Phoma destructiva’s 2nd Comment on Pubpeer – Watts Up With That?

By Andy May and Marcel Crok

Phoma Destructiva’s full comment is shown indented, as a block quote. To see the original go here. To see the abstract of our paper, go here. The official paper is still paywalled, to download the full final submission of our paper, fully peer-reviewed, for free click here or go to my ResearchGate page here. Our paper, published May 29, 2024, is in the 99.7%ile of all 26.5 million research papers followed by Wiley.

To download a bibliography with most of the articles cited in the discussion below, go here.

Below is our discussion of Phoma Destructiva’s second comment. His comment is indented and the portion of his comment quoting our first response begins with “Re:”. Phoma’s response follows his quote of us and our response follows the block quote in normal text.

Re: “The first part of the main critique, is actually a lengthy critique of Javier Vinós’ book Climate of Past, Present and Future, that has nothing to do with our paper.“

Incorrect. As shown in #1, citations 18, 19, and 20 in the authors’ paper are to Vinós’ book. The authors use that book to suggest some of the anthropogenic warming could instead be due to “natural forces“:

“Since general circulation climate models and the modern CO2 and greenhouse gas warming hypothesis were developed in the 1960s and 70s(17) many natural climate oscillations have been discovered. These long-term climatic oscillations and the resulting “climate regime shifts”(18) strongly suggest that natural forces, possibly driven by cyclic changes in the Sun,(19) are causing some of the recent global warming observed since 1920, or even earlier.(20)“

We stand by our original statement and see no merit in Phoma destructiva’s argument. We made no predictions, and Vinós’ predictions are not relevant.

Re: “In the introduction to his critique, Phoma destructiva writes: “the authors and their cited sources likely underestimated anthropogenic global warming.” We provide no estimate of the anthropogenic component of global warming.“

The authors repeatedly try to attribute at least some of the anthropogenic global warming to non-anthropogenic factors, as in the above citation of Vinós. That is underestimation of anthropogenic global warming, regardless of whether the authors provide a precise quantitative estimate anthropogenic warming. Attributing to X what was actually caused by Y is underestimation of Y’s impact, regardless of whether one provides a precise quantitative estimate of Y’s impact.

We believe and provide evidence that “at least some of the anthropogenic global warming” is due to non-anthropogenic factors. “Some” is not an estimate. The dictionary definition if “estimate” is clear and unambiguous “roughly calculate or judge the value, number, quantity, or extent of.”

Re: “The next section attempts to dispute the existence of all multidecadal ocean oscillations based on two papers by Michael Mann and co-authors, Mann, et al. (2020) and Mann et al. (2021).“

Other papers were cited, including: Mann 2014, Clement 2015, Stolpe 2017, and Haustein 2019. And the argument was against an unforced “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)” discussed in the authors’ paper. Such an unforced ocean cycle likely does not exist, as illustrated by the fact that contrarians who employed it generated failed temperature trend predictions (#1).

“Unforced” and “forced” events are poorly defined climate model classifications with very flexible definitions and little meaning in the real world. Our paper does not use the terms “forced” and “unforced” for that reason. Bringing these terms up is both a red herring and a strawman fallacy. Our paper works with the real-world terms “Anthropogenic” and “Natural.” Forced and unforced introduces an unnecessary level of complexity and is simply a juvenile attempt at deflection from the real issues discussed in our paper. Bottom line, the AMO is a real oscillation that has been successfully traced back to 1600AD, thus it persists from well into the pre-industrial to modern times and must have a natural component.

Re: “In fact, he admits: “Based on the available observational and modelling evidence, the most plausible explanation for the multidecadal peak seen in modern climate observations is that it reflects the response to a combination of natural and anthropogenic forcing during the historical era.” (Mann, Steinman, & Miller, 2020) We agree with this sentence, and it is consistent with our paper.“

No, it’s not consistent with the authors’ paper, as explained in #1 with citations to Dr. Karsten Haustein and Dr. Peter Jacobs in 2019, alongside Haustein 2019 and CarbonBrief. Again, if the observed peaks are forced instead of being unforced, then they’re already accounted for and are not some independent contributor to warming beyond the forcings already accounted for:

That contradicts this from the authors’ paper:

“What if the so-called human-caused warming from 1976 to the present day was boosted by a natural cycle? It would mean that the IPCC calculation of the impact of human greenhouse gases was too high […]“

Again with the “unforced” and “forced.” These are meaningless climate model terms. Mann writes: “combination of natural and anthropogenic forcing during the historical era.” Our paper contains, “What if the so-called human-caused warming from 1976 to the present day was boosted by a natural cycle.” What is the difference? We both believe that both anthropogenic and natural forces have contributed to the ocean oscillations like the AMO and “climate observations.” Hiding behind poorly defined terms like forced and unforced doesn’t change that fact.

Re: “Then the anonymous critique of our paper again resorts to comparing predictions by Vinós, (Wyatt & Curry, 2014), and others to the IPCC predictions. We made no predictions, we only cited observations.“

Predictions are tests of causal hypotheses. The authors cited Dr. Vinós’ hypothesis on what was causing some of the observed warming. So, it’s fine to evaluate the predictions of his hypothesis to see that those predictions fail. Similarly so for Dr. Curry’s failed predictions based on the AMO contributing to warming, and the IPCC’s successful predictions based on anthropogenic GHGs driving the warming.

We agree that predictions are an important part of the scientific process, but we didn’t make any in the paper, and this was deliberate. As for whether Vinós’ and Curry’s predictions are correct or not, you don’t know, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. The end of the prediction period is over a decade away. Don’t say “failed” when you don’t know.

Re: “This critique is a poster child for all that is wrong with modern climate science. Phoma destructiva sets up obvious strawmen from articles we cite, that are unrelated to our argument that observations show no dangers or net harm from climate change today, and then attacks his own strawmen, rather than our paper. This sort of irrelevant strawman fallacy is unfortunately very common in climate science and is never credible.“

It’s not a straw man when I quote the authors’ paper and then directly address what was quoted. The quotations show the authors’ paper suggests that warming that is actually anthropogenic was instead due to other factors, such as natural oscillations. Those suggestions are still in the paper, even if the authors highlight other arguments they made in their paper.

Your discussion of supposedly failed predictions by Vinós and Curry was a strawman. Your discussion of “forced” and “unforced” was a bait-and-switch strawman. Our suggestion that the AMO is a natural oscillation and has contributed to modern warming is well supported in the literature and in our paper. You are free to disagree with our conclusion, but our conclusion derives from the evidence and citations in our paper. You have not shown any evidence that our conclusion is incorrect, and neither have any of your sources.

Mann writes: “Based on the available observational and modelling evidence, the most plausible explanation for the multidecadal peak seen in modern climate observations is that it reflects the response to a combination of natural and anthropogenic forcing during the historical era.” (Mann, Steinman, & Miller, 2020). [Bold added]

So, it would seem he agrees with us.

If you truly believe all modern warming is anthropogenic, as the IPCC does, fine, but it is not consistent with the data we present in our paper, nor is it consistent with your sources.

Andy & Marcel