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.
What matters is the science, not an appeal to authority. On that front the AGW is having many difficulties because the science clearly shows that they are on the wrong side of the debate. Climate change is natural and changes in CO2 concentrations are not drivers of temperature trends.
“”” John H (12:32:24) :
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Well, I am an Expert Peer Reviewer for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); i.e. I am one of the often touted “thousands of UN Climate Scientists”. I and thousands of others speak, publish and sign petitions in attempt to get the media to tell the truth of man made global climate change. And in response to your invitation I post that truth below.
The AGW-hypothesis asserts that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs) – notably carbon dioxide – in the atmosphere will cause the globe to warm (global warming: GW), and that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are increasing the carbon dioxide in the air with resulting anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW). “””
Well John H, welcome to the discussion. So you are an expert Peer reviewer for the IPCC. I take your word for that; no reason I should doubt your claim.
But how do you justify this:- “The AGW-hypothesis asserts that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs) – notably carbon dioxide – in the atmosphere will cause the globe to warm (global warming: GW), ”
Now John, I am neither an expert peer reviewer for the IPCC, nor a recognized “climate Scientist; but even I know; beyonfd any shadow of doubt, that water vapor is far and away the most dominant GHG in earth’s atmosphere.
It isn’t even a close call. Water vapor starts its work in warming the atmosphere at around 760 nm wavelength in the near Infra-red, where about 40-45% of the total solar spectrum radiation occurs, of which water vapor takes out about one half, to prewarm the air before the sunlight ever touches the surface. The water vapor absorbs in bands all the way out to about 17 microns, after which is becomes essentially totally opaque.
CO2 on the other hand; your GHG of choice, has no effect on the incoming solar spectrum before about 1.9 microns wavelength; and only about 67% of the soalr spectrum occurs beyond that; and CO2 absorbs in three separate bands, which contain very little of the soalr spectrum, and no effect on the earth emitted thermal radiation before the 13-17 micron bending mode CO2 absorption band; where the CO2 also has to compete with the much more plentiful water vapor, that absorbs significantly in that same band.
So I am supposed to be moved by your indictment of CO2 when clearly it is but a minor player in the total atmospheric GHG picture.
Perhaps that explains why the IPCC cannot point to ANY observational data that shows atmospheric CO2 increases causing increasing surface temperatures. All of the available data, shows that temperature rise is a cause of the CO2 increases, and for well known Physical Chemistry reasons.
So John; perhaps if you were a little more diligent in examining the science behind atmospheric Physics, rather than the politics behind MMGWCC alarmism; you might accomplish something more for the human population on this planet; and for the planet itself.
If you just wrote down the nominal values for the air mass zero and air mass one “Solar constants” on a piece of paper, and kept that in your wallet; you might be able to show people how unreal are the wild eyed visions of a green renewable energy future beyond carbon.
Regards.
George
Roger Knights (12:44:57),
Thanks, Roger, but I filled in the anti-spambot code each time. The last two times I was extra careful. But I don’t want to be wrong about this, so I’ll try it once more.
Isn’t it true that an actual degree in “climatology” wasn’t even offered until the last 10 years or so?
So his answer “something to do with climate” seems okay to me, but the 20% of even the broadened definition is certainly pretty telling.
Smokey: Don’t forget to add your e-mail.
If your submission still doesn’t work, maybe it’s because the system automatically rejects comments over a certain length. Maybe you could try breaking it into two pieces, such as by providing certain material as a footnote in a second submission.
Hey, wait a minute, “degrees” are something to do with “weather” and not “climate”, there is a difference between the two after all!
“The steadily increasing resolution of GCMs [General Circulation Models] is blurring the already fuzzy distinction between weather and climate.” – David Lindley, “Calculating the Future”, ACM, January 2009, Vol. 52, No. 1, page 10.
Oh, darn.
Roger Knights (16:22:11),
Roger, I did include my email. All four times. And a couple of other posts were at least as long, if not longer than mine.
Could KK be miffed about the “Best Science” reference? I can’t think of anything else.
George E. Smith:
“Now John, I am neither an expert peer reviewer for the IPCC, nor a recognized “climate Scientist; but even I know; beyonfd any shadow of doubt, that water vapor is far and away the most dominant GHG in earth’s atmosphere…blah…blah…blah… The usual ignorant babble about CO2 only being a minor GHG.”
Far from being a minor player, CO2 accounts for at least 14 percent of the “greenhouse effect”. Its concentration has increased by about a third since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The water vapor concentration has only slightly increased during this period (you do understand why, don’t you?).
“All of the available data, shows that temperature rise is a cause of the CO2 increases, and for well known Physical Chemistry reasons.”
The isotopic composition of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels differs from that of CO2 produced by “natural” processes. Therefore, the source of the increase in CO2 can be identified, so it is a fact (not a hypothesis or theory) that the increase in CO2 concentration over the past 150 or so years is essentially entirely due to the burning of fossil fuels.
I don’t know what the point of this posting is; it does not add to the discussion at all. We all know that the UN is a political body, that their mandate was to determine how bad anthropogenic global warming is and not whether it was happening, that “consensus” is not a scientific idea but a political one, that the all important IPPC summaries were largely written and edited by politicians and not scientists, that the most relied upon papers in each section were written by the lead authors in those sections, that independent critical reviewers like Steve McIntyre were for the most part dismissed and outright ridiculed. None of this is new, so why rehash it now?
davidgmills (11:59:43) :
“But all are probably socialists, and that is what we are really dealing with.”
This really is disgusting.
Frankly why not say they are all do-gooders or evil-doers.
This is nothing but an ad hominem attack.
I take it that you are acknowledging their politics?
To be “Ad Hominem”, a statement must be BOTH:
A. True
B. Largely irrelevant
I don’t think the statement qualifies.
Well, I would not “diss” Soon just because his background is in astrophysics. On the other hand, I would not give him a free pass either. I would ask what he has published in the field of climate science, in what journals he has published it, and is his work widely cited, etc.
Being a physicist too, I won’t argue with that.
It may (or may not) surprise you that our backgrounds are remarkably similar. I too am a physicist working in industry (although I infer that I am a fair bit younger). And, I agree with what you say here. (Actually, a fellow physicist where I work says that he was once told that if you work in industry long enough, you eventually are doing essentially engineering. But, I agree that we physicists do bring a different approach to the work than most people trained as engineers do.)
And, I agree with you that the criteria for judging work in industry are different than the “publish or perish” mentality in academia. And, certainly, there are aspects of that mentality that are not good. However, overall one has to judge someone’s work somehow…one of the only ways to judge a scientist’s work when you are not working closely enough with him to have direct contact is by what he has published…or patented…since this is essentially what he has communicated to the outside world, especially if he is not working in industry and is thus not restricted in what he can publish or disclose because of trade secrets.
Of course, it is best not just to look just at the quantity of publications but at some measures of the quality…What journals are the papers published in? How often are the cited? and so forth. Again, I am not claiming this is perfect..But if a scientist is publishing a lot in the editorial pages of the newspaper on climate change but not in the recognized journals in the field, that is problematical to me…I.e., it provides little evidence that his views are considered very credible by his scientific colleagues. And, more direct study of those views in manay cases has confirmed to me that this is not too unreasonable a measure.
Sorry…I meant to properly attribute the statements that I was quoting and responding to above to George E. Smith.
I’m at the tail end of the comments here so I will take a swing at a few of you
Joel Shore
“Scientists don’t care what the original field of study is of their fellow scientists … It is what you are publishing that counts.”
I don’t know whether you are a scientist or not Joel but it is exceedingly difficult to get a paper published in a given discipline if you are an outsider. It is virtually impossible if your views also differ from generally held opinions (the “peer” group would soon send you on your way). My best example is that of Alfred Wegener an early 20th century meteorologist and arctic explorer who, noting that the eastern coast of N and S America seemed to fit fairly snuggly with the western coast of Europe and Africa, proposed the hypothesis of “Continental Drift”. Geologists around the world villified and insulted this fellow and then invited him to the AAPG (Am. Assoc. Petrol. Geol) annual meeting in 1927 (This organization was the the science’s “Synod of Medieval Bishops”) to excoriate him some more. He declined and soon after died before his theory became the jewel of geological science – albeit renamed Plate Tectonics out of shame. At the AAPG meeting noted, the president said that if Wegener was correct, we would have to consign all we have learned in geology over the past 100 years to the waste basket. We had to wait another 30 years before we consigned it there.
George Smith
You are inordinately scornful of engineers. Everything from a drink of water, your ability to send a blog post, robots walking on mars etc. are of course the product of engineering. Computer “science”, rocket “science” and other marvels are none the less engineering or nowadays known as applied science.
Richard M
” Can anyone really be an expert in climate? I doubt it. So, I don’t really cast aspersions on people in the field based on their background. However, I do think it brings forward the point that climate science is still in it’s infancy. It’s extremely complex and so little is really known about key elements.”
Try typing “climatologist” in Word or looking it up in the on-line Oxford Dictionary. Word underlines it in red and Oxford can’t find the word anywhere on its site! It is new indeed and probably this is the reason that the entire of spectrum of science, engineering, economics, sociologists and especially socialists have adopted it as their own. Such a group didn’t move in on medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.
“The claim that only Chris Landsea is a denier is clearly bogus.”
Yes, it’s bogus, because Chris Landsea is NOT a denier. A quote from his abstract for a seminar: “It is not disputed (by this speaker) that anthropogenic forcing has been the cause of at least a substantial portion of the observed warming during the 20th Century.”
That dude just saved me money on my car insurance.
Steve Moore
Ad Hominems do not have to be true. They can be any kind of an attack on a person, true or not.
And why would I acknowledge their politics? I have no idea what “their” politics are because I have no idea of the identities of all of them are.
That was nothing but a blanket slam on a group of people.
I also have no doubt that there are fascists who believe in AGW.
But the politics should be separated from the science.
Anthony won science blog of the year award. I doubt he wants to win political blog of the year award next year.
Gary Pearse:
“Try typing ‘climatologist’ in Word or looking it up in the on-line Oxford Dictionary. Word underlines it in red and Oxford can’t find the word anywhere on its site! It is new indeed and probably this is the reason that the entire of spectrum of science, engineering, economics, sociologists and especially socialists have adopted it as their own.”
Cognitive dissonance at its finest! The government of the state in which I currently reside has had a position titled “State Climatologist” for decades.
Gary Pearse says:
I am a scientist (a physicist). And, I think this claim is greatly exaggerated. I have to admit that I have not really published far outside my discipline…but I have published outside of my discipline. And, my thesis work, while inside my discipline, was entering a new subfield that neither my advisor nor I had published in and did in fact challenge a generally-held opinion in that subfield. And yet, we were still able to get it published in one of the top journals. Sure, people were somewhat skeptical of our results…but they did not seem to be closed-minded.
As for climate science, I have to say that people often use this excuse but I have not seen evidence of a lot of very good “skeptical” work that can’t seem to get published. To the contrary, it seems like some “skeptical” papers have gotten published that really probably wouldn’t have been published if the referees had simply done a little bit of due diligence (Douglass et al being one example). It almost makes one wonder if there is a little bit of a bending over backwards not to be biased that causes them to give real problems a pass.
As for Wegener, of course I am not going to claim that it is always easy getting new ideas accepted. But, I am sometimes a little suspicious of these histories and have also read (although I can’t remember where) in the particular case of Wegener that the story is actually more complex than it is made out to be. [It is also interesting to note, by the way, that the organization that you say played such a big role in excoriating Wegener [AAPG] was somewhat infamous for being the only major scientific organization to have a statement that was actively dissenting from the IPCC conclusions…although it recently adopted a new statement that is described as “noncommittal” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change ).]
Finally, it is worth noting something that is often forgotten in these discussions about paradigms and so forth, namely that AGW was not always the accepted theory in the field. In fact, the hypothesis spent a long time gaining acceptance. A good history of that is given here: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/
Joel Shore:
Harvard’s Dr. Willie Soon has published numerous peer reviewed papers on climatology. He is very widely cited. A small sampling gleaned from a few search clicks [which anyone could do if they were really interested in answers]:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
click6
click7
click8
click9
click10
AGW promoters hate Dr. Soon because his studies don’t toe their line.
Hey, blanketness is not in there either but it explains well the warming properties of greenhouse gases. Just remember to say that Pamela coined that word.
Smokey,
I suggest trying just a tiny bit of quality control on your links. Hint: Reports put out by conservative think-tanks like Fraser Institute or George C Marshall Institute are generally not considered peer-reviewed publications. Or, do you want us to call reports from Greenpeace and Sierra Club peer-reviewed too? As near as I can tell, the only link that goes to a peer-reviewed paper in a real journal in the field is the first one. That alone does make for a stellar publication record.
“The isotopic composition of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels differs from that of CO2 produced by “natural” processes. Therefore, the source of the increase in CO2 can be identified, so it is a fact (not a hypothesis or theory) that the increase in CO2 concentration over the past 150 or so years is essentially entirely due to the burning of fossil fuels.”
Please cite the studies that show that the increase is due to fossil fuels and not volcanic activity, forest fires, or ocean degassing. And try citing studies that show that CO2 concentration changes drive temperature changes because the ones that I see show that the hypothesis is not supportable by the science.
Chris Landsea IS a denier, …of sorts…
http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=ae9b984d-4a1c-45c0-af24-031a1380121a&k=0
He presented solid data, and was dismissed by those whose agenda didn’t agree with him because it undercut their fraudulent message.
To the contrary, it seems like some “skeptical” papers have gotten published that really probably wouldn’t have been published if the referees had simply done a little bit of due diligence (Douglass et al being one example).”
My examples are the Mann papers. The man showed that he is either a fraud or can’t understand simple statistics. Wegman crucified him and the review process, which was not at all independent and should have caught the obvious errors. From what I see, all the AGW proponents have are some very bad models that have no predictive abilities and have never been independently reviewed. And the situation for the AGW crowd is not too good because the warming that was supposed to take temperatures higher has not panned out and we haven’t seen a positive trend for a decade.
Joel, it’s your reading comprehension.
Since you asked your question, I provided a ‘sampling’ from doing a quick search, as I said. There is a lot more from Dr. Soon out there for anyone interested.
I know that a Harvard expert’s conclusions are hard for alarmists to take, but… well, there they are. CO2 is nothing to worry about. But we already knew that.
If you don’t bother check out who the esteemed Dr. Willie Soon is, others interested in finding out will, so it’s a win-win. I enjoyed the search, and learned a few things along the way – particularly the info on Michael Mann in ‘click10’.