Judith Curry's website eh? Have you critically examined this? Have you looked at discussion and debate about her work - not by laypeople - but by scientists of significant standing within the Earth Sciences community? Have you looked at those two papers she refers to in the link? Have you looked at where they were published? Do you know what the "EIKE" is? Do you know what "Energy and Environment" is? Do you know what its scientific standing is?
Part of being a true sceptic, as opposed to a fake one, is asking questions like these and establishing the reliability/credibility of your sources. because the web is wonderful tool for both information and misinformation as we all know. So given the answers to all those questions, I am immediately suspicious that those two papers may not be all you're cracking them up to be. A true sceptic would be sceptical (no surprise there), until they have either been verified by other scientists of significant standing, or until they have been torn down as deeply flawed junk. Sure, I concede this may be an amazing new breakthrough suddenly showing that the rest of the scientific world has got it all wrong. But you'll excuse me if I don't head off to Ladbrokes and wager money on that possibility.
Google Scholarship
Another point I want to make related to scepticism in general is "Google Scholarship". Google returns answers from websites which are only as good as the search terms you use. If you suspect the moon landings were faked, then google "NASA faked moon landings" and you'll be rewarded with information that confirms your suspicions (as long as you ignore the first hit, which is NASA's own website).
It's a beautiful example on this thread that someone seriously thinks Arctic ice is recovering. I have no doubt that this was extracted from a "sceptical" website. If you want to confirm it, just google "Arctic Ice recovery" and you'll be rewarded with "sceptical" websites arguing exactly that, and giving you all the information you need.........except that the information is wrong and totally misleading (usually deliberately so IMHO). If you go to a serious website where people actually do scientific research, like the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, or the Polar Science Centre, or a dozen others, you can get the real information which shows this is nonsense.
But "fake" sceptics seem incapable of, or just not inclined to actually do this level of research.
Originally Posted by konstantin
Publically released before peer review...
As a "sceptic", do you or do you not believe that the peer review process is fundamentally flawed? If it is (as many sceptics allege), then why would you care whether it hasn't been peer-reviewed? Not reviewing it would simply remove any alleged peer-review bias. If it is not flawed, then how do you reconcile that it simply
agrees with the rest of the peer-reviewed literature? In fact, how do you reconcile that anyway, regardless of your views on peer-review?
And for goodness sake don`t mention
"What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human action, Richard Muller acknowledged"
BEST was created
specifically to address allegations from fake-sceptics, primarily originating from the "climategate" scandal, that the temperature record has been
doctored or otherwise screwed up by scientists. It has done exactly that, and sceptics are
not happy with the results because they confirm what
every other credible scientific analysis of global temperature trends says, and that's not what sceptics wanted to hear.
Yes. "Global warming is real" No argument there. Never was.
Bulldust. See above. Fake-sceptics have been screaming at the top of their lungs since "climategate" that scientific observations of warming planetary temperatures are all proven to be a giant con. There
is an argument there and
no matter what evidence is presented to them, fake-sceptics simply will not allow it to go away! The evidence of this is how they have now turned on Muller's team like a pack of wolves! Muller may not have analysed (yet) how much is due to human action, but based on the current trend of BEST confirming exactly what the evidence in the peer-reviewed scientific literature has said for years, are you willing to take a bet that he'll discover something totally different? I mean, do you seriously believe this is a likely outcome?
