This is a bit disturbing, though in retrospect, not surprising. One of our local IPCC wonks at Chico State University, Jeff Price, is a biologist, but lectures me about climate all the same. – Anthony
by Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
I had intended to return to this point when I originally posted about this debate last week, but time got away from me. Thankfully, my colleague Roy Cordato brought it up today:
During the question and answer session of last week’s William Schlesinger/John Christy global warming debate, (alarmist) Schlesinger was asked how many members of United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were actual climate scientists. It is well known that many, if not most, of its members are not scientists at all. Its president, for example, is an economist.
Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC – trained initially as a railway engineer
This question came after Schlesinger had cited the IPCC as an authority for his position. His answer was quite telling.
First he broadened it to include not just climate scientists but also those who have had “some dealing with the climate.” His complete answer was that he thought, “something on the order of 20 percent have had some dealing with climate.” In other words, even IPCC worshiper Schlesinger now acknowledges that 80 percent of the IPCC membership had absolutely no dealing with the climate as part of their academic studies.
This shatters so much of the alarmists’ claim, as they almost always appeal to the IPCC as their ultimate authority.
Joel… By the way, if you want to see the list of the contributors to the WG1 part of the report, so, you can investigate their credentials to your heart’s content.
Jim Prall also lists the 619 contributing authors to the IPCC WG1 here, complete with links to home pages and pre-built Google Scholar queries. This is a subset of his list of over two thousand most-cited climate scientists here with photos. He also gives figures for those who have signed up to various ‘sceptical’ or ‘activist’ declarations. A handy resource if you don’t know your Spencer from your Jawarowski …
On a related topic, Bob Grumbine has done a breakdown of how many signatories to the much-cited ‘Oregon Petition’ are actually scientists (as opposed to engineers, MDs or veterinarians etc) here.
@Louis Hissink
I’m a socialist! I think you’ll find plenty on both sides of the political devide that go for AGW line. For me though, it’s not about politics, it’s about the science. I tentatively suggest a better line might be the devide between arts graduates and science grads. Then again…
Louis,
Mea culpa–I misread “scientists” where you wrote “socialists”.
Mark N,
Thanks for your illuminating comment.
Perhaps you might support your case with data?
I find having a couple of Science Degrees a real obstacle, so I can appreciate those not so burdened having a simpler view of the issue.
Louis Hissink (18:51:31
Well no, Louis, a lot are politicos, bureaucrats, sociologists, economists and various other hand-wavers.
Joel Shore;-)
It is all very well quoting a list of names of apparent scientists et al who have “contributed” to the workings of the IPCC. The point is this, they have “contributed” to the workings, what of course they cunningly omit to say is whether they “agreed” in all or part or none of the findings! Clever political play on words & that is all it is. It may as well be 2,000,000 contributing scientists for that matter it makes no difference. As Professor Paul Reiter said, he insisted on having his name removed from WGII as a contributing author as he vehemently disagreed with their conclusions & the process, but IPCC “officials” insisted he be named because he had “contributed” to the panel. After threatening them with legal action they finally relented. The IPCC has a political viewpoint & will make whatever decisions it wants to, & merely pays lip-service to hearing all sides of the argument.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri has to my knowledge PhDs in Industrial Engineering & Economics only, yet is frequently referred to in the UK media as the world’s “leading climate scientist” for which there can be no justification. It seems a little unfair that when a non climate scientist announced evidence of more warming he/she is lauded for his/her stance, yet when non a climate scientist speaks the other way, they are rounded upon because of the lack of their climate science qualifications! Two faced springs to mind.
John Philip, your J. Grumbine website has the same problem that the pro-AGW population in general has: try as they might, the believers in the AGW/CO2 hypothesis can’t seem to round up one-tenth the number of petition signers that the OISM site has.
So Grumbine resorts to parsing who, in his opinion, qualifies as a scientist. Is an M.D. a scientist? Grumbine doesn’t seem to think so. An engineer? Maybe not, but compare engineers’ credentials with Al Gore’s credentials.
Since Grumbine fails to make a valid case, it’s no surprise that his blog post has gotten a total of four (4) responses since July ’08. His engineer-disparaging position doesn’t generate much enthusiasm, and his argument generally fails.
There is a good reason why people like Prof. Freeman Dyson and over 31,000 others have co-signed the OISM petition. It states their position in clear, no-nonsense language:
Those educated in the hard sciences agree with the statement above by about 10 – 1 over those who don’t; about the same ratio that WUWT trounced RealClimate when winning this year’s “Best Science” site award. That’s a real consensus, no?
I’m at work right now, but I always enjoy watching debates like this on Youtube.
IQ2 did a debate a couple years ago with an all star cast, including Michael Crichton. You can find it on Youtube in 10 parts. VERY interesting debate. Before the debate, the audience was Pro Global Warming by almost 20 points, after it was flipped but only 6 or 7 points.
Still very cool.
Here is a link I found to the debate
http://www.crichton-official.com/video-iq2debate-part1.html
If AGW “science” were real science, the journals would be full of publications seeking to disprove it. Show me one. AGW “science” is classic Kuhnian “normal science.”
Louis Hissink (18:51:31) :
“But all are probably socialists, and that is what we are really dealing with”.
Louis,
Yes, and this could very well be their agenda:
http://green-agenda.com
The AGW/Climate Change doctrine puts the State in a position of TOTAL CONTROL over the entire society, from industry to aviation, from Agriculture to every individual citizen. They execute their Green Dreams wich will proof “your biggest Nightmare in time”.
Now you know what “Change” is brought to the world and how the “Wealth” will be devided.
Do you already feel the rope around your neck?
OT: I urge you all to go to Kevin Kelly’s “Cool Tools” site (the successor to the Whole Earth Catalog, which he edited) and check out the recent review (plus 74 comments) of “The Deniers,” a sympathetic look at critics of the hypothesis of manmade global warming. Here’s the link:
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/003532.php
Remember me?
Just saying hello and checking to see who is still trying to figure out what makes the world go around.
Have a great day!
pwl (19:20:55)
No we are getting derailed!
Do you know chaps, I really believe that if we now managed to fill the IPCC with objective and dedicated scientists who were allowed to publish their papers falsifying the AGW climate models, the press and politicians would ignore them. AGW is such a religious faith for the media and politicians that scepticism seems a lost cause.
Every politician of note has, I am sure, been made aware of the 31,000 petition, the 100 prominent scientists letter to the UN Secretary General and many other pieces of information that has occasionally make the headlines. But they do not want to believe. Who has the nerve to risk political oblivion to crack first? No best ignore these people and they might go away.
As a retired physicist but with little or no knowledge of climate science I believed the AGW alarmist up to about two years ago when I heard Lord Lawson complain that he found it difficult to get a book published that expressed doubt about the dogma. I then began to read both sides and was, and am still amazed at the lies propagated by such men as Hansen, Gore, Pachauri, Mann and just recently Field and many others. Surely, I ask, our political leaders must see through them. I am sure they do yet every day politicians of all persuasions, the press and the BBC speak of catastrophic global warming as if it is an absolute and undeniable fact. I suppose controlling carbon is too big a prize to give up.
Just a quick comment about “peer reviewed journals”. As anyone in science knows, there are a lot of journals out there, very few of which are worth the paper they are printed on. The poorer journals are referred to cynically as “write-only” because no one bothers to read them. They exist because grad students and scientists have to publish papers to further their careers – whether or not they have anything useful to say.
So “peer reviewed” is an essentially meaningless term. You have to be a specialist in the field to know which journals actually apply decent standards.
A list of IPCC members is available on the web. Some are bizarre. One member’s claim to fame is that he invented a stove that uses little wood (I think he is from Sudan). The committee is heavily weighted to members from undeveloped countries (or third world if the thought police allow that use). I am not sure how thorough their training and education would be in dealing with something as complex as climate change. It’s the UN after all, possibly the most corrupt organisation on the planet.
Meanwhile….the sun keeps on taking a long, long nap…
What Louis said!
“Louis Hissink (18:51:31) :
But all are probably socialists, and that is what we are really dealing with”
“This shatters so much of the alarmists’ claim, as they almost always appeal to the IPCC as their ultimate authority”
Huh? This makes no sense, even for this site. Working groups 2 and 3 are on impacts and mitigation and adaptation, so, yes, there are biologists and economists. This is not a secret.
Here’s a list of WGI climate scientists
I’d be interested to see a skeptic’s list like this. (Hint: not Marc Morano’s list)
Ooops… tidied up version..
Those educated in the hard sciences agree with the statement above by about 10 – 1 over those who don’t; about the same ratio that WUWT trounced RealClimate when winning this year’s “Best Science” site award. That’s a real consensus, no?
No. 31,000 is a tiny percentage of the millions who are eligible to sign up and you present no evidence for your first assertion; no reputable poll would use loaded language like ‘catastrophic’, a reputable survey takes pains to ensure that the questions and any accompanying material do not influence the opinions of the respondents. By contrast the Oregon Petition included an error-strewn, biased and bogus scientific paper mimicking the font and layout of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS even had to issue a press release distancing themselves from the paper and its conclusions.
The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal … The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.”
From Jim Prall’s ‘long’ list of the most-cited climate scientists:- of the top 500 most cited authors in the larger list, just 19 (3.8%) have signed any climate skeptic declaration, while 181 (36%) — over nine times as many — have signed an ‘activist’ statement (aside from the IPCC reports themselves.) See the site for definitions.
Amongst the general public, last year’s Heartland sceptic’s conference ‘Manhattan Declaration’ garnered just 525 ‘citizen endorsers’ [try doing a search for the word ‘coal ;-)] while the Alliance for Climate Protection’s ‘We Can Solve It’ campaign just passed the two million mark. …
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E.M.Smith (02:48:24) :
Minor point: The UK is very well suited for wave power, it would take far less area than wind (water density is higher..) and waves are much more reliable. While I’m generally in favor of some wind power, the ‘reasonable’ percentage has to stay small since it is not ‘dispatchable’ (fancy word for ‘no wind, no power’ when you need it). Were I the UK energy czar, I’d do about 50% baseload nuke, 35% wave, 25% baseload fossil (coal), and 15% wind / solar. I’d also hold a 25% dispatchable fossil (gas turbine, for example) on cold standby.
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There’s some good info on the web about Texas’ experience w/only 6% total wind capacity and how that small percentage causes transmission problems (& blackouts) during very changable wind conditions. Google “Texas wind power blackout”.
It looks like there’s a surprisingly small percentage of random-output “renewables” that a grid can withstand w/o stability problems. It may not be possible to have over 5-10% of such sources & still have a reliable (24/7) power supply. Wind/solar can stop almost instantly & even fast-starting NG/turbine units couldn’t start up quickly enough.
Joel Shore (19:09:59) :
You do realize that the IPCC has three working groups for its assessment reports because their mission is not just to review the climate science, but also its affects and how we can adapt to it and mitigate it? This necessarily involves such diverse fields as biology, economics, engineering, etc. After all, would you want only climate scientists talking about the effects of climate change on animal and plant species, or only climate scientists estimating the costs of mitigating climate change, or what sort of engineering solutions are possible?!?
I guess as a meteorologist, this is one of the things that bothers me most about GW. The climate scientists that support the theory need to prove AGW to their supports AND critics. They need to answer the questions inside the climatologist community first. Unfortunately climatologists are divided and concerned politically about their jobs.
I absolutely ignore all peer-reviewed scintific papers that start infer GW is already happening and what it is doing to the (insert animal name). I would really like to get more answers on what we don’t know than make hypothetical leaps based on the theory.
If I publish a paper about AGW is going to melt the polar ice caps, using other sources like the IPCC, I could site that the temperature of earth will climb 6° C by 2080. Then I could spend my entire paper looking at the impacts of a 6° C climb on Arctic sea ice. The problem is that the paper is worthless because I used an assumption at the beginning….. and this is where most of the peer-reviewed AGW papers fall.
It’s like publishing a ‘scientific paper’ about what occurs when you sail to the edge of a flat earth. It’s just pointless until the theory is proven and the doubts are investigated….. not shouted over.
Smokey,
Joel Shore cannot respond to the science for 2 reasons.
1) Personal Bias
2) The science itself is not sufficiently developed to adequately predict long term climate change.
Why? Too many variables with insufficient data about those that are known and too many unknown variables with no data at all.
What is fun for someone like me is to read all the pithy comments (Oh no, an O’reillyism) that “experts” make based on inadequate data.
Meanwhile AGW supporters really seem to reflect an arrogance that human beings have significant long term influence on this planet. Considering all the mass extinctions that have occurred on earth, I rather doubt that the dominant species in existence at the time was the cause. I think that human beings do have the capacity to alter life on earth and ultimately its climate. We could set off thousands of thermonuclear weapons in an all out war. Beyond that I don’t see any science that says we’re destroying the planet. We do, however, need to stop fouling our nest with real pollutants and CO2 is not one of them.
The thing which is most important is whether they have common sense, integrity and political probity, not what their academic discipline is.
I worked in biological research for 11 years in academia and there was so much posturing and twisting of facts in little ways to get grant income, to get papers past referees at journals etc etc that, to anyone not au fait with the game being played, it would have been incredibly misleading. In fact, as a PhD student, my views on many things were distorted because, being a simple chap at heart, I took what was being said far too literally because I thought, wrongly, that medical researchers were above that kind of thing. Big mistake.
It’s the same in business, politics and economics. People tell fibs/lies/call it what you will to manoeuvre people into position. IPCC will have done that. I knew people who needed to raise VC money for a biotech and the only way to do that was to spin the position in a certain way. You tell me whether that’s practical politics, fraud or taking the least worst option in an imperfect situation when people genuinely believe that what they are doing is for the good of mankind………
I’ll tell you this. You need some people without climate expertise in ANY panel like that because that panel is not a research council doling out grant income, it’s potentially an expert witness body informing global policy.
I don’t object to the composition as such, but I do object to the conclusions they have drawn.
But don’t for a moment believe that scientists with no training in economics and no understanding of practical global politics will necessarily, per se, come up with something better.
They might.
But it’s definitely not a given. Particularly given the spectacularly large sums that academics manage to spend on things which far too often don’t lead to the outcomes intended………