All well and good. In fact, both the exchange and the comments it provokes are fascinating. Go read it. Most of what Curry has to say — and make sure you read her comments as well as her responses to Keith’s questions — are straightforward, though not always uncontroversial. WIlliam Connelley takes issue with much of what Curry has to say, for example. I’m not going to weigh in on much of the debate as I have little to add in most cases. But one of Curry’s comments deserves to be highlighted:

Gavin Schmidt and Richard Lindzen are saying, well, what you would expect them to say

Schmidt is a NASA climatologist and one of the driving forces behind Real Climate. Like Curry, he accepts the basic premise and most of the science that inform anthropogenic global warming. He’s a respected and hard-working scientist whose competence and integrity have never been questioned by his peers.

Lindzen is an MIT meterologist who does not enjoy the same degree of credibility. His most recent op-ed, which appears in the denial-happy Australian and Wall Street Journal, doesn’t do much to salvage his reputation. Making claims about “unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation” despite the contrary conclusions of at least three independent reviews (two in the UK, one at Penn State) of the allegations arising from the UEA emails is just plain bizarre. As Tim Lambert puts it, “It seems that Lindzen simply does not care whether what he writes is true or not.”

To imply some kind of equivalency between Schmidt and Lindzen is perhaps not what Curry meant, but that’s the way it comes off, and it does Schmidt a great disservice.

In the end, the window into Curry’s perspective is refreshing. Right or wrong about the IPCC process or the state of uncertainty analyses, she’s a complex character who is doing some serious thinking about the way scientists interact with society large, and she’s hard to predict. For example, she shares James Hansen’s distrust of cap-and-trade mechanisms because of the inevitable corruption of such markets by Wall Street. On the other hand, she says Steven McIntyre has made “an important contribution” through his critical analysis of the “hockey stick,” a statement that won’t endear her to those who are tired of hearing the nonsensical claim that the stick has been discredited.

By the way, both Schmidt and Curry have generously granted interviews and assisted me in my work as a journalist in the past. It’s not particularly gratifying to see two good scientists sniping at each other. But they’re both adults and I’m sure they’ll both be able to laugh at it all in 30 years … assuming we’re still in a laughing mood, what with the specter of 4 or 5 °C of warming hanging over us.

Ninety-four gigawatts. None of those coal-fired plants are capable of capturing and storing CO2. And each of them will be expected to operate for three or four or five decades at the very least to justify construction costs to utility shareholders.

Now recall the arguments that James Hansen makes about the need for an immediate moratorium on non-CCS coal-fired plants and a phase-out of all existing coal plants over the next 20 years. Hansen’s case is solid, in the sense that there’s no realistic way to bring down carbon emissions fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change without shutting down most if not all of the world’s coal-fired plants. But how does one go about telling a utility that it has to shut down a plant on which they just spent upwards of $3 billion?

“it is equivalent to racing towards a cliff and hoping to stop just before it.”

Here’s the summary, as laid out in an opinion essay in Nature (subs req’d, although with something this important, it really shouldn’t be:

• Nations will probably meet only the lower ends of their emissions pledges in the absence of a binding international agreement
• Nations can bank an estimated 12 gigatonnes of Co2 equivalents surplus allowances for use after 2012
• Land-use rules are likely to result in further allowance increases of 0.5 GtCO2-eq per year
• Global emissions in 2020 could thus be up to 20% higher than today
• Current pledges mean a greater than 50% chance that warming will exceed 3°C by 2100
• If nations agree to halve emissions by 2050, there is still a 50% chance that warming will exceed 2°C and will almost certainly exceed 1.5°C

Those projections are based on national pledges made earlier this year in accordance with the Copenhagen Accord, which is supposed to get us on a path to keep warming at 2 °C above pre-industrial norms. “It is amazing how unambitious these pledges are,” write the essay’s authors. How amazing? Consider:

Our most pessimistic projection assumes that countries hit their lowest stated ambitions, take advantage of surplus allowances and use credits fully. This leaves us with potential 2020 emissions from developed countries of 19.9 GtCO2-eq — or 6.5% above 1990 emissions…. In other words, in the worst case the Copenhagen Accord pledges could permit emission allowances to exceed our business-as-usual projections.

And on the other hand:

In a more optimistic scenario, we assume that nations meet the ambitious end of their stated pledges without using surplus allowances and land-use credits. This gives 15.7 GtCO2-eq for developed countries in 2020 — 15.6% below 1990 levels…. Although this is significantly lower than business-as-usual, it is still far above an emissions pathway that could realistically reach the 2 °C target.

The essay also points out a potentially fatal flaw in the approach many governments assume they can take to deal with global warming. Near-term emissions are almost always allowed to increase, with steep cuts made later on. My home and native land is perhaps the worse offender in this regard:

Canada is the only country that both weakened its ambitions in the course of the negotiations, and effectively argued for an increase of 2020 emission allowances above its current Kyoto Protocol target: 3% above instead of 6% below 1990 levels.

Though the authors don’t mention it, this is the sort of strategy embraced by Bjorn Lomborg, who argues that because it will be cheaper to implement technological fixes in the future, we can wait to start bringing down emissions. What Lomborg and other adherents of “discounting” ignore is that, while they are right about the general trend of declining costs of renewable energy sources, carbon capture and other techno-solutions, the magnitude of the emissions cuts required grows dramatically the longer we wait to begin making the cuts.

Discounters are gambling on the slope of the cost of technologies being steeper than the slope of the emissions cuts required to avoid catastrophic global warming. Given the massive uncertainties involved in economic predictions, that’s just not reasonable. Hence the essay’s conclusion: “it is equivalent to racing towards a cliff and hoping to stop just before it.”

Their advice: get our act together now. Don’t repeat the mistakes of Copenhagen at the new global climate change conference in Mexico this fall.

Although these forces on the Earth’s crust are subtly changing all the time, their effects are most obvious at times of major or sudden climate change, such as at the beginning and end of an ice age or during the period of climate change we are expected to experience over the coming centuries. As the balance changes between the stresses acting on the crust and the strains held within it, the result can be an increase in volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

The Earth has seen this pattern many times before. In the past 650,000 years alone, the polar ice caps have expanded far beyond their current limits on seven occasions, locking up huge volumes of water in frozen oceans and vast continental ice sheets before retreating again to higher latitudes. These huge reorganisations of the Earth’s water resulted in dramatic and repeated swings in sea level, with falls as far as 130 metres below today’s level followed by equally spectacular rises. They also led to shifting loads on volcanoes and geological faults. As ice sheets that had pinned down volcanoes and active faults melted away, the Earth’s crust bounced back in a process known as isostatic rebound. As it did so, faults were reactivated and seismic activity increased sharply.

And so on. Melting ice brought on by a warmer climate means reduced pressure on tectonically sensitive sections of the Earth, which changes the forces that determine seismic and volcanic activity. Simple. Nothing particulary remarkable. None of this is to say that the recent Icelandic eruption is a direct result of global warming. No one is saying that. The recent Scientific American article that hints at a general link pointed out that the Eyjafjallajokull “glacier is too small and light to affect local geology.” It also make liberal use of qualifying terms like “may” and “suggest.” For more on the speculative nature of this discussion, see my colleague Erik Klemetti at Eruptions.

Compare the tenor of the scientific musing on the link between volcanoes and the climate change with the pronouncements of a senior Iranian cleric, one Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes.”

Funny, I thought the Earth was supposed to move after the fact, not before. Guess that’s why I’m blog about science instead of theology.

More on the speakers and hosts later, but first, let’s look at the description of the event, which appears on the invitation reproduced by invitee Sheril “Intersection” Kirshenbaum:

The scientific case for catastrophic global warming was already showing signs of weakening when the Climategate scientific fraud scandal broke in November of 2009. This release of thousands of computer files and emails between leading global warming scientists showed evidence of data manipulation, flouting of freedom of information laws, and attempts to suppress publication of research that disagreed with the alarmist “consensus.”

In truth, the scientific case for catastrophic global warming was affected not one wit by the release of the CRU (University of East Anglia) emails and evidence for fraud has refused to surface, as at least three independent academic investigations have shown. The most recent of those investigations found “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it.”

Climategate has raised many questions about the reliability of key temperature records as well as the objectivity of the researchers and institutions involved, but it is far from the only global warming-related controversy.

Yes, questions have been raised by many an amateur with little understanding of the methods used to gather and analyze the temperature records or the records themselves, but the answers are unequivocal. The Earth continues to warm at a pace consistent with the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Again, here’s the conclusions of the most recent panel of scientists to look into that very issue:

There have been various analyses of similar publicly available data sets by different international groups. Although there are some differences in fine detail that reflect the differences in the analytical methods used, the results are very similar.

The Unit has devoted a great deal of effort to understanding how instrumental observations are best combined to derive the surface temperature on a variety of time and space scales. It has become apparent from a number of studies that there is elevation of the surface temperature in and around large cities and work is continuing to understand this fully.

Next we are told:

It has been followed by revelations that some of the most attention-grabbing claims in the 2007 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report – the supposed gold standard of climate science – were simply made up.

If anything that appeared anywhere in the official IPCC reports or supplementary material was made up, it hasn’t come to light yet. As Stefan Rahmstorf writes at Real Climate, “We already investigated this and came to the conclusion that of the mistakes discussed excitedly in the media, nothing much remains except for the Himalaya mistake.” He refers to the reference to 2035 as the time at which the Himalayan glaciers could disappear. There have been conflicting notions of where the number came from. It could be a typographical flip of 2350. The real problem with the reference wasn’t that it was made up, but that it was attributed to a grey-literature WWF report rather than peer-reviewed science. In any case, climatologists remain worried about precipitous melting trends in the Himalayas. It is also useful to note that the 2035 date never made it into the final Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment.

Before laws regulating energy use are enacted that could well cost trillions of dollars, it is crucial to understand the extent to which the alleged scientific consensus supporting global warming alarmism has been discredited by these scandals.

It would be just as fair to write that such laws could save trillions of dollars, and likely will, if even the low end of climate-warming effects come to pass. And in any case, the “scandals” are nothing but alarmism generated by pseudoskeptics. None of the scientists involved in the email controversy have been discredited. Indeed, but Michael Mann and Phil Jones have been exonerated.

Join us for a discussion featuring two scientists who have closely studied climategate.

Sure, you could do that. You could attend an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, which has been caught misrepresenting the science at the behest of ExxonMobil for years, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has been doing the same for almost as long. You could spend your lunch hour listening to Pat Michaels, a scientist who feels comfortable in the embrace of a group that has repeatedly demonstrated its fellows can’t read even the simplest of climate science papers, and Joseph D’Aleo, whose idea of a reputable journal for publishing climate science is the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Or you could stay at home and read some of the literature produced by scientists who have actually studied the climate itself. Your choice.

On the other hand, they are providing lunch.

I remain convinced that the pace of climate change brought on by the combustion of fossil fuels is the most serious public policy challenge of our time. And I’m not the only one. Here’s the result of a new survey of the world’s science academies by New Scientist magazine. Respondents were asked to identify humanity’s most pressing concerns.

While the Island of Doubt was been a modest success — it was picked up by Scienceblogs after only a year, and recently made it into the top 20 science blogs as rated by Wikio — I have of late felt the need for a change. For one thing, the name is a bit misleading. Science is characterized by an embrace of uncertainty and doubt, the name has tricked more than one denial-oriented blogger into adding the Island of Doubt into their blogrolls (hah), and the forces of irrationalism still keep me up at night. But I’d like to shift gears a bit in terms of the blog’s focus.

The new blog, like this one, will concern itself with what science has to say about the suitability of planet Earth for human habitation. My intention is to restrict content to commentary and analysis of peer-reviewed science and to how the science is represented by mainstream and new media.

The way I see it, there is already an excellent blog dealing with the policy questions involved in dealing with climate change: Climate Progress. Several other members of the Scienceblogs collective — Deltoid, A Few Things Ill Considered to name two — do keep us up to date on some important climate science developments. But what is less common are blogs that regularly translate peer-reviewed science into more accessible language and provides a bit of context. Real Climate goes a long way down this road, but sometimes they need a little help getting out of the impenetrable jargon jungle. Stoat is always fun, but it’s cryptic still often reads like an insider’s blog that discourages wider circulation.

As a professional communicator with a science degree. I have some ideas on the nature of niche I’d like to fill, but I am open to suggestions. What are the elements you would like to see in a climatology-oriented blog? As the comment function on the Island is currently unavailable, you’ll have to email me: jamesh (at) cyamid (dot) net.

Many a blogger has advised that abandoning a successful brand name is a poor business strategy, but this isn’t a business, let alone an overwhelmingly successful one. So along with the new focus will come a new name, which will be unveiled upon its debut on April 30. I thank and apologize in advance to all of my colleagues who will feel compelled to update their blog rolls. The good news is anyone heading to The Island of Doubt for the foreseeable future will automatically be redirected to the new site, and there is no urgency in this regard.