The ever sharp Bishop Hill blog writes:
While perusing some of the review comments to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, I came across the contributions of Andrew Lacis, a colleague of James Hansen’s at GISS. Lacis’s is not a name I’ve come across before but some of what he has to say about Chapter 9 of the IPCC’s report is simply breathtaking.
Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report – it’s the one where they decide that global warming is manmade. This is the one where the headlines are made.
Remember, this guy is mainstream, not a sceptic, and you may need to remind yourself of that fact several times as you read through his comment on the executive summary of the chapter:
There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.
I’m speechless. The chapter authors, however weren’t. This was their reply (all of it):
Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.
Simply astonishing. This is a consensus?
(h/t to WUWT reader Tom Mills)
UPDATE: There’s an update to the story at Dot Earth.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/does-an-old-climate-critique-still-hold-up/
16 commentsDiscover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
derek (16:02:05) :
How come alot of the reviewers completely missed the mistakes lacis found?
there are those who don’t want to find them
and there are those who wouldn’t understand the topic in order to find them
If true this article shows an example of how NASA suppresses papers by ‘non-conformist’ scientists :
‘A former NASA contractor whose theory demonstrating that the greenhouse effect is constant and self-regulating and that increases in human CO2 emissions are not the source of global warming is fighting an uphill battle to publish his controversial work.
Developed by prominent atmospheric physicist Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, the new theory is enormously significant because it demolishes the prevailing doctrine of anthropogenic greenhouse warming (AGW), which blames humans for pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and triggering runaway global warming that could eventually lead to catastrophic climate change.’
http://www.examiner.com/x-32936-Seminole-County-Environmental-News-Examiner~y2010m2d9-New-research-into-greenhouse-effect-challenges-theory-of-manmade-global-warming
The paper is extremely technical and not for the faint hearted! :
http://www.met.hu/idojaras/IDOJARAS_vol111_No1_01.pdf
For those who want a more understandable scientific explanation of the ideas :
http://www.landshape.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=introduction
Published in 2007 so it may have come and gone on this board. Sorry if it just ‘old hat’.
Saying in effect, ‘One gets inputs, finds bugs, cranks through and the science moves forward’ may fill in blank space on a page. But it answers nothing, refutes no prior conception. Crank through and move forward? First, the man faces poverty if he does anything other than blow smoke around his prior words. Words which were termed “old” by your so-called reporter. Naturally someone representing the trillion dollar climate industry put out a flowery explanation of how it couldn’t possibly be true, he really meant such and such. Look how many ridiculous errors have been found in the Nobel Prize winning document already, and no one has even gotten through the whole thing yet. This report has been out for years and no one from the great NY Times or Washington Post could be bothered to read it. It’s over.
davidmhoffer (16:57:32) :
The 12 Howler Monkeys
Is Bruce Willis in that?
MyersKL (21:29:54) :
“NASA should stick to space flight. It’s global warming alarmism is politicizing the agency”
>>>
..and changing the structure of their budget by redirecting funding from space to study climate change. Another causality of this AGW movement.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/climate-science-nasa-budget-100202.html
Will adjust data for bananas…
A3K takes his info from a Mr. Murphy from Toronto:
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/
Whenever I read the word “robust”, I think of Kama Sutra May in Return to Almora. She was quite robusty. And superb after meditation.
8th Howler Monkey (22:24:09) :
Will adjust data for bananas…
Deal. 5 bananas for Hockey Puck graph LOL
Considering the administrative assessment is basically the blue print for what they wanted to find, I guess they got what they wanted…
I always found it strange that the administrative brief was always finished prior to any science experiments being performed…
Cold Fusion was based on peer reviewed literature.
But there actually is something to cold fusion.
Inconceivable.
If the man says something that agrees with your preconceptions, he is “heroic” and “committed to the scientific method.” Yet if later he says something with which you disagree, he is doing it for the money.
You start from a conclusion, seize upon anything that supports your conclusion and discard everything that doesn’t fit. Isn’t that EXACTLY what you accuse “warmists” of doing?
Anthony, I think you should take a serious look at the material referenced by Anticlimactic (21:35:37) :
It sure sounds groundbreaking on so many levels! Maybe worth an independent post?
savethesharks (21:22:19) :
Smokey: “Mr Daly was quite a guy, no wonder Jones was thrilled about his demise.”
“Agreed.
And contemplations of suicide of the latter is evidence of either borderline or narcissistic personality disorder.”
Or guilt?
@A3K
“Why do feel it necessary to stoop so low with your words? Has it not sunk in yet that it was, precisely, this type of frothing abuse that fuelled the “’sceptical’” revolution?”
Indeed? It was precisely this type of “frothing abuse” from AGW fanatics that fuelled my trip into scepticism to find some measure of reason and sanity on the AGW question. I remember the first time I looked at surRealclimate (seeking, as a layman, unbiased information!). It was more like a medieval witch manual than science.
With you AGW guys, disagreement only results in abuse and/or dismissal, intolerance, bluster, threats, finger waving. At places like WUWT, reasonable views of ALL types get a hearing and I’ve yet to find any abuse except from characters like you. And don’t get me started on accountability …..
Has Dr. Lacis spoken publicly about his reservations over the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, if not, could he be persuaded to?
I find this comment by Andrew Lacis to be interesting:
“If it were not known for a fact that greenhouse gases had increased during the past century, it woud still have been possible to blame any climate change on long-term solar variability. After all, there really are no definitive measurements of potential solar luminosity changes earlier then several decades ago. But there is a a clear record of documented GHG increases, and the radiative consequences of these GHG changes (together with some inferred aerosol changes) fully account for the observed trends of global temperature increase.”
I find this interesting because it suggests that the effects of solar are not fully understood and that the long term sensitivity to solar may explain a greater portion of the 20th century warming then it is currently accredited with thus indicating a lower climate sensitivity to more recent forcings. Granted, it is obvious he does not believe this to be the case.
Steve Goddard
Ok. Steve. Now you’re scaring me.
You’re telling me that the President of the United States of America endorses razing cities to the ground and blowing up dams even if it means sabatoge? Where I come from that is lawlessness.
John
…jaw on floor…
The peer review process has been turned into tyranny by (likeminded, self-appointed, self-credentialing, self-serving, grant-monopolizing, gatekeeping) committee.
It’s always Marcia, Marcia (21:38:22)
The 12 Howler Monkeys
Is Bruce Willis in that?
I THINK that was just “12 Monkeys”.
If Bruce wants #12 I can choose another one….
The major point you made is clear enough it needs no review. On the way to the major point was the oddity “Remember, this guy is mainstream, not a sceptic, and you may need to remind yourself of that fact sev…”
I don’t understand your need to apologize in advance. “This guy” is an insider and now “this guy” is a whistle blower.
That false comparison of “mainstream” and “skeptic” should be put in the back of the word armory, at least with respect to AGW, where the qualifications of opponents are at least as good as those of the proponents.
Pete (04:55:23) :
Anthony, I think you should take a serious look at the material referenced by Anticlimactic (21:35:37) :
It sure sounds groundbreaking on so many levels! Maybe worth an independent post?
I believe there were several posts about Miskolczi on WUWT. For example, see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/26/debate-thread-miskolczi-semi-transparent-atmosphere-model/.
Critics in the AGW camp claimed Miskolczi made several fundamental mathematical errors and, in my opinion, presented a strong case. If Miskolczi issued a rebuttal, I never saw it.
Regarding cold fusion, please see:
http://lenr-canr.org
Responding to a few of the comments here: The cold fusion effect has been independently reproduced in hundreds of labs, in thousands of experimental runs. Roughly 3,500 papers describing these replications have been published, including hundreds in the peer-reviewed literature. The effect sometimes produces far more output heat than input energy, and with gas loading there is no input energy; it is all output. Cold fusion has produced far more energy than can be explained by chemical reactions. Devices weighing a few grams have produced up to 300 MJ, which is the amount of energy 7.5 kg of the best chemical fuel can produce. The upper limits are not known but it is likely that cold fusion can produce millions of times more energy than any chemical fuel. Operating temperatures and power density as high as the core of a fission reactor have been achieved, so if the reaction can be controlled it will become a practical source of energy.
Cold fusion has not been developed into a practical source of energy until now mainly because the research cannot be funded in the U.S. because of academic political opposition. This opposition is not a conspiracy; i.e., it is not secret or organized. It is openly practiced and unorganized. Opponents have published many books and articles in the mass media describing their views. See, for example, Huizenga or Park. There is more funding and mainstream support in China, Japan and Italy. In October 2009, a major cold fusion conference was sponsored by the ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies Energy and the Environment), the Italian Physical Society, the Italian Chemical Society and the National Research Council (CNR).
In November 2009, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a report on cold fusion calling for more funding in the U.S. You will find a copy at LENR-CANR.org.
Regarding the notion described here that cold fusion is mistaken or nonsense, that is ruled out. If an effect widely replicated at high signal to noise ratios could be mistaken, the scientific method itself would not work, and we would still be living in caves. A small number of experimentalists have sometimes been wrong, but thousands of scientists repeating an experiment thousands of times have never been wrong, and never will be.