In a refreshing moment to climate science, Kerry Emanuel has come out and agreed that the more we know the more we know we don’t know.

*Unfortunately* for the world of climate science though, we still have the same old realclimate, the Beijing of the “scientific” world, who will be guilty of suppressing alternative views until the cows come home, or until they answer the question honestly:
“Is it true that when random numbers are put into the MBH98 procedure, a hockeystick shape usually results?”

I’m not sure I’ll ever have the time to comment to Real Climate (useless things tend to get pushed aside).

I also couldn’t seem to make a comment on your original post, so I’m essentially making it here.

Stefan Rahmstorf says the IPCC AR4 figure is a better analysis than yours, but that assertion is clearly wrong.

The IPCC AR4 figure has the temperature predictions (more properly, “pseudoscientific projections”) from ALL the scenarios. Your analysis makes the attempt to compare the actual temperatures to the scenario that you think has forcings (CO2 emissions and resulting concentrations) closest to what has actually been observed.

It is self-evidently (I’d think) better to compare only to the scenario that has forcings closest to what have been observed. Otherwise, the projections for temperature can be right, even though the input forcings are completely wrong.

My only criticism of your approach is that you only considered CO2. But I recognize it’s much more difficult to include SO2, methane, black carbon, organic carbon, etc. (The data for those are not nearly as available.)

Mark

The RC comments fill very quickly with ideologues from both the alarmist and denialist side. It’s the same people over and over, so I suspect some use services to immediately discover when a fresh post was posted just so they can get their comments up. Comments are vital to blogs, but figuring out how to deal with them is difficult! (My method is to figure out what the precise problem is and write a plugin!)