Where are they now?

W, you wrote:

“ left when all his friends told him the GWPF were nutters; and then blamed everyone but himself for his poor judgement).”

LB has sent me some explanations and CC:s by email and I find it reasonable, because of your statement here, to take myself the liberty to cite the following, which is addressed to his coauthors on the paper rejected by ERL afterward published in another journal:

“As the present situation has evolved  I see no other way than to resign from the joint paper as I can in no way accept that some of you have to give up your authorship because of your association with me. I might well have made a mistake to join the GWPF but that is my decision  and I have to take the consequences.”

[Perhaps you shouldn't have taken the liberty. The problem (apart from the conditionality: even if this is genuine he's still not actually admitting his error) is that what you've written is unverifiable. It might have come from LB, but it might not. We do know, however, that he has been careful not to say this in public -W]

W, in such cases it is hard to me to keep silent, perhaps a personal weakness, but I think that's a cause worth standing or falling for. The authors of the paper in Earth's Future know the truth.

[I can understand that. But the correct action is not to copy unverifiable emails here, but to ask LB to state publically that he made a mistake by joining GWPF; if that, indeed, is what he thinks. Of course he might find that rather hard to say, even if it is true -W]

On the other hand, W, humans are different, we are all unique individuals, you cannot know what is hard for another human to say or not to say. And we may look at things very differently depending on background. I, for example, don't understand all that squabbling about GWPF. I can see that a lot of climate people in UK and also in USA don't like GWPF, but I don't understand all those hard feelings.

You may enjoy the recent GWPF report on Ethics and Climate Policy, by a Peter Lee, in which the Bengtsson situation was quite prominent.

[F*ck me, a mad bishop. Where do they dredge them up from? Well, alright, Chester, yes, I know, but you know what I mean. "Peter Forster" is a new one on me; is he related to the one of the Hill, do you think? -W]

Peter,
I can see that a lot of climate people in UK and also in USA don’t like GWPF, but I don’t understand all those hard feelings.
It's not hard feelings. It's mainly because most of what they write (in the form of semi-official reports) and most of what they promote (in their press releases) is nonsense.

Incidentally, I recently wrote a blog post about the GWPF ethics report and in particular about their abuse of a Schneider quote (you know which one): "Global Warming Policy Foundation" tries to write about ethics...

“Peter Forster” is a new one on me; is he related to the one of the Hill, do you think?
I don't actually know which one you mean.

[Bishop Hill! Geddit? -W]

Lars,
Have you thought of emailing Peter Lee with a link to your post? I'm dying to encounter at least one academic who writes something completely bonkers, and at least has the courage to admit it when someone points it out. May not be Peter Lee, but I do think we should keep trying :-)

What about Force X? I found that a delightful example of self-parody.

On a related note would be the Stadium Wave. Or was that 2013? After a while it all runs together.

[ZOMG! I forgot it! How could I forget the most exciting development in physics since Einstein? I'll need to do a follow-up. Maybe -W]

You're still real as long as Scholar finds you, right?
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=+Sallie+Baliunas&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt…

[I thought of that. But there's nothing recent. Indeed nothing since 2013: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=+Sallie+Baliunas&hl=en&as_… -W]

[Bishop Hill! Geddit? -W]

Good grief, sometimes I'm just incredibly slow!

I thought WUWT did start the sceptics.org in the form of the Open Atmospheric Society (theoas.org) back in September, the major output of which so far seems to be 4 (four) tweets https://twitter.com/The_OAS

I suspect it, and its journal http://oasjournal.org/ are about as likely to be successful as pRIP for much the same reasons.

[theoas! How could I forget that? Thanks for the reminder -W]

1) Salby was indeed 2013, seeming to disappear after his Fall tour in UK sponsored by PSI (~slayers). Some still hope to see him give a public talk back in US, especially Boulder. I might even fly over for that.

2) It wasn't just the antipodes, but the UK's own Rupert Darwall, Salby nonsense and LB just last summer.

3) Note that LB goes way back: see speakers at 2006 conference organized by Peter Stilbs, also involved in Stockholms Initiativet aka CLIMATESCAM.

Good news: Google Translate worked, but the Translate feature of Google Chrome makes it a lot easier! Use Chrome to look at that page, and search for Salby, then click on icon next to star at upper right: much more convenient translation. People can assess the calibre of thinking in the 10 articles that mention Salby.

Did Curry jump on the Salby train too?

I can't really remember, but I am sure she made some vague comments questioning whether we really know if the rise in CO2 is manmade.

Harvard lists Baliunas as retired.

[So it does. Perhaps someone who can ought to update her bio at wiki? -W]

matt, you are looking for this
:
"Carbon cycle questions

Posted on August 4, 2011 | 1,129 Comments
by Judith Curry

I just finished listening to Murry Salby’s podcast on Climate Change and Carbon. Wow.

...

JC comments: If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science. ... "

This is the link:

http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/04/carbon-cycle-questions/

Over at Climate,Etc she made several posts, with huge numbers of comments:
http://judithcurry.com/?s=Salby&submit=Search

The earliest:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/04/carbon-cycle-questions/
Starts:
"I just finished listening to Murry Salby’s podcast on Climate Change and Carbon. Wow.

The abstract for his talk is here: ..."

"JC comments: If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science. Salby and I were both at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the 1990’s, but I don’t know him well personally. He is the author of a popular introductory graduate text Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics. He is an excellent lecturer and teacher, which comes across in his podcast. He has the reputation of a thorough and careful researcher. While all this is frustratingly preliminary without publication, slides, etc., it is sufficiently important that we should start talking about these issues. I’ll close with this text from Bolt’s article:

He said he had an “involuntary gag reflex” whenever someone said the “science was settled”.

“Anyone who thinks the science of this complex thing is settled is in Fantasia.” "

Curiously:
1) She had a different view of Salby as lecturer than did the extensive internal student ratings at CU, which put him at best average and usually lower. Another atmospheric scientist told me that Salby was a rarity in actually reading prepared scripts at scientific meetings (which is what he did in the 3 known videos).

2) Unclear what she meant by not knowing him well. They were both senior Professors that overlapped for a ~decade in a modestly-sized department headed by her husband Peter Webster. She was also Ack'd in one of his papers, as was Webster. A but later he brought complaints against Webster, as well as blaming him for lack of progress on a NASA grant.
(The outcome was murky.)
Anyway, in this case the term "personally" is ambiguous.

Salby's work at CU was primarily in atmospheric circulation and analysis of satellite, which after 1994 were carried out mostly via external shell companies that avoided CU oversight and limits on $. Salby published no research on carbon cycle or ice-cores, and his 2012 book was mostly good, but with nonsense sprinkled around. Look up book at Amazin:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521767180?qid=1420110693&sr=8-1&vs=1
I did a detailed review detested by Salby fans, including Lucy Skywalker and Morgan Wright, a retired optometrist who runs a disc golf course in upstate NY.

Anyway, Salby's high point was in the mid-1990s. His 1996 text is well -regarded by experts, he'd authored with other string people and was well-cited. It was downhill from there.
(In the course if tracking the financial chicanery, I got a copy if almost every paper from 1990 on and also checked citation counts. As far as I can tell, he was doing OK science until 2011, but it seemed that the field had moved and didn't care about his work so much. This contrasts with Lindzen, who dud great work when young, but then spent 2 decades inventing mechanisms to support a really low estimate if climate sensitivity.)

[Salby didn't give the impression of being very motivated in the video I watched about the CO2 stuff -W]

"very motivated"
1) It is generally a challenge when reading from a script.

2) Although RateMyProfessors should not be over-interpreted (small sample, self-selected, anonymous), that was quite consistent with internal CU ratings by students,
At least for this ATOC 3180 course (2006), Salby’s ratings were generally about average for the ATOC department, except for AVAIL, where he was near the bottom. I think this can be interpreted as students thinking Salby knew his material, but was at best an average teacher, and very inaccessible. I found ratings for ~12 years.

The students in introductory classes ATOC-1050/1060) weren't enthusiastic, he did better in upper division, but curiously had mixed ratings in graduate special topics classes. (That is odd, because usually, profs teach those to small groups on topics near their research interests, sometimes to recruit PhD students.)

All this is quite consistent with his lectures, but mainly raises questions about Curry's praise of him as teacher.

John Mashey #13,

In my view Murry Salby is a very valuable textbook writer as well as Judith Curry. This is supported by this citation from chapter #2 in Holton and Hakim (2012):

“Suggested References
Curry and Webster. Curry and Webster’s Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans contains an excellent treatment of atmospheric thermodynamics.
Pedlosky. Pedlosky, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, discusses the equations of motion for a rotating coordinate system and has a thorough discussion of scale analysis at a graduate level.
Salby. Salby’s Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics contains a thorough development of the basic conservation laws at the graduate level.

Holton, James R.; Hakim, Gregory J (2012-12-17). An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology (International Geophysics) (Kindle Locations 1987-1994). Elsevier Science. Kindle Edition.”

I think that the climate science community should take care not to use such aggressive personal attacks on their own valuable members, like Salby, Curry and Bengtsson in order not to undermine the credibility of the whole scientific field of climate science.

As to the climate conference at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm 2006 I myself was attending it. I was curious to learn more about global warming since my research as professor in chemical engineering in KTH to a large extent concerned alternative (decarbonised) chemical energy technology justified by the global warming issue. Such research is very important in Sweden and in KTH so a climate conference was obviously of very high interest for all of us working with such research. I found that there were a lot of issues in climate science that needed a lot of clarification.

One may criticize that there were few “warmist” presenters at this conference but this was because several expected participants declined the invitation from KTH. So this had more to do with the situation within climate science at that time than with the intentions of KTH. Anyway Sten Bergström had a presentation and represented the “warmists” together with Hans von Storch and Lennart Bengtsson.

It should be mentioned that also Bert Bolin attended this conference as well as Erland Källén although they had no presentations, but both delivered oral commentaries. Lennart Bengtsson and Hans von Storch participated in the panel discussion and represented the “warmist” side while the sceptic side was represented by Fred Singer and Bob Carter.

Our esteemed host covered the KTH conference way back in August 2006. In the comments thread the conference chair vigorously defended the choice of Jaworowski as one of the speakers. That really tells you all you need to know.

[Good grief you have a good memory. That lead me to Lennart Bengtsson, a post I wrote in 2006. Interesting to read that now, not because it says very much, but the tone.

The conference post is Global Warming – Scientific Controversies in Climate Variability. As Boris says, the meeting organiser - Peter Stilbs - vigourously defends the indefensible ZJ. His responses are interesting - starts off sounding fairly open and reasonable, but it only takes an exchange or two for the truth to become obvious -W]

Got to say I love the crocodile tears of Pehr Björnbom.

Marco:I can you explain the "crocodile tears" comment?
As best as I can tell, he is quite sincere ...

John,
I suspect that Marco's "crocodile tears" refers to this paragraph in Pehr's comment:

"I think that the climate science community should take care not to use such aggressive personal attacks on their own valuable members, like Salby, Curry and Bengtsson in order not to undermine the credibility of the whole scientific field of climate science."

That is correct, Lars.

I don't think Björnbom cares on yota about the credibility of the whole scientific field of climate science, considering his own rejection of most of the scientific output of that same field. Add his own personal attacks on some valued members, and the various unchallenged (by Björnbom) personal attacks on the website where he is a contributor, and you know why I call it "crocodile tears".

Note that I pointed out his hypocrisy earlier: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/08/27/roy-spencer-jumps-the-shark/#c….

That latter thread is of interest also because it shows how Björnbom consistently refuses to respond to specific questions as to what smears he claims are made against Salby and Bengtsson.

One aspect where he probably was sincere was his admission on that thread that he is "probably not especially consistent regarding who to defend or not to defend in connection with smear campaigns". Indeed, as I showed, he happily contributed to the smear campaign against Mike Mann.

Marco, that's Björnbom in a nutshell.

"Crocodile tears" are usually insincere, whereas Björnbom really seems to believe strongly that Salby, Curry et al are brilliant scientists being mistreated.

As I think Lars Karlsson knows well, the Stockholm Initiativet aka Climatescam is essentially a small Dunning-Kruger-afflicted, pseudoskeptic echo chamber for non-climate-scientists. They seem unalterably sure they are right and mainstream climate science wrong. I would not say that without having done a serious sample.

As part of the long study being done for Pseudoskpetics exposed in the SalbyStorm, I collected and annotated many comments. While Climatescam/Stockholms Initiativet seems pretty irrelevant overall, I included it as an example of such echo chambers, populated by people who don't seem connected with the real science community.
(How often do they attend AGU (US) or EGU(Europe)? Do they give presentations there? How many real climate scientists do they know? Etc)

The Climatescam part is ~18 pages out of *700*, draft excerpted here.
I don't want to over-emphasize this, it's a relatively unimportant piece of a large pattern, but since the topic arises:

As a group, SI/Climatescam:
A) Could not distinguish between atmospheric physicists specializing in circulation (Salby) and experts in carbon cycle or ice-cores. This is like trusting a brain surgeon who:
-suddenly espouses the idea that cardiologists are all wrong about heart disease because it's all in the head.
-has already been cashiered for malfeasance

Some of us know the difference, perhaps because we not only read the literature, but often trade emails with real climate scientists and talk them at university lectures and AGU meetings.

See my review of Salby(2012), condensed from the more detailed version in Appendices A.6-B.5, which covers other topics.

It is so rare that a good scientist (Salby was) goes so haywire this way that it was worth trying to understand the history. It took a lot of work to put the pieces together.

pp.42-43 Compares 1996 and 2012 editions of the book, followed by discussion of problems.

p.52 (Fig. B.1-1): by citation analysis, the high point of Salby's career was in the mid-1990s, when he did work well-respected by atmospheric scientists I know, but by 2003, his work got cited vastly less. I think it was still OK science, but the rest of the field didn't care as much.

Also documented there was the grant malfeasance, far more extensive than in the NSF report. They already had more than enough, and Salby had run to Australia ... a good move, since he might well have been liable for grant fraud (felony) had he stayed to fight. The NSF doesn't usually pursue that, but I have seen cases of similar scale where it happened ... and NSF was peeved.

People with zero obvious knowledge of NSF processes just dismissed the NSF report, as Bjornbohm did, p.395.

B) was repeatedly wrong on the science.
There's one example (p.165-) where Lars Bengtsson, who actually is a climate scientist, tries to explain why Salby is wrong ... but is not well-received.

C) but since Salby said what they wanted to hear, any issues or science or other malfeasance were brushed aside.
Hence, no matter how much evidence is presented, I am confident pseudoskeptics can reject it all in favor of viewing Salby as akin to Galileo. :-)

John,
Their DK-affliction is such that one of Björnbom's co-bloggers, a professor in philosophy of science, about a week ago claimed that the Hockey Schtick blog had done more good for climate science than Nature.
The Hockey Schtick blog is currently publishing a series of posts denying the greenhouse effect.

Lars: yes, the SalbyStorm has several Hockey Schtick pieces, including one that had::
'‘Swedish climate scientist Pehr Björnbom has recently replicated the work of Dr. Murry Salby, finding that temperature, not man-made CO2, drives CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Dr. Björnbom confirms Salby's hypothesis that the rate of change in carbon dioxide concentration in the air follows an
equation that only depends on temperature change, detailed in his report Reconstruction of Murry Salby's theory that carbon dioxide increase is temperature driven [Google translation]. …'

Was that Prof of philosophy the same one who wrote:
"He has for many years been interested in science and technology, nature; their structure and motivations. For many years it has been the policy impact on the scientific research that was in focus. Climate research today is perhaps the prime example of such influence and corruption of science since eugenic ethics days." ?

John, I don't doubt Björnbom considers Bengtsson and Salby very good scientists.

It's all about the fake boohoo of the supposed personal attacks undermining the credibility of the field. If he would seriously be concerned about that, he would not be engaging in such attacks himself and be more proactive in countering them on the blog to which he contributes.

Marco: yes, that makes more sense..

Yes John, that's the same prof.

Marco #28,

You wrote about me:

“...considering his own rejection of most of the scientific output of that same field. “

This is not true. I accept most of the scientific output of the climate science field. But I want to discuss climate science and climate policy as being a scientist myself and because global warming has such an important impact on our life and our economy.

Although my knowledge of climate science is limited I have found Kerry Emanuel's vews on climate science reasonable as a basis for a risk assessment what to be done an not to be done. By the way, what KE is proposing as reasonable actions for US are such things that we are already doing in Sweden, we have fossil free electricity production, high carbon taxes, perhaps highest in the world,.we do a lot of energy efficiency improving, we do research on sustainable energy technology etc., and where I live we have domestic heating by wood pellet burning.

However, I am honestly concerned about the risks for the credibility of the whole field of climate science due to the frequent personal attacks that we see between climate scientists. This is not normal from my experience in another scientific field. Isn´t it remarkable that climate scientists like Curry and Salby are cited honorably in the textbook by Holton and Hakim (2013) while in the same time they both are targets for aggressive personal attacks.

I don't normally do personal attacks on climate scientists. In some instances I have used so called meta ad hominem arguments, which in my opinion are permissible as a reaction with respect to a person who has committed a personal attack. For example a climate scientist A called another climate scientist B a “serial misinformer”, which is a personal attack. Then I remarked that A perhaps wanted to associate B with “serial murderers”, which is a meta ad hominem argument, a personal attack on A. Such personal attacks are permissible in my opinion. Meta ad hominem for that purpose is discussed in a paper by Souder and Qureshi (2012), “Ad hominem arguments in the service of boundary work among climate scientists”:
http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/11/01/Jcom1101(2012)A01/Jcom1101(2012)A01…

I don't take responsibility for what other writers on Klimatupplysningen are writing. Klimatupplysningen is Sweden's most successful climate blog, with five professors (mostly emeritus) among the regular writers and a lot of blog posts. I have great respect for my writing colleagues. However each one has her or his own profile, opinions and style of writing and it would be absurd if I would tell the others what to write and not to write. There are no climate scientists among the writers so there would be no problem of climate scientists doing personal attacks on other climate scientists, though.

Note that Lars Karlsson represents our main competitor in climate blogging in Sweden, Uppsalainitiativet. Thus you should not uncritically accept what he says about me and about Klimatupplysningen. There is a strong competition between our blogs although Klimatupplysningen is more active, is more read and has more comments.

O yes, using the adjective "serial" is a terrible personal attack!

Whereas when one of Pehr's co-bloggers calls Thomas Stocker "apparently insane and suffering from severe paranoia (Swedish: "uppenbarligen galen och lider svårt av paranoia") , then Pehr dismisses it as an innocent joke.

http://www.klimatupplysningen.se/2014/05/27/23-klimatmodeller-kan-inte-…

Pehr, I will respond pointwise, and expect you to ignore at least one of those (but one can always hope!)

1. I don't know why you refer to Lars, I can read what you write myself (yes, I can read Swedish). You sure have me fooled in Swedish when you claim here you do not reject most of what climate science says. Then again, over here you have already attempted to cast doubt on the CO2 increase being anthropogenic in nature.

2. You keep on claiming personal attacks (actually, you called them "smears" earlier, so maybe there is some progress), but when challenged to come with examples, you are quiet, in particular when it comes to Salby and Bengtsson. I'll get back to Curry/Mann later.
So, challenge one is for you to finally come with examples. Remember, this will have to be from the climate science community, since you indicate that this is what bothers you (I will come back to that, too)

3. You should also explain why it is *inappropriate* for a specific scientific community to 'attack' one of its own - but consider it just fine if people from outside that community do so. This is after all what you are saying. It doesn't matter whether you are responsible for the comments of others (you are not), but it does matter when you proclaim you are concerned about personal attacks, but then engage in them yourself and let others come with such personal attacks without any challenge. But that apparent hypocrisy you defend by saying that this is OK because those attacks do not come from someone within the climate science community.
So, to give an example of what you need to explain: why would it be inappropriate for the medical community to 'attack' Luc Montagnier's support for homeopathy, using words like "Nobel disease", whereas people like you or William should be allowed to do so without you getting concerned about the field?

4. You may also want to explain why it is OK for you to misrepresent your own original claim. Here you state "A perhaps wanted to associate B", whereas your original statement said "apparently" (tydligen), rather than "perhaps". The words "apparently" and "perhaps" are not equivalent.

5. Any explanation for the Appeal to Popularity? WUWT also is 'more popular' that this site, but the articles here, and most of the comments, are much more factual than anything on WUWT. HotWhopper frequently demolishes the claims on WUWT, too, but doesn't have as many readers (and definitely not contributors) as WUWT. Realclimate 'suffers' the same fate.

Marco #38,

As I said I am concerned that personal attacks between climate scientists may undermine the credibility of the whole field of climate science. That would be inappropriate,wouldn't it, because I am thinking that the credibility of climate science is very important for the world (perhaps you can agree on that).

[You were asked to supply examples of personal attacks, not to pointlessly repeat the same unsourced claim -W]

Klimatupplysningen's success as a climate blog in Sweden simply is a fact (to our competitors envy). In some blog posts or in comments there may appear personal attacks. However, on the blog which is our main competitor in Sweden they are much more notorious in that respect and they often use ad hominem as arguments in scientific discussions, which is a fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

As a scientist I am of course mostly interested of skeptical and critical discussion of issues in climate science and as a citizen I may have some views on climate policy. I like scientific discussion, like is happening in many other scientific fields, like this for example on a climate science blog, which I learned something from:
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2014/earths-energy-imbalance/#more-27…

Björnbom: "However, on the blog which is our main competitor in Sweden they are much more notorious in that respect and they often use ad hominem as arguments in scientific discussions, which is a fallacy:"

Now Björnbom is just making things up, Which, again, is Björnbom in a nutshell.

By the way, I am in no way envious of Björnbom's blog. On the contrary, I would be thoroughly disgusted by myself if I ever participated in anything like that blog.

It would be like being a contributor to WUWT.

Wow. I had predicted at least one point to be ignored, but not that I would only get a somewhat substantial response to just one (and minor) point.

Last try, completely dumbed down:
1. Please provide examples of the personal attacks on Salby and Bengtsson by climate scientists. Failure to provide such examples should be considered admission of having no evidence and meaning you just make things up.

2. Please explain why you are concerned about supposed personal attacks *between* climate scientists hurting the credibility of climate science, but *not* when scientists from outside the field, including yourself, engage in such personal attacks.
Including your own behaviour in your answer is important, since *you* claim to be concerned, but *I* consider your behaviour to be contrary to your expressed concern.

Marco #38,

Your comment raises many questions that I will think about. I will reply to some of your points in case I find them being valid.

Now to your following statement:

“Then again, over here you have already attempted to cast doubt on the CO2 increase being anthropogenic in nature.”

In my view you are framing an important thought in a peculiar way. As a scientist my attitude to the scientific discourse is that you can never ask too many questions. However, this is certainly not without problems since you risk to step on the toes of giants.

Perhaps I will come back with more views on your comments, Marco, but I don't promise anything.

Somebody will link to this sooner or later, so it might just as well be me:

http://youtu.be/BZwuTo7zKM8?t=58s

Uhm, Lars:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/05/14/ha-ha-lennart-bengtsson-leaves…