Bishop Hill Betts off
Dec 10, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Richard Betts has kicked off a small Twitter kerfuffle today, taking umbrage at Matt Ridley's Times piece yesterday.
@ProfMarkMaslin Exactly. If @mattwridley wants to criticise climate policy then he's got every right, but attacking scientists is wrong.
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) December 10, 2014Matt has responded on his own blog today and I'm taking the liberty of reproducing his comment here.
After this article was published an extraordinary series of tweets appeared under the name of Richard Betts, a scientist at the UK Met Office and somebody who is normally polite even when critical. He called me “paranoid and rude” and made a series of assertions about what I had written that were either inaccurate or stretched interpretations to say the least. He then advanced the doctrine that politicians should not criticize civil servants. The particular sentence he objected to was:
Most of the people in charge of collating temperature data are vocal in their views on climate policy, which hardly reassures the rest of us that they leave those prejudices at the laboratory door.
He thought this was an unjustified attack on civil servants. However, if you read what I said in that sentence, it is that (1) people in charge of collating temperature data are vocal in support of certain policies – which is not a criticism, just a statement; and (2) that we need reassurance that they do not let that consciously or unconsciously influence their work, which again is not a criticism, let alone an attack, merely a request for reassurance. Certainly there is no mention of civil servants, let alone by name, and nothing to compare with an attack on me by name calling me paranoid and rude.
Is the first assertion true? I had in mind Jim Hansen, who was in charge of GISS, a data set for which serious questions have been raised about adjustments made that warm the present or cool the past, and who is prepared to get himself arrested in protest against fossil fuels. I also had in mind Phil Jones, partly in charge of HADCRUT, who also is not shy with his views. I was not thinking of Julia Slingo of the Met Office, because I do not think of the Met Office as a collater of temperature data, but perhaps I should have been. And then there’s Australia’s BoM. And indeed the RSS data, whose collater, Dr Carl Mears, fumes at the way “denialists” talk about his data. Hardly objective language.
Is my request for reassurance reasonable? In view of the Australian episodes, the GISS adjustments, the USHCN story from earlier this year (see here) – all of which raised doubts about the legitimacy of adjustments being made to the temperature data – then yes, I think I am. Do I think the data are fatally flawed? No, I don’t. I happily accept that all the data sets show some warming in the 1980s and 1990s and not much since and that this fits with the satellite data. But do I think such data can be used to assert that this is the warmest year, by 0.01 degrees, a month before the year ends? No, I don’t. I think people like Dr Betts should say as much.
As of this writing, Dr Betts’s latest tweet is:
If @mattwridley wants to criticise climate policy then he's got every right, but attacking scientists is wrong.
Well, if by attacking he means physically or verbally abusing, then yes, I agree, but I don’t do it. I don’t call people by name “paranoid”, for example. But criticizing scientists should be allowed surely? And asking for reassurance? Come on, Richard.
The WMO “re-analysed” a data set to get its 0.01 degree warmest year. What was that reanalysis and has it been independently checked? I would genuinely like to know. I stopped taking these things on trust after the hockey stick scandal.
The thrust of my article was that the reputation of the whole of science is at risk if bad practices and biases are allowed to infect data collection and presentation, and that science like other institutions can no longer take public trust for granted. A reaction of bluster and invective hardly reassures me that science takes my point on board. For the moment, I remain of the view that
The overwhelming majority of scientists do excellent, objective work, following the evidence wherever it leads. Science remains (in my view) our most treasured cultural achievement, bar none. Most of its astonishing insights into life, the universe and everything are beyond reproach and beyond compare.
But Dr Betts’s reaction has weakened my confidence in this view.
I must say, this seems a bit out of character for Richard, particularly his retweeting of the "Ridley is wrong because Northern Rock" thing put forward by Mark Maslin (the latter declaring, "North Rock the ultimate failure of neoliberalism", thus rather making Matt's about politicised scientists for him). I always laugh when scientists try to poison the well in this manner. It does so damage their own credibility.
Reader Comments (338)
H2O: (To RB - my bold):
Nailed it!! Well said.Gosh 100 posts! Seems like the 'skeptics' are a bit rattled now that their 'there's been no warming since x' meme is invalidated.
Check out the recent blog by Tamino.
Richard Betts, in spite of many who try to paint RB as sympathetic to skeptics this little event on top of RB's blatant misrepresentation and attack on Dr. Ball last week illustrates how shallow RB's attitude towards non-alarmists really is.
I read through that article several times and never found where Matt Ridley attacked any scientists.
Yet R. Betts feels perfectly justified attacking Matt Ridley personally and professionally.
The old double standard RB?
If RB or his buddies do it, it must be all right; if anyone else does it they're cads and, and, well that is so climate astrologist of them!
diogenese2 - "more weights" ... reminds me of John Harrison whose obstinacy bypassed the Royal Society (or arrogant academics). It's ironic that this year, the Royal Society who have still not paid out the prize to John Harrison the instrumentation engineer whose watch literally created the modern world in the sense that without his watch we wouldn't have the world maps nor world trade and so no British empire .... this year, rather than honouring John Harrison or at least finally making good their obligation to pay out his prize ... they run another charade of a competition called the "longitude prize" which they yet again couch in terms that only someone in academia is expected to win.
"The WMO “re-analysed” a data set to get its 0.01 degree warmest year."
Wow. 1/100th of a degree Celsius precision for a global metric. Climate science in coming along in leaps and bounds! /sarc
More seriously, Richard Betts seems to feel aggrieved that Matt Ridley criticised climate scientists with a "scatter gun" comment. I'm no fan of the hostility of some comments, but what really gets us annoyed with the consensus position is that there are all these problems with datasets, reconstructions, hiatuses, statistics, manipulation of the peer review process etc. and we don't seem to hear much criticism of these matters. Except from our side.
Interesting to compare the comments on this thread with the comments on the WUWT thread where Richard Betts and Tamsin Edwards attempted to rebut a posting by Tim Ball, in some ways paralleling Betts's response to Matt Ridley.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/27/a-big-goose-step-backwards/
I would say that 97% of global warming sceptics believe that climate science is corrupt in some way.
There, nailed it.
Answer that, Richard.
I presume that; "4 Retweets 2 favorites" means that nobody gives a tinkers fart what Richard Betts thinks so I think I'll go back to sweltering in the additional 1000th of a degree celsius (+/- one tenth of a degree error bar) I'll stoke up my open coal fire and get some quotes for the Aircon that Anderson says I will be using in 30 years time if the temperature here goes from 22 in summer up to the unbearable 25 that he believes in. Maybe read the article by Geoffrey Lean proclaiming that Germany and China are cutting back on coal. Mull the possibility that India, The Philippines, The African Nations etc will suddenly decide that they don't want health, education, relief from energy poverty etc and will decide to light their cooking fires around the bases of the wind turbines provided by a generous West. Icons to a failed civilisation. See if I can find a Sinclair C5 on e-bay and trade in my diesel SUV. Consider how Davey is going to get gas prices to go up in a world glut to save his projected wind power miracle from the harsh realities. Think about the skill with which Ban Ki Moon will spend his 100 billion a year on himself and his chums in the UN, throw a few coins to the poor now and again maybe. Perhaps they could send out electricity kits consisting of a solar panel and a light bulb with the UN logo on them, or an electric fan powered by a portable wind turbine kit. What a load of cobblers.
Its all round to Ivor's gaff then.
Ivor: as ever, priceless! "A tinker's fart" Richard? Reply, Reply! (they called)
Re: Arthur Dent: I was referring to the fact that some commentators seem to take the view that all climate scientists are corrupt.
I'm happy to accept all of climate science to be corrupt.
Trust, is earned, not given or assumed. It is earned. And this whole industry has not earned any trust. From the lofty heights of Paul Nurse, to the politicians with their finger in the pie, to the dendrology scientists inventing new temperature histories.
With all the nonsense in the "science", there is no way I can trust any part of it. When parts are known to be rotten, the whole is held in suspicion. I bet you throw stuff out of the fridge that looks suspicious too.
They need to do a lot of work to "earn" their trust. It should not be given over just because they ask for it.
Richard Betts
you are fast losing whatever credibility you may enjoyed in sceptic circles
He NEVER had any in my circle. When he first appeared on the blogs at the Bish. I told him to go away until he had something useful to say. He objected [snip] He is persistently pulling a Janus and has now totally confused himself.
Richard Betts - is Paul Homewood wrong to say that 2014 is only the warmest year because of the change from Hadcrut3 to Hadcrut4? Records & Adjustments. Care to point out where Paul's summary is wrong?
Have you seen these examples of spurious adjustments of the surface record (collated by Steven Goddard):
Adjustments (Aug 2014) - NOAA, NASA GISS, Envisat sea level, Iceland, Texas, USA, Alice Springs etc
These are just a few examples. The more I look in detail, the more I conclude that climate scientists cannot be trusted with historic datasets, with fresh satellite data, nor with their computer model assumptions and fanciful projections. Your field has been corrupted beyond repair. I don't think that all this was an intentional or planned conspiracy, more an accidental or inadvertant. But we will all pay for it and it will end badly. What concerns me just as much as the dishonesty of individual climate scientists, is the silence of others when the malfeasance is laid bare. e.g. when Peter Stott brazenly mislead the Copenhagen delegates and policy makers by catagoricaly stating that the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures was linear (not logarithmic). To my knowledge he has never been asked to explain this or provide evidence, or criticised for this astonishing claim.
The second warning in Eisenhower's farewell address springs to mind:
.How right he was.
1254108338.txt: "So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean" ... "It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip".
3066.txt: Peter Thorne, commenting on a draft of the IPCC report: " I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run."
Phil Jones:
"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."
Ridley is spot on.
I'm happy to accept all of climate science to be corrupt.
Trust, is earned, not given or assumed.
Absolutely. One rotten can do no damage if it is thrown out of the store soon enough. Not one dendro, not one statistician, not one climate scientist came out against this crap until Judy and what a slagging off she got from the Betts et al cabal.
[snip -venting]
Tell the truth, the whole truth now guys your time is running out fast.
Having been a civil servant, a teacher, for a considerable portion of my adult life, I know a little about the subject of public criticism. Most civil servants are subject to professional overview and and are not immune to public criticism. Those that imagine that their status puts them beyond criticism are living in some sort of fairyland that has no link with reality. If Dr Betts imagines that 'taking the Queen's shilling' puts him and his colleagues beyond public criticism he is not rowing with both oars in the water.
If the criticism is unfounded, tough. Teachers contend with both sound and unsound criticism from outside their profession and have to learn to live with that.
Even if you and your colleagues, Dr Betts, imagine you are above reproach in every way, every taxpayer has the right to criticise that which he or she pays for. It's part of life in a democracy. [snip- venting]
Thanks Richard.
I love being proved right:-)
I wonder if Richard Betts would thing if a member of the HoS opined that the "policing in this country was not serving the best interests of the immigrant community". Would he believe that was questioning the integrity of the bobby on the beat, or even the Chief Suprentendants? I doubt it, he'd see it as an opinion of the people setting the agenda for the police force.
What we should all take into account is that Richard has been under tremendous pressure from his colleagues since attending that dinner with the likes of Nic Lewis and, horror of horrors, Anthony Watts. I don't know what's happening in private, but am pretty sure it has to be worse than what's happening in public, and in public I've seen Ed Hawkins, Doug McNeall and James Annan, castigating him for trying to build bridges, and, frankly, for mixing with "deniers". (I am always amazed at the school boy way people go about talking to each other in public). In private it had to be worse with emails of the type received by others who have similarly chosen to have a football match with the enemy in no man's land.
So why the uncharacteristically tetchy behaviour? Well to get back into the club of course, the strain must be immense. So let's cut him some slack, he's seen others ostracised and careers ruined for the same thing he must have a family to rear, and indeed does believe that there will be future problems.
I can't be sure, but if I was in his position I too would be looking for a way back in, or at least, not to be thrown out. He's gone too far with the dinner and now sees his way back as falsely claiming Dr. Ball had compared cliscis to nazis and now calling Matt Ridley of being "paranoid and rude" and "attacking scientists", an echo of Dame Slingo's response to the climategate emails, for which she organised a petition at the public's expense to denounce the attack on scientists that the release of those unseemly and conspiratorial emails revealed.
geronimo - If you are right, and I suspect that you may well be, it shows what a disgraceful state into which climate science has descended.
It truly is a cess pit.
That's because he wasn't *shooting* at anyone at all! And most certainly not the way RB takes aim with his ad-hom personal pot-shots. Very telling that RB admits he takes "shots at people". [snip -venting and O/T speculation]
I have to say that this has the flavour of a handbags at noon episode one sees between sports or show business stars. It raises the profile of both.
Mike,
That's irrelevant. The WMO did not say what Matt Ridley claimed they said. The BMO did provide evidence to justify their adjustment, and Paul Nurse did not say what Matt Ridley claimed he said. Let's correct the factual errors before delving into whether or not there were reasons to criticise what they actually said. In my opinion, if you think it's okay to simply say things that aren't true because there is a valid reason to criticise what was actually said, then any criticism of what Richard Betts said is highly hypocritical (especially as he had every reason to be annoyed by Matt Ridley, once again, maligning his colleagues).
eh! geromino
Ed Hawkins (who is pretty sound) was mixing at the same meeting as Richard!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/23/an-extraordinary-meeting-of-climate-skeptics-and-climate-scientists-in-bath/
and Doug has done no such thing, in fact the funniest thing Doug has done )recently was taking Naomo Oreskes to task for attacking scientists who were talking about the pause..
his tweet - 'pause while Naomi googles who I [Doug] am is a classic!
https://twitter.com/dougmcneall/status/514796671910567936
Doug – because pause slowdown
https://twitter.com/dougmcneall/status/514793399040638977
Oreskes -if you need to say something.
https://twitter.com/NaomiOreskes/status/514795069858394113
Doug – tell you what
https://twitter.com/dougmcneall/status/514795623355518976
Doug – Brief pause
https://twitter.com/dougmcneall/status/514796671910567936
https://twitter.com/dougmcneall/status/514801997774848000
Geronimo
Nope - in fact Ed Hawkins was at the dinner too, remember? And James Annan's point was just that he thought I was wasting my time, not that he actually objected.
I've not had any emails 'castigating' me or anything - anyone who's disagreed with me attending the dinner and/or posting on WUWT has done so openly on twitter or on blogs.
My reasons for speaking out against both Ball and Ridley's posts are entirely consistent with attending the dinner - I saw them as lowering the tone of an important conversation, making claims of ulterior motives etc, instead of discussing the really important stuff (the content of the science and the policies). We managed this at the dinner without anyone getting accused of anything underhand - if only we could find a way to extend this to the wider conversation….!
@ Dec 10, 2014 at 9:55 PM | Unregistered Commenter Stephen Richards
Please, for clarity, and honesty will you confirm, or deny that you are Stephen Richards the prospective UKIP candidate for Fareham?
I'm happy to accept all of climate science to be corrupt.Trust, is earned, not given or assumed
For goodness sake give over with the universal condemnation.
So your saying that Lindzen, Spencer and Curry are corrupt - please get a sense of perspective. I don't believe the hundreds of people who work in the Met Office are corrupt. Some may be overly subject to confirmation bias but then we all are.
Ridley made a good point but it was a limited one: "some" scientists was what he said and "some" scientists was what he meant. I personally don't think he was including Prof Betts in that "some". I don't agree with Betts conclusions but that is a scientific disagreement I would not accuse him of being corrupt. I would however apply that term to some of the people that he has worked with in the IPCC who I think fit the Ridley description to a T.
Stephen Richards
You're wrong - I didn't play any role at all in Judy becoming an 'outsider' (to use her own word for herself). I didn't start tweeting and blogging until 2011, a year after all that happened.
As someone who has to pay towards its upkeep I would be very pleased to see a very significant cost reduction or its privatisation.
Dec 10, 2014 at 5:21 PM | Schrodinger's Cat
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And an end to bonus culture. A plague of the public sector.
Whenever I hear climate scientists and their apologists shouting down any who have the temerity to suggest that "the Emperor has no clothes I think of the truth stated by Karl Popper (slightly amended).
" What is wrong with Climate Science, psychoanalysis, and individual [Adlerian] psychology? Why are they so different from physical theories, from Newton’s theory, and especially from the theory of relativity?"
Popper’s solution was the notion of falsifiability: such pseudosciences may base their ideas on observation, but, unlike true science, they advance propositions that are not open to the possibility of disproof. A scientific theory is a high-risk affair; it asserts things that have a real chance of being contradicted by as yet undisclosed facts. Indeed, science conducts its business so as to encourage the discovery of precisely such disconfirming facts. Climate science, by contrast, is never in danger of this embarrassment. Its propositions are so designed as to be immune to contradictory evidence, because every imaginable state of affairs can somehow be reconciled with them.
Dec 10, 2014 at 5:37 PM | SandyS
Betts is being deliberately disingenuous. The observations are so maligned by fraudulent adjustments that they'd confess to anything.
geronimo
No go geronimo! I agree with the sentiment, quite like the dude, at least he has some guts, but its just too late, this is now at long last out of our hands, doesn't matter whether or not we cut him some slack, the real questions will no longer come from the "sceptical" blogs, they will emanate from the establishment. Nurse will put on his best bedside but he will not stop the tide.
The scientists have been irrelevant for many moons, they thought it was by choice (not me gov etc), but it was just political and way beyond their control and now it is our long awaited turn to get elbowed out.
When the politicos, their officers, and the money men foresaw unquestionable personal benefits the scientists word was gold.
Now the politicos foresee the possibility their resultant policies have downsides that can be directly attributable to them they look for potential scapegoats - up front and center my advisers!
Who was Richard Betts?
"attending the dinner"
[snip - manners]
Andrew
Until "fair-minded" scientists like Richard Betts disavow Michael Mann, et al's frequent and vicious personal and professional attacks on Judy Curry and other "skeptic" scientists on Twitter and other media, they have zero credibility and reek of hypocrisy when they take umbrage at remarks made by Matt Ridley and like-minded individuals
I would recommend stepping back from this "Betts-season" here.
Richard, whoever he is in real life, cannot participate to any climate-related discussion. The human being commenting here under the moniker "Richard Betts" and elsewhere is for all intents and purposes THE met office speaking: a flawed self-serving organisation playing politics, as too many in contemporary Britain, impervious to debate and always ready to see the proverbial mote. There he was in fact amiably peddling to the Mann cult on the back of pure activism.
Expect more of the same, until he retires or maybe the Dame does.
But for the technicality of a ridiculously short statute of limitations period Phil Jones escaped criminal prosecution.
Peter Gleick confessed to mail fraud - a criminal act.
Mr. Betts, is it ok to criticize climate scientists for criminal behavior? If so, care to join in?
God forbid this blog becomes as contentious as Dr. Curry's (science/policy) or WUWT...
But at least two posts upthread deserve a calmly reasoned yet comtentious reply.
Dr. Betts, you properly esposed detente at the famous dinner. Then posted with Tamsin a half truth concerning a perceived slight at WUWT comcerning Dr. Balls use of exact quotations from Mein Kampf to discuss the evident big lies in climate change. Now you protest Dr. Ridley's rather milder statement that after climategate, it is better to trust but verify ( to quote precisely Ronald Reagan on Soviet disarmament promises) than to just trust, since that trust in science has been broken in many fields. How about you go verify/explain the numerous temperature fiddle examples in essay When Data Isn't in ebook Blowing Smoke. All examples footnoted. That would be a starting response to Ridley's general critique.
AttP, you claim errors and misquotations. My book Blowing Smoke provides only exact quotations, with referenced footnotes. And shows how distorted the publicized info becomes. Peruse Hiding the Hiatus, Unsettling Science, Shell Games, No Bodies, Polar Bears, Cloudy Clouds... Then get back with factual defenses of the apparently indefensible, which you are here generally defending. FACTS concerning each of the many cases cited, not just just your general opinions as above. [snip - manners]
Tim Ball hit a nerve.
Richard Betts, glad to hear it, not the first time I've been wrong and probably won't be the last. I was personally disappointed at your response to Dr. Ball's post as you'd described it as "rubbish" on Twitter. I, of course, expected some robust responce his conspiracy theory and questioning of the integrity of the IPCC. The reference to parts of Mein Kampf totally passed me by.
Having said that Brandon Shollenberger went ballistic about it being an accusation that CAGW was a Jewish conspiracy, while Barry Woods thought it was an attack on the scientists and that he sounded like a conspiracy theorist. I read and reread the article and still don't quite understand their take on it. Using Mein Kampf to suggest how a big lie is more likely to be believed than a little lie was a mistake, no doubt about that. There are many other big lies that have been believed in the face of all the evidence. Most are too sensitive to discuss because they are about religious beliefs sincerely held and likely to cause great offence.
I had expected you to address the issues he raised about Agenda 21, the UNFCC, the objectives set for the IPCC, which despite Barry's protests, were indeed only to look at the issue of human induced global warming and were very explicit in that it was the only objective in the document and of course his accusation that the IPCC was corrupt. Again Barry and I disagreed because he thought that meant scientists, and I don't because the IPCC is a political organisation and is likely to attract those scientists who want to prove human induced warming is occurring and will be a problem/catastrophe depending where they stand on the alarmometer scale. In any event it appears that the natural caution of people who spend most of their lives being wrong (like me) in the main body of the report is eradicated in the SPMs and I'd like to have seen your take on that.
In the event you took umbridge with his reference to the Nazis and comparing them to climate scientists, which as I say I didn't read into his intent, and missed the opportunity to present a scientist's view of the politics of climate change. Clearly you wouldn't want to work for an organisation that has been set up to provide scientific evidence to move large amounts of money from industrial countries to the third world, or was intent on bringing down Western Industrial Societies on the basis of the science you provied, so again, it would be interesting to have had an IPCC scientist's take on Maurice Strong and Agenda 21.
I was disappointed, and although I seldom stray beyond the argument at hand wasn't surprised at the venomous responses from some people on that blog.
Those tweets I witnessed between you James Annan, Doug McNeall and Ed Hawkins, go back and read them. They're very similar to the Orange/Catholic divide in the Liverpool of my youth where both sides ignored each other because there was no chance of changing the others mind. And interracting with the other side a stench in the noses of honest men/mortal sin depending upon your side. Nowadays Catholics and Protestants for the most part can jog along with each other and recognise the people behind the divisions. No such tolerance was exhibited by your colleagues on those tweets those on the other side are wrong and therefore are to be shunned and ignored. Why is that do you think?
RE: The comparison with a commercial company. I would fully expect a senior member of staff to publicly criticise junior staff if the situation warranted it. It is entirely appropriate when apologising for poor customer service for example.
Commercial companies are not required to work in the transparent environment we expect from our politicians and public sector employees. The requirement for transparency strikes me as a fair deal given that, with the exception of emigrating, we would struggle to take our custom elsewhere and are obliged by law to contribute financially in a variety of direct and indirect ways.
Watching this is like the morning after a drunken night at the Pin Club trying to recollect how many angels were dancing. We're part way through the year and part way through a plan to extract $100bn a year from the developed economies. Locally, we're part way through a series of debates in the Lords regarding energy resiliency, and possibly wondering about the impacts of "weather bombs" on wind turbines, or solar panels. Kevin Anderson made much about the way small increases in temperature result in large increases in weather severity, so should we be relying so much on systems that are the most vulnerable to weather impacts?
For some reason, presumbably unconnected with Lima we get a claim that 2014 (minus Winter) is a record year. If you ignore that the increase is less than the measurement error or uncertainty. The Met Office's press releases glossed over this, and the mainstream press didn't seem to ask why we're getting claims of 2014 records now, not in January or February 2015. It may be expedient or even convenient to throw out a press release now, but how does 1/100th of a degree warming compare to the warming we should be experiencing to match model projections? Or if we want to be especially sceptical, how this would show we're on track to hit the 3-4C warming Anderson is planning for, and Ridley rightly questioned.
Tsk.
===
Will Betts be doing another Guest Post on WUWT, this time raking Ridley over the coals?
AFAIK All compensation paid to the 3rd world is dependant on verifiable damage caused by a similarly verifiable rise in global temperature. It will never happen, so even that is a complete scam.
I know! I know! Throwing a wobbly and talking tough is the new 'Climate Communication'.
Come on "...and Then There's Physics" you are a "denier" just like the rest of us. Admit it.
I think more attention, not less, should be directed at AGW advocates who claim to be scientists. Many AGWers are hateful or deceptive. For instance, Hansen arrogantly calls for the prosecution of energy executives, which is a violation of the human rights' directive against ex post facto prosecutions. When warmist/"scientist" predictions are grossly wrong on the up side, the warmists then dishonestly label them as predictions.
Now we have warmist/"scientists" making a silly claim that because of a .01 rise in temperature that 2014 may be the warmest or one of the warmest years in history. Temperature records are commonly re-adjusted, so it is obvious that they are estimates, not precise measurements. A more accurate way to state the findings is to say that the estimated wmo dataset for 2014 is .01 degrees warmer than the estimated wmo dataset for an earlier year. If you state the issue accurately, in this manner, you can see how silly and unprofessional the effort is to claim that 2014 is the warmest or one of the warmest years. However, because those making the claim are as much advocates as scientists, they deserve to be closely scrutinized and called out for their silly and deceptive claims.
JD
Re: Arthur Dent
You’re making the same mistake RB made.
I said "I'm happy to accept all of climate science to be corrupt."
You said "So your saying that Lindzen, Spencer and Curry are corrupt..."
I'm talking about the science that cannot be trusted. Any given report coming out from the community at large, I will hold in suspicion.
I am NOT condemning the individuals within the scientific community. Though I sure do hold some specific names in contempt.
Galatians 5:9 A little leaven leavens the whole lump.
For last word of your first paragraph, JD, may we substitute 'projections' or 'scenarios'? I'm sure there are a plethora of more such nouns lying in ambush.
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Kim "For last word of your first paragraph, JD, may we substitute 'projections' or 'scenarios'? I'm sure there are a plethora of more such nouns lying in ambush."
Oops. You are right. I meant to use the term "projections." Then, I added to my mistake by reposting, when I didn't see my original post come up. However, in the reposting, I caught my error. Thanks for your help.
JD