But this whole episode of turning science into a war of “deniers” and “Believers” would make for one great epistemology chapter (likely a book as it’s got so many dynamics going on…), and as I’ve said, I find the maths and the models of science both very useful. But even in the case of satellite orbits I must remind myself that at this point our maths have only provided us with a useful tool and general vocabulary that allows us to take advantage of certain properties that something we call “gravity” presents. Yet we still don’t know what “it” – gravity – is (we have some very promising theories, but none of them are final yet), and it plays hell with our maths at higher levels where we see we obviously still don’t have a great grasp of it because the maths start falling apart. The reality of “it”, and our useful representations of such. Very different things.

All of our knowledge is a mental model of the world filtered through the gates of perception. Mathematics is merely a more precise, unambiguous, and self-consistent way of expressing that knowledge, and deriving its logical implications.

The philosophy of epistemology gets quite deep – but I don’t think we have to go that far in this case. The problems with climate modelling are well-known, and have been talked about for ages – that bit isn’t news. But the observations of “reality” rely on models, too. Models of satellite orbits and detector performance and so on. We need to be a little bit careful.

There are two real significant issues here. The first is how much will this affect our understandings and what will the adjustments to the maths end up looking like? On that one I agree time will tell, and I’m in no rush to jump to any conclusion (the only one I have made so far is we don’t even know a fraction of what we are pretending to in this climate issue).

The second is social science stuff, a reminder that in the end it is a math problem we are talking about. It is not “climate”, or even reality we are dealing with, but rather our abstractions of them (we try to pretend they are the same). Math is most useful when you can “test” it. That actually requires *knowing* what the answer is, and then seeing if the equations we’ve worked out arrive there. If so, our math “works”, if not we’ve “misunderstood” something… Except we always misunderstand when we start thinking the maths and reality are actually interchangeable… Our maths will tell us what they are designed to, reality will do what it will. On this point I think it is, or should be, already relevant and of great significance…

I see a disconnect between what the paper argues and the words used by liberal media and certain deeply invested climate scientists use to try to downplay or dismiss it.

But as I said in #15, it’s too soon to tell what it’s real significance is.

Ah, the usual suspects try to wriggle! Here’s what Spencer actually said:
“I have received literally dozens of phone calls and e-mails asking basically the same question: did James Taylor’s Forbes article really represent what we published in our Remote Sensing journal article this week? [...] The short answer is that, while the title of the Forbes article (New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism) is a little over the top (as are most mainstream media articles about global warming science), the body of his article is — upon my re-reading of it — actually pretty good.

“About the only disconnect I can see is we state in our paper that, while the discrepancy between the satellite observations were in the direction of the models producing too much global warming, it is really not possible to say by how much. Taylor’s article makes it sound much more certain that we have shown that the models produce too much warming in the long term. (Which I think is true…we just did not actually ‘prove’ it.)”

Even Roy Spencer himself agrees.

The definition of science is not consensus. The Real Climate team will never, ever except any evidence that even slightly contradicts their theory.

Want proof? Look how many scientific papers include a line like “this does not question the science of global warming”.

Its a throw away line in virtually every climatology paper, even if the paper isn’t even close to suggesting as such. They do it because the Real Climate team will block every publication of every piece of material they can.

The Chief Alarmists wouldn’t lose faith in global warming even if there was an ice age.

The “impact factor” is a means of scientific suppression by a consensus.

Of course the side with more bodies will publish more and cite each other more. That doesn’t make the science more valid.