Policy is informed by science, and the consensus of science is:
a) Temperatures have increased from 1800
b) Humans have played a significant role
(I wholeheartedly agree with both)
But it isn’t about:
a) ammount of temperature rise past, present, and future
b) possible damages/benefits for temperature increase
c) accepting the levels of forcings or its sign
d) how to prevent damage/ increase benefit
e) cost-benefit analyses of what, if any, to do.
These means that the consensus of climate scientists can only give non-actuable information, yet the consensus is used as an excuse to push political agendas giving them a scientific veneer.
My GigoBusteR-English dictionary says
Useless nitpick = Yeah, it’s true, but since I don’t have any answers I’ll pretend it doesn’t exist.
Significatn is not the same as “most important”, if you fail to recognise it, there’s nothing i can do.
Money, how much? who?
More money than Greenpeace (310 mill), Sierra CLub (200 mill) NOAA, NASA, IPCC?
Not even in the same ballpark, not even in the same league.
Well, the government that funded him cut him off more recently as many saw him not doing something useful.
What you said was “Germany scrapped its solar program” the whole truth was that it was just a cut on the subsidies, not the same at all, so yeah, Hot Air and Lomborg should not be trusted.
Not worth it to reply to your ad nauseam and personal attacks, but a cite here is needed, care to show the climate scientists accused of being on the payroll of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club? And you do demonstrate monumental ignorance if you are not aware of how much the scientists and policy makers that work at the IPCC make.
I suggest you go and read the emails - it’s quite easy. Google is your friend.
If you then say you are happy that the people who wrote them did it on your money and display a healthy attitude to science and furthermore, you are happy to take their advice on what’s good for you and the rest of us in the way of massive change in lifestyle - then, I have nothing left to say.
I thought politicians were ruthless and cavalier with the truth - but then maybe we live in a post-normal world where this kind of stuff is the new-normal.
Obviously Google is not your friend as Google pointed once again what several investigations found out, trash talk from the scientists is just wishful thinking when no other evidence is available to show that they followed on those thoughts. And the worst is that most of the email trash talk was taken out of context and deniers misrepresented what the scientists actually said.
The scientific process has been badly, badly corrupted by this GW stuff. No doubt about it, and the result is to make it far harder for us to get the answers that we really do need to get.
But scientific authority ultimately won’t be damaged. There is some evidence (such as climategate and such as the backing away of a lot of the population from slavish belief in the concept) that the scientific method will purge itself as it has done in the past.
After all, you can cook your books forever, and insist up is down. But ultimately, when you drop that ball, it’s gonna fall DOWN, regardless of what you’ve claimed. The climate system is so complex that sorting this out will take awhile, but sooner or later we’ll get there.
And, as a pedantic statement, no one at all should BELIEVE or DISBELIEVE in ANY scientific theory. You should follow the evidence, and accept the data.
Any statement that says “I believe in …” when the topic is science is merely stating that “I don’t understand science”
BTW…I’m a plasma physicist by training though I don’t work in the field and have not for a long time. I don’t work in climate research. However, I am well equipped to understand the subject, have an extensive background in computer modeling and simulation, and I have been looking very very closely at this subject for many years now.
I don’t feel like debating it now, but I do consider the field of climate science to be very badly corrupted, and the models have a long way to go before they can be trusted.
If the topic is “anthropogenic climate change”, then I’m completely convinced; we are changing our environment in many, many ways and we badly need to get a handle on it.
If the topic is “anthropogenic global warming”, then the evidence is at best thoroughly ambiguous. It is not clear that what we are doing is causing the planet to warm, though it is clear that the planet has been in a warming trend.
So, as I see it, all this focus on CO2 is akin to me going to the doctor and the doctor saying to me: “you have heart disease, but I don’t find it convenient to treat you for heart disease. I make more money if I treat you for cancer. So I’m starting you on chemotherapy.”
Cutting our emissions of CO2 as rapidly as makes economic and technical sense just seems like a good plan to me. But I am completely unconvinced that it is an urgent situation and I think that approaching it with panic is just going to divert resources from the real problems (deforestation, fresh water maintenance, soil maintenance, poisoning of oceans, other atmosphere chemical contaminants, etc), damage the global economy, and generally impair our ability to address what is probably more important than CO2.
I spend days reading those emails after they were released.
There was one thing in them that was substantially misrepresented in the press, and that was the talk about the mathematical “trick” that was used to make the results come out right. This was taken as being something sinister, when in fact “trick” in the context merely meant a way of looking at the problem and an elegant mechanism that neatly simplified and solved what otherwise looked like a difficult problem. Nothing wrong with that at all.
In fact, when I kept seeing the perjorative references to “tricks” in the popular press, it disgusted me and told me that the author simply didn’t understand what he was reading.
That said, there was plenty in those emails to get upset about - they were indeed totally damning. There was talk about how to replace the editor of a climate magazine to get one in place who would be more amenable to their goals, and who would be less willing to publish papers that didn’t support the global warming scenario.
There was talk about the famous “hockey-stick” graph, which turned out to be fundamentally flawed because the underlying computer code would (incorrectly) pull a “hockey stick” correlation out of ANY data, and this talk wasn’t appropriate, but more along the lines of “damage control”.
Professor Jones wrote in an email about how someone had tried to get him to release his source data and he refused stating that “you’ll only use the data to criticize the work I’ve spent years on” - or words to that close effect. When I read that I was absolutely appalled. After all, the primary purpose of science is to knock down any theory that is put up, with the idea that the theory that can’t be knocked down is likely to be the best theory. To this end, you ALWAYS publish your data. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS.
An attitude that I won’t publish my data is totally contrary to the philosophy and practice of science, and most certainly is damning.
I spent days reading those emails, several hours a day. I didn’t read them all, and I’m not even sure I read most of them. But I read enough. My general conclusion is that the group there is insular, has very much a “groupthink” mentality, views those who oppose them on the scientific merits as enemies to be beaten down and suppressed rather than colleagues to be convinced, and in general is more interested in protecting their turf than in genuinely advancing science.
I am absolutely convinced that they have fallen into the classical scientific heresy; having constructed a theory, they are not trying to pull it down. Instead, they are trying to bolster it. And that, by ANY scientific measure, is the wrong thing to do.
I don’t care what any third-party has to say about those emails. I don’t care about gov’t whitewashes. None of the money flows to me; I am completely independent. I have no axe to grind, I am totally fact-driven and want to get at the truth.
I read those emails. They were absolutely damning.
Well read it for yourself - especially “MIke’ Nature Trick”.
They had to admit it - it’s in the emails. See: I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
“Hide the decline” refers to the tree ring data showing a declining temperature, while all along they’s been telling us it had been increasing.
That, to me, is rank deception bordering on fraud.
Think for yourself and look it up - don’t believe people who would be out of a job if they were to admit it.
If you choose to believe people writing this stuff - then good luck, be careful with your money.
As pointed before, you have to learn now that it is the ones that claim that there is corruption on this the ones that are playing fast and loose with the facts. To begin with, are you even aware of the several investigations that found just evidence that researchers are human (but not dishonest as the investigations found no followups to their trash talk)?
What you need to check is sources that are set like Talkorigins is for biologists that deal with creationists, climate scientists have skeptical science.
That link goes to many legion examples of myths that are still supported by deniers, no matter how big the evidence is.
To start to see how supported is the climate science of today you should start here:
So was Peter Hadfield, a science reporter and a huge debunker of creationism pap, he is also fact driven and he also fell for the spin deniers made of the stolen emails.
Until he checked the context and found that the ones peddling the scandal were the ones selling snake oil.
*To begin with, are you even aware of the several investigations that found just evidence that researchers are human (but not dishonest as the investigations found no followups to their trash talk)? *
See my subsequent post. I really don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone else said; I read the emails for myself.
And there certainly was follow-up. Jones didn’t release his data. When he was forced to through a gov’t freedom of information action, some of his data “went missing” and “through some innocent errors” a lot of their source data was just deleted and is now gone, thus making it impossible to check on their conclusions.
An awful lot of the follow-up isn’t something that would be found by investigators, the more so because the research team would explicitly hide it from the researchers. This follow-up consists fundamentally of attitude.
A proper attitude of scientific enquiry would require them to be far more open about their mechanisms, not merely their conclusions. They wouldn’t seek “damage control” over the hockey stick thing; they’d celebrate that some bad results were uncovered and repudiated.
These debates on these forums inevitably turn into citation-fests, involving second party, third party and n’th party writings.
I will tell you that in almost every case where I put forth an opinion, it is a first hand opinion developed by me from my own review of the source data and the computer models. This doesn’t mean I’m right, but I’m not depending on anyone else to tell me what to think. Often enough, what someone else says puts me on the track of something, but if the opinion I express is something I got from someone else, I’ll tell you so.
And there are some things that I know I’m right about. Those emails show a research group at East Anglia that has gone badly astray. I wouldn’t trust a report from them that declared that the sun rises in the east. They are doing it wrong; those emails make that perfectly clear.
To quote you: Tree-ring growth has been found to match well with temperature and hence tree-rings are used to plot temperature going back hundreds of years. However, tree-rings in some high-latitude locations diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. This is known as the “divergence problem”. Consequently, tree-ring data in these high-latitude locations are not considered reliable after 1960 and should not be used to represent temperature in recent decades.
And why might that be? Nobody knows?
A far easier and simpler explanation is that the tree rings do not reliably correlate with temperature.
Or put another way:
Question: How did anyone know when they started diverging?
Answer: When it didn’t agree with the theory.
Words fail me. If I’d have put that forward when I was at college, I would have been laughed at.
And if you tried that selling stocks and shares, you’d be in jail.
BTW, you may ignore Skeptical Science, but you should be aware that the reason why even Republican conservative scientists like Barry Bickmore recommend it is that the science is linked to in the articles.
So where’s the problem? I agree with everything he said in this video. In fact you will note that I started my post by talking about the “trick” and how it was being misrepresented.
And from there, he talked about things that I didn’t pay any attention to. I read the emails, I did not read the statements of the conspiracy theorists. The thing about the “trick” crossed my desk, but I don’t remember any of the rest of it, and I haven’t taken any quotes out of context.
I have specifically mentioned a couple of other issues that the conspiracy theorists missed, didn’t understand, or couldn’t pull a good soundbite out of. And I have roundly criticized a general attitude that shines through clearly.
I haven’t even addressed their data or their conclusions. I have particular reasons for that; I understand what they did, and I recognize both the strengths and the weaknesses in what they did. It may be the best they could do. It may be right, it may be wrong. But it is certainly open to criticism, and the criticisms become immensely technical and not appropriate for this forum.
But the general attitude. The insularity. The “groupthink”. Their obvious unwillingness to brook the criticisms.
All unacceptable.
It isn’t a conspiracy. It is a field corrupted by money and politics that is worked by people who are falible. The corruption shows very clearly in East Anglia. The fallible team in East Anglia has fallen into the most serious heresy of science; they are NOT attempting to disprove their theory. Instead, they are working to bolster it. This will cause them to inappropriately weight any data that might tend to contradict their theory, perhaps without even realizing it.
Now, it isn’t all their fault. The conspiracy theorists are definitely out there. There is a HUGE amount of ranting - on both sides of the aisle - and the result is to totally obscure the legitimate and important scientific discussion. Rush Limbaugh is a complete and total moron when he denies any validity to any of this.
But the fact is that the science is far from settled. And all the politicization makes it harder and harder to make genuine progress in the field.
And once again, not all the scientists in the misquoted emails did that, and as Hadfield points out, it is the science that counts in the end.
Sorry to say but, it was not supposed to be so, and as conservative scientists like Bickmore show, it is the current Republican leaders the ones that are making it as political as it should not be.
