"Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940, Webster, Massachusetts) is an American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books.[1] He was a lead author of Chapter 7, 'Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,' of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. He is a well known skeptic of global warming[2] and critic of what he states are political pressures on climate scientists to conform to climate alarmism."
Famous scientist and well-known critic of AGW? This is the first I've heard of him...
Hmmm ... he's been well known in this field for both of the above since the late '80s, when a friend of mine interviewed him.
At the time he effectively said he had been rather naive in the publication of his research (as I recall it was a study going back 200+ years on ship temperature reports, rather important data since the majority of the world is covered by the seas). He had thought that the scientific community was interested in the truth....
His problem was of course that the '80s were the period where the climate alarmists switched from global cooling/new Ice Age to global warming. As I recall his funding sources went poof, fortunately he'd already gotten tenure.
Anyway, if you're interested in this topic yet haven't heard of him or, say, "atmospheric physicist" Fred Singer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer; e.g. he "designed the first instruments used in satellites to measure cosmic radiation and ozone" (all quotes from Wikipedia)), you might want to expand your sources of information.
What motivates these global alarmists? And how do they get money by being so shrill? Is your average citizen just dying to be worried over the next catastrophe and willing to throw money at whomever can scare them the most?
I don't know, but this specific phenomena goes back to 200 AD (sic), and then you can go back to, oh, the Book of Revelations and so on. There seems to be a strong drive in at least some people towards this sort of thing.
Politicians gain power by not "letting a serious crisis go to waste" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow); how real a crisis is irrelevant. Funding naturally follows for those talking up the crisis.
It isn't just the politicians either, where do you think the major environmental organizations get their money? Since the major cleanup during the 1970s, they have invented "crisis" after "crisis" to keep the money coming in. The "ozone hole" and "acid rain" crises were as overblown, running toward outright fraudulent, as the AGW crap.
Money is one motivator. Fame or the crusade itself may be others. Actually believing in the disaster and wanting to save people's lives is another motivator. It depends on the person.
The money argument is a pretty easy one. We are at a potential shift point in how we power ourselves. The problem is that the "new" power sources are not economical yet. Political pressure with subsides can make it economical (for the companies involved). Several politicians in the US are heavily invested in wind or solar. Fear works in spending public money.
The natural progression will happen when oil prices are too high and newer sources become economical or some breakthrough happens (think the progression of aluminum). Disaster / Fear means the change needs to happen before the market would normally change on its own.
I really wish media and politics had stayed out of the science. I mourn the loss of objectivity, testing, and discovery.
I'd heard of him because he'd misinterpreted satellite data that apparently conflicted with the general consensus. I'd assumed that was an honest mistake but it appears that every time one of his theories gets shot down, he just moves on to the next one. The fact that they all seem to have an implicit message of "don't worry about it, everything's fine" is looking less coincidental as time passes.
every time one of his theories gets shot down, he just moves on to the next one
So ... when faced with facts that contradict his theories, he modifies his theories so as to be consistent with the facts. Isn't this what, you know, a real scientist should do?
Yeah, I especially like the bit where they "prove" he "might" have lied to congress by posting a youtube video of a completely unrelated group "lying" to congress.
Don't be silly. This is not about scientific skepticism anymore.
But, in truth, Lindzen and the WSJ are not skeptics, they're deniers. Skeptic is someone not convinced that something is true. Denier is someone that believes that something is false. Lindzen (and the WSJ) are deniers.
> Well for one thing Lindzen has no testable theory, no data, and no papers explaining the current temperature trend. Despite this he still manages to get his opinions published...
No, but in order to be a scientist, you have to do... science, not opinion.
You can and many do "do science" without offering alternatives, all you have to do is to point out how those you are criticizing are wrong, e.g. in interpretations of data, use of statistics, etc.
Are those Canadian statisticians not doing science when they point out that you can use Mann's methods to get a hockey stick out of random noise?
No. A claim was made by two individuals, one a mining executive, the other an economist, in a trade publication called Energy and Environment with no peer review. Both of the authors are well-known industry skeptics. The claim was subsequently refuted by Mann, and ultimately discredited in a peer-reviewed article for the Journal of Climate (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI3351.1), in which an alternate method confirmed the original result.
The skeptics were Canadian, though, so at least you got one thing right.
The invocation of "peer review" doesn't mean anything (good) nowadays in this field, as previously discussed (see also what the CRU emails revealed about ... management of "acceptable" journals and editors), and a single peer reviewed paper by the CRU circle including Mann is less than convincing, let alone definitive. This email from McIntyre and McKitrick http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=458 should raise some serious questions about it.
If you're going to cry out censorship, then at least have the common decency not to rely on the tired old CRU/climategate scam. This has been rather thoroughly and soundly debunked over and over again. Denialist papers get rejected from peer reviewed journals because they aren't science, not because there's a conspiracy.
Lord Oxburgh who "debunked" Climategate is the chairman of Falck Renewables, a company whose entire business is predicated on global warming. This is what counts as "peer review".
Once you accept the idea that all climatologists are partaking in a global conspiracy, then yes, peer review means little to you. You're stuck referencing emails from people you trust, which in your case consists of a mining executive and an economist. I prefer to get my climatology from people who study the climate.
Oh, no-one seriously believes there's an organized conspiracy. But a lot of scientists seem to have noticed that tacking "climate change" onto their funding proposals increases the odds of them being accepted. And scientists are people who've gotta eat at the end of the day; of course they're going to act in their own self-interest.
Not all, because the above is from "alarmists" and much of their attention is focused on scientists who do believe in AGW, just not "enough". One of the best examples is Roger Pielke Sr., who believes in AGW: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/roger-a-pie...
From the CRU emails:
Out of context (I can't quite figure out what the context is), but it demonstrates a lack of good faith:
"I almost missed the [message] with Pielke's resignation in. Is this going to make your CCSP task easier or harder? Presumably now you'll get all his comments to officially deal with. Maybe you'll be able to ignore them?" http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=584
And then from what is probably the most infamous single email; for some inexplicable reason the Subject: line was "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL":
"The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it.
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !" http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419
If you do not agree that the above constitutes strong evidence of a conspiracy I don't think we have a basis for further discussion. As Pielke says in his AGW position posting: "The released CRU e-mails documents that a culture in the leadership of the climate science community to suppress and/or ignore viewpoints which differ from the 2007 IPCC view."
Here's the end of Pielke's initial comments on the above email:
"The challenge to the IPCC community, now that their duplicity has been exposed, is to communicate to all of us why the peer-reviewed papers that we documented, and that were available in time for the IPCC review process, were considered “bad papers” and thus ignored in the IPCC report. A balanced assessment would comment on these papers, and provide the reason they disagree with their results.
Anyway, Schmidt is NASA GISS scientist and a co-founder and current member of RealClimate (along with e.g. Mann), so if he's saying this we should pay attention, and we can safely say he and Pielke are not "no-one".
True, but the "CRU Circle" and largely overlapping (proper subset???) "IPCC oligarchy", plus old hands like NASA's Hansen and Schneider are the foundation of it. Many others have of course joined the bandwagon, you can't spend billions in "research" on small entities like the CRU and the part of NASA's GISS, etc. that are in this field.
Schneider, I should note, is famous for this quote from Discover magazine in 1989:
"To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements
and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."
(And yes, it's in context, I read the original article on paper.)
He's old enough to have been on the global cooling bandwagon before the fashion changed to global warming.
<quote>But a lot of scientists seem to have noticed that tacking "climate change" onto their funding proposals increases the odds of them being accepted.</quote>
First of all, it's not at all clear that this is true. But it _is_ exactly what you would expect if there was a perfect consensus that global warming is a threat. It's also exactly what you'd expect if global cooling were the threat. Public research money tends to flow toward issues of great public concern, and not surprisingly, possible change in the global climate is of great public concern.
What makes you think they mean it pejoratively? There are sites describing strong AI skeptics, paranormal activity skeptics, quantum computing skeptics, extra-terrestrial life skeptics. It's the reasons for their skepticism that matters.
" Lindzen recieved $2500 a day from oil and coal interests for his services.1,2, 3 His article "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC.1 Lindzen has lectured at numerous Cooler Heads Coalition meetings. The Cooler Heads Coalition is funded by CEI which is in turn funded by Exxon Mobil. He has also given talks for the George C. Marshall Institute which is also funded by Exxon Mobil. His connections to the oil, coal, and even tobacco industry are apparently rather extensive. Here is one listof many that is worth exploring. Richard Lindzen claims he is currently not recieving any handouts from oil companies."
If you're going to argue that he's been bought, you get to explain why AGW supporters aren't bought as well. After all, the connection between their conclusions and their funding is even stronger.
Of course, the truth is that money isn't the most corrupting influence by a large margin - true belief is. You can often spot true believers by their insistence that money is the only reason why their position isn't universally accepted.
All science is bought by special interests to a certain extent. Frankly, I think the connections to the oil industry, et al., are not as important as the veracity (or lack thereof) of his claims.
"All science is bought by special interests to a certain extent." Any evidence for that statement? My academic research was mostly funded by the US NSF, which doesn't really strike me as a "special interest". The NSF doesn't particularly care what the results are, just that the questions are worth answering and that the approach is reasonable.
I'm not asking you to do this work, but to prove your point you'd need to list some research that the NSF has funded that "denies" global warming (assuming they fund the reverse).
That's false equivalency. The NSF doesn't fund research to show that the earth is flat, because it isn't. Just because the well-tested AGW hypothesis exists doesn't mean that AGW denialism is on equal footing.
The "earth is round" folks don't hide data. They show their work.
Note that the NSF does fund things that seriously test special relativity.
Do you really think that the temp measurements are as sound? You remember the temp measurements. The US ones come from stations in parking lots, and they're the good ones. A huge fraction of the foreign ones have been moved. We don't know how that was adjusted for. (The dog ate their homework.)
Which reminds me, we have data showing that CO2 levels on earth have been several times higher than the projected disaster case. Care to guess what the "unbearable" temps were?
"To a certain extent," meaning that popular stuff gets funded at a much higher rate than unpopular research. I'm not suggesting your motives, or the motives of other hard-working scientists, are suspect. I'm just pointing out that most science is funded by outside organizations that have their own agendas, and can exercise those agendas by choosing what to fund. As an aside, this is true in scientific publications, as well. Just because your research is great, and your conclusions sound, doesn't mean Cell (or whatever journal) is going to print it.
"After all, the connection between their conclusions and their funding is even stronger."
Citation? I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying people to issue opinions favorable to themselves. Perhaps you can point some out to me.
> I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying
Are you suggesting that corporations are the only parties that have interests?
> opinions favorable to themselves
Irrelevant.
Do you believe that NSF or the Energy Department views research likely to be critical of AGW the same way that it views research that is likely to be supportive?
I do appreciate that you're demonstrating my claim that many folks think that monetary self-interest is the only corrupting influence. Many folks don't after I point that out because they realize that it isn't, that it isn't even the big one.
Why is this important? He's not going to get any funding by the government, which has decided "the science is settled".
By this standard, the funding of the members of "the consensus" is just as important and just as damning, if not more, since there's billions annually being funded on the other side.
As I said elsewhere, that's false equivalency. Just because AGW-denialism is not orthodox doesn't mean that it's on equal footing with AGW. By your argument, the government should fund intelligent design (or should I say evolution denialism) too!
The "skeptics" and "deniers", with some important exceptions, do not deny outright and in total the validity of climate science, which would be necessary to draw a valid equivalency between them and the Intelligent Design crowd. Many, perhaps most, don't even have a serious alternative theory, they're just pointing out what they think is wrong with AGW.
The important exceptions are:
As far as I know, the computer models that predict serious AGW just don't work. They don't "predict the past", i.e. you feed them historical data and they don't then predict what actually happened, and now that we can test their predictions they aren't working either. E.g.:
"The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong." http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&file...
ESR comments (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1473): "Eyebrows have quite rightly been raised over this quote. It is indeed a travesty that AGW theory cannot account for the lack of warming, and bears out what I and other AGW critics have been saying for years about the fallaciousness and lack of predictive power of AGW models.
"But the second sentence is actually far more damning. “The data is surely wrong.” This is how and where most scientific fraud begins."
And that brings us to the second big issue, how good is the data and based on that what can it be used for. The proxies are very iffy, especially when they get out of the historical period and can be compared to fairly solid actual temperature measurements ("hide the decline" of the tree ring proxies).
Then there's the questions of older thermometers, where researchers are trying to tease fractional degrees out of instruments with hand painted lines. That goes many times over for the proxies.
And the problem with badly situated ground monitoring stations, especially the urban heat island problem.
Then there's the demonstrated poor to impossible quality of the CRU data and their loss of the original data; as the detailed in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file (http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt), they can't even reproduce their own massaging of the original data....
And as I understand it, the NASA satellite data has been calibrated against these poor ground station data sets, not e.g. weather balloons, but I could be wrong there. This is important since instruments can drift over time, and when they're in an inaccessible satellite....
This just hits the highlights of the problems with the data, before we get into a whole lot of what looks like at worst case outright fraud.
These things including fraud don't throw climate science per se into doubt as a discipline, but they do engender skepticism and denial of AGW, which as noted is another thing altogether.
Anyway, I'll repeat the call many people are making: open it up. Retrieve the original lost records, do the science in the open, publishing all methods, code and data, and let the chips fall where they may.
When an author of a published "science" paper refuses to share his raw data, methods and code (and we're not talking about e.g. chemistry/chemical engineering where there's competitive advantage on the table for chemical companies), people legitimately wonder and discount what he says. When scientists give "the dog ate my homework" excuses, you might believe them about that (I think it's very possible WRT to the CRU ... but it says something that they didn't consider it important to archive it carefully), but I don't see how you're obliged to treat their unconfirmable results with any respect.
Add the bad faith that's manifest in the CRU emails...
Actually, you'll find that we're doing both. It is perfectly valid to point out conflicts of interest (it's a favored denialist tactic to invent CoIs that don't even exist, so isn't it hypocritical to take umbrage when CoIs are brought up?), so long as the actual claims are also addressed. This is like the difference between making your argument rest upon an ad hominem and making a wonderful argument followed by "oh, and you're an idiot."
You don't get to reject the mountains of well-understood science just because one guy dared raise questions about conflicts of interest.
First item: "How can Lindzen, a member of the National Academies be wrong about the consensus?"
Which is followed by an appeal to authority. Most of the following is appeals to authority, attacks on his funding (necessarily from eeevil sources since "the consensus" has halted funding to "deniers"), complaints about his not have current peer reviewed papers (see previous item), etc.
Sorry, but if we're talking real science, all he needs is an inconvenient fact to demolish the consensus (which is not quite what is being argued here; his point is that there isn't really a consensus, which it demonstrably true).
There are some attempts to deal with what he says on a basis of facts and the like (although some of them are appeals to the authority of the web site, e.g. general claims without references that would allow you to judge for yourself), but the site's dishonest style doesn't exactly encourage you to bother to see if it's telling the truth in those instances.
If someone is arguing that there is no consensus of opinion (second sentence on the page: "He is rather well known for claiming that "There's no consensus on global warming.""), then long lists of prominent institutions who have subscribed to that opinion isn't an appeal to authority, it's relevant info.
Without lists of those on the other side, its relevance is limited.
Insert, oh, the former "consensus" against heliocentrism. Relevant in a period calling for capital trials against "deniers" and HN commentators calling for their criminal prosecution (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283240).
Well at least we've established that it's not an appeal to authority.
Of course if it was, then this is a fairly convincing set of authorities, being the National Academy of Science in the US and their equivalents in the 12 largest countries in the world.
Who's missing that could even theoretically be on the other side? South Korea, Mexico, Spain? I have no idea who would rank up there with them but if I had to bet I'd say their national bodies representing science are going to be on the same side of the debate as those listed.
Again, this is someone who denies there is a consensus. That's relatively easy to fact check. It would be like knowing whether the church was for or against the Sun orbiting the Earth. It's an entirely seperate question from whether that position is factually correct. And, if you can't get that right why trust you on anything more complex?
I can claim that 60% of US citizens believe in angels and cite surveys to back that claim up. You can argue about whether that fact is correct with or without a personal belief in angels.
If someone (perhaps someone with an axe to grind for or against the existence of angels) simply refused to accept that evidence of 60% belief and provided nothing in return, then that alone would make them a dubious source to me.
This whole thread started with your confusion of a list of prominant subscribers to global warming which was offered as proof of consensus with it being proof of the consensus position itself. Let's not end in the same place we started.
"his point is that there isn't really a consensus, which it demonstrably true"
Not at all. You can search through the peer-reviewed papers in vain for any saying there isn't any anthropogenic climate change; there are no such papers. None. Zero.
A 6 year old paper is limited in its utility, especially since the CRU email leak confirmed that the "alarmists" have been systematically keeping the other side out of the peer-reviewed literature.
Here's the ones I can find in a few minutes with just the phrases I can remember off the top of my head and one or two leads from those:
Phil Jones to Michael Mann: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep
them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !" http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419&filen...
From Mann (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=295): "The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility--that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. [...] The skeptics appear to have staged a 'coup' at 'Climate Research'...."
[...]
"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal."
The end result was that half the editorial board resigned, I think all "non-skeptics".
Two quoted items in one email (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=484); first this from Mann: "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research'. We can't afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don't know him--he would seem to be complicit w/ what is going on here)."
Followed by a Tom Wigley writing to I think Mann: "If you think that [GRL editor] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary 1evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted."
While it's true that there's no consensus on the source of the warming, it is true that the planet is warming.
That's something that tends to get lost in the shuffle, and it's really scary what percentage of the American public believes that the fundamental point is false. It also seems to me that Lindzen is exaggerating the degree of dispute over the future climate trends. I do agree that there's not a lot of evidence we can prevent the climate from warming considerably over the next 50 years or so, but there is a general consensus that the climate will warm considerably over the next 50 years.
It also seems there's a general consensus this is a problem, even if it's purely natural. Lindzen is doing his fellow researchers a disservice by confusing the politics and science of the issue.
Hmmm, that's not my impression. The data reevaluation that resulted in 1934 being declared the hottest year in the 20th century, the "hide the decline" games, the fierce debate over the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and its extent (I think the alarmists now admit its existence, but debate its scope, e.g. there's a lack of data in the Southern Hemisphere and the oceans), they all suggest to me that the science here is not settled.
The only way you're going to convince "skeptics" like myself (I only deny that the science is settled) will be to retrieve the original data sets the CRU lost and then do the science again in a totally open manner. Share the data, publish the code and methods, etc.
>The data reevaluation that resulted in 1934 being declared the hottest year in the 20th century
This whole argument is getting extraordinarily tired, but 1934 could well be the hottest year on record in the 20th century without invalidating the claim that the climate has warmed on average by several degrees since then. Outlying data points are in every single data set.
>the "hide the decline" games
As I recall there was a single game, in a single email.
>the fierce debate over the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and its extent
Europe? As I understand that's where the data is from. But even so, even if the temperatures have precedents, that doesn't disprove the warming trend - it just casts some doubt on the alarmism. And that's what I'm trying to get at. Warming is happening. It will continue.
The point here is not which year was the hottest but the incorrect research that said a recent one was. An additional point would be the big deal the alarmists made when the first results came out and their silence on the correction.
Your recollection is incorrect, "hide the decline" is found throughout the source code in the CRU archive leak (quoted like that in comments and directly expressed in the code). There's also the green line in that IPCC graph that just ends in the middle of a thicket of intersecting lines. If it had been continued, it would have ... declined. It's a pretty big deal since it throws into doubt the entire tree ring approach (not to mention the explicit or implicit fraud).
Agreed on the "casts some doubt on the alarmism", although I'd say more than "some", since they went to some effort to disappear it in the first place.
Hmmm, maybe I should ask, "Warming tend over what period?"
Since the last Ice Age, obviously. Since the Little Ice Age, certainly. Beyond that? The time series of data really matters in this debate, for if recent increases do not correlate with anthropogenic CO2 increases (e.g. if it got warm in the 20th century before that was big, and now is getting cooler) then it calls the whole alarmism crusade into doubt (at best).
Did you actually read what "hide the decline" meant? Go learn about proxies and you'll see that what they mean is that there is a false decline in proxy temperatures that must be corrected for, likely due to increased CO₂ concentrations changing how tree rings are formed. There's no deception here-- they were up front and honest about this problem, and referred to data analysis techniques to correct for a false decline.
These "data analysis techniques to correct for a false decline" at best consisted of substituting thermometer readings for tree ring proxies. I wouldn't call that a "data analysis technique".
They also "improved" the curve for the 1930s as ESR learned from the code and data (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447): "This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century."
Also note how this meshes nicely with the paper that started this thread that did not until it was corrected show that 1934 was the hottest year in the 20th century.
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[ 13.2 ms ] story [ 1788 ms ] thread"Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940, Webster, Massachusetts) is an American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books.[1] He was a lead author of Chapter 7, 'Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,' of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. He is a well known skeptic of global warming[2] and critic of what he states are political pressures on climate scientists to conform to climate alarmism."
Famous scientist and well-known critic of AGW? This is the first I've heard of him...
At the time he effectively said he had been rather naive in the publication of his research (as I recall it was a study going back 200+ years on ship temperature reports, rather important data since the majority of the world is covered by the seas). He had thought that the scientific community was interested in the truth....
His problem was of course that the '80s were the period where the climate alarmists switched from global cooling/new Ice Age to global warming. As I recall his funding sources went poof, fortunately he'd already gotten tenure.
Anyway, if you're interested in this topic yet haven't heard of him or, say, "atmospheric physicist" Fred Singer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer; e.g. he "designed the first instruments used in satellites to measure cosmic radiation and ozone" (all quotes from Wikipedia)), you might want to expand your sources of information.
You can page back through the last umpteen national election results if you doubt this is true.
Politicians gain power by not "letting a serious crisis go to waste" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow); how real a crisis is irrelevant. Funding naturally follows for those talking up the crisis.
If you doubt this, I'd like to introduce you to the Department of Homeland Security.
I think we can argue structure (e.g. DHS vs. the old, FBI vs. MI5), means, competence, etc. while still accepting the reality of a threat.
The money argument is a pretty easy one. We are at a potential shift point in how we power ourselves. The problem is that the "new" power sources are not economical yet. Political pressure with subsides can make it economical (for the companies involved). Several politicians in the US are heavily invested in wind or solar. Fear works in spending public money.
The natural progression will happen when oil prices are too high and newer sources become economical or some breakthrough happens (think the progression of aluminum). Disaster / Fear means the change needs to happen before the market would normally change on its own.
I really wish media and politics had stayed out of the science. I mourn the loss of objectivity, testing, and discovery.
I'm sure Galileo felt the same way... Science that might fundamentally shift worldviews has always been subject to meddling by the powers that be.
What other atmospheric scientists have you heard of and why?
So ... when faced with facts that contradict his theories, he modifies his theories so as to be consistent with the facts. Isn't this what, you know, a real scientist should do?
But, in truth, Lindzen and the WSJ are not skeptics, they're deniers. Skeptic is someone not convinced that something is true. Denier is someone that believes that something is false. Lindzen (and the WSJ) are deniers.
No, but in order to be a scientist, you have to do... science, not opinion.
Are those Canadian statisticians not doing science when they point out that you can use Mann's methods to get a hockey stick out of random noise?
The skeptics were Canadian, though, so at least you got one thing right.
The invocation of "peer review" doesn't mean anything (good) nowadays in this field, as previously discussed (see also what the CRU emails revealed about ... management of "acceptable" journals and editors), and a single peer reviewed paper by the CRU circle including Mann is less than convincing, let alone definitive. This email from McIntyre and McKitrick http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=458 should raise some serious questions about it.
For folks out there who aren't conspiracy buffs, there's a good article on this 'controversy' at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-th....
Not all, because the above is from "alarmists" and much of their attention is focused on scientists who do believe in AGW, just not "enough". One of the best examples is Roger Pielke Sr., who believes in AGW: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/roger-a-pie...
From the CRU emails:
Out of context (I can't quite figure out what the context is), but it demonstrates a lack of good faith:
"Obviously, under no circumstances should any of this get back to Pielke." http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=424&filen...
This also doesn't exactly show good faith:
"I almost missed the [message] with Pielke's resignation in. Is this going to make your CCSP task easier or harder? Presumably now you'll get all his comments to officially deal with. Maybe you'll be able to ignore them?" http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=584
And then from what is probably the most infamous single email; for some inexplicable reason the Subject: line was "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL":
"The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it.
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !" http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419
If you do not agree that the above constitutes strong evidence of a conspiracy I don't think we have a basis for further discussion. As Pielke says in his AGW position posting: "The released CRU e-mails documents that a culture in the leadership of the climate science community to suppress and/or ignore viewpoints which differ from the 2007 IPCC view."
Here's the end of Pielke's initial comments on the above email:
"The challenge to the IPCC community, now that their duplicity has been exposed, is to communicate to all of us why the peer-reviewed papers that we documented, and that were available in time for the IPCC review process, were considered “bad papers” and thus ignored in the IPCC report. A balanced assessment would comment on these papers, and provide the reason they disagree with their results.
"The reply by Gavin Schmidt documents the control of the IPCC process by a few individuals (see also Climate Assessment Oligarchy – The IPCC)." http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/comment-on-...
Here's Schmidt's item on the IPCC "oligarchy": http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/climate-oli...
Anyway, Schmidt is NASA GISS scientist and a co-founder and current member of RealClimate (along with e.g. Mann), so if he's saying this we should pay attention, and we can safely say he and Pielke are not "no-one".
Schneider, I should note, is famous for this quote from Discover magazine in 1989:
"To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."
(And yes, it's in context, I read the original article on paper.)
He's old enough to have been on the global cooling bandwagon before the fashion changed to global warming.
First of all, it's not at all clear that this is true. But it _is_ exactly what you would expect if there was a perfect consensus that global warming is a threat. It's also exactly what you'd expect if global cooling were the threat. Public research money tends to flow toward issues of great public concern, and not surprisingly, possible change in the global climate is of great public concern.
" Lindzen recieved $2500 a day from oil and coal interests for his services.1,2, 3 His article "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC.1 Lindzen has lectured at numerous Cooler Heads Coalition meetings. The Cooler Heads Coalition is funded by CEI which is in turn funded by Exxon Mobil. He has also given talks for the George C. Marshall Institute which is also funded by Exxon Mobil. His connections to the oil, coal, and even tobacco industry are apparently rather extensive. Here is one listof many that is worth exploring. Richard Lindzen claims he is currently not recieving any handouts from oil companies."
Of course, the truth is that money isn't the most corrupting influence by a large margin - true belief is. You can often spot true believers by their insistence that money is the only reason why their position isn't universally accepted.
Note that the NSF does fund things that seriously test special relativity.
Do you really think that the temp measurements are as sound? You remember the temp measurements. The US ones come from stations in parking lots, and they're the good ones. A huge fraction of the foreign ones have been moved. We don't know how that was adjusted for. (The dog ate their homework.)
Which reminds me, we have data showing that CO2 levels on earth have been several times higher than the projected disaster case. Care to guess what the "unbearable" temps were?
Citation? I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying people to issue opinions favorable to themselves. Perhaps you can point some out to me.
Are you suggesting that corporations are the only parties that have interests?
> opinions favorable to themselves
Irrelevant.
Do you believe that NSF or the Energy Department views research likely to be critical of AGW the same way that it views research that is likely to be supportive?
I do appreciate that you're demonstrating my claim that many folks think that monetary self-interest is the only corrupting influence. Many folks don't after I point that out because they realize that it isn't, that it isn't even the big one.
By this standard, the funding of the members of "the consensus" is just as important and just as damning, if not more, since there's billions annually being funded on the other side.
The important exceptions are:
As far as I know, the computer models that predict serious AGW just don't work. They don't "predict the past", i.e. you feed them historical data and they don't then predict what actually happened, and now that we can test their predictions they aren't working either. E.g.:
"The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong." http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&file...
ESR comments (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1473): "Eyebrows have quite rightly been raised over this quote. It is indeed a travesty that AGW theory cannot account for the lack of warming, and bears out what I and other AGW critics have been saying for years about the fallaciousness and lack of predictive power of AGW models.
"But the second sentence is actually far more damning. “The data is surely wrong.” This is how and where most scientific fraud begins."
And that brings us to the second big issue, how good is the data and based on that what can it be used for. The proxies are very iffy, especially when they get out of the historical period and can be compared to fairly solid actual temperature measurements ("hide the decline" of the tree ring proxies).
Then there's the questions of older thermometers, where researchers are trying to tease fractional degrees out of instruments with hand painted lines. That goes many times over for the proxies.
And the problem with badly situated ground monitoring stations, especially the urban heat island problem.
Then there's the demonstrated poor to impossible quality of the CRU data and their loss of the original data; as the detailed in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file (http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt), they can't even reproduce their own massaging of the original data....
And as I understand it, the NASA satellite data has been calibrated against these poor ground station data sets, not e.g. weather balloons, but I could be wrong there. This is important since instruments can drift over time, and when they're in an inaccessible satellite....
This just hits the highlights of the problems with the data, before we get into a whole lot of what looks like at worst case outright fraud.
These things including fraud don't throw climate science per se into doubt as a discipline, but they do engender skepticism and denial of AGW, which as noted is another thing altogether.
Anyway, I'll repeat the call many people are making: open it up. Retrieve the original lost records, do the science in the open, publishing all methods, code and data, and let the chips fall where they may.
When an author of a published "science" paper refuses to share his raw data, methods and code (and we're not talking about e.g. chemistry/chemical engineering where there's competitive advantage on the table for chemical companies), people legitimately wonder and discount what he says. When scientists give "the dog ate my homework" excuses, you might believe them about that (I think it's very possible WRT to the CRU ... but it says something that they didn't consider it important to archive it carefully), but I don't see how you're obliged to treat their unconfirmable results with any respect.
Add the bad faith that's manifest in the CRU emails...
You don't get to reject the mountains of well-understood science just because one guy dared raise questions about conflicts of interest.
Which is followed by an appeal to authority. Most of the following is appeals to authority, attacks on his funding (necessarily from eeevil sources since "the consensus" has halted funding to "deniers"), complaints about his not have current peer reviewed papers (see previous item), etc.
Sorry, but if we're talking real science, all he needs is an inconvenient fact to demolish the consensus (which is not quite what is being argued here; his point is that there isn't really a consensus, which it demonstrably true).
There are some attempts to deal with what he says on a basis of facts and the like (although some of them are appeals to the authority of the web site, e.g. general claims without references that would allow you to judge for yourself), but the site's dishonest style doesn't exactly encourage you to bother to see if it's telling the truth in those instances.
Insert, oh, the former "consensus" against heliocentrism. Relevant in a period calling for capital trials against "deniers" and HN commentators calling for their criminal prosecution (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283240).
Of course if it was, then this is a fairly convincing set of authorities, being the National Academy of Science in the US and their equivalents in the 12 largest countries in the world.
Who's missing that could even theoretically be on the other side? South Korea, Mexico, Spain? I have no idea who would rank up there with them but if I had to bet I'd say their national bodies representing science are going to be on the same side of the debate as those listed.
Again, this is someone who denies there is a consensus. That's relatively easy to fact check. It would be like knowing whether the church was for or against the Sun orbiting the Earth. It's an entirely seperate question from whether that position is factually correct. And, if you can't get that right why trust you on anything more complex?
It has nothing to do with theory or data, it's not science, it's science policy.
As Jerry Pournelle said, "Science policy is to science as birdshot is to birds."
I can claim that 60% of US citizens believe in angels and cite surveys to back that claim up. You can argue about whether that fact is correct with or without a personal belief in angels.
If someone (perhaps someone with an axe to grind for or against the existence of angels) simply refused to accept that evidence of 60% belief and provided nothing in return, then that alone would make them a dubious source to me.
This whole thread started with your confusion of a list of prominant subscribers to global warming which was offered as proof of consensus with it being proof of the consensus position itself. Let's not end in the same place we started.
Thanks for the correction.
Not at all. You can search through the peer-reviewed papers in vain for any saying there isn't any anthropogenic climate change; there are no such papers. None. Zero.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
All joking aside, the CRU e-mail hack revealed no such thing. To say otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest.
Here's the ones I can find in a few minutes with just the phrases I can remember off the top of my head and one or two leads from those:
Phil Jones to Michael Mann: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !" http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=419&filen...
From Mann (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=295): "The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility--that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. [...] The skeptics appear to have staged a 'coup' at 'Climate Research'...."
[...]
"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal."
The end result was that half the editorial board resigned, I think all "non-skeptics".
Two quoted items in one email (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=484); first this from Mann: "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research'. We can't afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don't know him--he would seem to be complicit w/ what is going on here)."
Followed by a Tom Wigley writing to I think Mann: "If you think that [GRL editor] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary 1evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted."
And then nearly a year later Mann reports Mission Accomplished: "The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there...." http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=591
Saiers was in fact removed from dealing with the paper in question, although he insists he wasn't himself ousted: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/grl-and-james-saie...
Anyway, that's what I can find from the original sources in 15 minutes. There's a lot more, "The Truth Is Out There".
That's something that tends to get lost in the shuffle, and it's really scary what percentage of the American public believes that the fundamental point is false. It also seems to me that Lindzen is exaggerating the degree of dispute over the future climate trends. I do agree that there's not a lot of evidence we can prevent the climate from warming considerably over the next 50 years or so, but there is a general consensus that the climate will warm considerably over the next 50 years.
It also seems there's a general consensus this is a problem, even if it's purely natural. Lindzen is doing his fellow researchers a disservice by confusing the politics and science of the issue.
The only way you're going to convince "skeptics" like myself (I only deny that the science is settled) will be to retrieve the original data sets the CRU lost and then do the science again in a totally open manner. Share the data, publish the code and methods, etc.
This whole argument is getting extraordinarily tired, but 1934 could well be the hottest year on record in the 20th century without invalidating the claim that the climate has warmed on average by several degrees since then. Outlying data points are in every single data set.
>the "hide the decline" games
As I recall there was a single game, in a single email.
>the fierce debate over the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and its extent
Europe? As I understand that's where the data is from. But even so, even if the temperatures have precedents, that doesn't disprove the warming trend - it just casts some doubt on the alarmism. And that's what I'm trying to get at. Warming is happening. It will continue.
Your recollection is incorrect, "hide the decline" is found throughout the source code in the CRU archive leak (quoted like that in comments and directly expressed in the code). There's also the green line in that IPCC graph that just ends in the middle of a thicket of intersecting lines. If it had been continued, it would have ... declined. It's a pretty big deal since it throws into doubt the entire tree ring approach (not to mention the explicit or implicit fraud).
Agreed on the "casts some doubt on the alarmism", although I'd say more than "some", since they went to some effort to disappear it in the first place.
Hmmm, maybe I should ask, "Warming tend over what period?"
Since the last Ice Age, obviously. Since the Little Ice Age, certainly. Beyond that? The time series of data really matters in this debate, for if recent increases do not correlate with anthropogenic CO2 increases (e.g. if it got warm in the 20th century before that was big, and now is getting cooler) then it calls the whole alarmism crusade into doubt (at best).
They also "improved" the curve for the 1930s as ESR learned from the code and data (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447): "This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century."
Also note how this meshes nicely with the paper that started this thread that did not until it was corrected show that 1934 was the hottest year in the 20th century.
Looks like almost everyone's in agreement, there.