Judith Curry has found an interesting paper:
The participation of historians in the climate debate is critical. This is a topic that I am extremely interested in, and we have all been highly appreciative of the original posts by Tony Brown, at CE and also at WUWT.
Apart from the eloquent comment sense in this Jenkins’ essay, he raises the issue of the Goldilocks Principle – what climate do we want? Does anyone want the cold miserable climate of the 17th and 18th centuries? I’m not even sure we want the climate of the 1930’s or 1950’s. Historians have a huge role to play in articulating what constitutes a desirable climate, both regionally and globally.
Yes, the easiest way to stump a warm monger is to ask them what the ideal climate is, what is the magic year we want to return to?
I hadn’t seen warmmonger before…cool play on words.
Asking them exactly what we want the Wayback Machine to be set to and why is a good question.
For my choices:
1.) The Eocene, 55-40 milllion years ago, ….no ice caps and Doug Fir growing on the shores of the arctic ocean. (from Fossilized stumps there today)
2.) The EEmian, an interglacial lasting only about 15,000 years, with temps 5ºC above today’s.
Both *much* nicer than today’s temps.
In the meantime, there are two really interesting posts on climateaudit by Nic Lewis, in response to the Marvel & Gavin Schmidt et al paper claiming that climate sensitivity is much higher than previous estimates. Lewis _seems_ to find multiple serious problems with the paper. So Schmidt has responded that he’ll respond some time. Other commenters have responded that Lewis’s response is on a blog, not a peer reviewed journal, so they’re going to ignore it and assume that Marvel is right. Of course, no response can be published for six months to a year, so they’re safe till then. Science, love it!
Prediction (assuming Lewis is right, which I can’t tell due to lack of competence): sometime in the next two years, Marvel et al will be amended in such a way as to acknowledge Lewis’s points. They will not acknowledge Lewis’s contribution in any way. They will claim that the changes affect their results very little, which will not be true. (Nic Lewis or McIntyre will publish on climateaudit that the original results are completely overturned by the changes.) They will publish their correction separately with little fanfare, and not amend the original paper. The original paper will continue to be cited by warmists.
My prediction is based on _exactly_ the same events occurring with the PAGES2K paper and climateaudit. You will only know it if you go to climateaudit and search for PAGES2K; warmists still cite that paper as the gold standard in proxy studies.