Cheers - John

Steve has now reappeared on his blog (the Realscience one was where his demise was announced) to say that the site was hacked and rumours of his death are premature. Curiouser and curiouser....

Cheers - John

PS - he also states unequivocally that this was nothing to do with politics or climate...

I suspect and hope 'Steve?' is fine. I don't see there is any reason to think otherwise 

It is odd though, I do sometimes read his work and wonder if it matches the scientific thought, vision, critical thinking, graphical skills and incisiveness of 'inferno' over on 'denial depot'. And, strike me down with a feather, 'inferno' reappeard only a few days ago! Maybe the two are connected

So, keep well Steve, it's good to have people competing at the cutting edge of blog science 

"Ignorance-the-true-engine-of-science"

http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/23/ignorance-the-true-engine-of-science/ 

I wonder to what extent "ignorance" fuels climate change science?

Not a lot, by my experience, because 97% of scientists seem so sure about everything AGW.

Not my view or what you get from listening to the papers at the EGU last week. Put it like this, we know that increasing carbon dioxide is causing warming but we don't know all the detail of the climate system and some of that is  important to the degree of warming and especially to regional climate change. To use an analogy with another area of physics, if we drop an apple we know it will fall to the earth because of gravity but we don't know the detail of how the gravitiational force works or how it is related to other forces.

Another frankly bizarre observation from someone who professes to have a questioning mind.  If 97% of scientists are sure about the basic premise of AGW why don't you apply your questioning mind to the matter of why so many knowledgeable scientists are in agreement and you're out of step?

Could it be that you're wrong and merely trying to shore up your resistance by scraping around for the occasionally contrary views of the 3%?

When did climate science go off the rails, and start talking about facts and consensus (with anyone disagreeing with their “facts” and consensus as deniers)? 

That'll be you then? 
It's hardly a bizarre piece - more of a shrewd observation about the apparent desire to have things black and white when most often it's more grey-ish. 
Then the need for this 100% certainty starts to require assumptions and assertions which are not grounded in reality.

Interesting but entirely unrelated to my post

If you say so 

What other interpretation would you put on your post then? 

Let's be charitable, maybe you were distracted by the sheep...

JC comment:  Another book that I haven’t read, but I am ordering this one.  I find what I’ve read so far to be absolutely exhilarating.  How and why did climate science stop having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt? When did climate science go off the rails, and start talking about facts and consensus (with anyone disagreeing with their “facts” and consensus as deniers)?  Sounds like it might have been Madrid, 1995.

Ignorance according to this book, fuels science, but not it seemsto Judith Curry, climate science. Tom defended the consensus against Judiths point, but it seems to have gone over your head  Gandalf?

But in your world, Gandalf, perhaps ignorance is not the driver of climate science. Yep, bizarre that. An enquiring mind is driven by the unknown or ignorance - it has certainly been behind my quest to know "why", "how", "what" and "when".

Five years later, the Arctic ice at this time of year is way higher than in 2007.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

Not really.

Just a small difference of opinion on a specific aspect of climate science.

No one knows everything as yet.

Well, you certainly seem to "know" a lot of things.

Oh really Stephen, whoever said that?

So you cherry pick the lowest year in the record and then express mock surprise when we haven't got that low this year.

Of course you are never going to observe that of the last 260 weeks only 4 weeks have been above the mean, are you - because that would undermine your questionable stance on AGW and Arctic ice.

Perhaps you might want to acknowledge that only 1.5% of daily values above average is significant.  Or perhaps not, knowing your capacity for self-delusion.

Don't forget you are the one who said an ice free Arctic at the end of the summer melt wouldn't be anything about which to be concerned....

Though a 'shocking sight' an ice free Arctic is now inevitable and ,in retrospect, we should have worried when the Arctic started to increase its 'travel speed' of the buoys positioned there?

The loss of structural integrity of the pack, due to it's 'thinning', was really when the game was up for the summer pack (in a warming world).

As we can see at the moment last years older ice is flowing out of Fram at an alarming rate (even to the point of increasing the Greenland sea ice area on C.T.'s 'extent plot')

We have to hope this;

http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif

stops and that the current synoptics do not keep repeating and driving this type of drift;

http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticicespddrf_nowcast_anim30d.gif

Sadly the loss of ice , and it impacts on N.H. circulation, may be the cause of this early Exodus of older ice?

Judith says these things to promote discussion. I was at the European Geophysical Union meeting in Vienna last week attended by 11,000 scientists. Micheal Mann was honoured for his  work in paleoclimate research. He gave an excellent lecture on what is known and what is not known about man-made climate change and what can be learnt from past climate change. He particularly discussed the question of what we can tell about the climate sensitivity to doubling CO2 and what the uncertainties are.

We seem to be in agreement SC.  The cult of the denier and misguided sceptic is indeed on its knees - and about time too!

It's partially true, the desire to understand what is not understood now. However, progress can't be made without a starting point and that starting point has to be what is known

We see this again and again. One minute 'sceptics' know that it's all GCRs, the Sun, and anything else which isn't CO2 and the next minute our knowledge is so weak and flawed that we don't know anything. All this flailing about looking for the last floating straw in a torrent of evidence is quite amusing.

I wonder how you find time to achieve anything on that basis Dave. Every morning when you open your eyes you need to estalish who you are, whether the laws that describe gravity, light, sound and so on are still valid.  Whether what you put in the fridge last night is still what it was....

Just when I think I understand how you are approaching this you come out with another bizarre statement.  Maybe you don't mean it like this, maybe you are just debatiing yourself into a peculiar corner?

Surely you question something when it becomes apparent that it is no longer producing the correct answer or explanation.  Which leads us straight back to the issue of how much you accept and how much you challenge/question.

The pursuit of knowledge is admirable.  Some of this is rather less so.