Guest post by Steven Goddard
Suzanne Goldenberg recently
complained in the UK Guardian about the
ICCC (International Conference on Climate Change) global warming “deniers” :
The 600 attendees (by the organisers’ count) are almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age. Only two women and one African-American man figure on the programme of more than 70 speakers.
In the UK, profiling like that might be considered a hate crime if it were about any other group other than the one she described. But that isn’t the point. Below is a
photo of the vaunted
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change) taken at their last meeting. The spitting image of her description of the I
CCC. No doubt Ms. Goldenberg considers the adult white men in the I
PCC to be great visionaries, leading the noble fight against climate Armageddon.
Here are some other scientists active in climate change:
Jim Hansen:
Hansen at a climate conference in Denmark 2009.
Left to Right: Dr. Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Dr. Paul Knappenberger (President of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum), Dr. Wally Broecker (Columbia University), and Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago) pose for a photo after the first of the Global Climate Change forum. Forum I was held at the Adler Planetarium.
Is it a big surprise that most
senior scientists are adult white males? And what criteria did she use to choose the expertise of one group of prestigious scientists to the exclusion of another? Does she consider her personal climate expertise to be superior to
Dr. Richard Lindzen, to the point where she can choose to simply ignore his opinion?
Richard Siegmund Lindzen, Ph.D., (born February 8, 1940) is a Harvard trained atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his research in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves. He has published over 200 books and scientific papers. He was the lead author of Chapter 7 (physical processes) of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC on global warming (2001). He has been a critic of some anthropogenic global warming theories and the political pressures surrounding climate scientists.
It is one thing to question the scientific conclusions of an organisation, and a completely different matter to make an ad hominem attack against an entire group – based on such witless criteria.
H/T to Aron for finding the article
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Times Online’s environmental correspondent has been running a series of doom and gloom pieces from the Copenhagen conference this week but as far as I can tell, the sources have all been economists. Presumably, the scientists are trying to regain both credibility and funding.
If scientific arguments fail, then just open another can of pickled ad hominems. Deperation springs to mind….
Science is done in the MSM by attack. Find a spurious unrelated ‘weakness’ and attack. Clearly not science but clearly political agenda.
Dismissing the ICCC members on the basis of race and gender is simply a spurious ad hominem and deserves no respectful rebuttal.
However, the mention of a lot of “retired” attendees just may be relevant. People who depend of research grants to make house payments are unlikely to take a skeptical position on AGW.
Has there ever been, or could some organization sponsor, a poll of scientists about AGW with enough data to tease out the differences between people who still depend on grants from public funds and others with similar demographics but not dependent on public grants?
Why didn’t you continue the quote you pulled? “Aside from a smattering of academics from well-known universities, they are affiliated with rightwing thinktanks, such as the Ayn Rand Institute, the Carbon Sense Coalition, or the scarily named Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow, that operate far outside the mainstream of public discourse.”
But it is a proven fact that adult white males are EVIL. They are responsible for all the problems in the world today!
No fair! You’re not allowed to use someone’s ignorant prejudices against them! Are you?
Sorry, I get lost in this PC lunacy sometimes. Which is it today? All white males are horrible, or white males are good?
I think you should make clearer that Ms. Goldenberg’s article pertained to the recent Heartland Institute conference in NYC.
Science is about what can be proven — demographics are irrelevant.
http://news.aol.com/article/climate-changes/376821
Is there ‘female climate science’? How about ‘non-white climatology?
Science does not care about race, sex, religion or gender-orientation. Neither does the climate.
Politics does care about these things.
Incredible. The level to which the AGW ideologues will stoop in their mindless and hypocritical effort to cast aspersions on and smear those who dare speak against their cherished AGW Belief system seems to know no bounds.
“many, if not most, are past retirement age.”
Uh oh, Neven.
Potkettleblack
Maybe you should give further hints to Ms Goldenberg by pointing out that there are many Jews among the attendees of ICCC. For instance Richard S. Lindzen is descendant of German Jews who fled Germany in the early thirties. His middle initial S. stands for Siegmund. Fred Singer is an Austrian Jew, who managed to get out of hell in 1940. His first name originally was Siegfried, changed into Fred. When Fred Singer was visiting Germany last year, where he presented his views on climate change, he was branded lackey of the oil industry by our local press. I felt so ashamed then, but at that time did not have any power to protest.
Ad hominem attacks are as reflexive to the AGW crowd as chasing mice is to cats. The resort to ad hominem attacks is also a surefire indication that the attacker knows, at least subconsciously, the weakness of their position.
Clearly, Suzanne Goldenberg thinks it’s more important that the correct PC ratio of races and gender is maintained than that they should know about the science.
Suzanne Goldenberg cannot rationally dispute the facts presented at the ICCC so reverts to tired and irrelevant ad hominem attacks instead. That is also known as an admission of defeat in any intellectual or rational reasoned debate.
I’d rather be correct than fashionable, and Suzanne has demonstrated that it should not be too long before I am both.
Yes, one can’t escape the conclusion that the “anti-AGW” cohort (if one uses a broad moniker for the people who attended that meeting in NY) are predominantly men of a “certain age”.
And that’s pretty much true of the scientists or ex-scientists that are vociferously “anti-AGW”. There’s an awful lot of elderly blokes!
That’s certainly not the case for the scientists that study climate related science, and contribute to body of knowledge that informs our understanding of climate and greenhouse gases. Your selective groups of a few climate scientists rather distorts the reality. I spent 10 minutes looking through some of the papers from climate scientists involved in the IPCC:
there are actually rather a lot of women. And as with science in general, there is a strong representation of youthful women in climate science (it’s still the case that many major contributions are made by youngish scientists):
so for example:
The secretary of the IPCC is a women: Renate Christ
At least three women chair or are lead authors on IPCC groups/reports:
e.g. Susan Solomon (co-chair of IPCC Working Group 1)
http://cires.colorado.edu/people/solomon/
Gabriele C. Hegerl (IPCC coordinating lead author)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriele_C._Hegerl
Jean Palutikof (managed preparation of the report Climate Change 2007)
and a very quick look at other IPCC contributors/climate scientists:
Lorraine Lisiecki
http://lorraine-lisiecki.com/
Maureen Raymo
http://www.bu.edu/dbin/es/index.php/people/faculty/maureen-raymo/
Rosemarie Came
http://www.geo.utexas.edu/faculty-scientist.php?id=3142
Roxana Bojariu
http://www.ad-astra.ro/whoswho/view_profile.php?user_id=12&lang=ro
Coleen Vogel
http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/Science/Geography/Staff/Coleen+Vogel.htm
Cynthia Rosenzweig
http://www.barnard.edu/envsci/dept/rosenzweig/rosenzweig.html
Judith Curry
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/
Isabel Montanez
https://www.geology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/montanez.html
Isabella Velicogna
http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Velicogna/
Corinne Le Quere
http://lgmacweb.env.uea.ac.uk/lequere/
Sandra Diaz
Matilde Rusticucci
and so on….
I’m not allowed to comment or post any rebuttals on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (cough) section after I mentioned that the temperature data for the 19th century and early 20th century needs to be reconstructed to account for global dimming from the dense smog, and also because I challenged George Monbiot to a debate. I was insulted at often by a small clique and never fought back with anything except science. Yet those who prefer vicious attacks are still allowed to post their insults towards people while my comments can’t make it past the moderation filter. And no, I will not create a new account because my integrity is better off this way and I will hit them where it hurts when my research is done.
As if their disinformation wasn’t bad enough, the Guardian’s articles exploit the Holocaust by using those slurs (denier, revisionist, death trains, factories of death) against people, yet they have the audacity to call a part of their environmental section ‘Ethical Living’. Very unethical environmental journalism, subsidised by Auto Trader.
Just imagine a world without the contributions of the white man.
Reporters / People like this one would have burnt Galileo at the stake for being a skeptic of the flat Earth.
Suzanne US environment correspondent:
“Barrak Obama and Congress are working on legislation to curb the burning of greenhouse gases”
Oh really? Is this the latest technology to supplant CO2 sequestration? Maybe if we burnt them they would go away. But wait, then shouldn’t Barrak et al encourage the burning of greenhouse gases. Ah, I’m just a Guardian “environment correspondent” and I’m so confused by these Climate Deniers!!
If Suzanne would prefer young athletic men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds wearing scanty colorful outfits she should go to one of the anti-globalization events in Brazil. They know how to party there too.
So, we old, to the grave and young to power?, World upside down.
The elders used to lead in the past and teached and enlighten the younger, with tender love as addressing their grandchildren with their experience. Hear, ye youngsters, tomorrow (you will then remember these words) you will be the old ones, perhaps then confined and abandoned.
Just goes to show that the Alarmists are running out of “facts” to defend their position and now have to resort to attacking skeptics based on race, gender, and age. Pathetic really, particularly for a group that prides itself on being tolerant, diverse, and inclusive, but apparently that applies only if you believe what they want you to believe.
What is retirement age, in an epoch where your 401K is now a 201K? Isn’t it somewhere over 80, now 🙂