Isotherm

Anyone know why StudentofClimatology doesn't post here anymore?

17 90F days here. Tomorrow would make a heat wave and 18. Now at the seasonal normal for this area re 90s.

Climate is a field with many unanswered questions, and thus most topics are fairly debatable. I think part of the issue could be seeing things as black/white, right/wrong, rather than a difference in opinion. I've seen many posters fall victim to this way of thinking. Of course there are some aspects which are hard facts, but for example: one person could present a peer-reviewed study on a particular subject, but then I can respond with a peer-reviewed paper asserting something contrary to the one you posted (like ECS for instance). If someone holds an opinion that is different from your own, that doesn't necessarily make them wrong/liar. When someone cannot substantiate their claims with peer reviewed evidence, or at the very least, valid scientific reasoning, then it's a different story. But my interpretation of the entire conversation is that it boils down to differences of opinion regarding the utility of a dataset.

The quality of discussion in this forum has decreased dramatically recently, not because of SOC, but due to certain individuals who apparently have something personally against SOC, and thus are trying desperately to discredit him / run him off the board. Meanwhile, I've seen nothing from him that necessitates a banning (however, a ban could be argued for those responsible for the verbal attacks). As I said before, it's unprofessional, inappropriate, and speaks volumes of the characters' of the people engaging in this behavior. I'm not sure why a discussion on climate needs to devolve into something nasty (actually I do: it's because people cannot separate their emotional instinctive response from their more emotionally detached intellectual response, and the way to accomplish this is through simple discipline). I hope this forum improves in the future, as climate is an important subject that deserves attention. But productive discourse cannot occur if there are folks constantly attempting to derail the threads with personal attacks.

Is this a Supreme Court trial? Even if he was wrong, which is your opinion, he has no obligation to publicly admit it.

Strongly disagree. It is your opinion that his argument is correct, and besides, you've completely missed the point. Who is correct or incorrect is irrelevant. We can have civil, scientific disagreements without attacking posters' credibility, which skier has done to SOC in this thread (and SOC, LEK, and myself in the solar thread). He's done this on numerous occasions, and it appears you're condoning this both unprofessional and inappropriate behavior. Anyone who dissents from his opinion(s) are treated as intellectually inferior. It is very unfortunate because solid, good posters will be driven away from the climate forum, and soon, it will become an echo chamber in which only a handful of people possessing the same views remain.

If you follow the progression of the conversation, I think it's unfair to consider SOC as being problematic here, or the primary instigator of this discussion. As a reader, it's become apparent that skierinvermont continues to broach the same topic over and over again, seemingly in attempt to discredit SOC's credibility (as he directly states above - "you have no credibility"). I have seen it on previous occasions (attacking SOC's credibility). In the solar thread, his most recent post is now attacking the credibility of SOC, LEK, and myself. The behavior is both unprofessional and inappropriate. It's a major deterrent to new contributors to the forum as well. In all bluntness, the attacks on other posters' credibility decreases the credibility of the accusing party. The reasons for which he does this are beyond the scope of this discussion, and irrelevant to entertain at this point. However, the bottom line is that the accusatory posting consistently occurs, and is unproductive to civil, intellectual discourse.

Up to 13 here. Surpassed last summer's 11, and should attain 2013's 16 I think.

Agree. You can't verify the satellite datasets w/ datasets that measure something completely different. Saying that the satellites are outliers is presupposing that the surface datasets provide a more accurate, representative measure of global temperatures. One could make the argument that the satellites provide a more representative measure. The bottom line is that in the longer term, the datasets are very similar. Some seem to be expecting the satellites to consistently be in lock-step with the surface, which makes no meteorological sense when one considers the different domains being measured. It also appears that some are quick to point out the flaws in the satellite measurements, while never broaching the subject of sfc dataset flaws, due to the underlying biases present. Global temperature measurement is not an exact science, and we need to accept that limitations exist with both techniques.

Same here. 8 90F+ days (highest 93.8F), and 4 89F days. About as normal a summer as you can get so far. -0.1 temp departure June, and +0.2 for July through today.

I think each individual scientific paper needs to be assessed on its merits, in and of itself. I'm not a believer that one can broad-brush a particular journal as low-quality and consequently conclude that articles published in "low-quality journals" are also of low-quality. This was my disagreement in the E&E discussion. A journal's flaws is not necessarily relevant to the science published in a particular paper. There are drawbacks to every journal ranking measure that I've seen. A possible superior measure to the impact factor could be utilizing the h-index, but only in reference to an individual scientist, not to rank journals. However, even that, could be contaminated by politics. An excellent, objective measure of assessing the quality of an individual scientist's work doesn't really exist in my view.

Csnavy - appreciate the response. This seems to be exactly what I was referring to. I have a couple questions pertaining to this, but I'm going to look into it a bit more first.

I have a couple of thoughts in response to your posts. I disagree with the usage of impact factor rating as a means to assess the value of a scientist's work. I've linked an article here in which Bruce Alberts (editor in chief of Science) discusses the problems with impact factors, and the development of DORA. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/787.full?rss=1#pageid-content "To correct distortions in the evaluation of scientific research, DORA aims to stop the use of the "journal impact factor" in judging an individual scientist's work." "These recommendations have thus far been endorsed by more than 150 leading scientists and 75 scientific organizations, including the American Association" In addition to several issues, it seems the impact factors may retard the progression of science. "Any evaluation system in which the mere number of a researcher's publications increases his or her score creates a strong disincentive to pursue risky and potentially groundbreaking work, because it takes years to create a new approach in a new experimental context, during which no publications should be expected. Such metrics further block innovation because they encourage scientists to work in areas of science that are already highly populated, as it is only in these fields that large numbers of scientists can be expected to reference one's work, no matter how outstanding" So I do not agree with discarding or devaluing studies based upon low impact factor ratings.

I asked you this a couple weeks ago in the global temp thread, pertaining to your same statement above. Wondering what your thoughts are.

Those two critiques that you linked are from blogs/websites, and appear to be written by people with questionable/unknown qualifications on the subject (especially when I see the phrase "denialist troll" written in association with this paper). According to the OJA & CC, papers are normally peer reviewed within 4 weeks. What led you to think the Harde paper is not peer reviewed?

And one last point regarding "politically motivated journals." Let's say you happen to correct with that accusation -- even if that were the case, it's far from the only journal guilty of imperfect objectivity or bias. It's difficult to find any source that could be considered to possess perfect objectivity.

Since responses to my list thus far were only negative and in reference to EE's credibility, I was under the impression that no one had any interest/intention in actually examining the science of the papers. Given you're claiming that is not the case, I will repost the links here. I've eliminated the paper which was not accepted from COP, and replaced it with another one. It's difficult for me to believe that you've concluded the papers are of low quality this quickly, but here they are: And additionally, I've already demonstrated that there are more low ECS studies in existence than most folks thought. ECS 1.35C: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.3706 ECS 1.1C: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3b7otVla9qgJ:www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us ECS 1.5C: http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.7554 ECS 0.6C: http://www.seipub.org/des/paperInfo.aspx?ID=17162 ECS 0.6C: http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ACC/papers/846

No. Rather than debate / engage the science presented in the papers, you / others immediately rushed to attack the credibility of a journal which hosted one of the studies I posted. It's apparent that many here are not willing to even entertain scientific papers that deviate from their current mindset. That mindset is further evidenced in your reply above: you assume that low sensitivity papers are of low quality without having thoroughly examined the studies. It's pointless to post studies if no one intends to actually critique/address them for the science.

They are all peer-reviewed.

The question becomes, however: is the paleoclimate data sufficiently reliable/accurate as it pertains to inferring climate sensitivity, especially given the numerous uncertainties regarding cloud feedback, dust loading, and other mechanisms? I think the observation based studies tend to be more representative of how the climate system is behaving/responding in the presence of various forcings. There are obviously limitations with both types of studies, but I think there's more with usage of paleoclimate data as it pertains to inferring climate sensitivity.

Yes, there are numerous studies with low TCR's, but I also have (estimating) at least 25+ papers concluding ECS values of 1.5C or lower. Again, not saying that's necessarily what I believe, but there definitely seems to be enough disagreement for the door to be left open < 1.5C. There are an even greater amount of recent studies concluding 1.5C-2.0C ECS. Maybe I will create a new thread pertaining to this topic.

The bolded portion is much more in dispute. There are countless peer-reviewed studies I've come across that assert the net feedback to be weakly positive, around zero, or some even on the negative side. In fact, I've seen quite a few studies with projected ECS levels under 1.1C due to the possibility of incorrectly assigning positive feedback where it could be negative, and thus arriving at ECS values lower than the zero-feedback response (doubling of Co2 1.1C). Given the fact that plentiful peer reviewed research exists on the lower-end of the ECS scale, I don't think we should make any assumptions at this point. I think the IPCC ECS range of 1.5-4.5C should be changed to 0.5-4.5C (and at least 1.0-4.5c) to more objectively account for the full-range of peer reviewed studies. One of my primary concerns has been the potential exaggeration/over-assignment of positive feedbacks by modelling, and assumption of no negative feedbacks when there may very well be some. I'm not asserting that we'll be looking at under 1.1c of warming, but I am saying that there are countless peer reviewed papers doubting the notion of significant or even moderately positive feedbacks beyond the 1.1C/per doubling warming.

Just for future reference, how would you define "denier". I see a lot of labels thrown around in this forum quite a bit, and it seems that the labels given are simply a deviation/disagreement from that poster's point of view (i.e., anything less extreme than one's view is a denier, and anything more extreme than one's view is an alarmist). In other words, like my previous post, there's no objectivity involved in defining these labels, it's just a matter of the person's impression of the validity of their own opinion.

"We talk the truth"... Question: how would one go about defining objective truth when there isn't a known solution to the question(s)? Would we define truth as taking the mean ECS/TCR values across the spectrum of scientific literature? Would you define truth as the range of possibilities postulated by the IPCC? Or would you only define truth as your own opinion and nothing else? When there's such a variance in opinions on a particular topic (specifically, one that isn't settled), it seems inappropriate to apply the word "truth" to a subject which the specifics are still being debated heavily. For some subjects, there can be truth, as an answer is known. For this topic, I think probabilities are more applicable, I.e. "this is more likely to occur than that," etc. +3c temp increase would be more likely than a +7c temp increase in the next 100 years. You cannot claim to be talking the "truth" unless you possess some incredible foreknowledge that your opinion is the correct one.

Here's my guesses for the summer: First 90F NYC: 5/27 EWR: 5/26 Seasonal Totals: NYC: 13 EWR: 19 LGA: 14 NBW: 19 TTN: 16 PHL: 22 IMBY: 13 Going for another low impact 90F year. Last year I had 11 days IMBY. My guess is I'll end up fairly similar or slightly more, but still below the average which is 16-18 or so.