Thursday
Mar172011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Scottish Sceptic
Mar 17, 2011 Blogs Climate: Sceptics A new blog for your attention - Scottish Sceptic is the site of Mike Haseler, a former Green party candidate, who has now seen the error of his ways...
Reader Comments (6)
I can understand the attractions many green-minded people feel for the CAGW claims. Never before a set of scientific claims overlapped with a political party's social and environmental agenda,as it does with the Greens and climate science. Now that mainstream parties have been spooked, too, Green parties all around the world will benefit tremendously from the political momentum for decades to come.
I voted for Aussie Greens for 10+ years, but parted ways more than a year ago after becoming a climate skeptic. I don't like seeing the abuse of science for political purposes. Scientific method is supposed to protect us from our own follies. The Greens' embrace of dodgy climate science must be condemned, just as we condemn the abuse of religious sentiment for political purposes.
Mike is welcome to Our World.
Peter Walsh
I commented on the "Crisis Over?" post a couple of weeks ago about the Harde paper that Scottish Sceptic discusses a lot. I wrote back then, (Mar 3, 2011 at 3:53 PM comment) "to be honest, from a quick look, the work behind this looks unlikely to be correct to me". Reading the further detail on Scottish Sceptic's webpage, I'm no longer so sure. It looks as though existing GCMs really may not have a sophisticated enough treatment of absorption and emission spectra... Though it does also sound as though the Harde model might still have some basic error in it - I would have liked to have seen evidence that by using a more simple absorption model he can reproduce the higher sensitivity found in GCMs.
Excellent - you can never have too many climate-sceptic blogs!
Mike is not a very new convert - he's a familiar name on other climate blogs and he made a significant submission to the "independent" email review, raising issues of bias, contempt for opposing views, massaging data, and the delusion that the data must be wrong because it doesn't fit with their theory.
It is interesting to see that he has obtained a full version of the recently discussed paper by Harde on CO2 sensitivity (only generally available as a short abstract) though it seems Mike has had to translate it from German.
j
My thoughts too.
And if the models over-estimate the forcing, then the emergent (mean) value they generate for equilibrium climate sensitivity of +3C per doubling is too high. If this should prove to be the case it doesn't make global warming go away, but it does at least slow the process and reduce the likelihood of catastrophic consequences. But as you observe, it's early days yet and this result must be treated with proper caution.
Welcome to our world, Mike.
Surely you are in a minority up there - I thought the Scottish Parliament were hell-bent on providing all the electricity Scotland needs from haggis-farming; bagpipe music and the fumes from whisky..?
(Apologies - I am a great fan of the Scots - they were incredibly kind to us Sassenachs when our son got married recently in a castle near Dumfries...!)