The skeptic glass 4/5 full

Readers might recall my annoyance that the surfacestation.org project paper co-authored by Anthony Watts received so little attention. It had, after all, contradicted claims of a serious bias in the US mean temperature record when Watts had been spending years saying that it surely must account for some of warming trend.

Last year, Watts had appeared on ABC's Counterpoint making these claims (although he did not go as far as claiming the bias might be as much as .5 degree as he did to Andrew Bolt - a claim I am sure Watts would be more than happy to see disappear into the mists of time.) So I wrote to Counterpoint and noted that they said they would follow up on the project, and now they could. I suggested that some hard questions be put to Watts about how wrong some of his claims, particularly to Bolt, had been.

Counterpoint responded and said they would follow up.

Maybe I am therefore at least partly responsible for the interview they ran yesterday with John Neilsen-Gammon, the Texas State climatologist who is one of the co-authors of the paper. He's in Australia at the moment for a conference in Melbourne.

The interview is available to listen to here; perhaps a transcript will follow soon.

Don't, however, expect either the interviewer or interviewee to express any interest at all in co-relating what Watts used to say about his project, and what it actually found.

As one might expect from the soft-sceptic Counterpoint, they are interested in emphasising the finding relating to diurnal temperature range, the importance of which still seems fairly unclear, even according to Neilsen-Gammon.

The finding about mean temperature trends not being artificially inflated by siting issues gets the briefest of mentions. Surrounding it is a sea of words from Paul Comrie-Thomson emphasising that the paper did find something interesting, that it was a worthy project, that it would be good if more science of this type could be done, etc.

And you know what? The completely un-skeptical Neilsen-Gammon goes along with this.

It is a strange performance by him. As with a couple of comments he made when the paper came out, he appears completely uninterested in the political use which Watts made of premature claims about his project, and is keen to defend Watts in setting up it up. He seems to think it is most unfair that anyone should point out the major way in which Watts' disproved his own central claim.

In this interview, Neilsen-Gammon also speaks in a way which provides much for climate skeptics to cherry pick; such as when he talks about the complexity of working out the effect of all of the forcings other than greenhouse gases.

Sure, he does manage to slip in that he thinks the clearest thing about climate is greenhouse forcing, and the sensitivity range for CO2 is 2 - 4 degrees, but this is almost glossed over. In another part of the interview he talks about how climate research is not only about warming, and he seems to think too much time is devoted to talking about AGW.

He certainly therefore makes for a puzzling figure in the climate science community. He seems to not care about how his message will be interpreted (skeptics will probably interpret it as 4/5 full in their favour, whereas his attitude to climate change seems to actually be the other way round.) He gives the impression of not caring at all about the political issues around climate science. If he did you would think he would try to throw in the occasional comment to the effect "now don't think that I am in any way a climate change skeptic or 'lukewarmener'. I think it crucially important to limit the range of possible temperature increases that we start to seriously reduce CO2."

I'll update this post when the transcript is available.