FloridaJohn

The point of this topic, however, is that neither of those things actually happened. One guy had a problem with some office politics, and wrote on his personal blog his dissatisfaction. The climate change deniers took that post and created a completely inaccurate story that was not based on the guy's original problem. He even later clarified that those stories were inaccurate.

I guess you got your answer!

Here is Dr. Muller's reasoning behind his change of mind from being skeptical to joining the scientific consensus: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic by RICHARD A. MULLER "CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

For comparison, we can see here that Lamar Smith makes $174,000 per year.

Here's an interesting article that talks about the money climate scientists make and how they get that money. If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong "So, are there big bucks to be had in climate science? Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000. " "If they really wanted to make money at Penn State, they'd be coaching football or basketball. If they wanted to make money doing the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform all the time, of course, they should go to Wall Street. "

Definition of denier : one who denies <deniers of the truth> Simple Definition of deny : to say that something is not true : to refuse to accept or admit (something) I don't see anything about the holocaust in there. Please do not make connections where none exist.

Here's a summary of some of the research:http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=57 That link summarizes eight different peer-reviewed, published papers that specifically assign the human contribution as a percentage. Notice that many of the studies show the natural contribution to be a cooling effect. That means for the earth to warm, the human contribution has to be greater than 100%.

It's cheaper to prevent the sea level rise than to try and adapt to it.

James Hansen was misquoted in that article. The author admitted that he misunderstood what Hansen was saying, and reported it differently than what occured.

90% of the public has no idea who James Hansen is. I would be interested in what predictions you are aware of that he made that haven't come true. I find that stuff very interesting.

OK. That sounds like a good plan. What method do you suggest for assessing a paper on it's merits?

I wasn't using the Journal Impact Factor to judge any particular scientist's work, I was using it as intended as laid out in your link: "The impact factor, a number calculated annually for each scientific journal based on the average number of times its articles have been referenced in other articles, was never intended to be used to evaluate individual scientists, but rather as a measure of journal quality." But if you don't like using Impact Factor, I am open to other methods. Since we know that there are "fake" journals out in the wild with little to no peer review of articles, and mainly serve to create confusion on politically sensitive topics, there has to be a way to separate the good journals from the bad. What do you suggest?

This one seems like a legitimate paper. The journal has an Impact Factor around 6.9 or so (depending on year), and it appears on Google Scholar showing 21 cites to this paper. An ECS of 1.5 is within the range from the last IPCC report, so this is considered a "mainstream" position. There are probably other papers that show this result, too. I will note that this is also the highest ECS on your list. So of the seven papers you listed, you have one hit. You can see that there is not much support in the scientific community for ECS values of less than 1.5.

Well, I'm afraid that's about the only place you are going to find critiques these days. What were you expecting, stone tablets? I'm not sure what qualifications you are looking for, but here's a short bio of the guy who wrote the Skeptical Science critique. He's seems well qualified to me: "Dana Nuccitelli is an environmental scientist at a private environmental consulting firm in the Sacramento, California area. He has a Bachelor's Degree in astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master's Degree in physics from the University of California at Davis. Dana has been researching climate science, economics, and solutions since 2006, and has contributed to Skeptical Science since September, 2010. He also blogs at The Guardian, and is the author of Climatology versus Pseudoscience. He has published climate-related papers on various subjects, from the build-up of heat in the Earth's climate system to the expert consensus on human-caused global warming." Here's another critique of Lindzen and Choi 2011 that mentions a failed peer-review of the paper at another publication. Unfortunately the link to the peer review notes is dead, but this blog post (I know, sorry) does summarize what was in it. A couple reasons. First, Google Scholar has not indexed this paper. That may not mean anything, but when I searched for the authors name, the exact title of the paper, and the authors name and title of the paper, nothing came up. If other scientists were referencing that paper, it would be coming right up. Second, I am unable to find an Impact Factor rating for this journal. I checked several different sources for that, and none of them even listed the journal. This leads me to believe this is a fringe journal, so it's quality is suspect. Like I said earlier, it isn't hard to make a website look like a legitimate journal, so for me, I require some way to corroborate the legitimacy of the journal before I can take it seriously. That's why I'm skepical of the paper. You may have different standards than me, but I'm not going to put much stock into a paper no one has apparently heard of.

Here's a critique of this paper. "Ultimately the main flaws in LC11 are the same as those in LC09 - Lindzen and Choi simply did not address most of the problems in their paper identified by subsequent research, and what few issues they did address, they failed to explain why their results differ from those who attempted to reproduce their methodology."

It doesn't appear that this paper was ever actually peer reviewed, but I did find this criticism of the paper. For those that don't feel like clicking the link, the takeaway is this: "Harde has calculated only the atmospheric effects, and has ignored feedbacks completely." Plus, he only used a two-layer model for his calculations.

Another Energy & Environment paper. I'm not sure why it also appears in an unknown journal called "Development in Earth Science." Usually journals don't let papers get published in more than one journal because it dillutes their "brand" and makes it diffcult for people to find or reference.

Correct, it is not the only one. But some do a better job at objectivity than others. I prefer to stick with the ones who have proven over time that they are trying to be objective. That's why I look at the reputation of the journal first, if I'm not already familiar with it. If it appears to be objective an properly peer-reviewed, then I take the time to read the paper and try to understand it. There is a lot of junk out there that is purposely made to look like it is "real science," when, in fact, it is a product created to put forth a certain point of view. With how easy it is to make something "look" legitimate on the internet, it really pays to make sure you're not being duped.

I had only determined the first two were low quality, because those were the only ones I had looked at so far. Thanks for reposting the list, I will continue to go through them.

No, I assumed that the papers you posted were low quality because I actually took the time to look at them, and found them to be low quality. I was slowly working my way through your list because I am interested in reading how the low sensitivity was determined. But I am not going to waste my time reading papers in politically-motivated "journals," or papers that did not pass peer-review for whatever reason. Perhaps some of those papers you posted were solid science in real peer-reviewed journals. But since you have your take-my-ball-and-go-home attitude, instead of engaging in a constructive discussion of the topic, I will never know. It was you who intially asserted that there were dozens of papers that supported your position of low ECS, so it is up to you to prove your case. You have clearly not done that.

I see Isotherm has gone back and deleted all his posts regarding low ECS numbers. I assume that is because he determined those papers were of low quality. I would have preferred that he left his posts up so that the discussion is not so disjointed now, but I do appreciate that he has learned from his mistakes.

From your link: "Review Status: This discussion paper has been under review for the journal Climate of the Past (CP). A final paper in CP is not foreseen." This paper did not pass peer review and was never published.

Every paper with a different ECS is refuting that paper. That's how science works. If other scientists aren't referencing that paper, then they have not found it's results compelling. I haven't had a chance to review them yet, so I cannot comment.

No, it is being attacked because it has a history of publishing papers that are wrong. From the first article I linked to, Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said he regrets publishing a paper in the journal in 2000 – one year after it was established and before he had time to realise that it was about to become a fringe platform for climate sceptics. "[E&E] has published a number of low-quality papers, and the editor's political agenda has clearly undermined the legitimacy of the outlet," Pielke says. "If I had a time machine I'd go back and submit our paper elsewhere."