I have just finished reading Carter’s “Myth” paper, and listening to his radio interview, and Youtube (http://youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI ) videos. I think all these are excellent resources and should be read and viewed by all.

His work is excellent and, my highest compliment, statistically sound. In fact, I think I will link his Youtube talk on the main page so that others will find his work more easily.

Thanks very much.

I agree with your criticism. There are other ice cores. I assume that this is a time consuming and not trivial task. Otherwise, I would assume other people would spend the time to do it to see if other ice cores confirmed such a result.

If they did, wouldn’t this be a stake in the heart of the catastrophic aspect of the current climate change - the 20th century warming being less than 1/2 this amount? I don’t think even the last 30 years are at this average rate.

I was a bit skeptical as well so I loaded the GISP2 ice core data into excel and double checked Carter’s graph and did not find any discrepancies. The only criticism I have of his claim is one ice core does not a planet make.

Carter’s paper is here: http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/2007%2005-03%20AusIMM%20corrected.pdf

These people cannot properly be called scientists, they can only be called politicians or religious converts………..I sometimes give expert testimony in court and I suspect that the above attitude might land me in prison. At the very least it would (and should) destroy my credibility.

I have immersed myself in trying to learn more about the climate and in the months that I have studied it here are some of my impressions.

1. The science of Climatology is unbelievably complex, and the discipline of radiation physics very poorly understood from a fundamental level. While in theory GHG likely could influences temperature in a positive manner no one can possibly say how or how much from first principles. All calculations to determine the temperature increase from GHG that I have seen have always assumed that all of the current current warming is caused by GHG. This seem unlikely. There appears to be better correllations with PDO/AO and Solar Activity than GHG. While this is proof of nothing, it should give any prudent scientist pause. Another pet peeve of mine is that the “cartoons” of radiative transfer are only for daytime. Surely the transfer mechanisms are very different at night and might they be negative? Also the paleo record indicates periods of orders of magnitude higher CO2 quantities in the atmosphere. Why didn’t the earth end then?

2. The temperature data record is just a mess. Nineteenth and early 20th Century measurements surely give only ballpark temperatures.The GISS temperature data record is massaged in a manner unknown and unrevealed by it’s keepers. As revealed by the hockey stick debackle this is unacceptable. The satellite measurements are better, but as I understand them the instruments where not intended as temperature monitors and require a great deal of manipulation. Also the RSS and UAH give slightly (but statistically different?) results. The RSS temperatures have had to be recently adjusted (again a statistically significant amount?). These discrepancies in data make all sorts of data manipulation possible. ie which ones are used, date baselines, averaging, smoothing etc. This drives a layman like myself to absolute distraction.

Scientists should always remain skeptical and especially so with the present Climate controversy. That organizations like the AMS issue advocacy statements like this is totally unacceptable. They should keep to rigorous science and thus in the background.

Off topic. I saw on youtube Dr Bill (?)Carter (Australian) use a proxy graph for the rate of change of temperature in the Holocene. He drew two lines and stated that the average rate of change for the recent Holocene was 2.5 Deg C per century. This he said was a very strong indication that the changes we are seeing today are normal. I am intuitively uncomfortable with this statement, but cannot put my finger on why. I tried to find the raw data on this but cannot . I wanted to get the data to see if I could calculate the mean, or mode and see if one of those values would seem more likely. What are your thoughts on this. Is it a valid statement?

By the way I love your site and enjoy your writing. I am a complete dummy when it comes to statistics, but that doesn’t make me appreciate you site any less!!