"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Tireless Denialists Create another List

I've got a few things to say but I'm pretty tired today, so I'll just shoot a fish in a barrel.

I thought I'd just point out that a denialist has come up with a list of anti-consensus publications. Specifically the list is entitled Peer-Review Papers Skeptical of "Man-Made" Global Warming.

Now we'll have to go over it. Groan. What a waste of time these people are. (Of course, it would be nice if that was all the damage they did, but a massive waste of time, remember, is the best case.)

The first one I checked out (I ignored ones that had one of the usual dirty dozen as a coauthor) was Effects of bias in solar radiative transfer codes on global climate model simulations(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, L20717, 2005)- Albert Arking . Here is the abstract:
Codes commonly used in climate and weather prediction models for calculating the transfer of solar radiation in the atmosphere show systematic differences amongst each other, and even the best of codes show systematic differences with respect to observations. A 1-dimensional radiative-convective equilibrium model is used to show the effects of such bias on the global energy balance and on the global response to a doubling of CO2. We find the main impact is in the energy exchange terms between the surface and atmosphere and in the convective transport in the lower troposphere, where it exceeds 10 W m−2. The impact on model response to doubling of CO2, on the other hand, is quite small and in most cases negligible.
I don't know, does that sound "skeptical of man-made global warming" to you?

Update: Some fellow called Andrew claims credit for the list, and indeed it can be found with an earlier date stamp here, along with an impressively great spew of material of varying quality. I suspect this is a professional agnotology site.

Also via the "Andrew" article, this is the second time this week I came across this Higgs paper. Probably a sincere amateur in this case. Their intellectual armaments are getting quite sturdy for a group advocating a fundamentally incorrect position. Most likely the way the truth will finally out will not be pretty...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am sure that Rahmstorf and Keeling would be surprised to find themselves placed among the ranks of the unbelievers.

Anonymous said...

These lists are like bower bird display gatherings ..."look at how many I have, and they're all blue!"

Anonymous said...

...reminds me of the Inhofe 400, or more specifically, social anthropolgist Benny Peiser's poor attempt to come up with studies that challenge the consensus view. This attempt makes Peiser look remotely competent.

The list here is a mix of

1. Old studies from the 1980's or early 90's - not particularly relevant to today

2. Studies published in dubious journals (i.e. "Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology") or journals not particularly related to climate science (i.e. Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering). Many here are published in "Energy & Environment", a known denier journal that publishes sub-standard papers. It's editorial board is filled with those with a particular extreme ideological slant. It's thus no surprise it's not carried on ISI's Journal Citation Report.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_and_Environment

3. Studies that discuss specific effects of future warming

4. Studies that don't argue against the consensus view (the vast majority of them)

For instance, aside from 1 or 2 (the Soon/Baliunas study being seen as a massive failure of the peer review process by the editors of the journal it was published in), the studies in the "solar" section discuss solar variation, a known forcing in past and current climate change, yet don't argue against the consensus that most of the recent warming is due to human activities. In fact, solar forcing has had at most a negligible effect in recent decades, negative over the last 20 years.

http://publishing.royalsociety.org/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

Next, on "sea level rise", for example, the blog post cites this study as somehow arguing against the consensus:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5730/1898

In fact, increased precipitation in the Antarctic is predicted by the climate models.

Another study notes that temperatures in one sea region were a little warmer 1000 years ago (which means?).

Another example: 2 papers are authored by Stefan Rahmstorf, misinterpreted of course. Here's his page on global warming:

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/warmingfacts.pdf