;)
I've been very nice about Martin Robbins from time to time - I do think he writes some interesting stuff, and he looks at things from interesting angles occasionally too. His blind spot on climate change has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
His article in Vice (which sounds dodgy, but appears to be safe enough) seems to throw some light on the reasons, suggesting that he really only has the most superficial understanding of the subject. For example, he pulls out the NOAA temperature graph and berates us dissenters for pointing out the post-millennial pause, the one that the IPCC is struggling to explain. "But look at the pre-millennium temperature rise" he seems to say. "What a bunch of cherrypickers you bad people are!"
One of the things that I have been able to agree on with mainstream climate scientists is that you can't tell very much from looking at the temperature record alone: the records are too short to tell you whether the 20th century warming was anything other than a blip. Doug McNeall's view is, I believe, that you can only tell whether there's anything going on by comparing the temperature trend to a climate model. (This means of course that we have no wholly empirical evidence of global warming, but that's another story)
So then we ask whether the climate models are trustworthy, and we compare the temperature trend since the last set of predictions were issued (around the millennium) to the predictions themselves. And we find that the models got it completely wrong.
That's why we look at the trend since the millennium Mr Robbins and that's why we get excited about it. Perhaps next time read a bit before you write?
The rest of the article is equally superficial. For example, there is lots of discussion of Arrhenius, but no mention of feedbacks. Does Robbins really not see that the difference between disaster and decades - centuries even - of gentle, beneficial warming is the feedbacks? What is gained by shouting "Arrhenius" at the top of your voice.
And of course there's discussion of conspiracy theory too, despite the fact that the most frequent discussion of conspiracies in the climate debate comes from the climatological mainstream. Hell, they even write learned papers about the massive evil oil-funded denialist conspiracy.
And to finish there's this, hilarious, mindboggling, gobsmacking bit of idiocy:
Or you could just believe that scientists are really stupid – that they lucked out on stuff like the internet and the Higgs Boson, but when it comes to thermodynamics and atmospheric physics, generations of our finest minds have been outsmarted by you, Rupert Murdoch, a backbench MP everybody confuses with David Davis, some incredibly tedious bloggers and that boggle-eyed UKIP bloke in the pub.
Generations of our finest minds! What planet is this guy on? Climatology was an academic backwater until global warming came along to save it. This is the field that propelled Phil "how do you work Excel again" Jones to the top. The field that cleared Mann's hockey stick for takeoff, promoted it to the heavens, and then defended it to the death when it emerged that it used an ad-hoc statistical procedure that didn't hold water and data that everyone agreed was unsuitable. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the field in which a blatantly incorrect Bayesian approach was ubiquitous and in which even papers that did things correctly were rewritten by the powers that be on the incorrect basis!
Dear heavens, these are "our finest minds"?
No, Martin.
No.