The blog … And Then There’s Physics wades deeply into the recent Monckton-Soon-Legates-Briggs paper. And, they conclude, what it is saying is that, conditional upon no feedbacks, equilibrium climate sensitivity (“ECS”) needs to be small. Except that they don’t say that explicitly, dressing it up (presumably to look important).

So why didn’t they say so in the first place?

Update, 3^rd March 2015

Dr Wei-Hock Soon, co-author of the paper discussed here, defended his calculations and position, at an event sponsored by The Heartland Institute. Dr Soon’s official statement is available. [Replace by link to this page instead since the former page is now missing.] I would much rather he respond in technical detail to the critique of those calculations, releasing that as well, whether in the original journal, or through arXiv.org.

Heartland might want to portray Dr Soon as a martyr, and, indeed, I’d prefer the discussion to be limited to the technical details. But the public does not understand technical details, and just pays attention to the cloud from a scientific dust-up. Various individuals accusing many scientists of ‘being climate alarmists’ have repeatedly done the same, trying to involve and tarnish as many scientists as they can. It may be true that Dr Soon’s case and publication is a “troll”, something which Greenpeace and others have been suckered into exploiting. After all, he has three other co-authors on the paper, fiction writer Monckton, the ever-religious Legates, and the ever-entertaining Briggs. Briggs, for example, claims he was “being groomed to take over a spot at Lawrence Livermore lab“, a prestigous national laboratory, and was rejected because of his stance on climate change.

(Update, 2019-01-29)

The key links to Dr Soon’s statement has been removed from the Heartland Institute site linked above. I have instead replaced them with a link to Dr Soon’s standard page at Heartland.