2005-08-02

Pielke Senior has a blog

RP senior has a blog. Its quite interesting, and its about climate. Its http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/blog/ if you want to look.

In my normal carping way I'm going to pick up various points with which I diagree. So don't treat this as a review of the blog overall (and in fact it would be rather presumptuous of me to "review" his blog overall, given his status (err, and mine...)).

Browsing, Pielke and Christy Comment on Hansen et al. Science paper entitled “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.” caught my eye. In it, they complain that Science won't publish their comment. Well, tough, I say: Science doesn't publish a lot of things. And when you get reviews back like:

The exchange is not worthy of publication. In fact, I do not understand why P&C even wrote their piece in the first place. They continually destroy whatever point they had in mind by noting Hansen ‘did it right’... None of the participants in this pathetic exchange seem to have the slightest clue about the large decadal noise that exists in the oceans and some ocean models.


then you're not going to get published. Thats ferocious stuff (there's another review, which is also highly critical, though more measured).

I find this interesting because it has shades of other controversies: Christy Spencer [oops, wrong one: thanks to TPa: here] whining that he wasn't asked to review Fu; and another one that I can't remember now. That particular post looks like a severe error of judgement to me.

Coming back to the MSU (I do seem to be getting a bit obsessed by it... sorry) elsewhere, RP complains about people saying that the surface and upper-air records of temperature change can now, in fact, be reconciled which rather suggests that he should be asking Christy about the vn5.2 dataset... Yet again elsewhere he notes that Recently, Christy et al. (2003) demonstrated a strong correspondence between their version of the MSU time series and several other independent measures of tropospheric temperature trends, and they conclude that the Mears et al. (2003) trend is likely too strong.. Which might have been fair enough when he wrote it, but blogging about it now, when even S+C admit that their trend is now the same as Mears, is a bit odd. It also points out that there will be a lot of rowing back to be done when S+C finally publish. There's also the interesting point (and I've said this on sci.env but not here): given that S+C *do* assert a good correspondence between vn5.1 and sondes, what are they going to do about the 50% larger trends in vn5.2? If it *still* matches the sondes, then the sondes are a poor test. If it doesn't... are they going to say their data is wrong? Or are they suddenly going to discover that the sondes aren't so good after all? Interesting...

BTW, speaking of Christy, the rumour is: August 11th. Just checking to see if you read through to the end...

9 comments:

James Annan said...

I was amused by this post where he blatantly cherry-picks one aspect of model output to "prove" that the models cannot predict climate skillfully.

Of course, the aspect he cherry-picked was...surprise...that old sceptic favourite, the tropospheric temperature trend :-)

BTW, despite your obsession with S+C, guess whose blog comes up first in a google search? Just shows how clueless these search engines are, huh?

Anonymous said...

William, did you happen to spot Christy's comment (#2) in http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/blog/?p=13#comments. He seems to be saying that things will be clarified by the RSS team, not by him and S, although perhaps he means that the RSS team's paper will explain the new S+C numbers (which still seems a little odd given the apparent momentousness, S+C credibility-wise, of the forthcoming revision). Anyway, it's interesting that Christy just clammed up after making that one brief comment.

Small World Dept.: I had a look at the RSS site since I know very little about them and noticed that I know one of the team members, who is another local (San Francisco Bay Area) Sierra Club activist. Probably another rotten Greenie to boot. :)

Anonymous said...

Saw a post elsewhere that four satellite data papers are soon to appear in Science Express. Is this related to your August 11 date?

Anonymous said...

"Christy whining that he wasn't asked to review Fu"

Are you sure about this? Spencer did whine in this post at TCS, but has Christy done so?
http://www.techcentralstation.com/050504H.html

William M. Connolley said...

James: ha. Just cos I usually write S+C I sez.

Steve - no I hadn't seen Christys comment. Interesting. Still you can hardly complain about him clamming up when the alternative is talking to MB! What he says about an RSS paper fits what I've been told. 4 papers?!? They are breeding...

Thomas - thanks. I've corrected it. Thats what happens when I write at midnight.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Even small furry carnivores must go on holiday sometime...

Or at least that's what I infer from the continued presence of that stream of spam. When you get back, I'd appreciate any insight you might have into the apparent meltdown of RP Sr.

William M. Connolley said...

I'm back, spam is gone, hurrah.

You mean his stuff about MSU and not being consulted? All that stuff about the 2003 report... which is going to be out of date before its published. If it ever is.

Clearly I'm going to have to read the various Science Express papers.

Anonymous said...

In particular I mean his precipitous resignation as chair of one of the CCSP committees in the face of an apparent revolt by the members: http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/?p=30. It sounds as if a majority of the committee mught not have agreed that RP Sr.'s draft was quite so close to consensus. I suspect this may have had more to do with the resignation than the media comments.