#roy spencer

[trouser-drum]

Roy Spencer

[insidewarp]

This glitzy, 840-page report took a lot of your tax dollars to generate, and involved only those “experts” who are willing to play the game. It is difficult to answer in its entirety because government has billions of dollars to invest in this, while most of us who try to bring some sanity to the issue must do it in our spare time, because we aren’t paid to do it. It is nowhere near balanced regarding science, costs-versus-benefits, or implied policy outcomes. Like the previous two National Assessment reports, it takes global climate models which cannot even hindcast what has happened before, which over-forecast global average warming, which are known to have essentially zero skill for regional (e.g. U.S.) predictions, and uses them anyway to instill fear into the masses, so that we might be led to safety by politicians.

Dr. Roy Spencer

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/05/my-initial-comments-on-the-national-climate-assessment/

[nelc]

Production sketch for Blofeld's volcano base in You Only Live Twice.

[dljs]

Ars discusses a paper by Andy Dessler; a paper that presents a critique of the recent paper by Roy Spencer and his climate model. You know, the paper that caused all the hullabaloo and made the editor of the publishing journal resign from shame for not having vetted it more properly.

A climate model that violates conservation of energy is a bush league mistake. This means one of several things:

Roy Spencer carried out bad science in the name of results that would push an agenda. Bias will be bias, but evidence and science are unavoidable. Validating a model that violates a fundamental rule of physical science is inexcusable. In this case, Dr. Spencer is demonstrating very poor scientific ethics.

Roy Spencer carried out bad science because he is bad at science. In spite of the fact that he carries a Ph. D., he is clearly an idiot. In this case, Dr. Spencer is demonstrating very poor intelligence.

In either one of these cases, the most upsetting thing is that Dr. Spencer would have thought he would get away with it. Thus, in BOTH cases, Dr. Spencer is demonstrating that he is a complete and utter buffoon.

[sarahlee310-blog]

The hype surrounding a new paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell is impressive (see for instance Fox News); unfortunately the paper itself is not. News releases and blogs on climate denier web sites have publicized the claim from the paper’s news release that “Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming”. The paper has been published in a journal called Remote sensing which is a fine journal for geographers, but it does not deal with atmospheric and climate science, and it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published.

The paper’s title “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” is provocative and should have raised red flags with the editors. The basic material in the paper has very basic shortcomings because no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results. As a first step, some quick checks have been made to see whether results can be replicated and we find some points of contention.

[...]

The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper. It turns out that Spencer and Braswell have an almost perfect title for their paper: “the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in the Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” (leaving out the “On”).

[diadoumenos-blog]

July has been marked by an abundance of new evidence and arguments that point to the adverse effect of man-made climate change. But, surprisingly, it's been a controversial study from a controversial scientist that has generated the most buzz. Unsurprisingly, a slew of prominent right-leaning websites are pointing to it as proof that global warming is a hoax... But there are very real problems with [University of Alabama scientist Roy] Spencer's analysis, according to climate scientists. LiveScience interviewed several experts, none of whom agreed with the conclusions of Spencer's research. One NASA climatologist pointed out that nobody -- including Spencer -- knows what causes the mismatch between temperature projections and satellite-based climate data. Others blasted Spencer's conclusion (that cloud formation drives temperature change) as unrealistic. Others still questioned the statistical significance of his findings. The overwhelming sentiment is that the satellite data is inconclusive, but when compared against a large body of evidence from other sources, Spencer's findings seem unremarkable... Not to mention that Spencer's satellite-based research has been disputed, and refuted, in the past. In 2005, he and a colleague were compelled to apologize for a report in which they suggested that the lowest layer of our atmosphere is cooling, when the data he used actually supported the entirely opposite conclusion.

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