The Nobel Prize (for propaganda)

In a fresh challenge to claims that there is scientific "consensus" on climate change, Prof Ivar Giaever has resigned from the American Physical Society, where his peers had elected him a fellow to honour his work.

The society, which has 48,000 members, has adopted a policy statement which states: "The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring."

But Prof Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel award for physics, told The Sunday Telegraph. "Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science."

The US-based Norwegian physicist, who is the chief technology officer at Applied Biophysics Inc and a retired academic at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world, added: "Global warming has become the new religion."

Prof Giaever was one of Barack Obama's leading scientific supporters during the 2008 president election campaign, joining 70 Nobel science laureates endorsing his candidacy.

But he has since criticised Mr Obama over his stance on global warming and was one of more 100 scientists who wrote an open letter to him, declaring: "We maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated."

He has now parted company with the APS after what he called lengthy consideration. In an email to its executive office Kate Kirby, he said he "cannot live" with its official statement on global warming.

He questioned whether the average temperature of "the whole earth for a whole year" can be accurately measured, but contended that even if the results are accurate, they indicate the climate has actually been "amazingly stable" for 150 years.

And he concluded that in any case, both "human health and happiness have definitely improved" over the so-called "warming period" of the last century and a half.

In its policy statement, the APS declares: "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now."

Prof Giaever is one of the most prominent scientific dissenters challenging the controversial man-made global warming claims of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US vice-president Al Gore.

He has testified to the US Senate about his doubts, calling himself a "sceptic" on global warming and citing both his birthplace and other scientific scares he has seen come and go during his career.

"I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming?" he said. "I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around.

"Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money."

Prof Giaever, 82, is not alone in rejecting the APS's insistence that there is consensus on the existence and severity of man-made global warming.

Several prominent members have expressed frustration that it has refused to reconsider its position – drawn up in 2007 – in the light of the "Climategate" controversy about the findings of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

"Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today," dissenters wrote in an open letter to it its governing board.

Last year, another sceptic, Hal Lewis, a University of California professor quit the group, describing global warming as a "scam" and a "pseudoscientific fraud".

In a statement issued after Prof Lewis' departure, the APS said that "on the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree... carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity".

Tawanda Johnson, an APS spokeswoman, told The Sunday Telegraph that the society was "disappointed" by Prof Giaever's decision. It believed the criticisms were based on "misunderstandings" but would not "engage in a back-and-forth on Ivar's observations".

The APS says it that its climate change statement does not assert that "anthropogenic" (man-made) climate change is incontrovertible – but that the evidence of global warming is.

The society continues: "The graph of global temperature vs. time for the last 30 years shows just that. The statement also contains the following language: 'Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate.' That statement is based on basic principles of molecular physics and thermodynamics.

"Finally, the statement acknowledges uncertainties in the science: 'Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth's climate.'"

more...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...ing-as-Nobel-laureate-resigns-in-protest.html

Click to expand...

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.

I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.

Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.

Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.

Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.

Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.

Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.​

Are you with me so far? A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.

Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience. So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming. So, in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment.

Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles. It was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do.

This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the whole craze after a night at the pub. Every other explanation – ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning – was balderdash. The entire field of “cereology” was pseudoscience, as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated.

Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made.

So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology” after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists.

A Channel 4 team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were “genuine” or “hoaxed” – ie, man made. He assured them they could not have been made by people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man was poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a government minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by taking the cereologist’s side: “of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes”. What? The same happened when Doug and Dave owned up; everybody just went on believing. They still do.

Lesson number 2: debunking is like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.

In medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseudoscience is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary novel by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance, based on the real story of an eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen.

Gordon was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by medical folk like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon this discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet Abrams’s novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a flawed human being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas – such as a dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist one minute and scientist the next.

Lesson number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist.

Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall was not just ignored but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry. Eventually he won the Nobel prize.

Just this month Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying.”

That’s lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right.

What sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the evidence that fits our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence that contradicts it. We all do this all the time. It’s not, as we often assume, something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains conspiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange superstitions.

Bertrand Russell pointed this out many years ago: “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”

Lesson no 5: keep a sharp eye out for confirmation bias in yourself and others.

There have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain”, Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” and Tim Harford’s “Adapt” are explorations of the power of confirmation bias. And what I find most unsettling of all is Gardner’s conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed, the more you know, the more you fall for confirmation bias. Expertise gives you the tools to seek out the confirmations you need to buttress your beliefs.

Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.

Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.

Here’s what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-seller Limits to Growth in 1972:

“Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.”​

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts", said Richard Feynman.

Lesson 6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience.

Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.

Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.

I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.

I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.

Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before.

For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.

It was warmer in the Middle ages and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

Stalagmites, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time.

Sea level is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating. Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century. There has been no significant warming in Antarctica, with the exception of the peninsula. Methane has largely stopped increasing. Tropical storm intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years. Your probability of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s. Malaria has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.

And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

No doubt, there will be plenty of people thinking “what about x?” Well, if you have an X that persuades you that rapid and dangerous climate change is on the way, tell me about it. When I asked a senior government scientist this question, he replied with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. That is to say, a poorly understood hot episode, 55 million years ago, of uncertain duration, uncertain magnitude and uncertain cause.

Meanwhile, I see confirmation bias everywhere in the climate debate. Hurricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of golden toads – all cited wrongly as evidence of climate change. A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is “just weather”; a flood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas is “the sort of weather we can expect more of”. A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory.

To see confirmation bias in action, you only have to read the climategate emails, documents that have undermined my faith in this country’s scientific institutions. It is bad enough that the emails unambiguously showed scientists plotting to cherry-pick data, subvert peer review, bully editors and evade freedom of information requests. What’s worse, to a science groupie like me, is that so much of the rest of the scientific community seemed OK with that. They essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, yeh, big deal, boys will be boys.

Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s how the IPCC put it in its latest report.

“In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3.

Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.

So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.

The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive. What does the empirical evidence say? Since 1960 we have had roughly one-third of a doubling, so we must have had almost half of the greenhouse warming expected from a doubling – that’s elementary arithmetic, given that the curve is agreed to be logarithmic. Yet if you believe the surface thermometers (the red and green lines), we have had about 0.6C of warming in that time, at the rate of less than 0.13C per decade – somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple lines).

So we are on track for 1.2C. We are on the blue line, not the red line.

[SEE ON-LINE .pdf for missing graph]​

Remember Jim Hansen of NASA told us in 1988 to expect 2-4 degrees in 25 years. We are experiencing about one-tenth of that. We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990.

Ah, says the consensus, sulphur pollution has reduced the warming, delaying the impact, or the ocean has absorbed the extra heat. Neither of these post-hoc rationalisations fit the data: the southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the northern in the last 30 years, yet the majority of the sulphur emissions were in the northern hemisphere.

And ocean heat content has decelerated, if not flattened, in the past decade.

By contrast, many heretical arguments seem to me to be paragons of science as it should be done: transparent, questioning and testable.

For instance, earlier this year, a tenacious British mathematician named Nic Lewis started looking into the question of sensitivity and found that the only wholly empirical estimate of sensitivity cited by the IPCC had been put through an illegitimate statistical procedure which effectively fattened its tail on the upward end – it hugely increased the apparent probability of high warming at the expense of low warming. When this is corrected, the theoretical probability of warming greater than 2.3C is very low indeed. Like all the other errors in the IPCC report, including the infamous suggestion that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 rather than 2350, this mistake exaggerates the potential warming. It is beyond coincidence that all these errors should be in the same direction. The source for the Himalayan glacier mistake was a non-peer reviewed WWF report and it occurred in a chapter, two of whose coordinating lead authors and a review editor were on WWF’s climate witness scientific advisory panel. Remember too that the glacier error was pointed out by reviewers, who were ignored, and that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, dismissed the objectors as practitioners of “voodoo science”.

Journalists are fond of saying that the IPCC report is based solely on the peer-reviewed literature. Rajendra Pachauri himself made that claim in 2008, saying:

...we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don't settle for anything less than that.​

That’s a voodoo claim. The glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

The irony of course is that much of the green movement began as heretical dissent. Greenpeace went from demanding that the orthodox view of genetically modified crops be challenged, and that the Royal Society was not to be trusted, to demanding that heresy on climate change be ignored and the Royal Society could not be wrong.

Talking of Greenpeace, did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.

By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative reporting the media has forgotten how to do. In America, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwiththat.com; in Canada, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit exposed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org; here in Britain, Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the climategate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net. In Australia, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannenova.com.au.

The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.

In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.

Thank you very much for listening.

Click to expand...

Ever since the first Climategate e-mail release, the public has become increasingly aware that scientists are not unbiased. Of course, most scientists with a long enough history in their fields already knew this (I discussed the issue at length in my first book Climate Confusion), but it took the first round of Climategate e-mails to demonstrate it to the world.

The latest release (Climategate 2.0 http://foia2011.org/ ) not only reveals bias, but also some private doubts among the core scientist faithful about the scientific basis for the IPCC’s policy goals. Yet, the IPCC’s “cause” (Michael Mann’s term) appears to trump all else.

So, when the science doesn’t support The Cause, the faithful turn toward discussions of how to craft a story which minimizes doubt about the IPCC’s findings. After considerable reflection, I’m going to avoid using the term ‘conspiracy’ to describe this activity, and discuss it in terms of scientific bias.

It’s Impossible to Avoid Bias
We are all familiar with competing experts in a trial who have diametrically opposed opinions on some matter, even given the same evidence. This happens in science all the time.

Even if we have perfect measurements of Nature, scientists can still come to different conclusions about what those measurements mean in terms of cause and effect. So, biases on the part of scientists inevitably influence their opinions. The formation of a hypothesis of how nature works is always biased by the scientist’s worldview and limited amount of knowledge, as well as the limited availability of research funding from a government that has biased policy interests to preserve.

Admittedly, the existence of bias in scientific research – which is always present — does not mean the research is necessarily wrong. But as I often remind people, it’s much easier to be wrong than right in science. This is because, while the physical world works in only one way, we can dream up a myriad ways by which we think it works. And they can’t all be correct.

So, bias ends up being the enemy of the search for scientific truth because it keeps us from entertaining alternative hypotheses for how the physical world works. It increases the likelihood that our conclusions are wrong.

The IPCC’s Bias
In the case of global warming research, the alternative (non-consensus) hypothesis that some or most of the climate change we have observed is natural is the one that the IPCC must avoid at all cost. This is why the Hockey Stick was so prized: it was hailed as evidence that humans, not Nature, rule over climate change.

The Climategate 2.0 e-mails show how entrenched this bias has become among the handful of scientists who have been the most willing participants and supporters of The Cause. These scientists only rose to the top because they were willing to actively promote the IPCC’s message with their particular fields of research.

Unfortunately, there is no way to “fix” the IPCC, and there never was. The reason is that its formation over 20 years ago was to support political and energy policy goals, not to search for scientific truth. I know this not only because one of the first IPCC directors told me so, but also because it is the way the IPCC leadership behaves. If you disagree with their interpretation of climate change, you are left out of the IPCC process. They ignore or fight against any evidence which does not support their policy-driven mission, even to the point of pressuring scientific journals not to publish papers which might hurt the IPCC’s efforts.

I believe that most of the hundreds of scientists supporting the IPCC’s efforts are just playing along, assured of continued funding. In my experience, they are either: (1) true believers in The Cause; (2) think we need to get away from using fossil fuels anyway; or (3) rationalize their involvement based upon the non-zero chance of catastrophic climate change.

My Biases
I am up front about my biases: I think market forces will take care of the fact that “fossil” fuels are (probably) a limited resource. Slowly increasing scarcity will lead to higher prices, which will make alternative energy research more attractive. This is more efficient that trying to legislate new forms of energy into existence.

I also think currently proposed energy policies will cause widespread death and suffering. The IPCC not only destroys scientific objectivity and scientific progress, it also destroys lives.

Therefore, I view it as my moral duty to support the “forgotten science” of natural climate change, a class of alternative hypotheses that have all but been ignored by the IPCC and government funding agencies.

I hope I am correct that most climate change we have experienced is natural. But I also know that “hoping” doesn’t make it so. If I had new scientific evidence that human-caused climate change really was a threat to life on Earth, I would publish it. It would sure be easier to publish than evidence against.

But from everything I’ve seen, I still think Nature probably rules, and that humans (as part of nature) also have some unknown level influence on climate. We know that the existence of trees affects climate – why not the existence of humans?

Countering the Bias
Scientists are human, and so you will never remove the tendencies toward bias in scientific research. You can’t change human nature.

But you can level the playing field by supporting alternative biases.

For years John Christy and I have been advising Congress that some portion of the appropriated funds for federal agencies supporting climate change research should be mandated to support alternative hypotheses of climate change. It’s time for the pendulum to start swinging back the other way.

After all, scientists will go where the money is. If scientists are funded to find evidence of natural sources of climate change, believe me, they will find it.

If you build such a playing field, they will come.

But when only one hypothesis is allowed as the explanation for climate change (e.g. “the science is settled”), the bias becomes so thick and acrid that everyone can smell the stench. Everyone except the IPCC leadership, that is.

Click to expand...

With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag...

Clive Crook, a believer in the manmade global warming hypothesis and supporter of carbon reduction measures, expressed it like this:

“The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”...​

“Basic problem is that all models are wrong,” writes Phil Jones, bluntly, “not got enough middle and low level clouds.”

If that’s the case, then why isn't this printed as a large health warning on the cover of the IPCC reports? Politicians who devised policy based on estimates of certainty by the IPCC now know they’ve been sold a pup.

In the short term, the issues raised by Climategate I, which subsequent inquiries failed to explore, are back with a vengeance...

So the mewling infant that we call Climate Science – a 40-year-young offshoot of meteorology – has been thrust into a political role long before it’s capable of supporting the claims made on its behalf. From the archives we can see the scientists know that too, and we can read their own reluctance to make those claims, too.

“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?” muses one scientist. “They’ll kill us probably.”

That won’t be necessary.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23/climategate_2_first_look/

Click to expand...

...Climate research has long since passed from the realm of being a tiny discipline with a handful of researchers whose mistakes had almost no impact on humanity to being an enormous, publicly funded research machine that has a huge impact on the public weal. Whether or not you agree or disagree with the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis, there is no denying that it has a huge impact on people all over the world. Quite literally every human on earth is currently at risk either way relative to the conclusions of what is still a relatively small community of scientists with a remarkably homogeneous point of view.

Whether or not these scientists are honest — do or do not sincerely believe their own conclusions is not an issue (any more than it often is in the case of medical research or large scale engineering projects); what is important to the general public is that the scientists at this point have a clear interest that potentially conflicts with their own. At risk (to the scientists) is: loss of (enormous) funding; loss of prestige; loss of political power and influence. Many of them have staked their entire reputation and career on stating conclusions as near-certain scientific fact that have a multi-trillion dollar price tag to society associated with their conclusions — however objective and well-intended — turning out to be correct or incorrect.

This dwarfs the potential damage that could be done even by unscrupulous drug companies, by medical researchers seeking to make a name for themselves, by incompetent physicians and all of the other scientific activities in the general field of medicine that are so tightly regulated. It dwarfs the damage that can be done by a faulty braking system in an automobile, by whole cities of buildings that cannot (as it turns out) withstand earthquakes, by faulty O-rings in space shuttles. It dwarfs even the damage that can be done by unregulated banking systems leading to global financial collapse that lower the standard of living “suddenly” on a worldwide scale. It is larger than the combined probable damages from all of these activities put together over any reasonable time scale.

I must emphasize that from the public point of view, this risk is in some sense symmetrical. Taking global steps such as creation of an entire cap and trade financial instrumentation in order to combat CAGW is without any doubt enormously expensive and the loss in this case is certain and immediate. However, as proponents of CAGW theories are quick to point out, society is required to make some kind of wager regardless because the cost of doing nothing if their hypothesis is true may also be extreme.

However, it must be carefully noted that one is balancing a multi-trillion dollar and immediate certain cost against a future possible cost that is by no means certain. It is simply a matter of responsible governance that the cost-benefit of this risk be soberly and, above all, openly assessed. Furthermore, both regulation and liability are absolutely necessary — indeed, long overdue — in any scientific endeavor that has long since left the ivory tower of pure research and become the basis for such far-reaching policy decisions.

Unfortunately, climate research that not only has impacted, but has led the way in the public debate and scrutiny that should correctly attend the collective expenditure of vast amounts of wealth that could otherwise be put to better use has not, thus far, been conducted in an open way. Critical data and methodology have been hidden and treated as if they were proprietary by the scientific researchers involved, in spite of the fact that the data itself has rather often come from governmental organizations or is the direct product of research funded entirely by public research grants, as in most cases is the published work itself. That this has occurred, and continues to occur, is not at issue here — the evidence that this has occurred and continues to occur is conclusive and indeed, ongoing. The simple fact of the matter is that whatever the truth of the hypothesis, the methodology and data used to support it are largely hidden, hidden well enough that it is routinely true that they cannot easily be merely reproduced by a third party, let alone the conclusions be intelligently and critically challenged...

Click to expand...

...It is, in fact, essentially impossible for a third party to take the actual data used in the current HadCrut3 snapshot published by the Met Office at the Hadley Center, feed it to the actual code used to generate the processed data, and verify even the very limited fact that the data and the code do indeed produce the same result when run on different computers, let alone that the methodology used to produce the result from the data is robust and sound.

It must once again be emphasized that public policy decisions that have been made, are being made, and will be made in the future based on the raw data and methodology used will cost every living person on earth on average several thousand dollars, at least. Again this is stated without prejudice concerning whether or not the published temperatures are, or are not sound, or whether CAGW is, or is not, a well-supported scientific hypothesis. If it is true and we do nothing, it will cost thousand of dollars per living person and many lives over decades. If it is false and we spend money like water to prevent it anyway, it will cost thousands of dollars per living person and many lives over decades; in addition, it will do incalculable cost to the credibility of “the scientist” in the minds of the public that further amplifies this monetary damage by altering the profile of government funded research and the level of trust accorded to all scientists in the public eye...

Click to expand...

Richard, I can't answer for our host, but you have to remember why some of us got involved in the climate wars in the first place.

For me this has never really been about climate itself. I don't find climate partcularly interesting; it's one of those worthy but tedious branches of science which under normal circumstances I would happily leave to other people who like that sort of thing. My whole involvement has always been driven by concerns about the corruption of science.

Like many people I was dragged into this by the Hockey Stick. I was looking up some minor detail about the Medieval Warm Period and discovered this weird parallel universe of people who apparently didn't believe it had happened, and even more bizarrely appeared to believe that essentially nothing had happened in the world before the twentieth century. The Hockey Stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence, so I started reading round the subject. And it soon became clear that the first extraordinary thing about the evidence for the Hockey Stick was how extraordinarily weak it was, and the second extraordinary thing was how desperate its defenders were to hide this fact. I'd always had an interest in pathological science, and it looked like I might have stumbled across a really good modern example.

You can't spend long digging around the Hockey Stick without stumbling across other areas of climate science pathology. The next one that really struck me was the famous Phil Jones quote: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it". To any practising scientist that's a huge red flag. Sure we all feel a bit like that on occasion, but to actually say something like that in an email is practically equivalent to getting up on a public platform and saying "I'm a pathological scientist, and I'm proud."

Rather naively I initially believed that Phil Jones was just having a bad day and had said something really stupid. Surely he couldn't really think that was acceptable? And surely his colleagues would deal with him? But no, it turned out that this apalling quote was only the most quotable of several other remarks, and he really was trying to hide his data from people who might (horror of horrors) want to check his conclusions.

That's when I got involved in my FOI request. And consequently got exposed to the full horror of "big climate", as clear an example of politicised and pathological science as I have ever seen. And then came Climategate 2009, and "hide the decline". All downhill from there.

When will I be done with climate? Quite simply when it stops being a pathological science and starts acting according to the normal rules and conventions of scientific discourse. At that point I will, I'm afraid, simply lose interest in the whole business, and leave it to the experts to get on with their stuff, just as I leave most of the rest of science to the appropriate experts.

To put it another way, I will be done with climate once I can trust that Richard Betts can be left to do good work on his own. I absolutely trust you to get on with doing good stuff under normal circumstances. But I'm afraid I don't trust you to do good work under current pathological conditions, because you don't stand up against the all too obvious stench emanating from some of your colleagues.

For me the Hockey Stick was where it began, and probably where it will end (and I will daringly suggest that the same thing might be true for our host). The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong. Climategate 2011 shows that even many of its most outspoken public defenders know it is obviously wrong. And yet it goes on being published and defended year after year.

Do I expect you to publicly denounce the Hockey Stick as obvious drivel? Well yes, that's what you should do. It is the job of scientists of integrity to expose pathological science, and it is especially the job of scientists in closely related fields. You should not be leaving this to random passing NMR spectroscopists who have better things to do. But I'm afraid I no longer expect you to do so. The opportune moment has, I think, passed. And that is why, even though we are all delighted to have you here, and all enjoy what you have to say, some of us get a trifle tetchy from time to time.

You ask us to judge you by AR5, and in many ways that is a reasonable request. Many of us will judge it by the handling of paleoclimate, not because this is all that important an aspect of the science, but rather because it is a litmus test of whether climate scientists are prepared to stand up against the bullying defenders of pathology in their midst. So, Richard, can I look forward to returning back to my proper work on the application of composite rotations to the performance of error-tolerant unitary transformations? Or will we all be let down again?

Dec 3, 2011 at 6:11 PM | Jonathan Jones

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/12/2/tim-barnett-on-the-hockey-stick.html

Click to expand...

...It is not difficult to understand why people and institutions exaggerate the potential dangers of global warming and omit any mention of the probable benefits. There are billions of dollars available for climate change research. Obama’s 2011 budget allocated $2.6 billion for the “global change research program.” This stream of cash has created a monstrous industry that produces junk science that feeds demands for even more money. It is a scam.

In summary, this is a sad example of how money and ideology have corrupted contemporary science. Everything has to be tendentiously linked with climate change in order to obtain money. The public is being swindled, and the respect people have for science and scientists is being eroded. I feel especially sorry for the gullible activists who have a sincere concern for environmental quality. They’re being played for fools...

Click to expand...

I had an interesting exchange with Doug McNeall on Twitter yesterday. Doug is a statistician at the Met Office and an occasional commenter here at BH. We were discussing how scientists convey uncertainty and in particular I asked about a statement made by Julia Slingo in a briefing to central government in the wake of Climategate:

Globally, 17 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the last 20 years.

Click to expand...

This statement was made without any caveats or qualifications.

If I recall correctly, I've posted on the briefing paper before, so for today I just want to concentrate on this one statement. I think Slingo's words represent very poor communication of science since they do not convey any uncertainties and imply to the reader that the statement actually means something. There is, of course, a possibility that it signifies nothing at all.

By this I mean that the occurrence of the 17 warmest years on record could have happened by chance. Doug and I agree that this is a possibility, although we differ on just how much of a possibility. Doug assesses the chances as being very slim based on comparison of the temperature record to climate models. I don't see a problem in this per se, but I think that by introducing models into the assessment, certain things have to be conveyed to the reader: the models' poor performance in out-of-sample verification, our lack of knowledge of clouds, aerosols and galactic cosmic rays, and the possibility of unknown unknowns being obvious ones. Doug reckons our knowledge of clouds and aerosols is adequate to determine that that the temperature history of recent decades is out of the ordinary. This is not obvious to me, however.

But more than that, is the very fact that we are having to introduce models into the equation needs to be conveyed to the reader. Were our knowledge of temperature history better, we would be able to show based on purely empirical measurements that the temperature was doing something different in recent decades. That we cannot do so needs to be conveyed to the reader, I would say.

My challenge to you, dear readers, is to convey in, say, four sentences, the state of the science in this area. (We will take it as given that it is reasonable for Slingo to convey the basic statement about recent temperatures that she has chosen to do. If you feel otherwise, feel free to make your case in the comments.)

Click to expand...

It’s slipped past most skeptics with all the action lately, but John O’Sullivan is putting in above and beyond what any single skeptical soul ought to.

He’s already been a key figure helping Tim Ball in the legal fight with the UVA establishment, which has spent over a million dollars helping Michael Mann to hide emails. The case was launched by Michael Mann, but could turn out to do a huge favor to skeptics — the discovery process is a powerful tool, and we all know who has been hiding their methods, their data, and their work-related correspondence.

Tim Ball and John O’Sullivan are helping all the free citizens of the West. The burden should not be theirs alone. There are many claims for help at the moment, but that is a sign that the grand scam is coming to a head.

– Jo (Nova)

————————————————————————————


I Just Bet My House on the Outcome of Science Trial of the Century

http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/42475.html


No truer headline will you read. Last month this author literally wagered his home, life savings, and all his possessions on the outcome of a crucial global warming lawsuit currently ongoing in Canada.


So what is it that drove me to such apparent recklessness endangering not only my own well-being but that of my family? Well, to me this pivotal lawsuit encapsulates the archetypal ‘good versus evil’ battle no conscientious parent can ignore.


Dr. Ball famously declared that his adversary belongs “in the state pen, not Penn State.” For that Ball was summarily hit with a libel suit and Ball’s legal fees could exceed $300,000. But defiantly, the septuagenarian says, “if you think education is expensive – try ignorance.”


So persuasive is the evidence to me that last night I signed a contract in favor of Dr. Ball to forsake my worldly goods in the event the B.C. court ruled in favor of his adversary, Dr. Michael Mann .

An honest jury will see from Ball’s evidence that Mann perpetrated a cynical and heinous crime by secretly doctoring proxy climate data from a handful of tree rings he took from a corner of California that was then claimed to represent a 1,000-year temperature record for the globe. The Mann graph typifies all that is wrong with post-normal science now practiced in our universities.


With billions of dollars of climate taxes resting on the outcome, it’s no flannel to label the Mann-v-Ball trial in the British Columbia Supreme Court as the ‘science trial of the century,’ the most profound of its kind since the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ of 1925 ( http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm ).

Ball, a 72-year-old retiree has already used up his meager life savings but has made some headway with his escalating legal costs thanks to a fighting fund that is now past the $100,000 mark. But there’s a lot of lawyerly manouvering to go yet before Ball can be assured of victory.The corruption that is now pervading our universities is making many honest folk realize they need to stand shoulder to shoulder with principled scientists like Dr. Ball. In recent months I’ve worked hard to help promote Tim Ball’s Legal Defense Fund ( http://drtimball.com/2011/tim-balls-libel-case-and-legal-defense-fund/ ). But my efforts also made me a target for Michael Mann’s attorney, Roger McConchie, who didn’t hesitate in naming me as an accessory in his lawsuit. So as a yardstick of commitment to the case, yesterday I signed a binding legal agreement providing my full financial indemnity to Tim in case Mann wins his claim.

(Note: Ball’s law firm, Pearlman Lindholm are entrusted to administer the account. Donors contributing $10,000 or more will be reimbursed dependent on a favorable court ruling).

Click to expand...

January 27, 2012

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

Click to expand...

John Prescott was apocalyptic. “Our polar ice caps are melting,” the then deputy prime minister thundered. “Only this weekend Mexico was hit by freak snowstorms ... a world of drought and crop failures, rising seas, mass migration and disease ... rising greenhouse grasses [sic] . . .”

The year was 1997 and Prescott had just come back from Kyoto in Japan to give the House of Commons his account of the latest climate talks.

Prescott’s terrifying warnings were backed by Britain’s leading climate scientists. Just before Kyoto a Met Office report warned that climate-related floods would put 50m people at risk of death from starvation in the coming decades. Whole island nations would disappear, it added, while the American Midwest, which helps to feed 100 nations, was likely to face drought and the North Pole might melt.

That was 15 years ago — what has happened to world temperatures since then? Last month came the suggestion that the answer was, embarrassingly, nothing. Research based on Met Office figures pointed to temperatures having been flat since 1997.

It was the kind of admission that those who doubt climate science pounce on. “Forget global warming,” trumpeted The Mail on Sunday, because “the planet has not warmed in 15 years”. It then cited other research, into the declining energy output of the sun, to suggest the real danger was from a big freeze, raising the prospect of a reprise of the frost fairs held on the frozen Thames in the 17th century.

Two days earlier The Wall Street Journal had published a letter from 16 scientists advancing similar arguments. It said: “The lack of warming for more than a decade . . . suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.”

Since then the same cry has been taken up by innumerable bloggers, exemplified by Dr David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC’s science editor, now an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which frequently challenges the views of climate-change scientists. He, it turns out, was a source of the research that sparked the whole row.

“We set out to see how long it had been since the temperature had risen, and 15 years was what emerged from the data set,” he said. “It raises serious questions about how the Met Office models future climate.”

Some scientists appear to be warning we will fry, while other sources fear we will freeze It seemed a strong argument but the climate scientists came out fighting, starting with a furious blog posted by the Met Office itself, which attacked the Mail on Sunday article as “entirely misleading”.

That was followed by another letter in The Wall Street Journal, this time signed by 35 leading climate scientists, who pointed out that few of the signatories to its sceptical predecessor were actually involved in climate research.

“Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?” it asked, adding: “Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest on record.”

What were the rest of us meant to make of this? Some scientists appear to be warning we will fry, while other sources fear we will freeze. For the public the outcome is, increasingly, confusion. Where might the truth lie?

Perhaps the simplest first step is to put aside the arguments and get back to the data. Is it really true that global temperatures have not risen since 1997?

The simple answer is: they have risen, but not by very much. “Our records for the past 15 years suggest the world has warmed by about 0.051C over that period,” said the Met Office. In layman’s terms that is 51 thousandths of a degree.

These figures come from the Met Office HadCruT3 database, which takes readings from 3,000 land stations around the world, along with oceanic readings from a similar number of ships and buoys.

However, HadCruT3 is just one of several global temperature databases, each overseen by different scientists and calculated in slightly different ways. This allows each group to cross-check results, confirming findings or spotting errors.

One, held at the National Climate Data Centre (NCDC), run by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that global temperatures rose by an average of 0.074C since 1997. That’s small, too — but it is another rise.

A third and very different data set is overseen by John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He gathers figures from three satellites that orbit the Earth 14 times a day. They measure the average temperature of the air from ground level to a height of 35,000ft, a method completely different from those of the Met Office and NCDC. Oddly, given his reputation as a climate sceptic, he found the biggest rise of all.

“From 1997-2011 our data show a global temperature rise of 0.15C,” he said. “What’s more, our satellites have been taking this data since 1979, and over that period [the] global temperature has risen 0.46C, so the world has been getting warmer.”

Overall, then, the world has got slightly warmer since 1997. Perhaps the real question is: why has it warmed so much less than was predicted by the climate models?

For most climate scientists the answer is simple. “Fifteen years is just too short a period over which to measure climate change,” said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the Met Office. “The world undergoes natural temperature changes on all kinds of time scales from daily variations to seasonal ones. It also varies naturally from year to year and decade to decade.”

Whitehouse accepts this point. “The records do show that global temperatures have risen by about 0.4C over the past three decades, most of it in the 1990s,” he said.

“I accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that might warm the world but the key issue is how strong the effect is and how the data compare with the models used to predict the future.”

This is an interesting admission, turning what had appeared to be an attack on the keystones of climate science — that greenhouse gases cause global warming — into a “shades of grey” debate over whether global warming will happen slowly and steadily or in jerks, accelerating in some decades but then slowing or even reversing a little in others.

For the critics of climate science this is a crucial point — but why? The answer goes back to the 2001 and 2007 science reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that had predicted the world was likely to warm by an average of about 0.2C a decade. The implication was that temperatures would rise steadily, not with 15-year gaps. The existence of such gaps, the critics argue, implies the climate models themselves are too flawed to be relied on.

Other leading climate scientists have raised similar issues. One is Judith Curry, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She argues that global climate is affected by so many factors, ranging from solar output to volcanic eruptions, that predicting how the world will warm is impossible.

Crucially, however, Curry accepts that greenhouse gas emissions are likely to lead to long-term warming. She wrote on her blog: “We don’t know what the climate will be for the next several decades. In terms of when global warming will come ‘roaring back’, it is possible this may not happen for the first half of the 21st century.”

For Curry and many others one of the key unresolved issues lies in the behaviour of the sun, whose output appears to be undergoing a steady but small decline. Most scientists accept that this will reduce global warming. The debate is over just how strong this effect will be, with people such as Curry suggesting it could be powerful while others see it as small.

Among the latter is Mike Lockwood, professor of space physics at Reading University’s meteorology department, who believes the sun has been in a “grand solar maximum” since the 1960s, thought to be the longest-lived peak in its output for more than 9,000 years.

“A decline in activity is long overdue,” he said. “How deep will it go? We think there is about an 8% chance that it will drop below the famous Maunder minimum.”

This was a 60-year period, starting in about 1645, when the sun had very few sunspots; it was marked by an unusually high proportion of cold winters in Europe.

That sounds ominous but Lockwood calculates that even a decline in activity on that scale would now have little effect because the impact would be far smaller than the opposing effects of surging greenhouse gas emissions.

What about the most evocative image of all — the prediction that the Thames might freeze over? This did happen in 1963, but far upstream in the stretches around Windsor. The idea that the lower tidal reaches might be in similar danger generates little but scorn from all sides.

Lockwood said: “The disappearance of frost fairs is nothing to do with climate. It is because the old London Bridge — really more of a weir — was pulled down and the embankments were put in. So the river now flows much too fast to freeze and is also a lot saltier. Even a return to Maunder minimum solar conditions would not cause the Thames to freeze again so far downstream.”



http://thegwpf.org/science-news/490...-warmed-so-much-less-than-ipcc-predicted.html

Click to expand...

...As the [Royal] Society’s independence has disappeared, so has its former adherence to hard-nosed empirical science and a sober detachment from the political process. Gone is its former focus on natural philosophy as a way to solve the world’s problems and in its place is a new science that seeks to conjure up, in the words of Mencken, ‘an endless series of hobgoblins’ – a stream of apocalyptic visions with which to assail the public. Gone are the doubts and uncertainties that afflict any real scientist, to be replaced with the dull certainties of the politician and the public relations man. As one of the fellows interviewed in the wake of the rebellion of the 43 said:

“I can understand why this has happened – there is so much politically and economically riding on climate science that the Society would find it very hard to say ‘well, we are still fairly sure that greenhouse gases are changing the climate’ but the politicians simply wouldn’t accept that level of honest doubt.”

The ability to speak scientific truth to the powers that be is the Society’s only raison d’etre, but even this has now been usurped: there is nowadays a network of science advisers throughout the government machine – if the government and the bureaucracy already have scientists’ advice on tap, why should they need the Royal Society? The answer is, of course, that the Royal Society is an independent voice – or at least it was until swamped with taxpayers’ money, when it became something more akin to a government department. Without its independence, there is no point in the Royal Society.

The reputation of the Society is now on the line – the fellows and much of the general public know that there is something seriously amiss and that the leadership do not speak for everyone within the organisation. Each year that temperatures refuse to rise in line with the nightmare scenarios trumpeted by one president after another, the risk grows that the Society becomes a laughing stock. If government money is a drug of which the Society cannot or will not rid itself, its leadership could at least remind itself of those words of Lord Adrian over 50 years ago:

“It is neither necessary nor desirable for the Society to give an official ruling on scientific issues, for these are settled far more conclusively in the laboratory than in the committee room.”

-Andrew W. Montford​

Click to expand...

...the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry has been replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority.

-Richard H. Lindzen, Ph.D.
Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology​

Click to expand...

zed0 said:

Unfortunately global warming has become a partisan issue. You will notice the loudest screamers of "It hasn't been proved yet!" All tend to be republicans with ties to the oil industry, or worse yet brainless drones following the prescribed party thinking.

Petroleum is used in so many synthetics and plastics, that burning it as a fuel is just plain stupid and wasteful. If you don't believe it's bad for the environment, go suck on tail pipe with the engine on for five minutes and see what happens.

That should be proof enough, without having some scientist put it in writing for you. DUH!
The oil cartels have no reason to explore other forms energy, why should they? As supplies dwindle the price goes up, which increases profits for the share holders. It's good to be a share holder, just ask Cheney or "DubYa" and his daddy (who all have had homes given to them in Dubai, next door to the Brown & Root main office).

It is cheaper for them to befuddle and confuse the issue than actually come up alternative energy sources. There is no shortage of drones to help them with their disinformation (propaganda?), and the sad part is most of them aren't even share holders or involved in the oil industry, so when the gas, plastic and synthetics prices skyrocket, they're going to find themselves screwed right alongside of the lefty tree huggers and environmentalist.

So while you all are bickering over whether or not burning fossil fuels is causing global warming or not, it has been proven that burning fossil fuel and venting it into the atmosphere is not good for living organisms.
The multinational oil cartels (who no longer headquartered or have any allegiance to America) continue to fuck up the environment, but more importantly they waste a finite natural resource that could be better used in manufacturing synthetics. But they don't give a flying fuck, because it's all profit to them, and we use it up so much faster by just burning it.

Good excuse to keep drilling and spilling, and employing thousands, while damaging millions.

We put a man on the moon in five years! Why haven't we developed cold fusion, or at least some form clean nuclear power, that doesn't create toxic waste for a million years? Or a car that runs on hydrogen, or steam? This is NOT rocket science, and it's all "doable." But it's not going to happen as long as our government is controlled by oil industry. Last I heard Obama is waffling back and forth about continued exploration and drilling in the gulf. Palin would love turn her state into one giant stinking oil well

JEEBUS CRIPES! What the fuck does it take to wake this country up?

Click to expand...

The above is a well-informed comment by a true genius.

A perfect example of "when the gas, plastic and synthetics prices skyrocket" and "As supplies dwindle the price goes up":

That’s a serious problem, actually. Hell, I have an objective scientific bend and I have plenty of trouble with it.

Ultimately, the stock answer is: We should believe the most what we can doubt the least, when we try to doubt very hard, using a mix of experience and consistent reason based on a network of experience-supported best (so far) beliefs.

That’s not very hopeful, but it is accurate. We believe Classical Non-Relativistic Mechanics after Newton invents it, not because it is true but because it works fairly consistently to describe Kepler’s purely observational laws, and (as it is tested) works damn well to describe a lot of quotidian experience as well on a scale less grand than planetary orbits. We encounter trouble with classical mechanics a few hundred years later when it fails to consistently describe blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect (the one thing Einstein actually got the Nobel Prize for), the spectra of atoms, given Maxwell’s enormously successful addition to the equations of electricity and magnetism and the realization that light is an electromagnetic wave.

Planck, Lorentz, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and many others successively invent modifications that make space-time far more complex and interesting on the one hand — relativity theory — and mechanics itself far, far more complex than Newton could ever have dreamed. The changes were motivated, not by trying to be cool or win prizes, but by failures of the classical Euclidean theory to explain the data! Basically, Classical flat-space mechanics was doomed the day Maxwell first wrote out the correct-er equations of electrodynamics for the first time. We suddenly had the most amazing unified field theory, one that checked out empirically to phenomenal accuracy, and yet when we applied to cases where it almost had to work certain of its predictions failed spectacularly.

In fact, if Maxwell’s Equations and Newton’s Law were both true, the Universe itself should have existed for something far, far less than a second before collapsing in a massive heat death as stable atoms based on any sort of orbital model were impossible. Also, if Maxwell’s equations and flat spacetime with time an independent variable was correct, the laws of nature would not have had the invariance with respect to reference frame that Newtonian physics had up to that time enjoyed. In particular, moving a charged particle into a different inertial reference frame caused magnetic fields to appear, making it clear that the electric and magnetic fields were not actually vector forms! The entire geometry and tensor nature of space and time in Newtonian physics was all wrong.

This process continues today. Astronomer’s observe the rotational properties of distant galaxies to very high precision using the red shift and blue shift of the stars as they orbit the galactic center. The results don’t seem to agree with Newton’s Law of Gravitation (or for that matter, with Einstein’s equivalent theory of general relativity that views gravitation as curvature of spacetime. Careful studies of neutrinos lead to anomalies, places where theory isn’t consistent with observation. Precise measurements of the rates at which the Universe is expanding at very large length scales (and hence very long times ago, in succession as one looks farther away and back in time at distant galaxies) don’t quite add up to what the simplest theories predict and we expect. Quantum theory and general relativity are fundamentally inconsistent, but nobody knows quite how to make a theory that is “both” in the appropriate limits.

People then try to come up with bigger better theories, ones that explain everything that is well-explained with the old theories but that embrace the new observations and explain them as well. Ideally, the new theories predict new phenomena entirely and a careful search reveals it there where the theory predicts. And all along there are experiments — some of them fabulous and amazing — discovering high temperature superconductors, inventing lasers and masers, determining the properties of neutrinos (so elusive they are almost impossible to measure at all, yet a rather huge fraction of what is going on in the Universe). Some experiments yield results that are verified; others yield results — such as the several times that magnetic monopoles have been “observed” in experiments — that have not been reproducible and are probably spurious and incorrect. Neutrinos that might — even now — have gone faster than light, but again — probably not. A Higgs particle that seems to appear for a moment as a promising bump in an experimental curve and then fades away again, too elusive to be pinned down — so far. Dark matter and dark energy that might explain some of the unusual cosmological observations but a) are only one of several competing explanations; and b) that have yet to be directly observed. The “dark” bit basically means that they don’t interact at all with the electromagnetic field, making them nearly impossible to see — so far.

Physicists therefore usually know better than to believe the very stuff that they peddle. When I teach students introductory physics, I tell them up front — “Everything I’m going to teach you over the next two semesters is basically wrong — but it works, and works amazingly well, right up to where it doesn’t work and we have to find a better, broader explanation.” I also tell them not to believe anything I tell them because I’m telling them, and I’m the professor and therefore I know and its up to them to parrot me and believe it or else. I tell them quite the opposite. Believe me because what I teach you makes sense (is consistent), corresponds at least roughly with your own everyday experience, and because when you check it in the labs and by doing computations that can be compared to e.g. planetary observations, they seem to work. And believe me only with a grain of salt then — because further experiments and observations will eventually prove it all wrong.

That isn’t to say that we don’t believe some things very strongly. I’m a pretty firm believer in gravity, for example. Sure, it isn’t exactly right, or consistent with quantum theory at the smallest and perhaps largest of scales, but it works so very, very well in between and it is almost certainly at least approximately true, true enough in the right milieu. I’m very fond of Maxwell’s Equations and both classical and, in context, quantum theory, as they lead to this amazing description of things like atoms and molecules that is consistent and that works — up to a point — to describe nearly everything we see every day. And so on.

But if somebody were to argue that gravitation isn’t really a perfect 1/r^2 force, and deviations at very long length scales are responsible for the observed anomalies in galactic rotation, I’d certainly listen. If the new theory still predicts the old results, explains the anomaly, I’d judge it to be quite possibly true. If it predicted something new and startling, something that was then observed (variations in near-Earth gravitation in the vicinity of Uranium mines, anomalies in the orbits of planets near black holes, unique dynamics in the galactic cores) then I might even promote it to more probably true than Newton’s Law of Gravitation, no matter how successful, simple, and appealing it is. In the end, it isn’t esthetics, it isn’t theoretic consistency, it isn’t empirical support, it is a sort of a blend of all three, something that relies heavily on common sense and human judgement and not so much on a formal rule that tells us truth.

Where does that leave one in the Great Climate Debate? Well, it damn well should leave you skeptical as all hell. I believe in the theory of relativity. Let me explain that — I really, really believe in the theory of relativity. I believe because it works; it explains all sorts of experimental stuff. I can run down a list of experimental observations that are explained by relativity that could scarcely be explained by anything else — factors of two in spin-orbit coupling constants, the tensor forms and invariants of electromagnetism, the observation of -mesons produced from cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere far down near the surface of the Earth where they have no business being found given a lifetime of microseconds — and observation I personally have made — and of course all the particle accelerators in the known Universe would fail miserably in their engineering if relativity weren’t at least approximately correct. Once you believe in relativity (because it works) it makes some very profound statements about causality, time ordering, and so on — things that might well make all the physics I think that I know inconsistent if it were found to be untrue.

Yet I was — and continue to be — at least willing to entertain the possibility that I might have to chuck the whole damn thing, wrong from top to bottom — all because a silly neutrino in Europe seems to be moving faster than it should ever be aver to move. Violations of causality, messages from the future, who knows what carnage such an observation (verified) might wreak! I’m properly skeptical because what we have observed — so far — works so very consistently, and the result itself seems to be solidly excluded by supernova data already in hand, but you know, my beliefs don’t dictate reality — it is rather the other way around.

The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate. The result is presented, but no one ever takes questions from the podium and is capable of defending their answers against a knowledgeable and skeptical questioner.

I can do that for all of my beliefs in physics — or at least, most of them — explain particular experiments that seem to verify my beliefs (as I do above). I’m quite capable of demonstrating their consistency both theoretically (with other physical laws and beliefs) and with experiment. I’m up front about where those beliefs fail, where they break down, where we do not know how things really work. Good science admits its limits, and never claims to be “settled” even as it does lead to defensible practice and engineering where it seems to work — for now.

Good science accepts limits on experimental precision. Hell, in physics we have to accept a completely non-classical limitation on experimental precision, one so profound that it sounds like a violation of simple logic to the uninitiated when they first try to understand it. But quite aside from Heisenberg, all experimental apparatus and all measurements are of limited precision, and the most honest answer for many things we might try to measure is “damfino” (damned if I know).

The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.

We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.

In truth, we have moderately accurate thermal records that aren’t really global, but are at least sample a lot of the globe’s surface exclusive of the bulk of the ocean for less than one century. We have accurate records — really accurate records — of the Earth’s surface temperatures on a truly global basis for less than forty years. We have accurate records that include for the first time a glimpse of the thermal profile, in depth, of the ocean, that is less than a decade old and counting, and is (as Willis is pointing out) still highly uncertain no matter what silly precision is being claimed by the early analysts of the data. Even the satellite data — precise as it is, global as it is — is far from free from controversy, as the instrumentation itself in the several satellites that are making the measurements do not agree on the measured temperatures terribly precisely.

In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of shit. Perhaps — and a big perhaps it is — they know it more precisely than this relative to a scheme that is used to compute it from global data that is at least consistent and not crazy — but it isn’t even clear that we can define the global average temperature in a way that really makes sense and that different instruments will measure the same way. It is also absolutely incredibly unlikely that our current measurements would in any meaningful way correspond to what the instrumentation of the 18th and 19th century measured and that is turned into global average temperatures, not within more than a degree or two.

This complicates things, given that a degree or two (K) appears to be very close to the natural range of variation of the global average temperature when one does one’s best to compute it from proxy records. Things get more complicated still when all of the best proxy reconstructions in the world get turned over and turned out in favor of “tree ring reconstructions” based upon — if not biased by — a few species of tree from a tiny handful of sites around the world.

The argument there is that tree rings are accurate thermometers. Of course they aren’t — even people in the business have confessed (in climategate letters, IIRC) that if they go into their own back yards and cut down trees and try to reconstruct the temperature of their own back yard based on the rings, it doesn’t work. Trees grow one year because your dog fertilizes them, fail to grow another not because it is cold but because it is dry, grow poorly in a perfect year because a fungus attacks the leaves. If one actually plots tree ring thicknesses over hundreds of years, although there is a very weak signal that might be thermal in nature, there is a hell of a lot of noise — and many, many parts of the world simply don’t have trees that survived to be sampled. Such as the 70% of the Earth’s surface that is covered by the ocean…

But the complication isn’t done yet — the twentieth century perhaps was a period of global warming — at least the period from roughly 1975 to the present where we have reasonably accurate records appears to have warmed a bit — but there were lots of things that made the 20th century, especially the latter half, unique. Two world wars, the invention and widespread use and testing of nuclear bombs that scattered radioactive aerosols throughout the stratosphere, unprecedented deforestation and last but far from least a stretch where the sun appeared to be far more active than it had been at any point in the direct observational record, and (via various radiometric proxies) quite possibly for over 10,000 years. It isn’t clear what normal conditions are for the climate — something that historically appears to be nearly perpetually in a state of at least slow change, warming gradually or cooling gradually, punctuated with periods where the heating or cooling is more abrupt (to the extent the various proxy reconstructions can be trusted as representative of truly global temperature averages) — but it is very clear indeed that the latter 19th through the 20th centuries were far from normal by the standards of the previous ten or twenty centuries.

Yet on top of all of this confounding phenomena — with inaccurate and imprecise thermal records in the era of measurements, far less accurate extrapolations of the measurement era using proxies, with at most 30-40 years of actually accurate and somewhat reproducible global thermal measurements, most of it drawn from the period of a Grand Solar Maximum — climatologists have claimed to find a clear signal of anthropogenic global warming caused strictly by human-produced carbon dioxide. They are — it is claimed — certain that no other phenomena could be the proximate cause of the warming. They are certain when they predict that this warming will continue until a global catastrophe occurs that will kill billions of people unless we act in certain ways now to prevent it.

I’m not certain relativity is correct, but they are certain that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a true hypothesis with precise predictions and conclusions. I have learned to doubt numerical simulations that I myself have written that are doing simple, easily understandable things that directly capture certain parts of physics. They are doing far, far more complex numerical simulations — the correct theoretical answer, recall, is a solution to a set of coupled non-Markovian Navier-Stokes equation with a variable external driver and still unknown feedbacks in a chaotic regime with known important variability on multiple decadal or longer timescales — and yet they are certain that their results are correct, given the thirty plus years of accurate global thermal data (plus all of the longer timescale reconstructions or estimates they can produce from the common pool of old data, with all of its uncertainties).

Look, here’s how you can tell — to get back to your question. You compare the predictions of their “catastrophic” theory five, ten, twenty years back to the actual data. If there is good agreement, it is at least possible that they are correct. The greater the deviation between observed reality and their predictions, the more likely it is that their result is at least incorrect if not actual bullshit. That’s all. Accurately predicting the future isn’t proof that they are right, but failing to predict it is pretty strong evidence that they are wrong.

Such a comparison fails. It actually fails way back in the twentieth century, where it fails to predict or explain the cooling from 1945 to roughly 1965-1970. It fails to predict the little ice age. It fails to predict the medieval climate optimum, or the other periods in the last 10,000 years where the proxy record seems to indicate that the world was as warm or warmer than it is today. But even ignoring that — which we can, because those proxy reconstructions are just as doubtful in their own way as the tree-ring reconstructions, with or without a side-serving of confirmation bias to go with your fries — even ignoring that, it fails to explain the 33 or so years of the satellite record, the only arguably reliable measure of actual global temperatures humans have ever made. For the last third of that period, there has been no statistically significant increase in temperature, and it may even be that the temperature has decreased a bit from a 1998 peak. January of 2012 was nearly 0.1C below the 33 year baseline.

This behavior is explainable and understandable, but not in terms of their models, which predicted that the temperature would be considerably warmer, on average, than it appears to be, back when they were predicting the future we are now living. This is evidence that those models are probably wrong, that some of the variables that they have ignored in their theories are important, that some of the equations they have used have incorrect parameters, incorrect feedbacks. How wrong remains to be seen — if global temperatures actually decline for a few years (and stretch out the period with no increase still further in the process) — it could be that their entire model is fundamentally wrong, badly wrong. Or it could be that their models are partially right but had some of the parameters or physics wrong. Or it could even be that the models are completely correct, but neglected confounding things are temporarily masking the ongoing warming that will soon come roaring back with a catastrophic vengeance.

The latter is the story that is being widely told, to keep people from losing faith in a theory that isn’t working — so far — the way that it should. And I have only one objection to that. Keep your hands off of my money while the theory is still unproven and not in terribly good agreement with reality!

Well, I have other objections as well — open up the debate, acknowledge the uncertainties, welcome contradictory theories, stop believing in a set of theoretical results as if climate science is some sort of religion… but we can start with shit-canning the IPCC and the entire complex arrangement of “remedies” to a problem that may well be completely ignorable and utterly destined to take care of itself long before it ever becomes a real problem.

No matter what, we will be producing far less CO_2 in 30 years than we are today. Sheer economics and the advance of physics and technology and engineering will make fossil-fuel burning electrical generators as obsolete as steam trains. Long before we reach any sort of catastrophe — assuming that CAGW is correct — the supposed proximate cause of the catastrophe will be reversing itself without anyone doing anything special to bring it about but make sensible economic choices.

In the meantime, it would be so lovely if we could lose one single phrase in the “debate”. The CAGW theory is not “settled science”. I’m not even sure there is any such thing.




http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not-settled-science/

Click to expand...

[Dr.] Richard Muller is interviewed in the current issue of Physics World (H/T Jonathan Jones). The article is not online as far as I can tell, but there are some interesting comments that I will reproduce here.

Asked by[sic] he started the BEST project, Muller replies:

"I lost my trust," Muller says, referring to the alleged actions of the scientists at the centre of the "Climategate" scandal, which broke in 2009. The controversy centred on a series of e-mails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK that led to accusations about the conduct of these scientists, including the way that data were selected in their studies. Although all the CRU scientists involved have been exonerated by four independent inquiries, Muller, having read the leaked e-mails, is still scathing of these scientists and he is convinced that, while they did nothing illegal, they are still guilty of scientific malpractice and that big question marks remain over their scientific methods. "What bothers me is the way that they hid the data, and the way that they used the peer-review system to make sure that the sceptics' arguments - some of which I felt were valid— wouid not be published".

Click to expand...

And he also has high praise for Anthony Watts:

Muller also had four specific concerns with the scientific consensus on global warming, which the BEST project was designed to address. The first - and most serious, he says - is the "stations issue", referring to a problem highlighted by controversial US blogger and former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts. In 2007 Watts initiated the SurfaceStations.org project, which reported that 70% of temperature recording stations in the US were inaccurate to a level of 2--5°C. Muller says that the BEST team has now cleared up this issue by showing that when it comes to specifically measuring change in temperature, the 30% of good stations are not significantly more accurate than the 70% of bad stations. "lf Watts hadn't done his work, we would not have reliable data today. The fact that he did that means he's a hero; he deserves some sort of international prize."

Click to expand...

The other concerns are as follows:

The second concern Muller refers to is the "data selection" employed by the three major groups collecting global temperature data: NASA; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US; and the Met Office's Hadley Centre in the UK. Muller says that the number of stations being used between 1980 and the present day has dropped from 6000 to less than 2000, with no explanation to be found anywhere in the literature. The third issue is that rapid urbanization in the regions surrounding temperature stations might have led to localized temperature increases, or what is known as the "urban heat island" effect. The fourth concern, which Muller calls "data correction", refers to the small adjustments that the climate groups make to temperature readings as a result of changes in instruments and locations. Muller says the records describing why individual corrections have been made are very poor.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

But while Muller has maintained his concern for the potential impacts of global warming, he always had doubts about some of the accepted scientific claims. He believes that too many of his colleagues have put their names to petitions calling for action on climate change without considering the legitimate scientific questions that are still outstanding. "I have a sense that many of my friends look at global warming and say 'this is so scary that we have to abandon the objectivity of science'," he says.

Muller is worried that these colleagues are abandoning their scientific minds and becoming politicians. This, he fears, is discrediting science in the eyes of the American public, resulting in a form of politics less informed by science.

Click to expand...

Spot on in my opinion.

Apr 2, 2012 at 5:08 PM | Jonathan Jones
[ Jonathan Jones is a professor of physics at Brasenose College, Oxford ]

Click to expand...