By Roger Pielke Jr., Prometheus

Last week scientists at the Real Climate blog gave their confirmation bias synapses a workout by explaining that eight years of climate data is meaningless, and people who pay any attention to recent climate trends are “misguided.” I certainly agree that we should exhibit cautiousness in interpreting short-duration observations, nonetheless we should always be trying to explain (rather than simply discount) observational evidence to avoid the trap of confirmation bias.

So it was interesting to see IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri exhibit “misguided” behavior when he expressed some surprise about recent climate trends in The Guardian: Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said he would look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century. “One would really have to see on the basis of some analysis what this really represents,” he told Reuters, adding “are there natural factors compensating?” for increases in greenhouse gases from human activities.

Ironically, by suggesting that their might be some significance to recent climate trends, Dr. Pachauri has provided ammunition to those very same skeptics that he disparages. Perhaps Real Climate will explain how misguided he is, but somehow I doubt it.

For the record, I accept the conclusions of IPCC Working Group I. I don’t know how to interpret climate observations of the early 21st century, but believe that there are currently multiple valid hypotheses. I also think that we can best avoid confirmation bias, and other cognitive traps, by making explicit predictions of the future and testing them against experience. The climate community, or at least its activist wing, studiously avoids forecast verification. It just goes to show, confirmation bias is more a more comfortable state than dissonance—and that goes for people on all sides of the climate debate. Read full post here.

By Joe Bastardi, Meteorologist

Today, we have “Gods” walking among us that seem to know how an infinite system will turn out in the future, because they are armed with the idols that are known are models. They are given credit for things that have not occurred and in all likelihood, will not occur.

To those who want this debate shut down, it seems to me that you simply wish to flee what you don’t have the facts to fight. Or can it be some other reason, perhaps unrelated to the real issue. I am a skeptic not only to the results you claim inevitable, but your true motives. Instead of confronting cold hard facts with open and free debate to try to get to the right answer, we have a group of people that know better and will use future projections of a model as fact. One side chooses to ignore (which I think forms the basis for the word ignorance) other data while the other side says, lets look harder at what we are seeing to make sure.

How can this be even allowed, to assume the model knows the answer. The problem with this is not only the fundamental problem of predicting the future, but its bad democracy and bad science too, and can ruin the lives of many through the turmoil it can cause in unintended results. Read more here.

By John Tierney, New York Times Tierney Lab Blog

The New York Times reported this week on the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) Minority report debunking fears of polar bear extinction. John Tierney’s January 31 article, titled ”Polar Bears and Seer Suckers,” called the EPW Minority’s report “persuasive at debunking the predictions of polar bears going extinct this century.”

Tierney noted that polar bear extinction fears are “being stoked to build support in the U.S. for listing them as a ‘threatened’ or ‘endangered’ species even though it’s not clear that their overall numbers are declining.” Tierney noted that the EPW Minority’s polar bear report featured “one very hard piece of evidence that casts doubt on the doomsday predictions: a polar bear jawbone that appears to be at least 110,000 years old, meaning that polar bears have survived eras with considerably warmer temperatures than today.” [Note: For more on the discovery of an ancient jaw bone which “confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago” and thus survived past warming periods, see - LINK]

“The report points to, among other sources, an amusing analysis of the polar-bear predictions conducted by three researchers, including J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Armstrong, the editor of a standard text, ‘Principles of Forecasting,’ is the originator of what he calls the Seer-Sucker Theory: ‘No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, seers will find suckers,’” Tierney wrote.

“Dr. Armstrong and his coauthors, Kesten C. Green of Monash University and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, conclude that the most influential forecasts of polar-bear populations violate at least 73 of the 90 relevant principles of scientific forecasting,” Tierney wrote. “They criticize the forecasters for making large extrapolations based on sparse data and questionable models, relying too heavily on a single expert, ignoring contradictory data and tailoring conclusions to fit a political goal (listing the polar bear as a ‘threatened’ species),” Tierney added.