Full disclosure: I got this link from a conservative source that doesn’t believe in global warming. (Although given the nature of the link, what other kind of blogger would provide it?)
So, first question, which is more of a GQ: are physics relevant to global warming? I really don’t know.
Second question: does this make any conceivable difference whatsoever, other than to people eager to point out anything that has even the slightest chance to indicate that there “is no scientific consensus on global warming, so there!”
That’s nothing but spin. Why, specifically, does Lord Monckton believe the method is flawed?
The “opening the debate” is bullshit, frankly. Scientific debates are always open. Just in my lifetime the fringe theories of continental drift, and “birds are dinosaurs” have been generally accepted and had the shit refined out of them. If Monckton believes global warming is an incorrect theory, he is free to correct it.
I think that’s why conservatives are reaching like this, though. Many people (including some on this very board) have declared that the debate on this particular issue is closed. It’s proven, full stop, any argument further is to be dismissed as fundamentally unsound. This has contributed, I believe, to some desperation on their part.
I’m a member of the APS. The fact that someone wrote something like this in an unreviewed newsletter is pretty meaningless. Heck, at our biggest conference, there’s a guy who gives a talk every year on waves in trees that govern the alignment of the planets (no, I’m not kidding). He’s not a physicist, anyone can pay the dues and the registration fee and give a talk.
I love stuff like this, though. It’s like people who try to use science to prove creationism. They reject the direct statements by actual representatives of the scientific community while at the same time combing through newsletters to try to find some scientists to listen to who will tell them what they want to hear. They don’t seem to get the whole science thing.
It is beginning to be sad that right wing groups are trying their damnedest to make the issue of climate change a left issue when even McCain says that anthropogenic climate change is real.
Ah. Well, while I don’t believe it’s closed, I think it’s pretty much shown to be - in general - true. I believe that the opposition is not truly scientifically based, but politically based. While there may be refinements and corrections yet to come, I do not believe that Monckton and his compatriots will find it possible to overturn the general concept.
They are, or course, free to attempt to do so, but there needs to be some point at which we move on. Some scientists involved in the Manhattan Project believed that the Trinity test would destroy the world. Some believe that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world. Some believe that Atlantis existed.
And I’ll add - politically - that I would much rather we react and find out in 50 years that we didn’t need to than the other way around. That may be just me.
I am actually a (not particularly active) member of the APS’s Forum on Physics and Society, so this whole thing hit pretty close to home. I don’t really care if they chose to publish Lord Monckton’s garbage in the forum newsletter. What I am really pissed about is how this is systematically being grossly misrepresented by certain news outlets, conservative bloggers, and worst yet, by an organization that Monckton serves as “Chief Policy Advisor” for. The first sentence of this press release there says:
Now, that is a pretty impressive number of lies to pack into just one sentence. First of all, Monckton does not present a “mathematical proof” of anything…That phraseology is ridiculously arrogant. Second of all, his paper was not peer-reviewed. Third of all, what the paper appeared in was a newsletter of the Forum on Physics and Society, not “a learned journal”. That forum is one of 39 units of the APS (units consisting of sections [e.g., the New England Section], divisions [e.g., condensed matter physics, high energy physics], and forums [e.g., this forum or the Forum on Industrial Physics or the Forum on Physics Education].
Note that the forum newsletter has now been modified so that on the first page of Monckton’s article there is a disclaimer in red letters that reads
I do think the editors of the newsletter were a little naive (or perhaps had their own agendas…but I am going mainly with naive). They probably thought they would give Monckton a forum if he really wanted to genuinely make his case to scientists but in fact it seems clear that this was not Monckton’s motivation at all. It was not part of any scientific debate but rather part of a propaganda war…i.e., Monckton wanted to use APS’s prestige to lend legitimacy to his point-of-view. Hopefully, he overplayed his hand enough that this whole incident will backfire…although I am sure it plays well with the true believers.
There is some confusion on this issue. As Frank notes, in science a debate is never over. All scientific knowledge is inductively-based and thus unprovable and thus provisional. However, while this works great for science, it doesn’t work very well for the real world where people need to know things to make decisions, including public policy decisions. That’s where organizations like the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences (and statements by the APS and the American Meteorological Society) and concepts like scientific consensus come into play. Because, while it is great in science to have nothing ever decided 100% for certain, in the real world, people need to know what the general scientific consensus is on a certain subject (or if there is a consensus).
Bob Park, who is the founder of the APS’s Public Affairs Office, although I don’t think he is any longer associated with it, summarizes this and the whole Monckton affair pretty well in his weekly “What’s New” column:
The problem is that the true science debate is being hijacked by both sides. On the one hand you have people, mostly on the right, trying to belittle the real science and blow statements of caution out of proportion to make the scientific consensus seem smaller than it is.
On the other side, you have environmentalists taking the rather limited scientific consensus and attempting to make sweeping, scary predictions from them, and attempting to tie them to their preferred political solutions. This in turn energizes the other side even more. That’s the real problem here.
You’ll not that the APS’s statement on climate change doesn’t really say anything at all about what should be done, or what the extent of the problem is. Or even that it is a problem. All they’re saying is that there is good science that suggests that humans are affecting the global climate to some degree. That’s it. They’re not saying we have to sign the Kyoto treaty, or that our low-lying cities will vanish, or that the icecaps will melt. They’re not even saying there’s going to be global warming.
Anyone who takes their statement and says, “See? Al Gore is right! We’re all going to suffer unless we do something big, and do it now!” is just as guilty of using the APS for political spin as are the people who are using Lord Monckton’s words to discredit the entire theory of anthropomorphic climate change.
My impression has been that in discussions here people like jshore do not go for the sweeping or scary predictions, The warnings are very conservative and many scientists also do not give credence to the extreme predictions from extreme environmentalists. Your theme that the “true science” “debate is being hijacked by both sides” is mostly a straw man. (If we are talking about the popular media you may have a better point)
The reality is that the extreme right is grossly wrong on this subject, but it has people in power turning this gross situation into a problem. The extreme left is just dreaming as not much will be done when they do not have much power. Scientists however still tell us that this is a problem that is not going away.
I guess I don’t see why we shouldn’t do something. The doomsayers of 30 years ago who predicted that requiring industry to prevent air and water pollution would destroy the economy were wrong. It has since been shown that protecting air and water from pollution was a correct action, nor did it destroy the economy. In what way is this different?
I wasn’t talking about people on this board. I take jshore’s arguments seriously, and in fact I generally defer to his greater expertise when it comes to climate science. This board is a refreshing oasis from the heavily-spun debate that goes on elsewhere. That includes the conservative side - a lot of the ‘conservatives’ around here are actually on board with the notion that humans are causing climate change. This is just about the only place I’ve found on the internet where the discussion of climate change is generally carried on at a pretty intelligent level (with the occasional bomb-thrower from the right or left dropping by, of course).
That which they quoted on their website homepage in response to the latest brouhaha is not the full statement but only an excerpt (with a link there to the full statement). Here is the full statement:
Agreed. It sometimes can feel a little painful arguing here but that is nothing compared to the pain I experience when I do it on other sites that seem to have basically no standards as to what is considered evidence and such.
Every year? So the organizers know what he’s going to say and all? So they schedule him during Happy Hour and have a bar set up and everything, right? Because overcharging for the drinks could pay for the whole convention.
