Can I really be the first to snark about this?
Expert and Government Review Comments on the IPCC WGI AR5 Second Order Draft – General is now available for download.
As you'd expect, the pompous "Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom" notches up a string of "reject", please read the guidelines. Someone called "Jyrki Kauppinen, Finland" gets all his comments rejected with "please read what we said the first time". That was just the general stuff. There may be some treasures buried in the individual chapters.
John McLean gets lots of retractions; he seems to be some NN from the ASSC.
I should say, though, that merely having your comment rejected doesn't make you a wacko. Plenty of sane people have had comments rejected.
Watts et al. 2012 rides again, or not
Good for a laff, anyway: on Chapter 10, attribution one David Hagen reckons the IPCC ought to cite Watts et al. 2012 and has the gall to try to use the pre-print at WUWT as a reference. The reviewers are baffled: Rejected. This comment does not seem relevant. Seems to refer to Pg 16 ln 21-27. Still, this is an issue for the observations chapter. This is discussed in chapter 2.
Crok doesn't fare well in chapter 2 either.
Gray
Update: Hot Topic finds a lovely one for Vincent Gray:
Rejected – The comment does not reflect the scientific understanding. The errors in individual observations are not additive; we are also doing relative analysis that eliminates many of the concerns about individual errors. The reviewer obviously has a limited understanding of the associated error evaluation for analysis of large datasets. See Chapter 2 for more on the evaluation of these datasets. Or maybe even read a basic textbook.
(my bold).
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A fun project for somebody would be to catalog the commenters and the results of their comments. I've long thought that there should be some level of silly comments that got you a permanent ban, such that questions might be recorded, but no one had to bother answering.
Was Vincent Gray still in there pitching? THere wa a tl east one round I think
Jyrki Kauppinen is probably the professor emeritus, former head of Physics Department at University of Turku. His stance is that greenhouse gases account for 5...10 per cent of the observed warming.
> strong of reject
string?
storm?
[String. Thanks, fixed -W]
Who is Thomas Dunning Newbury? He almost got more comments rejected than all the septics combined!
As an endurance test see if you make it all the way through Alec Rawls' epic comment on Chapter 7 FOD, page 116...and 117... and 118... and 119.........
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/Ch07_WG1AR5FOD_RevCommRe…
It perhaps doesn't need saying that the response was somewhat more concise.
[Woo! Its big, but its definitely *not* clever -W]
Vincent Gray's intermittent comments (Damn and blast your confounded radiative models! its the clouds I tells ya! THE CLOUDS!!) provide welcome comedy relief, as do the dry-as-dust responses.
A small thing, but it made me smile: the responses to comments 7-1317 to 7-1334.
Aside from plugging Rawls I was looking in Chapter 7 for some clues to explain how the aerosol forcing estimates turned out how they did. Not really any the wiser but I did find this comment interesting:
'There is a potential inconsistency between the estimated total forcing, climate sensitivity and the observed ocean and surface warming. A large part of this is related to the aerosol total forcing estimated to be much smaller than in AR4. If all the forcing numbers are taken at face value, the observed warming implies a climate sensitivity of 2K or less, which is inconsistent with CMIP5, and which would imply much smaller warming in the future. This potential inconsistency needs to be checked, and if real its implications need to be discussed in one of the chapters. [Reto Knutti, Switzerland]'
This appears to be the genesis of Otto et al. 2013. Not necessarily this comment exactly, but the sentiment - Knutti is a co-author on the Otto paper. That paper was published following the SOD in order to feature in the final draft and appears to be the reason for the lowering of the ECS range to 1.5-4.5ºC - in the SOD it was still 2-4.5ºC.
These machinations were based on a best estimate total aerosol forcing of -0.9W/m2, which in the SOD was explicitly derived from various quantitative estimates using a number of basic method types - GCMs, satellite obs-informed, inverse - combined without weighting towards any set of individual estimates. The result of -0.9 depended on their averaging of satellite estimates to be ~ -0.7W/m2. The problem is that this averaging was badly in error, as is acknowledged by changes in the final draft. The real figure for satellite estimates should have been about -1.1W/m2, which is reflected in the final draft numbers (though note the estimate they actually give is -0.85 W/m2 because they incorporate a non-observational adjustment which wasn't mentioned in any previous drafts, or prefigured anywhere else in the chapter).
Interesting to think the series of events which led to the change in the ECS range appears to have been triggered by a simple calculation error. On the other hand the authors seem to have been wedded to an aerosol-cloud forcing of about -0.45W/m2 (total aerosol forcing including direct -0.9W.m2) from the first to final draft, so it's possible the error didn't make a difference.
Paul S, #5. Thanks, I enjoyed Alec Rawls's comment 7-1337, particularly the bit about a "misbegotten jihad against CO2."
Jyrki Kauppinen... fond memories
Fond memories, Martin?
He actually got a paper published with his nonsense:
http://butler.cc.tut.fi/~trantala/opetus/files/FS-1550.Fysiikan.seminaa…
Do note the Publisher.