Monthly Archives: July 2014

07.31.14
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Paper justifying AR4’s use of a uniform prior for estimating climate sensitivity shown to be faulty

Climate Audit

This is a guest post by Nic Lewis.

In July 2004 the IPCC held a Working Group 1 (WG1) Workshop on climate sensitivity, as part of the work plan leading up to AR4. In one session, Myles Allen of Oxford university and a researcher in his group, David Frame, jointly gave a presentation entitled “Observational constraints and prior assumptions on climate sensitivity”. They developed the work presented into what became an influential paper, Frame et al 2005,[i]here, with Frame as lead author and Allen as senior author.

Frame and Allen pointed out that climate sensitivity studies could be – whether or not they explicitly were – couched in a Bayesian formulation. That formulation applies Bayes’ theorem to produce a posterior probability density function (PDF), from which best estimates and uncertainty ranges are derived. The posterior PDF represents, at each value for climate sensitivity (ECS), and of any…

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07.31.14
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These are the sort of people we are up against

Watts Up With That?

While Steve McIntyre writes in detail about the sorts of gyrations that went on behind the scenes with Ove Hugh-Goldberg and John Cook, trying to prevent having to reveal Cooks’ rating data on his “97% consensus” paper by requests from Dr. Richard Tol, I stumbled across something so hateful, so juvenile, so bereft of moral character, that I couldn’t just let it be, and believe me I thought long and hard about whether to bring this up. I decided that certain forms of abuse just can’t go unchallenged.

It’s one thing to say things about me because I hold contrary ideas about global warming, that’s fair game. But I have to say that combining that criticism of my views on global warming with taunts over my hearing problem, is just so over-the-top and beyond decency, that it deserves a notice here.

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07.31.14
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Cook’s Trick

Climate Audit

In today’s post, I’m going to present a narrative of Richard Tol’s efforts to obtain rater ID and timestamps from the University of Queensland. See pdf here. While there have been a number of references to these efforts, few readers and commenters will (or can reasonably) spend the time to pull the threads together.

Tol requested data including rater IDs. In his initial responses to Tol, Cook undertook to provide the requested data, but asked for a delay due to his busy conference schedule. Cook initially promised to provide the data quite soon, but failed to deliver. Tol then moved his requests upstairs at both the University of Queensland and the journal Environmental Research Letters: Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and then DVC Max Lu at U of Queenslandl and Dan Kammen and then Paul Hardaker at ERL. In all cases, Tol was assured that Cook would provide the requested data, but needed…

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