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
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From: Wren on June 9, 2010 at 11:05 pm
All this really shows is you don’t understand how government works. When government decides roads must be built, it finds the money to build roads. If not a gasoline tax then it would be something else, although these days there’s a good chance government wouldn’t call it a tax.
Besides, the tax on gasoline, actually the taxing of liquid fuels for transportation use as diesel is also taxed, is abusive anyway. It hits hard those who drive the most getting to and from work, which includes many low-income workers. Good roads benefit everyone, thus taxes to pay for roads should more properly be based on the economic benefits derived from their use, thus an income or sales tax is indicated. It also hits the use of those fuels for non-transportation purposes, like lawn maintenance and electricity generation, and is paid in full by those using certain vehicles like mopeds and scooters who are denied the full use of all public roads, namely highways due to minimum speed limits.
Thus this carbon tax “of sorts” is flawed. Will a real carbon tax be any better? I don’t think so.
On June 9, 2010 at 5:47 pm sphaerica says:
“…they really, really don’t… are very, very unlikely … Be truly, truly skeptical.”
Just curious sphaerica, since you are obviously a careful and precise writer, what is the rhetorical purpose of the terms “really, really don’t,” “very, very unlikely,” and “truly, truly skeptical.”
Is there some kind of special meaning to the double emphasis, beyond that of Mommy admonishing little Billy?
Is that how you think of those who disagree with you? The “adults” versus the “children?”
Haven’t we heard enough of this implicit and very common insult from the CAGW camp?
Alan the Brit says: June 10, 2010 at 4:31 am
Ralph says: June 10, 2010 at 1:41 am
Let us not forget, as Obama appears to have, that this oil spill was caused by a Swiss company – Transocean – and to level all the blame at the door of B.P. (just because they have deeper pockets) is a tad opportunistic.
Answer:
Au contraire, Ralph. This is an American company founded in Louisiana in 1929 I believe, (feel free to correct me anyone) who forgot to maintain its policy objectives
Contraire again. Transocean – the company that caused the Gulf of Mexico oil spill – may be listed on the NYSE, but it is based in Vernier, near Geneva.
Does that make it American or Swiss? Your choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transocean
.
I am curious how the AGW’s respond to this argument set forth in the article (citations ommitted):
“The Ability of Climate Models to Explain Past Climate
The IPCC and the climate establishment have vastly oversold climate models by declaring that such models are able to quite accurately reproduce past climates, including most importantly the warming climate of the late twentieth century. Mainstream climate modelers have themselves explained that climate models disagree tremendously in their predicted climate sensitivity – response of temperature to a CO2 increase – and are able to reproduce twentieth century climate only by assuming whatever (negative) aerosol forcing effect is necessary to get agreement with observations.
These kind of explanations, by leading climate modelers, suggest that climate models do not in fact reflect understanding of the key physical climate processes well enough to generate projections of future climate that one could rely upon. It seems unlikely that climate model projections would be accorded much policy significance if the way in which they were able to “reproduce” past climate was generally understood. It seems more than plausible that policymakers (let alone the general public), take a model�s purported ability reproduce past temperatures as an indication that the model’s assumption about climate sensitivity is correct.
If policymakers were told that this is not so, that ability to reproduce past temperatures indicates only that a particular pairing of assumptions about climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing allowed the reproduction of past temperatures, then the logical question would be: which model gets the correct pairing of sensitivity and aerosol forcing? In answer to this, climate modelers would have to say that they do not know, and the best that could be done would be to use all the models (this is called the ensemble approach). But of course it is possible that all the models were very badly wrong in what they assumed about sensitivity.
A policymaker aware of this would then have to ask whether it would be better to base policy on climate models, or a more naive climate forecasting method, and whether further public funding of efforts to improve climate models was worthwhile. “
pauld,
“I’m still looking for a detailed response to this article from the AGW crowd. So far I’ve just heard broad, general statements that the article doesn’t raise points worth refuting.”
This is a thorough review reaching well argued conclusions by an attorney that has managed to succinctly summarize and manage to understand most of the key science at issue. A well argued and documented summary is always welcome and valuable, but it is not a new scientific result. The AGW crowd has probably already discussed most of the issues involved, so asking for a response is too general, and if they respond at all, there is plenty of opportunity for that response to be selective and to avoid the tough issues.
The type of issues to bring up would be specifics of the science that the author relied upon, or specifics of his criticisms of the quality and the ethics and the evidence that he used to support his opinions. It might be interesting to see them respond before a congressional committee or in an open peer review process but in other forums it will be too easy for those that usually avoid the issues, to avoid the issues. It will help to do some homework, if you want an interesting and insightful response on specifics. I wouldn’t bother with realclimate.
Bottom of page 1, the author (Jason Johnston) says he’s especially grateful for the comments from
in having allowed him to
Some would say a case of confirmation bias, I would have to agree.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 10, 2010 at 4:57 am
From: Wren on June 9, 2010 at 11:05 pm
We already have a tax of sorts on carbon, the tax on gasoline. Suppose we didn’t.
1. We could drive larger more powerful cars.
2. There would be less money to build roads.
Would this be a good trade-off? I guess it would depend on who you ask. But either way, tax or no tax, the money doesn’t disappear. I think we could say the same for a direct tax on carbon.
All this really shows is you don’t understand how government works. When government decides roads must be built, it finds the money to build roads. If not a gasoline tax then it would be something else, although these days there’s a good chance government wouldn’t call it a tax.
Besides, the tax on gasoline, actually the taxing of liquid fuels for transportation use as diesel is also taxed, is abusive anyway. It hits hard those who drive the most getting to and from work, which includes many low-income workers. Good roads benefit everyone, thus taxes to pay for roads should more properly be based on the economic benefits derived from their use, thus an income or sales tax is indicated. It also hits the use of those fuels for non-transportation purposes, like lawn maintenance and electricity generation, and is paid in full by those using certain vehicles like mopeds and scooters who are denied the full use of all public roads, namely highways due to minimum speed limits.
Thus this carbon tax “of sorts” is flawed. Will a real carbon tax be any better? I don’t think so.
——————
Use a carbon tax to pay down the national debt, and get two birds with one stone.
Almost 200 comments so far.
It looks like the Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School struck a nerve.
I’d say you were right. The vast majority of comments are congratulatory notes.
We have many people commenting here with appropriate degrees who do not accept (C)AGW.
Who? And what does the ‘C’ stand for?
The well-known contrarians with requisite credentials (Spencer, Lindzen, Pielke) agree that more CO2 must cause some global warming – they only question the degree. Which puts many of the commentators here at odds with sufficiently qualified skeptics. For instance, just above, kadaka:
Barry says:
“The well-known contrarians with requisite credentials (Spencer, Lindzen, Pielke) agree that more CO2 must cause some global warming – they only question the degree. Which puts many of the commentators here at odds with sufficiently qualified skeptics. For instance, just above, kadaka:
People here do study, they do learn. They do consider the theories and evidence. And they overwhelmingly conclude that (C)AGW, namely blaming CO2 for the warming, simply isn’t valid.”
The letter “C” in (C)AGW stands for “catastrophic”. I don’t think that Spencer, Lindzen, or Pielke would fall within the Catastrophic AGW camp
Do they?
Or do they merely acknowledge the possibility that more CO2 may cause some global warming?
No, they agree with the principle that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that absorbs long wave radiation, and that adding CO2 to the atmosphere should result in warming of the surface. Lindzen points out that a doubling of CO2, if all else is held equal, should result in 1C temp rise. Their arguments are about the degree of climate sensitivity, or the efficacy of models, but not about the sign (direction) of global temperature change from increased greenhouse gases.
I don’t think that Spencer, Lindzen, or Pielke would fall within the Catastrophic AGW camp
Spencer and Lindzen argue that climate sensitivity is lower than IPCC recommends, and therefore that warming will be gradual rather than (relatively) abrupt. To my mind, Pielke’s take is more genuinely skeptical. He vouches that we do not know whether warming will be fast or slow. He put it something very like this:
We should take efforts to deal with human induced climate change, not because we know what is going to happen, but because we don’t.
From: Wren on June 10, 2010 at 8:13 am
This time you have shown you really don’t understand how government works. The concept of “targeted government funding” is rather nebulous in practice, money going in to government gets spent where government wants to spend it. The Social Security surpluses became IOU’s as the money was diverted to the federal budget, the great sums of tobacco settlement money were largely diverted away from the agreed upon purposes and used for general state budget items, etc.
Besides, one of those birds is a 500 tonne enormous Super Bird set to ravage the country as in an old Godzilla-type monster movie, while the other is a little paper one based on some models you have sitting on your desk.
Re: comments from sphaerica
I thought I spelled it out pretty clearly in the previous posting, but you still miss the point. The Cross is not the unfair one-sided evaluation you’ve implied, BECAUSE it balances the one-sided “Direct” we’ve experienced for years. The IPCC been publishing in a “non-interactive setting” for some time now.
sphaerica says: But this isn’t a court of law, it’s a written document, and people aren’t going to go do all of the necessary research to see what the other side really presented as their case, so if there are untruths, misrepresentations, or anything else, it will slip by and seem perfectly reasonable.
A “written document” Redirect is the perfect way to address a “written document” Cross.
You see the threat posed by the Cross clearly, and you have the qualifications to solve it, and the refutation is “easy”. I don’t understand your reluctance. I would sincerely appreciate an intelligent and educated Redirect. Please.
sphaerica says: If anyone wants to see how this “cross” is easily refuted, their best approach is to do the work themselves.
Most of the world thinks it’s quicker to learn from someone who is already educated; That’s why they have “schools”. But, you’re probably right that we’d learn better the long, slow independent way. Your time is no doubt valuable, and it’s not like there’s a hurry or anything.
I will follow your advice, and I hope others will too; read the document in question, and spend the next few years trying to find something wrong with it.
barry,
That there has been some warming in the last 50 years is not that controversial a statement. This can be seen in the temperature records, although it has been shown the ground-based measurements have generally been “adjusted” to exaggerate the increase and increasingly are not a fully accurate gauge of the real temperatures, and warming can be a regional effect with many locations shown to have no warming and even cooling.
Of this warming, some fraction of it can be attributed to mankind. We do release the stored solar energy in fossil fuels, generate some from nuclear power, there are land use issues etc, so we are adding heat to the system that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. There is a logarithmic relationship, but still it can be generally said that increasing CO2 will increase temperature, if looking at just adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
However, as Dr. Pielke Sr. has put it, “…there are other equally or even more important significant human climate forcings…” than the “…added greenhouse gases from human activity…” of which CO2 is just one greenhouse gas. Dr. Spencer finds natural cycles predicted the warming, has shown how simple changes in cloud cover can account for the warming, etc.
(C)AGW, my terminology encompassing the IPCC-promulgated AGW belief with the usually-included Catastrophic element, lays the blame for the warming with CO2, blames mankind for the CO2 increases, and proposes the way to “fix” the planet is to limit the CO2 emissions of mankind. Yet it doesn’t take much understanding from an honest search for the truth to realize CO2 is a bit player at best, its contribution to warming matched or dwarfed by other factors, thus mankind’s contribution to the warming by its CO2 emissions is minuscule at best. If we really feel the need to combat global warming, as if we are capable of overwhelming the natural causes of warming, controlling CO2 emissions alone is clearly about the least effective strategy imaginable.
(C)AGW is failing. Here at WUWT is where individual belief in it often comes to die.
kadaka, I am skeptical of claims that go against the weight of evidence in mainstream climate science when they are based on a very small group of outlying papers. I am amazed that anyone can call themselves a skeptic that flourishes one or two papers on a given subject, claiming “here lies the truth”. The IPCC rests its assessment on thousands of studies (which themselves are built from thousands more). If the message was that these outliers add doubt to the central theory, I could come at that, but there is a decidedly unskeptical eagerness to latch on to whatever supports the skeptical view and announce that it’s a giant-killer. The example provided above (Johnson’s article) has been celebrated all the way down this thread, yet it is not a science paper, not peer-reviewed, not written by a scientist, incorrectly cites the IPCC, and gets the hocket stick controversy wrong, among other errors easily discoverable by some honest fact-checking. When you tell me that
it doesn’t seem that way to me most of the time. It seems that each post here feeds outrage or sarcasm, rather than inspires critical analysis – not all the time, but mostly.
#
#
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 10, 2010 at 1:34 pm
From: Wren on June 10, 2010 at 8:13 am
Use a carbon tax to pay down the national debt, and get two birds with one stone.
This time you have shown you really don’t understand how government works. The concept of “targeted government funding” is rather nebulous in practice, money going in to government gets spent where government wants to spend it. The Social Security surpluses became IOU’s as the money was diverted to the federal budget, the great sums of tobacco settlement money were largely diverted away from the agreed upon purposes and used for general state budget items, etc.
_______________________________________________
AND the Grace Commission report notes that 100% of personal income tax goes to pay interest on the national debt, the lion’s share of which goes to the banking cartel that we know as the Federal Reserve. http://www.bloggernews.net/17032
“Resistance to additional income taxes would be even more widespread if people were aware that:
* One-third of all their taxes is consumed by waste and inefficiency in the Federal Government as we identified in our survey.
* Another one-third of all their taxes escapes collection from others as the underground economy blossoms in direct proportion to tax increases and places even more pressure on law abiding taxpayers, promoting still more underground economy-a vicious cycle that must be broken.
With two-thirds of everyone’s personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government.” http://www.uhuh.com/taxstuff/gracecom.htm
I do not know about you but I am VERY opposed to taking money from the poor and middle class, in the form of taxes, and giving that money to wealthy bankers because of an unethical law written by a European banker (Paul Warburg) 100 years ago.
It seems every time any one tries to get rid of the darn thing they end up dead. Rep. Louis T. McFadden (R) after not only ” accusing the Federal Reserve of deliberately causing the Depression… introduced House Resolution No. 158, Articles of Impeachment for the Secretary of the Treasury, two assistant Secretaries of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the officers and directors of its twelve regional banks.” He paid for his boldness not only with losing his seat in Congress but was shot at twice and later poisoned. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article5556.html
Reagan, who commissioned the Grace Report above and dared to criticize the Fed was shot, as was Kennedy when he tried to have silver certificates issued by Executive order. They would compete with the Federal Reserve Notes but the plan was never implemented.
Ralph says:
June 10, 2010 at 6:31 am
It looks like there have been numerous take-overs & n=mergers since it’s original inception, I’d say it was international on the current score, so who will sue who?:-))
Interesting thread … I’m late to the topic but couldn’t help noting the projection in all of sphaerica’s comments. Naturally, those still naive enough to believe that climate scientists understand our world (wren, barry, anu, etc.) come forth with there normal responses that are nothing more than “but, but, but … all the authorities say it’s so …”.
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
“Spencer and Lindzen argue that climate sensitivity is lower than IPCC recommends, and therefore that warming will be gradual rather than (relatively) abrupt.”
I think Spencer and Lindzen are disputing more that the timing of global warming. If climate sensitivities are in the range of 1 degree for doubling of CO2, as both suggest, it is unlikely that greenhouses gases will pose a significant threat ever, given the logarithmic nature of greenhouse gas warming.
Johnston’s paper has value only within the political realm as an argument to disregard science and keep the status quo; otherwise all 80+ pages are worthless.
He argues based on the existence of advocacy scientists, an establishment science association, and an international sinister conspiracy. None of these exist, except in his paper and in the minds of his stakeholders.
Johnston also views science solely through the lens of political theatre, which explains his misunderstanding of scientific inquiry and the scientific process. Just as politicians do, scientists also argue a lot–actually all the time. Unlike politics, however, science has no real dogmas, sacred cows, or beliefs. Further, even common words like “theory” have a different meaning in science in comparison politics.
Unlike political theory, a scientific theory goes through cycles of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, initial theory formation, more retesting, re-experimentations, and possibly countless theoretical revisions, only to arrive at a possibility. And that’s just the beginning.
Climate science is considerably complex and continues to present challenges. When one considers the six years of additional work and refinements in our understanding, of course IPCC’s 2007 report would differ from its 2001 report. And climatologists continue to argue all the time. However, humanity’s role on climate change is not one of them. Herein lies the main problem with Johnston’s paper. Johnston mischaracterizes scientific inquiry as political advocacy. Hence, the value of Johnston’s paper is dubious at best.
Sancta Simplicitas.
Conradbaugh says: “He argues based on the existence of advocacy scientists, an establishment science association, and an international sinister conspiracy. None of these exist, except in his paper and in the minds of his stakeholders.”
So, did you actually read the paper? The one mentioned in the post?
@conradbaugh re “However, humanity’s role on climate change is not one of them.”
Even assuming, arguendo, that human activity has an impact on the Earth’s average climate, that impact is so small as to be ignored. The clear evidence is overwhelming that humans have done, and can do, essentially zero to change the climate. Not via CO2 emissions, not via land use changes, not via aerosol emissions or any other activity.
Instead, what a few humans have done is manipulate the historic temperature record to create the appearance of a warming trend. See the Abilene Effect on my blog. See Chiefio’s excellent (and futile) search for the warming trend.
What other humans have done is conveniently ignore massive impacts to the climate – clouds, solar activity, oceanic basin oscillations, jet stream path, and others.
What the engineers know is that a deliberate change in atmospheric CO2 concentration will have zero effect on the average temperature. Scientists may be very good at “doing science” but not one of them ever defeats the fundamentals of process control. Dr. Latour and I have shown that CO2 cannot be manipulated in order to control the earth’s temperature.
“conradbaugh says:
[…]
I plan on studying his paper more closely later when time permits because… well, in all honesty, I’m just so disappointed. There must be something of value somewhere in there.”
You forgot to say that Anthony’s blog loses credibility by posting things like this. I will have to report you to your politkommissar for not sticking to the script.
“Unlike politics, however, science has no real dogmas, sacred cows, or beliefs.”
+++++++++
That is the Ideal Science believed in Grade 5 classrooms. Science is and always has been filled with dogma, sacred cows and (unfounded) beliefs and ‘hunches’. Many experiments are performed to confirm hunches. Belief is a powerful and essential component of science. Most scientists have faith in their results and believe them to be true, until someone shows otherwise. On the other hand, belief in something that science shows is otherwise, is superstition. Because it all depends on one’s state of knowledge, one man’s science is another man’s superstition.
Academia, where most of the climate scientists work is, in my experience, a zoo of competing species of thought trying to become top predator – great fun as long as no one takes it too seriously or too far. Quite a bit of real science is properly classed as philosophy – (often idle) speculations about how and why something does or does not happen, beginning and ending in words. Inflation of the universe, for example, is a hunch supported by some observations and not by others.
In my view, CAGW is not supported by much at all because of the weak circumstantial case for any AGW and the greater likelihood that it is natural variation. Then there are the laughable speculations of models that everyone agrees do not have a grip on what appears to be by far the most important variable: clouds. It is not about heating then, it is about cooling.
Read the Copenhagen Agreement very carefully. It is not really about changing the climate, it is about providing development funding to poor and deprived countries – something that is not happening and would have, long ago, were it not for the obscene amounts of money spent annually on preparing for and making war.
Development of the poor, which I fully support, paid for by carbon taxes, which I do not, is a great idea. It is also advocacy of the First Order. That is why the phrase, ‘the science is settled’ was adopted – to avoid independent peer review of some key (anointed) scientists’ beliefs.
Advocacy hiding behind a thin veneer of trumped-up GW is a poor substitute for genuine international development and war-prevention programs. Humanity deserves better than that.
Patience, patience. As it gets colder emperor CO2’s want of clothing will be even more evident. Another theory will take its place.