(Is climate catastrophism losing its ‘politically correct’ grip?)
by Robert Bradley Jr. from masterresource.org
January 4, 2010
The times are changing in the wake of Climategate. And more is to come as the polluted science embedded in the email exchanges gets reviewed by talented amateurs and pros alike on the blogosphere (see Climate Audit, Roger Pielke Jr., and WattsUpWithThat, in particular).
Given time, the rethink will go mainstream. Scientists are truth seekers at heart, but an entrenched mainstream of climate scientists–so many of them friends and political allies–will need to be nudged out of their denialism.
Old voices are challenging their ‘mainstream’ colleagues, and new voices are coming forth. I have seen this clearly here in Houston (examples below), and I expect it is happening elsewhere.
Consider what Andy Revkin, the recently retired climate-change science writer at the New York Times, told the public editor at the Times regarding Climategate: “Our coverage, looked at in toto, has never bought the catastrophe conclusion and always aimed to examine the potential for both overstatement and understatement.”
Sounds like the Times will report both sides of the issue now, rather than just trumpet alarmism as it was prone to do in the past (remember William K. Stevens?). Joe Romm at Climate Progress (Center for American Progress) is furious at this development, but just maybe over-the-top Joe has himself to blame for getting Revkin and the like to want to report on both sides more than ever before. And Romm himself is now considered damaged goods by the Left, thanks to the four-part expose by the Breakthrough Institute.
Climategate, in short, is making quite a difference. But much more courage is needed.
Dr. Michelle Foss (University of Texas at Austin)
Consider Michelle Michot Foss, an internationally respected energy economist with the University of Texas at Austin who is past president of both the United States Energy Association and the International Associations for Energy Economics. Her December 8th letter to the New York Times read:
To the Editor:
Your editorial concludes, “It is also important not to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action, in Washington and in Copenhagen.”
Hold on a minute. It was precisely because “one set” of opinions has been driving climate politics that the whistleblowers, not hackers, published the evidence. And it is precisely because of the type of coverage that The New York Times and other mainstream news organizations are giving the whistleblowing incident that the integrity of both the scientific and journalistic communities is being threatened.
Honest questions have been raised and honest attempts have been made to shed light on questionable claims about climate science for decades. We need to push for greater disclosure, more scrutiny, better research and a halt in the action before we jump into policy and regulatory schemes that we will deeply regret.
Dr. Foss has kept her views somewhat under wraps given her university position, but Climategate was enough for her to go public in the above very public way. And she has received a number of emails of support–and some emails by her alarmist friends to the effect: ‘gosh Michelle, I agree with you on Climategate, but I thought you were one of us….’
To such critics, her answer can be: Climategate proves that alarmism is exaggerated, and most modest warming scenarios win the debate for adaptation over mitigation. Robert Murphy has made this point in a post very widely read among economists and entitled “Apologist Responses to Climategate Misconstrue Real Issues.”
I think that if some on the UT-Austin faculty were to try to silence her powerful voice, they would have a (climate) McCarthyism issue on their hands post Climategate. What a difference compared to several months ago!
In John Coleman’s talk on global warming,
http://tinyurl.com/yjmjdsk
John suggests the possibility of suing Al Gore for damages caused by his misinformation.
The question is whether Al Gore is simply a tool of the same group that now controls US Presidents?
Certainly Al Gore was involved, but I suspect that Al was a pawn – just as George Bush was a pawn when he decided to use US forces to police the world and invaded Iraq in violation of the US Constitution.
Nobody that I know ever voted to make the US a police force for the world.
Barack Obama is now moving our forces to another country, but US voters were not involved in that decision either.
The real culprits may be identified if Al Gore is sued for damages caused by his role in creating and distribution false information.
John Coleman’s lawyers probably have some idea if Mr. Gore is the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s instrument. Could that be the reason for their delay?
Whether or not they believe Al Gore is the primary perpetrator, a lawsuit would help us get to the bottom of an intriguing mess that involves leaders of many different countries and organizations, such as Nobel Laureates Dr. Rajendra K Pachauri of the UN’s IPCC, Former Vice-President Al Gore, Norway’s Nobel Prize Committee, NASA, NAS and literally armies of consensus scientists.”
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
good to hear about climategate again.
was beginning to think it’s “15 minutes” were used up.
probably our best weapon in the short term.
All greenies should be forced to grow all their food them selves (no animals allowed) and should not be allowed to import or buy or trade any other product for their subsistence – then they would quickly go extinct I think. The problem with the green movement is that they are so dependent on the rest of us to survive. E.g. how did they travel to Copenhagen? By swimming? because they would certainly not chop down a tree to build boats? They are all hypocrites in one way or the other.
JonesII (06:36:25) :
” “and most modest warming scenarios win the debate for adaptation over mitigation..”
Still believing in “modest warming” while surrounded or interred by snow and ice?”
The advantage of adaptation is that it will help whether there is modest warming or not and pushing an adaptation agenda is still possible for people who are too embarrassed to admit that they drank the kool-aid. As a pragmatist, I am pushing this with most of my (warmist) colleagues to keep them talking – if you just tell them they are wrong, you lose a lot of the audience….. (trying to write a smiley face here – unsuccessfully for some reason!)
As an Alumni of the University of Texas, with my degree in Economics… I gotta say a big hoorah for my school!
Glad there’s something to celebrate after our loss last night, might be time to reply to those alumni newsletters I keep getting 😀
I’m trying to recall if I studied under Foss… I don’t think so but I can say that the Economics Department there is top notch with lots of good, realistic folks. Strangely enough for a very liberal college (a lot of people call it the Berkley of Texas), the Economics Department was very even-handed… unlike many of the other Departments, in particular Government/PoliSci and History.
Hook Em Dr. Foss!
An ongoing analysis of the Climategate emails from a scientific viewpoint can be found at http://www.assassinationscience.com/climategate/
This is an excellent article, as have been the majority of updated information this website provides on Climategate. However, I have just one minor issue with this sentence: “The times are changing in the wake of Climategate,” because you’re linking to Wikipedia from the keyword “Climategate.”
Personally, having followed the scandal closely since November, Wikipedia is the last source you should be linking to as a reference on Climategate. Instead, I’d recommend linking to Conservapedia’s Climategate page, here: http://conservapedia.com/Climategate
It’s a much better, factual source than what you’ll treat readers with if linking to Wikipedia’s page. It’s just a suggestion, but I’m sure if you read through Conservapedia’s article it’ll become clear why I’m making this recommendation. Hope this helps and keep up the great work!
time to come out then….
Here is Mohib Ebrahim’s climategate poster displayed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Strangely enough for a very liberal college (a lot of people call it the Berkley of Texas), the Economics Department was very even-handed… unlike many of the other Departments, in particular Government/PoliSci and History.
Sounds a lot like U. Chicago. My alma matter and #2 son’s school as well. He far eclipsed me. I dropped out. He graduated with honors.
Master Resource provides another exellent read . Of particular interest are the links in the right hand side bar – if you want to know how weasley JR is just check it out . Ditto for Erlich , Holdren and Krugman . While not of MR’s articles hold mt interest , I visit almost daily and recommend it to all regular readers of WUWT .
AdderW (08:10:06) :
Have you read Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six?
Your Greenies get off lightly.
AdderW (08:10:06) : wrote “… how did they travel …”
For one example see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/norfolk/8436054.stm
He should now be inline for the Darwin Award.
And all the while we sceptics point out the disgrace of Climategate and the barefaced lies put out by such con men as the CE of the UK Met Office and Al Gore. What do we hear from those that matter, eg. Barak Obama, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, David Cameron, Greg Clark (Ed Miliban’s shadow), and just about every other world leader and influential politician? “Global Warming is real,the science is settled, look for and punish the Climategate hacker/whistle blower, CO2 is a pollutant, tax carbon etc., etc.”
Until just one of the great and the good breaks ranks, I am afraid we are just p*****g in the wind.
The AGW narrative took 30 years to really get going and although it will probably die off more quickly than that, it will take a lot longer than some commentators seem to think, and it will take more than a few science wonks poring over some leaked emails to do it. This nonsense is so deeply embedded that politicians don’t even pause to think before automatically invoking AGW. For example, just today we see this BBC item: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/8447314.stm
The relevant snippet that made me laugh like a horse was our future Prime Minister referring to the current cold spell saying, “[…]we are going to see more extreme weather events and we have to prepare for them better.”
There is nothing warming can’t do, including causing unprecedentedly cold winters (like those of 1981, 1963, and 1947 and…oh, wait, those are precedents…)
This isn’t strictly on topic, but I have been wondering if anyone knows the literature well enough to confirm whether there exists a paper proving that the amount of CO2 that we currently have could cause the observed warming. If they’ve been working at this for 30 years or more they should be able to produce such a paper, right? The fact that we’re still having (or are now starting) a debate suggests that they do not have such a paper and are working other angles.
Thursday, January 7th, the U.K. Daily Telegraph carried the following short article:
BBC to review ‘biased’ science coverage claims
By Urmee Khan
The BBC Trust is to launch an investigation into allegations of bias in its science coverage.
The BBC has been criticised for its science reporting and accused of failing to cover the climate change debate objectively. The corporation came under fire in November, after Paul Hudson, a BBC weather presenter and climate change expert, admitted he knew about the leaked climate change emails from the University of East Anglia a month before the story broke. The messages indicated that researchers massaged figures to mask the fact that world temperatures have been declining.
Some critics have said the trust is not in a position to conduct the review because it is too close to the corporation. A trust spokesman said the review would be independent of the trust and would “take an in-depth look” at BBC science coverage.
End of Daily Telegraph article.
So we might be getting somewhere with the BBC as well. Keep complaining.
Makes me so proud of my father who has stuck to his guns for more than 30 years, despite all the lies and misinformation on the net about him. I had a customer tell me the other day that she looked my father up on the net and came to the conclusion that he was right about all of it. She recognized the ad homs and the fact that they did not attack the science, but attacked the man. She also went on to add that no one in her office (a very large firm) believed in global warming. She had heard nothing about climategate, so I suggested she google it, and also that she check WUWT?. It was all I said. She was bright enough to recognize and made mention of the fact that I tried in no way to convince her of my views, but was allowing her to make up her own mind. Gives me hope for sanity to prevail.
Got a link for that 4th part? I found only three.
There are four elements that come together to challenge the AGW hysteria
1. Climategate – the emails which revealed the biased mindset of the Michael Mann and his friends
2. Climategate – the data which revealed the biased tampering of the raw data to make the results to produce the “science” that underlies AGW hysteria.
3. The Weather – which is experienced by us all and simply does not match the pattern predicted by the AGW “pseudoscience”
4. IPPCgate – which is the corrupt politics at the top of the IPCC that is promoting the AGW hysteria to make money for Pachauri wearing his other hat as head of TERI. TERI helps banks to invest in green solutions and carbon trading. This is the newest element and it is due to receive a big boost this weekend when the Sunday Telegraph publishes Richard North’s allegation against Pachauri and his crowd.
Can I recommend any of you who enjoy jigsaws that you can have a lot of entertainment helping Richard look for the various pieces and help him fit it all together. We have threads where we all work as one team on eureferendum.blogspot.com and it is possible for you to make a contribution to ending the nightmare of AGW pseudoscience hysteria.
It is important not to let one set of intruders in an obscure office in the Watergate development undermine the important tasks ahead in the Nixon reelection.
Bill S. “This isn’t strictly on topic, but I have been wondering if anyone knows the literature well enough to confirm whether there exists a paper proving that the amount of CO2 that we currently have could cause the observed warming.”
No there isn’t and that’s why so many scientists and engineers are sceptics. The reasoning we have from the alarmists is that it’s getting warmer (we all agree, maybe the extent of the warming is in doubt but the world is getting warmer, it should be we’ve just left a little ice-age), the CO2 in the atmosphere is rising, we can find no other reason why it’s getting warmer, so it must be the CO2. That, Bill, isn’t science, it’s soothsaying.
Historical records cannot find any relationship between the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere and temperature, except of course CO2 rises around 1000 years after a temperature rise.
I’t scientific bunkum, they could indeed be correct but not scientifically it would still be soothsaying.
“Stefan (07:48:00) :
[…]
I guess that there are also other types, but they’re in a small minority. There are some true environmentalists who don’t care whether something involves high technology or not, whether it involves eating more meat or learning to meditate, but who just want whatever works. But I’m guessing they’re kinda a minority. Still, as greenie culture is 50 years old already, that minority will grow over time.”
Natural selection. The vegans will always have a tough time reproducing.
The basic radiative precept of AGW is a strictly theoretical notion not subject to experiment. Thus “climatologists” had only two options, neither of which is science:
(1) build computer models to attempt to simulate the world climate system and see if they produce warming; (2) examine huge amounts of global temperature data and try to tease a trend out of the noise.
I’ve constructed complex computer models and know full well that I can get any result I want; that’s just what the climatologists did. They started with the conclusion that there was warming and tweaked the models until they agreed. They also used novel (to say the least) methodologies to produce historical temperatures that conflict with history. Did they know that they were no longer doing science? Yes, they obviously did, based on their deliberate subversion of the peer review process and their vilification of everyone who disagreed. They HAD to do this, since they knew their results were non-scientific, would never stand up to full scrutiny, and conflated correlation with causation. The result is Climategate. Science is dead; let us never forget who killed it.
Roger (07:46:11) :
Henry Chance
Three attempts to measure the average temperature of a small triangle of England over a six/seven day period produce a discrepancy of -1.5C and yet we are asked to believe that they can measure the whole globe over a 100 year period and produce an irrefutable temperature rise of 0.7C
How can this be?
Well, the odd one out is the Hadley Centre, employing 200 persons in Exeter and funded by our apostolic warmist government through departments DEFRA and the Ministry of Defence.
Known in the ‘trade’ as DEFRA and blindra