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Don't Worry About Global Warming, Say 16 Scientists in the WSJ
An anonymous reader writes "According to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, there's 'no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy'. From the article: 'The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2. The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle.'"
its rather nice having 62 degree days in the last weeks of January when it should be -3, let our children's children figure it out, they need to have something to do anyway as we keep doing it all for them as it is
No action will be taken anyway.
The fact that water is not a pollutant. It's a colorless and odorless liquid, consumed and expelled in high volumes by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's lifecycle.
And therefore we should disable all flood and tsunami advanced warning systems.
You will die without it. You will also suffer greatly if you have too much of it. Urine is natural. Do you want to swim in it? Poop is natural. Do you want to live in it?
Lots of things are natural, the concentrations are what matter. I don't need to read the flaming article if the summary is going to quote such moronic and specious reasoning.
It's like the wags who try to get people worked up with some flippant story about Dihydrogen Monoxide being a toxin, only to reveal it's water. Well, la-de-dah, but I happen to live somewhere we spent quite a few millions to stop flooding, so you know what? I'm going to regulate the stuff and be happy with interrupting that part of the natural process.
This reads, unfortunately, like a WSJ op-ed, with lots of polemic, and relatively little science. Have the 16 scientists in question written up a more sober whitepaper that I could read? I'd actually be interested in reading their analysis, if there were a version with more data and less rhetoric about "those promoting alarm", drumbeats, and CO2 being colorless.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkable-editorial-bias-on-climate-science-at-the-wall-street-journal/
Quote --
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 “scientists.”
--
I see Allègre in the list of scientists. He is a very competent *geologist*. He has no clue in climatology. That did not stop him from writing a book about the topic in which he *falsified* data to fit his own personal views that are not supported by science. Here is one of several examples http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/claude-allegre-the-climate-imposter/ . No need to say that the people who published the original data are horrified by his fraud. So in the end the WSJ publishes crap. Nothing unusual.
Here are the hottest ten years on record, in the past 130 years, in order: 2005, 2010, 1998, 2003, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2007, 2004, 2001
Notice a pattern? How about the fact that they are all in the past decade.
I notice also that of the 16 scientists, only 2-3 have titles that directly related to the study of climate and atmospheric sciences. The rest are the usual mismash of experts in other subjects who (as "smart" people are won't to do) apparently claim equal expertise in global warming, who are simply doing the classic trick of "donning a labcoat" to look authoritative.
Which is the more credible source for scientific analysis: reports written in terms of physics, and published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal; or an opinion piece written in terms of politics and economics, and published in the house organ of the financial-commodities-trading industry?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
False flag.
"The lack of warming for more than a decade" is contradicted by e.g.
"An increasing amount of seaborne traffic is moving along a new Siberian coastal route, cutting journey time and boosting trade prospects"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/05/arctic-shipping-trade-routes
The sea north of Siberia is opening up, for the benefit of transport! So, some in the industry are already using the global warming. Russia is planning expanding some of these harbors for summer traffic.
So, even if those WSJ jerks are wrong, there are some beneficial outcomes. Not all parts in the world suffer from droughts or desertification.
Still, the poor people in Nevada, California, Spain, Italy and elsewhere will suffer from an even drier climate.
The winners are the already affluent people in high latitudes, with an already booming industry.
Global temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period were actually lower than they are today. The warming you are describing was a local phenomenon experienced in the Northern Atlantic region.
The same guy who owns the WSJ owns Fox News.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
"16 Marketing Managers,HR Directors, and First-Level Help Desk Technicians have decided that routinely testing backups is a waste of effort and not needed at all".
It's a biased op-ed from a right-wing newspaper. To quote Forbes:
But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I wonder why they signed it? They aren't subject matter experts.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest for 450,000 years. There's been a steep rise since the 1950s, from 315ppm to 370ppm (parts per million). And, in case the WSJ has forgotten, we can't breathe CO2. Too little and too much oxygen will kill us. Too much CO2 would eventually lead to too little oxygen, among other things.
Oh well, maybe we'll start burning fossil fuels to create enough energy to split off oxygen from water and sell it in supermarkets, resulting in even less oxygen available. Oh, and we need oxygen to burn fossil fuels, so eventually we all lose...
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Edward David
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_E._David_Jr.
Roger Cohen
http://www.durangobill.com/RogerCohen.html
1. Fill an ordinary pot with ice water.
2. Set the pot on a hot stove eye to boil.
3. Monitor the temperature of the pot's contents as the ice melts.
Amazingly, the temperature of the water will not begin to rise until the ice has melted. All the heat applied to the pot goes into melting the ice, not heating the water.
This is called a "phase change" (a reference to the phases of matter), and is a possible explanation for the Earth's not having burst into flames despite humans' venting unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
I suspect once the ice caps melt, the real fireworks will begin.
...aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.
The key word here is "economically".
Of course it makes no economical sense to do that.
That's because we're not trying to solve an economical problem.
You could also add that there's no economical reason to have children and you would certainly be right while totally missing the point.
Tell me, if you burn a gallon of gasoline in an engine, where do you think the products of the reaction go?
You have liquid hydrocarbons and oxygen and you react them in a chamber. Then you empty that chamber and fill it with new reactants. Do that repeatedly until you have no gasoline left. Where are the products of this reaction?
Where does all the mass go? I mean, I assume your car doesn't have a waste tank you have to empty every time you fill your car with fuel.
the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections
Ah, yes. Dr. Curry uses an inappropriate statistical model (simple linear regression) to the team's data set, which ends with two unusually cold months. The result is to nearly eliminate the warming trend in the result (end points have unusual weight in a simple linear regression.) Drop those two months and you get about the same warming trend as the models predicted, or add the following two months (which were unusually warm) and again you match the models.
Impressive work, and the WSJ makes the most of it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The best sources I can come up with (things like this [wsj.com] and this [transworldnews.com]) suggest that hundreds of millions are spent on one side, and billions on the other.
The big difference here is that those billions are mostly spent on scientific research, while the oil company money is mostly being spent on PR and lobbying.
Well, let's look at the sixteen climate scientists who signed this, shall we?
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris: Sounds reasonable, though it looks like the proper name for the "University of Paris" is the "Paris VI University", or "Pierre and Marie Curie University". Unfortunately, it looks like the man is kind of a crank, and he hasn't been the director of that Institute since 1986, which makes it weird that it's the one thing they list about him.
J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting: That's pretty reasonable, but forecasting and climate science aren't exactly the same thing; forecasting is the study of what's going to happen tomorrow or next week in any topic, while climate science is trying to figure out what will happen in the next year or the the next ten years with the weather. Also, Armstrong's professional background seems to be primarily in advertising, not forecasting, and he hasn't actually published any papers on climatology that I can see.
Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University: I'm not exactly sure what he's doing on this list, since presumably it's a list of climate scientists? I mean, just because he's a researcher in one field doesn't automatically qualify him in others; it's like taking your car to ten mechanics and ignoring what they say, then asking your doctor about it and following his advice.
Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society: This dude seems to be a writer for the NY Times, and I can't seem to find anyone by that name on the list of Fellows of the American Physical Society. Maybe he received his fellowship before 1990? In any case, it doesn't signify much in terms of his ability to evaluate any kind of science; those fellowships are kinda prestigious, but they're handed out for all sorts of things.
Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences: What can I say? He's an electrical engineer. Would you trust him to diagnose a heart condition? An expert in one subject is not automatically an expert in all subjects.
William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton: What can I say? Damnit Jim, he's a physicist, not a climatologist! Sure, they're related - but would you trust this guy if he was talking on the way that chemists all over the world are trying to fool us about the mind control properties of fluorine? (as a side note, he's also a Fellow of the American Physical Society - why didn't they mention that?)
Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.: This dude is kinda hard to Google because he shares a name with a fairly famous guitar company and a well-respected journalist (who died in 2003); however, it looks like he's done some pretty awesome work on semi-conductors. Unfortunately, that doesn't have anything to do with climate research.
William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology: Well, for one thing, he hasn't been the head of the ABM since 1998 (this seems to be a theme, you know?); for another, he's trained as a meteorologist, not a climate scientist. Just because they both deal with the weather doesn't necessarily mean that his word carries extra weight, but I do have to admit that he's one of the better signatories of this list.
Ric
Once upon a time (very long ago) the purpose of the press was to tell us what was going on in the world. Now the purpose of the press is to align us with their goals. It's a sad thing to see. Thank goodness for the Internet where we can get a vast array of biased viewpoints instead of just one.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
> Think about nature. Think about how many active volcanoes there are on the planet.
> Now try and convince me that we humans are somehow MORE of a factor than nature when it comes to CO2 emissions
-- volcanoes emit 200 million tons a year.
- the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes.
Care to reverse you position ?
Look at the facts. Human CO2 is more than 100x that of volcanic CO2.
Humans are a very significant impact on the atmospheric composition.
A hoax? From the scientific community? Maybe you could lay off the magic mushrooms for a bit.
I'm a scientist. We live or die by how well our theories explain the natural world. You seem to be suggesting that there's a cabal of scientists who are for various reasons trumpeting "the hoax" for precisely what? Our reward system would make any of us fabulously rich if only we could conclusively prove man-made warming is wrong. It hasn't happened.
And that's the rub. Can anyone conclusively prove that we aren't forcing the world to warm? But that only leads to the real point. If we do not know, why should we conduct an experiment for which there's no turning back?
This somewhat reminds me, and here I'm betraying my own bias, of the controversy over smoking. Does it cause lung cancer or not? It took years and many "scientists" on the take form the tobacco industry to swear it didn't before it was finally resolved. And it wasn't resolved within the scientific community (they were adamant that it did), it was resolved when the public finally decided whom to believe.
So we have the current debate? It will not be resolved by scientists, per se. Most have already decided. It will be resolved by the public and what they can see with their own eyes. But then if we have turned the world into one with a runaway greenhouse effect, does it matter? Do you feel lucky? Should we wager the planet on, "Gee, I don't think it could happen" when most scientists are telling you it could?
In reality, the arguments actually are all valid on their face. Everything there is factual, except the laissez-faire attitude. The problem comes from the writer(s) choosing to strip the context of each point.
I'm literally going to read it now (I chose not to when it popped up on a science blog recently), just to see how quick it is to correct (being written after the fact, it was about an hour):
It starts with Ivar Giaever, who, despite expert work in Quantum Physics and a solid background on Biophysics and coming from the country bordering the one where the discovery of global warming happend...a century ago, has chosen to ignore recorded, glacial, oceanic and tree records to declare, not that global warming is fictional, but his distrust of anthropogenic climate, due to the apparent popularity among physical, atmospheric, oceanic and glacial climatological scientists. Skepticism based on popularity is not uncommon, and you could likely pull up a couple more nominated Nobel Prize winners. His attack on the APS seems to ignore the difference between theoretical physics and real world macroscale examination. I believe it was Planck who said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
Then there's the COv2 is not a pollutant, even though, as a relative output outside of the natural chemistry of the Earth (the effect of living creatures and other processes) it does count as a deposit which changes the chemistry of the surrounding environment, ergo, pollution.
The now over-used 10 year decrease/steady state analysis ignores the natural wave of environmental change. If you look at the larger source, search for "Global Temperature Anomaly 1880-2010," you would find that there is always a downward period, but taking the total effect of cycles, it average has always increased. Claiming the effect is related to changes in evaporation truly ignores that heating that much ocean to increase the level of evaporation is and incredible amount of energy...we use steam power for electricity...imagine how much electricity it would take to move the increased precipitation as just water from one side of a continent to the other.
To hit on "ClimateGate" is quite humorous within itsown context. As those who know what the supposed terrifying things said were, it's great to poke fun at those attacking it. First, it's a group of people who were amazed that faulty meta-research was actually included in the IPCC assessment; then, the, "mathematical trick," that they used was not only a justifiable, "We know the energy is there since no satellites have shown it disappearing," logic, but that mathematical trick CAME FROM THE PERSON WHO SUBMITTED THE FAULTY META-RESEARCH. It's one of those moments that only look bad out of context, and that's how denialists want the public to see it.
Also, recently explicitly justified: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-029
The IPCC's own projections were, in part, based on the larger than average spike during the 80's, possibly assuming the aforementioned wave-effect might have become reduced. Calling the first set of projections embarrassing is, to say the least, childish, and suggesting it was alarmest ignores how frightening the 80's spike was then perceived. To dismiss extreme weather's effect as a mitigator ignores the point of the previous paragraph.
While I've already covered carbon dioxide as a definition of pollution, the unique mention of a benefit to plants have ignored recent studies that plant have been decreasing their stomataphors in count and opening period in areas of higher COv2 concentrations, thus indicating and upper-bound limit to COv2's usefulness to plants.
Next, skimming past the unidentified fields of study, unidentified quantity, unconfirmable scientists, we have Dr. de Freitas, who is another well recognised name to those aware of the field. He's had some interesting logic. One: Human beings didn't use significant amounts of fossil
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum