WUWT readers may recall that my posting in July 2008 on some of the angst going on within APS over a paper from Christopher Monckton ruffled a few feathers. The paper, Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, was reviewed by APS and this odd disclaimer then placed on it:
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.
What was odd, is that APS invited Monckton to submit, so to then place a disclaimer was quite unusual. However there is good news; they may be changing their tune on climate change issues. Today we have this from Luboš Motl:
APS is reviewing its statements on climate change
Climate alarmism is a particularly embarrassing attitude for professional institutions that should represent disciplines with very high intellectual standards because climate alarmism is associated with extremely poor intellectual (and ethical) standards, besides other negative characteristics.
The American Physical Society (APS) was therefore embarrassed on November 18th, 2007 when its bodies approved an alarmist statement that was much more constructive and issue-oriented than the statements of many institutions outside physics but it was still a scientists’ variation of the same blinded, biased, irrational hysteria.
It shouldn’t be surprising that members around Will Happer, a renowned Princeton physicist, wrote an
where they mention that the climate has always been changing and warming and trace gases have many positive effects, according to scientific literature. The proposed new statement also discusses the unreliability of the existing climate models and urges the scientists to investigate all these effects objectively, and to study technological options related to the climate that are independent of the cause.
The petition has been signed by
Add your name if you are one, too.
Happily, Nature just published a letter from six members that informs that the APS is currently reviewing its 2007 statement:
Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change
By S. Fred Singer, Hal Lewis, Will Happer, Larry Gould, Roger Cohen & Robert H. Austin
We write in response to your issue discussing “the coming climate crunch”, including the Editorial ‘Time to act‘ (Nature 458, 10771078; 2009). We feel it is alarmist.
We are among more than 50 current and former members of the American Physical Society (APS) who have signed an open letter to the APS Council this month, calling for a reconsideration of its November 2007 policy statement on climate change (see open letter at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u; APS statement at http://tinyurl.com/56zqxr). The letter proposes an alternative statement, which the signatories believe to be a more accurate representation of the current scientific evidence. It requests that an objective scientific process be established, devoid of political or financial agendas, to help prevent subversion of the scientific process and the intolerance towards scientific disagreement that pervades the climate issue.
On 1 May 2009, the APS Council decided to review its current statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. We applaud this decision. It is the first such reappraisal by a major scientific professional society that we are aware of, and we hope it will lead to meaningful change that reflects a more balanced view of climate-change issues
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ralph ellis (05:26:59) :
“How did we get taken over quite so comprehensively – in all departments?”
I often ask the same question. I was at University in Scotland from 1985 to 1989. During that time the oil price crashed. Academic funding had been continously cut by Thatcher’s government (yes – her again) since she got into power in 1979. A further source of funding – certainly in the earth sciences – was from the oil companies. This source of funding stopped in 1986 because of the oil price crash. Along came Hansen and his Venusian greenhouse and academia jumped on the bandwagon big style. I remember talking to one of my fellow students at the time about this guy Hansen. The said student has gone on to have a successful academic career having completed a PhD on carbon sequestration.
My own career has been in the oil industry. I always say to warmers when they jump on the fact that I am in the oil business (and therefore in the pay of ‘big oil’) that I would have made a much better living over the years had I ridden the green bandwagon since day one. I had the chance but it just didn’t appeal to me: I thought it was all a load of crap then and I still do.
Merrick (04:17:56),
Right about the Puritans. People routinely confuse the Puritans and the Pilgrims. They were very different.
The Pilgrims arrived with visions of a utopian communist society dancing in their heads. Everyone would work the fields, and share in the bounty.
But there was no bounty. The resentment of hard workers toward the more lazy was corrosive, since everyone shared equally in what was produced. But not enough was produced because the energetic workers lost their incentive when they saw layabouts getting the same benefits.
The result was that the Pilgrim colony almost died out the first year. Their last ditch conversion to capitalist incentives saved what was left of them, but the few remaining eventually dispersed. Nothing was left of the Pilgrim colony, and they made no lasting impression on America. People remember Thanksgiving, and their funny hats and shoes with the buckles. But in fact, Pilgrims were a complete failure.
The Puritans, on the other hand, were successful from the start. The Puritan ethic was the seed planted that made America so successful. Puritans believed that a man’s success came from his own hard work, and that he should benefit. If a man didn’t work he didn’t eat, not because the colony lacked food, but because each received the fruits of his individual labor.
Puritans were not a dour, unhappy lot, as is frequently portrayed. They were outgoing, lusty, hard working refugees who came to America to escape religious persecution. They were consummate businessmen with strict moral standards
America today can be better understood in the Puritan context. Puritans were hard working capitalists, and unlike communism, capitalism produces great wealth. The other side of the coin is that the Puritan morality was imposed on everyone. We see that today, where moral crusades are used by green groups, communists [same-same] and politicians for leverage, because the ingrained culture of Puritan morality is part of the American character.
For better or worse, the Puritan ethic had an enormous influence on succeeding generations, while the Pilgrims came and went, leaving no lasting imprint.
This item is a good opportunity to renew my thanks to so many wattsupwiththat readers who were kind enough to write to the APS when it was mistreating my reviewed article on climate sensitivity, whose conclusion that climate sensitivity is <1 K at CO2 doubling continues to be borne out both by subsequent papers in the peer-reviewed literature and events in the real climate. Here is my suggestion for a revised APS climate-change policy statement:
"Farms, industries, and transportation emit greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. While some warming may result, catastrophe is unlikely.
"Global air temperature has been rising for 300 years, static for 14, falling for 8. Ocean temperature has also been falling for at least five years. Recent temperatures and rates of change are unexceptional. The past four interglacials, most of the past 10,000 years, and the Bronze-Age, Medieval, and Roman warm periods were warmer than today.
"Instrumental temperatures disclose no anthropogenic signal. Nature is the principal cause of decadal or centennial climate change. Climate sensitivity to anthropogenic CO2 enrichment is small, harmless, and beneficial.
"Computer models are instructed to be over-sensitive to greenhouse gases. In any event, models can never reliably project climate. The anthropogenic greenhouse-warming signature they project in the tropical upper troposphere is not observed.
"Therefore, the APS urges a balanced, objective scientific effort to understand natural and human effects on climate, and to provide new technologies to mitigate future warming or cooling, however caused."
Additionally – to Alan the Brit!!
I have come to an accommodation with the way US sceptics (the bloggers at least) view politics in Europe – which is that socialists/marxists/greenies/lefties and even fascists are all lumped together and given various interchangeable labels – I realise that the US has never had any regime from which it could learn to tell the difference!
However – Alan, you have no such excuse! We have to do better than label what is happening as ‘red-under-the-bed’ as a lead writer did a few days ago in the Times. We are dealing with a new phenomenon and it needs some up-to-date sociological analysis, not outworn and misleading labels.
What we are dealing with is both new and old. The tendencies are old. But these have a new face. We are seeing an alliance of Green Party/environmental activists like Greenpeace, FOE/world development organisations such as Oxfam and Christian Aid/ the left-liberal press/the science institutions/and oddly, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, WWF and even the Woodland Trust – all supporting the evangelists such as Al Gore who rally the youth movement – and of course, now, the business and banking world who see the benefits of carbon trading. This diverse set of ‘interests’ has a monolithic faith in UN science. There is also a quasi-religious element relating to ‘save the planet’, as well as suppress the heretics (and this has some very dark undertones relating to how democracy will not deliver us from the evil of climate change). Governments then respond and ally with this powerful coalition of interests.
The opponents – the sceptics or deniers, appear to be supported largely by ‘right-wing’ defenders of low taxation and free markets with business as usual, who argue that truth is on their side (as I suspect it is where climate science is concerned), and this of course, antagonises the AGW camp and causes them to close ranks even more and not listen to rational argument.
I am not going to argue on this blog that ‘business as usual’ is already straining human support systems – but will certainly argue that it will not provide the very necessary adaptation that future climate change requires of us if we are to protect the most vulnerable sections of society (in the UK and globally) – most especially as oil becomes expensive and cooling deepens (maybe).
We need less labelling and more discourse on both sides of this fence – at least here on the sceptic side, there is a willingness to engage in that discourse and to examine the science in a critical and rational manner – thank Goodness, otherwise, I would feel very isolated in my work.
It appears AGW is dying a death of a 1000 cuts.
Why do they have to have any statements at all? Have they released a statement about anything else – nuclear proliferation, for example?
peter naegele (06:02:38) :
“How sad is it that there is a need for this to be said. The abuse of the scientific method by global warming alarmists has nearly silenced all debate on the issue. From calls of heresy to hopes of natural disasters to further their cause, it is evident that the believers in this nonsense are willing to do anything to protect their sacred beliefs.”
Very true. I’ve just experimented with a couple of posts on Tamino’s website. All I said was that I agree with what Richard Lindzen wrote. It was like being attacked by a rabid pack of wolves! There’s no chance of having a civilised debate over there.
For the Climate Red Team report see:
Climate Change Reconsidered
the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
Anthony notes:
anna v – agree with you 100%!
Phillip Bratby – thanks for the link, that letter was brilliant and not a single word was wasted. Can’t wait to see the reply. As I was reading, a catchphrase from the immortal Corporal Jones (the old geezer from Dad’s Army) sprang to mind, “They don’t like it up ’em!” 😀
Jimmy Haigh (06:56:13) :
“It was like being attacked by a rabid pack of wolves!”
And the wolves are virtually all anonymous too!
Peter Taylor (06:43:49) :
Good analysis. I made a post before that it’s the first time that the rent-a-mob lot have been on the side of the establishment! WUWT?
Mae (03:47:42)
“As a (former) Green Party voter, I expect the greatest damage to environmental causes to come from the AGW camp itself. That, to me, is even more tragic than the damage done to Science. Science will prevail, but I fear environmentalism will have self-harmed too much to recover easily.”
Likewise.
“It appears AGW is dying a death of a 1000 cuts.”
It does seem like there are a lot of cracks in the dam. If the APS changes its official stance, I would say it’s an important step.
Normally when “global warming” is debated online and elsewhere, the fallback position of the warmists is the “consensus” argument. The main underpinning of this argument is that some huge list of scientific societies have issued statements endorsing global warming.
Of course there are two serious weaknesses in this argument: First, that most of these consensus statements don’t actually endorse “global warming” as supported by the likes of Al Gore. Second, that these statements don’t necessarily represent the views of all the members of these organizations. They might not even represent the majority view.
But still, it would be nice if a few of these organizations took a more skeptical stance.
Graeme Rodaughan (23:00:54) :
A small analogy wrt the recent AGW Hub-Bub…
“Well, I went out yesterday and it was quite cool, and then today it was much warmer, so I said to myself – well that’s a trend isn’t it. It’s just going to like – get so much hotter!
So I picked up my hand saw and chopped my left leg off, because I figured that I just had to do something about it…”
Well at least you did something. If there was even the slightest chance of your dire prediction coming true, inaction would have been foolish.
Experts say there is a problem. Now some others say there is no problem. I’m no expert. The question is, is the earth getting warmer because of human activity, and will that cause climate change that is problematic? I do happen to be pragmatic.
““It was like being attacked by a rabid pack of wolves!”
I made one comment on Tamino’s blog which didn’t make it through their moderation system.
As I recall, he had some post saying there was like a 90% chance of a new global surface temperature record by the end of 2012. I offered to bet a thousand dollars that the record would NOT be broken.
I don’t see any legitimate reason to censor such a comment.
Here’s a prediction: when the whole AGW scenario finally falls apart it will be be eagerly analysed by historians of science to explain how enlightened scientists fell once more into a eugenics-style delusion. The”get-rich on the backs of the poor” actions by businesses that have moved to take advantage of carbon trading will enable academics to portray this entire episode as a vast right-wing conspiracy. Big-business investment to take advantage of AGW, in fact, may offer AGW supporters a back-door route to distance themselves from their former stance.
JamesG (06:54:48) ” The Executive Board of the American Physical Society is concerned that in this period of unprecedented scientific advance, misguided or fraudulent claims of perpetual motion machines and other sources of unlimited free energy are proliferating. Such devices directly violate the most fundamental laws of nature, laws that have guided the scientific progress that is transforming our world”.
It’s good to see that scientific communities are coming to their senses and realizing that the “consensus” school on Global Warming and Climate Change is incompatible with the notion of science itself. Science is about the the constant, comparative evaluation of competing bits of data and evidence to change our mind about the way the physical world works. Saying “the debate is over because we have a consensus” is like saying “science is dead.”
Good on them…. Now, to roll back the politics of AGW and get politicians to abandon these crazy CO2 taxes and trading schemes…. We gotta defund these mad environmentalists…. Before they destroy our economies and society.
Watch out for the ol’ double back/ outflank maneuver. I fear the day proponents of AGW start using the same logical tone Watts & Team use.
This is hopeful. Too long time the world has been subjected to a climate conspiracy which will be, surely, the object of study in the future, not only of physical sciences specialists but in special of psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists.
28 07 2009
Monckton of Brenchley (06:41:04) :
This item is a good opportunity to renew my thanks to so many wattsupwiththat readers who were kind enough to write to the APS when it was mistreating my reviewed article on climate sensitivity, whose conclusion that climate sensitivity is <1 K at CO2 doubling continues to be borne out both by subsequent papers in the peer-reviewed literature and events in the real climate. Here is my suggestion for a revised APS climate-change policy statement:
"Farms, industries, and transportation emit greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. While some warming may result, catastrophe is unlikely.
….
We thank you for your support, your efforts towards truth and the exposure of propaganda and exaggeration, and your courage in discussing the issue while too many others hide.
A comment though – or, recommendation more properly. I would add an additional sentence to the effect that" "Today's rising CO2 levels, only a small fraction of which are man-made, are directly responsible for increasing all plant life on Earth by factors between 12 to 27 percent: More hardy plants, growing faster and yielding stronger stems, roots, and flowers will produce more food, fodder, fuel, and feedstock for all the world's populations of men, mammals, fish and birds. These naturally rising CO2 levels and a slightly warming climates pose no threats, only benefits to man and the earth, in future centuries."
Jason S. (08:36:30) :
“Watch out for the ol’ double back/ outflank maneuver. I fear the day proponents of AGW start using the same logical tone Watts & Team use.|”
In my experience, I don’t think we need to ‘worry’ about this ever happening…
Just amazing isn’t it that while Relativity is still a theory, AGW is an incontrovertible fact.