EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming 1057
theodp writes "CNET reports that less than two weeks before the EPA formally submitted its pro-carbon dioxide regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.' In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.' The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic. In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.' BTW, the official who chastised Carlin also found himself caught up in a 2005 brouhaha over mercury emissions after top EPA officials ordered the findings of a Harvard University study stripped from public records."
Did anybody read his paper? (Score:5, Informative)
If you read through the entire article, you can find some interesting information on what it was he wanted us to do. Instead of regulating CO2 emissions, he states that it is more economical to reduce the amount of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth. I don't really understand his position. In effect, he's saying, "I don't believe in global warming. However, even if I did, there's no reason to regulate CO2 emissions." He seems bent against regulation of CO2 at any cost.
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work. This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
This man strikes me as being very much against any type of environmental regulation, and I'm not surprised that the EPA is trying to silence him.
They said he's not a climate scientist (Score:5, Informative)
They said he's not a climate scientist, but he has an undergrad physics degree and a PhD in economics and he's seems to have spent most of his career writing position papers for economics think tanks! Heck, that should be enough to qualify him as a client scientist...oh wait. What I mean is, with those credentials he should be able to practice dentistry and set policy on...no, that's not it.
He's a...race car driver? No, that's not it either.
Let me think.
I know! He's an economist.
So now all I have to do is prove that climate science is a subset of economics and the "how dare they say he isn't a climate scientist" outrage will be justified.
--MarkusQ
P.S. From what I can gather, the "suppressed opinion" was just that--an opinion. It isn't like the guy had gone out and done any original research.
Re:They said he's not a climate scientist (Score:5, Informative)
They said he's not a climate scientist, but he has an undergrad physics degree and a PhD in economics and he's seems to have spent most of his career writing position papers for economics think tanks! Heck, that should be enough to qualify him as a client scientist...oh wait. What I mean is, with those credentials he should be able to practice dentistry and set policy on...no, that's not it.
He's a...race car driver? No, that's not it either.
Let me think.
I know! He's an economist.
So now all I have to do is prove that climate science is a subset of economics and the "how dare they say he isn't a climate scientist" outrage will be justified.
--MarkusQ
P.S. From what I can gather, the "suppressed opinion" was just that--an opinion. It isn't like the guy had gone out and done any original research.
Exactly. Please check his publication record,not even one single scientific paper on climate change on a career spanning over 38 years as... an economist.What a surprise!
Problems with the US Temperature Record (Score:1, Informative)
Recently, a National Weather Service temperature sensor in Hawaii was racking up day after day of record temperatures before they discovered that the sensor was not only located in the middle of all the runways of the Honolulu airport, but that the temperature sensor was malfunctioning and was reporting temperatures many degrees higher than they actually were.
When compared to measurements taken at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center only four miles away (which is outside the highly developed area) temperature measurements were *seven* degrees cooler. Did the weather service invalidate the temperature records that by the faulty sensor in the middle of the airport runways? Nope. All that faulty data is now being used to 'prove' global warming.
A survey of the official National Weather System ground temperature measurement instruments is underway and a huge number of problems have been observed. More information on this survey and photos of just how fucked up some of the instrument placements are is available here:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf [wordpress.com]
Re:Stop giving them power (Score:4, Informative)
The point still stands though. There's a lot of people who just don't understand the value of limited government. This is a huge piece of the value: What if they're all stupid and evil in the government? If they don't have any power, it really doesn't matter.
Once you give them power, you better be certain they're all infallible. If you can't be certain of that, then don't give them power.
Re:Problems with the US Temperature Record (Score:3, Informative)
This is one bit of denialist propaganda that gets repeated over and over. Only there's one huge problem with it -- the satellites temperature measurements correlate very closely with the ground temperature measurements. (Compare the blue with black and red lines here [wikipedia.org]). I suppose the satellites are misbehaving in exactly the same way too?
Get the facts straight (Score:2, Informative)
in other words, the usual excuses (Score:3, Informative)
The alleged danger that cigarettes pose will never be known with acceptable certainty, and anyone who says anything one way or the other doesn't know what the hell they are talking about.
Same hand waving, same excuses.
We'll never really know for 100% certainty.
Nothing is "100% certain" in science, not even gravity. But for practical purposes, yes you can be sure that climate change is happening, and humans have been the driving cause. Deal with it.
Re:Stop giving them power (Score:2, Informative)
Irony and Science (Score:5, Informative)
Unbelievably, despite the fact that I am working on a deliverable for this coming week, I took the time to a) RTFM on CNET, and b) download the PDF of the author's report.
I read through the table of contents, and thought it was worth scanning through portions of the document.
Ironic Item One
In the executive summary, the author chides the EPA as an organization for relying on decades of work by the IPCC, and thousands of person-hours involved in climate science that were brought to bear on the IPCC reports over the last several years. The author points out that the IPCC reports did not include the most recent findings regarding, among several phenomena, solar sunspot cycles, cosmic rays, and the melting of Greenland's ice sheet. The author supports his contention that sunspot cycles and cosmic rays affect Earth's climate by citing one or two, non-peer-reviewed postings to web sites.
Interestingly the most recent peer-reviewed findings regarding all of these items indicate that a) sunspot cycles have nothing to do with global mean temperatures; b) cosmic rays have nothing to do with global mean temperatures; c) Greenland's ice sheet continues to melt at a fairly good clip.
Ironic, and damaging, Item Two
Scanning through the report, the reader comes to page 64 of the report, 79 of the PDF, and finds this heading:
The author then goes on to point out how the following aspects of life in the US have improved over the last century or so, despite rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations:
Then, the kicker comes on page 66; I quote:
While the author does cite a number of actual scientific reports, the text quoted here and the failure to consider the entire constellation of improvements wrought by technology over the last century render his entire report ridiculous.
Re:Carlin? Of the RAND corporation? (Score:3, Informative)
RAND is actually rather non-partisan, and does serious work on climate change policy, e.g. here [rand.org], here [rand.org], here [rand.org], here [rand.org].
Re:Did anybody read his paper? (Score:5, Informative)
Can you give me a hard problem? Something at least partially challenging? You know the rules of physics and chemistry better than this. There will be no rise in temperature in any area undergoing a phase change, until the change is complete. The heat is entirely taken up by the phase change itself.
Since the world's glaciers and ice sheets are demonstrably melting, we have a phase change. None of the regions in which the phase change is taking place will be rising in temperature for the same reason that water with melting ice will not rise in temperature.
BUT THEY ARE ALL WARMING!!!
You are confusing temperature with heat. The two are NOT the same! The two are proportional IF AND ONLY IF no phase change is taking place.
In order to create the kinds of phase change being observed, an enormous amount of heat is involved, but without any corresponding rise in temperature. This is very basic stuff.
Ok, so what about the fall in temperature? What about it? Temperature is only proportional to heat for a specific material, including a specific mix of gasses. As water evaporation increases, you are altering the composition of the atmosphere. Ergo, an absolute temperature means bugger all. You must calculate the heat present (based on the gasses/vapour) and then talk about the change in heat.
This is really basic stuff and I shouldn't have to be telling you this. You learned it in school and the laws of physics haven't changed since. Not even Scotty could change the laws of physics, so don't think that believers or skeptics could do so.
And as I've said before, the only person I regard as a credible voice in all of this is James Lovelock. Since he believes that Global Warming is real, man-made and far too advanced to be stopped (merely limited in impact), and as he's been entirely correct on all prior predictions, his conclusion is the one I will be going with.
Re:I agree (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you've got to like having a government salary and benefits. The guy's longevity at the agency says nothing of his competence as a scientist. His lack of a PhD in atmospheric science also says nothing. The fact is that we have no reason to assume this guy is qualified. So the best thing to do is to read his paper. Which, by the way, makes him look like a loon.
Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Informative)
The guy is a 38 year veteran of the EPA. That refutes your ignorant statement.
Re:I agree (Score:3, Informative)
The article said it listed recent research papers whose findings contradicted the draft EPA report he was reviewing. So in other words, it collected and summarized information.
Re:Oh this "best fit" (Score:3, Informative)
You're right, my friend. Consider the trendline from June of 2008 to January of 2009: if anything, global temperatures are plunging. At this rate, even the tropics will freeze in a few years. AGW is a farce: we have global cooling to worry about!
</snark>
The OP's point is that the graph's trendline is meaningless in context.
(Curve-fitting is probably the most abused practice in all of statistics: it's absolutely bonkers unless you know a priori (that is, before you see the data) what kind of curve you expect to see, and you fit against a reasonable sample of the data. If you choose incorrect parameters, you can show a curve that fits any cockamamie notion you come up with.)
Re:And we want the gov to run health care? (Score:5, Informative)
This may be true, but Government control of medicine is actually worse. I live in Britain...
Congratulations, you live with one of the worst implemented of socialized medicine.
Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor. It is poor because it is inefficient, and it is inefficient because it is run by a Government monopoly staffed by more bureaucrats than doctors.
I'm sure it's terrible, but statistically, you still pay less than the average US citizen with much, much better results. It may seem bad to you over there, but the grass is definitely browner over here. The rates of people going blind from preventable causes, is absurdly higher here, for example. The correlation between wealth and lifespan is much more drastic. The overall lifespan is shorter.
. An American may lose his house to pay for an operation, but at least he gets the operation...
Fewer and fewer have houses to lose, in no small part because of health care costs and trying to get a loan so you can get medical treatment is not going to happen. It's a bad bet. I have a friend who is naturally skinny and tall. He can't get insurance at all because he is clinically underweight. I know a girl who is short. Clinically overweight, no insurance for her. Most doctors won't even treat them even if they have cash. They don't go to the hospital when they get very ill, because they simply can't afford it. One had something stuck in their eye, but decided to wait it out and hope they would not lose vision in that eye, because the alternative was losing everything she owned. The other spent a week in massive pain because of a serious infection of the inner ear. Again, no option other than begging people he knew with money in the hopes someone would help. You assert that Americans get the operation but a huge number of us certainly don't. In the UK they prioritize by severity of condition but here if you don't have the money you just suffer in pain or even die. I have other friends stuck in jobs that provide health insurance. The job is terrible but they can't ever quit because it's the only way they can get healthcare. Oh, and what about me. I'm physically fit, not too old and have no serious medical conditions. I will never, ever be able to buy medical insurance again because I had an inexplicable illness once and they never figured out what it was, so I'm a poor investment for insurance companies too.
Sorry, but the US has every other first world nation pretty well beat for worst health care and there are plenty of numbers to back that up.
Shoot the messenger. (Score:3, Informative)
The only problem I have with a government department quashing a psuedo-skeptical report is if they do it in secret, I don't know if this is the case since i haven't RTFA. If this guys opinion is different to every reputable science institution on the planet then he should be allowed make a fool of himself by speaking to the press provided he makes it clear he does not represent his employer.
There are only a handfull of credible scientists world wide who disagree with parts of the much maligned consensus (the only one I can think of is Dyson). This is despite the fountain of anti-science bullshit from think tanks such as the Heartland Institute. The science has prevailed over the lobbyists as it did with the tabacco industry in the 80's and countless other extrodinary claims since the time of Copurnicus.
Re:Did anybody read his paper? (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm... is it possible for temperatures to decline in the last 11 years but rise in the past 30. Uh. Yes. The trend since 1998 is decidedly down. What does that mean? Well that's a more complex question, but your broad brush covers it up.
I suggest reading the following to get a taste of the counter-argument to the EPA's finding:
These all address concerns about the lack of underlying science--not the political/economics issues.
Re:Oh this "best fit" (Score:3, Informative)
I can't predict the weather over the next ten days, but I have a pretty good idea of what it'll be like over the next ten months. If you're trotting out this argument, you have no idea what a "chaotic system", and have no business commenting on climate science.
Like this one [geology.com]? Or this one [combatclimatechange.ie]? Or even this one [zfacts.com]?
Re:Oh this "best fit" (Score:3, Informative)
My point is that the creator of the OP's graph cherry-picked a period during which temperatures happened to decline, and that it's no different from my doing the same thing with a different cherry-picked period. If you look at recorded temperatures and ice-core results, you'll find that the runup since the beginning of the industrial revolution is like nothing we've been since the Eocene Thermal Maximum [wikipedia.org].
Re:Oh this "best fit" (Score:3, Informative)
I have two conditions: 1) show me a correlation between solar activity and temperature that's stronger than the correlation between CO2 and temperature [greenoptions.com], and 2) propose a plausible theory of why past temperature correlates so closely with CO2 excursions, but why this CO2 excursion won't in turn cause a large temperature excursion. That is, show me that CO2 doesn't have a causal relationship to temperature, or that it does, but not for this cycle. Due to the strong correlation between CO2 and temperature, that would require you to show that CO2 is instead increased by temperature, or that CO2 and temperature increases have typically had a common cause.
Just to warn you: it'll be hard to show that CO2 increases don't cause temperature changes: the physics of the CO2's heat-trapping effects and the feedback effect of increased water vapor are well-understood. Granted, I'm not a climate scientist, but just an informed observer. But I'll still need to see some credible evidence. Given that, however, I'll start to think "By George, maybe they're onto something!"
Re:He has shown forty years of bias (Score:5, Informative)
Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.
That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists. The consensus is that CO2 is increasing, that CO2 is highly correlated with historical temperature changes, and that the last century of climate change is caused primarily by humans. There is far less consensus over the exact changes that will occur, that they will all necessarily all be bad, or that we must reduce them at all costs.
Paranoia is a slashdot chestnut (Score:2, Informative)
I know paranoia is popular on slashdot, and nobody RTFA, however, don't you think it's at least reasonable to judge the EPAs actions on the merits of their arguments?
For what it's worth, some climate scientists wrote a short article on Alan Carlin's paper [realclimate.org].
There is, of course, no substitute for reading Carlin's paper yourself, but you need to also read the references, and try to find out more information about the arguments. Then you can judge whether the EPA is just being manipulative
Re:The Administration modded this guy troll too! (Score:1, Informative)
You're forgetting one thing....higher temperatures can be a problem as much as lower. It's a matter of Too hot, too cold, and just right...applied to the whole world.
That's kind of a big gamble to take.
Re:Stop giving them power (Score:2, Informative)
The only honorable way to do this is to plant a garden in your backyard and live on a subsistence income to avoid paying taxes.
Property taxes, obviously, but if you can't handle putting a few thousand a year into public education, then you don't deserve to live in a developed society, so you can do this somewhere outside the US.
Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score:3, Informative)
"Economics" is the study of how to use limited resources most effectively. This is a broader and more interesting field of study than most people tend to think. "Money" doesn't necessarily play a part.
Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score:1, Informative)
On target, gandhi. Global warming is nothing more than the religion of the 21st century
So you're saying, what, that gods actually DID walk around in ancient Rome?
The world is getting hotter, and has been for, literally, as long as we've been recording the world's temperature. So we're stuck with three possible answers, to explain the FACT that global temperature measuresments are going up.
1: We messed up the temperature measurements, and glaciers really aren't melting.
2: The warming is completely normal, and not a cause for alarm.
3: This IS is a cause for alarm, and we should do at least SOMETHING to change this trend.
#3 is the consensus, or "ordinary", opinion. You can believe either #1 or #2, but, as the saying goes, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Prove either that our historical records and personal views are incorrect, or that temperature swings like this are just fine. Or accept the consensus.
This isn't religion, this is science. In religion you can have as extraorindary a claim as you like. Science is ALL ABOUT the ordinary view, though -- challenging it, testing it, and above all accepting it when it passes whatever test you can throw at it.
Re:Did anybody read his paper? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score:3, Informative)
James Hansen has a PhD in Physics, and his astronomy work was on planetary climate models (his first post-dissertation publications were on Venus's atmosphere -- the pioneering work on it, which lead to a much greater understanding of the greenhouse effect -- which then led to his work with GISS since the 1980s). Alan Carlin is an economist who merely has a BS in Physics and hasn't worked in any physics-related field since he graduated college. You don't see the difference?
Now, don't get me wrong -- economists' voices are *very* critical in this debate. However, their voice is not warranted on the science aspect of the field. An economist discussing the field should operate via a Monte Carlo simulation of the scientific consensus positions and their stated confidence intervals, rather than adopting minority positions and/or confidence intervals. Carlin should not be discussing the science. And for that matter, Hansen should not be discussing the economics, either. Neither are in each others' respective fields.
Re:Did anybody read his paper? (Score:1, Informative)
"No warming in 11 years", in particular, is a wingnut claim
Er, no, actually, that's observation of the data.
It rather says quite a bit about this topic that a demonstrably factual statement is attempted to be labelled "a wingnut claim" doesn't it now?
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/GlobalTroposphereTemperaturesAverage.jpg [friendsofscience.org]
FYI: "Friends of science" is an oil industry sponsored lobby group with a strong bias.
Re:Did anybody read his paper? (Score:5, Informative)
Mentioning Christy Spencer McIntyre and Pielke as if they had a clue demonstrates just how stupid you are. Christy and Spencer have stated repeatedly in the scientific literature that they their analysis of radiosonde data agrees CLOSELY WITH THOSE OF OTHER SCIENTISTS AND WITH THE IPCC report. In a Vermont law suite filed by auto dealers to prevent further tightening of emission standards the Judge noted that Christy UNDER OATH ADMITS that Jim Hansen is correct. Christy is one of the authors of NOAA's Climate Change Science Program report that clearly states that global warming is real and man-made. Yet, he is more than happy to take money from the ExxonMobil funded Heartland institute and say global warming doesn't exist
McIntyre cann't even use someone elses data and programs correctly. He tried to replicate Mann's hockey stick, but made so many mistakes that the National Research Council had to publish it's own analysis that demonstrated McIntyres errors and reaffirmed Mann's work. ten other independent groups have been able to duplicate Mann's work and show that Mann was too conservative in his findings. McIntyre's been pissed ever since
These fools don't address any underlying science they merely spread FUD for money
Re:The sole purpose of government is politics. (Score:5, Informative)
I find it interesting that mentioning Obama's middle name is considered "taboo". Now, why is that? Hmmmm???
It's not a taboo, it's just doing that makes you look stupid. After all, people don't usually write "George Walker Bush" or "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" in full, either. Same goes for Obama - only context when his middle name is spelt out is generally when someone is trying to hint at his "un-American" ancestry.
Re:Stop giving them power (Score:3, Informative)
Please tell me, how am I supposed to stop giving them power (with legal means of course).
Your champions can't win when the playing field is stacked against them. The thing you need to do is work for instant run-off voting. The libertarian and green parties are working towards this at the local level and they are finding success. Once people start using it they will slowly realize they can actually vote in a candidate they want without worrying about throwing away their vote. Then we can push to have it at the state and national level. That will break the two-party system in the US, which neither the democrats nor the republicans have an interest in doing.
Sorry I don't have an immediate fix for you. We must plant trees now so that our great-grandchildren can eat fruit in the shade.
More cut and paste Kool aid (Score:3, Informative)
In October 1999 Craig D. Idso and Keith E. Idso mentioned that they had "recently completed a project commissioned by the Greening Earth Society entitled "Forecasting World Food Supplies: The Impact of the Rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentration," which we presented at the Second Annual Dixy Lee Ray Memorial Symposium held in Washington, DC on 31 August - 2 September 1999." [1] The Greening Earth Society, [is] a front group of the Western Fuels Association. Donald Paul Hodel, chairman of Summit Power Group is listed among the "scientific advisors" to the Center.[2] - sourcewatch [sourcewatch.org].
Or I could just google his name along with the CEI ( the organisation pushing their psuedo-scientific report in TFA ) and find that he collarborates with them through yet another well known anti-science think tank called the "Cooler Heads Coalition".
"[Hansen is]considered by many to be perhaps the world's foremost authority on the 'greenhouse effect' of anthropogenic CO2 emissions" - At least you got that right.
Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)
Did you read his paper?
They silenced someone who had no data, no degrees, no expertise, really no rational argument at all.
Now if he had presented a study, that was peer reviewed, and reproducible, you'd have a point. Silencing unsubstantiated dissent is certainly fine.
Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score:3, Informative)
[..]
In short, people are generally classified in one of these 2 groups (good or evil):
1) The ones who believe that man is responsible from global warming. They are the "good" people.
2) The ones who believe that other factors might be involved. They are the "evil people", which must all have interests in oil companies.
[...]
Wrong.
There is a group of people who conclude that of the many factors only anthropogenic emission explain the current warming. These are called climatologists.
There is another group of people who while knowing better, spread FUD about the above. These are called "evil people", and they usually get paid by corporations. Many of them were spreading FUD about second hand tobacco smoke, CFCs, DDT, you name it.
Then there are people who believe they have proved 150 years of science wrong, or theory of relativity wrong, or heliocentric solar system wrong. These are ignorants, or fools. They forgot/ignored/haven't slightest clue that human CO2 warming atmosphere is based on very simple physics and very simple statistics, and any alternative explanation must also explain why the CO2 isn't warming atmosphere.
And finally we have people who either believe doctors, lawyers and other experts on issues they feel they can't understand properly, and people who come up with a bundle of excuses not to listen to experts if the experts tell things they don't like.
After all, no science, including climatology, is done on blogs or bulletin boards, or in op eds. If look at those, there is a flood of divergent opinions. For example in early 90s USA joined the Rio agreement to cut emissions (among other things) and majority of American were conserned about AGW. 15 years later majority believes it's a hoax, and USA hasn't done a thing. You want us to believe that's because divergent opinions are not allowed?
Re:He has shown forty years of bias (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously you missed my comments. The guy should be sacked as incompetent and corrupt.
Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score:5, Informative)
> Why don't we examine the content of his report before disregarding it based on his non-qualifications.
Because people hired to make noise must be disregarded eventually. But since the noise-making apparently succeded enough to get a slashdot post, I can at least link to an examination at
deep climate [deepclimate.org].
Short version: He cut and pasted from various contrarian blogs and astroturf organisations - the ones that are now shouting censorhip - rewriting it slightly to remove too obvious editorialising. The actual content is standard issue denialist fare: misrepresenting papers (and ignoring the protests when the author complains), along with some long discredited talking points (global warming stopped in 1998, and anyway it was the sun and cosmic rays that did it)
One thing is certain (Score:2, Informative)
To the report itself... (Score:5, Informative)
Can you point to *one* paragraph, "new study" or "data revision" in the report that you think is worthwhile debating? - All I can see are the same old arguments [skepticalscience.com] and misinformation put out out by the anti-science lobbyists at CEI and other FF think tanks that have been debunked a million times over. Here are a few specific critisisims...
1. He claims that tempratures have been trending downwards for the past 11yrs - this can be debunked by a simple google search [google.com.au] and is laughable to anyone who has looked at the temprate records.
2. He blathers on about sunspots and cosmic rays - a theory born from a book by a self-agrandising author [physicsworld.com] and completely unsupported in the litrature, debunked in detail by yours trully here [slashdot.org].
3. He complains the last IPCC report is 3 years old and thus out of date. - Fucking nonsense [realclimate.org].
4. He claims that the 1998 temprature spike cannot be explained - maybe it's a mystery to him but yet another simple google search shows it's well known that the 1998 spike was due to El Nino [google.com.au].
I stopped there because my head was about to explode. Suffice to say that after skimming what I was sure would be 98 pages of anti-science drivel I no longer think he should be sacked, I think he should be prosecuted for collusion and conspiricy.
"all the more reason to not rush through it to satisfy political whims of the day!"
I'm sorry to say, and mean no disrespect, this is exacly what the psuedo-skeptical slimeballs at CEI want you to think. They lost the technical debate over a decade ago and have been promoting "debate" as a delay tactic ever since. These are the same people who promoted "tabacco scientists" in the eighties and are still recieving funding from Phillip Morris. They are the scum of the earth and I don't find it the least bit "bizzare" that the "slashdot crowd" are calling bullshit on this particular example of Machevelian politics.
Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think you're an ass, just like I don;t think people who believe in God are asses.
The problem I have is that you are not qualified to debunk climate science (or if you are you are keeping it well hidden) - you dismiss the science out of hand because it doesn't fit with your world view, and you seem to have a massive axe to grind about Al Gore, who is not a scientist, but who is good at giving presentations and presenting the science in a way that is easy for non-scientists to understand.
This is not a new thing for him, or a passing craze he has picked up on. He has been campaigning to stop climate change since the 70s, long before it was a hot button issue like it is today.
The core argument "that humans can't possibly be affecting climate change" and that this "is a cyclical thing, the Earth does this every now and then" can be shown to be incorrect quite easily with the ice core graph of CO2 levels versus global temperature.
If nothing else, this graph clearly shows that at no point in the last 650 million years have atmospheric CO2 levels been anywhere close to what they are today. The line is clear. They go up and down over those 650 million years, through ice ages, through droughts, through continental shifts, through extinction events, through massive volcanic activity, through over half a billion years worth of natural processes. Now suddenly in the last 150 years, when humans began their relentless industrial revolution, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has jumped up to far, far above any previous high point over the past half a billion years.
Now, a scientist cannot say for absolute certainty that it is a human cause, but the evidence is overwhelmingly strong that we are causing this (in the absence of any other large scale source of CO2 being released into the atmosphere by some other means like volcanos, meteors, aliens, God, other), it is man's actions that are creating this enormous swing away from the natural line (which does indeed vary cyclically, but this is way off the chart).
Then it's just a case of plotting another graph of CO2 concentration versus global temperature over those same 650 million years and the two graphs look remarkably similar....
Note though, that you can't definitively prove that CO2 level in the atmosphere causes these changes in temperatures, the correlation in the graphs is striking (but again, you can only infer it since the graphs are *so closely related*). Now it's just a case of extending the temperature graph out in line with the CO2 one...
Where it all falls down for people like you is that you seize on the inability to definitively prove things as a fundamental weakness in the science, when in reality it is the greatest strength. In the absence of some other reasonable explanation (again, tested by the scientific method), the general scientific consensus right now is that humans are causing the huge rise in global CO2 concentration, and that CO2 concentration affects global temperature, thus, if we keep adding to it, the Earth's climate will change.
We might be totally wrong! It might be aliens all along. Or God. Or a temporal vortex only detectable by Geordi's visor, but right now, our best inference is the one we have. It's not a guess, since it has a lot of scientific research behind it, but it's not unlikely to be hugely wrong either (barring some major shift in human knowledge like finding an invisible CO2 generator put there by aliens).
A lot of people have been working on this, for a long time, and we are learning all the time. I am actually a scientist, and while I understand some of the science, I am not a climatologist (I am a chemist). I can show you that Antarctica used to be a rain forest with a temperate climate (the lake that formed due to rain when it was still hot down there is still there, just buried under ice). No one is claiming the Earth's climate doesn't change significantly over time (and we can look at 650 million years of time remember), or that North Dakota wasn't once a rain
Learn what "consensus" means. (Score:2, Informative)
Wiki: Consensus in the English language is defined firstly as unanimous or general agreement; and secondly group solidarity of belief or sentiment.
Webster's: general agreement : unanimity b: the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned
If someone is disagreeing, it is NOT consensus.
Re:News Flash! Civil Servants Corrupt! News @ 11:0 (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever seen an atom? How many scientists have actually reproduced the Rutherford scattering experiment? Well, most scientists have not, so everybody is following the consensus that atoms are built in a certain way. Damn, most people rely on the consensus about the world being round instead of flat—there is not that much space in the ISS.
I work with methanol, and I never ran spectroscopy to ascertain that methanol actually is CH3OH. I never checked out that the gas it reacts into actually is CO2. I never checked out the circuits in the mass-flow controllers to check they are measuring the right flow, and even then I would have to check that Maxwell's laws are actually true.
Everybody, and this goes for scientists too, make a huge number of reasonable assumptions. That's the consensus, and it is a consensus because it works.
Strawman. Who would those be? Einstein changed the view more than any other, and the only reason certain people frowned upon him was unrelated to his science—he was a Jew. Galileo was surely frowned upon, but certainly not by scientists; and what about the discovery of DNA, the proof of Poincaré's conjecture, nuclear physics—were all those scientists doing ground-breaking work being "frowned upon"?
In fact, making bold new claims is all there is to a scientist's life. You need to publish new stuff, which needs to pass anonymous peer review. It's not just a formality, and when I was called for some reviews I have actually sunk a couple of papers which made fundamental mistakes. The problem you have is, you cannot just make absurd claims without any proof on the only basis of faith or personal political bias.
... and that is misleading, bordering on falsehood. It has never happened this fast [grist.org] in nature, which leaves human activity as the most likely cause. If you make this kind of extraordinary claims you should follow it up with extraordinary proof.
Oh my god, gas-guzzling climate-change deniers have interbred with the evolution-denying fundies! Let's hope they do not meet the flat-earthers too...
The Republic of Science (Score:3, Informative)
A dictonary is not a particularly illuminating source for understanding scientific philosophy. Try researching the term Republic of science [google.com.au], it's an older alternate term for "consensus" and is indeed central part of the philosophy of science, it's what gives rise to the term "scientists say" as in "scientists say the earth orbits the sun". A strong scientific consensus is derived from...
1. Overwhelming evidence via multiple independent lines of enquiry.
2. A high degree of predictive and/or explanatory power.
3. A lack of conta-evidence and a lack of equally valid alternative explainations.
Of course it's every scientists duty (and wet dream) to find a logical or evidentry crack in a strong consensus but it's also every scientists duty to accept a consensus he cannot convincingly refute. The strong scientific consensus [nature.com] on GW is that mankinds emmisions are causing the bulk of the observed warming and it will servely retard our civilisation unless we act to reduce those emmissions by ~70-80% over the next four or five decades. The good news is it's "doable" if people can overcome their political predjudices toward the messengers.
"The earth is warming. Evolution is at work. Adapt, or die. And, in the end, no one will give a shit which you do. Except maybe your grandchildren, however many generations removed."
These sort of statements always confuse me as to what they mean by "adapt". Please explain to me why reducing emmissions through a free market cap and trade scheme that strives to make renewables economically viable is not seen as an adaptation? And yes this has little effect on me as I will probably be dead come 2050. However I already have grandchildren that "scientists say" AGW will affect if I make decisions based solely on a few pennies pressing on my hip pocket nerve. If my grandparents generation had thought that way in the 50's we would all be chocking to death under a layer of soot.
Re:He has shown forty years of bias (Score:3, Informative)
"That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists." Really? Like James E. Hansen, Nasa's lead climatologist [naturalnews.com]. Oh, no, I guess not. How about atmospheric scientists from the University of Oxford [sciencenews.org]? Hmm. No. Or maybe you mean Jonathan Overpeck [arizona.edu], the director for the University of Arizona's Institute for the Study of Planet Earth who once said of climate change, "The results suggest the threshold is close to the end of this century, and it could come sooner. The Arctic is already warming much faster than we thought it would. To think we're not going to get 4 to 5 degrees warmer in another 50 years is wishful thinking." Oh, no, you don't mean him. How about Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, or Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford ... no, not them [newscientist.com]. Perhaps you mean Roger Pielke Sr. [climatesci.org] of ClimateScience.org, who does at least say, "Policies that focus on CO2 by itself are ignoring definitive research results ... that humans have a much broader influence on the climate system."
I've not found a climatologist who has said that raising CO2 levels are a good thing or even a neutral thing.
I can find meteorologists, economists, physicists, and many other very clever people who say such things, but if there are climatologists out there saying "Ah, nevermind the CO2, it's no big thing," then they are outnumbered 100 to 1 at best. Is that "far less" consensus than the rest? No, I don't think so. Maybe a little less. But I'm giving you a hypothetical. I still haven't even seen one of these mythical pro-CO2 climatologists of which you write. Please enlighten.
Re:He has shown forty years of bias (Score:3, Informative)
Blind, unquestioning faith is not science. To assert that the debate is closed is anti-scientific and ultimately very dangerous. YOU may be certain, a large number of people may be certain, but ongoing criticism and debate is the hallmark of real science. How certain are lemmings that they are heading in the right direction just before they plunge over the cliff? Groupthink is not science. Consensus is not science. Arrogance and hubris are not science. Science is only useful as a process insofar as it is capable of yielding to additional data or new ways of looking at existing data. You should be very, very skeptical of anyone who claims to be so certain as to need no further inquiry.
Re:More cut and paste Kool aid (Score:2, Informative)