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“Just suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external forcings, such as those caused by changes in solar output. Just suppose all this is true for the sake of argument.

“Now put yourself in the place of a climatologist, one of the many hundreds, in fact, who was involved with the IPCC and so shared in that great validator, the Nobel Peace Prize.

“You have spent a career devoted to showing that mankind, through various forms of naughtiness, has significantly influenced the climate, and has caused temperatures to grow out of control. Your team, at a major university, has built and contributed to various global climate models. Graduate students have worked on these models. Team members have traveled the world and lectured on their results. Many, many papers were written about their output, and so forth…”

I am quoting Statistician William M. Briggs** who explores this issue by considering four different alternatives for today’s climatologists:

1. Abandon the model and seek a new career

2. Discover where the model went wrong; publish results admitting why and how you were wrong

3. Sit and wait: after all, the temperature is bound to increase sooner or later, hence validating your model

4. Believe that the model cannot be wrong, else so many people wouldn’t believe it, and so posit some new source that is “holding back” warming, and only if that new source weren’t there, your model would be perfect.

Read more here: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/2008/01/28/is-climatology-a-pseudoscience/

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** Is climatology a pseudoscience?
January 28th, 2008

Physicist F. James Cripwell, a former scientist with the UK’s Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and now a member of the notorious list of 400 skeptical scientists, is of the opinion that we need an independent study to compare and contrast the four ways of measuring world temperature anomalies. Following is a copy of recent communications between the physicist and Marc Morano in which he explains why:

Dear Marc,

I write with respect to your latest communication about Alexander Cockburn. He seems to have made an important and fundamental error. He writes “While the world’s climate is on a warming trend…”. I do not believe the world’s climate is on a warming trend, though I cannot as yet prove this.

It is quite true that since somewhere around 1970, the world has warmed up. What is not clear is that, as of now, the world is still warming up. And, of course, “now” is moving. As time goes on, I believe the indications that the world has ceaased warming, and has started to cool, will become more and more obvious.

As I have noted before, there are four major agencies which measure average global temperature anomalies, and report them of a monthly basis. These are NASA/GISS, NCDC/NOAA, HAD/CRU and RSS/MSU.

The first, NASA/GISS data, shows that at present, average global temperatures are increasing. The other three show the opposite, that they are decreasing. I am suspicious that Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt are closely connected with the NASA/GISS data, but they are very competent scientists with impressive credentials.

If you ask for a linear least squares regression analysis, you find a linear trend of increasing temperatures. However, if you ask for a non-linear analysis, NASA/GISS shows an increasing trend, but the other three show that temperatures has passed through a maximum, and are now decreasing. What is missing is an independent study to compare and contrast the four ways of measuring world temperature anomalies, coming up with an opinion as to which is “best”, whatever this means.

Until we have such a stduy, we are unlikely to make any progress in this area. Or we must wait until the data showing that world temperatures are decreasing becomes too overwhelming to be ignored.

Sincerely,
Jim Cripwell

This dominant 4.5metre male Estuarine Crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) resides a kilometre or so downstream from my own abode on Cooper Creek; a proximity that we never forget!

It has long been known that crocodile gender is determined by temperature. If the temperature of egg incubation is cool, around 30 degrees C, the hatchlings are all female. Warmer temperatures, around 34 degrees C, hatch all males. There is also strong population bias towards females; often as high as 10 to 1.

For about thirty years, this skewed ratio was thought to provide an evolutionary advantage, whereby sex ratio optimises survivorship considerations.

In a recent News in Science article by Dani Cooper, entitled ‘Sex-change lizards settle a hot topic’, Professor Rick Shine of Sydney University and his former student Dr Daniel Warner, now of Iowa State University, report that they have proven this 30-year-old theory.

Studying the relatively short-lived Jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus), which produces off-spring within one year of hatching and lives no longer than four years, the researchers found that hormonal manipulation of gender determination had no effect on the health and survival of the hatchlings, but the natural males were five to 10 times better in terms of mating and producing offspring, while the natural females produced four to five times more offspring.

It was therefore shown that the incubation temperature that produces that sex in nature optimised reproductive success of each sex.