Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming Dissenters Suppressed?
sycodon writes "Global Warming has become more than just a scientific issue and has been portrayed as nothing less than the End of the World by some. However, despite all the hoopla from Hollywood, Politicians and Science Bureaucrats, there is another side, but it's being suppressed according to Richard Lindzen, an Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. From the article: 'Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.'"
If you don't trust Lindzen, you can run your own global climate model at home and check the outputs yourself!
EdGCM is a NASA GCM that has been ported to run on Mac and Windows, and given a GUI interface. Want to turn the sun down by 2% or add some CO2? Just point and click and drag. Then, hit play, wait a day or two, and you'll have your own GCM outputs, complete with a visualization utility to view them with.
Space and Computers.
We were saying about labeling people as corporate stooges?
Here's the way it works:
1. You say "hey, this thing is more complex than we thought, let's try to understand it"
2. Your are labeled an "enemy of the planet" by those who review grant money
3. You get no further funding
4. You go to the sources that WILL fund your research
5. Because you are now backed by evil corporations your are branded a stooge
6. Your peers ignore your data and input
Isn't it great how we're not surpressing anyone's research?
PS: "enemy of the planet" is a direct quote from those reviewing funding for a friend of mine who was in solar astrophysics at the time. His lab had dared to propose a model by which the sun could power observed warming.
... is irrelevant to this discussion.
y cle.html ) as a prime example of what happens when we begin looking more closely at these problems. Many scientists are tossing out potential hypotheses in a science that is very difficult to easily test these hypotheses properly. There's a rush to put out results of any type by the P-or-P philosophy... easiest is verification of previous results in a slightly different regime.
;) Cooler heads will prevail eventually.
There is something that he points out (in a roundabout way) that needs to be said: There is a lot of bad science going on in this debate. Both sides.
Now, granted, I'm a lowly Ph.D. student in Atmospheric Sciences studying hurricanes... what would I know about this, right? (Yes, that's slightly sarcastic.)
"Science" and "Nature" are hack journals nowadays. The only reason that one publishes in those is for publicity. Pure and simple. I haven't seen an article pertaining to atmospheric science come through there that I haven't been able to poke significant holes in for years now. (I speak mainly for atmospheric science articles in those journals. Other articles may be fine... I don't know.)
The real science happens in the less-public journals. And, believe it or not, the actual science always leads to more questions than answers. There are details that aren't covered in science news coverage that are vital to making valid conclusions in these issues. But, the nature of the "publish-or-perish" funding makes careful science difficult to do.
So, we're left with more questions than answers. Look at Dr. Denning's carbon cycle findings ( http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/globalcarbonc
I'm not claiming that the scientists in this debate are bad scientists... I'm claiming that they're getting caught up in a problem that is so incredibly complex that we're far from having a more-than-cursory handle on. A lot of this is pioneering work... and even pioneers in sciences can get things wrong or not understand everything (how many refinements of Einstein's relativity theory have there been in the last couple decades, for example?).
It's not just about politics or philosophy or science or anything like that. It's seeing the maturation of a whole discipline of science. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that alarmists may be taking things too far. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that there are politics involved here. He may be off-base in a number of points, but cooler heads will prevail eventually. This is an exciting time to watch all this... it's like our generation's relativity (20's and 30's) or nuclear chemistry (late-40's to 60's).
Those who are getting up in arms about all this... settle down. Seriously. Your hyperventilations are only speeding up the global warming process!
-Jellisky
The earth has supposedly been warming over some period of very, very recent history. So with over 4 billion years of weather, we humans in our infinite wisdom are choosing about 100 years of data and trying to extrapolate where the earth is heading.
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway? Probably driven underground by the latest "Sky is Falling" group known as the Global Warming evangelists.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
I guess the press doesn't want to report on the failings of these wackjobs since the press was the ones who gave them credence in the first damn place.
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Global warming is going to follow the same stupid path. Tomorrow there will be a new threat and billions will be spent on that problem, meanwhile we'll be paying $10.00 / gallon for gas and no one will be solving the real problems.
Well, that position is not without its critics. There is evidence to suggest that the way the data was collected was not adjusted for changes in the technology they used to gather it, and when it was collected -- specifically, how the heat-shielding to rule out the effects of sunlight warming has been improved over time without that being factored into the analysis.
This blog gives a nice summary of what happened, as well as a bunch of relevant links. (The author is an astrophysicist, so he's not without some ability to read science papers and follow the math.)
From this article:
In short, since the heat shielding on the measuring devices became more effective, the daytime measurements were skewed downward, while the nighttime readings showed a warming trend.
So if the improved technology skews the data, you need to look a little harder at the way the data was generated.
This issue is by no means settled, but what you cite is one possible interpretation which may not fully fit the inherent issues in the way the data was collected.
Cheers.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
More hot air... It's hilarious, as a grad student in the atmospheric sciences, how compartmentalized this beleif is. I work with geologists, glaciologists, climatologists, and meteorologists all days, and there are several signs that warming is occuring- the most convincing being the melt of tropical glaciers, of which all of them are melting. I know this because I've examined the satellite photography myself, and modeled the glacial decline. This gets the geologists and glaciologists into the mix. The climate databases almost always show a climatological rise, so the climatologists are in on it. However, teh real-time meteorologists really don't think it's occuring- and if you think that they don't know what's going on, these are the people that are forecasting your weather all day. Go figure...
The science supporting global warming is suppressed by the politicians.
The science opposing global warming is "suppressed" by peer review in prestigious journals.
You can easily figure out from that one where the scientific community stands on the issue.
(Note that his complaint isn't even that these people can't publish their work at all, it's that it's hard to publish these results in the most prestigious journals. That's kind of like saying that your human rights are being violated because Britney Spears refuses to date you.)