Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Schwartz spanked again...

...though of course he might not see it that way.

The original paper is here which I discussed here. Now there is a comment from Knutti and Plattner, and reply from the original authors. To be honest, I'm a little bit surprised they bothered, since (as I said originally) the paper wasn't, for the most part, actually wrong, just misleadingly presented ("Why has the earth warmed just as expected" might have been more accurate a title). Actually, Knutti and Plattner do find a genuine error, in the way that Schwartz et al extrapolate their results to consider the case of committed climate change (ie due to emissions to date), in that they ignore that the atmospheric CO2 level would actually fall significantly if emissions were to cease. I must admit I hadn't bothered to wade through the paper sufficiently carefully to see that. So maybe it was worth correcting.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Schwartz paper didn't really say anything more than what was already widely known by the community. Greenhouse gases alone (with nothing else) should give you a bit more warming than expected, and the only way to resolve this is to introduce a negative forcing or change the system's sensitivity. Duh.

It seems the response paper did misread Schwartz' argument, but the body of the Schwartz paper does not follow suit with the title of the paper.

David B. Benson said...

Pick all nits, no matter how small.

James Annan said...

Well there is an issue of time-effectiveness. But I'm not saying they were wrong to do it.