WWTBAM Bored

Articles like this one are why I try never to dismiss rational skeptics out of hand -- even if I deeply disagree with their conclusions. A leading climate skeptic caught a major mistake with a recent report about ocean warming. What's heartening about this story to me is that the skeptic did not (as far as I can tell) try to score political points with it, and the scientists immediately owned up to the mistake and withdrew the report, even though they could have argued that their prediction was still possibly correct. For those who don't want to wade through the technical info, the bottom line is that the scientists seriously underestimated the uncertainty of their results. So their conclusion could be correct, but almost the exact opposite of what they concluded could also be correct, and everything in between.


I do still believe the preponderance of evidence supports my three claims: the globe is warming; humans have contributed to that warming in a major way; and the effects are going to be bad enough that we ought to be doing something about it now rather than later. Our argument should be about what and how much we should be doing, rather than if something is happening.

I mostly agree with you, I do think Warming trends depends on the time scale (of course it has warmed since the LIA) and I don't see the evidence that humans are a major contributor to climate trends.