The Salt Lake Tribune – July 16, 2009
Article Excerpt: Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004, is listed as one of 450 IPCC “lead authors” who reviewed reports from 800 contributing writers whose work in turn, was reviewed by more than 2,500 experts worldwide. (Tripp, a metallurgical engineer, is the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.) […]
At Thursday’s [Utah Farm Bureau] convention, Tripp found a receptive audience among the 250 people attending the conference. He said there is so much of a natural variability in weather it makes it difficult to come to a scientifically valid conclusion that global warming is man made. “It well may be, but we’re not scientifically there yet.”
Tripp also criticized modeling schemes to evaluate global warming, but stopped short of commenting on climate modeling used by the IPCC, saying “I don’t have the expertise.” Full article here:
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With that, I’d like to resurrect Christy & Douglass 2008:
Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
Notably
“Models giving values of g greater than 1 would need a negative climate forcing to partially cancel that from CO2. This negative forcing cannot be from aerosols.”
I would like to thank Mr. Tom Tripp for his honesty.
I also would like to thank the Commerce Secretary Gary Locke for his honesty.
“Americans ‘Need to Pay’ for Chinese Emissions”
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/07/17/commerce-secretary-americans-need-to-pay-for-chinese-emissions/
I know it does not state anything about our climate, if we are cooling or warming.
It only tells us that human evolution has resulted in an epidemic of madness.
He said: I don’t have the expertise. Apart from this as an IPCC lead author he must be considered to be one from the 2500 World’s top scientists.
Of course it is not his personal fault and I appreciate him for being honest to his audience.
It is a nice surprise as this attitude has been released by an IPCC leader. Perhaps they already are noticing the lack of correspondence of their idea on an anthropogenic climate change with respect to observations of the natural world.
Saying “I don’t have the expertise.” as a member of IPCC!
Why did he not resign?
A friend of mine has met a member of IPCC who did not know El Niño!
That is the summum,maximum,das schlimmste,l’inepsie,Dummheit-pur,no word can express what I feel.
The IPCC staff individuels are incompetent and have been paid for a political report with no, no, scientific value.
Gore, Pachauri make money on the faith of silly people with politics assisting.
You mean there was an honest man among that group of thieves and montebancs?
Tripp is a metallurgical engineer and the AGWiers bitch when some guy with an MIT physics degree but now in finance makes a comment against their religion. How real is this world?
From his own words we can resume what the IPCC is… a hand full of people “without proper expertise” that review and decide what the lawmakers should know.
Am I missing something here?
OK Gang, carefull, carefull…
My background (aside from the PE’s, the Masters (Mech) and the post graduate diploma) includes the title: B.S. Metallurgy.
Now with a specialty in heat transfer and finite element analysis for the MS mechanical, I consider myself QUITE able to work with the integral/diffe-Qs of radiation heat transfer, and I’ve learned QUITE a lot in the last 5 years on classic “atmospheric physics”.
SO having a Metallurgy background doesn’t mean you are an ignoramous.
Then again, consider our “Energy Secretary”. Having a Nobel Prize (in one narrow area) doesn’t make you a cupable expert in other areas too…
Sorry, I still want my PILOTS to have 3000 plus hours IN THE AIR, not just degrees in Aero Engineering.
For climate research, frankly, I don’t know HOW to draw the line except READING WHAT THEY WRITE and examining it with the background I have…
and everything I can learn.
Mark H.
PS: Svendsmark STILL is my big hero, however. Do most people understand what it takes to build a 1/2 ATM “vacuum” chamber of SIZE (basement of his office building) and then arranging to cool it to -40F (-40C) to duplicate the “Stratosphere”??? What a MENSCH!
Adam Soereg:
“He said: I don’t have the expertise. Apart from this as an IPCC lead author he must be considered to be one from the 2500 World’s top scientists.”
His contribution was to Vol. 3 “Industrial Processes and Product Use”
http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session22/doc12.pdf
So I don’t think he was involved with any of the parts dealing with models.
It Is the Best of Times and the Worst of Times for Science
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/it-is-the-best-of-times-and-the-worst-of-times-for-science/?print=1
Says Professor Plimer:
The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology.
I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, another brave and honest man, endorsed Plimer’s book:
This is a very powerful, clear, understandable and extremely useful book. … [Plimer] convincingly criticizes the UN, the IPCC, U.K. and U.S. politicians, as well as Hollywood show business celebrities. He strictly distinguishes science from environmental activism, politics, and opportunism.
This has now become an urgent matter because the political Left in Europe and America is desperate to lock in tax and trade as quickly as possible, before everybody understands they’ve been suckered.
Writes Richard Booker in the U.K. [3] Telegraph:
The moves now being made … to lock us into December’s Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. … Britain and the U.S. are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 percent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry.
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The lesson is: when science lies, people die.
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The media chasing scare stories, and fake “scientists” chasing the media. They fed each other lie after lie after lie. It was a very profitable partnership.
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If this is the best of times, it is also the worst of times — with a fetid plague of fraud whipped up by the likes of Al Gore, who helped to put fanatics like [4] James Hansen into power. Hansen is not a scientist. He is a zealot who uses math models to push his personal crusade.
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Any half-decent scientist can whip up a computer model to predict anything you want. Disasters are easy to build into a model, because all you need is a positive feedback loop. CO2 is supposed to reflect heat back to earth, which is supposed to increase other greenhouse gases, and if you fiddle long enough, yes, you can predict the world is coming to an end. The same kind of model will predict that your body will explode in a big puff of steam tomorrow. Or that your brain will go into a epileptic fit. Models that run out of control are a lot easier to conjure up than models that predict stability in a hypercomplex, nonlinear climate system. What’s really hard to explain about the climate is those long, long periods of stability.
As Professor Fred Singer and others have shown, none of the climate models can “retrodict” the solid data of the past. How could any decent scientist therefore claim to predict global temps in the distant future? Global warming was always a flaming fraud, and at some level a lot of scientists knew it. They just kept their heads down — to their everlasting shame.
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My question is, what shall we do with the science frauds once everybody gets it? The rules are very clear. Science organizations and universities have strict regulations against fraud. Proven liars are fired, and if they have stolen money by deception, they should be held legally responsible to pay it back or go to jail.
Bernie Madoff is a small operator compared to James Hansen. Madoff just got 150 years. Hansen is still ranting against the plain evidence.
There are all sorts of scientists who may have valuable insights and criticisms relevant to the IPCC report. The fact that this guy is not a meteorologist or “climate scientist” is not very important.
This is an example of what I have often referred to in conversation as the “deep reservoir of scepticism about AGW” that is in the science community. (It sounds like Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” and I hate that, but there you go…)
Those who are committed to the AGW view, agitate for it vigorously because they fear the sky is falling. Those who are not…think their own thoughts and maybe write columns or serve on review boards. Is one supposed to write a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, the content of which would be to point out the sloppiness of other scientists? No. Thus, as Oreskes pointed out in her summary of her survey of literature on the topic, there was not a SINGLE article in her sample rejecting the AGW view. Not surprising. Professional scientists have better work to do.
For the last fifteen years or so, I make a point of asking everyone I meet with a Ph.D. in geology, oceanography, and the like, “What’s your view?” The clear pattern is that unless they are working on global warming projects, they shrug and say, “Maybe. We’ll see…”
There have been a number of well regarded former and current IPCC authors and contributors who have come forward to dispute the IPCC scenarios on various grounds. I certainly hope that they and their positions are known to the Washington policy makers who are intent on taxing us into oblivion based on nothing more than the vaporware produced by suspect climate models.
Mark Hugoson (09:58:35) :
I am not claiming that this Dr. Tripp has not any scientific background or some sort of expertise in climate or atmospheric science. I think after a number of years following the whole debate and reading the papers lots of people became climate scientists… but it is the attitude of some of those “climate scientist” that is, for the lack of other words, drole.
However, from his own lips he said he had not the expertise for judging the climate models… I am sorry but this whole AGW idea is based on climate models.
“I don’t have the expertise.”
Perhaps climate science is a bit like the banking problem. During the good times when stocks and property were rising those who got results in this environment got promoted within the banks. The regulators were expected to have the “expertise” so they were taken from the industry and carried over the industries way of thinking. What they needed was someone at the top who was not an expert in the industry, this way they would be free to question the way business was done and would be not polluted by the group think.
Being a climate scientist whose result conform with AGW is easy when temperatures are rising, like the banker when property is rising. What both need are an honest man/woman who does not have the “expertise” to look at it objectively and ask the tough questions. If temperatures drop like the banks did, climate science is not getting any bail out.
Even in areas of much less controversy than the present Armageddon of AGW, I haven’t seen a huge scientific “consensus” as claimed these days ever before. Scientists are just not that palsy-walsy and “understanding” of their colleagues when it comes to scientific theory. A bristling debate is always bubbling, even over Einstein’s theories (which, after all, fell short of a Unified Field Theory). I believe this to be a true scientific proof that the grand consensus claimed for the End-of-the-worlders” never was.
Indeed, a corollary of this theory is that one can predict that when such a consensus is claimed, it is of the same political-agenda-anti-science form as the soon-to-be-shamed AGW scientific consensus. Indeed, it has been politicians and new world governance demogogues that have minted “the consensus” and many scientists among the AGWers have been rather uncomfortable with the label. Moreover, with the passage of time, the failure of the evidence to appear and the atrocious shrill and debasing behaviour of the political propagandists that have usurped the field, thoughtful, troubled AGW scientists have been quietly and not so quietly: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/06/foaming_at_the_mouth_with_joe.php
slipping away from this so-called consensus. Most recently Real Climate, too:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/14/real-climate-gives-reason-to-cheer/
Although they don’t appear to have mutinied, they pretty well have stepped away from the “consensus” giving themselves a decent decade to save face and complete the transformation. Let us not ridicule such as they. Let us open the door to them. Give them and wayward others someplace to go. See if you can find a paper of merit they have written and post it. Such magnanimity will help speed the ending of this Neo-Dark Ages in science.
Mark H.
PS: Svendsmark STILL is my big hero, however. Do most people understand what it takes to build a 1/2 ATM “vacuum” chamber of SIZE (basement of his office building) and then arranging to cool it to -40F (-40C) to duplicate the “Stratosphere”??? What a MENSCH!
Mine too! And he NEVER trash talks anyone on either sied of the climate debate.
In re “I don’t have the expertise”, and at least one poster’s call for resignation:
Metallurgists are responsible for the composition of nearly all parts of a modern combustion engine. That does not imply they have any expertise in engine design. That one might have no clue how to design an engine does not make his own area of competence any less important to the total process.
And while the IPCC is telling us for years on a role that Anthropogenic CO2 is the driver of Global Warming, Mr. Tom Tripp sheds doubt just about that fact and NOAA is delivering the “proof” that the planet is warming and Dr. Pielke Sr. has offered to eat his hat if NOAA is right, Mr. Chip Knappenberger tells us “Why Waxman-Markey Is Not A Climate Bill”.
I tell you, it’s a mad, mad world.
http://www.icecap.us
Mark Hugoson:
“culpable expert”!!! — If deliberate, nice one. If not, it is still a keeper.
I thought the science was settled.
Evidently a number of settlers are leaving the settlement.
They don’t come any cheaper:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0709/Big_Dem_cash_dump_on_eve_of_climate_vote.html?showall
I ask myself, if it is true that votes can be bought so cheap and the people accept this
scam, why all the fuzz?
What I understand is that he doesn’t have the expertise on climate models. He still can be an expert climatologist without knowing the Fortran code behind the models the computers are running. (or C++ or whatever, I hope it is not written in Perl)
Whats that funny graph, ending in 2007?
Speaking of former IPCC experts, Here’s Dr Vincent Grey
Ron de Haan 9:12:51
With respect to Gary Locke, he is a former governor of the state of Washington. The state now publishes its ballots in two languages, English, and Gary’s language, Chinese. It’s his most visible legacy.