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Climate Change and the Integrity of Science
blau tips news of an open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, decrying the "recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular." The letter lays out the basics of the scientific method, and explains how certainly highly-regarded theories — such as the big bang, evolution, and Earth's origin — are commonly accepted due to the strength of the evidence supporting them, though "fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong." It goes on to "call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them." According to the Guardian, the letter "originated with a number of NAS members who were frustrated at the misinformation being spread by climate deniers and the assaults on scientists by some policy-makers who hope to delay or avoid making policy decisions and are hiding behind the recent controversy around emails and minor errors in the IPCC."
Is it worth mentioning that the National Academy of Sciences has on the order of 2100 members, of which 255 were willing to sign this letter?
How many mathematicians or physicists are there in this list of authors? (I may be wrong, but it seems to me that they my be under-represented?)
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Of course, the corollary to that is:
"It is easy to get a man to prove something, when his salary depends upon him proving it."
I will take a shot at it.
First of all, there is the interesting question of quantification. I have seen some predictions that start with the CO2 stuff and come up with a lag time of what, 600 years. science does not have to be quantified by any means, but none of your points are very interesting without some verified numbers. overwhelming natural processes is a bit interesting, but it is not that anyone can really claim that natural processes should dominate. Now I do like the acidification of the ocean claim.
but being a bit nasty, I might make a nice physical claim that increased insolation would allow me to predict a nicely corresponding global temperature increase. but, since insolation seems to have increased 25% over the past, very long, period without an obvious death of the biosphere, maybe i am missing something somewhere. Now it seems the awg computer models change whatever it is that think of as their physical basis rather often, if i feel emperical, I guess I would say the models are going to continue changing their code significantly. but plug in long term isolation and tell me what the awg models say. my, such settled science.
so i am probably narrow. I really think of an interesting model as a set of partial differential equations. nice physical basis. and i have not done that stuff for a long time. but i sometimes see comments on slashdot from people who sound like they might really know something about reliable modeling of physical processes and they did not seem very impressed with the awg types.
on models, I recently saw something about a problem with duplicating the cosmic background radiation models. I do not recall any claims of hiding the basis of the models or hiding the data and i bet it is all very physical, but you go from having a signal to not having a signal. computer models are maybe only maybe 60-70 years old. sort of science, and sort of math, but probably not science in the way Jones wants to think. You can phrase an aspect of the problem in an interesting way: did a computer model ever yield a new fundamental principle of the universe?
That's as much the fault of AGW denialists as it is of the fanatics. Just look a few posts above yours, how somebody who's merely expressing his concern for the measures proposed to combat AGW is used to prop up the validity of the denialist movement.
If nothing else, I would expect the /. crowd to be at least a little skeptical of *anything* that causes vast sums of money to change hands.
Sure. But the mark of a true skeptic (as opposed to a denialist) is that a skeptic can eventually be convinced, and this has been going long enough that true skeptics are somewhat scarce these days.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
No one is suggesting Lomborg committed fraud or going after him personally. People are suggesting he is wrong.
When you call the title of your book The Lomborg Deception, it's pretty hard to say you are not going after him personally. Deception by definition implies fraud.
Qxe4
And with all due respect, considering the gravity of this matter, skeptics are a bit unwise to require this incontestable proof to be served on a silver plate in front of them. This kind of attitude that "if someone doesn't convince me, then it isn't true" is a bit dangerous.
If AGW is happening, you should be asking for completely revised infrastructures and policies, for you own sake. It is your responsibility and in your own interest to find out what the truth of this matter is. Skeptics shouldn't expect others to do this work for them.
Maybe we live in different parts of the world, but I don't share your view of how skepticism has been dealt with. On the contrary, I find it commendable how some find the effort to continue arguing with, usually misinformed, deniers. But there comes a point when the discussion needs to be settled, because it could truly go on forever, or there will be no time left to act.
Precisely that, is what peer-reviewed scientific journals are for. Have you been reading them?
We've all been painted with the brush of religion because some Scientists forgot their place and their core principles in pursuit of Being Right(tm).
We've been painted with the brush of religion because market research shows the people are more comfortable talking about people's motives than they are about the actual issues. That was probably determined very scientifically.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
And with all due respect, considering the gravity of this matter, skeptics are a bit unwise to require this incontestable proof to be served on a silver plate in front of them. This kind of attitude that "if someone doesn't convince me, then it isn't true" is a bit dangerous.
Gotta run, so can't reply to everything, but that's a bit of a Pascal's Wager. Like the fallacy of the wager, the fallacy of that is that there are infinite things that can do us in environmental disaster, war, asteroids, gray goo, skynet, etc. As a society, we don't have time to evaluate and consider them all. Climatologists really need to toe the line on following the very best Scientific methods so that those of us sincerely interested in doing the right thing won't be turned off or confused by waters muddied up by a bunch of politics.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
No, I am making a prediction about what life would be like today. You said that the auto industry would not be (present tense) on life support it would be dead and buried. That puts the rest of the statements in the present tense.
Right now, we have nothing that can replace fossil fuels as an energy source within the next 20 years.
In my opinion, it would be more cost effective to address the symptoms of global warming than to try and remake our economies to try and stop it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
As someone who spent a decade battling Creationists on talk.origins, I can tell you right now that the pseudo-skeptics pretty much ape the anti-evolutionist pseudo-skeptics to the letter. It's like they lifted the Panda's Thumb tactics and applied it to climatology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't see how regulating the amount of emissions amounts to "complete control", though. We already regulate other polluters - for good reasons - so why not CO2?
So, that means regulating everybody, because everybody emits CO2. If we regulate every activity that causes the emission of CO2, we regulate every activity. Now you may be fine with that idea, but don't try and say that you haven't heard of proposals for complete control of all economic activity, because you just called for it.
Additionally, I don't consider CO2 a pollutant. Please list one other pollutant regulated under the Clean Air Act that the complete absence of would destroy the overwhelming majority of life on this planet.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So, that means regulating everybody, because everybody emits CO2. If we regulate every activity that causes the emission of CO2, we regulate every activity.
Wow, what a strawman. By that logic, we already regulate every activity - ever heard of taxes?
Additionally, I don't consider CO2 a pollutant. Please list one other pollutant regulated under the Clean Air Act that the complete absence of would destroy the overwhelming majority of life on this planet.
It's a matter of quantity (like so many other things). We're not talking about regulating how you breathe, or how cows fart. We're talking about regulating extremely large-scale emissions (in cases of cars, small emissions that add up very quickly due to large scale of the phenomenon), that, by all scientific accounts, have direct observable and undesirable long-term effect on our environment.
You also know that CO2 has a maximum absorption limit, right? And that after that saturation point, it cannot possibly contribute to more warming, right?
Look, your big problem here is the lag time in the ice core record. CO2 increases lag temp changes by about 800 years. Not sure exactly what the world looked like 800 years ago since we only have proxy data, but there you go.
Now, if CO2 actually LED temp increases, maybe you'd have a point (although not such a strong one if the lead was something like 800 years...that's a long time to adapt). In any case, despite the creative reasoning of some modelers (hard coding in scenarios where CO2 can lead and lag, based on some mythical "trigger" and an absence of any explanation of how the positive feedback loop of runaway warming is stopped), the statistical analysis of anything might lead to correlation, but not causality. For causality, you're going to have to build a falsifiable hypothesis, not a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition.
And you wonder why people get sick of hearing nonsense like "mystery models with hidden data"? Because it is fundamentally a lie repeated by people like yourself either willfully or through being too lazy to actually look and see what is publicly available. I recommend that you start at the handy page of links provided by the climate scientists who run the RealClimate site. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
On that page you will find links to NCDC raw station data which is used to compile the NCDC and NASA GISS global surface temperature reconstructions. You will also find links to the Global Paleo Climatology Network, maintained by NOAA, containing vasts amounts of proxy data such as tree rings ice cores etc. You will also find links to freely available climate model code. And lots more besides. Try visiting the NASA GISS site where just about everything they do is downloadable - data, papers, models, code - the lot.
This single page of links provides any thinking person who posseses the requisite skills, with sufficient information to begin their own evaluation of climate science. Or you could start by reading some of the published research.
People will stop saying "you are full of it" when you stop constructing straw men and telling porkies.
"Seriously, if you believe AGW (and let's be specific here and call it out as Catastrophic AGW, because frankly, nobody gives a rats ass if human CO2 causes an increase in temps of 0.1C/century), give me your falsifiable hypothesis."
The warming trend is 0.14deg/decade, define "catastophic".
For AGW you can falsify it by showing Fourier's spectral analysis techniques don't work and therfore throw out much of astronomy, cosmology and quantum mechanics as a side effect. I imagine if you can manage such a feat your name will be immortalised in the history books.
For CO2 RF = 5.35*ln(C2/C1), (Fourier 1824), where...
C2 & C1 are repectively the start and end concentrations of CO2.
RF is radiative flux in watts/m^2.
Here's a hint -> You don't need a supercomputer to calculate the forcing from CO2. A few hundred dollars worth of equipment is all you need to start your investigation.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Go to the NOAA/NCDC web site to get their code. It's available. Go the the NASA/GISS web site for their data and the Model E code, one of the major GCM's. Read the published papers for methodology. It's mostly out there if you care to put in the work to examine it. There are links to lots of data and code on this page.
I do believe this has been going on for a long time now. It's called publishing in peer reviewed journals. Thousands of times.
And that model holds up until the peer reviewed journals start rejecting alternate theories because they disagree with the AGW gospel.
When the baseline for your field isn't "here's the data, this is what I think it means as somebody who's spent a lot of time learning about it", and is instead "here's the data that fits with the theory our backers want us to prove, we justify it by saying there's a consensus, and kick blasphemers out of the consensus to keep it" then you're no longer science - you're religion.
I am become
It really is very well established. http://www.nerdpocalypse.net/climate.html There's oodles of supporting data. The deny'ers are not very credible. Frankly, you can see a lot of evidence outside my window. personally, I'm rather for reforestation, soil reclaimation as solution (which should have broad support), and I see carbon sequestration as a bit of a scam
Hah, yeah... when you eliminate mostly northern ones.
..but most of the ones that are decided to be "bad" by the graph makers are the ones with cooler than average records.
You would THINK that badly situated instruments would be location agnostic.. normal distribution and all that...
Pity that selectively eliminating the northernmost readings for later years tends to increase the warming trend.
"His name was James Damore."