This paper looks to me like it might be serious, earnestly meant scientific work. Creationists are not automatically wrong about the time of day.

There may well be difficulties to extracting the earth’s overall climate sensitivity to increases in CO2 level, as an exercise in statistics. The whole scientific enterprise depends on people putting theories and conclusions through the wringer.

So long as our friend refrains from scientific fraud, and only raises objections that to his mind seem well founded, and so long as the referees think he has a point, I say, Lay On, MacDuff.

If we are right that AGW is real and urgent, then when the dust settles, we’ll have a good enough answer. Consider, for comparison, the matter of whales with legs. Darwin caught some flak for maintaining that whales must have evolved from land animals, and his justification, from the example of bears, was not exactly on target.

Later authors had to concede that while the DNA and the internal bone structure of whales supported the evolution hypothesis, they’d sure like to have fossils of (proto)whales with legs, with reduced but functional, and then with vestigial, legs. Opponents of evolution, e.g. in Pandas and People, made hay by observing that such fossils had not been found.

This is the sort of attack that we who find evolution a compelling scientific conclusion must answer with more than derision. The absence of such intermediate fossils does not destroy our case, but we’d be in that much stronger a position if we had them.

Now we do.

This thrust and parry is part of science. Oh, and evolution wins, and AGW will win. It wins, though, by being right and by vigorous logic-and-evidence based answers to challenges that have enough logic and evidence to them that they are more than empty nonsense.