Well, now there will never be any question about whether Scripps is political or not. They even made up a graphic to go with the story here. When a prominent scientific organization allows a member to resort to name calling on an issue in an official communications on their website, it cheapens the whole organization.
This appears to be a response to John Coleman’s hour long video special. It was dated the same day as the video release, Jan 14th. Of course, when you read his website at richardsomerville.com you may come to understand that he may not be speaking for everyone there at Scripps. Here’s his page at Scripps. Perhaps the UCSD President might benefit from some communications about the use of his institute to label people with differing views on science.
A Response to Climate Change Denialism
Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, issued the following statement in response to a recent request to address claims recently made by climate change denialists:
1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. This is solid settled science. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example. We know this because we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of the sun, which we also measure.
2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.
3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted changes. Some changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case. Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.
4. The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many web sites and in many books. For example, natural climate change like ice ages is irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.
5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.
6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.
— Robert Monroe
Jan. 14, 2010
h/t to WUWT reader Skepshaka
There should be a law against scientists in denial of the truth. In the case of Richard Somerville he is telling blatant lies.
I laugh uproariously at most of the responders here. Such Free-enterprise slaves you do not even know you are campaigning against proven facts so that individual businessmen (who Are NOT you) can continue to make money hand over fist at the expense of the environment we live in.
When the Point of No return has been reached you can be sure that the Bush family and the Bill Gates of the world will be well looked after in shelters built by your tax money but completely off limits to you. You can be sure that they will have all the clean air to breath in filtered chambers but YOU will have to live a shortened lifespan in a sick world.
You can be sure that they will start wars as they try to grab onto the shrinking resource base from within those safe shelters but that YOU will be completely responsible for paying for that war via taxation and for sacrificing yourself and your loved ones in it. No soldier with the name of ‘Bush’ or ‘Clinton’ or ‘Gates’ or ‘Rothchilds’ will EVER be your trench partner. you are expected to die as you are nothing but cannon fodder to them and yet you campaign to make them stronger not weaker. You feed into their conspiracies and lies.
check out ‘Land use in the Himalayas’ and compare this info to the story recently about how the section in the IPCC report stating the melting rate of the himalayas glaciers was heavily exagerated and you can see where the deception is going.
[snip – a bit off color]
I don’t know who this guy is. My apologies if is he has some global or local credibility. His assessment reads as a rather out of date AGW press release. It sounds like a sort of pre-CRU universal AGW propaganda statement.
If he is trying to counter the recent allegations about station data manipulation, he has failed miserably. Actually, I felt rather sorry for the guy.
“Our predictions are coming true.”
Hm, which one?
“Robin (13:59:40) :
[…]
check out ‘Land use in the Himalayas’ and compare this info to the story recently about how the section in the IPCC report stating the melting rate of the himalayas glaciers was heavily exagerated and you can see where the deception is going.”
Oh come on Robin, you sound like a really smart guy, let us know. What’s with the Himalaya’s?
Robin, and I only snicker at the people that laugh “uproariously” at the responders. (Obviously being slaves to the state.)
I am astounded – totally gobsmacked actually – that he could not only write such a statement but – if he read it prior to publication – did not see that it read like a statement from Wikipaedia. As with other comments, I don’t even know where to start: frankly, this is like a 14 yr olds science report taken from press releases from WWF, PETA, Greenpeace and Wikipaedia – full of assertations and unfounded assumptions. I hasten to add that I am a schoolteacher and am familiar with such reports – I also do have a BSc and a MSc in geology.
Here is just one question for Mr Somerville. You said, ‘This is solid settled science. The world is warming . . “.
Pray explain the causes of the Younger Dryas Event. No? Thought not.
Johnhayte (12:44:09) :
“It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody.”
That is the part that gets me. If AGW is just some baseless cult, then it is an awfully big cult.
Naw, there are some cults that are bigger: Scientology, for example, according to adherents.com, is the 22nd largest religion in the world with about a half-million adherents. Somerville’s assertion, however, is just plain ignorant. There are a great many climate scientists who do NOT acept thew AGW hypothesis, and many more operating in specialized niches who accept the word of people like Hansen, Jones, Mann, Briffa et al. These people ARE conspirators and allied with a truly unsavory cabal of elitists and opportunists.
Reading that stuff I would think is clear this whole AGW thing is a large washmaschine for booth the brain and money. It has nothing to do with a science, it just plays that role in a completely other show of fraud and bribery. No wonder there it looks like the curtain just falls:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/sorry-but-this-stinks.html
just look at the TERI list of sponsors:
http://www.teriin.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43
I would think this people will see the global warming – they’ll find a hot seat everywhere.
“Schrodinger’s Cat (14:16:36) : ”
You’re alive?
Richard Somerville has clearly placed himself into the ranks of those who practice the “science of deception and half truths”. I don’t care how many letters of the alphabet follow your name as a signifier of credential. If you FAIL to be totally honest and truthful in science… you are not qualified.
1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science have been shattered. Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have proven the Hockey Stick a fraud. Measuring CO2 atop the world’s largest active volcano in the middle of the world’s largest temperature dependent, CO2 ladened, water sink is a supremely bad idea. How does science distinguish the CO2 molecules generated by man from those generated by Mauna Loa and the Pacific Ocean? Do they look for name tags?
2. 95% of all CO2 is generated by nature. 99.999% of all water vapor is generated by nature. Wv by a factor of 26 has more of a spectral absorption bandwidth and gw influence than does CO2, After adding the influences of N2O, CH4 and CFCs, it turns out nature is responsible for 99.72% of the GGE; Man only 0.28%.
3a. One tidal gauge in Hong Kong Harbor showing a 2.3 mm/yr sea level rise, situated on geology which is sinking is singly responsible for all this baloney of rising sea levels. Hundreds of tidal gauges around the world show no increase at all. The increases are only in computer projections and the minds of programmers. The data says otherwise.
3b. In general, glacial ice is melting below 1,500 feet. But above 1,500 feet, it is increasing. The all-important Mass Balance of all the world’s inventory of ice is growing, not shrinking.
4. During the last 200 years CO2 has been higher than today on two occassions: 1825 and 1942 (Beck 2007). 600 million years ago CO2 was 7,000 ppm, 18 times higher than today. If all the 4,000 Gt of known fossil fuel reserves were burned and added to the 750 Gt already in the atmosphere, the resulting logarithmic temperature increase would be a mere 1.5C. This would increase temperature from the present 14.5C to 15.9C. For the last 550 million years temperatures have held between 12C and 22C. There has been absolutely no relationship between CO2 and temperature for the last 550 million years. (Berner and Scotese). The worldwide temperature drop of 0.595C in 2008 erased all the temperature increases dating back to 1780.
, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
5. By “high standards of science” are we talking about Cllimategate?
6. The political management at the UN IPCC, national academies, and scientific societies may speak for their members, but do not necessarily represent the views of their members. I submit the majority of thinking adults from scientists to cab drivers know this manmade global warming is just that “Mann” made.
Too many scientists are grazing at the public trough of grant money and cannot stop themselves from eating. Other scientists are main-lining and cannot pull the tube out of their arms. It’s time for these charlatans to become clean and sober.
Contact:
Dr. Tony Haymet, Director
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Vice Chancellor – Marine Sciences, UC San Diego
thaymet@uscd.edu
858-534-2827
http://sio.ucsd.edu/Profile/thaymet
1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. This is solid settled science
What a ridiculous statement.
The world is warming….
It is so unfortunate for this man that he doesn’t look out his window.
While the Scripps credo supports the global warmers” Doctrine of Certainty, elsewhere on the Scripps website (“Global Warming: The Great Experiment on Planet Earth”) we can find the following:
Thus [carbon emissions are] an experiment whose course and outcome are uncertain. … We are passengers on a voyage into fog-shrouded uncharted waters. Some say, there are reefs ahead. Others say, there are none. The truth is, no one knows. [italics added]
So, apparently, the effects of global warming aren’t as certain as Scripps would like the public to believe.
asks if Somerville
David (09:55:16) :
JSinAZ (09:48:09) asks “[snip]? Has this guy never sat in the sun on a clear day??”. If he does, David (09:55:16) explains the fool’s pig ignorance. Geez those gases are hot!
The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.
Both sides of this issue could say this in their argument. It is ambiguous. But what is implied by Richard Somerville is the issue.
CO2 is a minor player in climate. Other factors are far more important and are the real climate controlling players. CO2 goes along for the ride with those other factors where ever they go, not vice-versa.
Robin
Are you Michael Mann in disguise?
I love his use of the “Appeal to Authority” argument.
Sadly, however, the Authority that Appeals to him is proving less credible day by day!
Another argument he makes is that there is nothing, other than CO2, that can be responsible for what is happening to our climate.
Wasn’t this the argument once used to burn witches.
“there was nothing wrong with that cow before it died! It must be witchcraft”
Wouldn’t it have been wiser to have actually looked at the data for sea-level rises, ice-melts and “unprecedented” temperature rises before you sharpened your quill and penned this puerile nonsense?
One day, you will look back at all of this, and you will cringe!
If the science is settled, surely there is no need for further research. Could save an awful lot of money, but would make a lot of research scientists redundant.
3. Our climate predictions are coming true.
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Richard Somerville, I will try to be polite, but you are sorely wrong in this point. Even a casual investigation would show most predictions of ‘manmade global warming’ are wrong.
Primarily you can check global temperature and manmade co2 production since 1998. The graphs of these two are heading in opposite directions not in the same direction as ‘manmade global warming’ predicts. That prediction is the foundation of AGW and that foundation does not exist.
Co2 controlling temperature correlates poorly.
Science has its own high standards
Yes, it is supposed to. That is why many are shocked by ClimateGate!
Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned.
That is true. That is why the Mann Hockey Stick graph has been exposed and abandoned by those who care about real science.