Yesterday Michael Shermer, the founder of the Skeptics Society, issued one of those mildly irritating calls for global warming sceptics to run up the white flag:
Libertarians, tea partyers, & free market advocates: you're on the wrong side of the climate issue. The science is rock solid. Follow data.
Being a global warming sceptic who falls into more than one of the categories mentioned, I asked Shermer whether he wanted to discuss the issue or whether he was in broadcast mode. As he didn't reply I proceeded to press him to explain exactly what was the science was that he felt was "rock solid" - was it cloud feedbacks, uniform priors in ECS, deep ocean heat transport, climate models? Libertarian sceptics wanted to know.
Eventually he seems to have felt obliged to come up with something to support his view and he pointed to an article on the eSkeptic site by a geologist called Donald Prothero. I have a vague feeling I discussed this at the time of publication a year or so back, but suffice it to say that it's awe-inspiringly pathetic stuff.
Shermer seems to feel that the science that we should all accept as "rock solid" includes, for example, the millennial temperature reconstructions. I kid you not. Prothero's article cites the Moberg study, which is far from the worst in the corpus, but does include the use of bristlecones. This presumably means that Shermer also feels that the use of bristlecone pines in temperature reconstructions is "rock solid", despite the world and his wife - including the National Academy of Sciences! - agreeing that they are unsuitable for such applications. And slapping the instrumental temperature record on top of the reconstruction is not a "rock solid" procedure in my book either.
Also in Shermer's "rock solid" files are melting polar ice caps, despite a 30-year increase in Antarctic sea ice extent, and melting glaciers. It seems that neither Prothero or Shermer have heard of sublimation. And what about Prothero's claim that the population of India are are all going to die because they rely on meltwater from the Himalayas for irrigating their crops? Have neither he nor Shermer heard of the monsoon?
If this is the "rock solid" science, I hate to think what the "slightly dicky" science is like.
