I am really worried about wading into the fray here. But as a long time believer that global warming is real AND man made, I ran into this article on Phys.org and it was suprising to me.
http://phys.org/news/2015-01-peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator-climate-exposes-errors.html
I would LOVE to find that my viewpoint on global warming is wrong. According to the article anyway, the original paper
"survived three rounds of tough peer review in which two of the reviewers had at first opposed the paper on the ground that it questioned the IPCC's predictions."
The paper's authors state
"Our work suggests that Man's influence on climate may have been much overstated. The role of the Sun has been undervalued. Our model helps to present a more balanced view."
Again, I am a stanch supporter of the man made global warming theory so please don't attack the messenger here. However, I am also a strong believer of the ability of science to be self correcting and, as much as my pride might take a hit, I would be completely willing to change my viewpoint in light of new evidence (provided that the evidence is fact based of course).
Has anyone read more about the subject paper or see any holes in the author's argument?
Just a couple thing that immediately jump out at me.
They keep saying what a respectable important journal it was published in, rather than the big name peer review journals or climate/atmospheric science specific journals it's an English language Chinese journal. Despite it's association with the Chinese Academy of Science it's impact factor is a relatively low 1.37
Second. Disagreeing with a large body of previous work without explaining why your results are different and putting forward a case for them being superior IS cause for failing peer review.
The paper claims it's virtue is simplicity, but when the simplified version gives different results that the full featured models the obvious conclusion is that it's been oversimplified and omitted important elements.
The graphic at the top purports to contrast observed warming vs a number of model results. It reports an observed warming trend going out to 2050, how we can have already observed the next 35 years is not explained.
Instead of the actual model run results they show only the final degrees per decade number from those results. The model results are not linear and have slower warming in the early period and faster warming later. This falsely represents the amount if warming they predicts in the "observed" period ending at 2050. In fact the actual results for even the highest emissions scenarios are much lower then drawn on this graphic.
On emissions scenarios, other than the Hansen "A" it doesn't say what emissions scenario the model model runs are for. The "A" scenario, however, is an ultra high CO2 emissions scenario designed to give the worst case possibility. Observed warming should come in below this level. (Actual observed forcing matches most closely to the "C" scenario). The actual Hansen "A" a scenario shows ~0.6 degrees of warming from 2000 - 2020, much lower than the 0.50 degrees C per decade the graphic climes, so again it looks like some outright dishonesty here.
The IPCC similarly does a wide range of emissions scenarios, they never justify which they are choosing and why, but some are clearly among the highest emission scenarios, while others are mid or low emissions scenarios. The pattern seems to be they pick higher emissions scenarios for older IPCC reports to try and create the false impression the IPCC is reducing it's warming projections as time goes on when in fact median expected Degrees C per doubling of CO2 has not change much in a long time.
It seems to me the whole point of the article is to make so many dishonest claims no one would take the time to debunk every singe one of them and if they did no one would read their efforts.
) and this one is no different, it's just more prominent (since there's more money involved) and has the interwebs to work with instead of just the usual media.