10 December 2009

The NYT is reluctantly and visibly skeptically reporting on the ‘skeptics’ in Copenhagen:

John Vidal, environment editor for The Guardian in London, demanded that a panel’s members explain why a variety of villages in India and Bangladesh were slowly being swallowed by the sea if, as the Swedish physicist and geologist Nils-Axel Morner had contended the day before, sea levels were not rising.

Mr. Morner, who has spent much time measuring sea levels in South Asia, said his most recent data pointed to plenty of erosion, but “zero rise in sea level.”

Then, as debates over global warming often do, the discussion dissolved into incomprehensible shouting.

Which is probably why the reporter ended his piece there. But unless I’m confused, isn’t Bangladesh essentially the delta of the continent’s largest rivers, the Ganges et al?

What is the normal thing for a delta to do as billions of tons of loose sediment are washed into it every moment of every day? You are correct if you said that it subsides...which may look to a newspaper reporter about the same as if the villages were slowly being swallowed by the sea.

What do you know about that? Someone finally noted how long this has been going on!

And how are we ever going to get anywhere when we cannot get the straight story, without spin, out of even the executive editor of “Science”?

Climate-change science is clear: The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide -- derived mostly from the human activities of fossil-fuel burning and deforestation -- stands at 389 parts per million (ppm). We know from studying ancient Antarctic ice cores that this concentration is higher than it has been for at least the past 650,000 years. Exhaustive measurements tell us that atmospheric carbon dioxide is rising by 2 ppm every year and that the global temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. Multiple lines of other evidence, including reliable thermometer readings since the 1880s, reveal a clear warming trend. The broader impacts of climate change range from rapidly melting glaciers and rising sea levels to shifts in species ranges. ...

Doubters insist that the earth is not warming.

Sounds pretty clear, huh? That high-pitched whining noise comes from his spin machine. He’d like to convince you that the millions of ‘doubters’ who do NOT actually insist that the earth is warming simply do not exist.

But we do. What we doubt is that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is the SOURCE of global warming.

Aside from the fact that this famous scientist is telling us about something it “looks like” will happen, which is what we call science-fiction when written by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, the fact is that he’s being just as selective as those he faults for being selective, while claiming HIS heart is pure!

This man now wishes to talk about the warmest decade at the same time he brushes off the cooling (and shortens its period conveniently) while simultaneously telling us that CO2 concentrations are the highest ever (or at least recently) and rising at 2 ppm or even more as China adds one new coal-fired power plant every week!

He doesn’t seem to think it of interest to explain why the cooling should happen, in that case? Nor does he seem to think it of interest to note that today’s temperatures are essentially the same as those of 1934, let alone how that could have happened

I suspect that number is now 9,999,999 as Dr Trenberth, formerly a dues-paying member of the East Anglia Club, was caught on the exposed e-mails writing:

Trenberth and others have spent a lot of time and effort explaining what he really meant, he was complaining about data inaccuracies, lack of information, etc, and here’s a typical explanation you can Google up:

Trenberth published similar comments in the journal article he cited. Wired’s Threat Level blog reported that Trenberth “says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it. That article — An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (.pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.” RealClimate.org similarly stated in a November 23 post that “[y]ou need to read his recent paper on quantifying the current changes in the Earth’s energy budget to realise why he is concerned about our inability currently to track small year-to-year variations in the radiative fluxes.” Indeed, the Trenberth article referred to what he called an “incomplete explanation” of short-term climate variations, and maintained that “global warming is unequivocally happening.”

Again they want to get back to the long-term trend and pretend that ‘doubters’ say it isn’t happening, or are falsely claiming that Dr Trenberth said it wasn’t happening.

This is the equivalent of the mother quail pretending to have the broken wing to make the coyote come after her rather than continue to hunt for her hidden chicks.

The issue is neither the long-term rise in CO2, or temperature...both have been going on for 12,000 years, at least.

The issue is that we know for a fact that industrial man did not begin these trends 12,000 years ago.

Nor did he cause any of the OTHER warming trends our Science editor fails to mention.

“Finally, it is worth setting the debate about the medieval warm period in context. The Team, by ingeniously getting the world to focus exclusively on the medieval warm period, diverted its attention from the fact, well established in the scientific literature, that most of the last 11,400 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, have been warmer—and often considerably warmer—than the present. Certainly the Bronze Age, the Roman era, and the medieval warm period were all warmer than the present. Also, each of the past four interglacial warm periods was up to 6 C° (11 F°) warmer than the present.”

How clear could it possibly be that Industrial Age man could not have caused any of these events? Unless you are willing to argue that Monckton is completely bonkers and is fudging his data as clearly as the disclosed emails—by the computer programmers, if not the scientists—reveal that ‘The Team’ of politicized scientists have been doing.

I would say that few rational people deny that the North American continent and Central Europe, et al, are now free of the mile-thick ice sheets which covered them 12,000 years ago. Things very obviously started warming at that time. And it’s pretty plain to see from the ice cores, et al, that carbon dioxide concentrations have increased since that time. In fact, they have during ALL of the previous interglacials, something your “Science” editor also failed to mention.

But look what happens when we get to today’s argument in Copenhagen? All of a sudden your editor, writing this Op-ed, wants to talk about the warmest decade—decade, for God’s sake!—“like(ly)” to be the warmest “on record” while pointing out that we have had “reliable thermometer records” only since the 1880s.

Nor do the AGWers (AGW standing for Anthropogenic Gelobal Warming) like to discuss the fact that while today’s temperatures are definitely warmer than 12,000 years ago, in between there have been some significant fluctuations both up and down, warm periods warmer than today and cold periods even colloquially known as “the Little Ice Age” when temperatures suddenly plummeted to the point where the major rivers of the civilized northern hemisphere, the Thames and the Hudson, froze over!

So wouldn’t one expect CO2 concentrations to also have fluctuated widely, up and down, in that case, to correspond with the temperature changes?

None of which could possibly have been caused by Industrial Age man prior to the 1880s, when accurate thermometers were perhaps coincidentally invented.

Anyhow, do them? Well, no, as a matter of fact. While temperatures cycle upward and downward over time, true enough, the same is not true of CO2 concentrations, which have only increased, to what our dear “Science” editor tells us is the highest level in 650,000 years.

But are temperatures at the highest level they have been in 650,000 years? It would appear not.

Um...what was the point of even bringing up that 650,000 years number, Mr Science Editor, if the glacial periods and the interglacial warming periods in between occur on a cycle of 12-20,000 years or so?

The ‘doubters’ doubt warming? No sir, the actual ‘doubters’ are the scientists who doubt cooling, even when they see it happening. If you are completely invested in the notion that warming is caused by increasing carbon dioxide, which is and has been steadily increasing (and was even before the anthropogenic component was added) then you simply cannot afford to entertain any notion of cooling, not ever. Cooling simply cannot happen if increasing carbon dioxide concentrations are the cause and all those concentrations have ever done is increase.

There are times I wish I had an expensive search engine. I’d like to know what the executive editors of “Science” reported in those late 1880s, with newly-reliable thermometers, when things got so cold, and again in 1975 when all those thousands of respected scientists warned we were headed into the next ice age and should be storing food because growing seasons were being curtailed by the cold and unprepared people would soon be starving.

You are to be forgiven if your mind flashes back on that great scene in “The Wizard of Oz” when Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal Henry Morgan pulling the levers and shouting that they are to pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain, he really isn’t important. Irrelevant.

The important point is that these were not actually selected emails; the whole damn thing was dumped, and the fact that these people thought they were writing privately is essential to the truth they contained. Some even cautioned others to be careful what they wrote, because others might someday be reading it.

What hurts so bad about the emails is that they were the unvarnished truth...the painting with “warts and all” they hadn’t ordered.

All of this has left me a little behind on Tiger Woods, so Media Notes catches me up:

For all the early handwringing about why the media were descending into the gutter and bothering the poor golfer, it's now clear that Tigergate has morphed from a sex-scandal story to a career-threatening one. I would say this happened, oh, sometime around when the mistress-count broke into double digits. Or maybe it was when we learned that the list allegedly included a Jamie and a Jaimee, or two porn stars. Now we have sponsors keeping their Tiger ads off the air, the wife moving out, the mother-in-law going to the hospital, and a general sense that the man's life is unraveling.

If Woods thinks he's going to ride this out without going before the cameras, his judgment is worse than I thought.

The debate also has taken a racial turn, with lots of critics pouncing on this WP column by Gene Robinson:

"What's with the whole Barbie thing?

"No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

"This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story -- and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn't variety but some kind of validation. . . .

"But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes -- some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an 'official' standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive."

Broad noses? Really? I’m not influenced much by skin color, obviously, but noses? A girl I was once trying to hit on complained that she had seen me picking my nose. Honey, I assured her, if I had had any choice I would never have picked this one.

My son, who is fairly brown, has expressed some concern about skin color and whether mine is better. I told him to look carefully at mine...blotchy pink, white and red and spots of brown, rough and irregular. His is a smooth and uniform brown. Are you kidding me, I asked him...who would pick MY skin when they could have yours?

I learned about gay people in somewhat the same way, back in the days when I had been told it was a lifestyle choice. The gay guy discussed how much trouble he had had all of his life, staying in the closet, then getting beaten up, fired or not even selected for some jobs, uncomfortably married while trying desperately to fit in, discrimination on both sides, etc. Are you kidding me? he wrote, that you would think this would ever be my CHOICE?

I read that and I understood for the first time about being gay...or black, white, or brown.

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, but I’ve noticed during a long life that there seem to be some universal standards which apply even across the racial spectrum. If I had to guess (and I do) I’d say that people go for “regularity” of face and form. But even that doesn’t work well...for instance, some women are considered beautiful who have unusually large eyes, although I don’t think I can recall any who were touted for having tiny ones. Mouths, though, can be either “generous” or “rosebud”. Dumbo’s mother thought his large ears were great but I don’t recall that anyone else did.

I haven’t tried to be too analytical about it, but I can sit at the bar on the street and watch the women walk by and note that some turn the heads of all of the men while others do not. Whether Eugene Robinson likes it or not, there do seem to be at least semi-official standards of beauty.

This works for men, too, of course...women hold to similar standards for male attractiveness. Women of all kinds seem to hold similar standards, for some reason. One of my favorite authors for dialogue is Robert B. Parker, and maybe I quoted him the other day, I forget, as his girlfriend was discussing with another girl about how she wouldn’t change Spenser even if she could.

Not even into Brad Pitt? he wanted to know. Well, she said, that would be different.

"Being a member of Congress rates as the least ethical and honest professions -- faring worse than car salesmen by 4 percent -- according to a new Gallup poll out Wednesday.

"In a poll ranking how Americans view the honesty and ethical standards of 21 professions, Congressmen were rated as having a 'low/very low' ethical standards by 55 percent of 1,017 adults across the nation. Only 9 percent said members of Congress have 'high/very high' standards, while 35 percent gave the lawmakers an 'average' rating.

"Car salesmen were the only other professionals to get a 'low/very low' rating by at least 50 percent of respondents, receiving 51 percent.

"Senators ranked third lowest in the poll, earning a 49 percent 'low/very low' ethical rating, beating out stockbrokers, 46 percent, and HMO managers at 43 percent."

Christopher Hitchens, my favorite atheist with the perfect name, on Christmas:

I never cease to be amazed by how little the Bible-believing Protestants, who constitute most of the soldiery in the Christmas wars, know about their own tradition. Under the rule of the Puritan Revolution in the England of Oliver Cromwell (ancestor in many ways of the Pilgrim Fathers) the celebration of Christmas was banned outright. This was for three reasons: the December fiesta was actually the honoring of Paganism in disguise, and a descendant of the old rites of the Winter Solstice. Then, it was also a manifestation of Popery and superstition (the "Christ-Mass"). Finally, it was an excuse for the riff-raff to get drunk and over-indulge in general. Only the last part seems to have truly survived into our present day.

And the Jews and Moslems and atheists no doubt can call you Christopher rather than Happyholidayopher a lot easier, too.

Hitchens is the kind of atheist who likes to think of himself as broad-minded, except he doesn’t like others, particularly the president, to be broad-minded in their own fashion.

The United States is not, of course, the world’s first secular Republic, nor did it ever pretend to be. Nor does the Constitution say anything much about religion, except that it could not be used as any kind of test in order to hold office, and that the new federal government had no power to make any laws, pro or con, about any establishment of religion. Not for; also, not against. Or even sideways.

Atheists spin mightily to try to separate church and state when such was never actually intended, people still swear oaths on the Bible unless they actively protest, and the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Republic are openly religious. And always have been.

The ironically humorous part about all of this is that America’s founding fathers intended religious belief to be wholly voluntary, while today’s atheists want the voluntary part stifled. Atheists who are willing to hear people say “Merry Christmas” think they are being wonderfully permissive.

And what could possibly be funnier than the fact that the name of one of the world’s leading atheist voices begins with Christ?

It makes you wonder where journalists come from these days, or how hard put they are to write something regularly, but the two subjects aren’t related except incidentally.

You have to wonder where these people went to school? Reincarnation and astrology are among the oldest of the world’s beliefs, “New Age” only in the sense that woefully ignorant Americans think that anything they didn’t know before must somehow be New.

This is interesting...Kim Strassel’s take on the new EPA role on environmental science:

Hurrah! It's the administration's problem! No one can say Washington isn't doing something; the EPA has it under control. The agency's move gives Congress a further excuse not to act.

"The Obama administration now owns this political hot potato," says one industry source. "If I'm [Nebraska Senator] Ben Nelson or [North Dakota Senator] Kent Conrad, why would I ever want to take it back?"

All the more so, in Congress's view, because the EPA "command and control" threat may yet prove hollow. Now that the endangerment finding has become reality, the litigation is also about to become real. Green groups pioneered the art of environmental lawsuits. It turns out the business community took careful notes.

Industry groups are gearing up for a legal onslaught; and don't underestimate their prospects. The leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in England alone are a gold mine for those who want to challenge the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming.

But the EPA's legal vulnerabilities go beyond that. The agency derives its authority to regulate pollutants from the Clean Air Act. To use that law to regulate greenhouse gases, the EPA has to prove those gases are harmful to human health (thus, the endangerment finding). Put another way, it must provide "science" showing that a slightly warmer earth will cause Americans injury or death. Given that most climate scientists admit that a warmer earth could provide "net benefits" to the West, this is a tall order.

I’ve always felt that to be the case, but this is the first time I’ve read anyone say that “most climate scientists admit” warmer is better. I feel vindicated, but I’d like a link and a quote.

I won’t go into this in detail, but it’s well worth reading: Wait until you learn what they do with the ‘raw’ data in the ‘homogenizing’ process!

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic believes that some of the data analysis and modeling problems now being found in the AGW thesis are due to confirmation bias in which researchers’ observations are anchored on what had previously been reported. She looks at the devastating exposition on Watts Up With That? and asks “Climategate: Was the Data Faked?” But she’s not willing to concede the existence of a conspiracy, which she believes would have required too many conspirators. Instead, she posits the existence of an unconscious bias and quotes Richard Feynman on how error crept in Millikan’s electron experiment to illustrate her point:

Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.

Confirmation bias “is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.”

I liked it because that was one of the physics experiments we had to duplicate in physics lab as a student: Millikan’s. And while we all knew what the correct answer was, by that time, we also understood that we were not expected to duplicate it because we were, after all, only beginning students.

As you might guess, none of us was going to turn in a perfect duplication of the actual number even if we did our work so well that we managed to achieve it.

This article continues with a discussion of the Challenger disaster, in the same vein:

Nature cannot be fooled, but man is capable of a great deal of self deception and politicians especially so. One commenter on Megan McArdle’s site unwittingly reiterated Feynman’s thesis. He argued that once the AGW money train began the danger of confirmation bias would rise almost unchecked. Like NASA’s Challenger a launch schedule for carbon amelioration had been publicly announced by the politicians, the activists and the UN. ...

Having created such a department, they must fill it with faculty that will carry out their mission statement. The department will hire professors who already believe in AGW and conduct research based on that premise. Those professors will hire students that will conduct their research without much fuss about AGW. And honestly, if you know anything about my generation, we will do or say whatever it is we think we’re supposed to do or say. There is no conspiracy, just a slightly cozy, unthinking myopia. Don’t rock the boat.

The former editor of the New Scientist, Nigel Calder, said it best – if you want funding to study the feeding habits of squirrels, you won’t get it. If you wants to study the effects of climate change on the feeding habits of squirrels, you will. And so in these subtle ways, there is a gravitational pull towards the AGW monolith. ...

For the field as a whole, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s the unfortunate consequence of having a field totally dominated by politically-motivated, strings-attached money. In the case of the CRU email group, well, the emails speak for themselves. Call it whatever you want.

There’s also one other important point: scientists hate to be shown to be wrong just as much as the rest of us do. And I’ll bet that more than just a few of them were embarrassed to let it be known that they had either lost or discarded the raw data upon which their careers rested.

And some simply behaved unscientifically, my favorite being the ones who depended upon tree-ring data to prove their point right up until the tree-ring data no longer supported their argument, and in fact actually contradicted it, at which point they simply disregarded tree-rings as evidence.

If nothing else they needed to be able to explain WHY such a change occurred and WHAT it meant, because otherwise your second set of tree-ring data might have been the best set and it was the first set which were flawed. Any real scientist at this point would be beside himself trying to figure out what was actually happening and why, but they were not.

Today, Al Gore proves to be economical with the truth in his interview with Slate:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus. But the noise machine built by the climate deniers often seizes on what they can blow out of proportion, so they’ve thought this is a bigger deal than it is.

Unless Gore is just speaking clumsily, and simply means the most recent email he read was ten-years-old, he’s lying, misinformed, or both. The last email actually dates to Nov. 12 2009. The emails as a whole outline a campaign of disinformation and distraction that has lasted for 13 years. Who is really in denial here? ...

If Al Gore really thinks that the sound and fury from people worldwide who have actually, unlike him, read the emails is insignificant, then he has once again proven that he possesses the world’s biggest political tin ear.

How Gore could admit to not having read any of the emails less than 10 years old but yet still somehow know what they did and didn’t say is completely ridiculous. He doesn’t have a tin ear because he isn’t even listening at all.

And, finally, the difference between science and journalism that journalists do not understand:

· Surging greenhouse gas emissions: A picture is shown of CO2 and CH4 increasing (fig. 2) since 1980. But showing these gases are increasing in not proof that AGW is valid. AGW theory states that increasing gases cause dangerous warming. Therefore, what is needed, and what is lacking, is a demonstration that the causal link between the two — warming and increased gases — has been proven.

· Recent global temperatures demonstrate human-induced warming: They claim that the small amount of observed warming before the last decade is “consistent” with AGW. This is true. But there are many other theories of climate change; AGW is just one of them. The observed changes in temperature are consistent with many theories, not only AGW. And what of the last ten years of no change, or even cooling? It is dismissed as a “short-term fluctuation,” which is “usual.” The problem is that this “fluctuation” was not predicted by AGW models; this weakens our belief that AGW is correct.

· Acceleration of melting of ice sheets, glaciers and ice caps: Even if this were true — and it is not so in recent years — it is not evidence that AGW is true. It is only validation that ice melts when it gets hot. Remember, we are after proof that the AGW theory is true. An observation of what happens when it is hot outside is not acceptable proof. We want to know what caused the air to get hot, not what caused ice to melt once it was hot.

· Rapid Arctic sea ice decline: This merely repeats the previous point, and is also not valid evidence for AGW, particularly in light of that decadal cooling “fluctuation” we are experiencing.

· Current sea level rise underestimated: When that ice melted, the water went into the sea (where else?), and so this point is again not evidence of AGW.

· Sea level predictions revised: They must have had room left over for them to repeat the same point a fourth time. There is no other explanation for why they insert this non sequitur once more. Let us repeat: observations of what happens to something when the air is hot are not evidence that mankind causes global warming.

· Delay in action risks irreversible damage: This is the most common — and most irresponsible — method of argument. It says bad things will happen if AGW is true. But it is logically impossible that what might happen could be proof for AGW. This is a scare tactic, a logical fallacy so blatant that we can only hope the “Diagnosis” authors blushed when they wrote it.

· The turning point must come soon: Alas, this last point assures us that they did not blush, but were willing to commit the same fallacy again, and with gusto. Threats of doom are simply not proof of anything except excitability in their authors. ...

Quite simply, in any scientific study it is not sufficient to observe two things happening and then relate them in some fashion without being able to demonstrate a rigorous explanation for their relationship.

If you observe an empty bench and, after watching for a while note more and more people arrive at the empty bench, and then a bus appears, did the people cause the bus to arrive or did the bus cause the people to gather. What would be the explanation if no bus arrived? Or if a bus arrived but there were no people waiting? Or if many of the people had been accompanied by their pet dogs, who thereafter dispersed back to their homes or upon other doggy errands?

A journalist may legitimately draw any number of conclusions or beliefs or expectations, but a legitimate scientist cannot, simply because there isn’t enough information contained within those things to become a factual scientific explanation.

Where we stand in the CO2-vs-global warming debate is the fact that we’ve seen an increase in CO2 which seems to correlate fairly well with an increase in global temperatures, and perhaps vice versa.

But, as this author points out, similarities do not constitute proof of anything. Furthermore, sometime we see CO2 increasing rapidly, like at the present time, while temperatures are even slightly declining. Honest scientists become highly skeptical of conclusions drawn, after seeing this, but it seems that some of our AGW proponents have found it more convenient to “adjust” or “homogenize” the data than to reconsider their conclusions.

The more you read of the argument regarding “raw” data (much of which seems to be, unaccountably, missing, especially after being sought by FOIA requests) and the “adjustments’ made to it, the more concerned you will be.

And the “proxy data” argument is even more illustrative, when it turns out that it is used when it gives the “warming” answer but discarded when it says “cooling” but without any scientific justification for doing so.

This was also the cute move made in the “peer review” sleight-of-hand. First you argue that papers don’t count unless they are peer-reviewed. Then you lean on friendly editors (or even get them fired if that doesn’t work, which actually happened) to avoid letting them be published in peer-reviewed publications. If they get published you decide to remove that publication from the ‘approved’ list of peer-review journals. If this is going to happen, anyhow, then you CHANGE THE RULES for peer-review. All of these things are discussed, over the years, in the emails.

But even if these criticisms were refuted, the subsequent “hockey sticks” and other pictures of historical changes in temperatures are not direct proof for AGW’s validity. The “Diagnosis” authors, it is obvious, do not understand this. They feel that because it might have been colder in the past, and warmer now, that this proves AGW. It simply does not.

Those observations are consistent with many theories of climate change, AGW being just one of them. What would be proof, and what is missing from the “Diagnosis,” is evidence that the AGW models have skillfully predicted future temperatures.

They have not done so.

In fact, to disguise the AGW models’ poor performance, they employ statistical slight of hand: every picture of temperature leaves out the last few years of cooling. This is because AGW models said it would grow hot, but we actually cooled.

The models, in other words, were wrong.

Which is the difference between science, journalism, the Super Bowl championship, Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes and just about everything else. You can lose 30% of the time and still win the Super Bowl or the World Series and we’ve demonstrated all too well recently what it takes to win even formerly-prestigious prizes, but when it comes to actual science then you have to be right and your models have to work EVERY TIME in order to become considered fact. Even most of the time won’t be sufficient.

Yet what do we see today? Far too many people telling us that “the science is settled” when their models and their predictions aren’t working even much of the time.