Thursday, February 03, 2011

Short Sharp Science: Climate sceptics and scientists attempt peace deal
the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig, including NASA's Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so there was nothing to discuss.

Across the spectrum, participants were mostly united in disagreeing with Schmidt. Climate science, they said, is much less certain than the IPCC mainstreamers say, and peace can be found only if all accept what they dubbed "the uncertainty monster".
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The biggest, most totemic, issue remains the IPCC's adoption of the "hockey stick" narrative, which holds that 20th-century warming is unique over the past millennium. Most in Lisbon saw this as a scandalous example of IPCC editors taking sides in an unresolved debate, and of how "scientific findings were judged according to their political utility".

Equally contentious is the charge - the pet subject of several in Lisbon - that the IPCC is "in denial" about whether ocean oscillations, which can absorb and release heat from the atmosphere but are not well represented in climate models, could explain the global warming of the past 40 years.

Third, most agreed that there was no scientific basis for the world adopting a target to prevent global warming going above 2 °C. It was "arbitrary", they said, and cooked up by climate scientists with a political agenda.
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Public trust in climate science had collapsed and had to be rebuilt through reconciliation, they said. Of course, mainstreamers would claim it is hypocrisy for "sceptics" to lash out at mainstream climate science and then invoke the resulting public confusion to demand a seat at the table. But have they a better idea?

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