Justin Gillis, the green guy at the New York Times, has an extraordinary take on climate sensitivity in his latest column. Discussing the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report he tries to claim that all the empirical and semi-empirical measures of ECS are "outliers"
...we have mainstream science that says if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, which is well on its way to happening, the long-term rise in the temperature of the earth will be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but more likely above 5 degrees. We have outlier science that says the rise could come in well below 3 degrees.
...the drafters of the report lowered the bottom end in a range of temperatures for how much the earth could warm, treating the outlier science as credible.
Now I must say, I thought that one area where there was agreement was that nobody seriously believed in values over 4.5°, let alone that that values over 5°C were "more likely". But to argue that a swathe of empirical estimates are outliers and then to fail to mention that the higher values are hypotheses generated by GCMs is extraordinary even by the normally abysmal standards of green journalism. It's theory trumping measurement - a simple, clear and unequivocal rejection of the scientific method.
No doubt this is Gillis generating helpful cover for the greens in the IPCC, who will argue that "extremists on both sides" were unhappy and that therefore they have got the balance about right. It doesn't give you a warm feeling about the report. And there are others sending out the same signal too. In her post last night, Judith Curry noted that the old-timer scientivists still have the upper hand in the IPCC:
When I first saw the list of IPCC authors for the AR5, I was excited by all the new names including some excellent scientists that are well known to me and whose integrity and honesty I trust absolutely. I ran into one of these scientists a few years ago at a meeting, and he said how excited he was to be a part of the IPCC, how a review on his topic was long overdue, and that he looked forward to the outcome of this review. I ran into another of these individuals at the AGU meeting last fall, who had become jaded by the process. He said it is a constant struggle between the newcomers, who want to ‘tell it like it is,’ versus the old hands who are worried primarily about what was said in the AR4 and not providing fodder for the skeptics. Even if the ‘good guys’ prevail at the chapter level, I have the sad suspicion that the people who are really in charge will be playing politics with the document whereby primary concerns are not providing fodder for skeptics and showing continued increasing ‘confidence’.
Everything is pointing to the continued corruption of the IPCC. It's looking very much as if AR5 is dead in the water.