Yesterday, we came across a startling post on WUWT. The headline claimed that the climate system is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere four times faster than the rate that models use.
It was a repost from Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog, and to Spencer’s credit, he introduced the post with a note that what he wrote “is scarcely believable to [him].” He apparently looked for errors, but couldn’t find any, and admits to being “not well read in this field,” so he apologized if he “overlooked some basic issue or ignored some previous work on this specific subject.”
But before we could dive in and figure out where Spencer went wrong, we were distracted by another WUWT post, this one by guest blogger Kip Hansen about spider behavior. Well, sort of. It was really about a researcher’s apparently faulty data, which led to a number of retractions by other scientists who used the data before eventually realizing it was unreliable, to say the least.
At the end, Hansen explains that “when a single researcher works alone,” as was the case with the spider data, “there is a danger that shortcuts can be taken with justifying excuses made to himself, leading to data being inaccurate or even just filled in with expected results for convenience.”
“Scientists,” Hansen concludes, “are not special and they are not gods -- they are human just like the rest of us. Some are good and honorable, some are mediocre, some are prone to ethical lapses. Some are very careful with details, some are sloppy, all are capable of making mistakes.”
Which brings us back to Spencer’s post. As it turns out, Spencer notes in a correction on his original blog post and a follow-up (neither of which were relayed to WUWT’s all-too-credulous readers as of this morning) that he made a pretty basic error by using the wrong baseline number for how much extra carbon dioxide is in the air.
When you use the correct baseline, it turns out that the models are exactly right. But Spencer remained undeterred in his quest to disparage models he clearly doesn’t understand, criticizing them (without evidence) for showing a decrease in the amount of CO2 the climate will absorb going forward.
Spencer concludes with some well-earned humility, although the correction starts with “Well, as I suspected (and warned everyone),” as if this mistake was everyone else’s fault, and not his for publishing something he suspected was wrong in the first place. It’s just the sort of arrogance needed to believe your admittedly ignorant take on a complex issue is accurate and everyone else who actually studies the issue is wrong.
“It can be claimed that my model is too simple, and does not contain the physics necessary to address how CO2 sinks change in the future,” Spencer writes, using the passive tense to implicitly admit his model is useless because it fails to actually model the climate in any meaningful way.
He concludes that there’s no evidence, at least not that he can see, that there has been a reduction in how much CO2 the climate can remove, and so “there is no way for [him] to win that argument.”
And on that, he’s likely right. After all, as Kip Hansen reminded us, some scientists are sloppy, unethical, and make mistakes, so they shouldn’t work alone. Spencer offers the perfect example as to why that’s true.
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