Quote of the Day

I just don’t get it. The level these denialists are sinking too, it’s getting scary. They’re hacking computers, breaking into UVic, and on and on. It’s essentially a war between Big Oil and their goons versus the basic freedom to do science. Plus there’s the PR war, which science has never been good at.

Here’s a quote for you Dan:

About the human quest to understand the physical world, physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg concluded, “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

Dan, it was never about the science, it has always been about the transfer of funds.

Ok, if you are of a mind read the following link

http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_History.htm

if there is information in there that is not factual let me know. I have looked it over but not checked every quote or link.

Regardless of right or wrong, you have to recognize that many people are finding ways to make money off of the alarmism that is CO2 levels and AGW. In fact, the purchase of carbon offsets and carbon credits, where nothing is traded, is making people like Al Gore and Maurice Strong rich.

http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/CarbonMonetization.htm

If the AGW portion of global warming falls apart then the carbon trading schemes fall apart. Without a human component of global warming how could it do naught but fall apart?

I see carbon offsets and credits in the same light as indulgences that the Catholic church used to sell. It makes someone feel good to purchase, but really, what does it accomplish? Now, if this was only limited to the average person, I would have no problem as there is always a con man somewhere, and there is always a victim waiting to be fleeced. But once governments start to kick in and spend taxpayer funds on this, I have trouble living with it.

So, I think it is about the money.

As for your links:

The first one makes the same point you made in your comment. Again the fact that bad polices have been proposed doesn’t speak to the science. Neither does the fact that some people might make money of those polices.

The second one deal with the science but is full of errors. It starts off decently enough stating that

the models only depend on anthropogenic CO2 after 1970 – prior to that, warming and cooling is explained by natural factors.

It is true that before roughly the 70’s The CO2 forcing was quite minor and the natural forgings were enough explain the variations in climate (except perhaps for the mid century cooling which depends on aerosol emissions). But the reason is simple, it wasn’t until roughly the 70s when the anthropogenic CO2 forcing became large enough (remember it has been increasing every year as atmospheric concentrations rise)to markedly impact temperature trends.

But then they really go off the deep end, trying to associate this with the 1970s cooling ‘consensus’.

In the 1970s there were many media reports about the coming ice age – global cooling was occurring and society was encouraged to be fearful and to act to prevent it

While this may be technically true it doesn’t speak to the science. Notice how they refer to media reports rather that scientific papers?

At any rate in the 70s the majority of papers looking at climate change predicted warming not cooling as was shown by the BAMS paper titled: The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus. I wrote about it here. Basically the paper did a literature review and looked at the number of papers that predicted warming, cooling or were neutral.

main goal is based on the assumption of “human-induced climate change” – there was never an attempt to evaluate the scientific evidence of the cause

I don’t see how any reading of the IPCC could yield that conclusion. AR4 has a whole chapter (9) on attribution, it is 84 pages long and cites hundreds of papers. It has never been assumed that our GHG emissions have cause the earth to warm, that hypothesis has been rigorously tested.

has never provided substantial scientific evidence that anthropogenic CO2 is the cause. The only evidence provided is a correlation with CO2 since 1950, but mainly the output of computer models.

This is an outright lie. Again please read chapter 9 ion the AR4 if you don’t believe me.

Thus in just over 10 years, the consensus switched from global cooling to global warming

Again this is an outright lie. The first IPCC said that while observations were consistent with AGW attribution was not yet possible (many climatologist disagreed with that but there were enough that were not sure so the IPCC could not accurately claim attribution). And there was never any cooling consensus. Just a growing number of papers predicting warming.

The rest is a bunch of ranting against the UN (obviously there is plenty of legitimate criticisms of the UN as a whole) and against the Kyoto protocol. but a quick scan shows the same lack of accuracy as the ‘science’ section.

It is worth noting that the IPCC’s conclusions are endored either especially or implicitly by the National Academies of Science from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the USA, the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of London, the Geological Society of America, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, and thousands of peer-reviewed journals, amongst others.

hmmm, my comment disappeared.

I will try and redo it.

I looked at your link and will try and respond to your #1 point, that there is scientific consensus.

In fact a recent poll shows that 97% of climatologists agree that humans are causing climate change.

That poll was sent to 10,257 scientists of which 3146 responded. According to the poll in your link appx. 5% were climate scientist, that is about 157. The 97% you refer to is climate scientists that have published papers in the last 5 years, that would be 76 of 79 climate scientists.

I tried to find a number for the number of climate scientists in the USA and a page I found pegged the number around 20,000 in Nov. 2006.

http://logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm

The 76 respondents are, therefore .3% of the 2006 climate scientist population. That is hardly an overwhelming majority Dan.

Here is an anecdotal story re deniers:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/12/6/climate-of-fear.html

Here is a link to 700 scientists who are skeptical about AGW

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2674e64f-802a-23ad-490b-bd9faf4dcdb7

Here is more anecdotal evidence showing a threat to a reporter for not towing the line:

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-scientist-threatens-boycott-of.html

Oh and please answer the three questions I asked you.

@ Dwayne

I am done here.

Sorry I wasn’t convinced by your lack of evidence.

I answered your #1 question.

You answered it but not well. Your answer was that no consensus exists, and to justify this you made some invalid claims about the recent survey (more on that bellow) and a Inhofe/Morano list. But my question didn’t mention the word consensus. It referred to the overwhelming majority. And I provided much more evidence that just a recent survey to support the contention of overwhelming majority.

But the first question wasn’t even the important one. The third question is the one that really matters.

I even provided some anecdotal evidence that views outside the accepted are being suppressed and threats are even made.

And I acknowledged that. But as I said above anecdotal evidence is not nearly enough to substantiate your extraordinary claims. I could show you similar anecdotal evidence from creationists, but I think we both would agree that that doesn’t prove an anti-creationist conspiracy within biology community.

I understand very well what a sample is, and a .3% sample of climate scientists cannot be held up as an “overwhelming majority” of anything.

The whole point of of taking a sample (vs a census) is to draw conclusion of a whole population. One does not need to conduct a census to draw conclusions of the whole population.

As to the statistical error on this sampling, not being a statistician I would only be hazarding a guess that it is extremely high.

So based on a guess, you are willing to throw out a survey? Not good enough. The survey paper (published in EOS) mentions that response rates were typical, so this doesn’t lend credence to your guess. Let me put it this way, how many people are surveyed in political polls? A couple thousand people is fairly typical. And yet political parties spend millions (when in campaign mode) based on the results of these polls.

But I would agree with you that one survey doesn’t demonstrate consensus with much confidence. This is why it was only one of many lines of evidence (in fact probably the weakest) used to demonstrate consensus. Jim’s Prall’s database is probably the strongest.

And as the links I provided you make abundantly clear citing 700 people who disagree with the consensus doesn’t in fact disprove it. The following is about OISM petition (which has far more than 700 names on it), but the point applies here as well.

“Robinson misleads the public to think that a consensus is defined by some large absolute number of persons. It is not. It is determined by a large percentage of persons in a relevant sample.”

700 hundred people is not a large percentage. Especially given the divers fields of those on the list (and not all of them even deny climate change!). Notice how few of them are climatologists?

Thanks for the interchange but I can see you are not willing to listen to me, as I am not willing to listen to your consensus.

A very odd claim given that I have been quoting you then commenting directly on the points you have raised. Not accepting your evidence (and explaining why I do not, while at the same time citing my sources) is not the same as not listening to you.

But at least you admit that you are unwilling to listen to any talk of consensus, regardless of what evidence is presented in support of it. That is the very definition a crank, as defined by Nature in 1906:

“A crank is defined as a man who cannot be turned.“