The issue of human-induced climate change is a contentious one.
There are a lot of reasonable scientists and informed lay people who cannot completely rule the human factor out. But neither can they rule it in. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is an hypothesis. Period. It is not a proven fact, nor, in the true sense of the word, is it even a theory. It is an hypothesis that is currently being tested by thousands of scientists of different stripes throughout the world - from the South Pole to the North Pole, on the seven continents and the seven seas. The results gleaned from the testing of the AGW hypothesis are all over the map. Models disagree with one another - eminent scientists disagree with one another. The biggest problem pertaining to the credibility of the AGW proponents is that they are trying to prove their hypothesis rather than objectively testing it. That's bad science. There is a lot of cherry-picking of data by many scientists who are desperately trying to prove that AGW is a reality. Their reputations as scientists are on the line, so it's a reasonable assumption that there will never be even a wisp of an acknowledgement by AGW proponents that maybe humans aren't entirely to blame after all.
This also holds true for the other side. AGW "deniers" have been accused of cherry-picking data as well. There is a spectrum of thought ranging from the overzealous true believers of the James E. Hansen mold to the far right-wing deniers and global-warming-is-a-hoax crowd. That AGW is a hoax is just as unproven as those who argue the AGW science is settled. The fact of the matter is that we just don't know yet. You see, the climate is a chaotic system, or series of systems, and even supercomputers have trouble with computing chaotic systems. Then, when one considers the quality of the code being used for predictive models, and the point of view of the programmers, further complications are introduced.
Then there are the cyclic systems in the world's oceans - the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and the AMDO (Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation). And the El Niño and La Niña phenomena, which are not necessarily cyclic. The extreme drought conditions in the US Southwestern states, the extreme heat over much of North America, and the unusually severe tornadic out brakes earlier this year are attributable to an unusually strong La Niña, one of the two or three strongest La Niñas in the last 100 years. One can argue that climate change is the cause of the current extreme La Niña, and unless somebody proves this not to be true, it deserves consideration.
I am a skeptic. I was formerly agnostic on the issue, but after reading various articles and blogs, and seeing interviews with scientists on both sides, I am convinced that the so-called skeptic camp is standing on firmer ground. Another thing that influenced my thinking was the childish way some of the AGW researchers behaved. There was a lot of naked vitriol directed at climatologists who questioned the veracity of the AGW research as it was being conducted, who didn't necessarily agree with their conclusions, and who didn't sign on to their political agenda. I am very, very suspicious when I see that kind of hysteria being displayed. It tells me their position might not be credible, that they're trying to run cover for a flimsy case. That is my opinion, anyway, for whatever it's worth.
One thing that really sticks in my mind is the statements by Professor David Deming concerning Dr. Jonathan Overpeck's appeal to re-write historical climate records to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Moreover, Dr. Deming cited an article in Discover Magazine in 1989 where a prominent climate researcher discusses the need to amplify the evidence for and ignore the evidence against AGW. (CLCC 5 - Quack Science). While I believe Dr. Deming's categorizing AGW as a "hoax" is too strong (we don't know yet that it is a hoax) his revelations do raise legitimate questions.
We hear from the mass media, over and over, that human-caused climate change is already settled. We hear there is "overwhelming scientific evidence", there is overwhelming scientific consensus among geoscientists of every stripe. Actually, there are roughly 2500 scientists who hold that humans are at least partly responsible for climate change, and a significant sub-group of scientists who hold that humans are entirely responsible for the warming climate. Conversely, there are roughly 900 scientists who signed a petition disputing the role of humans in the changing climate. Again, there is a distribution curve, with some opinions being that humans may play a minor role, while others hold that none of the climate change is due to humans.
Most of the clamor by geoscientists of the climate change phenomenon focuses on carbon emissions without regard to the destruction of carbon sinks such as tropical rainforests.
One of the foundations of scientific research is to probe and poke around in someone else's previously accepted theory, to seek out and find areas of weakness, and either disprove the theory or improve on it. People like Galileo Galilei, Nicholas Copernicus, and Albert Einstein fought the conventional dogma of their respective times and prevailed.
Today's conventional wisdom, as it's being communicated to us by an eager media, is this: The earth is getting warmer because of human activity, and that's THAT! It's settled. End of story.
I believe that the story is still unfolding. Only time will tell - probably a lot of time.
Following is a list of links to the articles, videos, web pages and other reference material which I've availed myself to while writing these blog articles over the past 17 days or so. If you wish to dig deeper into the AGW question, these references would be helpful and informative. I would encourage you to do so. And you can be assured - these references barely scratch the surface of the AGW debate.
CHARTS
Charts of logarithmic CO2 effect
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
Charts I wanted to upload upload for CLCC - 8 but was blocked from doing so
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/heating_effect_vs_measured_co2.png
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/natural-vs-agw_warming.png
More very illuminative charts
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/co2_modtrans_img2.png
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/co2_modtrans_img1.png
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/heating_effect_of_co2.png
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/perth_temp_annual.png
Side by side comparison of the 1990 IPCC First Assessment millennial temperature record and the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment featuring the hockey stick graph
Note that these radically different charts ostensibly describing the exact same thing were published by the same organization just eleven years apart
http://a-sceptical-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Comparison-charts.jpg
James E. Hansen's data
GISS temperature charts
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A3.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.B.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
Global greenhouse gas pie charts
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/globalghg.html
Link to sunspot charts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Activity_Proxies.png
Excel charts of CO2 emissions 1980 - 2006 - Itemized
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/carbondioxide.html
YouTube video of interviews with climate experts
Interview with Lord Monckton of the UK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKrw6ih8Gto&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Alex Jones discusses Climategate - a must-see video
(Jones is a little over the top but he does make a few good points)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2153PnMzSw&NR=1
Dr. Tim Ball on Climategate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydo2Mwnwpac
Pro-AGW journalists confront a non-AGW journalist & shut off his microphone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbj78civS-4&NR=1
A reporter confronted by armed guards after asking a UN scientist about Climategate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtzMBfDrpI&feature=related
Tim Ball Interview W/ Red Ice. Parts 1 through 7 of 7 part series. Just click on the top line and it will take you into YouTube from where you can simply navigate to each successive part within the YouTube site.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qj5jf_7eMM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUxShcstKrY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3LqJnomvls&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Tl3gLRbWQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcuBKe5DFjA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXehhlyNUes&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKD1ZniB5Dc&feature=related
John Coleman interview with Glenn Beck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8LfE7AI2w&feature=related
IPCC 's Jonathan Overpeck giving us his pro-AGW viewpoint
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCVfQ-_MQXc
Jonathan Overpeck video
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/
ARTICLES AND REPORTS
Article explaining how the quantum mechanical structure of
CO2 yields a saturation effect - also explained by Lindzen & Choi
in their paper LC2009
http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
Discussion of how degrees of freedom for the vibration of linear molecules such as CO2 are calculated
http://www.analyticalspectroscopy.net/ap3-4.htm
This page demonstrates the three ways an excited CO2 can
vibrate. These three modes happen when CO2 absorbs longwave radiation
http://science.widener.edu/svb/ftir/ir_co2.html
Article by David Deming - the climatologist who received the
email from Jonathan Overpeck proposing the necessity of
getting rid of the Mediaval Warm Period
http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming3.html
Ineractive exercise where the three absorption bands of CO2
reach a saturation point at around 804 ppmv and reach a point of
inconsequencial effect under 100 ppmv
http://chemlinks.beloit.edu/warming/pdf/IRConc.pdf
Science & Public Policy –
Very Good Expose
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/markey_barton_letter.html
Theory that Tunguska Event contributed to a layer of
microscopic dust particles that contribute to surface warming
http://www.physorg.com/news11710.html
35 inconvenient truths – debunks Al Gore's movie
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html
Letter about Al Gore
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/markey_barton_letter.html
IPCC Summary for Policy Makers
http://www.gcrio.org/OnLnDoc/pdf/wg1spm.pdf
IPCC - A library of assessment reports and other material
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.htm#1
IPCC First assessment http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/IPCC_1990_and_1992_Assessments/English/ipcc-90-92-assessments-overview.pdf
IPCC – Third assessment
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/221.htm
UNFCCC
http://unfccc.int/methods_and_science/other_methodological_issues/items/1077.php
UNFCCC – UN plan to finance climate change policy
http://unfccc.int/files/press/backgrounders/application/pdf/fact_sheet_financing_climate_change.pdf
1934 hottest year on record
http://www.skepticalscience.com/1934-hottest-year-on-record.htm
Dr. Robert Balling article in GCMPOI
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/170.pdf
Pittsburgh Times-Review article on Dr. Tim Ball
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/mostread/s_492572.html
Article on funding for research of climate change
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=289
Funding of AGW reseaerch
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/289.pdf
Note that anti-AGW funding comes from special interests as well, such as petroleum and coal lobbies
Article about the discredited hockey stick graph
http://a-sceptical-mind.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-hockey-stick
Hockey Stick article
http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com/mann's-hockey-stick-climate-graph.htm
About hockey stick graph being debunked
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13830/
About Wegman’s investigation of hockey stick chart
http://www.desmogblog.com/wegmans-report-highly-politicized-and-fatally-flawed
Critical of exoneration of Mann
http://greenhellblog.com/2010/07/14/penn-states-integrity-crisis/
The Civil Heretic - Article in NYT Magazine with Freeman Dyson
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html
Transcript of Bob Garfield interview with Joe Romm
and Romm's acerbic response to the Dyson piece
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/04/10/03
An MIT article about lambda, the climate sensitivity factor
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/explained-climate-sensitivity.html
Article on climate sensitivity
http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity
Satellite re: climate science climate sensitivity from space
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Lindzen-Choi-2009-low-climate-sensitivity.htm
Satellite re: climate science climate sensitivity from space
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Lindzen-Choi-2009-low-climate-sensitivity.htm
Web site re: solar involvement in global warming
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
Radiative forcing
http://www.springerlink.com/content/np556415834h8862
Vertical eddies
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h4440726140826j5
Heliogenic climate change
http://www.heliogenic.net/2010/05/03/lindzen-and-chois-new-paper-out-confirms-negative-feedback-unlike-agw-climate-models/
Solar dynamo – sunspot activity
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/360/1801/2741.full.pdf
Sunspots and climate change
http://www.suite101.com/content/sunspots-and-climate-change-a133866
Greenhouse warming reduced
http://www.john-daly.com/bull-121.htm
Temperature records provide clue why Americans are skeptical (Page 1)http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2691449/temperature_records_provide_clue_why.html?cat=37
Page 2
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2691449/temperature_records_provide_clue_why_pg2.html?cat=37
Dire global warming messages backfire
http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/News-dire-global-warming-messages-backfire-112210.aspx?xmlmenuid=51 01
Scripps Institute of Oceanography - http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/mauna_loa_record/mauna_loa_record.html
Climate Audit – Steve McIntyre
http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/18/curry-reviews-lindzen-and-choi/
Dr. Roy Spencer
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-background-articles
Anthony Watts PhD
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
Article describing CO2 levels following temperature changes
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/CO2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/
Reasoned critique of Lindzen and Choi paper by Dr. Roy Spencer
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/03/spencer-on-lindzen-and-choi-climate-feedback-paper/
Article offering a rebuttal of the claim that temperature
changes predate CO2 changes - discussion both pro and con
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
Examples of pro-AGW people railing against skeptics
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-hide-the-decline.html
Reasoned pro AGW
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/contributors/
Lindzen & Choi; A rebuttal article
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/lindzen-and-choi-unraveled/
Joe Romm's pro-AGW blog
http://climateprogress.org/
Skeptic article
http://greenhouse.geologist-1011.net/
Skeptic article
http://fgservices1947.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/co2-is-a-greenhouse-gas-%e2%80%93-note-from-norm-kalmanovitch-via-ccnet/
Technical Info site
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=172161
Earth blackbody
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Earth/earthtemp.html
Spörer paper
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1895ApJ.....2..239V
Excel chart misrepresents CO2 – temp relationship
http://chartsgraphs.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/excel-chart-misrepresents-co2-temperature-relationship/
AGW critical of Lindzen - Choi
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2009/08/quick-comment-on-lindzen-and-choi.html
Joe Romm expressing himself on his blog http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/04/joseph-romm-on-nicholas-dawidoff.html
Subj. Lindzen - Choi
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipcc-types-read-lindzen-choi-2009.html
Paleoclimate http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/kling/climate_models/index.html
Paleoclimate of recent past
http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/paleoclimate.html
Paleoclimate article http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/climatechange/visualizations/paleoclimate.html
Paleoclimate
http://www.news9.com/global/story.asp?s=11333682
Paleotemperature
http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/8615/allpaleotemp.png
Paleo CO2
http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/755/paleoco2all.png3
Bio of Heidi Cullen
http://www.zimbio.com/Heidi+Cullen
About Heidi Cullen and her view that skeptics should be decertified
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming011807.htm
Greenhouse gas
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html
Article on CO2
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Carbon_dioxide
Rebuttal to idea that human greenhouse gas is miniscule
http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm
How much is anthropogenic
http://www.strom.clemson.edu/becker/prtm320/commons/carbon3.html
Note from Craig James re: Hansen, RealClimate,
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/politica-lclimate/hansens_ideology_makes_him_no_longer_qualified_to_be_the_keeper_of_the_glob/
Capital Climate: Interesting tidbit about Hansen’s award by AMS from contrarian perspective
http://capitalclimate.blogspot.com/2009_01_25_archive.html
Rebuttal to Craig James speech on climate skepticism – Ed Cutlip
http://www.mediamouse.org/news/2008/04/craig-james-lec.php
Critical assessment of Bill Steffen by Ed Cutlip
http://www.mediamouse.org/news/2009/04/bill-steffen-global-warming-wood-tv-8.php
Litany of skeptical commentary by credentialed scientists
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=672bfd77-802a-23ad-4264-12316616363c
Pravda article skeptical of CC Gregory F. Fegel
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/11-01-2009/106922-earth_ice_age-1/
Pravda article skeptical about AGW – Gregory F. Fegel
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/11-01-2009/106922-earth_ice_age-2/
Article about coming ice age - Pravda
http://www.iceagenow.com/Pravda-Earth_on_the_Brink_of_an_Ice_Age.htm
Article about Pravda article
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/12/pravda-the-coming-ice-age/
Article about Pravda article
http://scaredmonkeys.com/2009/01/12/hey-al-gore-what-about-global-warming-pravda-says-earth-on-the-brink-of-an-ice-age/
Excellent article re: Pravda article
http://www.fcpp.org/publication.php/2578
Articles on Venus - Universe Today
http://www.universetoday.com/14140/history-of-planet-venus/
http://www.universetoday.com/23651/venus-possibly-had-continents-oceans/
Venus info
http://www.solstation.com/stars/venus.htm
How Venus lost its oceans
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/venus_oceans_020516.html
About rain forests
http://www.hipark.austinisd.org/projects/fourth/rainforests/environment.html
About Indonesia rain forest destruction
http://www.indonesiamatters.com/1252/rainforest-deforestation/
Rain forest destruction
http://library.thinkquest.org/26026/Environmental_Problems/rain_forest_destruction.htmlhttp://library.thinkquest.org/26026/Environmental_Problems/rain_forest_destruction.html
Goodbye to West Africa’s rain forests
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0122-forests.html
Christian Science Monitor article about how recession caused emissions to decline
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/1122/Global-warming-carbon-dioxide-emissions-worldwide-fell-in-2009
HARD COVER REFERENCES
Black Holes & Time Warps
Kip S. Thorne
1994
ISBN: 0-393-31276-3
The Whole Shebang
Timothy Ferris
1998
ISBN: 0-684-81020-4TF
Physical Chemistry - A Molecular Approach
Donald A. McQuarrie & John D. Simon
1997
ISBN: 0-9357032-99-7
ERRATA:
1. In CLCC-10
I cited the figure $70 billion the U.S. government had awarded pro AGW scientists in grant money. I've been unable to verify that figure. I've replaced that figure with $3 billion which is verifiable.
2. In CLCC - 5
I identified Dr. Phil Jones as being a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Dr. Jones is the Director of Research at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK. I cannot verify he actually sits on the panel. Dr. Jones, however, has been and continues to be closely associated with that body.
3. In CLCC - 9 I referenced China's population as outnumbering that of the U.S. by 10 to 1. With a population of 1.3 billion (not 3 billion), China's population exceeds that of the U.S. by 4.33 to 1.
Showing posts with label James Hansen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Hansen. Show all posts
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 9)
CLIMATE CHANGE JIHAD
“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth”
Albert Einstein – 1900
Albert Einstein was an iconoclast. So is Freeman Dyson, the brilliant physicist and mathematician who unified quantum theory and electrodynamics into the discipline of quantum electrodynamics in 1949.
Dyson has been at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at Princeton NJ, since 1953, where he shared time and space with Einstein for two years until Einstein's death in 1955. IAS, established in 1930, is a sort of elite scientific think tank staffed at different times by some of the most brilliant scientists of the modern era. Dyson is "infinitely smart", according to Bill Press, former Deputy Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory (birthplace of the atomic and hydrogen bombs). Few people who know or worked with Dyson would disagree - but there are some who don't know a lot about him who think of him as a know-nothing. They are some of the global warming radicals who push Anthropogenic Climate Change (AGW) as a holy war to be waged with every nanogram of their beings, and they don't like Dyson because he thinks the climate change issue has been blown way up out of proportion. He agrees that it's getting warmer, and that carbon dioxide may even have something to do with it, but he doesn't see it as a crisis. To the AGW people, that's heresy, and it makes Freeman Dyson a heretic.
Dyson was interviewed by Nicholas Dawidoff in early 2009 for an article that ran in New York Times Magazine on March 28, 2009, where he had the temerity to voice his opinion on the AGW issue - and likewise, Dawidoff had the temerity run Dyson's opinion in his piece.
Both took a lot of heat from the climate radicals because of this piece. Here's Dr. Joe Romm, physicist and climate blogger, attacking Dawidoff to Bob Garfield of On The Media with a blistering fusillade for "misleading the public". "The public is not scientifically expert, and the public’s ability to distinguish science and pseudoscience, which sound pretty much the same, is very small. So it is up to the filters, the media, to use its own judgment based on talking to many different sources and itself weighing the credibility of sources".
There you have it right from an apocalyptic's mouth. We, the public, are stupid (and easy targets for being duped by their propaganda in the media). Only pro-AGW scientists, in their view, have the inside track on the scientific nuances of climate change - other scientists, no matter how accomplished in their field, need not utter a peep. It's the media's job, according to Romm, to be the AGW's mouthpiece, to selectively filter out anything that calls AGW research into even a hint of a question. They are doing an admirable job of doing just that.
Even if a scientist is a practicing climatologist and knows of what he or she speaks, he or she has to know they'll get blackballed by the "mainstream" scientific community if they don't mind their Ps and Qs. These scientists and technocrats can and do arrange for funding to be pulled from apostate scientists who do not agree or agree strongly enough with the AGW dogma. Moreover, the AGW people can and have arranged for the ousting of non-compliant journal editors who have had the bad sense to allow the publishing of papers on climate that aren't sufficiently zealous enough to satisfy them.
Famed AGW apocalyptic Dr. James E. Hansen responded to the New York Times Magazine's piece with this comment: There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about (Huh?). If he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.” Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Hansen needs to do his homework. Dyson worked with Alvin Weinberg at the Institute of Energy Analysis (a subdivision of the Department of Energy (DOE) in the late 1970s studying carbon dioxide's relationship with global climate, and has been pondering the issue for years. Hansen believes himself to be one of the, if not the, foremost expert on climate change in the world, that he drives the car, and everybody else please get in the back seat. But Hansen doesn't give Dyson any credit - just like Einstein's Professors at the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (ETH) in Zürich didn't give him any credit for his contrarian thinking a hundred and ten years ago that ultimately led to Relatively superceding the previously unshakable Newtonian concepts of Absolute Space and Absolute Time.
Dyson is someone who can roll with the punches the AGW people throw at him. With his customary air of humility, Dyson says: " [m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have".
Dave Roberts of Grist Magazine has this suggestion: Put AGW "deniers" on trial à la Nuremberg. Roberts equates the AGW "crisis" as being equivalent to the Holocaust, and he equates "deniers" (whom he doesn't distinguish from "doubters" or "skeptics") equivalent to Nazi war criminals. And who is responsible for the "Holocaust" we're experiencing? We humans, of course. This is pretty radical stuff!
Meet Dr. Heidi Cullen, formerly of The Weather Channel, now the interim CEO of Climate Central, who believes meteorologists or other weather professionals should be decertified if they don't toe the line. Here's what she wrote: "If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS (American Meteorological Society) shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns."
Wait a minute! I didn't know that AGW was an established scientific fact. I thought it was a hypothesis that is being tested, and, since by definition, climate is defined as the aggregate weather over the course of decades, centuries, and millennia, then at best, the jury's still out on whether man-made climate change is established as a "fundamental" truth. The testing of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, begun in earnest only a couple of decades ago, has in fact barely begun. On the matter of AMS's members agreeing with Cullen's statement about the AMS being on board, well, not so fast!
Here's what TV meteorologist James Spann, a meteorologist at an ABC affiliate in Alabama, had to say about it: "I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can't find them".
Bill Steffen, a meteorologist at the NBC affiliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan, concurs. In an email Steffen said most meteorologists accept that the earth has been warming over the last hundred years, but do not believe the warming is anthropogenic. Those that do believe in AGW do so because they're mandated to do so as per their job description. They're afraid they'll lose it if they stray from the fold. Another example of the financial interests involved in the AGW movement.
Climate science - a legitimate and highly complex discipline in the physical sciences, has been hijacked by financial, political and ideological interests, which means that the science, as practiced by the ideologues, has lost its claim to objectivity. It has become, in my words, a scientific jihad. Climate science has been hijacked in the same manner as Islam has been hijacked by the terrorist jihadis. It's been bastardized by a fringe element who have been portrayed as mainstream by the mainstream media and sympathetic politicians and, most of all, by themselves.
Dispassionate scientific inquiry is the foundation of scientific research, and likewise, journalism is supposed to be the dispassionate, objective pursuit of the truth. Yet the mainstream media, with the New York Times and the Washington Post leading the charge, is acting as a mouthpiece for only one side of the story. Dozens of columnists and op-ed writers like Tom Friedman and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, Michael Mandelbaum and Bryan Walsh, of Time Magazine, just to name a small handful off the top of my head, tout AGW as established fact. A case in point - when Climategate happened, the media smoothed over the incriminating stuff. Specifics were mentioned very little by most media outlets. The story ran along the lines of " ..... It was just a bump in the road - It was just glitch, no harm done - It didn't change anything - It didn't alter the fact that the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change is clear - The deniers are making a tempest in a teapot out of this - It was all taken out of context - It was deliberately misconstrued by the enemies of "real" climate science" etc. etc. Andrew Revkin of the NYT, called by some an "alarmist reporter" and a shill for the AGW jihad, was one of the most ambitious reporters running interference on behalf of the East Anglia jihadis. But Revkin was butchered by radical ClimateProgress blogger Joe Romm (remember him from earlier in this post?) in his blog for (responsibly) questioning the validity of a slide in one of Al Gore's lectures that asserted there had been "unprecedented" occurrences of wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters - all due to global warming. Even the IPCC had to admit that even they didn't know enough to say for sure that all these disasters were caused by AGW (though curiously, they didn't explicitly deny it).
According to The Gospel According to Joe, any media that doesn't carry the Word with sufficient zeal must be censured or labeled with some epithet. Romm, as difficult as it is to believe, is probably even more radical than Hansen. He uses his blog to mount attacks on "enemies" of the AGW jihad, and even sometimes wages war against journalists and scientists whom he considers insufficiently passionate AGW jihadis - such as Revkin. Romm has even said Hansen, of all people, is understating the climate crisis in which we are perishing.
As revealed by the Climategate emails from East Anglia and radical bloggers like Romm, along with interviews by AGW scientists given with sympathetic reporters, op-ed columnists for radical "green" publications, Dave Roberts of Grist, and others, there is a significant degree of hatred, rancor, and derision directed at scientists and politicians who have an opposing view. AGW radicals at East Anglia, including notorious schemers Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, collaborated to get Review Editor James Saiers removed from his position at the Geophysical Review Letters because he allowed a "sceptic" (sic) paper (by climate scientist Steve McIntyre) to get published in that journal. They also lobbied for the removal of Hans Von Storch from his position as Editor in Chief at the the journal Climate Research because he allowed a "sceptic" (sic) paper (dubbed "crap science" by Wigley) to be published in his journal.
Climate jihadis who push for punitive measures against those who disagree with their viewpoint aren't limited to just the media and scientific community - here's a real doozy of a fanatic - Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford, UK. who's hell-bent on waging economic warfare on the United States for having too big of a carbon footprint. He is the UK's leading "climate economist".
Lord Stern is threatening economic jihad on the U.S. in the event we don't cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 17% within the next ten years. And if we don't (which we won't - because we can't), he's going to get a bunch of other countries, which presumably includes the U.K., to boycott all products made here in the US. Stern is claiming that "if nothing is done", the global temperature will rise as much as 7° C by the year 2100.
What?!
This guy doesn't know science from shinola. Apparently his cronies over in nearby East Anglia are feeding him this stuff and he must think it tastes good. He thinks the AGW science is settled, which it's not. But it doesn't matter to him, because he's on the war path and his mind is made up.
The illuminating thing about Lord Stern is that he is an economist, and as such he knows for certain that the United States would cease to be a viable society if such drastic measures to cut CO2 emissions were enacted and enforced. But that would be alright with him. He apparently wants to see the U.S brought to it's knees, one way or another. This is a classic, lose-lose scenario that would have implications for not just the U.S., but globally. Maybe Stern figures China would step in and become the world's primary economic engine (they're already well along in that direction as of now).
Curiously, Stern wants to let China off the hook, even though China emits more CO2 than the United States. Stern used the "per capita" gambit to excuse China's carbon footprint. China's population outnumbers that of the United States more than 4 to 1, which would render any per capita comparison between the two countries utterly meaningless. These are just a few of the schemings and machinations Wigley, Jones, and others have orchestrated or tried to orchestrate. The emails and other spoken and printed material from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia are filled with ad hominum attacks on scientists outside their circle (and thus, outside their control) who carry out climate research the AGW jihadis consider heretical or not sufficiently supportive of their agenda.
The nature of science is often adversarial - that's its nature. Subjects of scientific study are often rife with mind boggling complexity - almost never is there any one right answer, and usually there are many, many "somewhat right" answers that are unequivocally right to true believers. Sometimes even competent scientists get it wrong, and when an honorable scientist gets it wrong they accept the correction graciously, publish an erratum, and move on. One of young Einstein's Professors at the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (ETH) who was critical of him was his mathematics instructor, Professor Hermann Minkowski (who refered to Einstein as "a lazy dog").
Einstein was vindicated when, in 1908, Professor Minkowski united the three spacial dimensions with the dimension of time into a unified four dimensional "spacetime" using Einstein's Invariance Theory (better known as the Special Theory of Relativity) as its foundation.
Scientists who disagree should, but often do not, respect the differing scientific opinions of other scientists. In researching this serial story of climate change - I have seen many interviews and read many articles. I have discussed (via email) many aspects of both sides. What I've come to understand is simply this: AGW jihadis display a singularly rigid and unnatural animosity towards those credentialed scientists (and journalists) holding opposing scientific views, while opposing scientists are less rancorous on a personal level but dismiss the AGW jihadis as practitioners of quack science who are driven by greed, by the quest for fame, money, and hero status. As for the AGW jihadis, their jobs and prestige depends on their being right. It's the politicization of science for personal and political gain that has turned off many scientists. Many climate scientists respond to their critics by questioning their integrity rather than responding with reasoned arguments backed up by solid data. IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri trashes research not done by AGW jihadis as "voodoo science" even after it has been shown that some of IPCC's most quoted data came right out of unvetted activist brochures, reports from corporations with a vested interest in the AGW jihad, and newspaper articles by activist AGW journalists. UN Environment chief Achem Steiner suggests anyone who questions questionable claims and data produced by AGW jihadi scientists are guilty of conducting "witch hunts". AGW jihadis flail wildly at those who have legitimate disagreements with their conclusions, and along with their media shills, they release chaff and run interference to cover up legitimate questions on whether or not they are practicing quack science to maintain their position in the driver's seat where they can continiue to ride the gravy train only as long as they fight with all the abandon they can muster.
With AGW, we are told by the media that the "overwhelming majority" of "climate experts" and "leading scientists" support man-made global warming and believe it is a crisis of epic proportions. These are "the authorities" that Einstein would consider them to be today if he were here. If he were here, you can almost bet money he would say: "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of Truth".
“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth”
Albert Einstein – 1900
Albert Einstein was an iconoclast. So is Freeman Dyson, the brilliant physicist and mathematician who unified quantum theory and electrodynamics into the discipline of quantum electrodynamics in 1949.
Dyson has been at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at Princeton NJ, since 1953, where he shared time and space with Einstein for two years until Einstein's death in 1955. IAS, established in 1930, is a sort of elite scientific think tank staffed at different times by some of the most brilliant scientists of the modern era. Dyson is "infinitely smart", according to Bill Press, former Deputy Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory (birthplace of the atomic and hydrogen bombs). Few people who know or worked with Dyson would disagree - but there are some who don't know a lot about him who think of him as a know-nothing. They are some of the global warming radicals who push Anthropogenic Climate Change (AGW) as a holy war to be waged with every nanogram of their beings, and they don't like Dyson because he thinks the climate change issue has been blown way up out of proportion. He agrees that it's getting warmer, and that carbon dioxide may even have something to do with it, but he doesn't see it as a crisis. To the AGW people, that's heresy, and it makes Freeman Dyson a heretic.
Dyson was interviewed by Nicholas Dawidoff in early 2009 for an article that ran in New York Times Magazine on March 28, 2009, where he had the temerity to voice his opinion on the AGW issue - and likewise, Dawidoff had the temerity run Dyson's opinion in his piece.
Both took a lot of heat from the climate radicals because of this piece. Here's Dr. Joe Romm, physicist and climate blogger, attacking Dawidoff to Bob Garfield of On The Media with a blistering fusillade for "misleading the public". "The public is not scientifically expert, and the public’s ability to distinguish science and pseudoscience, which sound pretty much the same, is very small. So it is up to the filters, the media, to use its own judgment based on talking to many different sources and itself weighing the credibility of sources".
There you have it right from an apocalyptic's mouth. We, the public, are stupid (and easy targets for being duped by their propaganda in the media). Only pro-AGW scientists, in their view, have the inside track on the scientific nuances of climate change - other scientists, no matter how accomplished in their field, need not utter a peep. It's the media's job, according to Romm, to be the AGW's mouthpiece, to selectively filter out anything that calls AGW research into even a hint of a question. They are doing an admirable job of doing just that.
Even if a scientist is a practicing climatologist and knows of what he or she speaks, he or she has to know they'll get blackballed by the "mainstream" scientific community if they don't mind their Ps and Qs. These scientists and technocrats can and do arrange for funding to be pulled from apostate scientists who do not agree or agree strongly enough with the AGW dogma. Moreover, the AGW people can and have arranged for the ousting of non-compliant journal editors who have had the bad sense to allow the publishing of papers on climate that aren't sufficiently zealous enough to satisfy them.
Famed AGW apocalyptic Dr. James E. Hansen responded to the New York Times Magazine's piece with this comment: There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about (Huh?). If he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.” Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Hansen needs to do his homework. Dyson worked with Alvin Weinberg at the Institute of Energy Analysis (a subdivision of the Department of Energy (DOE) in the late 1970s studying carbon dioxide's relationship with global climate, and has been pondering the issue for years. Hansen believes himself to be one of the, if not the, foremost expert on climate change in the world, that he drives the car, and everybody else please get in the back seat. But Hansen doesn't give Dyson any credit - just like Einstein's Professors at the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (ETH) in Zürich didn't give him any credit for his contrarian thinking a hundred and ten years ago that ultimately led to Relatively superceding the previously unshakable Newtonian concepts of Absolute Space and Absolute Time.
Dyson is someone who can roll with the punches the AGW people throw at him. With his customary air of humility, Dyson says: " [m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have".
Dave Roberts of Grist Magazine has this suggestion: Put AGW "deniers" on trial à la Nuremberg. Roberts equates the AGW "crisis" as being equivalent to the Holocaust, and he equates "deniers" (whom he doesn't distinguish from "doubters" or "skeptics") equivalent to Nazi war criminals. And who is responsible for the "Holocaust" we're experiencing? We humans, of course. This is pretty radical stuff!
Meet Dr. Heidi Cullen, formerly of The Weather Channel, now the interim CEO of Climate Central, who believes meteorologists or other weather professionals should be decertified if they don't toe the line. Here's what she wrote: "If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS (American Meteorological Society) shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns."
Wait a minute! I didn't know that AGW was an established scientific fact. I thought it was a hypothesis that is being tested, and, since by definition, climate is defined as the aggregate weather over the course of decades, centuries, and millennia, then at best, the jury's still out on whether man-made climate change is established as a "fundamental" truth. The testing of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, begun in earnest only a couple of decades ago, has in fact barely begun. On the matter of AMS's members agreeing with Cullen's statement about the AMS being on board, well, not so fast!
Here's what TV meteorologist James Spann, a meteorologist at an ABC affiliate in Alabama, had to say about it: "I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can't find them".
Bill Steffen, a meteorologist at the NBC affiliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan, concurs. In an email Steffen said most meteorologists accept that the earth has been warming over the last hundred years, but do not believe the warming is anthropogenic. Those that do believe in AGW do so because they're mandated to do so as per their job description. They're afraid they'll lose it if they stray from the fold. Another example of the financial interests involved in the AGW movement.
Climate science - a legitimate and highly complex discipline in the physical sciences, has been hijacked by financial, political and ideological interests, which means that the science, as practiced by the ideologues, has lost its claim to objectivity. It has become, in my words, a scientific jihad. Climate science has been hijacked in the same manner as Islam has been hijacked by the terrorist jihadis. It's been bastardized by a fringe element who have been portrayed as mainstream by the mainstream media and sympathetic politicians and, most of all, by themselves.
Dispassionate scientific inquiry is the foundation of scientific research, and likewise, journalism is supposed to be the dispassionate, objective pursuit of the truth. Yet the mainstream media, with the New York Times and the Washington Post leading the charge, is acting as a mouthpiece for only one side of the story. Dozens of columnists and op-ed writers like Tom Friedman and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, Michael Mandelbaum and Bryan Walsh, of Time Magazine, just to name a small handful off the top of my head, tout AGW as established fact. A case in point - when Climategate happened, the media smoothed over the incriminating stuff. Specifics were mentioned very little by most media outlets. The story ran along the lines of " ..... It was just a bump in the road - It was just glitch, no harm done - It didn't change anything - It didn't alter the fact that the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change is clear - The deniers are making a tempest in a teapot out of this - It was all taken out of context - It was deliberately misconstrued by the enemies of "real" climate science" etc. etc. Andrew Revkin of the NYT, called by some an "alarmist reporter" and a shill for the AGW jihad, was one of the most ambitious reporters running interference on behalf of the East Anglia jihadis. But Revkin was butchered by radical ClimateProgress blogger Joe Romm (remember him from earlier in this post?) in his blog for (responsibly) questioning the validity of a slide in one of Al Gore's lectures that asserted there had been "unprecedented" occurrences of wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters - all due to global warming. Even the IPCC had to admit that even they didn't know enough to say for sure that all these disasters were caused by AGW (though curiously, they didn't explicitly deny it).
According to The Gospel According to Joe, any media that doesn't carry the Word with sufficient zeal must be censured or labeled with some epithet. Romm, as difficult as it is to believe, is probably even more radical than Hansen. He uses his blog to mount attacks on "enemies" of the AGW jihad, and even sometimes wages war against journalists and scientists whom he considers insufficiently passionate AGW jihadis - such as Revkin. Romm has even said Hansen, of all people, is understating the climate crisis in which we are perishing.
As revealed by the Climategate emails from East Anglia and radical bloggers like Romm, along with interviews by AGW scientists given with sympathetic reporters, op-ed columnists for radical "green" publications, Dave Roberts of Grist, and others, there is a significant degree of hatred, rancor, and derision directed at scientists and politicians who have an opposing view. AGW radicals at East Anglia, including notorious schemers Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, collaborated to get Review Editor James Saiers removed from his position at the Geophysical Review Letters because he allowed a "sceptic" (sic) paper (by climate scientist Steve McIntyre) to get published in that journal. They also lobbied for the removal of Hans Von Storch from his position as Editor in Chief at the the journal Climate Research because he allowed a "sceptic" (sic) paper (dubbed "crap science" by Wigley) to be published in his journal.
Climate jihadis who push for punitive measures against those who disagree with their viewpoint aren't limited to just the media and scientific community - here's a real doozy of a fanatic - Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford, UK. who's hell-bent on waging economic warfare on the United States for having too big of a carbon footprint. He is the UK's leading "climate economist".
Lord Stern is threatening economic jihad on the U.S. in the event we don't cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 17% within the next ten years. And if we don't (which we won't - because we can't), he's going to get a bunch of other countries, which presumably includes the U.K., to boycott all products made here in the US. Stern is claiming that "if nothing is done", the global temperature will rise as much as 7° C by the year 2100.
What?!
This guy doesn't know science from shinola. Apparently his cronies over in nearby East Anglia are feeding him this stuff and he must think it tastes good. He thinks the AGW science is settled, which it's not. But it doesn't matter to him, because he's on the war path and his mind is made up.
The illuminating thing about Lord Stern is that he is an economist, and as such he knows for certain that the United States would cease to be a viable society if such drastic measures to cut CO2 emissions were enacted and enforced. But that would be alright with him. He apparently wants to see the U.S brought to it's knees, one way or another. This is a classic, lose-lose scenario that would have implications for not just the U.S., but globally. Maybe Stern figures China would step in and become the world's primary economic engine (they're already well along in that direction as of now).
Curiously, Stern wants to let China off the hook, even though China emits more CO2 than the United States. Stern used the "per capita" gambit to excuse China's carbon footprint. China's population outnumbers that of the United States more than 4 to 1, which would render any per capita comparison between the two countries utterly meaningless. These are just a few of the schemings and machinations Wigley, Jones, and others have orchestrated or tried to orchestrate. The emails and other spoken and printed material from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia are filled with ad hominum attacks on scientists outside their circle (and thus, outside their control) who carry out climate research the AGW jihadis consider heretical or not sufficiently supportive of their agenda.
The nature of science is often adversarial - that's its nature. Subjects of scientific study are often rife with mind boggling complexity - almost never is there any one right answer, and usually there are many, many "somewhat right" answers that are unequivocally right to true believers. Sometimes even competent scientists get it wrong, and when an honorable scientist gets it wrong they accept the correction graciously, publish an erratum, and move on. One of young Einstein's Professors at the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (ETH) who was critical of him was his mathematics instructor, Professor Hermann Minkowski (who refered to Einstein as "a lazy dog").
Einstein was vindicated when, in 1908, Professor Minkowski united the three spacial dimensions with the dimension of time into a unified four dimensional "spacetime" using Einstein's Invariance Theory (better known as the Special Theory of Relativity) as its foundation.
Scientists who disagree should, but often do not, respect the differing scientific opinions of other scientists. In researching this serial story of climate change - I have seen many interviews and read many articles. I have discussed (via email) many aspects of both sides. What I've come to understand is simply this: AGW jihadis display a singularly rigid and unnatural animosity towards those credentialed scientists (and journalists) holding opposing scientific views, while opposing scientists are less rancorous on a personal level but dismiss the AGW jihadis as practitioners of quack science who are driven by greed, by the quest for fame, money, and hero status. As for the AGW jihadis, their jobs and prestige depends on their being right. It's the politicization of science for personal and political gain that has turned off many scientists. Many climate scientists respond to their critics by questioning their integrity rather than responding with reasoned arguments backed up by solid data. IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri trashes research not done by AGW jihadis as "voodoo science" even after it has been shown that some of IPCC's most quoted data came right out of unvetted activist brochures, reports from corporations with a vested interest in the AGW jihad, and newspaper articles by activist AGW journalists. UN Environment chief Achem Steiner suggests anyone who questions questionable claims and data produced by AGW jihadi scientists are guilty of conducting "witch hunts". AGW jihadis flail wildly at those who have legitimate disagreements with their conclusions, and along with their media shills, they release chaff and run interference to cover up legitimate questions on whether or not they are practicing quack science to maintain their position in the driver's seat where they can continiue to ride the gravy train only as long as they fight with all the abandon they can muster.
With AGW, we are told by the media that the "overwhelming majority" of "climate experts" and "leading scientists" support man-made global warming and believe it is a crisis of epic proportions. These are "the authorities" that Einstein would consider them to be today if he were here. If he were here, you can almost bet money he would say: "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of Truth".
Friday, November 12, 2010
A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 3)
SOME CONTRARIAN VIEWS
Here’s my personal belief – Dr. Hansen means well. In his own mind, he’s convinced he’s right about catastrophic climate change, and he may very well be right on some points of the debate. Hansen has some luminaries in his corner, to be sure. That great, internationally renowned scientist Osama bin Laden has taken up the cause – pontificating from his hideout in Pakistan about the evil West’s involvement in the destruction of Muslim lands with its wanton disregard for the global environment. He was talking about the Pakistani floods earlier this year. Why did the floods happen? According to Osama, global warming caused by the Infidel West was a direct causation of the flooding that killed more than 1,500 Muslims, upended the lives of over 30 million more, and ruined 20% of Pakistan’s countryside.
There was another flood several millennia ago, according to the Bible. That flood was supposedly caused by God to destroy the people who were sinning profligately and were living in the area that sustained the flood. The big difference: That flood was caused by God to punish the sinners and infidels who lived where the flood happened, whereas the recent floods in Pakistan resulting in such devastation to the Muslims who were living there were caused by infidels living on the other side of the world.
Seriously, the proponents of man-made global warming have a very large soapbox from which to render their verdicts against mankind and its culpability in this ongoing, accelerating destruction of Mother Earth. Further, they have a large megaphone through which to amplify their message - it's called The Media. Then, in 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina, that noted American scientist - Al Gore, appeared on the scene with his movie. And How! No soapbox was bigger than Al Gore’s Hollywood podium. And no megaphone was bigger and louder than Hollywood’s slick production apparatus through which Gore was able to promulgate his political and worldviews. The outcome of this collaboration was the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth – a quite convincing and well made production that made a huge splash on public awareness. It got the people on the street’s attention. It got everybody’s attention, including members of the scientific community who don’t agree with the viewpoints of Al Gore, James Hansen, and even Osama bin Laden. And that’s when some of these previously silent contrarian voices began to speak up.
Critics of the man-made global warming movement were very quick to cite errors and misstatements of fact in the movie and elsewhere. There was a lawsuit filed in the UK - Dimmock v. the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, where the plaintiff wanted to bar the film from being shown in an educational context. The plaintiff won the case – the verdict in favor of the plaintiff cited nine specific examples in the film that weren’t accepted as factual by a “scientific consensus”. These specifics came to be known as “the nine errors”. To give just a few examples:
1. The film says Hurricane Katrina was caused by man-made global warming.
The scientific consensus says no. Global warming didn’t cause Katrina
2. According to the movie, coastal regions would be inundated by glacier-melt from Greenland and Antarctica making refugees out of a hundred million people.
Scientific consensus holds that such glacier-melt, if it would ever happen, would take millennia and allow people living in low lying coastal areas plenty of time to relocate – plenty of time as in several hundred generations
3. The movie says there are polar bears in the arctic drowning because of the scarcity of ice due to excessive ice melt
What really happened was four polar bears had recently been found drowned after a ferocious winter storm, not because of disappearing ice
And there are six more "errors" along the same lines cited in the verdict. As H. L. Mencken would probably have said: "Nine Convenient Un-truths.
But it doesn’t stop there. Here’s John Coleman, co-founder of the Weather Channel in an interview:
Well, when I looked at the hockey stick graph that was produced in Manning’s (Mann's) original report, and it showed a steady-line temperature through the millenniums (sic), and then it showed a sudden rise, I knew that was incorrect, I knew that couldn’t possibly be, and I started asking experts about it and I started digging into how that was produced, and I found out it was bogus science, it wasn’t real, the numbers had been massaged, the whole thing had been created. What bothered me was, the other scientists had accepted it, and why did they possibly do that? And I think the real answer to that question is, they all have an agenda, an environmental and political agenda that said “let’s pile on here, we’re all gonna make a lot of money, we’re gonna get research grants, we’re gonna get awards, we’re all gonna become famous, and I guess that’s what happened”.
The "Hockey Stick" graph came up again in an interview with Canadian climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball, who believes, as do many others, that the Earth is getting warmer, but natural causes are mostly to blame. The release of thousands of hacked emails between researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK opened up a real can of worms for the apocalyptos.
Dr. Ball on the emails: I saw the hijacking of climate science, particularly by computer modelers…and by a small group of people associated with the (UN’s) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...
...But now, suddenly, with the exposure of these files, it’s …not only a smoking gun but a battery of machine guns that has been exposed, and, uh, it really is deeply disturbing, because what you’ve got here is confirmation this small group of scientists, who, by the way, Professor Wegman, who was asked to arbitrate about the Hockey Stick…he identifies 42 people, and said 'look, these people are all publishing together, and they’re also peer reviewing each others’ literature…'
So Dr. Ball gleaned from the leaked emails from East Anglia a pattern of collusion by climate researchers, particularly on the “Hockey Stick” graph showing a dramatic, unnatural spike in global temperatures in recent years. Dr. Ball further described how the leaked emails show clear evidence of data culling and omission and collaborating on publishing fudged data. He cites a cabal of climate researchers who peer-review each other’s papers so they’ll be published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and be accepted by the world as scientific fact.
Dr. Hansen's boss at NASA, Dr. John S. Theon, now retired, wrote the following in a communiqué to the (Congressional) Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works committee dated January 15, 2009:
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,”. His major concern was the computer modeling... “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” He made a disturbing comment about the data, which beyond the models is at the very heart of the climate problem. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,”
Claude Allegre, a former French government official and member of France's Socialist Party who was at one time a proponent of man-made climate change, converted to the other side. He wrote that "the cause of climate change is unknown" and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall has been stable over the last 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice.
And then there's the late Dr. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, who was considered by many to be one of the world's most astute climatologists. Dr. Bryson famously said on CNBC"...you could spit and do more damage to the environment than doubling CO2 in the atmosphere".
And finally, there's Canadian paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, who says this:
• “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"[31][32]
Drs. Patterson and Ball were signatories, along with 58 other climate scientists from all over the world, on an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper appealing for alternative or additional points of view to be considered in a debate on the Kyoto Protocol. On a broader scale, some 900 climate scientists throughout the world signed a document opposing and disputing the "overwhelming consensus" that the earth is warming due entirely to human activities.
On the matter of high CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere 450 million years ago, Dr. Patterson is correct - paleogeologic evidence suggests that the CO2 count was of the order of 4200-4500 ppmv in the late Ordovician Period, which would make it eleven times higher than it is today. The Ordovician Period ended around 438 million years ago with glaciers covering much of the planet for a million years or more and causing a mass extinction. An ice age lasting over a million years with a CO2 count eleven times higher than it is now! But, there's a fly in the soup...it's just a question of whether that fly is microscopic or if it's as big as a pterodactyl. And that fly in the soup is this - the sun shone with only about 97% of its current intensity during the Ordovician. How relevant is that? I'll publish some calculations where I plug numbers into a formula in a day or so, although whether anything meaningful will come out of these calculations is uncertain to me at this point. Stay tuned.
Here’s my personal belief – Dr. Hansen means well. In his own mind, he’s convinced he’s right about catastrophic climate change, and he may very well be right on some points of the debate. Hansen has some luminaries in his corner, to be sure. That great, internationally renowned scientist Osama bin Laden has taken up the cause – pontificating from his hideout in Pakistan about the evil West’s involvement in the destruction of Muslim lands with its wanton disregard for the global environment. He was talking about the Pakistani floods earlier this year. Why did the floods happen? According to Osama, global warming caused by the Infidel West was a direct causation of the flooding that killed more than 1,500 Muslims, upended the lives of over 30 million more, and ruined 20% of Pakistan’s countryside.
There was another flood several millennia ago, according to the Bible. That flood was supposedly caused by God to destroy the people who were sinning profligately and were living in the area that sustained the flood. The big difference: That flood was caused by God to punish the sinners and infidels who lived where the flood happened, whereas the recent floods in Pakistan resulting in such devastation to the Muslims who were living there were caused by infidels living on the other side of the world.
Seriously, the proponents of man-made global warming have a very large soapbox from which to render their verdicts against mankind and its culpability in this ongoing, accelerating destruction of Mother Earth. Further, they have a large megaphone through which to amplify their message - it's called The Media. Then, in 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina, that noted American scientist - Al Gore, appeared on the scene with his movie. And How! No soapbox was bigger than Al Gore’s Hollywood podium. And no megaphone was bigger and louder than Hollywood’s slick production apparatus through which Gore was able to promulgate his political and worldviews. The outcome of this collaboration was the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth – a quite convincing and well made production that made a huge splash on public awareness. It got the people on the street’s attention. It got everybody’s attention, including members of the scientific community who don’t agree with the viewpoints of Al Gore, James Hansen, and even Osama bin Laden. And that’s when some of these previously silent contrarian voices began to speak up.
Critics of the man-made global warming movement were very quick to cite errors and misstatements of fact in the movie and elsewhere. There was a lawsuit filed in the UK - Dimmock v. the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, where the plaintiff wanted to bar the film from being shown in an educational context. The plaintiff won the case – the verdict in favor of the plaintiff cited nine specific examples in the film that weren’t accepted as factual by a “scientific consensus”. These specifics came to be known as “the nine errors”. To give just a few examples:
1. The film says Hurricane Katrina was caused by man-made global warming.
The scientific consensus says no. Global warming didn’t cause Katrina
2. According to the movie, coastal regions would be inundated by glacier-melt from Greenland and Antarctica making refugees out of a hundred million people.
Scientific consensus holds that such glacier-melt, if it would ever happen, would take millennia and allow people living in low lying coastal areas plenty of time to relocate – plenty of time as in several hundred generations
3. The movie says there are polar bears in the arctic drowning because of the scarcity of ice due to excessive ice melt
What really happened was four polar bears had recently been found drowned after a ferocious winter storm, not because of disappearing ice
And there are six more "errors" along the same lines cited in the verdict. As H. L. Mencken would probably have said: "Nine Convenient Un-truths.
But it doesn’t stop there. Here’s John Coleman, co-founder of the Weather Channel in an interview:
Well, when I looked at the hockey stick graph that was produced in Manning’s (Mann's) original report, and it showed a steady-line temperature through the millenniums (sic), and then it showed a sudden rise, I knew that was incorrect, I knew that couldn’t possibly be, and I started asking experts about it and I started digging into how that was produced, and I found out it was bogus science, it wasn’t real, the numbers had been massaged, the whole thing had been created. What bothered me was, the other scientists had accepted it, and why did they possibly do that? And I think the real answer to that question is, they all have an agenda, an environmental and political agenda that said “let’s pile on here, we’re all gonna make a lot of money, we’re gonna get research grants, we’re gonna get awards, we’re all gonna become famous, and I guess that’s what happened”.
The "Hockey Stick" graph came up again in an interview with Canadian climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball, who believes, as do many others, that the Earth is getting warmer, but natural causes are mostly to blame. The release of thousands of hacked emails between researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK opened up a real can of worms for the apocalyptos.
Dr. Ball on the emails: I saw the hijacking of climate science, particularly by computer modelers…and by a small group of people associated with the (UN’s) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...
...But now, suddenly, with the exposure of these files, it’s …not only a smoking gun but a battery of machine guns that has been exposed, and, uh, it really is deeply disturbing, because what you’ve got here is confirmation this small group of scientists, who, by the way, Professor Wegman, who was asked to arbitrate about the Hockey Stick…he identifies 42 people, and said 'look, these people are all publishing together, and they’re also peer reviewing each others’ literature…'
So Dr. Ball gleaned from the leaked emails from East Anglia a pattern of collusion by climate researchers, particularly on the “Hockey Stick” graph showing a dramatic, unnatural spike in global temperatures in recent years. Dr. Ball further described how the leaked emails show clear evidence of data culling and omission and collaborating on publishing fudged data. He cites a cabal of climate researchers who peer-review each other’s papers so they’ll be published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and be accepted by the world as scientific fact.
Dr. Hansen's boss at NASA, Dr. John S. Theon, now retired, wrote the following in a communiqué to the (Congressional) Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works committee dated January 15, 2009:
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,”. His major concern was the computer modeling... “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” He made a disturbing comment about the data, which beyond the models is at the very heart of the climate problem. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,”
Claude Allegre, a former French government official and member of France's Socialist Party who was at one time a proponent of man-made climate change, converted to the other side. He wrote that "the cause of climate change is unknown" and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall has been stable over the last 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice.
And then there's the late Dr. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, who was considered by many to be one of the world's most astute climatologists. Dr. Bryson famously said on CNBC"...you could spit and do more damage to the environment than doubling CO2 in the atmosphere".
And finally, there's Canadian paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, who says this:
• “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"[31][32]
Drs. Patterson and Ball were signatories, along with 58 other climate scientists from all over the world, on an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper appealing for alternative or additional points of view to be considered in a debate on the Kyoto Protocol. On a broader scale, some 900 climate scientists throughout the world signed a document opposing and disputing the "overwhelming consensus" that the earth is warming due entirely to human activities.
On the matter of high CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere 450 million years ago, Dr. Patterson is correct - paleogeologic evidence suggests that the CO2 count was of the order of 4200-4500 ppmv in the late Ordovician Period, which would make it eleven times higher than it is today. The Ordovician Period ended around 438 million years ago with glaciers covering much of the planet for a million years or more and causing a mass extinction. An ice age lasting over a million years with a CO2 count eleven times higher than it is now! But, there's a fly in the soup...it's just a question of whether that fly is microscopic or if it's as big as a pterodactyl. And that fly in the soup is this - the sun shone with only about 97% of its current intensity during the Ordovician. How relevant is that? I'll publish some calculations where I plug numbers into a formula in a day or so, although whether anything meaningful will come out of these calculations is uncertain to me at this point. Stay tuned.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 2)
THE EVANGELICAL ZEAL OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING PROPONENTS
Dr. James E. Hansen, 69, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), is one of the world’s most passionate advocate of apocalyptic climate change, who, with messianic fervor, proselytizes aggressively against the evil black demon rock, coal, and it’s use as a fuel in the generation of electricity. According to Dr. Hansen, “death trains” are crisscrossing the country transporting coal to power-generation facilities nationwide where carbon dioxide effluent saturates the atmosphere and threatens all life on Earth. "Coal" says Hansen "is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet". Pretty strong stuff. Early in Barack Obama's first term as President, Dr. Hansen issued a dire warning to the new president –
"We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead".
Wow! Pretty strong stuff. Pretty dire, indeed!
Despite Dr. Hansen’s hyperbole, he has a devoted following of atmospheric researchers, politicians, and media types who hang on his words, do his bidding, and trumpet his proclamations. One of his most devoted disciples is Al Gore, who consulted extensively with Hansen in the making of his Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.
Dr. Hansen holds a PhD. in Astrophysics and is a high ranking NASA scientist specializing in atmospheric science. He got his start studying the greenhouse effect on Venus as part of his Doctoral Dissertation at the University of Iowa in the 1960s, and published several papers on the subject in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dr. James E. Hansen, 69, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), is one of the world’s most passionate advocate of apocalyptic climate change, who, with messianic fervor, proselytizes aggressively against the evil black demon rock, coal, and it’s use as a fuel in the generation of electricity. According to Dr. Hansen, “death trains” are crisscrossing the country transporting coal to power-generation facilities nationwide where carbon dioxide effluent saturates the atmosphere and threatens all life on Earth. "Coal" says Hansen "is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet". Pretty strong stuff. Early in Barack Obama's first term as President, Dr. Hansen issued a dire warning to the new president –
"We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead".
Wow! Pretty strong stuff. Pretty dire, indeed!
Despite Dr. Hansen’s hyperbole, he has a devoted following of atmospheric researchers, politicians, and media types who hang on his words, do his bidding, and trumpet his proclamations. One of his most devoted disciples is Al Gore, who consulted extensively with Hansen in the making of his Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.
When the Solar System was young, Venus, Earth, and Mars all were thought to have had thick atmospheres, oceans consisting of liquid water, and relatively moderate temperatures that allowed water to exist in its liquid state. The oceans on Venus and Mars came from the same place as Earth’s oceans – fusillades of comets and icy planetesimals that pummeled the four terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, during the Late Heavy Bombardment period some four billion years ago.
Mercury, being too close to the Sun, never retained any of its water - any water left over from the icy planetesimals that survived their trip to Mercury boiled off into space immediately.
As for the Earth, it orbits the Sun at just the right distance, the so-called Goldilocks Zone, where the temperature, currently at a worldwide average 14° C (57° F) is at a temperature where most of the water on our planet is in liquid form. Mars wasn’t so lucky – because of its small size it cooled off to a tectonically inactive state after a few hundred million years and it wasn’t able to hold on to its volatile atmospheric gasses, like nitrogen and methane (a greenhouse gas that, if it was present in substantial quantities, originally helped to keep Mars warmer). Another ramification of Mars' small size and early interior inactivation was that it lost its magnetosphere and thus lost its protection against energetic particles born by the solar wind. Constituents of the Martian atmosphere would have been dissociated into ionic moieties and carried off by the solar wind. So Mars exists today as a cold, dry, inhospitable desert world. As for Venus, it was too close to the sun to hold on to its liquid water forever. Venus receives twice as much irradiance from the sun as Earth, and even in the early Solar System when the Sun was only about 70% as hot as it is now, Venus still received 40% more irradiance four billion years ago than Earth does now. Before long, copious amounts of water vapor - a potent greenhouse gas - evaporated out of Venus' oceans and seas and saturated the atmosphere. As the planet got hotter and hotter over time the oceans reached a boil - and eventually boiled away. As the oceans boiled, the steam and water vapor molecules that had been in the oceans migrated into the upper reaches of Venus' atmosphere and underwent dissociation (became ionized) because of the intense ultraviolet radiation coming from the Sun. The hydrogen components of the water molecules sailed off into interplanetary space on the solar wind, along with some of the oxygen – whereas the rest of the oxygen was taken up by Venus’ crust. Meanwhile, as the oceans were boiling away in the searing heat, CO2 was being baked out of the crust and entering the atmosphere as a major constituent. Eventually, the water was gone and all that was left was CO2. CO2 is a much weaker greenhouse gas than water vapor (about one-fifth as potent), but by the time all the water was gone the damage had been done. There was so much CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere that the atmospheric pressure at the surface is ninety-three times that of Earth – 1,367 pounds per square inch! That’s the same pressure you would experience at a depth of over 3,000 feet in the ocean. And how hot is the temperature at the surface? A toasty 460° C (860° F)?
Dr. Hansen did study Venus in the Late 1960s and early 1970s, and contributed a great deal to contemporary knowledge of the planet, but most of what we now know about Venus has come from space probes that have visited the place. The upshot of this accumulated knowledge is that water vapor – a potent greenhouse gas – created the original greenhouse effect on Venus and that CO2 – a weak greenhouse gas – was a usurping opportunist. But that’s not what Hansen and other alarmist climate scientists want you to hear.
His position is that what happened billions of years ago on Venus resulting in the greenhouse effect that made it such a brutally hot, hellish place is now happening here on Earth, or will happen soon if we don't shut down coal-fired power generation facilities - like - yesterday! He’s assumed a prominent position at the forefront of scientific research on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the warming of our home planet and carries a very large megaphone. Thousands of credentialed scientists worldwide, some at the top of their respective fields, are participating in this endeavor. But whether or not the burning of coal is ruining the planet is still an open question from a scientific point of view, according to many other atmospheric scientists with impeccable credentials of their own. On a broader level, human activity, whether it’s the burning of fossil fuels, the runaway urbanization of global real estate, the decimation of tropical rain forests, or natural processes may, or may not be the cause of global warming, if, in fact, global warming is really happening. From the available evidence and the mainstream interpretation of that evidence, the Earth does appear to be heating up. Whether or not it’s being caused by burning coal to generate electric power, or by some other factors, is being hotly debated by climate scientists throughout the world. The next installment of this series will explore some competing outlooks on climate change, its causes, and the degree to which it’s happening. Stay tuned.
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