I’m about to leave for ICCC4, which is predictably being billed as “denialpalooza” by our friends in alarmist world. Heh. Maybe smearapalooza might be a good label for their response.
This year, the conference is in Chicago, and it appears to be the biggest yet. I’ll try to have some on the scene reports posted when I can, but I’ve got a pretty full schedule.
I have a couple of posts set for auto insertion on schedule today, so my readers won’t be without new and interesting stories. New stories and moderation may be spotty the next 4 days. Volunteer moderators and guest authors, please help when you can.
I’ll be having dinner tonight with some very special people.
I hope that the restaurant won’t be so noisy that I’ll miss hearing most of the conversation. I look forward to seeing many friends there and at the conference.
I should note that Willis Eschenbach has been invited to make a presentation. Good for him! Steve McIntyre will be giving a keynote address, and Lucia and Jeff Id will be joining as guest bloggers, which is easy for them since they both live within driving distance of the conference.
Here’s a list of speakers, including yours truly. Here’s the program (PDF) Roger L. Simon at Pajamas Media also has a short summary.
A number of people with opposing views, including Gavin Schmidt, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and William Schlesinger, were invited to the ICCC4 conference. They all declined.
PJTV is providing an important service. Live video coverage (streaming and otherwise) will be at the PJTV CLIMATEGATE 2010 MICROSITE. I thank them for doing this.
Oh, and I want to sincerely thank Evan Jones, he’ll know why.
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Smokey – It has been advertised in The American Spectator for a while too , but I doubt they read it .
The invitees, of the opposite opinion, that decline the invitation are branding themselves ‘Ivory Tower incumbent’ in a political mood that does not favor such. Their backers on the grant funding front also wear the label ‘incumbent’.
What do you suppose the outcome will be post-elections?
Anthony
Thank you very much for your wonderful awareness!
I am reminded of the movie “War Games”, where the ‘dead’ games programmer points to the screen and states “It is an illusion!”. As the nukes come crashing in, the computer sates ” Chess Anyone?”.
Good luck, someone has to ‘save the world!’ If not, I am around to rebuild it ‘one by one’. If not, I have confidence in my 5 year old grandson!
Kipling:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
As the wonderful Kipling wrote:
Thanks Again! We are here and listening!
Eric
I saw an ad for this in the USA Today that they gave me at my hotel this week (traveling for work). Distinguished list of attendees, most of the big name Evil Big Oil Funded Deniers (TM) looked to be there. 😉 Would love to be attending myself, I hope you have a great and productive time, though I know it’ll get about 1/1,000,000th the press coverage that the Copenhagen sky is falling festival got sadly.
ohh, to be able to be there
thanks PJTV
Say hi to everyone on behalf of the baby skeptics.
I think that this conference has already delivered major victory by the hockey team.
My thanks to phil and the boys for confirming what most of the skeptics know but that the wider world may not. This conference provide a perfect platform to debate the science. What better place could there have been for them to make their message loud and clear and to interact with their adversaries in a topic of international importance. Its just possible that one or even two had other important plans but ALL OF THEM. I don’t think so. We are therefore left to draw the obvious conclusion that their case does not bear close scrutiny and because they could not control the data, they chickened out.(as it would appear, that they always do)
Much should be made of this by the MSM and all the speakers. They, each and every speaker should begin their address with a statement of profound regret for the inexplicable of the absense of many colleagues and they should be named and shamed
i implore the speakers to take up this suggestion.
and i apologise for the bad grammer in my earlier post.
grammar grammar grammar
Jim G says:
May 15, 2010 at 9:40 am
Bob Carter will be there, he’s a marine geologist with a good command of geology, lingo, and language. Geologists see the last Ice Age as a current event and terminal moraines like Cape Cod proof that it isn’t over yet.
Smokey says:
May 15, 2010 at 11:22 am
Curiousgeorge,May 15, 2010 at 11:15 am:
And whose fault is that??
These conferences should all have people with different points of view attending and speaking. But the climate alarmists would rather cancel a conference than allow a skeptical scientist to speak. And then they boycott these conferences, rather than attending and discussing the issues. No wonder they’re losing all credibility.
I wasn’t assigning blame, nor denigrating this conference. It’s just the way it works for many different reasons. Same holds true for other fields, including politics. I used to attend a variety of Engineering conferences on behalf of the company I worked for prior to retirement, and I’m sure that there will be a lot of information sharing and networking going on (as well as the fun stuff associated with these things ), but no one should expect it to change the oppositions mind or even enter the general public’s conscientiousness .
Sadly unless prominent AGW scientist attend and debate their side then this conference has all the hallmarks of a talkfest of the converted. As such seen by the MSM ad yet another fringe meeting of deniers funded by big oil and big industry.
nednead says:
May 15, 2010 at 10:35 am
Have you looked at the ICCC program? The two full science tracks spill into another track. I need a clone or two.
I fully agree their should be a conference that includes both sides, however, the Heartland Institute may point out that they sent invitations to some of the warmists, but I think they never expected them to come. Even the title of the conference, “Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?” makes it clear there’s an unfriendly bias.
OTOH, the scientists who have attended previous ICCCs have said they appreciate an environment where the politics can be pushed aside and science reigns, and there’s a place for that, even if it is one-sided.
The AGU seems willing to let both sides mingle, e.g. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/30/agu-presentation-backs-up-mcintyres-findings-that-there-is-no-hockey-stick-in-yamal/ and http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/17/spencer-on-his-agu-presentation-yesterday/ so maybe there’s some hope.
Science has a long history of abusing people with novel theories. Sometimes the theories violate various natural laws and should be discarded, sometimes there’s an interesting twist and laws aren’t being violated, and sometimes they’re right or pretty close. Probably the best example is continental drift morphing from ridicule to plate tectonics overhauling geology. See http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Wegener/wegener.php for a very good history.
Very rarely does science rise above human frailties and two or more groups with such different expectations work together to learn how the things really work.
Given the way grants are awarded now, there’s no chance of that ideal being realized. Until then, gatherings like the ICCC will serve a useful purpose. Climate science is such a wide field, no one can be an expert at all of it. So getting the specialists together with the generalists helps everyone learn details relevant to their work.
Neither side has all the answers, and frankly, its really stupid the amount of energy the two sides have used to berate the other. I don’t know if there is a solution, but there certainly should be ways to improve on the status quo.
Anthony – have fun and I am looking forward to your posts on the conference when you get back and have some time. Really, really wish I could have made it but I will be following it closely on the web. Wonder if MSM will be there? It is just astounding how they are missing the party since Climategate.
Reminder to self:
NEVER fly United into Ohare
Looks like I’m hosed for the dinner meeting
From SFO
Oh dang, the HTML code didn’t work like I thought it would, so half my earlier comment (i.e. the quote I was responding to) is missing, and my out-of-context response ended up in italics. I hope some kind mod will correct that one and delete this later post.
Thanks
Make sure you get some good pictures of the inevitable protest. I hope you invite them in for intermission entertainment.
Nedhead,
Isn’t “weather folk” being a little catty? After all “climate science” is a multi-disciplinary field, and unlike many of those disciplines, the “weather folk” are the ones directly dealing with the same nonlinear dynamic system. Keep in mind that the cold fusion scientists were doing peer reviewed state of the art calorimetry to standards that that had been accepted for more than a century. Are you saying the physicists should have stayed out because they were not experts in calorimetry? They seemed to have been able to get up to speed with fresh scrutiny pretty quickly. So should “weather folk”, physcists, complex systems analysts, chaos theorists and nonlinear dynamics mathematicians leave the field to glaciologists, marine biologists, computer programmers, instrument specialists, government pollution monitoring specialists and vulcanologists?
There needs to be some independent perspective, because there has been a failure of peer review in the field and institutionalized in the IPCC process. How often do you see model based papers that review the diagnostic literature for the models they are using and couch their attribution and projection conclusions with expanded error ranges and disclosure of uncertainties in recognition of the diagnostic issues? You certainly don’t see it in the IPCC expressions of “very likely”, 90% confidence.
How often do you see “model independent” assessments of climate sensitivity that discuss the implications the non-linear dynamic nature of the system and acknowledge that the climate sensitivities to CO2, aerosol and solar forcing should not be assumed to be equivilent. It is patently obvious to anyone who has dealt with complex nonlinear dynamic systems, yet Knutti and Hegerl are the only ones that I’ve seen that has given it any lip service:
“The concept of radiative forcing is of rather limited use for forcings with strongly varying vertical or spatial distributions. In addition, the equilibrium response depends on the type of forcing. As mentioned above, climate sensitivity may also be time-dependent or state-dependent; for example, in a much warmer world with little snow and ice, the surface albedo feedback would be different from today’s.”
“There is a difference in the sensitivity to radiative forcing for different forcing mechanisms, which has been phrased as their ‘efficacy'”
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/knuttir/papers/knutti08natgeo.pdf
There are no good model independent estimates of sensitivity to CO2 forcing, and models which couple CO2 forcing to the whole mixing layer of the oceans ignoring that the penetrance of CO2 radiative wavelengths is mere microns rather than 10s of meters like solar don’t help clarify matters.
If you can get the Geological Society of America to focus on the issue of whether net feedback to CO2 forcing is positive or negative, since even if they merely acknowledge that it is a open question, then there is no evidential basis for AGW alarmism, yet.
Even though I am attending the ICCC, I think the proper forum for exposing the true evidential state of the science would be a open refereed exchanges on the internet. Conferences allow little time for questions or for well considered answers. But the scientists you appear to have in mind, appear to have been studiously avoiding them and been publishing in journals without being subjected to truly independent peer review. Where are those scientists, who did you have in mind? Reading their review article in totality, Knutti and Hegerl appear to have been more intellectually honest and less inclined to gloss over the state of the science. I’d have to read more of their work.
Anthony
From recent news reports it appears Algore has acquired new digs out in California, Montecito I believe. If he’s out there enjoying his new manse, you could give him a call and see if he’ll lend you a Gulfstream for your trip. Since not many of the alarmist contingent will be attending, it shouldn’t be difficult to find a parking spot for the jet for the duration. Unlike in Copenhagen where they not only filled all the local spots but about half the airports in Scandinavia.
And don’t let Lord Monckton talk you into swilling down too much of that Big Oil provided Dom Perignon. The last thing the world needs at this point is a bunch of YouTube vids of all you sceptical madcaps with lampshades on your heads.
All kidding aside, have a safe and hopefully productive trip and please let all those in attendance know that, despite all they must put up with because of the stance they have taken, there are very large number of people out here who are eternally grateful for their and your efforts on our behalf. Godspeed.
James Allison says:
May 15, 2010 at 12:48 pm
You would be misreading the public mind: The ‘incumbents’ are not in attendance.
It make Climate Change Legislation look like an edict in the same vein as Health Care.
Backlash squared.
BTW, for those who think the lack of alarmist participation somehow invalidates this conference, perhaps you can provide a list of prominent sceptics who had an opportunity to make significant presentations at Copenhagen, at least within the confines of the conference itself.
Any such debate should consist of separate mini-debates focusing on separate sub-topics, since the whole ball of wax is too big and complex to treat adequately in a single debate.
re:Bruce Cobb says: May 15, 2010 at 11:14 am
On the other hand, we might call the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico in Nov. “Alarmalot”, assuming there’s a round table.
—
One big difference is tax payers will probably be footing most of the bill for the Cancun jolly, but not a trip to Chicago. Which side is it that supposedly has all the money again?
For some time I have forced myself to make a nearly daily visit to Climate Progress in the spirit of “keeping one’s enemies close.” Over time, it has become clear that their failure to provide solid proof of the AGW theory in order to refute skeptics/deniers, has resulted in resorting to various Alinsky-esque tactics to revile and discredit them to the point of molding them as veritable non-persons (or, the Orwellian “unperson”).
The warmist’s refusal to participate in, or even acknowledge existence of gatherings of skeptical scientists (“anti-scientists”) comports with this walling-off as non-persons those who have contrary opinion or evidence. What really cements their psychosis is the certainty that each of us non-persons receives a regular check from some entity within “Big Oil.”
This is sad to watch in human terms but explains their non-participation next week.
We simply don’t exist.