Book Tour
Well known, but who could resist
Excerpts
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Hmm. You really need to read the book, since I discuss this in some detail. That claim is been refuted in a number of actual studies in the peer-reviewed literature, by folks like Von Storch, Huybers, Wahl & Ammann, etc. McIntyre engaged in some rather dubious cherry-picking to falsely make this claim. Among other things, he sorted through thousands of random series to eventually find some that had the shape he was looking for. There is a good discussion at the site "DeepClimate", search on "mcintyre": http://deepclimate.org/?s=McIntyre
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James Hansen is widely quoted as saying that climate-sensitivity is "nailed" at 3C by paleoclimate. What are your views on this?
PS, loved the book.
All the best.
What can be done to re-civilize the debate on climate change policy?
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My question concerns the 'loading the climate dice' studies that are starting to pop up in the literature. What are your thoughts on the validity of such studies? In my view, it's either the methodology is uniformly applicable, skillful, and revelatory, or the methodology is flawed.
For example, Stefan Rahmstorf's study showing the 'loading of the climate dice' when it comes to attribution of the Moscow heat wave (y'all discuss this at RC as well) ... What if his same methodology (or others like it) were to be applied to the extreme cold gripping Eastern Europe / Balkans this winter?
Now, the extreme cold during parts of the winter in Europe for the past few years is very interesting. I would have guessed that there was no particular connection to climate change. However, a number of recent peer-reviewed articles have argued that there may indeed be a connection: the loss of Arctic Sea Ice in the summer and the impact that has one the transfer of heat form the Arctic ocean into the overlying atmosphere in fall and winter, may be perturbing the jet stream in such a way that you get more frequent wiggles favoring northerly (arctic) air flow over parts of Europe during winter. But the jury is still out on this. That's what makes the science so interesting. There are real uncertainties & controversies, and they have implications. Were that the discourse was over these issues, rather than the false debate we're still having in the public discourse about whether or not climate change is even real :(
Given that the term "denier" has obvious holocaust denial connotations, do you think that your use of that word is:
1. unacceptable for a scientist to use
2. one that could incite certain elements to violence against people who question the concensus
Or do you consider it a reasonable term?
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The other day I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures. The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. Rhis is precisely the phenomenon that Steve Mcintyre has been talking on about.
Have you attempted to process random data with your statistical procedures in order to verify that they don't make hockey stick shapes simply as a result of an incorrect methodology?