Not a climate skeptic, not in the sense of the improperly commandeered word we use in the climate debates. In my experience they know little of real skepticism as a general rule. But me, I really do dislike taking assertions on their face if I don't have all the facts and I really do try to form my own opinions, especially about people.
So I have tried very hard to reserve judgement on Judith Curry and her emerging role in the climate blogosphere despite reading some pretty damning reviews of her blog performances from voices in my own "camp". My first awareness of her is from the hurricane wars a few years ago, around the time of Katrina. She struck me as a voice of calm and perspective in what was a quite passionate debate about very unsettled science. I watched her venture on to Climate Audit and try to reason with people who can be very... um, unreasonable.
So it is really with regret and even sadness that, faced with clear and incontrovertible evidence, my opinion of her has plumetted to rock bottom.
When faced with enemy graphs, remember that if extent is dropping then clearly we are looking at the wrong metric. Perhaps we should look at volume instead, unless that is dropping too, in which case we should look at area. If all that fails take a look at extent again because it might have gone up again in the meantime. If not then we should look to regional ice trends or if push comes to shove abandon the arctic entirely and talk about Antarctica instead. This is not cherrypicking because we know there is a recovery it is only a matter of finding a metric that shows it.
Um...okay. I guess that's true if your definition of "anyone" excludes every single scientific agency that concerns itself with climate indicators and those of us who actually look at them. A good dose of boring old realreality from the Union of Concerned Scientists follows:
Geoengineering is getting more and more attention in political discussions as well as research. I am by no means a proponent of any geoengineering scheme I have heard of and the majority of them try to address surface temperature only and therefore do nothing about "the other CO2 problem", aka ocean acidification.
I must confess that H. E. Taylor's article a while back went some way in convincing me that like it or not we need to be considering these perilous pathways. He basically makes the compelling argument that we are in fact now, unwittingly or not, geoengineering our global climate so best if we do it with our eyes open.
So, I do attract the occasional nutter email, and they meet the trash can pretty quickly, but this fellow put so much verbal affort at this one sent to my Facebook account I thought I should share the laugh.