And, by the way, religious-like fanaticism is in no way to the realm of environmentalism. I enjoy poking fun at what I call “market fundamentalists” who have a similar sort of fanatical religious belief about the market system. Adherents to this philosophy hold similarly quasi-religious notions that cause them to claim, for example, that the market will solve problems whose costs are not even accounted for in the market at the moment.
By the way, I came across a nice letter from 1996 in The Scientist that was written by one Patrick Hassett at Ohio University. It was written in response to an opinion piece by S. Fred Singer (who I mentioned in a post above and runs SEPP, from which the OP obtained the reprint of the Chricton speech. In that piece, Singer blasted the Swedish Academy of Sciences for awarding the 1995 nobel prize in chemistry to the researchers who discovered the CFC - ozone chemistry that causes stratospheric ozone depletion (or what Singer calls the “stratospheric ozone depletion hypothesis”).
Hassett’s letter, which I think provides a nice summary of the political landscape and explains this attack on environmental science by a few self-annointed skeptics, is [. You need to register…which is free…to access it. I will quote a good part of the letter below but I strongly suggest that you go read the whole thing since I had a hard time deciding what parts to leave out in the quote here (in order not to infringe on any copyright by quoting the whole thing or nearly the whole thing):
Although written in 1996, phrases like “in front of accomodating congressional committees” are still particularly timely today, given the hearings on climate change held just this past summer by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works under the chairmanship of arch-anti-environmentalist James Inhofe! ([url=]Here](]here[/url) is a link to the PDF of an article that originally appeared in the New York Times and discusses this event. Here is a piece with more details on the industry and organizational affiliations of the people involved.)
Maybe the cactus Michael Crichton had a conversation with told him aliens caused global warming. He talks about the conversation he had with the cactus in his book “Travels”.
I do admit that it was an enjoyable book though.
It is great to see jshore has not given up on trying convince this forum that the current increases in Earth’s temperatures are being caused by humans.
The fact is no one knows.
The NAS thinks it might be humans.
The IPCC models say it is so, but strangely the models don’t match reality. And even ten years later, the models aren’t even close to matching reality.
Jshore is wrong, and just because he has a lot of documentation does not make him right.
There really is a very large group of credible scientists that do not agree with the IPCC. There really is a lot of credible theories, like it is the sun’s cycles, that make a hell of a lot more sense that CO2 forced warming, and can explain temperature variations prior to man even being on Earth.
Earth’s climate is, as of now, a very large mystery. The human contribution to Earth’s climate is something, but what that something is is so far from being known that it is absolutely ridiculous to be making changes to human behavior based on the junk science the IPCC is putting out.
If anyone here really wants to find out what is going on then they should research the ‘precautionary principle’ and how it is being applied by people like jshore and the IPCC to control your lives.
Oh yeah, isn’t Crighton a Medical Doctor? Don’t you have to take just a wee bit of science to become a Medical Doctor? Atleast enough to learn basic scientific principles, like Hypothosis, Test, Data, Analyse and Conclusion.
The IPCC has a great Hypothosis, but they skipped straight to the Conclusion. Everything in between is junk science.
Wow, Oblivion. There is so many logical fallicies in what you just posted it’s hard to know where to start. So I’m not going to. Please try and post again with a coherent argument - perhaps by giving your proof that the IPCC report is incorrect.
I am glad that I have not disappointed you, Oblivion.
Well, noone knows anything about the world that has to be derived inductively with complete certainty. However, the evidence that the rise in global temperatures over the last ~40 years (which turns out to be most of the net rise in the 20th century) is due primarily to humans continues to accumulate.
And the probability that our emissions of greenhouse gases will cause warming in the next century is considered virtually a certainty by the IPCC and by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in [statement that they just adopted which reads in part:
[url=http://www.ametsoc.org/POLICY/climatechangeresearch_2003.html]Here](]this[/url) is what the American Meteorological Society has to say. These are both professional organizations of their respective disciplines which try to keep their statements focussed on the science and shy away from taking political statements.
Actually, it is considerably stronger than “might”. Here is a quote from the NAS report:
It is worth noting that the group of scientists that produces this NAS report included Richard Lindzen, probably the most scientifically-respected of the naysayers on global warming, and he presumably fought tooth-and-nail to get as many doubtful words as possible put into the report.
If you download the SPM (summary for policymakers) of Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis from the IPCC website, you will see in Figure 4 that this is not the case. The models can now do quite a good job of reproducing most of the general features of the temperature record between 1860 and 2000. However, to do so, the models must incorporate best-guess estimates of both the natural and anthropogenic climate forcings. Incorporating natural forcings only does a poor job, particularly over the last ~20 years. Incorporating only anthropogenic forcings fails to account for some of the features seen prior to ~1970.
Well, there is no doubt that there is climate variability due to natural factors. That is sort of obvious since there have been ice ages and times when the earth was very warm in the distant past. However, I have yet to see a theory not invoking anthropogenic factors in any peer-reviewed work (maybe anywhere) that does a good job with the past data including the dramatic upkick in the last ~40 years.
The group of scientists in disagreement is not large…and is particularly not large in terms of their body of published work in the peer-reviewed literature. They do make a lot of noise in the popular press and on the web because they have some pretty good backing from some right-wing/libertarian think-tanks and those in the fossil fuel industry that are still backing this point of view (e.g., not BP and Shell anymore…BP supports Kyoto and has already implemented Kyoto-like cutbacks in their own emissions, completing them several years ahead of schedule and at a claimed net savings due to reductions in energy costs.)
IPCC is not so much “putting out” science of its own as much as summarizing the state of the science as it exists in the peer-reviewed literature. Thus, condemning the IPCC is pretty much condemning the entire peer-reviewed scientific community or, alternatively, making the claim that the IPCC process has been hijacked. A few have tried to make the latter claim but it hasn’t stuck. (In particular, the NAS report essentially re-affirmed the IPCC findings. Also, nearly every article I’ve seen published on climate change in Science and Nature includes a reference to the IPCC report in the context of presenting the current state of thought on climate change.)
The point of the IPCC and others is that, while there are still many remaining uncertainties in terms of magnitudes and severity, the dangers are very real and the window to mitigate the effects is closing ever more with time. The longer we wait, the more draconian and expensive will likely have to be the response.
That does not make him infallible. Science is never unanimous. One can find PhD biologists and physicists and what-not who are young-earth creationists. (I think one of the “creation science” websites has a convenient listing of them.)
Well, let’s see who it is who are the perveyors of (or at least have been duped by) this junk science:
(1) the IPCC.
(2) NAS (National Academy of Sciences).
(3) AGU (American Geophysical Union).
(4) AMS (American Meteorological Society).
(5) The editor-in-chief of Science magazine, noting the peer-reviewed literature that has appeared in his own journal.
(6) The editors of Nature.
(7) British Petroleum (which is something like the 7th or 11th largest corporation in the world).
I’m sure people could add to that list…In particular, I am sure there are plenty of professional societies in other countries besides the U.S. who I have sort of short-changed here. Wow, it’s a pretty vast conspiracy to foist junk science upon us!
On the other side, we have (listing the ones I happen to know, biased toward the U.S.):
(1) Richard Lindzen, a respectable scientist but reportedly also a consultant for Western Fuels Association (i.e., coal industry).
(2) Patrick Michaels, a Senior Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and also a receiver of funding from Western Fuels.
(3) S. Fred Singer, who heads his own outfit called “Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)” which in addition to railing against the scientific consensus on global warming, also rails against the one on stratospheric ozone depletions, and the ones on other environmental issues.
(4) Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, Senior Scientists at the conservative, industry-founded George C. Marshall Institute. (And, also big-time associations with Tech Central Station, a libertarian site on the web which may or may not be related to the Marshall Institute…I don’t know.)
(5) Robert Balling (who I haven’t heard much of lately): Can’t recall what his affiliations are and leave it as an exercise to the reader.
I guess all we know about global climate change is that jshore is wrong. Thanks for that update, oblivion.
If you have anything other than windy denunciations to contribute, start now.
They way I see it, the whole thing is just a big tangled mess of fallicies and soundbites.
Dear Rooves, I also read the Crichton book “Travels”, and as you point out, it does tend to vitiate some of Mr. Crichton’s credibility. It does not however, discount the logic and facts he presents in his speech regarding demographics, meteorology, and environmentalism. These sciences are useful, and have some predictive and thus decision making value. However, they can and have been abused by both well meaning and unscrupulous individuals to provoke dangerous, unnecessary, and expensive government policies, at least some of which have proven to be counterproductive even to the goals of those promoting them. To my mind, demographics is perhaps the worst of what I call the “voodoo sciences,” that is sciences which can be used by practically anyone to prove and predict practically anything. Demographics has been and is still being abused to produce failed but expensive government policies dealing with poverty, income disparities, medical care, education, unemployment, and welfare. And these failed policies aren’t confined to the United States, but have spread to Europe and the Far East where increasing numbers of healthy and productive people are being impoverished to finance these programs.
By the way, I should note something as a point of clarification: I do not believe that the IPCC itself officially endorses any specific policy solutions. Its job is to weigh the science (with science used in the broad sense to include economics and such). So, they will point out the various costs and benefits of different actions and such but they do not specifically propose any action. That is done through the UN FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change), which uses the IPCC reports as input to formulate and implement policy solutions and that is what Kyoto has grown out of.
Another point of clarification: In calling Lindzen “a respectable scientist”, I meant that he has (as far as I know) a decent publication record in peer-reviewed journals on issues related to climate change. The others I listed may also be “respectable” scientists but are ones who, as best I understand it, have a very limited publication record in peer-reviewed journals on issues related to climate change. I.e., they are people who are engaging in arguments in regards to climate change mainly in the popular press, by putting out their own materials, or occasionally by publishing letters to the editor of magazines like Science (since usually such letters are subject to less-stringent standards of peer-review for the purposes of allowing a dialogue), or more occasionally by getting a full-fledged article published in some peer-reviewed journal (as Soon and Baliunas did…although, as the NY Times article I linked to discusses, the publisher and editor-in-chief both admit it shouldn’t have been published and the latter has resigned in protest over the journal’s reviewing procedures).
**
He was, 20 or so years ago, an ophthalmologist.
In an interview several years ago he talked about his battle with bi-polar disorder. He didn’t take meds, because it interfered with his creativity. Sorry, No cite. It was probably 10 years ago. I’m old, I don’t remember.
I do have a habit of linking to things before I have completely read them myself. Having now read this entire statement, I feel compelled to put in a stronger plug for it. I think it is a particularly nice summary of what is known and what gaps still need to be filled in climate change research.
I’ll restrict myself to quoting just one paragraph here, discussing the motivation for setting up the IPCC and the dangers of listening too much to one small subset of the scientific community:
[The bolding in the above statement is mine.]
What would be the reason for inventing the human-made global warming hypothesis and using it to influence policy?
Is there an international cabal of windmill manufacturers just itching to cash in on widespread fear of global warming?
Are universities paying scientists big money to crank out dire predictions about how our gases are hurting the planet? Even if they are (which they’re not), I can’t imagine they’re paying more than the industries are paying greenhouse skeptics.
beniyyar says he tries to stay away from conspiracy theories. So do I. I have a hard time imagining entire communities of scientists getting together and deciding to propagate misinformation and fear with no benefit to themselves or anyone else.
Ben ,
To be honest with you this debate is out of my league so I’m not even going to try to argue the issues.
I just found it a little weird that he can accept certian fringe ideas like communication with a cactus and the ability to detect auras etc while chiming in on sciences that are just begining to be accepted.
I uderstand blaming politics but not science. If there’s only one earth, it would seem to me to air on the side of caution no matter what we’re looking at.
-my less than two cents
By the way, in regards to Crichton’s examples in the original OP’s linked-to speech of cases where the scientific “consensus” was stubbornly wrong and refused to change its view for a long time, I had a suspicion that at least some of these examples might be a bit simplistic. As it so happens, I ran across this article tonight that discusses the Wegener continental drift example that Crichton summarizes thusly:
As the article I linked to makes clear, the reality of what happened is a bit more complicated than this. For one thing, Wegener’s views were hardly “sneered at”. Rather, “hard rock geologists opposed it and theoretical geophysicists supported it”. Furthermore, some of Wegener’s arguments for his view were erroneous and it took a long time before more compelling evidence emerged. Also, some of the critics agreed that the “jigsaw puzzle” argument did suggest the continents may have been one at an earlier time but were unconvinced that this implied the continents were still drifting today as opposed to having done so in the past when the earth was in a hotter, more molten state. Furthermore, the final theory of continental drift was considerably modified from what Wegener had originally proposed.
The point of all this is not to argue that the “consensus” of scientists can never be stubbornly wrong but rather that some of the purported historical examples of such failure may not be as clear-cut as people tend to believe now. My own personal guess is that for every scientist who has a correct theory that represents a “paradigm shift” from the consensus view, there are probably on the order of 100 scientists who think they have a viewpoint or theory that would represent such a paradigm shift but are simply wrong. (More precisely, my guess would be that the larger the issue and scale of the paradigm shift involved, the worse are the odds that it is correct.) So, that in most cases, these scientists are being marginalized by the scientific community for good reason…i.e., they are really not presenting compelling enough evidence or arguments to carry the day. (In my own personal experience, my PhD thesis did this “arguing against the consensus” on a much much lower, less earth-shattering, level…I.e., my advisor and I came into a small subfield of physics that we hadn’t worked in and made a claim that went against what seemed to be more-or-less the general consensus in that small subfield. We were definitely greeted with a certain amount of skepticism but we didn’t have any real difficulties getting our theory published and, as near as I can tell, more or less accepted.)
Crichton’s speech is not about the merits of the global warming debate, but about a concern that a strain of political correctness is infecting the scientific community.
Just as being on the wrong side of the affirmative action debate may be hazardous to an academic’s career at many universities, being on the wrong side of the global warming debate (or second-hand smoke, or nuclear winter) may be professionally dangerous for a scientist (whatever the evidence).
Surely this could have a chilling effect on science, and set the stage for pernicious public policy (such as the smoking bans in NYC and elsewhere).
It seems to me an important point, and one he argues compellingly.
Am I the only one who noted that counterarguments to Crichton’s speech are being ignored in favour of reiterating rhetorics?
:dubious:
And, the evidence he provides to back up this claim is what exactly? To me, it sounds very much like the claim of “creation scientists” and others who have a view of things that cannot stand up to the evidence well enough to get published in the peer-reviewed literature so instead they take their argument out into the general public.
By the way, I can tell you that being on what you call “the wrong side” of the debate in the case of global warming certainly doesn’t seem to hurt you in the sense of making you unable to find monetary support for your research. Rumor has it that Western Fuels was paying its consulting scientists on a per-hour rate that most scientists would only dream of! (And, Richard Lindzen, a naysayer on global warming who was said to be the recipient of some of this money, was nonetheless chosen by NAS to be one of the members of the group that issued their report on climate change.)
So, yes, I understand that there are certain “fads” or “paradigms” in science and that it may sometimes by easier to get your papers published if you agree rather than disagree with those who are most likely to be refereeing your papers. But, Crichton is trying to claim much more than that in that he is arguing:
(1) That this leads to the actual suppression for a reasonable length of time of a lot of good science that really has good support and evidence. [And, particularly, that it is still likely to happen in a case when care is being taken to have an open and inclusive process of reviewing the peer-reviewed literature to give a summary of the current state of the science to policymakers and others.] Scientists are supposed to keep an open mind to other evidence and, while they are admittedly imperfect human beings, I think they will usually be willing to accept science into the literature that goes against their biases. I, for one, when serving as a referee recently recommended to a physics journal that they publish a paper whose main point was to show that something that I and a colleague had conjectured in a paper (concerning the generality of a feature we found in one particular model) does not in fact appear to be true. And, this was true even though I did not find their evidence to be completely convincing…I basically said in the review that the evidence was sufficiently strong that I thought it met the criteria for being published. I hope (and believe) that I am far from unique in this regard.
(2) He is arguing that it goes in one direction toward what you call “political correctness,” by which you seem to mean by your examples only one sort of political correctness. He is also ignoring all the factors going in the other direction, e.g., the availability of lots of money through industry and conservative / libertarian think-tanks to support and amplify the other point of view to the point where as the AMS statement says it can leave “the impression that the scientific community is sharply divided on issues where there is, in reality, a strong scientific consensus.”
By the way, I should add that although I don’t consider myself to be very well-informed on the science of secondhand smoke, Crichton’s summary of the issue is…to put it politely…only one side of the story. Here is an SDMB thread that got into this issue a fair bit. [As one example, note that I in my 11-25-2003 4:37EST post on the 3rd page of that thread linked to a cite, admittedly with its own biases, that provided additional background on the judge’s ruling in regards to the EPA, including the fact that it had been vacated on appeal.]