By Harold Ambler
A new editorial in Nature is startling for what it reveals, especially the fact Paul Ehrlich is a go-to figure about how hard scientists have it when it comes to media access.
Ehrlich is an individual who became an international celebrity by spinning one frightening story after another (about the death of the oceans, for one thing) who maintains, with a straight face, that he and his fellow scientists have an unfair disadvantage in communicating their side of the climate debate.
He is quoted by Nature as saying, regarding the aftermath of Climategate and the fact that skeptic scientists are finally getting a hearing,:
“Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do.”
People often forget: Goliath, right before the end, sensed that something was amiss.
For, ironically, among the most pervasive myths attending global warming is the one pitching David against Goliath, in which those touting the risks of damaging climate change are cast as David and Big Oil is Goliath.
The story requires observers to ignore the facts: Media, most scientists, and governments the world over have spent and received so much money on their version of events that they have collectively become Goliath. Observers must ignore, too, the reality that skeptic scientists maintain their intellectual freedom at significant risk. Funding routinely dries up; tenure is denied them; ad hominem attacks of the most vicious variety are launched against them from the Ivory Tower of academia, from the studios of multi-billion dollar news organizations, and from the bully pulpit of government.
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“Everyone is scared shirtless, but they don’t know what to do.”
I submit we’ve seen a parallel to all this before so let me expound.
Remember the problem with asbestos? What took it out of production and use? Was it science? No. Was it activist rallies? No. Was it a mass mailing campaign? No. (Certainly that was before the Internet was a big factor, so nix that).
Asbestos was blindsided by something rather obtuse—market analysts rated companies with asbestos mines so low that their share prices tanked and those companies couldn’t get rid of their asbestos holdings fast enough. (For most, the “bottom line” contribution from asbestos was negligible anyway; shutting them down was the preferred solution.)
Like asbestos, AGW will collapse but not because of better science; it won’t come directly from blog pressure; and Gore’s naked caricature appearing on the cover of some news magazine won’t cause the collapse, either.
These will help, but like asbestos, AGW will collapse because of risk estimation:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=526842
George E Smith
“Exactly how CO2 gathers up surface emitted thermal energy (we’re pretty sure it does (most of us)); it really doesn’t have much result on the bottom line, compared to the heavy hitter H2O vapor/H2O liquid/H2O solid; aka clouds.”
Anthropogenic Global Warming depends and rests entirely on one single premise.
That “greenhouse gases” alone (at no more than 1% of all the atmospheric gases) are responsible for all atmospheric temperature.
The assumption requires that oxygen and nitrogen (at 99% of all atmospheric gases) absorb no heat whatsoever.
It also requires that CO2 (0.0385% of atmospheric gases) is the primary driver of temperature in the atmosphere and that at a certain temperature, a positive feedback loop involving water vapour becomes activated by CO2 warming.
So to settle AGW debate should be and oddly is, a very simple and straight forward thing to do.
If it is possible to show that this premise is false then AGW is debunked.
Firstly we must ask, is it possible for the latent/absorbed heat of one substance at 0.0385% of the entire atmosphere, or even several substances at no more than 1%, to be responsible for the assumed, estimated atmospheric temperature of 33º C ?
Secondly, is it really at all possible that oxygen and nitrogen are, as originally claimed by John Tyndall and now maintained by the so called climatologists and AGW proponents, “transparent to radiant heat” ?
Thirdly is it possible to answer point one and two with simple reproducible experiments ?
The answers are NO, NO, and YES respectively.
We can resolve the first question with a simple thought experiment as follows:
Is it possible to heat one liter of fluid by 33º C, be it gas or liquid, with one centiliter (1% of 1 liter) with boiling water or steam ?
Answer, a resounding NO.
The second question can be answered just as easily:
How does ordinary air (20% oxygen and 79% nitrogen) compare to pure CO2 with regards to heat absorption ?
The answer can be found here: “AGW Debunked for £3.50”,
and is further verified here: “The Heat Capacity of gases”,
The only conclusion you can draw from this, is that not only is AGW a fraud but clearly so too is the so called greenhouse effect.
@ur momisugly John R Judge: “Three things I have learned from the AGW controversy:
1. You can trust science but you can’t trust “scientists”.
2. If a scientist says, “Trust me”; don’t.
3. Trust, but verify.”
Not quite. (Real) science does not rely on, and never has relied on, “trust.” It relies on verifiable data and verifiable facts. If anything, one might say that good science relies on a healthy DIStrust. Or “scepticism,” if you will.
I think this article would be more convincing if it didn’t refer to ancient myths.
“Paul Ehrlich is a go-to figure.”
Why? What has Ehrlich ever gotten right? I’d love to know. So, I think do a lot of other mere mortals.
I imagine that the next IPCC reports will be about 42% fewer pages. And it’ll be vetted thoroughly by sceptics. The “street fight” has just begun.
Interesting that Nature attempts to co-opt Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” title. They stumble badly. For example in their closing paragraph, Nature states:
“Scientists… can and must continue to inform policy-makers about the underlying science and the potential consequences of policy decisions — while making sure they are not bested in the court of public opinion.”
Herein lies yet another train wreck for the IPCC and “science” orthodoxy. They still think they’re in politics. “Potential consequences of policy decisions…” speaks to a deep psychological need to control. A need to control the “science,” the decision makers, the perception of decision makers and the general public. This is the outdated, dysfunctional thinking of failed propagandists.
What is demonstrated by the plunging AGW polls is this deep need has been taken away. Alarmists (the few there really are) are indeed scared “sh*tless” because they have failed badly and are now about to be put on trial for those failures. Have we yet one “scientist” outside the hockey team who steps forward with empirical proof of CAGW?? No. We have only faceless, bodiless statements from institutions. These institutions will collapse with the AGW agenda unless some brave souls come forward and challenge the orthodoxy.
Meanwhile, the hits just keep on coming; and will continue until the tarnished zealots of climate cry UNCLE.
I can see one good reason for Paul Ehrlich espousing AGW.
All the mitigation strategies will tend to bring about his previous predictions of millions dying, life expectancy of 40 years etc. He can just say he got the timing wrong.
DaveE.
The Nature editorial says:
“Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it’s only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant.”
—
As a scientist who has worked in this field for over 25 years, I am offended! MY real goal is to glean the scientific facts….if, in fact, the accumulation of manmade compounds in the atmosphere is proven to be deleterious, I can accept that fact and work with others towards a solution. The Montreal Protocol and controls over CFCs was a tremendous example.
However, I am NOT willing to eat any B.S. that these folks care to shovel at me! And, I don’t care to be characterized as a “global-warming denier” either, I’m a research firmly grounded in traditional scientific method.
This stinks.
Is Paul Ehrlich still alive?
I thought he got eaten during the great worldwide starvation in 1984.
There seems to be a stage in the collapse of the authority of a ruling hegenomy where there is this crisis-of-confidence panic, and the oppressor starts to identify with the oppressed. Goliath feels vulnerable for the first time and so thinks he’s David.
And then he starts saying things like: the poorly informed public debate often leaves one wondering whether science has any role at all.
Yeah, David that’s right.
And Goliath-who-thinks-he’s-David keeps informing the public debate with his weird mantra like: For example, the IPCC error was originally caught by scientists, not sceptics.
And it’s not just that ‘scientists’ and ‘sceptics’ are mutually exclusive categories here, but that all the evidence suggests that the lie of melt-by-2035 was known to everyone involved, including the (anti-sceptic) scientist authors and the (sceptical) scientist reviewers, before publication. So again, yeah, David that’s right.
I have to keep reminding myself that I am reading yet another editorial in Nature — that this is not just about one phoney branch of science science going down — the rot is in the trunk, root and branch, at the core. This Goliath, now clutching his eye and wailing, is not some timely passing hero like the Hockey Team or the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, no, this is the whole Science Establishment.
Paul Ehrlich was awarded the Heineken prize in 1998:
“…Paul Ehrlich is an outstanding ecologist and visionary scientist….”
Read the laudatio at:
http://www.knaw.nl/cfdata/heineken/laureates_detail.cfm?winnaar__id=47
Makes you think the judges were drunk…
One would think that Paul Ehrlich said everything that could be said but this would not be true. He will massage the words, invert the phrases, hide the facts, and generate an incline of outrageous proportions (a hockey stick) out of thin air. The man is a genius. No wonder he’s enjoyng such popularity and reward. It would not be unreasonable to imagine that one day, perhaps sooner than we’d care to think, this great scientific mind will be nominated to replace that Einstein of our modern world, the one, the only, Rajendra Pachauri.
Of course ‘Nature’ will no longer be the same or at least we can hope not. What is life and ‘Nature’ without hope?
“Everyone is scared s***less, but they don’t know what to do.”
Scared? I can understand them being disappointed and even angry that their work is being countered but scared? That sounds more like an emotion that you would experience if you were doing something wrong and it looks like you were found out. Adulterers say they’re sorry for the affair, but most likely it’s just sorry they were caught. I doubt these people are scared for humanity, more likely scared for their own future.
Christoph @ur momisugly 13:45:51
The trouble with people like you is you don’t recognize a story with a moral point to it.
===============
lichanos (08:59:10) :
I just went and read again I Samuel 17, and I don’t see how Goliath knew at all what was coming.
He had a premonition…
“Meanwhile, the Philistine, with his shield bearer in front of him, kept coming closer to David. He looked David over and saw that he was only a boy, ruddy and handsome, and he despised him. He said to David, ‘Am I a dog, that you come at me with hockey sticks?‘ ”
*koff*
New translation…
“”” Politicians cost lives (13:44:31) :
George E Smith
“Exactly how CO2 gathers up surface emitted thermal energy (we’re pretty sure it does (most of us)); it really doesn’t have much result on the bottom line, compared to the heavy hitter H2O vapor/H2O liquid/H2O solid; aka clouds.”
Anthropogenic Global Warming depends and rests entirely on one single premise.
That “greenhouse gases” alone (at no more than 1% of all the atmospheric gases) are responsible for all atmospheric temperature.
The assumption requires that oxygen and nitrogen (at 99% of all atmospheric gases) absorb no heat whatsoever.
It also requires that CO2 (0.0385% of atmospheric gases) is the primary driver of temperature in the atmosphere and that at a certain temperature, a positive feedback loop involving water vapour becomes activated by CO2 warming.
So to settle AGW debate should be and oddly is, a very simple and straight forward thing to do.
If it is possible to show that this premise is false then AGW is debunked.
Firstly we must ask, is it possible for the latent/absorbed heat of one substance at 0.0385% of the entire atmosphere, or even several substances at no more than 1%, to be responsible for the assumed, estimated atmospheric temperature of 33º C ?
Secondly, is it really at all possible that oxygen and nitrogen are, as originally claimed by John Tyndall and now maintained by the so called climatologists and AGW proponents, “transparent to radiant heat” ? “””
Well Pcl, let’s take a look at some of your concerns.
Right now, Anthony’s little climate gizmo, up on the left, says that CO2 is currently 388.33 ppm of the atmosphere (by volume) which means it is one CO2 molecule per 2575 total atmospheric molecules; but close enough to your 0.0385%. So you ask how such a small percentage of the atmosphere can be responsible for the “”” assumed, estimated atmospheric temperature of 33º C ? “”” not sure who is doing the assuming or the estimating; but most sources seem to put the number (mean) more like 15 deg C; and proxy data for the last 600 million years says that temperature has never ever been higher than 22 deg C; well only over that 600 million years.
So you seem to be saying that one CO2 molecule out of 2575 molecules couldn’t possibly be doing anything; well anything as drastic as “Greenhouse Effect” warming.
So what would you say if the “impurity” level was much less than 1 in 2575; like what if it was only one in 442,000 molecules; could an impurity level that low really do anything. Do you think your house tap water is that clean.
If you think an impurity level of 1 in 442,000 molecules couldn’t possibly do anything; then you should turn off your computer imediately; and immediately discard it in the trash; because it couldn’t possibly be working.
Your computer is chock full of materials made from ordinary sand; from which they extract a material that has 4.42 x 10^22 molecules per cubic cm in the material. It is rather high purity material; say one impurity atom/molecule out of 10 million, so it is 99.99999% pure. That should be clean enough for anybody.
But then they go and cruddy it up by deliberately stirring into it some foreign material impurities; typically about 10^17 molecules per cm^3, which comes out to one impurity moelcule in 442,000; so still very much cleaner, than either your tap water of the CO2 laden atmosphere.
Except if it wasn’t for those impurities they put in your computer; your computer would not work.
Neither will your cell phone, your Sony Walkman; your TV set; not even your car would work these days.
But you are so sure that one impurity atom in 2575 in the atmospehre couldn’t possibly do anything to heat the atmosphere.
You ask whether oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to “radiant heat”
Well now you have me bamboozled because I have no idea what that is. I do know that oxygen and particularly nitrogen are pretty transparent to “radiant energy”; but not to whatever that “heat” part is.
In fact, that once CO2 molecule that you sneer at happens to collect some of that radiant energy, and then uses it to “heat” the oxygen and nitrogen; which themselves rapidly pass it on all around the atmosphere.
So the radiant energy may just steam right on through the oxygen and nitrogen unscathed; but because of that miserably low one CO2 molecule out of 2575, those main gases can actually be heated quite well by some of that “radiant energy”, that is captured by the CO2.
So reject that if you like; but then why don’t you donate your non-workable computer to Goodwill so somebody else can try to get it working with its one impurity atom per 442,000. Well actually, it could be as high as one in 44,200; or even as low as one in 4.42 million; just depends on where you look in your non-functioning computer.
@ur momisugly CRS, Dr.P.H.
Thank you for being one of the (many) good guys. I have never doubted that most scientists out there still adhere to those age-old scientific principles, and that your good name is being tarnished by a relatively small few at the top who have the power and the influence (or are happy to have their strings pulled by such people). The Manns and the Joneses of this world, the ones who have sold out their scientific principles for (twisted) political ones – and for their pieces of silver – have lowered the respect of the Climate Scientist to that of the Politician.
But the truth always comes out eventually. All you need to do is stick to your principles (and I know you will), and when – in God knows how many years – this sorry era in scientific history has passed, you shall hold your head high.
Dave F (13:19:53) :
Anu (10:31:36) :
A good question. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive, so the point you are trying to make is really irrelevant, and somewhat distasteful.
————–
Do you have any proof that a belief in guardian angels does not correlate negatively with an understanding of science ? Strong correlation is much more important than “mutually exclusive”.
Science often provokes “distaste”:
http://www.myclassiclyrics.com/artist_biographies/Charles_Darwin_ape.jpg
And what is it called when you disparage an entire class of people based on a belief system?
Airport security ?
G.L. Alston (09:31:54) :
You say;
“Stupid, slow, sluggish, brute force Goliath will always lose to a smarter, tech equipped David. Isn’t that the real biblical lesson anyway? Progress and technology are symbiotes.”
I beg to differ. And I think the story of David and Goliath is very pertinent to consideration of the Editorial in Nature by Paul Ehrlich. Indeed, that Editorial and the reasons for it are directly analagous to the story of David and Goliath and the reasons for it.
Paul Ehrlich is not the first political spin-doctor, and he won’t be the last.
The story of David and Goliath is a fabrication or – to be precise – the Bible says it’s a fabrication. The Bible says there was a family of giant Philistine warriors from Gath and one, called Goliath, was so big “his spear was the size of a weaver’s beam”. But the boy David did not kill him. The Bible says (in 2 Samuel 21: 19) a man from Bethlehem by the name of Elhanan son of Jair Killed Goliath.
This poses the question as to the origin of the story of David and Goliath. The answer to that question cannot know for certain, but the obvious explanation is probably the right one, and it is as follows.
David ruled Israel as its king throughout his adult life. He was an exceptional war-lord who established the power and secured the territories of Israel. And through his son, Solomon, he established a dynasty that lasted for centuries. But, other than that, he was a poor king. David was a tyrant whose decisions were arbitrary and self-centered. An adulterer, he married Solomon’s mother having arranged the death of her first husband so he could. But with old age came weakness.
The elderly King David was rich with the plunder of many wars, and he was powerful because the king’s vengeance was feared. But in 1 Kings 1: 1 we are told that his strength and health failed with age. Belief in David’s invincibility needed to be nurtured if pretenders to the throne were to be dissuaded from trying to overthrow the old man.
What better warning about taking on a weakened old David than a story about how when weak, as a boy, David had defeated a giant that no other warrior dare face?
Compare that to the reason for the Nature Editorial.
The self-titled ‘Team’ has ruled climate “science” throughout their adult lives. They were funded and organised so they could and did obtain a power over the science publishing media that secured research funding towards their domain. They still hope their followers will control climate “science” in the future. But other than that they have been poor scientists. Their scientific methods have been arbitrary and self-centred. And their moral turpitude is demonstrated by their actions to destroy and defame others and to distort the peer review process so they could get what they wanted. But with Climategate has come weakness.
Their science has been lavishly funded by provision of large grants, and they have been powerful because their control of the peer review process was feared by other scientists. But their power has been severely reduced by Climategate, Mountaingate, Africagate, etc. Belief in the Team’s David’s invincibility needs to be nurtured if real scientists are to be dissuaded from trying to overthrow the weakened Team.
What better warning about taking on a weakened Team than a story about how the Team when weak, in the past, had defeated the giant force of Big Oil?
So, the lesson to be learned from the myth of David and Goliath is to recognise the true strengths and weaknesses of opponents, and to avoid being fooled by their spin. It is important to remember those lessons when considering the Editorial in Nature by Paul Ehrlich.
Richard
“Everyone is scared s***less,”:
Probably sums up the feeling of 1/3 of the U.S. Senate,
and all of the U.S. House of Representatives, that are up for election this November.
I wonder where they stand on catastrophic AGW ?
Reference the article in the’New Scientist’ which was quoted. I think that the opening lines indicate the inclination of the author:-
“Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota – have been told to teach alternatives to the scientific consensus on global warming. The moves appear to be allied to efforts to teach creationism in public schools.”
So, we anti-AGWers are now equated with the Creationist loonies!
This, imo, has got to be the most obnoxious thing about Big Doom “science”.
They’re always the “tiny voice of enlightened reason” to everyone elses apathetic, yet subconsciously ruffled attitudes. They think this true even though they have access to billions and billions of dollars, always have their views publicized, and seemingly can get any corporation to surrendur with but a single phone call. They think this true even though there’s many people in the world struggling in poverty, coming from cultures that have done so since anyone can remember, and many people in the developed world going broke even as their retirement date comes ever closer.
It’s the pinnacle of intellectual dishonesty that they keep playing this victim card, and at times I just wanna smack ’em one for it.
I can understand why they are scared. If AGW continues to crumble there will be about 20% of the jobs in climate science available in the future. 4 out of every 5 will be looking for a new job.
I have some Spotted Owls I’m letting go at rock bottom prices. They make wonderful pets.