Gavin Schmidt's "Good Science" Part 2

In part 2 of the last post, Good Science Gets Its Revenge, we examine additional emails from the recently released NASA FOIA files part 4. Gavin Schmidt, taxpayer-supported blogger-in-chief at realclimate.org (see also The Truth About Realclimate.org), is quoted in the New York Times: “Climate scientists are paid to do climate science” and “Their job is not persuading the public”. In the following email, Gavin acknowledges that his job is "explaining the science to the general public/blogosphere", although he can't be explaining papers he has no refutation for such as in the title of the email "half of recent arctic warming may not be due to greenhouse gases" since he "can't be picking up after everybody".

 

(on a subsequent post I will show 3 emails from taxpayers to NASA/GISS in the FOIA files complaining about Gavin Schmidt being paid by taxpayers to essentially full-time blog on a privately-owned left-wing political advocacy site connected to Al Gore, George Soros, Michael Mann, etc. masquerading as the authoritative scientific source of all things climate. I will also have a post on the paper Gavin "doesn't want to pick up after" in Nature Geosciences stating that "half of recent arctic warming may not be due to greenhouse gases" )





As the following email shows, the paper Gavin wrote for submission to BAMS (the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society), which was rejected twice by BAMS upon the unanimous recommendation of three peer reviews, was actually written because Gavin needed a single peer reviewed reference on this topic for purposes of debunking Dr. Richard Lindzen on Gavin's blog:





 

As he states above, Gavin needed peer reviewed literature to back up his statements on realclimate.org because "the lack of a clear reference clearly handicaps debunking" the statements of Dr. Richard Lindzen. He says that Lindzen is "clearly wrong", but is frustrated that there is no peer reviewed literature to support Gavin's views, so he'll just have to write something up himself, unless maybe Andy Lacis at NASA/GISS can find anything in the literature to support Gavin's blog posting (he couldn't).





In the next email Gavin admits that there isn't anything "absolutely clear" in the peer-reviewed literature to support his blog postings on this topic for purposes of debunking Lindzen, so even if it is not groundbreaking new science or anything it might be a useful thing [for debunking purposes on his blog].

The reply from Andy Lacis educating Gavin on what Gavin claimed he already knew is also interesting. It reveals what the GISS models say would be the real change in global temperature due to a doubling of CO2 if not for imaginary positive feedbacks from water vapor due to CO2 Hansen & Co. stick in the models: 1.2 degrees.





In the next email, Gavin learns more about the imaginary science behind the GISS models. He asks if the conversion factor between change-in-temperature-if-no-positive-feedbacks into a W/m2 forcing is an empirical number drawn from the 1 dimensional model. The definition of empirical is information gained by means of observation, experience, or experiment, but a computer model doesn't represent information gained by means of observation, experience, or experiment.

The next email shows the results after Gavin asked Rudy to run some experiments [note apparently only GISS "scientists" consider "experiments" to be tweaking computer models] to find out the answers on this topic so he could then write up the BAMS paper to support the views he already "knew" were true in his blog postings:

Of note, the Hansen & Co. model predicts a temperature change of 4.54 degrees for a doubling of CO2, due to all sorts of imaginary positive feedbacks, in contrast to 1.2 degrees change noted above without positive feedbacks.





In the last post, Gavin's bad karma resurfaces as he is sure reviewer #3 of his BAMS submission is Richard Lindzen (who was the scientist this paper was supposed to debunk), and in typical fashion Gavin uses the only argument he has against Lindzen's review in a reply to the editor of BAMS, an ad hominem attack: "Disregarding Lindzen's nonsense..."



Since Lindzen and two other peer reviewers trounced Gavin's two submissions to BAMS, poor Gavin will have to continue without a single peer reviewed paper to point to when he debunks Lindzen on realclimate.org, but he can continue to use his own blog postings as the only citation available.