re: #391 kf

Your conflating the peer-reviewed and subsequently supported work of Dr. Spencer vs. his other allegations.

This is classic… and pertains to Dr. Lindzen as well. Indeed, it pertains to Isaac Newton too. Many times an individual can make meaningful contributions during their lives, then, later (and it is usually later as they age), go off into la-la land.

As for your statement about the IPCC and sea levels, as you ought to be aware, in their fourth report they explicitly state that they ignored changes due to ice-cap melting because there was no consensus on the amount to expect during the targeted timeframe… not that it doesn’t exist, and not that we can’t expect melting from Greenland and WAIS.

That there is concern about sea level rise because in the previous two interglacials sea levels were higher while also temperatures peaked at slightly higher temperatures than today, is not a complex hypothesis that is being proposed. It is a concern based upon observations. As you well know, if you follow any of the discussions about ice melt, there is lots of research on this topic currently. Last week I posted a link to the latest (and rather hefty) report from the British Antarctic Survey, which goes into detail about climate change in Antarctica. Thus it is both reasonable to be concerned about sea level rise from melting ice-caps (based on the paleoclimatology) and a matter of intense current research.

As for the large coupled climate models used by the IPCC for projections… yes, a great diversity of models. What you didn’t mention though is that all of them agree with the general trend. Also, the nature of predicting a chaotic system that also has random input means that the approach taken to predictions is never the kind of certainty the layman requires of their daily mundane routines, such as turning on the faucet and expecting water to flow out of the tap. The IPCC and anyone else who is legitimate readily recognize the probabilistic nature of the prediction scheme. That is why error bars, or in the case of most graphs, shaded areas are included on either side of the mean output of the models, based on repeated runs of the models to allow for randomness and chaos.

What you are demonstrating for us here on LGF is that you are well educated, but not being complete and open about the entire truth. This is the same sin, if you will allow me to use that term, that Spencer exhibits.