ClimateGate busts things wide open

How arrogant art thy name-callers?

The guys at Popular Tech have done a Very Nice List. They’ve put together seven names of eminent scientists who are skeptical of man-made climate catastrophe, along with their stellar biographies and quotes. It tells us nothing about the climate, but before you write it off as just a fallacious appeal to authority, ponder that these eminent people are the same people that teenage tree-huggers would call “deniers”.

To see just how mindlessly puerile “denier” is, try the thought experiment of putting those-who-use-it in the same room as one of the more notable “deniers”.

Julia Gillard (the new PM downunder) used “denier” 11 times in one recent speech. So imagine she’s in a room talking with, say, Ivar Giaever. She studied arts and law, he got a PhD in theoretical physics two years before she was born, and won a Nobel Prize by the time she was nine. Picture him talking atmospheric physics and her telling him he’s a denier.

A Nobel doesn’t mean he’s right, but when Gillard says “Denier” she is referring to thousands of people including Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever (Nobel Prize), Robert Laughlin (Nobel Prize), Edward Teller, Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg.

The arrogance of all those who use this inane form of name-calling ought be exposed for exactly what it is, a cheap tactic to intimidate people who disagree, and a big bluff. The smug conceit of “denier” implies that the answer is so obvious it’s not even worth discussing. Thus it’s main purpose is to stop people talking about the finer points, the pros and cons, the weight of the evidence. It’s a form of censorship and has no place in a scientific discussion.

Anyone who uses it ought be shamed, even more so, any scientist who doesn’t protest at it’s vacuous use ought be shamed too.

The list includes Robert Jastrow, none other than the Founding Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“The scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities.” – Robert Jastrow
Freeman Dyson: Unification of Quantum Electrodynamics Theory.

Ivar Giaever: Nobel Prize in Physics

Robert Laughlin: Noble Prize in Physics.

Frederick Seitz: Pioneer in the field of solid-state physics and President Emeritus of the National Academy of Sciences.

Edward Teller: Manhattan Project Member, Developer of the Hydrogen Bomb and Founder of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

William Nierenberg: Manhattan Project Member and Director Emeritus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The mass collection of awards, sought-after titles, and decades of experience at the highest levels of physics tells us that those who pretend that there is nothing to discuss are either faking it or witless.

That we’ve sadly lost four of these remarkable brains in recent years changes nothing. The term “denier” was in use while all of them were alive, and any collection of eminent achievers with long service and recognition is hardly going to include fresh graduates. Given the name-calling and political spite involved, it’s also unlikely that eminent achievers who are still in the rat race (and applying for grants and memberships) will feel enthused about speaking out.

There are of course thousands more names on the Global Warming Petition Project.

The team at popular technology have been assembling a list of scientific papers for a long time too. It’s now up to 750 peer reviewed papers. I keep hoping to get time to do a proper post on it. For the moment, I’ll just note that’s it’s a very useful resource. Thanks to the pop tech team.

PS: Before there are any predictable critical comments about the Petition Project let’s remember that it was done by volunteers and done twice which is an extraordinary indication of the grassroots movement out there. It says something about the petition and the name-callers, that critics are still attacking the first round (known as the Oregon Petition) .

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/07/how-ar ... #more-9158
http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/0 ... f-agw.html

cookie wrote:I wonder if the farmers in Russia will agree with your statements???

Many farmers are on the brink of bankruptcy, while a state of emergency has been declared in 17 Russian regions. Nearly 10 million hectares of crops have been destroyed by drought

And Cookie will now demonstrate how this drought is caused by global warming, climate change and CO2 ....... waiting ..... waiting ...........waiting

The satellites are missing

By Steve Goddard

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/21/t ... more-22305

Back in January, our friends were crowing about the warmest satellite temperatures on record. But now they seem to have lost interest in satellites. I wonder why?

Data: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

It probably has to do with the fact that temperature anomalies are plummeting at a rate of 0.47 °C/year and that satellite temperatures in 2010 are showing no signs of setting a record.

The attention span of our alarmist friends seems to be getting shorter and shorter. They lock in on a week of warm temperatures on the east coast, a week of warm temperatures in Europe, a week of rapid melt in the Arctic. But they have completely lost the plot of the big picture.

The graph below shows Hansen’s A/B/C scenarios in black, and GISTEMP overlaid in red.

Note that actual GISTEMP is below all three of Hansen’s forecasts. According to RealClimate :

Scenario B was roughly a linear increase in forcings, and Scenario C was similar to B, but had close to constant forcings from 2000 onwards. Scenario B and C had an ‘El Chichon’ sized volcanic eruption in 1995. Essentially, a high, middle and low estimate were chosen to bracket the set of possibilities. Hansen specifically stated that he thought the middle scenario (B) the “most plausible”.

In other words, actual temperature rise has been less than Hansen forecast – even if there was a huge volcanic eruption in the 1990s, and no new CO2 introduced over the past decade! We have fallen more than half a degree below Hansen’s “most plausible” scenario, even though CO2 emissions have risen faster than worst case.

Conclusions:

We are not going to set a record this year (for the whole year)
Hansen has vastly overestimated climate sensitivity
Temperatures have risen slower than Hansen forecast for a carbon free 21st century
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?

rufus wrote:You guys who claim global warming does not exist or is not caused by man would be funny if the issue were not so serious. Denialists are stuffing up the world for my kids. Unfortunately I won't be around to take retribution when the truth becomes even more evident.

"take retribution" ............... you silly man!

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models." - Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson, B.A. Mathematics, Cambridge University (1945), Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge University (1946–1947), Commonwealth Fellow, Cornell University, (1947–1948), Commonwealth Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University (1948–1949), Teaching Fellow, University of Birmingham (1949–1951), Professor of Physics, Cornell University (1951-1953), Fellow, Royal Society (1952), Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University (1953-1994), Chairman, Federation of American Scientists (1962-1963), Member, National Academy of Sciences (1964), Danny Heineman Prize, American Physical Society (1965), Lorentz Medal (1966), Hughes Medal (1968), Max Planck Medal (1969), Enrico Fermi Award, United States Department of Energy (1993), Professor Emeritus of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University (1994-Present)

jackspratt wrote:Interesting fellow is Freeman Dyson - and hardly, it seems, a skeptic.

Dyson agrees that anthropogenic global warming exists, and has written
“ One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas."

More recently, he has endorsed the now common usage of "global warming" as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change, referring to recent
“measurements that transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a precise observational science"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dy ... al_warming

Thanks for the lead ronan.

Dyson is well-aware that his "heresy" on global warming has been strongly criticized. In reply, he notes that:

“ My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.[14]

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated."

Desperate days for the warmists
Warmists may be winning the big grants, but they're not winning the argument, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker
Published: 7:12PM BST 24 Jul 2010

Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future "such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent". He didn't explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.

In America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog, shows that NOAA's claimed warming appears to be strangely concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at all.

A second technique the warmists have used lately to keep their spirits up has been to repeat incessantly that the official inquiries into the "Climategate" scandal have cleared the top IPCC scientists involved of any wrongdoing, and that their science has been "vindicated". But, as has been pointed out by critics like Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, this is hardly surprising, since the inquiries were careful not to interview any experts, such as himself, who could have explained just why the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were so horribly damaging.

The perfunctory report of the Science Appraisal Panel, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, examined only 11 papers produced by the CRU, none of them remotely connected to what the fuss was all about. Last week Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, revealed on his blog (Bishop Hill – bishophill.squarespace.com) that the choice of these papers was approved for the inquiry by Sir Brian Hoskins, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, and by Phil Jones, the CRU's former director – an appraisal of whose work was meant to be the purpose of the inquiry.

A third technique, most familiar of all, has been to fall back on the dog-eared claim that leading sceptics only question warmist orthodoxy because they have been funded by "Big Oil" and the "fossil fuel industry". Particularly bizarre was a story last week covering the front page and an inside page of one newspaper, headed "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics".

The essence of this tale was that Exxon Mobil, the oil giant that is the world's third biggest company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks. These had gone on to dismiss the Climategate inquiries as "whitewashes".

It was hardly necessary to be given money by Exxon to see what was dubious about those inquiries. Not one of the knowledgeable sceptics who have torn them apart has received a cent from Big Oil. But what made this particularly laughable was that the penny-packets given to think-tanks that have been largely irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into the army of groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.

Even the big oil companies have long been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low-carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.

The Grantham Institute provides another example. It was set up at the LSE and Imperial College with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund billionaire, to advise governments and firms on how to promote and invest in ways to "fight climate change", now one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses in the world.

Compare the funding received by a handful of think-tanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on those who speak for the other side by governments, foundations, multinational corporations, even Big Oil, and the warmists are winning hands down. But only financially: they are not winning the argument.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/25/d ... more-22535

HUMAN-CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING

McCarthyism, intimidation, press bias, censorship,policy-advice corruption and propaganda

Testimony of
Dr. Robert M. Carter
James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
before the
Committee on Environment and Public Works
United States Senate

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Since 1988 - fuelled by insistent lobbying from special interest environmental, scientific,political and industry groups - human-caused global warming has become one of the great political issues of our time.

Today’s dominant paradigm is that human emissions ofgreenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, will produce dangerous warming of the globe (the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis; AGW).

When tested against empirical evidence, this hypothesis fails. It maintains its popular sway only because of
the remorseless propagation of climate alarmism based upon anecdotal evidence, and on unvalidated computer modeling (GCMs) and related “attribution studies”.

This paper describes ways in which the AGW paradigm has achieved its consensus hold over western political consciousness, and explains how it maintains that status.

AGW supporters exercise strong influence over the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and also over what is published in the professional scientific literature about climate change. Climate rationalists (derogated as “sceptics”) who seek a balanced discussion on the issue, and greater recognition of the dominant role
of natural climate change, are subject to harassment, intimidation and censorship.

Policy advice to governments through scientific agencies and academies is corrupted by financial and political self-interest. Public discussion of climate change is greatly degraded by an unremitting press bias and by lavish NGO-funded propaganda towards alarmism in the AGW cause.

With the publication of the British Stern Review into Climate Change in late 2006, and the scheduled release of the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC in early 2007, AGW alarmism is reaching unprecedented heights. The non-alarmist, rational interpretation of climate change will prevail through this hysteria, as empirical data come to trump
unvalidated computer model predictions.

Thereafter, attention will turn to the real climate policy problem. Which is the preparation of appropriate response plans for the occurrence of extreme weather events, as well as for longer term climatic coolings and warmings, in
the same way that we prepare to cope with other natural hazards such as storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Attempting to “stop climate change” is an extravagant and costly exercise of utter futility.

Rational climate policies must be based on adaptation.

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/cl ... 2006-1.pdf