapolate this trend to predict future temperatures. Thats is the distinction I was trying to make.

On this particular climate change thing I’m one of the very few who is actually accepting that there is a problem but then trying to look at the various proposed soultions and finding them appallingly wanting.

The IPCC itself says that globalisation is part of the cure, not the problem: not something that G. Monbiot or Caroline Lucas ever tell us now, is it?