Oh look! It's The Oregon Institute Of Science & Medicine, Back With A "New" Paper!

[hatrack]

10 October 2007
Oregon Institute of Science and Malarkience

A large number of US scientists (to our direct knowledge: engineers, biologists, computer scientists and geologists) received a package in the mail this week. The package consists of a colour preprint of a 'new' article by Robinson, Robinson and Soon and an exhortation to sign a petition demanding that the US not sign the Kyoto Protocol. If you get a feeling of deja vu, it is because this comes from our old friends, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and is an attempt to re-invigorate the highly criticised 1999 "Oregon Petition".

The article itself is just an update of the original article, minus an author (Baliunas), with a switch of Robinson children (Zachary's out, Noah is in), but with a large number of similar errors and language. As in previous case, this paper too, is not peer reviewed. Since this is a rehash of the previous paper plus a few more cherry-picked statistics of dubious relevance, instead of tediously going through the whole thing ourselves, we are going to try something new - an open source debunking.

EDIT

Just to get you started, all versions of the paper make a mistake in the dating of Keigwin's Sargasso Sea record by 50 years (Figure 2 in early versions, Figure 1 now) since they do not notice that the published dates are in 'years BP' (Before Present) which is conventionally dated from 1950, not 2000. And that's even without getting into the question of why this is the only paleo-record they highlight, or on what logical basis they put the '2006′ value on.

In another example, the authors appear to think that human breathing out of CO2 is contributing to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. (Actually since that carbon comes directly and indirectly from recent plants taking it out of the air, our breathing is carbon neutral). Additionally, they take the ratio of temperature change to CO2 change in the ice core record and assume that is the climate sensitivity of climate to CO2 as opposed to the other way around.

There is much, much more. Have at it!

EDIT/END

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/oregon-institute-of-science-and-malarkey/#more-480