BUMPED for visibility. Originally published on 6/24. Bumped on 6/28 and again on 6/30
This poll will gauge reader perception to the issue that Dr. Hansen of NASA has recently raised that I cover in my post here. One vote per computer, and please spread this permalink to the poll far and wide to get a good mix of input across the blogosphere.
Click on a dot, then click the little yellow vote icon. Poll closed.
I will run this poll 1 week until next Wednesday at 9AM PST, at which time it will close. The results will be submitted to a member of the U.S. Senate for distribution, NASA’s director, and will also be mailed to Dr. Hansen at NASA GISS.
You can subscribe to the results of this poll by RSS. Simply copy the link below into your RSS reader.
http://polldaddy.com/pollRSS.aspx?id=49940E93EC30ACAF
NOTE: A couple of Pro-Hansen sites have staged a “crash party” for this poll. This has accounted for a huge increase in the votes for the first question overnight. This sometimes happens with online polls when agenda driven activists decide to skew it, which is the biggest weakness of online polls.
Addendum: Some other sites that are not Pro Hansen have also now linked to this poll, so I suppose it is becoming a battle between opposing views now. Agenda driven activists on both sides are at work now.
Update 7/1 It appears that about 8000 votes were added for question 1 overnight. -Anthony
Update 7/2 9 AM PST Poll is closed, more here
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Guys and gals, I need some help. I’ve been reading this blog for a few months now. For some time, I believed that there were only a handful of people willing to question AGW theory. I have been pleasantly surprised to see so many critical thinkers here. Please keep up the good work one and all. Special thanks to Anthony Watts. I’ve never claimed to be a scientist, and frankly some of the topics discussed here have sent me to the books and google simply to discern what was discussed. I’m fairly good with numbers but have little exposure to statistics. At any rate, the help that I need is that I have been challenged to find five “climate scientists” that have a peer reviewed published paper challenging the theory that anthropological CO2 is causing global warming. The caveat is that these “climate scientists” could have never had anything to do with the fossil fuel industry. I know this is a silly quest, yet, I feel that I just may help this person to understand that it may not be as black and white as he thinks. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks before hand,
James
What do you mean by “challenging the theory that anthropological CO2 is causing global warming”?
The ‘greenhouse’ principle of CO2 is reasonably well accepted, and Man is a carbon-based animal, so almost every activity he indulges in releases CO2; from breathing if nothing else. ANY release of CO2 will have some effect on radiation absorbtion, so few people would claim that Man has NO effect. Most sceptics I know would claim that the effect from anthropic CO2 is so small that it is lost in the noise, there is little evidence of the level of ‘forcing’ that believers claim, and climate changes due to major natural forces are the only important driver, though we do not yet understand these in any detail. So would a paper suggesting that CO2 forcing sensitivity is lower than required by some models meet your purposes?
The other sceptic line is to question whether ‘Global Warming’ is taking place at all. Temperatures are always changing around the world – there is always a record somewhere. Collections of temperature data from the last 100 years seem to show an increase, but so much statistical correction and trickery has been applied that it is hard to know how to read them. Does a paper casting doubt on these calculations count? The most recent years seem to show a temperature drop – does a paper showing this count?
Whatever papers you use, I would include the story of the ‘Hocky-stick’. This iconic graph is now throughly discredited, but the original paper pointing this out was refused publication by all the reputable papers for blatent political reasons. This will help to indicate why “peer reviewed published papers” are frequently called for by the believers, and why they are hard to provide from the sceptics….
[…] Click here to vote […]
I voted
Energy companies should be investigated to see if Hansen’s claims are true.
Yeh and when they are proven not to be he should be sued by the companies for all the money he has gained in spouting his doctrine and then sacked by NASA with lose of pension.
James; Scafetta and West have done a number of papers on solar climate effect; B. R. Helliker & S.L. Richter have done an excellent paper using plant proxies to critique AGW; excellent historical temp reconstructions which undermine AGW claims that current temps are exceptional may be found here;
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_perushelf.php
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003175.html#comments
I’ll get you started: Roy Spencer.
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm
You do have a problem since EVERY climate scientist with a dissenting view has been labelled an oil shill. Roy’s been accused but it doesn’t hold muster.
Oh yeah another is Roger Pielke Sr. He’s clean as a whistle.
What Constitutional Amendment was it that gave Congress the power of a court? I must have missed its passage.
Not immediately germane, but if hydrogen powered engines emit H2O, aren’t they worse polluters than the internal combustion engine, since water vapor is a much more powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas than CO2?
I was terribly conflicted on this.
Congress should operate based on data, but you know they won’t and never have.
But I did want him fired. Perhaps we should have the option of putting him on trial.
A hint. Five won’t be enough to convince this person. Only several thousand who agree with him would be enough.
Two foci of debate might be the corruption of the IPCC process, and attention to the primary data, dropping atmospheric and oceanic temperatures, falling sea levels, and increasing ice.
=========================
I suggest you take another challenge. Find five scientists with peer reviewed papers that support the global warming hoax that have never had anything to do with government, government grants, the UN or political patronage. That I would say would be a far greater challenge.
The notion that a government scientist sits in front of a government panel and testifies that citizens should be sent to jail for questioning what the government non-scientist says, that’s just downright Stalinist. This kook non-scientist doesn’t deserve the time of day, he is purely a propagandist. You also might want to ask Dr Hansen why the 70s ice age was a no show. It was such a nice scare, what happened? Is that what comes next? We switch back to cold — The public could get whiplash from all the switching, especially if we have to follow the climate. Oh that’s right, that’s what the ‘climate change’ re-badging is all about.
Pay more in taxes, so government can PRETEND to control the weather. If you can’t figure out that scam by yourself, not much else to say. And tell me, why can’t oil companies pay for AGW research and governments can? Who benefits from higher taxes, the oil companies or the government. Seems like you start out with a conflict of interest and on the wrong side of the argument.
Government is no longer an honest broker of science fact … deal with that fact first.
James, climate science is a new, hypothetical field. By that I mean the mechanisms are not understood, obviously, or predictions could be made that align with observations. James Hansen is an astonomer, who like most climate scientists declares himself so and is supported by others in the same shoes. In effect they are ‘peer reviewed’ for authenticity by each other, just like their ‘scientific’ papers. I am desperately trying to avoid sarcasm here, it is so difficult. Seriously, try John Cristy, Roger Peilke Sr. and Roy Spencer for starters.
Sorry for the freudian slip, Hansen is an astRonomer.
Okay, so first we would have to get him to be more explicit in defining ‘energy executives’ . – what does that mean exactly – is it just extraction/distribution based big companies like Shell, Exxon, etc. (what annual revenue basis will be used to define ‘big’ and why would it just be big, aren’t the small independents as ‘guilty’ as the big guys?)), does it include distributors, refiners, independent gas station owners, fertilizer makers, coal miners, tar sands (damn those pesky Canadians). Does this include leaders of oil producing countries in which the oil extraction process has been nationalized, like Saudi or Venezuela ( I might go for trying old Hugo)?
Then we would need a more specific ‘crime’ than high crimes against humanity. Wait, what if it isn’t a ‘high’ crime against humanity and nature, like they haven’t given ‘very much’ money to deniers, then it might be said to be just a ‘medium’ crime, sort of like a misdemeanor against humanity and nature, should they still be prosecuted?
I’m trying to show just how silly this proclamation by Dr. Hansen really is.
I really can’t vote in your poll until Dr Hansen becomes a lot more specific about both violators and which crimes against nature have been committed.
Does that include free pens, and car washes with fill up? Are we also to exclude everyone who has gotten money from, been associated with, or been connected to an organization associated with a group connected to alternative energy, politicians and political groups, and environmental organizations.
I suspect everone who has ever gotten an education would have to be excluded as most if not all universities have gotten grants from at least one if not most of the above.
This is part of Hanson’s attempt to divert people away from the flaws of AGW.
I voted the first option. Firing him or similar would be likely to turn him into a martyr, however having the whole AGW thing opened up in a court of law is something I would like to see happen.
James,
Right off the bat I’ll tell you I am not a scientist either (and I didn’t sleep in a Holiday Inn express either). I am a trained engineer with a background in physics and math, tho not statistics. This subject caught my interest a year or so ago and it has motivated me to relearn my calculus and explore statistics. Most times the statistics here and especially on Climate Audit make my head hurt, but I am slowly gaining some understanding. I do much better with the calculations around climate sensitivity than some of the arcane statistics (arcane to me at any rate) I see around here. I also have a background in feedback systems and a tad bit of modeling dynamic systems ( I had at one time started Phd work in Operations Research). I was perfectly willing to accept what the ‘CO2 is all there is’ crowd was telling me until I started looking at the issue more closely.
What exactly does ‘never having anything to do with the fossil fuel industry’ mean? A strict interpretation could mean they can’t have ever bought a tank of gas, right? That has something ‘to do with the fossil fuel industry’ I assume they really mean ‘not have received monies for research’, like grant money?
I think the restriction is silly. Truth is truth, no matter the source (or the funding), either the science is correct or it is not. Where the money came from to fund it is irrelevant. Better to restrict it to scientists who have a reputation for honest research and who are not dependent on ‘fossil fuel industry sources’ for funding, even if they have received some funding from those sources, like Dr Lindzen at MIT. He doesn’t need fossil fuel based funding to conduct his research so it can’t be rightly said to ‘influence’ his work. In any case, if he does produce flawed work to please the fossil fuel industry, it would become evident as other scientists rip his findings to shreds, wouldn’t it? I’m still waiting for my check from Exxon, btw.
I can give you one. Look to the Europeans like Dr Heinrick Svensmark for one. He has never taken or received any funding from fossil fuel. Nigel Marsh (no relation) is another.
Laurence Solomon has a series of articles in National Post called The Deniers, where he interviewed a different non-fossil-fuel-connected AGW-skeptical major scientist every so often. That link is what I saved a year ago, I don’t know whether there have been more updates since then. But he already had twenty-some scientists.
I believe firing hansen would only give reasons to accuse NASA or your government of censoring Hansen yet again, so the congress should just ignore him.
Anthony I dont think you have to worry about Hansen anymore. This poll is not even worth you time or effort. ( a bit like GISS data) you get my gist LOL
Anthony I dont think you have to worry about Hansen anymore. This poll is not even worth you time or effort. ( a bit like GISS data) you get my gist LOL for the record I’ve got a Msc, McompSc, DVM and PhD
James,
This little challenge is somewhat of a red herring because the logic behind it is false. Your challenger is trying to prove his belief in AGW with an appeal to authority and guilt by association, rather than basing it on the data. I doubt that even if you find five, your challenger will be convinced of anything you say. I’d spend less time on the quest and more on finding a paper or website that explains the science factually. You might look at the late John Daly’s site as a jumping off point http://www.john-daly.com/.
Anthony,
These poll choices are somewhat uneven and incomplete. Hansen is getting quite silly and should be ignored for his shrillness. He ought to be reprimanded for using his position as a chief scientist improperly. He ought to be criticized for some sloppy science. Congress ought to look into the administration of it’s “science” agencies for evidence of suppression (in any direction, not just top-down as Hansen claims). Etc. It’s even hard to find the right choice among the ones you provide and the others left out. But this isn’t a scientific poll, so who cares? 😉
You left out tarred and feathered.
While I think that we should work towards reducing all pollution, we will soon see a reduction in global temp due to normal cycles. In 1977 we were told that an ice age was going to kill us all, I fear the cold more than heat.
Our elected officals in Washington will do nothing anyway unless they are empowered, we need to vote out all 535 of them in my opinion.
It seems that one party uses Robin Hood policies and the other, the King policies…where is support for the majority?
James, you’re right, it’s a silly quest. You can’t help someone to learn whose only agenda is to try to sandbag you. Try turning it around and say “sure”, just as soon as you give me the name of just one AGW “climate scientist” whose funding, job, and/or reputation as a scientist isn’t dependent on AGW being true.
Peer review? Give me a break. The AGWers have that racket sewn up, as they will gladly “peer review” each others’ work in order to keep that gravy train rolling along.
Tell him to try some actual science for a change.