The Realclimate blog is not objective. It is one of the most biased blogs on the web - almost as biased indeed as this one. The Realclimate blog is authored by the same authors who came up with the debunked hockey stick graph. That graph made their reputation and probably paid their mortgages. If it was widely known that their graph is a nonsense, they would be made to look - and rightly so - complete idiots. It is little wonder that they defend their graph - and criticise those who question the maths behind the graph - with the vitriol and rage of a cornered snake. It is laughable that they promote themselves as the objective voice in the climate change debate.

You criticise Christopher Monckton’s article for being biased and unscientific. And yet your article here is the epitomy of biased unscientific writing. You start off your article with an unsubstantiated rant against The Telegraph (which, incidentally, is considered one of the UK’s more objective papers, unlike the Guardian). You admit that your opiniion of The Telegraph is based on the opinions of George Mombiet. It is hardly surprising that George does not like the Telegraph. He is a leftwing fundamentalist environmentalist. The Telegraph has a right wing slant. So you are happy to blithely believe every word that George Mombiet says because he happens to be left wing, but believe that an article in The Telegraph is eye-poppingly awful claptrap because it has a right wing slant.

I have actually read The Telegraph (though am not a regular reader) and I can assure you that its quality of journalism is very high. And, if you had read Monckton’s article, and the responses from many scientists. you would know that this article was not a load of claptrap but a serious attempt to deal with a difficult issue. And it was far more objective than anything ever written by you or George Mombiet.

The only eye-poppingly awful claptrap (do you know what tautology is, btw?) I see is the rubbish written on your blog.

You are a disgrace to objectivity and to science. Do everyone a favour, and write your bigotted and biased opinions down in a book, rather than publish them on the web, so that some unsuspecting surfer won’t have the misfortune of stumbling across them ont his risible site.

Alex

Climate science is a difficult topic, relying on modeling, computer simulation, extrapolation of laboratory results, and a geologic understanding of the planet’s climate history, among many other components. These are all imperfectly understood and practiced an no scientist worth his or her salt relies on any single result (for example, the hockey stick graph) to infer climate change.

If you agree that the universe is more complicated than climate on earth I find it ironic that you call yourself a scientist. As a cosmologist you rely “on a single result” to infer the changes in the universe, the most complicated system ever known. If you think people who make outrageous claims about a simple system such as Earth’s climate from insufficent sample are not scientists, how can you claim to be a scientist while you build a cosmos from even a smaller sample?

Thats the type of science that reporters produce. I would need to be luckly to get that past a reviewer.

I remember when it was all doom and gloom becasue we were heading into a new ice age.

There were some scientists who had mentioned the possibiliuy of an ice age, but there was never a broad scientific consensus about that.

Since there is corelation between CO2 and current warming does NOT make it casual. PERIOD.

It is causal, because CO_2 absorbs infrared radiation. The correlation just confirms the theory as pointed out by deconvoluter.

Reasons for doubt: You could have
1. CO2-> warming
OR
2. warming -> CO2
OR
3.
warming -> CO2 -> more warming
4. Coincidence
5. Uncertainty in the records

The most likely version is item 3. Your brief account leaves out about a hundred years of physics which provided the mechanism, made the predictions and motivated the observations (e.g for obtaining the graphs which you saw). You might try looking at

http://www.trumpington.co.uk/green (NOT from Green party)

You will find there a couple of essays devoted to the sort of question you ask and some alternative references.

I remeber when it was all doom and gloom becasue we were heading into a new ice age.

mmmm.

There lots of other examples.

Don’t tell me what people think. Tell me what they can prove! Since there is corelation between CO2 and current warming does NOT make it casual. PERIOD. The number of pirates in the world is also correlated with current warmming… In god we trust, but the rest of you show me the data. Oh and CO2 has been higher in the past without humans driving SUV’s

Scientist are influenced by popular ideas like everyone else. In a large nonlinear system it may be quite imposible to prove/disprove that we are the cause of warming. That is the question “Are we casuing gloabal warming?” could well be untestable. We know what some people here think about untestable hypothisis….

Facts are the world changes. We can change with it, or we can deem that we are more important than that and do everything we can to keep everthing constant..and probably get chaos

Oh… Once i was a climate whatever you want to call it. Still work a bit on the simulation codes too. We really just don’t know.

“I have determined that we will not be able to predict the weather untill we haved killed all the butterflys” –can’t remember

I agree that in the last few years we’ve seen more media exposure to the science of climate change. But I think this is too late. Politicians are only starting to act now, while you could see this problem coming in the 1980s.

” … without doing some serious research in the scientific literature to find out the truth. (Or even googling for things like ‘ice core CO2 calibration,’ like I just did.)”

QED (my earlier comment).

Similarly, proxies like tree-ring data overlap in time with direct historical temperature measurements (trees didn’t suddenly stop growing around 1850!), so these proxies are calibrated by matching them to the historical temperature record.

It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder about these things. What’s not reasonable is to assume, “Wow, I’ll be none of the scientists involved in studying this have ever thought about this question, so it must be a valid objection and their data must be crap!” without doing some serious research in the scientific literature to find out the truth. (Or even googling for things like “ice core CO2 calibration,” like I just did.)

Explanation: Both temp and C02 graphs have on thing in common: the use proxies like tree rings or ice cores to produce historical data and use direct measurements for more recent data. So maybe all the recent big changes in the temp and C02 graphs are just due to that the proxy data having bad resolution so it tends to average away high frequency variations. Or maybe its because the proxy data are crap. Why do we trust the proxy data again? Anyways the explanation I have given is the simplest one that explains the recent large variations in the C02 and temp records. Occam’s razor applies.

Due to limited historical records, they have not previously been recorded on the northeastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. This does not necessarily mean that they were absent, but rather demonstrates a lack of surveying. Currently, an abundance of mature pine trees as a result of many years of wildfire suppression and milder winters have combined to enable the expansion of mountain pine beetle into large tracts of pine forest. The mountain pine beetle has been able to survive winters farther north than previously seen.

Layman wondering.

IN what years were such temperatures conducive to bug infestations?

It’s hard to ignore these issues when you walk through such a forest. But you know, there are natural circumstances that have appeared in the past(global temperatures?), and the forest has been rejuvenated through them, by fire.

Some would revolt to nature taking such a stance but the fact is, “forests” are renewed this way.

I understand how Peter Woit feels now.

Mathematical models to computerized versions have sometimes taken on new perspective that we might not have known previously?