There are (at least) two forms of doubt: There is the doubt that scientists bring to table, which advances science and is thus an important part of science. Then there is the doubt that is not advancing anything, it’s spreading doubt for the sake of throwing wrenches into the system. That’s the doubt used by doubt makers.

I am not trying to defame Pat Frank. I am not questioning whether he is a scientist or not. All I was trying to do with this post is ask some questions about his motives, which seemed to be consistent with the way the doubt makers are working.

“Brian wrote “All in all I think your post and many of the comments here were unfair in that they were not even addressing the points of his article.” This post was not about Pat’s article. It is about Doubt Makers, hence the title. ”

That was what I posted on Climate audit but it wasn’t shown. That was not in response to your article. The entire portion below where I said “Missing RealClimate comment:” is what I had posted at realclimate that they suppressed.

“Amazing! I wrote: “science thrives on doubt and questioning,” which contradicts what you’re putting into my mouth, Brian.”

Firstly, it’s not putting anything in your mouth as I didn’t claim you said anything you didn’t. That you have provided contradictory statements is not my problem. You have several sentences where you portray spreading doubt as a sin. You link to an article where-in spreading doubt was don’t for nefarious purposes. In fact, the title of the article is “doubt makers”. That you have one fragment of a sentence that contradicts the entire mood of your article doesn’t get you off the hook. You can’t have it both ways. This was a hit piece on Patrick Frank and his crime was in part “spreading doubt”.

You wrote:

“I don’t know if Frank is part of the doubt makers. What I do know is this:
He is spreading doubt about the causes of climate change by attacking graphs and models.”

Several of the other things on your list are not in the spirit of science. What control does Pat Frank have over his “bedfellows” meaning somebody who liked his article, not someone who pays his bills, etc. If some nazi got a crush on you and wrote you a public love letter then would that say anything about your integrity?

Furthermore, I got the part about “consensus” from the comments. You said:

“Referring to scientific consensus is not an argument from authority. The scientific consensus is based on evidence, whether it is evidence for evolution or global climate change. By labeling the consensus “argument from authority,” you are implying a dogmatic belief, which is not the case. “

That is wrong in all it’s particulars. Then there was this line of argument

“To these facts I can testify: Pat Frank is not a PR flak. Neither is he a party to or sympathetic to any of the beliefs or causes insinuated on these pages.

Pat Frank is a scientist, period. “ – T H Ray”

To which you replied:

“What is an argument from authority, though, is your statement that “Pat Frank is a scientist, period.” You seem to suggest that we’re supposed to believe that simply because you said so. “

Which makes no sense because he is acting as a witness and not “arguing from authority”. However, what is interesting here is that now you are arguing the contradictory position that Pat Frank isn’t a scientist.

So first you give a minor aside, “Of course, science thrives on doubt and questioning, so in a lot of ways Frank is simply being a scientist. ” in an article that is basically branding him a Doubting Thomas, and later you take it back by questioning even if he is a scientist.

So despite your claims that I’m putting words in your mouth it is pretty clear what you are doing here. You want it both ways. You want to defame but don’t have the courage to accept the mantle of defamer.

Brian wrote “I said that [you don't understand science] because you think not “spreading doubt” and “scientific consensus” are what science is about.” Amazing! I wrote: “science thrives on doubt and questioning,” which contradicts what you’re putting into my mouth, Brian. I never claimed that science is about consensus, in fact, as I have pointed out in another comment, I didn’t even use the word “consensus.” Sometimes, meta-analyses are used in science to consolidate learnings, to summarize what we’ve learned so far.

Because you are a woman? No, I said that because you think not “spreading doubt” and “scientific consensus” are what science is about. I also said it because you think that science is primarily about evidence, and didn’t seem to be aware that collecting evidence, and interpreting it is always theory laden.

“I have not seen anything in this discussion that has convinced me that human activity has no impact on climate. “

I have absolutely no doubt that adding CO2 to the atmosphere, all other things being equal, will increase global temperature. I won’t bother explaining why. What is in doubt is the amount. What I haven’t seen anywhere at all is credible evidence that anybody has a good idea about how much. My main concern is the dishonesty of a few of the “climate scientists” who are overselling their positions, fear mongering, and perverting scientific process. You can’t do good science and be dishonest. Not admitting ones mistakes is one way to be dishonest.

As an example of such dishonesty and attempts to control what is discussed here is the comment I placed on RealClimate that they erased. Gavin got caught in several contradictions in his own position. Instead of addressing or admitting his mistakes it was much easier for him to just erase the comment.

You’ll notice that there isn’t any swearing, etc.

Missing RealClimate comment:

“It was meant to be an audit of one behavior of GCMs.” – Pat Frank

Yes, with regard to CO2, the issue in contention. The skeptic model is not for instance modeling issues with the earths orbit, inclination, etc. So, of course, it isn’t going to model climate changes in the distant past that were driven by such processes.

So to Gavin’s statement, ” It doesn’t work for the 20th Century, or the LGM, or the mid-Holocene or the Pliocene, or for the Younger Dryas or ENSO, or volcanoes or for the NAO etc. etc.”, is a big “So what?”

Apparently Gavin didn’t read this sentence of your article:

”The climate models excluded other “external forcings,” such as volcanic explosions, human-produced aerosols, and changes in solar intensity, but included internal feedbacks such as heat transfer between the oceans and the atmosphere, changes in snowfall, melting of ice caps, and so on.”

So the models he was criticizing (10 GCMs investigated in the “Coupled Model Intercomparison Project” (CMIP) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) weren’t handling volcano’s either.

“It explains absolutely nothing.” – Gavin

Reread the article, it’s not meant to explain the climate. It’s meant to show something interesting about the GCMs. It’s a model of a simple assumption about how CO2 will affect temps. It’s a model in the sense of many other simple models like E=MC^2. The purpose of the model was to criticize the GCMs handling of CO2. It was quite devastating in its effect because it shows that the models on average are no better than this simple model. Quite simple to understand really.

He states that explicitly in his article:

”This result tells us that somehow the complex quintillion-watt feedbacks from the oceans, the atmosphere, the albedo, and the clouds all average out to approximately zero in the General Circulation Models. Apart from low intensity wiggles, the GCMs all predict little more than passive global warming.”

“Thus taking it’s error propagation and claiming it applies to the real models is just dumb.”

What are you talking about? There is no “error propagation” in his simple model at all. This is the model:

Warming=0.36x(33°C)x[(Total Forcing)÷(Base Forcing)]

You claim it is a “nothing more than a linear fit” and you also think it has error propagation? You are making contradictory statements about your understanding of what he is saying which tells me you don’t understand what he’s saying. His discussions of error propagation had to do with the GMCs, and not this simple model which is not merely a linear fit. If you do understand that then what’s your purpose in misrepresenting his article? If not then now you’ve been corrected.

“As to my ‘ignorant’ remark, I might ask you how many people were displaced by the 120m rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age?” – Gavin

Well not many because there weren’t that many people, which is because they didn’t have the kind of complex society that could better afford to shelter them from things like weather, let alone climate change and other threats like predators, disease, crop failures, etc. I can tell you this, 100% of those primitive people had to move due to those changes in sea level. That’s not the case with people with complex societies. The Netherlands comes to mind, and they had to deal with drops in land levels that were much more rapid. Peoples with complex societies are much better able to adapt to new climates. That’s why we can maintain a year round presence in the Antarctic.

Plants and animals (life on earth) fairs far worse than this. If Florida slowly floods over the next hundred years people will just move away. I can’t say the same for the native apple snails.

”How much infrastructure was affected by the changing monsoon 7000 years ago? How much now?”

A monsoon is weather not climate change. You do understand the concept of depreciation, right. Infrastructure needs to be maintained or it naturally decays. For instance, it’s all but certain that my house won’t exist in 200 years. It hardly matters if my property is under sea level then. I tell you this. I’d much rather be in a complex society when a hurricane strikes than some primitive in a straw hut, with no weather forecast, no roads, and no hurricane shelters.

Ability to cope with climate differences and habitat is measured by carrying capacity and by that metric complex society is far more robust than either ‘life on earth’ and primitive society. If it weren’t then the Amazon rain forest would be intruding on human habitat and not the other way round.

“Here’s another reason why your argument is bogus – you claimed that since your model has no heat capacity and therefore no ocean warming, there cannot be any committed heating “in the pipeline”. Yet the models you say you are matching certainly do have both these things. Therefore your claim that your linear model (which ‘fits’ a linear trend) says something about the underlying GCMs is just wrong. “

I don’t see any use of the phrase ‘in the pipeline” or “pipeline” in his original article nor in his comments here. What he showed was that the average of the models are no different than his simple assumption. That

Read his comment 308 here again. It was a devastating response to Anthony Kendall’s poor understanding of what his article was about. It might help you understand the article better.

A lot of other people here didn’t understand the article either. Barton Paul Levenson, states “Frank’s article assumes that global warming goes away if you take out the models. It doesn’t. And you don’t need computer models to predict global warming.” Of course, he never made any such assumption. He didn’t assume global warming goes away.

All in all I think your post and many of the comments here were unfair in that they were not even addressing the points of his article. The fact that some of you guys think that because a model has skills in one area that it automatically has them in others is quite scary.

Okay, enough time wasted. I have other things I want to do tonight.