From Lawrence Solomon at the Financial Post:
A cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics has concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fail to stand up to scrutiny.
He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”
The cross-examination, carried out by Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”
Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak, systematically examined the claims made in IPCC publications and other similar work by leading climate establishment scientists and compared them with what is found in the peer-edited climate science literature. He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”
Financial Post
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe the author of The Deniers.
The 79-page document, which effectively eviscerates the case for man-made global warming, can be found here:
Global Warming Advocacy Science: A Cross Examination
U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 10-08
University of Pennsylvania – Law School
Date Posted: May 22, 2010
Last Revised: May 24, 2010
Working Paper Series
More lawyers getting involved, hopefully they’ll soon get together with the legislators and solve AGW by making it illegal.
From: Wren on June 8, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Thus I am moved to propose, for consideration by my fellow WUWT commentators, a new term for use on this site:
Smokey Bait
It’s obvious someone is fishing for some contentious replies, as the Hansen stuff has been brought up and replied to several times lately, yet keeps showing up like some brand-new thing deserving of brand-new discussion.
Strange, after all those broken lines and snapped poles, you’d think they’d finally show up with some stronger tackle…
Not only would one suppose that it would be worthwhile to verify the climate establishment’s view, considering the amount of spending involved, we would have a duty to future generations to engage in such a verification before we spend their money now even before they have had a chance to earn it.
I have had exactly this same thought for a very long time and it certainly does feel good seeing someone else reach the same conclusion.
Snakes in worldwide decline… Aww, you know what’s coming (especially as it’s Richard Black from the BBC!)…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8727863.stm
What a tour-de force ! I am only at page 50, but what an excellent dissection(neater than evisceration) of the IPCC’s lazy scholarship. One gem inspired by Spencer that seems obvious except to those blinded by ideology….
“…….. precipitation systems act in effect as
a kind of atmospheric thermostat and would cause the atmosphere to cool in response to a
temperature increase due to CO2 increases.”
And, Derek B says:
June 8, 2010 at 9:34 pm ,
Maximum daily temperatures are more representative of daily insolation that a mean of max/min. Daytime temperatures are a proxy for incoming radiation, night time temperature measurement estimates back radiation with all the problems that have been discussed here for years.
I read this yesterday, and it was hard going in part, mostly because he was having to spell out in detail concepts which WUWTters are already familiar. This is standard fare when proving a legal case, so absolutely neccessary, but it lends the paper a dry technical slant which would not work well as a popular explanation.
I hope it’s not wishful thinking, but I get the feeling that the rest of the world (i.e. every other bit apart from the climate ‘science’ community) is slowly starting to come to the realisation that this is not all as solid as it was originally portrayed. I’ve sensed this as a time-lagged response to the CRU emails. Even Richard Black and the ‘Environment’ team at the BBC has been backing off somewhat from the AGW bandwagon – today the reported snake population decline has not automatically been attributed to AGW – bravo to the scientists for resisting tagging this attribution to every piece of work they do, and praise where praise is due to the BBC for not appending it for them. There is not a single AGW story on the BBC Environment page today – compare that with one from this time last year, where every story was some sort of AGW scare.
I suspect the Hutton Equiry was not as useless as it appeared on the surface. While the public report exonerated the ‘Team’, I have a sneaking suspicion the unofficial reportage back to TPTB was that the thing was a total fiasco and to back off from it before it exploded. Since then, all the icky government ads with drowning puppies have not appeared, and there has been very very little MSM coverage of AGW stories. At the same time, there has been a deluge of what I’d call ‘real’ science programming on the BBC – actual factual real scientific documentaries with absolutely zero AGW slant. Wishful thinking perhaps, but I feel that MSM and Science is trying to reassert itself, prompted by behind-the-scenes rumour of the actual Hutton findings.
I suspect this is all the ‘satisfaction’ we are ever going to get from the AGW camp. I see the whole AGW debate as the first ever macro ‘flamewar’ – the argument techniques of 1990s Usenet used in the macro world. Like all flamewars, nobody will ever emerge as a ‘winner’ – and the ‘losers’ will just slink away into obscurity without ever being held to account. If you want to rub their faces in it when then next 10 years shows cooling, then you’re in for a disappointment. You are never going to get that sort of satisfaction from the blogosphere, they will argue that the data at the time supported their views, and like good scientists they adapted their views with new data. You can’t win. You are also highly unlikely to get satisfaction from the scientists concerned, who will all have retired on nice pensions, doing the lucrative paid tour circuit of the shrinking band of true believers who still want to listen to the armageddon/atonement message.
Our satisfaction will have to come simply from being proved right.
This is very important, Prof Johnson is to be applauded. Science as practiced in Europe and USA needs legal oversight and auditing. For too long scientists have been obscurantists, creating unnecessary and obscure technical jargon to give the impression that only a high priest of science with years of cloistered training can have any hope of understanding the operation of the scientific process. This fraudulent smokescreen has limited outside investigation and allowed unfettered corruption, cronyism and mafia control of many scientific fields.
Well educated and intelligent professionals such as lawyers have not the slightest difficulty understanding scientific questions after some research into the substance of research stripped of obscurantist jargon.
Outside legal and financial oversight of scientific research is needed, perhaps this will be one positive outcome of the climate fiasco. At present there is astonishingly little checking of what universities do with their research grants after receiving them. Everything is geared to the next grant application, not what was done with the previous ones. Peer-reviewed paper output is one metric used to assess researchers, and as we well know, such crony-review is more or less totally corrupt.
EXCELLENT !! This provides the basis for massive law suits.
I have kept email records of the dozens of emails I have sent news paper, TV stations, AGW fraudsters (Hansen, Mann etc) and politicians.
Because I intend to sue them one day.
I suggest each and evey one of you start sending emails to them.
I have for a long time, included in all my emails, a note to them, that I personally intend to sue them in future if they continue to committ AGW fraud.
I dont know if I have any case, but at least I`ve prepared well !!
OT
Snake populations decline in tropical and temperate climates – 9 June 2010
“Although we do not know the cause of these observed declines we wish to alert snake ecologists to what appears to be happening and to stimulate further research.”
This is a big news; AGW not blamed! http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news/news_archive/2010_news_item_16.html
The dominos keep falling. I find it interesting that the intellectual qualities many sceptics bring to the examination of the known facts of CAGW can be so superbly examplified by an expert lawyer. This makes the formal enquiries conducted up to now in the UK and the USA look to be examples of the CAGW believers circling the wagons, rather than rigorous attempts at establishing the scientific facts.
My hope is that the politicians who are also climate catastrophists must focus on reducing the damage from the recent financial disaster for the next few years and so will be denied funds to waste on futile attempts to modify the global climate.
OT, but possibly interesting – as both my work and income were once weather-dependent, I have been in the habit of recording daily max and min temps plus daily rainfall in my back garden for many years. My equipment is simple, inexpensive, but of reasonable quality although probably not suficiently accurate for scientific purposes; I have noticed that I have never lived anywhere in the UK or New Zealand where the official max temp promulgated by the Met Service or NIWA has been reached on a regular basis.
Wren, you fail to appreciate the issue. Sceptics do not have to prove anything. They did not make any claims. They only question the claims of those who say they have evidence of a climate crisis.
It is the climate warming scientists that have to prove, on the balance of evidence, that human caused global warming is happening and that it is dangerous.
They haven’t, far from it based on the analysis of many including this lawyer. Their science is rubbish.
The author does indeed lack the expertise to determine whether what he describes as ‘global warming advocacy science’ is wrong. We know this because he says so.
The problem is not the global warming advocacy science is wrong – something that in
any event I lack the expertise to determine – but that by overselling models and evidence,
global warming advocacy science has created some very serious misimpressions …
This lack of expertise is evident in a few basic factual errors that can be picked up in just a cursory reading …. e.g.
The global mean temperature data that the IPCC reports are a particular
temperature dataset put together and jointly maintained by the Climatic Research Unit
(CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the United Kingdom Meteorological Office’s
Hadly Center, a dataset known by the acronym Had CRUT.
But here’s the figure showing the IPCC reports on no fewer than HadCrut and 3 other different global datasets: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-1.html
The author asserts that Mann’s Hockey Stick was removed from AR4,
Why would the IPCC both delete the famous (or infamous) hockey-stick graph
and yet continue to assert (albeit with lessened confidence) that 20th century temperatures
were the highest in the last 1,300 years?
but here it is labelled MBH99 … http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-10.html
Has the Professor even read the report he is criticising?
This is a ‘prosecution’ document, intended to present ‘the case against’ and so one should not expect it to exhibit a balanced review of the evidence, yet the presence of such basic factual blunders means a ‘rebuttal witness’ would have little difficulty in undermining its credibility, seems to me.
@DerekB:”The analysis makes much of the fact that daily max surface air temperatures are more representative of average temperature through the troposphere than the daily min temperatures are. This strikes me as totally irrelevant. If we choose to define the mean surface temperature as the average of the max and min, that is likely reasonable for several of the purposes to which it will be put…”
Wasn’t he making the point that the night minimum temperature was cooler just a few metres above the weather station and so the max-min gap was being artificially lengthened and the average temperature inflated. Not sure it’s important if you’re measuring anomolies, or now we have satellites, but that was my take on it.
He doesn’t say? Well I never! What a surprise.
Slightly OT, from what I uderstand from the technical summaries & then the far more scientific SPMs (yes I’m joking), we have to be worried more about higher night time temps in the winter season rather than higher day time temps, or have I missed something? I point folks to the Met Offices’ website, for their incredibly accurate & revealing summary of things to come. e.g. Some regions may experience wetter conditions, some areas may experience dryer conditions, some areas may become warmer, some may become cooler, some areas may experience greater hurricane activity, some areas may expereice less hurricane activity. $400M a year & a $45M super computer to arrive at those statements! Amazing. Hot on predictions slightly light on accuracy. Seaweed any body?
I have not yet had a chance to read this article, but from the abstract it appears to confirm what I have been saying to my acquaintances for two years, that the evidence offered in support of agw would not stand up in court.
I am a retired trial lawyer. Marshaling scientific and engineering testimony for complex trials, and cross-examining the other side’s experts is stock in trade for litigators. When I started reading in this field, I had no supposition about it. I was frustrated by conflicting claims on what seemed to be an existential question. So, I decided to gather information from both sides, and examine it, as I would preparing for trial. I also consulted scientific experts, including science historians, to better understand the science involved.
My long-time friends would have expected, based on my progressive political activities, that I would be pro-agw. But as I began reading, I quickly came to the conclusion that the evidence offered was shallow, manipulated, incomplete, lacking an uninterrupted flow of logical support, and not secure against distortion and the temptations of careerism.
I believe the agw proponents would have a difficult time testifying in court. They would be forced to answer questions directly and fully, without political and ideological commentary or ad hominem attacks. They would also be required to testify under oath, mindful of the attendant penalties for perjury.
Whilst I agree with the argument put forward, it carries no scientifically valid weight.
Lawyers are paid large sums of money to be able to argue that black is white. They are trained to win an argument, not establish the whole truth. In fact when a witness under cross examination swears an oath to, “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…” The cross examining lawyers are then set upon them to test and maybe break that “truth” apart.
Climateologists would tell this lawyer to stick to law and leave the science to the scientists.
I may have to review my extremely cycnical opinion of lawyers…
“Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak,”
Welcome to the club, Prof.
I am convinced that most politicians haven’t looked at the evidence either. I cannot believe that anyone can look at the “evidence” from paleo-climatologists and think it holds water. (Therefore scuppering the “unprecedented” claim)
NOOOOOO, this must be part of the universe wide vastly Jewish conspiracy to destroy Green/Progressive/Socialist/Hamas/Humanitarian/Peace Activist/Code Pink/Animal Rights/Communismismisms!
We need to find more victims to counter this. And if we can’t find victims we’ll create them by hook or by crook!
Oxburgh, Oxburgh , Oxburgh … not Hutton.
This evisceration will evince the absolutist agenda which is currently perverting science and politics disguised as the precautionary principle. The process is insidious and needs to be recognized for exactly what it is. TYRANY
“a rose by any other name etc”
“He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method.”
We’ve known this for years. And as an actual scientist, I am appalled.
“Lawyers are paid large sums of money to be able to argue that black is white. They are trained to win an argument, not establish the whole truth. In fact when a witness under cross examination swears an oath to, “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…” The cross examining lawyers are then set upon them to test and maybe break that “truth” apart.”
As a lawyer I must correct the common misconception expressed above.
We have what is known as an ‘adversarial’ legal system in the UK and USA. The idea is that the truth is best found by picking apart the opponent’s propositions and defending against his attacks on yours.
A neutral observer (judge and/or jury) is supposed to then weigh the arguments from an independent viewpoint and arrive at a decision as to what the truth is most likely to be.
Lawyers are not permitted to mislead the courts or promulgate untruths but they do need to accurately submit the statements made by the Client but only if they have no evidence that demonstrates their Client’s statements to be untrue.
There is a duty to the court as well as to the Client and lawyers can readily fall foul of either or both.
There is a great deal in common between the true scientific method and an adversarial legal system. The same skills and ideals are in play in both.
Alexander K says:
June 9, 2010 at 1:38 am says “I have noticed that I have never lived anywhere in the UK or New Zealand where the official max temp promulgated by the Met Service or NIWA has been reached on a regular basis.”
Bad luck re New Zealand. Not possible then to study the extinction of snakes?
Ken Hall (June 9, at 2:15 am) “…climaTEOlogist” Freudian slip or intended, Ken??