You plainly have either not read or else have decided not to pay attention to the specifically linked page at comment no 20 above. That article specifically addresses the question of scope, with significant citational details.

You will therefore find there a serious answer on the scope of the journal in question, and also on the linked the peer review and editorial-consultative process. (I beg to remind you that on checking the peer review file was found in order, and that the paper in question was sucessfully peer reviewed by “renowned” scientists, as the external legal review found. A read of the OSC letter here would also help you to see what was manifestly going on, and what in effect your behaviour/ attitude is enabling.)

The ball, sir, is — and has long been — in your court. (It would also be wise for you to reflect on your basic responsibility of respect towards the reputation of others when making assertions, starting with Mr Sternberg.)

GEM of TKI

Please, show us that you have done your homework, and have something substantial rather than merely assertive [and party-line], to say.

I have done my homework, and it is amusing that you assume I have not.

Now, will you make an honest attempt to answer the simple question I posed, namely was the paper in question atypical for the journal?

Check out this letter today from Monckton to the president of the APS:

http://corner.nationalreview.c.....jM0NjQyMWU=

Thanks.

MB:

Please, read and respond to the above remarks and the above linked by myself and others.

You may also find this helpful on a common intellectual pathology today: selective hyperskepticism. (On Sternberg, on AGW — and BTW Monckton [pardon!], as I noted, lays out his case point by point in ways that are consistent with my own fact-check findings when I had to work with AGW on projects — and even on the possibility of a spirit-world.)

Please, show us that you have done your homework, and have something substantial rather than merely assertive [and party-line], to say.

Gil and VJT:

Thanks also!

Think about a feedback loop that goes into runaway . . .

GEM of TKI

Two false assumptions: Appeal to authority and appeal to experience for a theoretical paper.
Monckton’s paper systematically lays out the key parameters critically foundational to model climate sensitivity. Those should be laid out clearly enough so that anyone with high school level calculus or college physics or chemistry should be able to follow through the derivations, parameter evaluation and results.

Some background logic and uncertainty analysis should be suffice to understand Monckton’s important point that the IPCC is relying on four papers for its results and that its results are substantially above what those sources justify.

It will be interesting to see what the 50,000 APS members and the scientific community at large conclude from his scientific “gauntlet” compared to the lock step response of their executive officers.

M.B. at 6
“The usual process was bypassed,”
As kairosfocus directed – go read Sternberg’s description. He clearly lays out that the process was followed. (PS Did you mean to state opposing arguments in the same paragraph?)
See: Richard Sternberg

The IPCC overstates temperature feedbacks to such an extent that the sum of the high-end values that it has now, for the first time, quantified would cross the instability threshold in the Bode feedback equation and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that has not occurred even in geological times despite CO2 concentrations almost 20 times today’s, and temperatures up to 7ºC higher than today’s.

Sometimes a little bit of common sense can go a long way. If the earth’s climate were unstable regarding CO2 concentrations and temperature, a runaway greenhouse effect would have occurred in the past and we wouldn’t be here.

Here is a link to a recent article in “The Australian” (18 July, 2008) by Dr. David Evans, a scientific consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.

http://www.theaustralian.news......80,00.html

Dr. Evans was once a firm believer in global warming. He has since changed his mind. Here is an extract from his article:

“I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector… I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

“When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects…

“But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’”

Here’s another link to an article in “The Hindu” (10 July 2008) about Russian scientists who question global warming.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/1.....521000.htm

It seems the Russian Academy of Sciences is pretty sceptical of the man-made global warming theory, too:

“When four years ago, then President Vladimir Putin was weighing his options on the Kyoto Protocol the Russian Academy of Sciences strongly advised him to reject it as having ‘no scientific foundation.’ He ignored the advice and sent the Kyoto pact to Parliament for purely political reasons: Moscow traded its approval of the Kyoto Protocol for the European Union’s support for Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organisation.”

I am not qualified to judge which side is right in the dispute about anthropogenic global warming, but it seems to me the tide is turning.

2. Regarding demons, readers might be interested in having a look at this article by Dr. Mark Roberts, entitled “Do Demons Exist? So What?” at http://www.markdroberts.com/ht.....demons.htm

However, the best article on the subject that I have come across is this one by Glenn Miller, entitled “Is there evidence for the existence of ‘spirits’ and some ‘spiritual dimension’?” at http://www.christian-thinktank.com/eyesopen.html

Read these articles… if you dare!

I would ask you MB: do you know — per warranted, credibly true belief [as opposed to question-begging assumptions and assertions, often in the name of "science"] — that beings that could be with some justification called “demons” are either logically or physically impossible and/or are in fact non-existent?

If you are asking “do demons exist”? then of course the answer is no, I don’t believe that they do but I can’t prove that they don’t exist. Just like I can’t prove that invisible unicorns don’t exist either. If this is the best argument you have for their existing (i.e I can’t prove they don’t exist) then you’ve won this argument simply by using a tatic 10 year olds have been using for time immemorial. Congratulations. As you evidently believe in deamons, I guess you also believe in exorcisms, ghosts, fortune telling, horoscopes and so on? You can’t prove they *don’t* work right?

RE: Sternberg. A simple question for you KF – was the article in question in keeping with the other articles that the journal published? A simple question, but I don’t expect a simple answer. You tatic appears to be pointing people towards links rather then addressing the actual argument itself.

Perhaps Moncton is wrong, but he needs to be answered, not caricatured and dismsissed

You make much of your credentials as a scientist concerned with similar issues. Don’t you know if Moncton is right or not from your experence in the field? If you don’t know if it’s right or wrong then why are you supporting him before you’ve determined that?

Happy birthday, Dr Dembski!

Now, MB:

A footnote or two (I had hoped someone else would have correctively taken up your points, especially on 1 jut below . . .):

1] Sternberg

Before further accepting at face value and/or propagating onward the PR message on Mr Sternberg you reproduced in 6 above, kindly first read here.

2] Moncton

I took time to read the paper.

It is consistent with what I — as a physicist myself, who has had to look at environmentally related issues tied to the CC controversy — have known of the serious limitations of the GCM models, questions that have long been raised. For instance, the H2O amplifier on CO2 forcings debate has been in the literature for years, e.g. cf Lindzen 2001. (And the institutionally politically charged way this participant in the IPCC process was treated was telling.)

Where Moncton breaks new ground is in laying out at a reasonably accessible level the basic modelling framework and issues on the related parameters. In so doing, he is in part summarising inputs from Lindzen, and Spencer et al. Serious questions have attached to the so-called Hockeystick graph, and even to the datasets (I am especially concerned on urban heat island effects and changes in collection procedures.) The point that there is a significant divergence between GCM projected temperature-altitude-lattitlude profiles and the observed, is telling on the credibility of the models; and this has long been raised.

His summing up here is serious and needs to be cogently answered:

We have set out and then critically examined a detailed account of the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity. We have made explicit the identities, interrelations, and values of the key variables, many of which the IPCC does not explicitly describe or quantify. The IPCC’s method does not provide a secure basis for policy-relevant conclusions. We now summarize some of its defects.

The IPCC’s methodology relies unduly – indeed, almost exclusively – upon numerical analysis, even where the outputs of the models upon which it so heavily relies are manifestly and significantly at variance with theory or observation or both. Modeled projections such as those upon which the IPCC’s entire case rests have long been proven impossible when applied to mathematically-chaotic objects, such as the climate, whose initial state can never be determined to a sufficient precision. For a similar reason, those of the IPCC’s conclusions that are founded on probability distributions in the chaotic climate object are unsafe.

Not one of the key variables necessary to any reliable evaluation of climate sensitivity can be measured empirically. The IPCC’s presentation of its principal conclusions as though they were near-certain is accordingly unjustifiable . . . .

The IPCC overstates the radiative forcing caused by increased CO2 concentration at least threefold because the models upon which it relies have been programmed fundamentally to misunderstand the difference between tropical and extra-tropical climates, and to apply global averages that lead to error.

The IPCC overstates the value of the base climate sensitivity parameter for a similar reason . . . .

The IPCC overstates temperature feedbacks to such an extent that the sum of the high-end values that it has now, for the first time, quantified would cross the instability threshold in the Bode feedback equation and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that has not occurred even in geological times despite CO2 concentrations almost 20 times today’s, and temperatures up to 7 ºC higher than today’s.

The Bode equation, furthermore, is of questionable utility because it was not designed to model feedbacks in non-linear objects such as the climate. The IPCC’s quantification of temperature feedbacks is, accordingly, inherently unreliable. It may even be that, as Lindzen (2001) and Spencer (2007) have argued, feedbacks are net-negative, though a more cautious assumption has been made in this paper.

It is of no little significance that the IPCC’s value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; that its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind’s effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter ? depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.

The IPCC has not drawn on thousands of published, peer-reviewed papers to support its central estimates for the variables from which climate sensitivity is calculated, but on a handful.

On this brief analysis, it seems that no great reliance can be placed upon the IPCC’s central estimates of climate sensitivity, still less on its high-end estimates. The IPCC’s assessments, in their current state, cannot be said to be “policy-relevant”. They provide no justification for taking the very costly and drastic actions advocated in some circles to mitigate “global warming”, which Eqn. (30) suggests will be small (<1 °C at CO2 doubling), harmless, and beneficial.

Perhaps Moncton is wrong, but he needs to be answered, not caricatured and dismsissed.

3] Of the demons that haunt the world how many would you say were . . . . Invented by people who believe in the literal existence of demons whose home is hell, where they await sinners?

This reflects a now increasingly common pattern of hostility to and suspicion of people of faith that needs to be very seriously addressed.

I would ask you MB: do you know — per warranted, credibly true belief [as opposed to question-begging assumptions and assertions, often in the name of "science"] — that beings that could be with some justification called “demons” are either logically or physically impossible and/or are in fact non-existent?

And, given the sad and as yet unfinished history of C20, with 100+ millions slaughtered through democides in the name of ideologies that claim to be sceintific in their roots, we need to think very soberly about, say the point raised by Provine in his 1994 debate with Phil Johnson:

. . . There is no intelligent design in the natural world. When mammals die, they are really and truly dead. No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth. These are all conclusions to which Darwin came quite clearly. (Stanford University Debate with Phil Johnson, April 30, 1994)

Evolutionary materialism-anchored “scientific” secularism has a lot to answer for. Starting with the self-referential incoherence and reduction to absurdity implied by such claims.

GEM of TKI

a) Invented by scientists?
b) Invented by people who believe in the literal existence of demons whose home is hell, where they await sinners?

Just wondering.