IOP issued a no holds barred statement on Climategate to the UK Parliamentary Committee.
Some criticism ensued. Now IOP fires back:
Concerns raised over Institute of Physics climate submission
A statement submitted by the Institute of Physics (IOP) to a parliamentary inquiry on climate change continues to draw criticism, with one senior physicist saying that it is “not worthy” of the organization. Others have complained that the statement appears to play into the hands of climate “sceptics”, as it criticizes scientists for withholding climate data when requested using the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. The IOP, which owns the company that publishes physicsworld.com, has responded by making it clear that it believes in man-made climate change and that its submission was criticizing instead the practices of the climate scientists at the centre of the inquiry.
The IOP’s submission was sent last month to a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry into the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The inquiry is investigating the alleged hacking of CRU servers, which resulted in hundreds of private e-mails between researchers over the last 14 years being disclosed online last November. The inquiry solicited responses about what possible implications the e-mail disclosures might have for the integrity of scientific research and whether the scope of a separate independent inquiry – led by Muir Russell, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow – into the CRU’s practices is adequate.
Some of the e-mails reveal that CRU director Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from the post until the Russell review is published, withheld data from being released even after freedom-of-information requests. One particular e-mail sent by Jones on 16 November 1999 caused a media furore when it was revealed that he wrote “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
The [IOP’s] evidence is both misinformed and misguided Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam University
“Mike’s Nature trick” refers to a paper published in the journal Nature (392 779) in 1998 by Michael Mann from Pennsylvania State University, Raymond Bradley from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona. In the paper, the researchers sought to estimate how the mean temperature of the northern hemisphere has changed over the past millennium by combining various “proxy” temperature records, such as the diameter of tree rings and the presence of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in ice cores, with thermometer temperature measurements.
[We] focused on the need to maintain the integrity, openness and unbiased nature of the scientific process IOP statement
The resulting “hockey stick” plot shows a relatively flat, but fluctuating, temperature for more than 900 years, from A D 1000 onwards (the shaft of the hockey stick) that then rises suddenly in the past 100 years (the blade). The hockey-stick graph, which is widely considered as a valid result in the climate-research community, was later included into the third assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.
The “trick”, as mentioned by Jones in one of his e-mails to Mann, Bradley and Hughes, is a statistical method that is widely accepted in the climate community and is applied to proxy measurements in the years since 1960. It deals with the problem that some tree rings in certain parts of the world have stopped getting bigger since that time, when they ought to have been increasing in size if the world is warming. According to physicist Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and a blogger for realclimate.org, Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming.
However, sceptics of man-made climate change jumped on the phrase used by Jones saying that he and the CRU were hiding temperature decreases in their data and using certain sections of the full data set that most support the conclusions they want to report.
Under fire
The IOP’s submission to the inquiry, which was sent on 10 February following approval by the Institute’s Science Board, says that the disclosed e-mails from the CRU threaten the “integrity of scientific research in this field”. The submission argues that the integrity of the scientific process should not have to depend on appeals to freedom-of-information legislation and says that refusals to comply with such requests harm “honourable scientific traditions”. It also states that the possibility that only a part of the raw data set was included in Jones’ temperature reconstructions was “evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information”.
Arnold Wolfendale, who was president of the IOP from 1994 to 1996, says that the evidence is “not worthy” of the Institute and that the submission “further muddies the waters regarding global warming”. Oceanographer and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf from Potsdam University, Germany, has gone further, calling on the IOP to retract the statement from parliament. “I was taken aback when I first read it,” he says. “The evidence is both misinformed and misguided.” Rahmstorf, who is a board member of Environmental Research Letters (ERL), an open-access journal published by the IOP, wants the Institute to withdraw the evidence or clarify who wrote and reviewed it.
In a statement, the IOP says it regrets that its submission to the inquiry has become the focus of what it calls “extraordinary media hype” and that the evidence “has been interpreted by some individuals to imply that the IOP does not support the scientific evidence that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to global warming”. The Institute adds that it has long had a “clear” position on global warming, namely that “there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.
The Institute says that its evidence to the House of Commons committee was “like that of other learned societies, focused on the need to maintain the integrity, openness and unbiased nature of the scientific process. The key points it makes are ones to which we are deeply committed – that science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way, however much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information.”
There have also been concerns that the IOP’s submission appears to prejudge the outcome of the inquiry. “I consider it not only inappropriate but highly irresponsible for a body like the IOP to appear to presume a judgment on what is clearly not a simple issue without having the full facts and without presumably knowing the full context,” says atmospheric physicist John Houghton, who is currently president of the educational charity The John Ray Initiative and is a former director-general of the UK Meteorological Office. Houghton has also been the lead editor of three IPCC reports.
That view is echoed by Andy Russell, a climate researcher from the University of Manchester in the UK, who has written an open letter to the Institute about the submission. “As it stands, they have written a judgment rather than an evidence statement,” he says. Russell calls on the Institute to retract its evidence and points to a statement by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) that, he says, essentially makes the same points as the IOP but in what he calls a much more diplomatic way. One statement in the RSC’s submission says, for example, that “a lack of willingness to disseminate scientific information may infer that the scientific results or methods used are not robust enough to face scrutiny, even if this conjecture is not well founded”.
Process issues
Benestad, however, does not think that the Institute should retract the evidence to the inquiry, although he wants more transparency about how it submitted the evidence. “I thought the evidence sent the wrong message. Transparency should be the same for all sciences and not just single out climate change,” says Benestad. “Regarding being more open about how the submission was written, the IOP should practise what it preaches and say how this was submitted.” He wants it to be made clear who specifically wrote the document, as well as who independently checked it before it was submitted.
In its statement, the Institute says that the evidence submitted to parliament followed “the process we always use for agreeing documents of this kind”, noting that it submits 40 to 50 evidence statements to parliamentary inquiries per year. “We asked the energy sub-group of our Science Board to prepare the evidence, based on its analysis of material that is in the public domain following the hacking of the CRU e-mails last year,” says the IOP. “The draft was circulated to the Science Board, which is a formal committee of the Institute with delegated authority from its trustees to oversee its policy work, and approved. However, we are already reviewing our consultation process for preparing policy submissions, and the comments we have received on this submission reinforce the need to make sure our procedures are as robust as possible.”
The Institute also says it “strongly rebuts” accusations of “being overly influenced by one ‘climate-change sceptic’ on the energy sub-group, and then of a lack of openness about the authorship of our evidence”. It adds that “The individual in question had no significant influence on the preparation of the evidence. Responsibility for the evidence rests with our Science Board, whose members’ names are openly available on our website.”
The parliamentary inquiry came as the UK’s Meteorological Office published a review of the latest climate-change science. The report says it is “very likely” that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the climate to change and that the changes bear the “fingerprint” of human influence. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee is expected to publish its findings in late April.
About the author
Michael Banks is news editor of Physics World
================================
Story is here, comments are open
@A C Osborn (06:01:31) :
“RockyRoad (20:45:17) :
Do you mind, there are about 60 Million of us in the UK alone, why should be subjected to the SCAM just to show the rest of the world it doesn’t work”
Fully agree, A C Osborn!
Isn’t it bad enough to have the EU government, the Westminster (make believe) “government”, all the Scientific Institutions, the Charities & Churches, every major Political opposition party, the heir to the Throne, the big money financiers, virtually all the media and 99% of the rent seeking and corrupt academics all spouting this AGW crap at every turn (and conspiring to bleed us all white with food and energy price hikes to pay for it all)? Not to mention clowns like “Sir John” Houghton.
I certainly don’t want to be the kind of demonstration project @Franklyn Durilla Road suggests here!
Although it is clear that, actually, we’re not far from that point already.
Perhaps, as a compromise, there is a quicker and more painless way.
If all the coal-fired power station operators got their heads together and shut down for “essential maintenance” for a few days, everyone would very soon get a foretaste of what will inevitably happen in five years time when most of them have to shut down anyway, whilst all the 2,700 bird shredders up and down the land still only provide a percent or two (at best) of the power we need.
It wouldn’t take more than a day or two for the UK population to tire of shivering in the dark.
And I predict that a “full and frank exchange of views” would ensue, between the British public and the greenies and the pusilanimous and ignorant politicians who have enthusiastically sucked up the greenie propaganda and who are driving this whole farce.
Could be really interesting.
Go, on (the generators), give it a go! Just before the election would be a good time!
I liked the IOP’s submission but this is disappointing. On one hand the IOP supports the LHC and the search for repeatable evidence of the existence of the hypothesised Higgs Boson (as do a lot of physicists, arguments aside about particle physicists getting all the grants). On the other hand they ‘believe’ in man-made climate change as in that man is having an influence on climate. And yet where is the evidence of this and the characterisation of the processes that are supposed to cause it? I thought the IOP had more backbone. It seems the pro-AGW movement has the power to influence akin to the physical power of that big super truck from Knight Rider that Garth Knight drove all over KITT.
To kadaka:
I can empathise but show me the characterised curves as to how a tree ring can represent temperature and to what accuracy and then we can discuss reconstructions. Correlations are not enough. If they are showing a divergence we can’t know why until the growth behaviour of the tree is known. Until this point it’s anyone’s guess and we shouldn’t use them. This is Science 101 (as they say in the US). It amazes me how many people jump the gun.
Martin Brumby (09:49:00) :
LOVE IT!
Bring on the Anarchy.
*********************************
DirkH (06:34:12) :
And if a lot of people send similar FOI requests “in an organized way”, oh perish the thought, like the organized mass e mail campaigns where GreenPeace makes their members flood MPs with protest letters, well, wouldn’t all these necessarily similar FOI requests be answerable in one go?
You really seem to have problems with the FOI act. Or with accountability of climate science in general, but then, maybe you are a climate scientist yourself – they seem to have exactly the same problem.
******************
I have to agree with you there. Really, this is the computer age. All it would have taken is an organized computer. How hard is it to put a file on FTP?
Jordan says:
Well, none of what he says should be in dispute (and isn’t really within the scientific community) and yet there seem to be a lot of people here and elsewhere spouting all sorts of nonsense about the greenhouse effect violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the radiative effect of CO2 already being saturated, the observed rise in CO2 being natural, etc., etc.
It would be nice of the [snip] actually restricted their arguments to issues involving feedbacks and climate sensitivity, for which the evidence is generally against them but at least they have a prayer of being right, rather than arguing all of this other nonsense.
I agree with you that high climate sensitivity does not follow directly from the basic physics. However, I disagree that the arguments for positive feedbacks are “untested arguments”. For example, there has been lots of testing of the water vapor feedback using satellite measurements recently. And, there has been a lot of testing of climate sensitivity in general using paleoclimate data as well as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo and even just the general current mean climate state. Admittedly, it remains a difficult problem to narrow down what the climate sensitivity is, but there is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that it is likely in the range of ~2.0-4.5 C and very unlikely to be below 1.5 C.
Mike Haseler says:
I honestly don’t know where you guys come up with statements like this. Climate scientists in fact know this quite well. They understand both the shortwave cooling effects and longwave warming effects of clouds. It is true that modeling clouds is very difficult and thus that clouds remain a major source of uncertainty, but to claim that climate forecasters don’t know that clouds affect temperatures is just silly. I have a book sitting on my bookshelf entitled “Clouds in the Perturbed Climate System” that is from a recent conference that was held in Frankfurt in March 2008.
tarpon says:
There are very few climate scientists talking about “runaway positive feedback” as a likely occurrence in our current climate system. They are talking about positive feedbacks that amplify the warming but do not lead to instability. There is some confusion because what many climate scientists refer to as net positive feedback (i.e., feedbacks leading to a larger increase in temperature than is predicted due to the radiative effects of the change in CO2 alone) would not be called net positive feedback in control or systems theory. The question essentially comes down to whether you include the response of the climate system described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation (i.e., the increase in radiative emission as the planet warms due to the T^4 dependence of emission on temperature T) as a negative feedback or whether you consider the temperature change implied by this (in response to the radiative forcing due to increases in greenhouse gases) as the zeroth-order effect and then talk about amplification or reduction of this temperature change by the other feedbacks.
It boils down to a matter of definition and, while many climate scientists have adopted terminology that can create confusion, some do follow the more traditional systems theory definition and view the increased the S-B effect as a negative feedback, in which case the net feedbacks are negative even for high climate sensitivity (only going positive if there is a real runaway effect). For someone following this convention, see for example, “Global Physical Climatology” by Dennis Hartmann, Section 9.3: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Physical-Climatology-International-Geophysics/dp/0123285305
“Do you mind, there are about 60 Million of us in the UK alone, why should be subjected to the SCAM just to show the rest of the world it doesn’t work?”
I would say because in a democracy, people get the government they deserve. The best hope for Britain would be if it is forced to stare into the abyss of utter destruction; a desolate landscape of shuttered factories, endless dole queues and a currency pegged to the Zimbabwean dollar. Only then can the British rise up in Churchillian defiance and throw off the shackles of these eco fascists with the cry “Never again!”.
@ur momisugly Micky C (10:10:41) :
I have read up on the isotope dating techniques enough to reasonably trust them. However what I find interesting is not the actual numbers themselves, but what the numbers are trying to show, the shape of the data over the actual data.
For me it is the fixed point that gives it away. If for example it was shown that you couldn’t trust tree ring data less than twenty years old, possibly due to some unknown process that “fixes in place” the temperature data over that period, then you could trust data over twenty years old. The point of trust would move over time. Instead it is set at a certain time, the 1960’s, and does not change. Yet the problem has been know for over a decade. So the period of “unreliability” grows without a plausible explanation being presented for the trees.
Now if you wished to use tree ring data as proof of AGW, you should show what changed since the 1960’s to make the tree ring data unreliable from then onward. What are your answers? Temperatures and CO2 concentrations went up. Thus to say the trees are lying since the 1960’s you have to say that the trees don’t properly report higher temperatures and CO2 concentrations, thus allowing the possibility that temperatures and CO2 concentrations could have been higher in the past and the trees didn’t record such.
The trees are doing their level best to refute the alarmist claims. Mann etc have tried to manipulate the tree ring data, that work was discredited, and less-alarmist revisions have been issued. Currently with the divergence problem, using the tree ring data has become a bit of a liability. Discrediting it significantly would allow them to get rid of that albatross and more firmly root their case in “reliable” data like the adjusted temperature records. If you have solid scientific reasons to disavow the trees and feel compelled to do so “for the integrity of science” then go right ahead, we want honesty in science. But as things stand, I’m content to let the trees speak for themselves.
Nice article by Dr. Martin Hertzberg:
When a scientist becomes a fear-mongering propagandist
Please follow the IOP discussion here: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41965
It is clearly an advantage for us that climate “scientists” still believes, as is evident in the IOP discussion, that it it perfectly OK to use only the observations that support a certain point of view: at some point a critical mass of proffesional scientists and engineers will know about this attitude – and Climategate will explode!
Also, it is an advantage for us that Pachauri is still around and that the Climategate whitewash is conducted by Robbert Dijkgraaf, who recently broadcast on Dutch radio a complacent statement about the “consensus” on climate science.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100029630/climategate-the-ipccs-whitewash-review-is-the-agw-camps-biggest-mistake-yet/
Possibly we should focus even more on the science here at WUWT and let “the dark side of the force” organize and deliver the mistakes.
Joel Shore (10:59:40):
Prof Richard Lindzen, head of the Atmospheric Sciences department at MIT, gives a climate sensitivity of less than 1, in which case CO2 is a non-problem.
Who should we believe? You and the 100% political appointees at the IPCC? Or MIT’s chief climatologist?
“Joel Shore (10:59:40):
Admittedly, it remains a difficult problem to narrow down what the climate sensitivity is, but there is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that it is likely in the range of ~2.0-4.5 C and very unlikely to be below 1.5 C.”
“Evidence” probably means “we ran a computer simulation and it fell over completely a bit later than the others when we tuned the climate sensitivity parameter to 4.5″… only in nicer words.
Joel Shore (10:59:40) :
I guess we agree that John Mashey was wrong to suggest AGW is all a matter of basic physics. Failure to mention temperature amplification by positive feedback is a material omission.
There is a very good account of the basic issue by James Annan at climateaudit:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/02/james-annan-on-25-deg-c/
As James Annan stated, “a doubling of CO2 will result in a 1C warming at equilibrium, *if everything else in the atmosphere stays exactly the same*”. So neither of us view this part as controversial, but neither is it at the more alarming levels you mention.
Anan’s discussion then moved onto assertions of amplification by positive feedback. He simply uses a quotient to inflate the climate sensitivity, by considering possible numeric values for feedback factors.
Nothing at all convincing in that. And this type of approach leaves me wondering whether there is indeed a violation of conservation of energy in amplified climate sensitivity.
It is all very well talking about notional factors in an equation to get a particular result, but the real world has to comply with the laws of thermodynamics.
If we have a change in a physical variable, there must be a source of energy for that change to cause an amplified change in a physcial variable with the same units/dimensions.
To convincingly argue for amplification in climate sensitivity, we need a detailed account of all the physcical process involved, to state whether they merely dissipate energy (passive elements) or whether they add power to the system (active elements).
There must be at least one active element in the feedback loop for amplification. Without this, there is nothing to add power and therefore to gives us the conditions for amplification.
The mere addition of the output signal to the input does not do this. To argue that this can cause amplfication would be like suggesting that you can jump into a basket and lift yourself off the ground using the basket’s handle. Physical systems don’t work that way.
To repeat, if everything in the climate sensitivity loop is a passive physical process (purely energy dissipative), there is nothing in there to give us amplification.
I have not seen the question of feedback analysed in these terms and that’s why I tend to dimiss it as an “untested argument”. I’d be happy to receive any references which fully address this issue.
Smokey says:
You might try believing almost all of the other 99.99% of the world’s climate scientists who aren’t named Richard Lindzen…and every major scientific society who has made a statement on the issue. But, you already know that.
Deciding scientific issues by the fact that you can find one expert who will support your point of view is the sort of attitude that will lead to a new Dark Ages where we ignore science in favor of own political and ideological preconceptions.
Jordan: The fact that you think that there is “a violation of conservation of energy in amplified climate sensitivity” shows that you do not understand the concept of feedback loops outside a very narrow engineering space. In the climate system, you have an open system with huge energy input from the sun. All that is necessary is for changes to occur that retain a little bit more of this energy. Examples are increased water vapor and the resulting decrease in infrared radiation escaping back into space or reduced ice / snow and resulting albedo change that reduces the amount of incoming solar radiation reflected into space.
In fact, it is by enforcing conservation laws, and not just ignoring them, that climate scientists model the climate system.
Well, they can still get a grant from Chesterfield.*
(* “4 out of 5 Docs smoke Chesterfield.”)
Joel Shore (17:12:22),
You made the statement: “You might try believing almost all of the other 99.99% of the world’s climate scientists who aren’t named Richard Lindzen…”
I would guess that probably 100.0% of the world’s other climate scientists aren’t named Richard Lindzen.
Word games. You’re trying to imply that 99.99% of the world’s climate scientists agree with you. They don’t.
The ones employed by gov’t & universities know how to play the game, and they know what to say and when to keep their heads down.
But when they retire, suddenly lots of them speak their minds.
The Dark Ages were plagued and abetted by superstition, which has everything in common with the CO2=CAGW scare.
Woo-woo, run, it’s “carbon!” Call the IPCC Exorcist!
Joel Shore: “Deciding scientific issues by the fact that you can find one expert who will support your point of view is the sort of attitude that will lead to a new Dark Ages where we ignore science in favor of own political and ideological preconceptions.”
Ahh there is more than one expert Joel. As a matter of fact there are quite a few.
I would say that you are the pot calling the kettle black [on the Dark Ages oart especially] in trying to shut down anyone who dare calls into question the new pseudo-religion/pseudo-science of CAGW.
Welcome back. I was wondering where you were.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
correction [on the Dark Ages part especially].
Not sure what oart is….maybe like the oort cloud lol.
Joel Shore: “Deciding scientific issues by the fact that you can find one expert who will support your point of view is the sort of attitude that will lead to a new Dark Ages where we ignore science in favor of own political and ideological preconceptions.”
I now pronounce you, “Man and Wife “, Joel.
Joel Shore (17:18:26) : “The fact that you think that there is “a violation of conservation of energy in amplified climate sensitivity” shows that you do not understand the concept of feedback loops outside a very narrow engineering space.”
I asked for references Joel, and all you can come back with is a swipe at me and how much I might or might not understand feedback systems. That kind of reply isn’t going to persuade anybody – certainly not me.
I take it that you agree with me that there must be at least one active element in a feedback loop in order to give closed loop amplification. The reason I mentioned this is because you may wish to accept it as universally true, and independent of whetehr a physical system is open or closed.
You correctly observe there is supply of energy to the climate system from the sun. But this plain fact comes nowhere near demonstrating that anything in the climate acts as an active component. Until the case for an active response has been convincingly made, the default must be that the physical processes are purely passive (energy dissipative).
I have seen no demonstration that ice albedo change or water vapour produce an active response to CO2. This tend to be just loosely asserted and then leapt upon to get the required amplification by fiddling around with quotients and then surmising the values of numerical parameters in assumed mathematical models.
There is plenty of supposition and speculation in this subject, but substantive and convincing analysis is surprisingly short on the ground.
If you wish to assert amplification Joel, please provide the references to scholarly articles I requested. Argument about how you think it might work does not convincingly enforce conservation laws.
“Peter Taylor (14:35:57) :
The ‘hide the decline’ issue has a significance that is generally missed – the period of recent tree ring data also corresponds to a period of expanded instrumental coverage – and the overlap has to be used to calibrate the longer term tree-ring record back to 1000AD so that a graph of ‘global temperature’ back that far really compares like with like. It is easily forgotten that proxy data does not give an ‘absolute’ temperature – even for the region in which the trees are sampled.
The lack of correspondence between the two data sets in a significant period of the overlap, as found by Jones, is very important – and it is this fact which is ‘hidden’, not just the decline in the tree rings themselves. Mann’s methodology was already flawed – and the ‘trick’ of replacing the tree ring data was just another flaw – so Jones’s defence that this was a common ‘trick’ to pull is no defence at all.”
When I worked in the vital area of making car-parts (rather than the trivial business of deciding the future of the human race) I could predict with 100% certainty what the response would be if I had proposed to a customer that I perform vital measurements with a process that could not be calibrated to agree with my best available control data. The conversation would have been brief and would have suggested an immediate conjunction of fornication and travel.
Its a hoot reading Physics-World, the regular Physicist readers are getting a bit fed up with the religious repetitive contributions of the “consensus” advocates.
Who seem to think that if they repeat the same point endlessly to wear down the other contributors they must be correct.
Or are they trying to convince themselves!
Bryan (06:48:14) :
Its a hoot reading Physics-World, the regular Physicist readers are getting a bit fed up with the religious repetitive contributions of the “consensus” advocates.
Who seem to think that if they repeat the same point endlessly to wear down the other contributors they must be correct.
Or are they trying to convince themselves!
From another thread Smokey also noted :
R Gates simply ignores all the evidence that debunks his CAGW conjecture, and instead constructs his own mental world, like the UFO cultists in Dr Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails.
You can’t debunk the CAGW kind of Conspiracy Theory because its adherents simply won’t let it be debunked or truely scientifically falsified. It’s a mental process very similar to the infantile, “Whaaa, you can’t make me, whaaaa”, where the fact of the adherents’ right to believe whatever they want to makes the belief “true”.
But what these kind of Conspiracy Theorists also don’t seem to realize is that their “belief” is verbal nonsense because it states nothing factual, while still having the wording and grammatical form of a statement making a factual claim. It’s a “cargo cult” kind of statement – one having the form of a factual statement but without the actual substance or content which would make it a truely factual claim by allowing it to be checked it against the real world.
And it’s not like this way to confuse oneself and others by the misuse of words is new. For example, the process was well known, explained, and deconstructed in my Philosophy courses 45 years ago. Back then we were also noticing it mainly in religious speech where special, protected ways of knowing were then claimed to exist by the Religion’s adherents. People using this verbal trick were also seen [by Wittgenstein?] as essentially being “entranced” by words devoid of any factual content, and so the trick is useful in propaganda campaigns such as that of Climate Science’s CAGW.
No reference to the statement the IOP attributes to Rasmus can be found, by me , by google or by others. Unless someone comes foreward with a url, this will have to be regarded as a lie.
Please send the url to annieatbr@gmail.com
Thanks:
John
Jordan: I don’t really know what you are asking. You seem to be asking for someone to translate the climate system language into the control theory (or whatever) sort of language that you are familiar with. I think you need to find someone more familiar with the latter’s language to do so.
But from the point of view of basic physics of energy conservation, it is very simple. If you change the albedo of the earth by melting ice, for example, then more solar radiation is absorbed and the earth is then out of radiative balance (i.e., it is absorbing more radiation than it emits). The earth responds by warming until its emission of radiation increases enough that radiative balance is restored.