Slashdot Mirror
Skeptical Environmentalist Saga Continues
"The Ministry critique holds that the Committee's procedure was unfair. It does not address the scientific issues. Lomborg's book caused outrage among many environmentalists and scientists, while right-wing organizations such as the Cato Institute have defended Lomborg. Scientific American devoted eleven pages of its January 2002 issue to a critique of Lomborg. Lomborg was only allowed to publish a one-page rebuttal, to which Scientific American replied here. When Lomborg defended himself by posting the Scientific American critique on his web site and that of Greenspirit with his commentary [PDF file] interspersed, Scientific American threatened to sue and both sites took it down. It is, however, still available at the iGreens web site."
(Slashdot ran a review of Lomborg's book early last year.)
If he doesn't believe in warming, does that make him a cold danish?...
Just another day in Paradise
8 Summary of the assessment of the Ministry
8.1 Regarding statutory authority
Point 5.1.1. Legal basis for the work of DCSD:
The opinion enclosed with the complaint of 13 February 2003 states the view that the legal basis for the DCSD making rulings regarding whether specific researchers have acted with scientific dishonesty is doubtful.
The Ministry considers that the establishment of the DCSD was clearly provided for in the remarks on section 4e(4) of the Danish Act on Research Advice, and that the duties of the DCSD can be included under the advisory function, which was located in the Board of the Danish Research Councils and its sub-committees.
With this background, the Ministry considers that the DCSD did have the necessary statutory authority for its general work.
Point 5.1.2. Basis for statutory authority in Order no. 933 of 15 December 1998 and use of the term 'good scientific practice'
The opinion enclosed with the complaint of 13 February 2003 argues that the authority of the DCSD is exclusively laid down in the Order concerning the DCSD. This means that the DCSD cannot take a position on whether the respondent has neglected standards for good scientific practice. The special aspect of this case is that the DCSD has included its position on breach of good scientific practice in the conclusion to their ruling.
Irrespective of whether or not the Ministry finds that the DCSD has grounds to take a position on the issue of good scientific practice, there is an independent point of criticism if, in its assessment, the DCSD has applied a standard for good scientific practice in the individual specialist area that is not true and fair.
The Ministry considers that the DCSD has not applied a completely true and fair standard for good scientific practice within social sciences in its examination, and that on the current basis it cannot be ruled out that this delusion could have led to an incorrect assessment of the work of the respondent. The seriousness of this situation is emphasised by the DCSD itself in that it makes this issue the pivot for the ruling in its conclusion.
Errors such as these, that can influence the result of a ruling, must lead to the case being remitted so that the situation can be rectified.
Point 5.1.3. The concept of 'objective scientific dishonesty'
The DCSD divides scientific dishonesty into objective and subjective parts. Thus, the Ministry understands that, as part of its working methodology, the DCSD use the concept 'objective dishonesty'. The Ministry considers this the usual legal working methodology.
However, the Ministry does not consider that the methodological division can be repeated in the conclusion, as this could present a misleading picture of the actual conclusion; namely that in the opinion of the DCSD there is no scientific dishonesty in terms of the Order.
In the opinion of the Ministry, it is a mistake that the DCSD allows the methodological division to appear in the conclusion, but not to the extent that the mistake results in the case being remitted.
Point 5.1.4. The ruling has not been made by one of the three committees under the DCSD
With the basis that the complaints were aimed at the specialist areas of all three committees, in the opinion of the Ministry the three committees are jointly competent to address the complaint on the grounds stated. At the same time the Ministry must emphasise that this is a scientific issue, outside the authority of the Ministry. However, the Ministry points out that the procedures chosen to decide whether or not a case should be addressed by the committees jointly was, in the opinion of the Ministry, not correct. According to the information in the DCSD statement of 5 May 2003, the ruling was made by the committees jointly following recommendations from the chairman.
The Ministry finds that the ruling must be made by the individual committee within whose area the respondent works, in that there is otherwise a r
Jerry Pournelle posted a link to this on his site.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
By Michael Crichton
It is a very good read. Crichton claims that the public believes in things like Global Warming and Nuclear Winter for the same reasons that it believes in little green men. He says that science has failed to act as "a candle in the dark."
That teaches him for questioning orthodoxy.
Lomborg's book has 2 930 footnotes which allows you to fact check every single assertion that he makes. I've never seen that level of detail from the environmentalist movement and I speak as someone who has read more than just their pamphlets.
It should be noted that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation published its own response to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty:
"[T]he DCSD has not documented where [Dr Lomborg] has allegedly been biased in his choice of data and in his argumentation, and...the ruling is completely void of argumentation for why the DCSD find that the complainants are right in their criticisms of [his] working methods. It is not sufficient that the criticisms of a researcher's working methods exist; the DCSD must consider the criticisms and take a position on whether or not the criticisms are justified, and why."
Oh, you mean the DCSD has done what they are accusing of Lomborg on? Right then...carry on!
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
People trying to win ideological points will be disappointed to have to face the reality that science is not just another arm of politics... it actually a real discipline of proof and justification toward the evaluation of evidence. Whether you "think" there is global warming or not, higher degrees of scientific analysis should not be tossed aside on the basis of scatalogical arguments. Long live scientific inquiry and the scientific method (it's been on the ropes quite a bit these past years... starting with Cold Fusion... look at the junk reported in the mainstream press and it's nearly always slightly wrong, misguided, or flat-out incorrect).
Anyway, back to Lomborg -- I call myself an environmentalist and I'm certainly concerned about the possibility of a human effect on climate change, but the more the issue gets turned into a matter of theology they may not be questioned, the more skeptical I get about the whole thing. This simply is not the way science is supposed to work.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well the upper atmosphere is warming, but that can be easily explained by the weakening of the magnetic field which causes more radiation to hit the atmosphere in turn increasing the temperature in that region.
As for the ground data, Urban heat islands are the cause. The material used to build Urban areas retains the heat from the day, and radiates it at night. If you take the urban heat island data out of the ground temperature data, there is almost a zero increases in surface temperature.
No need for CO2 in the equation at all, though, Green house effect and what I outlined above both have an equally strong base of evidence (each is a hypothesis to climatology). I think that the hypothesis outlined above makes more sense personally.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"I call myself an environmentalist and I'm certainly concerned about the possibility of a human effect on climate change, but the more the issue gets turned into a matter of theology they may not be questioned, the more skeptical I get about the whole thing. "
In this case there are billons of dollars at stake. If global warming is real then entire industries will have to change the way they function. None of these people want to spend one more dime then they have to so its in their interest to turn this issue into a theological/idelogical war.
It is inevitable that the global warming issue will be turned into a matter theology. In a way it strikes at the soft underbelly of the theory of capitalism. That being the environmental impact of large scale economic growth. The founders of capitalism never took into account the impact of their theories would have on the global environment because they presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc.
The stakes are huge and the war will be bloody however it is also inevitable. This war will be fought whether we like it not. Nobody knows who is going to win but there will be many losers. As in any war however the truth will be the first casualty.
War is necrophilia.
That was a very harsh critique, possibly even unfair. What was certainly unfair is (If I remember correctly) that SA refused to let him respond for about a year, and even then only let him use one page, when a rebuttle to his rebuttle was many pages and in the same issue. Supposedly SA also got lawyers involved to refuse him his fair use rights in his website rebuttle here:
i st -defended/
http://reactor-core.org/skeptical-environmental
Personally, I think it's good to call BS on pseudo science and fusged stats (i.e. ALL mainstream science reporting), but when someone with only a highschool education in science starts rewriting the science books, we're in trouble.
We've been keeping track of global climate for more than 140 years!
s hgl.gif) Surely this is the sign of evironmental armageddon!
Surely this is enough to be able to accurately predict the warming and cooling cycles of the Earth!
You stupid people! Global temperature has risen almost 1 degree F in the past 140 years! (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nh
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
on Monday, an earthquake shook the foundations of Diablo Canyon nuclear power station in California. This plant, if it had been built as originally planned, would likely have failed on Monday, likely contaminating hundreds of miles of pacific coastline with deadly radiation.
Thank GOD the environmentallist wackos were there, in the 1970's, to halt construction on this plant, and force PG&E to redesign the plant so that it could withstand a 7.0 direct on it's location. The magnatude of the San Simeon quake was estimated to be in the 5.5 to 6.0 range on the site of Diablo Canyon.
I personally don't mind having a nuclear power station in my "backyard". But that's because I've toured it, and I *know* they built it right.
For all those who blamed the 2000 blackouts on environmentalist wackos - screw you. It was fradulent enerygy trading practices.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That first paragraph was confusing so lemme post my summary:
Bjorn Lomborg says evironmentalists are stupid.
Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid.
Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation says Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty is stupid.
Cato Institute says Bjorn Lomborg is not stupid.
Scientific American says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid.
okay makes sense now.
There seems to be a misapprehension in many posts that the book is skeptical of global warming itself. It isn't.
There are a *few* comments to the effect that the conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not certain, or at any rate the *magnitude* of the warming is much disputed, but Lomborg's comments just mirror the ongoing debate in the meteorlogical community itself.
Then he gets on with it and says, basically, "but let's just take the final conclusions of the panel as the best estimate we have" - the rest of the chapter is about the 1.5C-5.8C (most likely number : 2.2C) of warming we will see by 2100, according to the IPCC.
What the global warming, ah, community(?) hates about Lomborg is that he takes a position against Kyoto, based on the models and figures in the IPCC report.
In brief: that Kyoto is unlikely to delay that 2.2C warming by more than a miserable six years, at a cost of hundreds of billions that could be better spent preparing the hardest-hit nations for the *effects* of the warming, not to mention on R&D for wind turbines, solar power, safer nuke plants, fuel cells, etc.
This, I found pretty convincing.
Anybody who would call the Cato Institute a "right wing" group is terribly, terribly ignorant. Cato is very pro-individual rights. On economic issues, they tend to agree with conservatives. On social issues, they tend to agree with liberals.
Contrary to what some people believe, it's possible to have positions other than what most people understand to be left wing or right wing. That two-dimensional scale is terribly inadequate for explaining the range of possible political positions. See the following quiz from Advocates for Self Government for a more useful way to look at the choices:
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
Really, SciAm's response was quite fair, and they rebutted the critiques of his rebuts by offering him as much space as he wanted on their web site.
I read the whole mess. I'm not an expert, but I am a physicist and competent to review the work at a high level. My personal opinion is what follows:
1) Lomborg's reasoning is specious and poorly connected. He extracts details out of context and puts them together to tell a rosy environmental picture that ends up being in diametric opposition to the best data. That is he builds up a lot of small anomalies in the data and ends up with an answer that a first order check against big picture data shows is false. He uses the specious conclusion to attack the first order results, which is anti-scientific.
2) The political argument is that "environmentalists" somehow benefit from being alarmist, and are therefore all suspect. I have yet to figure out the reward mechanism for tilting against big business. The contrary position, engaging in research the findings of which support the activities of the wealthiest corporations on earth, has a direct and well documented fiscal reward system.
3) The vast majority of environmental scientists have found data which supports the contrary argument, and present their data, both raw and refined, in support of those conclusions over many years, and to extensive review, both researchers in all fields.. Lombard has done no such research and merely picks and chooses among the data which supports his arguments and dismisses the majority that doesn't as false to support his alarmist argument that environmental regulations will be the ruination of us all.
He does make some good economic arguments though - as much as his environmental science is as weak as one would expect from a young and inexperienced economist with no background in science, his economic arguments are both sensible and deserving of consideration.
The argument of his that I find most persuasive, after the veil of poor science is brushed away, is that given finite resources, and given some calculation of risk*consequence (that is the statistically weighted risk of some particular outcome) it is not rational to squander finite resources on low risk outcomes. More precisely, the best answer is to carefully consider consequences and probabilities and rationally allocate resources to optimize future survivability.
SciAm did not attack that foundation or reasoning, though they did fail to give it proper credit in their response to Lombard's science. Indeed, SciAm supports such rationalist arguments as they did in suggesting that asteroid monitoring is under funded due to the relatively low cost of doing so, and the high risk*result value of a very low risk, but catastrophic cost of a potential impact.
Lombard's book got undeserved attention because it fits so well with the needs of polluting industries to refute the obvious damage done. It's really not his fault - he's got a limited education in science and he overstepped his expertise. This isn't new, and as pointed out over and over again in the response to this article, almost inescapable in popular science writing. Why he got unfairly crucified is because he was unreasonably lionized, and it all had little do with the content or lack thereof of his book. A more reasonable answer would have been a clear review of his scientific failings and a pat on the back for a nice first try, and an open hand from the scientific community offering to teach an obviously bright guy the basics of environmental and atmospheric science so he could give it a better go next time.
Oh well.
After reading through Lomborg's book and the responses to it, I've determined that there is one tested scientific theory inherent in global warming. Unfortunately it has more to do with psychology than earth sciences.
In 1972 a psychologist named Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink, a theory that postulated that people within a group will think alike, or as he put it:
In other words, when you get a group of people together with a similar worldview and ask them to process some information, they will process that information in such a way as to coincide with their worldview.
The theory of groupthink is a tremendously useful model for analyzing public policy decisionmaking. Many articles have been written that apply this model to everything from the Cuban Missle Crisis (Graham Allison's indispensible Essence of Decision for those who might be interested in foreign-policy decisionmaking theory) to the decisions over the war in Iraq.
Scientists are not immune from groupthink. The consensus in January of this year was that the incident of ice hitting the space shuttle Columbia was not a major issue of concern. Those who did believe otherwise were dissuaded by others. Of course, the consensus was wrong in the issue and the dissenters were correct.
Global warming is more a consequence of groupthink than of sound science. It is pseudo-science to argue that a system as complex and chaotic as the environment can be predicted with any accuracy over long periods of time. We can't even predict the weather over a given chunk of territory with scientifically reproducable accuracy, yet one is to believe that we can say that the Earth's average temperature will rise x number of degrees by 2100?
The fact is that such claims are unverfiable and irreproducable, and rely on computer weather models that would respond as a model would be expected to but could have no relationship with the real world. Yet we're being asked to base our entire way of life based around flimsy assertions that cannot be proven or disproven scientifically.
So why are scientists behaving so unscientifically?
Because they have been given a worldview in which "polluters" should be stopped using science. In essence, the people who grew up watching Captain Planet are now out there either consciously or unconsciously trying to make the evidence fit their preordained worldview.
Those who dissent, like Lomborg, are practically apostates to the prevailing conventional wisdom. Lomborg is instantly assumed to be in the "pockets of big corporations" and trying to "defend the polluters." Lomborg's arguments are being treated as wrong on a prima facie basis and the prevailing conventional wisdom is being upheld - exactly the way in which Janis would describe for a group in the throws of groupthink.
Certainly pollution isn't good, but the way in which critics have attacked Lomborg have shown a shocking willingness to abandon dispassionate and objective science in favor of using science as a tool of public policy. When such an attitude becomes prevalent, real science falls behind. The scientific community deserves a black eye for this, and the way in which global warming is treated as a prima facie truth rather than a flimsy scientific theory is not hard science - it's a function of personal and professional bias on the part of many in the scientific community.
What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.
Heat islands have been the subject of intense discussion and research in this area for as long as I've been following it, and a quick search immediately turns up refutations of that claim. From physicist Martin I. Hoffert (who is certainly more qualified to expound on the issue than Lomborg): Here's another take on the issue: and another independent measurement: (I can't believe the things that get modded up. Okay, given the lack of research obvious in what gets posted, maybe I can believe the credulousness obvious in what gets modded up. But it's still dismaying.)Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yep.
A climatologist researcher friend of mine was going along with the global warming consensus while he was running Global Circulation Models. Then he got deep into paleoclimatology and changed his position, because he saw first hand how terribly bad the historical climate record was, and what large, important conclusions were drawn from inadequate data coupled to very suspect indirect causation chains.
Other acuaintances of mine in the field, at least during the Clinton administration, would not publish their skepticisms and didn't want to be quoted by name because being a GW skeptic meant not getting research grants!
Another acquaintance doing research on increased CO2 on plant growth had trouble getting grants once he started showing very positive results.
Global Warming "science" is already highly politicized. And I put "science" in quotes because forecasting something 100 years in advance is not particularly scientific, given the lack of testability in reasonable time frames. Furthermore, there is a sampling bias in the models... huge amounts of assumptions go into models, many in what is called "paramterization" - which means literally sticking in fudge factors to account for many phenomenon either too fine grained, too poorly understood or just too hard to model to put into the program. Naturally, those models which can "forecast" the historical record tend to be considered the best ones. However, given the level of tweaking the models require, this is more likely to be a matter of chance than to indicate that the model is really correct.
Finally, what BL says about the Kyoto accords is true. Put in different terms, the change in temperature as a result of Kyoto would not be measurable (separable from noise) in 100 years. In other words, Kyoto does nothing to help the environment (the other formulation is to say it delays warming 6 years out of 100). If one pins down a knowledgable Kyoto proponent, they will admit that Kyoto doesn't achieve anything of significance with regard to the climate, but rather gives a start to what is really required, which (if you believe the IPCC models) is a reduction in CO2 emissions so great that with current technology it would destroy the economies of the world and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 3rd and 4th world.
In other words, Kyoto was meant as a trojan horse (with goodies in there to make the US economy less competitive with Europe, and a complete lack of regulation of the largest and fastest growing countries). Its purpose was to get people used to suffering to reduce CO2, and to get agreements in place that could be used to tighten the CO2 rules over time.
Finally, many environmentalists believe in the "precautionary principle" which in effect says that if we suspect something might be harmful, but can't prove it, we should stop it anyway.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that it is applied to restrict CO2 emitting activity, but is not applied to the potential social impacts of those restrictions. In other words, precautionaryism (to coin a term) is okay for the environment, but potential harm to man does not receive the same level of caution. Furthermore, it is easy to extend the precautionary principle to end all progress. For example, the precautionary principle, applied to genetic engineering, would cause us to shut down all efforts in the area, because it is likely (yes, likely) that the technology will be used by terrorists to create dangerous pathogens.
On another topic, I read the Scientific American criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist. It almost caused me to cancel my subscription after forty years. It was an poor excuse for a rebuttal - it was an attack on the person, BL, more than on what he had to say. It ignored most of his main points and where it found specific fault (and there was almost none pointed out), it was on trivial details. And yet, they only gave him one page to respond. Furthermore, the threatened him with copyr
The only good weather is bad weather.
Tehe! Whenever I hear this kind of environmentalist rabble, I can now clearly associate them with dihydrogen monoxide issues. The biggest green house gas in a newly discovered substance known as dihydrogen monoxide. Yet it is invisible to most environmentalists radar. They don't know it exists. Most media have never heard of it let alone mention it. Even if you were to mention that two thirds of the planet is covered with dihydrogen monoxide (or H2O as its commonly referred to) its somehow fogs out the core issues. There is plenty of steam in dihydrogen monoxide theories make it THE number one factor for global warming and since dihydrogen monoxide covers two thirds of the planet, there is nothing that anyone can or should be doing about it. Dihydrogen monoxide carries gigawatts of heat energy around the planet. It is responsible for all the heat retention of the planet and maintaining conditions suitable for life. Without it Earth would be cold and dead just like the Moon. Environmentalists leap at their sceptics as heretics - but in their haste to preserve their funding, they can't address dreadfully simple issues like dihydrogen monoxide. I can only hope they grow up some day and admit their childish pseudo science was all a waste of money and not real science.