Correction from David Douglass to Ken Miles

I received the following email yesterday from David Douglass, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, New York:

Dear Dr Marohasy

The following quote from your web page has come to my attention:

“A good example of skeptics cherry picking is ‘Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation’ by David Douglass, Benjamin Pearson and Fred Singer (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004, Volume 31, Page L13208).

Here the authors claim to compare modeled and observed atmospheric temperature changes.
A nice idea in theory.
But in practice, the data set which they compare the modeling results against has been cherry picked in three ways.

[1] There are a number of different attempts to determine atmospheric temperature trends. They pick the only one that shows a cooling influence.

[2] The authors of this attempt to determine atmospheric temperature trends have since refined their algorithms, the new dataset shows warming. Their new data is ignored.

[3] They end their analysis in 1996. Had they included the extra data, the dataset would have shown warming.“(end of quote)

You have not read this paper very carefully (attached).

I will comment on your 3 points.

[1] Which atmospheric trend sets showing warming have we ignored? I believe that I have read all of the relevant papers and am not aware of a single measurement supporting positive trends in the troposphere. Please send reference to such papers.

[2] Who are the authors? Not us. You may mean other attempts to analyze the satellite data. If so, then Christy has shown that those attempts are flawed and that the UAH results stand. The UAH satellites only gives us one point. What about the other two independent data sets showing disagreement with the models?

[3] We explained why we only showed the results to 1996. However, we did do the whole range and found very little difference (read the paper).

I do not mind being called a skeptical scientist, but it is not too accurate because the word skeptic as used in the climate debate implies being against.

I prefer just “scientist”. In physics the word scientist, without adjective, has an invariant meaning. It means one who searches for scientific truth by comparing observations against hypothesis — if there is disagreement, the hypothesis is wrong.

However, in this field of climate research there evidently is more than one kind of scientist and adjectives seem to be necessary. If forced, then I choose “agnostic” for myself because I do not know which hypothesis is correct. That is why I am working in the field of climate research right now.

Sincerely
David Douglass
Department of Physics and Astronomy

I have emailed David explaining that the comment was posted by Ken Miles, not myself as he had assumed. And I wrote that I would post his response – which is what you have just read. The comment from Ken followed my post of 18th April titled “Warwick Hughes” and can be read here
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000559.html.

Ken ended with the comment, “Climate change skeptics may say that they are just after the truth, but in the vast majority of cases (I can only think of two prominent exceptions) it simply isn’t true.”

I ask, “Which pot is calling which kettle black?”.