Too bad there’s no picture of one of the climate modelers seconding Velikov at Erice, Candidate academician Vladimir Alexandrov. He was taken out of conference circuit circulation by the Soviets after deviating from the party line on the End Of The World version of nuclear winter, which Central Committee Chief Ideologist Boris Ponomarev endorsed as gospel in 1984.

In what may qualify as an homage to the Sicilian Vespers, Alexandrov was hustled into a van in front of the Soviet Embassy in Madrid on Palm Sunday night 1985, having blown his lines at a Eurocommunist peace rally in Cordoba the day before.

No one has seen Alexandrov since, but his more tractable Erice colleague, Academician Yuri Israel ,survived the unpleasantness and , as his Heartland Conference presentation attests, his staunch advocacy of global cooling has continued under other sponsorship.

Teller was never Reagan’s Science Advisor, although he presumably had more influence with Reagan than those who officially held the position.

Not to be a fussbudget, but this is Climate Audit…

Some countries are already baulking at the suggestion that they will need to supply the service with data, citing issues such as national security or commercial interests that would prevent disclosure. Martin Visbeck of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel in Germany, who chaired the conference’s programme committee, explains that one option would be to allow “data of convenience tailored for specific purposes [to] be commercialized”, while allowing “fundamental information to be freely available”.

Climate scientists will also have to improve the quality of the climate projections that the service could provide. Today’s global climate models predict how climate variables, such as temperature and rainfall, will change over the coming century at scales of several hundred kilometres. But scientists are hopeful that with further research they could bring that down to just tens of kilometres, covering timescales of a decade or less.

Mankind has dramatically changed the atmosphere by adding gases that have long-wavelength absorption. Using the simplest of physical arguments, the most likely outcome is that there will be an increase in global mean temperature. Fitting recent historical data gives a good understanding of the level of expected temperature rise.

Only the simplest conceptions of how the climate system operates and the most short-sighted, uncritical views of historical temperature data lead to the AGW attribution. Evaporation from the oceans is also real and is the principal means by which they shed heat, outstripping LW radiation and conduction combined. To those of us who insist on rigor in science, the jury of peers is not only out, but is still being assembled.

This is quite serious if these policies are sued to guide the functioning of the world economy.

I know that was a typo, but appropriate nonetheless. In the US, if the EPA thinks it’s going to promulgate regulations, they better be damned sure the studies they rely on meet their own standards and can stand up in court. IMO, that’s going to be tough without primary data and computer code being openly available.

Oh, and by the way, since I don’t post here very often: anthropogenic global warming is real,

The work presented on this blog is not intended to determine if AGW is real or not. The work examines the papers that detail aspects of AGW idea to see if their findings have any validity or not. This is quite another issue.

If these papers lack validity then the policies that are derived from them will not be effective and can, indeed, be counterproductive. This is quite serious if these policies are sued to guide the functioning of the world economy. As an example, The UK is in serious danger of serious electricity shortages in the next few years because of the application of AGW policies.

The important aspect of AGW work is not the progress made in climate science but in the validity of any polices that will be made to meet the AGW threat. One need not be skeptical of AGW to be skeptical of the quality of the published literature in climate science.

From my own point of view, I asked a question on this blog about the verification and validation of GCMs. He was involved in the NASA GCM effort. He told me that they got the right answers in hindcasts and pointed me to the user manual. I don’t have to be skeptical of AGW to be skeptical of current GCMs if that is typical of the way that they are developed.

Oh, and by the way, since I don’t post here very often: anthropogenic global warming is real, regardless of whether Hansen is a jihadist or not. There are too many independent lines of evidence supporting it. Finding flaws in any one of them is not good enough to dismiss the whole framework. Keep up the good work, though.)

Agreed. All the more reason to free the data, free the code and free the debate.

[Fixed. Pielke Sr too... thanks! -- ed]

Steve: You’re welcome to post. Any discussion of evolution or use of evolution analogies is prohibited here – that’s all. Editorially, I am totally uninterested in such issues. I do not wish to discuss such issues here and do not wish to open the door even a crack to such discussions. It’s a red-letter rule.