From Physics World: APS rejects plea to alter stance on climate change
The American Physical Society (APS) has “overwhelmingly rejected” a proposal from a group of 160 physicists to alter its official position on climate change. The physicists, who include the Nobel laureate Ivar Giaver, wanted the APS to modify its stance to reflect their own doubts about the human contribution to global warming. The APS turned down the request on the recommendations of a six-person committee chaired by atomic physicist Daniel Kleppner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The committee was set up by APS president Cherry Murray in July, when the society received the proposal for changing its statement, which had originally been drawn up in November 2007. It has spent the last four months carrying out what the APS calls “a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research” and took soundings from its members. “We recommended not accepting the proposal,” Kleppner told physicsworld.com. “The [APS] council almost unanimously decided to go with that.”
Different positions
The official APS position on climate change says that “emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate” and adds that there is “incontrovertible” evidence that global warming is occurring. The APS also wants reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions to start immediately. “If no mitigating actions are taken,” it says, “significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.”
However, the petition’s signatories claim that “measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20–21st century changes [in climate] are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today”. They say that various natural processes, such as ocean cycles and solar variability, could account for variations in the Earth’s climate on the time scale of decades and centuries.
“Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate,” the petition concludes. It also points to “extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals”.
Next steps
Although the APS council turned down the request, it has, however, agreed to one proposal from Kleppner’s committee: that the society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) should “examine the statement for improvements in clarity and tone”. Princeton University atomic physicist Will Happer, who was one of those leading the proposal for change, sees that fact as a form of vindication. “They basically sent both statements back to their committee on public affairs and asked them to reconsider,” says Happer. “I think it’s a big victory for us. Many of [the people who signed the petition] took quite a bit of risk in signing this statement.”
However, the APS firmly refutes Happer’s reading. “The council has, in effect, said we reject outright the replacement of our statement,” points out APS spokesperson Tawanda Johnson. “We are certainly not rejecting the 2007 statement. It’s still on our website. POPA reviews statements every five years; it would have come up for review anyway.”
Kleppner also points out that the call for change came from a small minority of the APS’s 47,000 members. “This is certainly not a majority opinion,” he says. “Most other physicists have come to a different conclusion looking at the same evidence.”
About the author
Peter Gwynne is Physics World‘s North America correspondent
Joel Shore (12:04:13)
Wrong. I am a scientific skeptic. Joel is a true believer who misunderstands the debate.
This issue is not a debate between those who believe that CO2 is going to cause runaway global warming, and those who believe that it won’t.
The debate is between those who believe that CO2 will cause runaway global warming — and those who have not been convinced, due to the lack of evidence supporting that belief. The latter are scientific skeptics.
Because Joel Shore has been unable to provide the necessary empirical evidence to convince skeptics of his beliefs, he gets upset. But those feelings of frustration come from within Joel; they are not forced on him by skeptics, who want solid empirical evidence that CO2=CAGW.
Computer climate models are not empirical evidence. They are simply a tool — and a fairly inaccurate tool regarding the climate. Also, many purveyors of catastrophic climate change continue to stonewall the requests of other scientists for their raw data and methodologies. That refusal to cooperate is directly contrary to the Scientific Method. Therefore, skeptics reject their unconvincing pronouncements.
The President of the European Institute for Climate and Energy, Dr. Holger Thuss, explains the problem from a scientific skeptic’s point of view: click.
I can understand Joel Shore’s frustration. He lacks the necessary real world evidence to convince skeptics that a rise in CO2 will lead to runaway global warming and climate catastrophe. But that is what Joel truly believes, and he gets upset when he is unable to convince skeptics to share his beliefs.
Skeptics don’t have a particular belief system. Skeptics simply say, “Prove it.” Or at least, provide solid empirical, testable and reproducible evidence that CO2=CAGW. The fact that there is still no convincing real world evidence to support their hypothesis is no reason to abandon scientific skepticism.
Those claiming to have shown that there were no such events as the LIA or the MWP, and then claiming that current temperatures are far above any temperatures for thousands of years, still continue to stonewall requests from other scientists for full cooperation, and for the disclosure of all of their raw data and methods. The fact that Briffa, Mann and many others deliberately withhold their data makes skeptics even more skeptical of their conclusions. Falsification is central to the Scientific Method, and a hypothesis cannot be falsified without the original data.
Joel Shore should be pounding the table, demanding that all raw data and its provenance, and all algorithms and methodologies used by others to conclude that carbon dioxide is such a grave threat, must be publicly archived, with no more delays. Further, that those arguing the CO2=CAGW hypothesis must fully cooperate with skeptical scientists by providing any and all information necessary to falsify their hypothesis.
That is what the Scientific Method requires; because that is how the truth is discovered. Hiding the data makes skeptics suspicious that those alarmists are deliberately scaring the populace in order to receive more financial grants — which would not be nearly so forthcoming if it were shown that rising CO2 is of little consequence.
If Joel Shore were actually interested in finding the truth, rather than being so determined to convince skeptics of his personal beliefs, he would demand that his fellow alarmists need to promptly make all of their work and data completely transparent to everyone. If their methods and data withstand the scrutiny of skeptical scientists’ efforts to falsify them, then what is left standing is the truth.
But it appears that the alarmists know very well that disclosing their data and methods would cause their hypothesis to be falsified — and that would cut off a major source of their income. So rather than following the Scientific Method to find the truth, they say: “Trust us.” Skeptics decline.
Dr Shore writes
‘It’s not a matter of politics; it is a matter of what regime a substance falls into based not just on its radiative properties but also on its behavior based on its current concentration and rates of injection into and removal from the atmosphere. Water vapor is a very different beast because of the rapidity of its natural cycling through the atmosphere relative to practical anthropogenic injection rates.
It is ‘the rapidity of its natural cycling through the atmosphere’ that akes it more important than CO2
Natural cycle deniers, such as Dr Shore want to write water out of our clmate. Only gases we produce are considered by them as ‘greenhouse gases’.
The WMO does the same.
The World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases (WDCGG) is one of the WDCs under the GAW programme. It serves to gather, archive and provide data on greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, CFCs, N2O, surface ozone, etc.)
http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/
No mention of water.
‘Greenhouse gases’ are, according to them, by definition, man-made.
Even though I do not agree with Joel Shore, he at least understands the debating process. Unlike RRKampen, who just made his side look bad. I can respect Joel Shore for backing up his statements, and taking a lot of abuse in this forum. You have to admit he keeps us on our toes, and for that he should be commended. The fact he can voice his opinion here is something that shouldn’t be taken for granted by either side. That being said, good luck showing that we are beyond natural variability and that mankinds signal is distinguishable from the noise, Joel. Also, the big bad oil card no longer holds water. This article shows that neither side is to be trusted with public monies. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/16181
I just read the Kleppner APS report, “Ad-Hoc Committee Report on APS Climate Change Statement.” The APS makes it available only to members, but anyone who wants to read it can get it here.
It’s a stunner. The committee members, acting as agents of the APS and in their professional capacity as highly trained physicists — positions requiring two levels of responsible integrity — decided, in their words, “[to rely] primarily on the 4th Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change, in particular its first volume: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon et al, Cambridge University Press]. (PSB). We have also turned to the NRC report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, (National Research Council, 2006). (STR).
So there we have it. Official physics is now a combination of the tendentious with the fallacious. It’s as though the APS issued a statement on Astral and Galactic Winds (AGW) after consulting the Encyclopedia of Astrology. The APS and the Kleppner committee were entirely uncritical in their analysis and their decision. It’s shameful.
Some APS member needs to put up a web-site where other APS members can give their contact information in confidence. If a few thousand members sign in, their views on AGW can be consulted, and a real perception of the scientific opinions of the APS membership can be brought out..
I think its your browser, _Jim.
I apply the italics exactly where I want them: on the quotes.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Joel Shore: “People like Smokey are amongst the least skeptical people who I have ever interacted with in terms of believing anything that supports their preconceptions.”
Hmm….if you LOOK at the real, raw data, Joel, that is, what he has said and how he tirelessly references his charts and quotes, then YOU, as another scientist, have to make sense of all that “raw data,” whether you agree with it or not.
But instead, in haste, you fire out an emotional statement like the one above, and thus step out of your “scientist” mode and turn it into a personal agenda.
Stick to the science, Joel.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Joel Shore: “I think I have probably spent more time reading and trying to understand arguments from the “AGW skeptics” side than almost anyone here has spent in trying to understand the science discussed in the IPCC report and such.”
You are evading the question, Joel.
While I am sure there are plenty of heavy-hitters on here who can easily take you to task on the above broad-brush side-swipe, I will leave that to them. Furthermore that is not what I asked.
I specifically asked you about you and the 160 “heavy-hitters” who petitioned the APS….about you and them in one room.
What do you make of their significant objections??
Do you just call them, as fellow (and mostly more experienced than you) physicists, do you call them insane??
How do you deal *scientifically* with their objections.
Would you be willing to debate all 160 of them to prove them wrong???
Nah I didn’t not think so.
I knew you were smarter than that!! 🙂
But the point is….YOU have to deal with all of these human “outliers”…..all 160 of them (and probably many more).
And I heard they are a restless lot!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Correction: “Nah, I didn’t think so.”
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey: “But it appears that the alarmists know very well that disclosing their data and methods would cause their hypothesis to be falsified — and that would cut off a major source of their income. So rather than following the Scientific Method to find the truth, they say: “Trust us.”
Skeptics decline.
WELL SAID!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Another politically incorrect Physicist here.
I am reasonably convinced that we have experienced a recent (geologically speaking) period of “global warming” (poorly named), at least up until around 2000 or so.
I am not the least bit convinced that it is exceptional or persistent.
I am not the least bit convinced that it is caused by human activity, and if it is, I am more unconvinced that it is caused by the emission of “greenhouse gasses”, even given THAT, I am yet even more unconvinced that the culprit is carbon dioxide.
I guess you’d say I’m pretty unconvinced.
A politically correct lie is still a lie.
Pat Frank (16:08:01) :….the Kleppner APS report, here.
(http://climaterealists.com/?id=4362)
Thanks for the link. It is shameful.
Robert H. Austin et al – “As physicists who are familiar with the science issues, and as current and past members of the American Physical Society, we the undersigned urge the Council to revise its current statement* on climate change as follows, so as to more accurately represent the current state of the science:
Greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, accompany human industrial and agricultural activity. While substantial concern has been expressed that emissions may cause significant climate change, measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today. In addition, there is an extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals.
Studies of a variety of natural processes, including ocean cycles and solar variability, indicate that they can account for variations in the Earth’s climate on the time scale of decades and centuries. Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate.”
20th 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today. Natural processes can account for climate change.
This is obviously contrary to what IPCC says.
So what do the committee do? – they consult the IPCC report and shoot it down. Brilliant!
I have 2 questions: The American Physical Society (APS) has “overwhelmingly rejected” the petition. “Overwhelming” is not unanimous. How many of the committee did not reject the petition and what was their minority view?
While in the posts here I’ve had time to read, it seems that Joel Shore has not said he’s a member of APS but finds it just fine that a small leadership group can decide to to speak for the membership without so much as a scientifically conducted poll to find out the view of the membership.
I don’t have any qualms of uncertainty concerning how dramatically his views would suddenly shift 180 degrees on this subject(assuming he is in fact a member) if the political pronouncement made had been for the support of creationism of the 4000 yr old Earth fundamentalist variety.
Hey joel, maybe the APS has a majority of 4000 year old Earth believers and that Cherry and the leadership should go ahead make a procclaimation for this majority. What? No need to conduct a poll first?
Richard says:
You are confusing two things. First, there is the ad hoc committee of 6 people who issued one report. Then, there was the vote of the APS Council to basically follow this report’s recommendation of rejecting the proposed change, keeping the current statement but referring it to the Society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) “for possible improvements in clarity and tone”. Somewhat surprisingly, I heard from someone who claimed to have heard it from 2 independent sources that even Austin himself voted in favor of this in the end.
cba says:
I am a member of APS and have been for over 20 years. There are people here who have noted that science is not decided by voting but by evidence and I tend to agree with that. I don’t want the Council to ask me my opinion on every such question because I don’t think I am best qualified to judge the science in such a broad array of different areas. However, I am pretty confident that the methods that Council has in place are good ones that tend to insure that the statements issued are scientifically accurate.
That being said, I am also quite confident that a poll of APS members would find that a significant majority supports the current APS statement and did not support the proposed alternative statement. And, I would also think that you would see the membership seriously up-in-arms if the APS put out statements that the majority found to be bad…and it would be easy to run a slate of candidates for council that would kick the current group out and put in a new group more representative of the members.
Well, one can always come up with ridiculous hypotheticals. But, as I have noted above, I think the current way that APS formulates statements on matters of public policy is actually better (and less cumbersome) than doing it by direct polling of its members.
savethesharks:
It takes two to tango. I have spent A LOT of time going through Smokey’s charts and explaining to him in detail what is scientifically wrong with them or the conclusion that he draws from them. It doesn’t do any good.
And, I don’t know how you came up with the claim “he tirelessly references his charts and quotes”. He does not…He most often simply links to the charts. And, in fact, he sometimes does not know himself where they even come from. (I once commented on the fact that so many of his came from ICECAP and he denied that he had ever knowingly posted something from there until I pointed him to specific examples. It hardly seems “skeptical” to me to post charts that you don’t even know the origin of.)
That is pretty much what I do here, isn’t it? But, it is not at all realistic for me to believe that I can convince all “outliers”. About the best I can hope for is to convince people who are closer to being on-the-fence…rather than those who are not so dead-set against the science because of their political or philosophical views that they are not convinceable.
There is absolutely NO EXCUSE for this:
The American Geophysical Union is sending science back four hundred years!
http://www.rightsidenews.com/200911157302/energy-and-environment/galileo-silenced-again.html
Joel Shore churns away, but only succeeds in convincing himself.
Sort of like a cargo cultist busily carving up new planes to keep that faith alive.
Skeptics may be outliers, but usually – and especially in the case of AGW- outliers showing the way to truth and reason.
The batting average of apocalyptic cult thinking like AGW is .000.
Not one AGW promoter has shown any reasonable explanation of why their apocalyptic prophecies are going to do any better.
Joel Shore says:
“There are people here who have noted that science is not decided by voting but by evidence and I tend to agree with that.”
That’s a good tendency. If Joel keeps working on it, he might eventually understand that the empirical evidence is all that matters in science.
In the case of the APS Council, they veered away from science and into political advocacy. That’s what is causing their current problems.
Joel made a statement that shows his mind is made up and closed tight: “I have spent A LOT of time going through Smokey’s charts and explaining to him in detail what is scientifically wrong with them or the conclusion that he draws from them. It doesn’t do any good.”
I’ve linked to literally hundreds of different charts and graphs here, from numerous different authorities, but Joel Shore has insisted that each and every one of them is wrong. There is not one chart I’ve linked to that Joel Shore can bring himself to admit is accurate. Not a single one; they’re all wrong, no matter where the data came from. GISS? NOAA? HadCRU? It doesn’t matter, they’re all wrong. What are the odds, eh?
Joel Shore’s typical response is to complain about the starting point of a graph, or the time frame covered. When someone disparages literally everything another poster says or links to, it must be chalked up to a case of cognitive dissonance. Joel’s mind is made up, and when confronted with facts, he responds with emotion.
If it were not for psychological projection, Joel wouldn’t have much to say: “…those who are not so dead-set against the science because of their political or philosophical views that they are not convinceable.” Um-m… who is it again that’s not ‘convincible’? I’d like Joel to name one person here who’s been convinced, in hundreds of posts, to buy into his CO2=catastrophic man-made global warming conjecture.
As I made clear in my post @13:48:16, the problem is that the alarmist contingent has failed to provide the necessary empirical evidence to convince scientific skeptics [which are the only honest scientists] that their CO2=CAGW conjecture holds water. It doesn’t, and it will continue to be untenable so long as the alarmist crowd refuses to make their data transparent. By hiding their data and methodologies they are trying to sell everyone a pig in a poke, and Joel Shore’s response is to get angry and upset when skeptics don’t roll over and agree with his emotion-based belief system.
Kleppner also points out that the call for change came from a small minority of the APS’s 47,000 members. “This is certainly not a majority opinion,” he says. “Most other physicists have come to a different conclusion looking at the same evidence.”
160 called for a change. A commitee of 6 rejected it. THAT is certainly not a majority decision.
Joel Shore: “That is pretty much what I do here, isn’t it? But, it is not at all realistic for me to believe that I can convince all “outliers”.”
As per usual, you evaded the question.
I wasn’t asking about those “on here.” (Though there are plenty of heavy-hitters here).
I am talking about 160 who signed the petition. The list of Who’s Who Department Chair Physicists and what not.
YOU and them, in the same room.
You, as a scientist, are obligated to make sense of these 160 outlying sets of raw, “rogue” data.
It’s easy to tow the party line, Joel.
It’s difficult to put one’s career, reputation, and funding-source on the line and sign one’s john hancock and say “Hell no.”
You have to make sense of that data.
And you aren’t because you can’t.
It is process called “cognitive dissonance” and it gets the best of us, and is endemic to our species.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey: “By hiding their data and methodologies they are trying to sell everyone a pig in a poke, and Joel Shore’s response is to get angry and upset when skeptics don’t roll over and agree with his emotion-based belief system.”
And it really IS a belief system.
It certainly is something….but it is NOT science.
Soon, very soon, it will be relegated to the halls of junk science.
And long, LONG after the junk science has been shelved to that sad and embarrassing chapter in human history…psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who specialize in scientific minds and group-think phenomena…will be studying this well into the next Ice Age.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
******
savethesharks (21:32:38) :
I think its your browser, _Jim.
I apply the italics exactly where I want them: on the quotes.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
******
O/T Firefox works fine. That is a problem with IE 8.0
Ron de Haan says:
I don’t know. Without knowing the details of how the AGU meeting is organized, this sounds pretty much like a manufactured controversy. Noone is being silenced. It sounds like all of the papers will be presented…and a large group of them will be in one session. Others will be in other sessions in the conference where the conference organizers thought that they fit better.
To be honest, if these “skeptics” really want to talk to fellow scientists beyond themselves, they might do better to have their papers spread out in the conference. Chances are that when all grouped in one session, they will pretty much be talking to each other.
Smokey says:
Or, alternatively, it could be that you like to pull almost all of your graphs from junk-science sites like ICECAP. It is not like you are linking to graphs from peer-reviewed sources.
At any rate, I don’t think I have objected to every single graph. Occasionally, you have linked to a reasonable graph but I have explained how it doesn’t really show what you presumably think that it shows.
Joel Shore says:
“…it could be that you like to pull almost all of your graphs from junk-science sites like ICECAP.”
1. ICECAP is one of numerous sources that I get the graphs from that I post. As I’ve pointed out, graphs from NOAA, GISS, HadCRUT and many other sources have been posted. They seem to be acceptable to others, just not to those suffering from CD.
2. Joe D’Aleo has forgotten more about the climate than you will ever learn. Labeling his site as “junk science” is purely ad hominem, and typical of alarmists’ arguments.
3. Putting quotations around the word skeptics is an attempt to marginalize those who make the Scientific Method work.
4. Ducking the repeated point that the alarmist contingent has failed to provide the necessary empirical evidence to convince scientific skeptics [which are the only honest scientists] that their CO2=CAGW conjecture is valid, and always changing the subject, is a tactic used by those who have no reasonable answer.
5. And constantly ducking the fact that lots of the big names in the alarmist peer review crowd have been discredited for refusing to provide their raw data and methods is not surprising. They are hiding that information for one reason: if they made everything transparent, their CO2=CAGW hypothesis would be falsified.
I will be convinced that CO2 will lead to climate catastrophe when real, falsifiable, testable evidence is provided that measures the temperature change resulting from a specified increase in CO2. Alarmists claim that rising CO2 will cause runaway global warming. Show us, empirically. Until that happens, I am skeptical of the impotent word games that form the basis for the AGW hypothesis.
Smokey says:
Really? You have posted a lot of graphs and it may be true that a few of them came from the sources that you mentioned but I certainly don’t recall them. Hint: A graph from ICECAP that takes HadCRUT data and replots it in a way where it has cherry-picked the time period that is used and perhaps have overlaid a plot of CO2 rise scaled in a very deceptive way does not constitute a graph from HadCRUT.
Whatever. Here is a graph that you have showed a lot from that site: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2MSU.jpg Even leaving aside the issue of why he started in in 1997 and how it would look if he started it earlier (or why he chose the UAH MSU data in particular), why did D’Aleo (or whoever produced it) choose to scale the CO2 axis so that the rise in CO2 over a 10-year period corresponds to a rise of about 0.65-0.7 C on the temperature axis? Does D’Aleo honestly believe that the IPCC is predicting decadal temperature rises of that magnitude? It would not be hard to look up the IPCC AR4 Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers and see that they say, “For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios.” [If you want to go with a prediction made before most of the data shown, one could also go with the IPCC TAR Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers prediction that “anthropogenic warming is likely to lie in the range of 0.1 to 0.2°C per decade over the next few decades under the IS92a scenario.”] The only problem would be that if one adjusted the scaling of the CO2 axis in that graph accordingly, it wouldn’t really produce the “desired” effect.
I would argue that the more charitable interpretation of this graph is that D’Aleo doesn’t know what he is talking about. I will leave it to you to infer what the less charitable interpretation would be! In either case, it really makes me wonder why anybody, let alone someone who calls himself a “skeptic”, would ever trust D’Aleo again on anything. Yet, you not only continue to show graphs from his cite in general, you even show this particular graph (or ones very much like it) after the problem with it has been explained to you!
I am sorry, but calling oneself a skeptic does not make one a skeptic.
Joel Shore:
“You have posted a lot of graphs and it may be true that a few of them came from the sources that you mentioned but I certainly don’t recall them.”
Isn’t that convenient? Not only does blaming a bad memory take Joel off the hook, but the whole post is a red herring, trying to avoid my concluding comment:
Since Joel Shore is incapable of providing the empirical evidence measuring the amount of warming due to human emissions, he makes a red herring of graph provenance the issue. That’s what happens when an alarmist is cornered. So, here are a few non-ICECAP graphs that I’ve posted over the past year or so:
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Not one from ICECAP. Got lots more, too. They all say the same thing one way or another: there is no credible basis for climate alarmism.