You must be confusing me with someone else. I’ve never said that post 1998 temps were falling. Plateau is my favourite word.

As for relying on a ‘single data point’, can you read? I edited the whole 14 years of climate emails. Took 3 miserable weeks.

And I’ve written often about the failings of “peer review”.

Not sure what your problems is John…

Still hanging on by fingernails to wishful thinking are we? As usual, you have drawn your conclusion from a single data point - an error in the review process. How you explain the very significant preponderance of error-free statements in the IPCC report is yet to be disclosed. It is certainly not just luck.

Nice it is to note that you now claim a “Global Temp Plateau” in lieu of a posited decline post 1998 or some such. I must have been asleep for a while, because I didn’t notice your retraction of your previously held belief that temps were falling.

Yes, new and forgotten facts do come to light and people - even your good self - do change opinion. Errors are made and corrected. Yet the overall truth remains, that the IPCC reports are the best that human frailty can deliver and that these reports, including the predictions within them, correlate very well indeed with the observed facts.

I choose to rely on advice which has been subjected to wide peer critique. You have again identified yourself as one who does not. Best of luck, because you and Tamas Calderwood are betting on a guess.

“Nothing would have pleased scientists more” to discover they were wrong. Read the emails. You couldn’t be further from the truth- their careers are on the line. If observations invalidate AGW, they’ll be ridiculed. Hence the desperation.

Whoever wrote this still doesn’t get it. Climate science “peer review” is hopelessly compromised at present. The practitioners themselves are highly politicised, not just “the context in which they operate”. As one of the chief protagonists (Trenberth) says himself in the well-known email and in a recent survey paper, climate science is full of uncertainties. There’s no question the dominant climate scientists have felt under siege for many years and that this has clouded their judgement, so to speak. Any deviation from The Line is punished severely. The recent global temp plateau and failure of many lesser predictions has generated paranoia. Read all the emails to see this, not just the handful of allegedly scandalous ones.

Annabel Crabbe was inadvertently right in denigrating “East Bumcrack” academics- status is everything in academia. The Cinderella climate scientists almost all hail from Bumcrack universities…they struggled to get money and attention in the 80s and early 90s (read the emails), then came the big breakthrough. More money and attention (but not academic status) than they ever dreamed possible. As their dubious practices have been exposed and as the AGW hypothesis has lost headway since 2000, panic set in. They have a long way to fall. They know there’s a real risk that their cascading series of computer models could end up revealed as an intellectual Ponzi scheme.

Science is a self-correcting method, based on continuous recording of new observations and refinement of theory, which outline patterns and trends subject to continuous testing and revision.

Which is a process based on scepticism and intellectual honesty, the method by which major insights have been gained into natural processes and laws.

Nothing would have pleased scientists more than if they discovered climate change is not actually happening, or the Earth started to cool, or in the very least humans emissions and land clearing are not responsible for climate change.

By contrast, the so-called “climate change sceptics” have an ideological position of “No global warming” or “no anthropogenic global warming”, in support of which they have a standard 10 or so long-refuted arguments. Some of them manufacture “data” and ignore the basic laws of physics and chemistry, yet they have the support of powerful vested interests and major platforms in the media, including hundreds of bogus internet sites.

A disinformation campaign whose cosnequences defy contemplation.