Below is what Dr. Roger Pielke has posted on his website on the webpage titled, "Main Conclusions."  Be sure to read the concluding paragraph. It's a doozy!

Should, over the course of the next fw monts, SkS generate aan article on each of the conclusions that Pielke has articulated as gospel?

This post directly relates to the General Chat thread, Good cop, bad cop campaign to burst Pielke's bubble
 

The Climate Science Weblog has clearly documented the following conclusions since July 2005:

1. The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.
2. Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.
3. Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.
4. The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.
5. In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO₂relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate forcings on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
6. Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting regional and local climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.
7. Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO₂ emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.
8. A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.

Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide. The IPCC assessments have been too conservative in recognizing the importance of these human climate forcings as they alter regional and global climate. These assessments have also not communicated the inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate. The forecasts, therefore, do not provide any skill in quantifying the impact of different mitigation strategies on the actual climate response
that would occur.

Well, he's probably overemphasizing local effects, but I don't know enough about it, or think it's an important enough claim to devote a post to.  #3 is kind of a 'whatever' statement.  Sure, natural variability can cause short-term local climate changes.  Whatever.  #4 we're probably going to address in the back-and-forth with Pielke.  It's basically his Q3, or whichever one was about the proper metric.  #7 is probably true, but CO2 is also by far the most important single effect.

Really most of this 'gospel' isn't a terribly big deal.  Just Pielke focusing (probably too much) on local impacts.

That is a word salad.  Sorry, but it is.  For example, 

"Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling."

WFT?  I mean really.  This is an exercise in casting doubting, fabricating confusion and doing so while sounding 'sciency'  (it is a Monckton trick minus the latin).  Well I call bullshit!

And this dear readers are how he is going to repond to his carefully crafted questions to SkS.  h eis also going to quote his own papers and those of his associates ad nauseum.  Just to warn everyone, it will be very painful.

I am not sure what to m ake of this, is he suggesting that we do not do anything b/c "inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate. The forecasts, therefore, do not provide any skill in quantifying the impact of different mitigation strategies on the actual climate response"?

But dear Roger, you like Lindzen and Spencer are ichoosing to ignore the valuable lessons from paleo climate!

John,

His ramblings are really quite absurd and incoherent, and he says a lot without saying anything-- except that we do not know the system well enought o make the right decisions, or somehting like that.  And that makes them very difficult to address and refute.

I wonder how long he took to craft those God awful points?

3.  "... climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling."

Huh ???

That statement is absolute nonsense. 

What else can cause global climate change if not temperature changes?  Pixie dust?

We have known since 1821, when evidence of past ice ages was first published in a scientific paper by Ignaz Venetz, that climate change can occur over significant and long-lasting timescales.  By definition, such climate changes are measured in terms of temperature changes.  All other metrics are proxies for temperature change.

So, is this Pielke's final will & testament, or what?

I don't see the need to do anything, unless somebody else takes it up and makes a big noise. That can't happen at his site, since comments aren't allowed.

So:

- If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody can talk about it, did it really fall?

- Was there a tree to begin with?

Unless someone else picks it up, I suggest we contemplate these points in philosophical silence.

I agree with Alby - we've posed some good questions to Pielke, but he'll probably respond in this "word salad" fashion.  But hopefully there will at least be some more content to his answers to our questions than there is in his 'gospel' here.  I think we can expect more of the same though - obsessing over short-term local climate change effects.

Dana et al.,

It may have been a mistake (I admit it is risky), but I have just made the first post on that thread and tried to call Pielke on his BS up front. Moderator's may choose to delete it, and I am OK if they do that. 

But I wanted to try and show people that this guy is predictable, that he has essentially made up his mind and will argue everything and anything that he thinks supports his set of beliefs.  Etc.

I have a meeting this afternnon, so I will prpbaly not be aorund much today.  That thread will reaquire strong moderation b/c of trouble makers like me! ;)

It's a great sentence to deconstruct...

"Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling."

Like I said, you can have short-term local climate changes without a radiative forcing.  But they're just that - short-term.  That's why I called it a "whatever statement".

It puts us in a bad light by pre-judging Pielke's response. I recommend that it be deleted. Alby can revise and repost once Prielke has responded.

Hi John,

You mght be right. I agree that my post is cheeky and may be perceived by some that SkS is not interested in engaging in an honest debate.  But I do not speak for SkS-- Dana is listed as the author of the response and this is John Cook's blog.  So in that repsect I'm just another poster.

But keep in mind that this is also about strategy and it might force him to a)  stay on topic, b) not waffle and c) squirm b/c his answers have already been anticipated.  I think it is time to play hard ball and try and avoid a word salad response by Pielke.

Anyhow, I am not going to defend/rationilize it anymore-- if people think it is a bad move, then I have no problem having it removed :)

I'll let Dana or Neal make the call.

I don't really have a problem with the comment, and subsequent comments have mentioned it, so I'd just leave it.  Not a big deal.

In Pielke's new post at the scientifically robust WUWT, he has this statement on the new Meehl 2001 study:

A final comment on this paper, if heat really is deposited deep into the ocean (i.e. Joules of heat) it will dispersed through the ocean at these depths and unlikely to be transferred back to the surface on short time periods, but only leak back upwards if at all. The deep ocean would be a long-term damper of global warming, that has not been adequately discussed in the climate science community.

Can we get confirmation on the validity of the 2 lines I highlighted?  I don't know anything particularly wrong with the statements, but are they actually facts or his talking out his u-no-watt?

If 100% true, this would invalidate the models used by Meehl.  Right?