Global Warming/Climate Change: Extended Discussion

Talking to legendary Chicago talk show host Milt Rosenberg, two global warming skeptics (James M. Taylor and Steve Goreham) discuss the issues in depth.

Interestingly, proponents of man-made global warming refused to appear on the show, leaving Rosenberg to play the role of devil’s advocate. This, Rosenberg explains, is almost invariably the case as warming advocates imperiously insist that warming is “settled science” about which there is no legitimate doubt.

But public opinion polls shot there most certainly is doubt among the citizenry.

So if their case is so strong, why won’t the advocates avail themselves of the opportunity to convince doubters with their (supposedly) superior arguments? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the issue is way more complex than the warmists want the public knowing, and that they fear they would be on the defensive.

Instinctively, we should distrust people who refuse to argue their case. Their refusal implies that they live in a little bubble where everybody shares their assumptions, and they fear stepping out into the world where their assumptions will be challenged.

Global Warming Alarmism Explained

No Global Warming for the Last 16 Years

Yes, this was linked on Drudge, but we can’t resist blogging about it.

It seems there has been no global warming for the last 16 years (actually, just a bit less than 16).

The global warming proponents at Britain’s Met Office have responded to this, claiming that you can show warming if you choose the proper end points of the series. Lop off the first couple of years, and the trend is upward. And indeed, if you go backward to 1980, the trend is clearly upward.

But if global warming is real, we should not have had a decade and a half of temperatures with no warming trend.

Proponents usually fall back to claiming that there is a “consensus” among climate scientists about global warming. But whole groups of scientists have been wrong before, and they are particular likely to be wrong when large government grants are at stake. They are particularly likely to be wrong when their political ideology inclines to a particular view. And they are just as prone to group think as any other segment of society.

The graph tells the story. Is it possible that warming will resume? Of course. And it’s quite possible the earth will become colder, as it has after each previous warm spell.

The money quote in the Daily Mail article comes from British Energy Minister, John Hayes, who said that, for the UK:

. . . the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few.

That does go to the dirty little secret of the warmists: they are elitists who resent the affluence of the masses.

Climategate 2.0 / More E-mails

From Forbes:

A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of science is the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so that independent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory or hypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments or observations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,”writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.

“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

The original Climategate emails contained similar evidence of destroying information and data that the public would naturally assume would be available according to freedom of information principles. “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]?” Jones wrote to Penn State University scientist Michael Mann in an email released in Climategate 1.0. “Keith will do likewise. … We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site] claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!”

The new emails also reveal the scientists’ attempts to politicize the debate and advance predetermined outcomes.

“The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out” of IPCC reports, writes Jonathan Overpeck, coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s most recent climate assessment.

“I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause,” wrote Mann in another newly released email.

“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email.

These new emails add weight to Climategate 1.0 emails revealing efforts to politicize the scientific debate. For example, Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, authored a Climategate 1.0 email asserting that his fellow Climategate scientists “must get rid of” the editor for a peer-reviewed science journal because he published some papers contradicting assertions of a global warming crisis.

More than revealing misconduct and improper motives, the newly released emails additionally reveal frank admissions of the scientific shortcomings of global warming assertions.

“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary,” writes Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office.

“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” Thorne adds.

“Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC,” Wigley acknowledges.

More damaging emails will likely be uncovered during the next few days as observers pour through the 5,000 emails. What is already clear, however, is the need for more objective research and ethical conduct by the scientists at the heart of the IPCC and the global warming discussion.

So what we have here is a glimpse behind the façade of “science.”

Where “science” is a set of methods about how one knows about the natural world, it’s pretty good and extremely useful.

But when “science” is a social group, rather ingrown, with a distinctive political ideology and distinctive collective interests, no so much.

Here, sociology has trumped the supposed pristine virtues of “science.” We see human nature in full bloom.

Campus Speaker: A Skeptical Take on “Global Warming”

From the College Republicans: a talk by Christopher Horner, best selling author and Global Warming skeptic, this Wednesday (tomorrow) in the Weasler Auditorium at 6:00 p.m.

More information on Horner can be found here.

Did your high school teacher (or maybe your Marquette professor of English or Sociology) make you watch “An Inconvenient Truth?”

Do you get all your news from the New York Times and PBS (we have a colleague who does this and is proud of the fact)?

Then you need to know about the other side. After all, why would anybody want to hear only one side of a debate?

Unless perhaps they are wedded to an orthodoxy, and are offended that anybody is even allowed to challenge it.

Challenging the Climate Change Orthodoxy

From a German research organization, a paper attacking the orthodox dogma on climate change.

We have no credentials in climatology, so we can’t vouch for the scientific merits. We do know enough to know it raises some very interesting issues.

We also know that apostles of the climate change orthodoxy have destroyed their own credibility by the actions that were revealed by Climate Gate.

We know enough about academia to know that skepticism of any supposed “consensus” among college professors is warranted.

In the first place, the notion that there is a “consensus” is largely a product of the mainstream media. There is plenty of dissent among people with impressive scientific credentials.

In the second place, any “consensus” among professors is likely to be the product of their ideological biases. Leaning to the left, professors can be counted upon to favor any scientific “finding” that supports big government, and increasing the power of politics over the economy.

Third, there is groupthink. Professors are as conformist as any other group. Indeed they are more conformist since they tend to exist in a cocoon of similarly-minded people, getting their information from Public Radio, newspapers like the New York Times and leftist websites and knowing few people who will challenge the assumptions of their subculture.

Finally, there is careerism. If global warming is a huge threat to human civilization, that makes climatologists very important people. If important elites outside of academia (left-leaning politicians, grant-giving agencies, foundations, the media) have an interest in promoting the idea of global warming, scientists who provide the “correct” results are certain to prosper. Scientists who produce the “wrong” results are likely to languish.

The bottom line here is that academics aren’t any special sort of people. They are generally more ideologically biased than other groups, just as conformist and just as likely to pursue their own interests.

And those interests aren’t always condusive to learning and speaking the truth.

Where Is the Global Warming?

Global Warming: The Other Side

Check the video here, on the website of Newsbusters.

Some of the material is a bit fluffy (interviews with people on the street), but also some solid material.

Being a Global Warming Skeptic

From (of all places) the New York Times Magazine:

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

The fact that anthropogenic global warming has become a sort of faux religion is important.

It’s no accident that environmentalists tend to be secular -- atheists and agnostics. When one decides that one does not believe in God, the desire for personal righteousness does not go away. It has to be redirected.

In the environmental movement, it has been redirected into a kind of pantheism in which nature is sacred, and any tampering with nature is a kind of blasphemy.

And those who disagree with the orthodoxy are heretics endangering the True Faith, and need to be shut up.

Yet More Bogus “Global Warming” Data

From the Telegraph:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever.” In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.