Yep, those dumb scientists. With their dumb peer reviewed papers. Idiots!

I was participating in a news group focusing on nuclear issues, when someone posted a paper by Hansen, showing some empirical evidence that shows a positive correlation to global temperature and CO2 concentration, from which Hansen concludes that the asymptotic temperature of the earth would rise due to the rise in the global CO2 level.

The conclusion, however, does not hold from the premise. Many dynamic systems (e.g., non-minimum phase systems) can show asymptotic behavior that local sensitivities don’t capture. This is a known mathematical fact to dynamicists, like myself, but probably not to Hansen, nor (and this is important) to the reviewers of his papers.

A similar thing happened with Mann. Being insufficiently grounded in stochastics and sampling theory, he made a huge mistake which lead to his infamous Hockey Stick Graph. Here again, his reviewers probably didn’t understand the subtleties of the statistical field, and published his paper.

Add to this the fact that most reviewers are simply overworked and don’t have time to go through the papers with a fine-toothed comb.

My point (as was excellently made by the thermonuclear pickle above): Peer review doesn’t confer an infallible status on any paper.

I could also go further and talk about how the TTAPS climate model utterly failed when it predicted a nuclear autumn scenario from oil well burns in Iraq in the first Iraq war. Or, I could relate in my own experience how a team of very talented Ph.D.s missed an important factor in a dynamic model of a particular structure after repeated testing and trying to validate their model for over a year.

So, while I won’t dismiss AGW, nor do I think it’s prudent to do so, I still believe that many of the claims are inflated or just plain wrong.