OMG...too easy. You really aren't good at this.
It seems Rathbone is still content to quote from wattsupwiththat.com, a pseudo-science climate-denial blog run by a TV weather man. The graph and editorial posted in response to WAToffee is by Tim Ball. Tim Ball is a lying hack and not a climate scientist. Simple as that. Here's what we know about Tim Ball:
Timothy Ball, a less well-known denier, is a former professor at the University of Winnipeg. Over the last decade he has given over 600 public talks on science and the environment, at the breakneck pace of over one talk every six days. Between 2002 and 2007 he wrote thirty-nine opinion pieces and thirty-two letters to the editor in twenty-four Canadian newspapers, a rate of one a month. Despite this rapid pace, he found time to write for the denier website Tech Central Station, and to appear in both the denier documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle and in a Fox News special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, hosted by Glenn Beck. Ball was associated with Friends of Science, a great-sounding name but in practice funded by oil and gas companies. Ball then left Friends of Science in order to establish the (even greater sounding) Natural Resources Stewardship Project. Two of its three directors were PR flacks for energy industry clients.
In 2006, Ball rashly initiated a battle that ended in defeat. In an opinion piece published in the Calgary Herald newspaper, he claimed both that he held Canada’s first Ph.D. in climatology, and that he was a professor of the subject at the University of Winnipeg for twenty-eight years. Ball also disparaged another Canadian professor, Dan Johnson, Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Lethbridge. Johnson wrote a letter to the Herald accusing Ball of inflating his (Ball’s) resume, and claiming that Ball “did not show any evidence of research regarding climate and atmosphere.” Ball sued everybody in sight.
In the ensuring legal battle, Ball confessed to inflating his resume, admitted that he had been a professor for only eight years (not twenty-eight), and acknowledged that his doctoral degree was in geography, not climatology. The Herald newspaper expressed confidence in Johnson’s letter, and wrote “The plaintiff (Ball) is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist.” In June 2007, the time came to show up in court; with his reputation in ruins, Ball dropped his lawsuit. (http://monthlyreview.org/2012/05/01/petroleum-and-propaganda)
As to the misquote that Rathbone posted, this is text-book pseudo-science. While Rathbone claims to use logic in his arguments, he still can't be bothered to even post a correctly worded quote out of context as a form of quote mining. Instead, he has laughably doubled-down by quoting from the paper I posted, in which the opening quote talks about uncertainty in modeling. In Rathbone's simple-minded analyses, he equates uncertainty with wrongness (such logic would make nautical travel or baking a cake impossible, as apparently we can't rely on future expectations in the face of uncertainty...LOL), and again tries to quote-mine a climate scientists to make his case. This is quite funny and reminiscent of creationists who quote-mine an evolutionary biologist who talks about uncertainty/gaps in our understanding of evolution as a means to say that
all evolution is wrong. Typical simple-minded stuff.
Rathbone simply doesn't understand what modeling is. But this isn't surprising as he truly thinks that NASA was able to land humans on the moon because they sent animals up into space prior to humans, and this was what allowed them to develop models. Sadly, I'm not making this up! The quote is here:
"The moon landings were based on computer models devised by empirical observation - animals sent into space - climate models have no such grasp of the variables hence their failures but thanks for directing the reader to their inherent problems." --Barry Rathbone.
So, apparently we have an admission that models are useful ("...based on computer models..."), and then we have some typical garbled nonsense about "grasp of variables" which again betrays that Rathbone hasn't the faintest conceptualization of what scientific models are. This is also evident from his discussion of null hypothesis significance testing, which is rarely used in stochastic modeling--there are many ways to model uncertainty and determine the robustness of a model (this was, in fact, the point of the Dave Frame's paper that I posted above, which Rathbone tried to simplistically quote-mine--again!), and most don't rely on an alpha = 0.05 significance level.
The fact that Rathbone is content to quote from an
anti-vax site (without attribution, of course) to support his laughable agenda is pretty much all you need to know.
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