Well lets see, we have thousands of scientist in the field of study suggesting one thing and then we have a much smaller number, mostly unqualified trying to inject various theories of there own and most of the time just making poor claims. I know you want to consider AGW to a be religious like, but if any position is the wild-ass theory that is up against the bulk of the science community it is clearly your side of the debate.
I don’t know.
I don’t think this is an apt analogy. Financial institutions are not created to make smart long-term decisions. They are set up to reward those who make as much money in the short-term as possible. As long as they were making money, they had no reason to listen to people warning them of danger farther down the road. Scientific research is exactly the opposite – there’s no reason to publish a paper that will get you a lot of short-term attention if it will be proved wrong and you’ll look like an idiot later on.
Im’ not in the field, so I can’t speak to why they aren’t making headlines. Is it possible that their scientific evidence for disputing the current consensus is weak?
Lol. Tell that to Michael Mann. Seriously, there’s every reason to publish a paper like that. Especially if you hedge yourself a bit and leave some wiggle room.
Besides, it’s not as though people like Michael Mann are thinking to themselves “Haha! I’m going to fool everyone!!” What happens is that they know which side the bread is buttered on and that knowledge corrupts their judgment.
Anyway, what’s interesting about the financial crisis is that the rating agencies (apparently) hopped right into bed with everyone else. Now, if there ever was an institution that should value long-term credibility over short term financial gain, it’s a ratings agency. And yet they all went along for the ride.
Anything’s possible, but the main point is that there is plenty of room for an advocate to argue the case either way. Which is why there is a disincentive to go against the popular viewpoint.
The fact that you’re looking for reasons why the scientific community would be suppressing the most accurate interpretation of the data or hiding the fact that the data is completely inconclusive makes me think your viewpoint may be getting distorted by your conclusions on the topic.
As I said, I’m not a climate scientist so I don’t have much of a dog in this fight. Heck, I’d be absolutely delighted if someone could show evidence that AGW was false. But I know how science works, and the fact that there is such a strong consensus on this issue is troubling at the very least. Given the stakes, I think it’s far better to err on the side of caution than to demand iron-clad proof before taking any action at all.
What headlines? In the scientific community, a “headline” would be publishing an article in Science or Nature, or one of the top journals in whatever specialized field you’re working in. They’re not not the Washington Post or Time Magazine. How many of those articles get enough attention from outside the field to be called headlines?
The headlines you seem to be looking for are irrelevant to the state-of-the-art science itself. Blog postings, newspaper articles, and blurbs on Fox News or MSNBC are worthless in evaluating current science… but they’re the place to go for discussions of political ramifications or for simple explanations written for non-scientists. The scientific discussion takes place in peer reviewed journals, which most of the public, both supporting and opposing the idea of AGW, never even see.
A search of Geobase (a database of scientific literature covering earth sciences) turns up 67 hits for Lindzen, including 26 peer reviewed articles in journals like the Journal of Climate, the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, and the Journal of the American Meteorological Society. Svensmark had 17 hits, including 15 journal articles. Loehle’s good for 62 hits (although there’s at least one that’s a different Loehle), but only 8 journal articles. Christy’s a pretty common name, but I found at least one article from the Journal of Geophysical Research. I gave up on Carter when it gave me 3,000+ journal articles, but his wikipedia page cites a few journals that he’s published in, including Science.
Those are “headlines,” in the context of scientific research. There’s no grand conspiracy to prevent them from publishing, but the bulk of the current literature and a majority of the scientific community disagree with their conclusions. That disagreement is part of the process of science, though - if they continue doing research that meets the standards of the reviewers for these journals, they’ll keep making headlines. If, on the other hand, their experiments and anaylses skew towards a foregone conclusion, then their headlines will (and should) be limited to conservative blogs.
Is that what I said? Is Al Gore a guy who works for the EPA?
Don’t trust Gore and don’t trust Exxon. Both of these parties potentially can and possibly are floating money around. But Al Gore would have to be dumping a whoooole lot of money into the global climate science world to get any meaningful result out of it. (And if he was doing that, how does he get paid?)
Let’s assume that any one climate scientist will produce fake evidence for you for a sum of $1000. Now, we need at least half of all climate scientists (half of one million is 500,000 climate scientists worldwide) on our side. So what we do is, we go back in time to 1950 and every year we give all 500,000, $1000. So, that’s a piddling fund of 58 years X $1000 X 500,000 scientists = $29,000,000,000 (time machine not included.)
Personally, I would guess that you would have to pay more than $1000 per year’s worth of fake data, and that if you bought off 50% of a million people that this would not last very long as a secret. So if you say that this secret has indeed been blown, I’ll gladly peruse your evidence.
Addendum to my previous post, but let’s assume a more realistic price at which you must bribe someone. $40,000 a year seems like a decent number.
58 years X $40,000 X 500,000 climate scientists = $1,160,000,000,000
Mr. Gore had better get cracking on selling more of his books if he wants to afford that!
I wouldn’t call it “supressing” or “hiding” so much as “spinning.” But anyway, I could turn your argument right on your head: The fact that you are so quick to deny the possibility that there is groupthink at work makes me think that your viewpoint may be getting distorted by your conclusions on the topic.
In any event, you don’t seem to dispute that the rating agencies got right on board the mortgage train as it headed for disaster. These are institutions which really should be putting long term credibility ahead of short term gains. And yet they completely screwed up, as far as I can tell.
Here’s a question: How is it that the hundreds of analysts working for the ratings agencies (and banks) screwed up so badly? And can you really be confident that researchers – who are under intense pressure to bring in grant money; to get tenure; to feed their families – are immune from screwing up in a similar way?
I laid out my case against CAGW on my blog. I’m not sure what “AGW” means to you, however.
Consensus as to exactly what? The devil is in the details.
Prove it. I say he would continue to attract funding, in order to find out why he was wrong. It’s not like the world is knee-deep in climate scientists, is it? And there’s nothing damning about a scientist being wrong with a hypothesis, as long as he know when it’s convincingly disproved. Which climate change theory hasn’t been.
So prove that having being on the wrong side of a scientific disagreement, after it’s resolved, is detrimental to one’s career, please. Not that being a denialist is detrimental while the controversy is ongoing, but that after proof is finalised, the scientists who backed the wrong horse suffer.
You seem to know an awful lot about how science departments supposedly work for someone who isn’t in one.
That is true. It is also true that for every Galileo there are at least a hundred Timecube Guys.
Thank you.
Probably it’s more like a thousand. Or ten thousand.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true, the climate in the UK is influenced by the gulf stream, but Rome is in the Mediterranean and not in the direct path of the gulf stream. Now the west coast of Spain and Portugal might be affected, but not, I suspect, Rome.
Has anyone else noticed the acronym creep? It used to be that the “debate”, such as it was, was about whether GW was occuring. Then it eventually became clear to everyone that it was, so it turned out that the debate had really been about AGW, anthropogenic global warming, all along: Sure, the Earth’s heating up, but it’s not our fault. Now, it seems, the real issue is CAGW (Catastrophic, I assume?). So, yes, the Earth is heating up, and yes, it’s our fault, but it’s not really going to be so bad. What’s the next topic of debate? CAGW-induced human extinction? Sure, the Earth’s warming up, and it’s our fault, and it’s devastating the environment, but the planet’s crust isn’t melting yet, so it’s nothing to worry about?
Actually, what I have unscientifically noticed is more and more use of “AGCC” or “climate change”; which seems to hedge the alarmists’ bets a bit. That way if it gets colder, warming, dryer, wetter, icier, windier or whatever, mankind can be blamed.
Chronos, I think you’ll find that “CAGW” is a denialist shibboleth. I only find it on their blogs and when they argue in other forums. It’s not something I’ve come across in the climatology literature, for instance. Look who insists it be the term of art here, for instance.
Well spotted. If you lose the argument at first, just shift the goal posts; pretend the previous debate never existed, or at least that you never spent tremendous political capital and endless column inches disputing it, and then start another agitprop war over the next debate. You again frame the question obliquely to suit your side, and hide the credibility issues, by juxtaposing reasonable concerns against alarmism on the other side.
It’s a great strategy for never being accountable for past claims.
It seems to me that the burden has always been on the warmists to prove (1) the world is warming significantly; (2) mankind is causing measurable warming; and (3) any such warming will have significant negative effects.
So it looks to me like the goalposts have always been there.
Are there prominent skeptics who denied (1) but conceded (3)? I don’t know if it matters, but I’m seriously skeptical and I would be interested to see some cites.
Yeah…Note how the fit does not do well in fitting the various ups-and-downs over the period but then fits the downturn over the last year or so exquisitely…even though there is no reason to believe it is any different that the previous downturns such as around 1991 and 1999. In fact, it is understood that the current cooling is likely due to the El Nina conditions.
To be fair, this satellite data set of the lower tropospheric temperatures is only available since 1979. Of course, one could ask why he chose the satellite data set rather than surface temperatures…and why he chose the UAH analysis and not the RSS analysis. I hardly think it is a coincidence that the UAH data set is the one with the lowest overall warming trend of all of the available lower tropospheric or surface temperature data sets. So, there is a little bit of cherry-picking going on on top of the poor data fitting.
I’d say they are treated pretty well. Lindzen was appointed to the 2001 committee that the NAS convened on climate change in response to questions from the Bush Administration. He was one of the few skeptics with a significant publication record and reputation in atmospheric sciences who they possibly could have chosen, so it seems they bent over backwards to get a wide range of views by including him. Lindzen returned the favor by writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece after the NAS report appeared that accused the media of misinterpretting it (while bizarrely disassociating himself from the executive summary of the report) and attempted to spin the report the way it might have read if he had written it alone. So, I think the relevant question is not how his fellow scientists have treated Lindzen but rather how he has treated his fellow scientists.
Christy was appointed to at least one U.S. Climate Change Science Program report. In what way has Svensmark been mistreated? Loehle, as far as I know, has not published significantly on climate change in reputable journals…And, no, Energy and Environment is not a reputable journal. Bob Carter also is a nobody in the field of global climate change in terms of publications…Just a geologist who goes around making lots of incorrect or misleading statements about climate change in speeches, op-eds, etc.
I think the fact that most of these guys are such giants on conservative blogs compared to their stature in the scientific community says more about the conservative blogs than about the scientific community. Science is a rough-and-tumble enterprise and if you publish stuff, you can expect to have it criticized…and if it goes against a prevailing theory for which there is a considerable amount of evidence, then you can expect it to be critiqued all the moreso. If you don’t even publish your ideas in reputable peer-reviewed journals, you can’t really expect them to be taken seriously at all.