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To: All
OK.....NOT SURE about Wikipedia...

Seems to me that they have decided that the warming was blamed on CO2....

17 posted on 02/27/2011 3:21:12 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach ( Support Geert Wilders)
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To: All
OK...Lets look at the Blog Website RealClimate

I believe that is a Warmists website

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PETM Weirdness

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Filed under: * Climate Science * Greenhouse gases * Paleoclimate * Reporting on climate — gavin @ 10 August 2009

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The problems probably started with the title of the paper “Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warming” which on it’s own might have been unproblematic. However, it was paired with a press release from Rice University that was titled “Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong”, containing the statement from Jerry Dickens that

“There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models”.

Since the know-nothings agree one hundred per cent with these two last statements, it took no time at all for the press release to get passed along by Marc Morano, posted on Drudge, and declared the final nail in the coffin for ‘alarmist’ global warming science on WUWT (Andrew Freedman at WaPo has a good discussion of this). The fact that what was really being said was that climate sensitivity is probably larger than produced in standard climate models seemed to pass almost all of these people by (though a few of their more astute commenters did pick up on it). Regardless, the message went out that ‘climate models are wrong’ with the implicit sub-text that current global warming is nothing to worry about. Almost the exact opposite point that the authors wanted to make (another press release from U. Hawaii was much better in that respect).

What might have been done differently?

First off, headlines and titles that simply confirm someone’s prior belief (even if that belief is completely at odds with the substance of the paper) are a really bad idea. Many people do not go beyond the headline – they read it, they agree with it, they move on. Also one should avoid truisms. All ‘models’ are indeed wrong – they are models, not perfect representations of the real world. The real question is whether they are useful – what do they underestimate? overestimate? and are they sufficiently complete? Thus a much better title for the press release would have been more specific “”Global warming: Our best guess is likely too small” – and much less misinterpretable!

Secondly, a lot of the confusion is related to the use of the word ‘model’ itself. When people hear ‘climate model’, they generally think of the big ocean-atmosphere models run by GISS, NCAR or Hadley Centre etc. for the 20th Century climate and for future scenarios. The model used in Zeebe et al was not one of these, instead it was a relatively sophisticated carbon cycle model that tracks the different elements of the carbon cycle, but not the changes in climate.

19 posted on 02/27/2011 3:31:27 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach ( Support Geert Wilders)
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