Gavin Schmidt, a much misunderstood character in the global warming debate, has demonstrated his good faith and honourable intentions by issuing a denunciation of Skeptical Science.
Earlier today Gavin and I exchanged some tweets about the use of means and modes in climate sensitivity studies. Gavin's thoughts were as follows:
@aDissentient @micefearboggis Comparing the mode to previously reported means is a sleight of hand.
I was slightly confused at first, as I was unaware of anyone who had done such a wicked thing. However, having now read Dana Nuccitelli's post about Nic Lewis's paper at Skeptical Science I can now see that Gavin calls out scientific malfeasance whereever he sees it. Here's the relevant excerpt from the Nuccitelli piece:
One significant issue in Lewis' paper (in his abstract, in fact) is that in trying to show that his result is not an outlier, he claims that Aldrin et al. (2012) arrived at the same most likely [i.e. the mode] climate sensitivity estimate of 1.6°C, calling his result "identical to those from Aldrin et al. (2012)." However, this is simply a misrepresentation of their paper.
The authors of Aldrin et al. report a climate sensitivity value of 2.0°C [per the paper, the mean] under certain assumptions that they caution are not directly comparable to climate model-based estimates. When Aldrin et al. include a term for the influences of indirect aerosols and clouds, which they consider to be a more appropriate comparison to estimates such as the IPCC's model-based estimate of ~3°C, they report a sensitivity that increases up to 3.3°C. Their reported value is thus in good agreement with the full body of evidence as detailed in the IPCC report.
A sleight of hand indeed. I will not hear a bad word said about Gavin at my blog. :-)