The 4th International Conference on Climate Change – Chicago, Il., USA
Consensus? What consensus?
by Roger Helmer MEP
I’m writing this in the Marriott Hotel in Chicago, where I’m attending the Heartland Institute Climate Conference (and I’ve just done an interview with BBC Environment Correspondent Roger Harrabin).
Ahead of the interview, I thought I’d just check out the Conference Speaker’s list. There are 80 scheduled speakers, including distinguished scientists (like Richard Lindzen of MIT), policy wonks (like my good friend Chris Horner of CEI), enthusiasts and campaigners (like Anthony Watts of the wattsupwiththat.com web-site), and journalists (including our own inimitable James Delingpole).
Of the 80 speakers, I noticed that fully forty-five were qualified scientists from relevant disciplines, and from respected universities around the world — from the USA, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, Norway, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
All of them have reservations about climate alarmism, ranging from concerns that we are making vastly expensive public policy decisions based on science that is, to say the least, open to question, through to outright rejection of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) model.
Several of these scientists are members or former members of the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But how do 45 sceptical scientists stack up, you may well ask, against the 2500 on the official IPCC panels? But of course there aren’t 2500 relevant scientists on the IPCC panel. Many of them are not strictly scientists at all. Some are merely civil servants or environmental zealots. Some are economists — important to the debate but not experts on the science. Others are scientists in unrelated disciplines. The Chairman of the IPCC Dr. Ravendra Pachuari, is a Railway Engineer.
And of the remaining minority who are indeed scientists in relevant subjects, some (like my good friend Prof Fred Singer) have explicitly rejected the IPCC’s AGW theory. Whittle it down, and you end up with fifty or so true believers, most of whom are part of the “Hockey Team” behind the infamous Hockey Stick graph, perhaps the most discredited artefact in the history of science. This is a small and incestuous group of scientists (including those at the CRU at the University of East Anglia). They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.
And there are scarcely more of them than are sceptical scientists at this Heartland Conference in Chicago, where I am blogging today. Never mind the dozens of other scientists here in Chicago, or the thousands who have signed petitions and written to governments opposing climate hysteria. Science is not decided by numbers, but if it were, there is the case to be made that the consensus is now on the sceptical side.
Roger Helmer MEP Follow me on Twitter: rogerhelmerMEP
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:54 pm
well first off, even your beloved Roy Spencer believes that CO2 in the atmosphere has increased during the last 100 years. And even Roy believes that w/o the natural Greenhouse gas affect, the Earth would be much colder than we are.
—
REPLY: You are a naive teenager. I don’t deny any of this. AGW says that the late 20th century warming was MOSTLY caused by the extra Co2 produced by man. This is the issue for you to prove!!!!!!!!!! You can’t prove it!!!!!! If so show us here right now. We are waiting.
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:49 pm
But modern science is usually right, and the AGW skeptics don’t have a Helicobacter pylori.
———-
Usually right does not make one right today. If you are right then prove it!!!! Provide evidence and make predictions which we can observe about future runaway warming [the ultimate test of any theory].
#
James Sexton says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:02 pm
@barefoot girl….that’s a beautiful picture of scientists that you just painted. The poor laborious scientist. Unaffected by the gale winds of politics. Simply trying to understand our world without an ounce of advocacy or self aggrandizement or desire for the fortunes the private sector offers. They’re only in it for the quest of knowledge and to pass the knowledge on in the halls of academia.
Then, I see the likes of Jim Hansen and Mike Mann. It is then I realize,…….you’re not very grounded in reality…..
__________________________________________________________________________
BOY, do you have that correct. I had originally assumed barefoot girl, was newly graduated because of her naïveté. Given the dishonesty, lying, data manipulation, theft of research and other less than admirable activities I have encountered while working as a chemist and a lab manager, I can only envy her luck . But then again she maybe a “Team Player” so never “sees” the real world.
Oh and barefoot girl, the AGW scientists WERE invited to the conference so why weren’t YOU there giving a paper????? If you ASKED I am sure they would have been happy to have you.
Off to the conference
“…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.” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/15/off-to-the-conference/
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:49 pm
But modern science is usually right, and the AGW skeptics don’t have a Helicobacter pylori.
—–
You may have a point but as you look at a helicopter in the sky you sometimes see the …..???
@ur momisugly Wren
“Perhaps someday science will find that a diet heavy in salt actually is beneficial to people who have heart disease. In the mean time, they probably should avoid it.”
Which science concluded by observation, not computer generated hysteria. Your assertion that science is generally right today but not yesterday is typical warmist think. Remember when eggs were bad for you? Is that current enough? Or last years flu was going to kill us all and we didn’t have enough vaccine? Oh, wait, that hysteria was generated by………you guessed it!!! Scientific computer modeling. Science gets it wrong more often than not, it has from the beginning and continues through today and on to tomorrow. Yet through the two step forward and one back routine, we continue to know more. Remember when we knew it all? I think I was about 25 or 26 when I realized I lacked all knowledge.
Science isn’t right or wrong, it is the understanding that we lack adequate knowledge in most occasions and we engage in learning more, but at no point will we or rather should we state we have complete understanding of all things or anything. We can never get there from here.
Gerald Machnee says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:19 pm
They are not all climate scientists and they do not all preach AGW.
I did not make either assertion, so this is an irrelevant objection. I was responding to Anthony’s claim that
As you all are fond of saying, strong claims require strong evidence. For the statement to be anything other than hand-waving, someone is going to need to show that five hundred sixty-nine of those names are either non-scientists or “explicitly rejected” the conclusions on the IPCC. Put up or shut up, folks.
Karl B. says:
It is chapter 9 that concerns people, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change.”
You all are fine with “Chapter 2: Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing,” ”Chapter 3: Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change,” “Chapter 4: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground,” “Chapter 5: Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level,” “Chapter 6: Palaeoclimate,” “Chapter 8: Climate Models and their Evaluation,” “Chapter 10: Global Climate Projections” and “Chapter 11: Regional Climate Projections?” Really? Wow.
MartinGAtkins says:
Chapters 3 through to 11 are observations of global warming and evaluation of models. They do not address cause.
“Chapter 9: Understanding and Attributing Climate Change” does not address cause? Really?
James Sexton says:
Hmm, alarmists dismiss a list of 31,000 and tout a laughable list of 620?
Well, it was Anthony who’s playing the numbers game. I know millions of people who think the Lakers are better than the Celtics, that doesn’t make it so. However, the number Anthony posits is “fifty or so,” not six hundred nineteen.
Even when the 620 list has names of people that are skeptical of the alarmism.
Anthony asserts that they have explicitly rejected the conclusions of the report. That’s a bold statement, and should be subject to as much skepticism as any claim.
Jimbo says:
Where does NASA get its funds from?
Um… up until 2009, from George W. Bush. Don’t tell me… he’s in on it too?
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:26 pm
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
“……How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”
============================
Maybe I don’t understand the cloud theory, but unless there is a cloud trend, how can the global temperature trend be effected?”
______________________________________________________________________
Here are some articles on the subject:
Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/07/spencer-strong-negative-feedback-found-in-radiation-budget/
Spencer: Clouds Dominate CO2 as a Climate Driver Since 2000
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/13/spencer-clouds-dominate-co2-as-a-climate-driver-since-2000/
This is a bit easier to read and understand:
The Thermostat Hypothesis
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
This one is also interesting:
Pielke Sr. on Revkin’s question
Update To Andy Revkin’s Question In 2005: “Is Most Of The Observed Warming Over The Last 50 Years Likely To Have Been Due To The Increase In Greenhouse Gas Concentrations”?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/06/pielke-sr-on-revkins-question/
Barefootgirl, thanks for your input but I think you oversimplify things tremendously. Changes in global climate may be occurring, in fact it would be astonishing if things were not trending in one direction or another. Absolute stability is not a hallmark of natural systems. Just because the current trend appears to be warming (or at least it was for a while) doesn’t mean the trend will continue. Attributing all the observed change, which to date has been rather small, to human activity is not well supported. Changes of greater magnitude, in both directions, have happened repeatedly in the past at times when human-generated CO2 could not possibly have been a contributing factor. So the real question is not, as you try to make it, “what is the climate sensitivity?” but “is there anything at all about the current situation that’s outside the known variability of the system and therefore requires an explanation that might include factors that weren’t operative in the past?”
I have never seen a remotely convincing argument that the answer to the second question is “yes”.
@ur momisugly Jimbo
Maybe there should be a web site stating what the typical skeptic believes. The alarmists here seem confused.
@ur momisugly ALL ALARMISTS
While I can’t speak for anybody but myself, most skeptics, especially here, don’t have a problem with the assertion there is more CO2 in the air(although there is at least one conflicting study). Further, every skeptic I’ve ever interacted with knows(apparently before the alarmsts figured it out) that our climate changes. It always has, it always will. What some here may state, that warmer is preferable to colder. Some may also state that most of the “observed warming” can be attributed to the natural variances to the climate.(look back at the always changes thingy) Some may also state, given the “adjustments” to the temp data, there is no one that can state unequivocally that we are getting warmer to any significant degree. Some also have a difficulty with the arbitrary assigning of the optimum temp time frame. Knowing the temp and climate always changes, who decided we should compare today’s climate to a climate between 1940’s to 1970’s? Why don’t we compare it to 1200 AD or 100 AD? Further, more may say climate change is worth studying, but to scrap our entire socio-economic structure today would be tantamount to the “cure being worse than the disease”. Which, the alarmists hype is why it is being proposed. Others simply see the fraudulent “science” for what it is. Fraud. If an alarmist wants the world convinced of the threat of CAGW, they have to rid themselves of the Hansens, Schmidts, Manns, Gores, ect. from their advocacy group. There’s much more, but, it’s SUPPER TIME!!!
PEACE
This is a small and incestuous group of scientists (including those at the CRU at the University of East Anglia). They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.
Do I hear Dueling Banjos from Deliverance?
Paul Daniel Ash:
Allow me to accept the challenge and “put up,” even though it will never change the closed minds of those afflicted with Cognitive Dissonance koff*paulash*koff
As stated upthread, over 31,000 scientists and professionals with degrees in the hard sciences signed the following statement, which explicitly rejects the IPCC’s conclusions:
That is well over fifty times more than the 569 alarmists Mr Ash was able to find.
So, will he concede the point?
My bet is no. Cognitive dissonance is stronger than the need for credibility.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:53 pm
The folks at the ICCC conference sent out emails to dozens and dozens of climate scientists who are AGW supporters, offering them the opportunity to present and discuss their views. Of all of the invitations, only two scientists accepted. They were warmly and publicly thanked for their participation. Please check your facts before posting, it is affecting your credibility.
barefootgirl,
You intrigue me. You seem to have a barefoot in both camps, and sincerely so. Please judge my understanding of the claim that there is no science of Earth’s climate at this time. What I mean by science is best seen in the progression from Ptolemy, through Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo to Newton. Kepler was the first to do away with a whirligig model of planetary movement and replace it with a set of empirical hypotheses that enabled prediction not only of planetary motions but relative speed and distance from the sun. As with all empirical hypotheses, they were formulated as univeral generalizations. For example, Kepler’s Second Law states that a planet’s speed in its orbit is directly proportional to the area swept by a line from the Sun to the planet. Newton benefitted directly from Kepler’s work and deduced Kepler’s Third Law, about the size of orbits, from his Theory of Gravitation. Bringing together Kepler and Galileo, Newton explained that the same laws governed projectile motion on Earth and the regular motion of the planets. He explained that given a tall enough mountain and a powerful enough cannon, he could launch a satelite into orbit around the Earth. The point of this story about the history of astronomy is that, at some point, empirical science emerges from whirligig models and qualitative hypotheses grow over the decades into quantitative hypotheses that synthesize earlier results into higher level hypotheses. I do not see that climate science has gone beyond the whirligig stage. Of course, there are generalizations about the CO2 molecule, but everyone agrees that a random distribution of CO2 molecues in the atmosphere cannot produce more than one degree of warming. The fearsome warming has to come from the forcings. But the forcings can be known only if there are empirical hypotheses about them. I have used every opportunity to ask climate scientists for these desired hypotheses, as I am now asking you, and I have received worse than silence as a response. Are there empirical hyptheses about forcings? If so, what are they? If not, then why do climate scientists deny that they are in a pre-empirical, whirligig stage of climate science? Climate scientists have hunches about the melting of glaciers, the melting of arctic sea ice, the role of cloud cover in temperature, but none of these hunches can be relevant to the others so long as there is not a set of empirical hypotheses that ties them together, as Newton tied together Kepler and Galileo. So, please barefootgirl, tell me, are there empirical hypotheses that can be stated as universal generalizations and used to explain forcings and predict their behavior?
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:18 pm
“As you all are fond of saying, strong claims require strong evidence. For the statement to be anything other than hand-waving, someone is going to need to show that five hundred sixty-nine of those names are either non-scientists or “explicitly rejected” the conclusions on the IPCC. Put up or shut up, folks.”
It would seem you have your logic somewhat reversed. Since most of the names on the list had only limited input to the IPCC AR-4 [as contributing authors, reviewers, technical support, etc.], the burden of proof would seem to be yours to show that all or a majority of them have made subsequent public utterances in which they totally embraced its conclusions.
Gail Combs says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:20 pm
You’re laboring under the illusion that Wren cares about the science.
Smokey says:
As stated upthread, over 31,000 scientists and professionals with degrees in the hard sciences signed the following statement, which explicitly rejects the IPCC’s conclusions
Smokey, it’s always best to read before posting. For your benefit, I’ll again reference the claim that Anthony made without a shred of evidence:
As you’ll note if you read the actual WUWT post to which you’re commenting, Anthony was referring to “scientists on the IPCC panel.”
That was awesome, though, being all condescending to me when you clearly had no idea what either I or Anthony had written. Do that more, I love it.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Good. That’s all we are after, too. It is a shame the media have an entirely different perspective, and that perspective is fuelled by many.
They were asked. They declined (or did not respond). Go figure.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
Jimbo says:
Where does NASA get its funds from?
Um… up until 2009, from George W. Bush. Don’t tell me… he’s in on it too?
Sorry, but Presidents, not even evil ones like GWB, cannot raise funds or determine where they are spent, that is the Constitutional function of Congress.
Even though I’m personally skeptical of AGW theory, I have to side with Paul Daniel Ash.
A statement was made about there only being about fifty true believers of AGW in the climate science field. Bold statements like that from the AGW camp are (rightly) harshly criticised here at WUWT. It is only fair and just that that statement be defended and some evidence provided to justify the number.
I think a reasonable place to start would be to try to estimate the number of appropriate climate scientists who meet the required categorisation of being relevant to the discussion. I don’t know the field well enough to even try to do so, but it’s definitely relevant to the discussion. If the total number of scientists who qualify is only about fifty, then the statement that only about fifty support AGW is misleading in that that would mean it’s the vast majority. If the total number of scientists who qualify is a five hundred, then we’re talking only ten percent and the original statement takes a lot stronger meaning (assuming that it can be demonstrated that the other ninety percent don’t support AGW).
Dave Wendt says:
the burden of proof would seem to be yours
Really? So Anthony can make any statement he likes, and it’s merely accepted? Anything that doesn’t confirm your preconceptions, however, is rejected out of hand.
This is skepticism?
PDA,
You said:
“…someone is going to need to show that five hundred sixty-nine of those names are either non-scientists or ‘explicitly rejected’ the conclusions of the IPCC.”
I decided to respond to your “explicitly rejected” comment.
James Sexton says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I do remember all the fad warnings:
C02 forcing is geometric, no wait, C02 forcing is logarithmic.
Now it’s C02 is a toxic pollutant, no wait, C02 is plant food.
Sure am glad to see an ICCC to counter the IPCC.
barefootgirl says: May 18, 2010 at 4:26 pm
yeah Smokey, I do believe [in man-made climate change] because I actually work with the observational data whereas you spend your days blogging.
Smokey you have let us down! If only you didn’t spend your days blogging and observed the temperature outside your house everyday you would also believe in man made Global Warming like barefootgirl. She observes the temperature and by jove its going up! We are responsible!
But wait there’s more – what does barefootgirl say now? – “I’m not an alarmist since I understand the complexities of the climate system and feedbacks may emerge that will offset warming trends.”
barefootgirl, then what are you creating all this fuss about? I thought I would have to give up eating meat and driving a car. Please go back to your thermometers and dont try and dabble in subjects beyond your ken and quit griping about your paycheck. If I were you I would try and re-train in something more constructive. The doom and gloom, crying wolf, industry won’t last forever.
Smokey says:
I decided to respond to your “explicitly rejected” comment.
Those were Anthony’s words. That’s what the two little inverted commas are doing on either side of them.
@Paul Daniel Ash
As I’ve stated before, I can only name about a dozen or so “true believers”, so I can’t get to the 50 or so stated. I don’t know, I can only suppose the writer is more intimately knowledgeable about the warmistas than I am. And apparently you, too. Else, you would have produced a list of scientific CAGW alarmists to refute his claim. If I state there are only 100 stars in the sky, you wish for me to name them so you can then refute me? What a ridiculous line of thinking. As shown several times above in this thread, there are literally thousands of scientists rejecting the IPCC’s conclusions. But as a token of my good will, I’ll start your list for you, let’s see…….there’s Mann, Hansen, Jones….no wait, he’s on record as stating there hasn’t been any warming for the last decade or so…..uhmm, Schmidt, Tamino…..hmm a pseudonym? Well, there’s Pachy…..dang no he does trains……well there’s always Gore….nope he’s a ….??? …profiteer. Well, there’s been too many beers for me and I’ve way past putting the CRU crew on the irrelevant list…..you’ll have to finish the list yourself.