Below is the press release (on the web here) from the American Physical Society, responding to the resignation letter of APS fellow Dr. Hal Lewis made public last Friday, October 8th. APS Members Dr. Roger Cohen, Dr. Will Happer, and of course Dr. Hal Lewis have responded in kind, and have asked me to carry their response on WUWT. I’ve gladly obliged, and their inline comments are indented in blue italics in the document below. – Anthony
October 12, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tawanda W. Johnson
Press Secretary
APS Physics
529 14th St. NW, Suite 1050
Washington, DC 20045-2065
Phone: 202-662-8702
Fax: 202-662-8711
tjohnson@aps.org
APS Comments on Harold Lewis’ Resignation of his Society Membership
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a recent letter to American Physical Society (APS) President Curtis A. Callan, chair of the Princeton University Physics Department, Harold Lewis, emeritus physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, announced that he was resigning his APS membership.
In response to numerous accusations in the letter, APS issues the following statement:
There is no truth to Dr. Lewis’ assertion that APS policy statements are driven by financial gain. To the contrary, as a membership organization of more than 48,000 physicists, APS adheres to rigorous ethical standards in developing its statements.
We know that the existing 2007 APS Statement on Climate Change was developed literally over lunch by a few people, after the duly constituted Committee had signed off on a more moderate Statement.
The Society is open to review of its statements if members petition the APS Council – the Society’s democratically elected governing body – to do so.
We have yet to receive a response to our Petition:
http://www.openletter-globalwarming.info/Site/Signatures__APS_Council_Study.html
…delivered last spring and signed by 260+ members and former members, including nearly 100 Fellows, 17 members of national academies and 2 Nobels. Driven largely by the ClimateGate revelations, the Petition asks that the Society conduct an independent study and assessment.
As for democratic membership participation in matters of science, consider the reaction to a grass roots outpouring of APS member opinion on the 2007 APS Statement http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200912/apscouncilors.cfm . “[APS Councilor] was uncomfortable with the idea of a membership-wide referendum on statements. He said that he was concerned that having a membership wide vote on controversial issues could lead to the adoption of scientifically unsound statements.” Evidently physicists should be excluded from inputting on a question of physics; only “physics monks” are entitled to do so ex cathedra .
Dr. Lewis’ specific charge that APS as an organization is benefitting financially from climate change funding is equally false. Neither the operating officers nor the elected leaders of the Society have a monetary stake in such funding.
The chair of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) that re-endorsed the 2007 APS Statement on Climate Change sits on the science advisory board of a large international bank http://annualreport.deutsche-bank.com/2009/ar/supplementaryinformation/advisoryboards.html The bank has a $60+ billion Green portfolio, which it wishes to assure investors is safe…not to mention their income from carbon trading. Other members of this board include current IPCC chief Pachauri and Lord Oxburgh, of Climategate exoneration fame. The viability of these banks activities depends on continued concern over CO2 emissions . Then there is the member of the Kleppner Committee (that reviewed the APS 2007 Statement prior to POPA) who served on that committee while under consideration for the position of Chief Scientist at BP. The position had been vacated when Steve Koonin left to take a post in the administration at DOE. Soon after the Kleppner Committee report in late 2009, this committee member took the BP job. BP had previously funded the new Energy Laboratory at Berkeley, which was headed by current Energy Secretary Steve Chu.
Moreover, relatively few APS members conduct climate change research, and therefore the vast majority of the Society’s members derive no personal benefit from such research support.
This does not mention the firm expectation by federal government agencies such as the NAS and the Presidential Science Advisor’s office that the APS will continue to support the huge funding machine that diverts billions of taxpayer dollars into research that must support the alarmist credo. APS has been silent on the documented practice by some climate scientists aimed at preventing opposing research from being published.
On the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:
- Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity;
- Carbon dioxide is an excellent infrared absorber, and therefore, its increasing presence in the atmosphere contributes to global warming; and
This passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.
- The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.
Well, it depends on what you mean by “dwell time.” If it is the conventional half life of an impulse loading of carbon dioxide, the statement is wrong – by a lot.. The IPCC’s Bern carbon cycle model http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~joos/model_description/model_description.html gets a 16 year half life. If it is the time for the last molecule to get picked up by a sink, the statement is meaningless. At the very least, the statement is sloppy and hardly befitting a world class scientific society.
On these matters, APS judges the science to be quite clear. However, APS continues to recognize that climate models are far from adequate, and the extent of global warming and climatic disruptions produced by sustained increases in atmospheric carbon loading remain uncertain.
This is much better than the 2007 APS Statement itself. However, the phrase “climate disruptions” is noteworthy because it is the new buzzword recently introduced by Science Advisor John Holdren http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100054012/global-warming-is-dead-long-live-er-global-climate-disruption/ , evidently enabling advocates to assign any unusual weather event to human causes. It is curious that that the APS press release happens to echo this new phrase.
In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewis’ claim that global warming is a “scam” and a “pseudoscientific fraud.”
What we have here is a bait and switch. No one is saying that the greenhouse effect itself is a scam. This passage seeks to transfer the ‘scam’ charge from its real target to the trivial. The fraud/scam is to be found in the continual drumbeat that the science is settled; that the effects will be catastrophic; that it requires draconian economic sacrifices to avoid; and that mandates and subsidies for rent-seeking corporations are justified.
Additionally, APS notes that it has taken extraordinary steps to solicit opinions from its membership on climate change. After receiving significant commentary from APS members, the Society’s Panel on Public Affairs finalized an addendum to the APS climate change statement reaffirming the significance of the issue. The APS Council overwhelmingly endorsed the reaffirmation.
Never mind that the Panel on Public Affairs is chaired by an individual whose research funding stream (from BP) depends on continued global warming alarm. And you have to keep your eye on the pea. The dispute was not over the “significance” of the issue; it was over the alarmist nature of the statement. The addendum used more than five times the number of words to try to explain what the original statement meant. Not a good sign that they got it right the first time.
Lastly, in response to widespread interest expressed by its members, the APS is in the process of organizing a Topical Group to feature forefront research and to encourage exchange of information on the physics of climate.
Never mind that the Topical Group was proposed in a petition organized by a group of five members that included Dr. Lewis. Also, the Council has not yet approved a TG; therefore it is not in the process of being “organized.” It is being considered. No formal charter or bylaws have been set down. What we have here is the first attempt to co-opt the TG for PR purposes. This before it has even been approved by the APS Council.
Read the APS Climate Change Statement and Commentary: http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/07_1.cfm.
APS should be very reluctant to draw public attention to this Statement, with its infamous phrase, “The evidence is incontrovertible,” despite the fact that nothing in science is ever incontrovertible.
About APS: The American Physical Society (www.aps.org) is the leading physics organization, representing 48,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and internationally. APS has offices in College Park, MD (Headquarters), Ridge, NY, and Washington, DC.
Tawanda W. Johnson
Press Secretary
APS Physics
529 14th St. NW, Suite 1050
Washington, DC 20045-2065
Phone: 202-662-8702
Fax: 202-662-8711
tjohnson@aps.org
=================================================
This page is available as a PDF here: APS Press Release Deconstruction
=================================================
Dr. Roger Cohen writes in with an addedum:
I would like to clarify one technical point for your visitors. It relates to: “This passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.”
The statement is fact, but it does not by itself imply that additional amounts of atmospheric CO2 will not cause significant warming. Straightforward radiation transfer calculations have established that the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 would be to increase global average temperature by only about 1 deg. C. — if there were no other climate effects involved. However, these other effects, generally called “feedbacks,” can amplify or attenuate the primary radiation altering effect of additional CO2. The most prominent feedback is the “cloud-water vapor feedback,” which is very difficult to calculate or determine empirically. The IPCC says these feedback effects are in aggregate large and positive, giving rise to their most recent estimate of 2 to 4.5 deg. C for doubling, with a most likely value of 3 deg. C. However, a substantial body of other research points to a much lower value, much closer to the zero feedback value of 1 deg. C, or even lower. The actual aggregated effect of feedbacks is a critical aspect of the debate.
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The Hal Lewis “problem” probably came up over lunch and a few of them decided a response letter was in order – so after another bottle of wine, deep thought and deliberation, they produced this lousy letter.
Graham Dick,
Very good comment. And thanks for posting that link. It’s better than most, because it sits on the fence instead of sending all the usual AGW code words. But I have to question this statement:
“…even though it is evident that the world is currently experiencing one of the fastest warming rates since the beginning of the observational record…”
Even Phil Jones would disagree that the current rate of warming is anything unusual.
And in spite of all the hubub, the tropospheric temps are the warmest on record (in spite of the current deep La Nina) and arctic sea ice (seems to be accelerating in its loss) and glacial land ice continue to melt. And only some of the CO2 rotational bands are close to being saturated.
Nature will have its way and the laws of physics obeyed.
Lucy Skywalker,
From the abstract of the following paper
Oceanic Uptake of Fossil Fuel CO2: Carbon-13 Evidence
P. D. Quay 1, B. Tilbrook 2, and C. S. Wong 3
The 13C value of the dissolved inorganic carbon in the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean has decreased by about 0.4 per mil between 1970 and 1990. This decrease has resulted from the uptake of atmospheric CO2 derived from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. The net amounts of CO2 taken up by the oceans and released from the biosphere between 1970 and 1990 have been determined from the changes in three measured values: the concentration of atmospheric CO2, the 13C of atmospheric CO2 and the 13C value of dissolved inorganic carbon in the ocean. The calculated average net oceanic CO2 uptake is 2.1 gigatons of carbon per year. This amount implies that the ocean is the dominant net sink for anthropogenically produced CO2 and that there has been no significant net CO2 released from the biosphere during the last 20 years.
It is pretty old, so it should be easy to provide a cite that debunks it, or the 98 papers that cite it.
And what happens to CO2 in solution in the oceans, Hint, look at the White Cliffs of Dover, for a clue about Henry’s Law and whether or not CO2 is in equilibrium in the oceans.
from Floor Anthoni, although I could have written it from memory having studied chemistry
CO2 + H2O H2CO3 H+ + HCO3- H+ + H+ + CO32-
Now if you add CO2 the reaction goes to the right, increasing the amount of H+, or dare I say it, the acidification.
Again, since you say Ca++ is present, and you are correct, it binds with the CO32-, forming Calcium Carbonate, which also causes the reaction to move to the right, increasing the acidity.
Is the amount of CO32- and HCO3- present really relevant, as what is important is the change in the amount of H+ present which increase both with added CO2 as well as the formation of calcium carbonate.
And Floor Antoni is less published than Oliver Manual, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think he is a good guy.
What do you think about the change in O2 in the atmosphere? Do you think it is changing as a result of burning fossil fuels?
Dr. Hal Lewis has joined the club of honest science Skeptics that was begun some 400 years ago, in 1610, by a man named Galileo Galelei who challenged the SCIENCE-DOGMA of his time. At least in 1610 the DOGMA was based upon ignorance and not greed.
Anthony,
You know I was not refering to the emails but to the loss of data Jones admits in various moves in the 1980s. You state:
“Dr. Lewis:
Yes. I really don’t have them, you know. I’ve long since either lost in moving or discarded everything that I had. So I have no papers around from JASON, if that’s what you mean.
Aaserud:
No, generally — both JASON and generally speaking.
Lewis:
There are lots of things, but they’re scattered in a complicated way. Generally speaking, I throw things away after a few years, so the only things I have are the things that have accumulated over the last few years and are relevant to the things I’m actually doing these days.
…
Big difference between discarding old things as you move, versus asking other to delete. Your point fails. -Anthony”
Now compare this to you very vociferous attack on jones of which this is an example:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/03/climategate-so-wheres-the-oh-snap-email/
“One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.”
I take it that you would now retract your insinuations that Jones acted unscientifically by losing data?
\harry
REPLY: Nope, when you are the keeper of a public data set, used by thousands of others, and used to determine policy of nations, you get held to a higher standard, particularly when you say things like:
Warwick Hughes requested the current data in 2005. The e-mail you received from Jones on 21 February 2005 – you know, the one that said:
Could that have been in his mind when he wrote to Mann, Bradley and Hughes, also on 21 February 2005 :
Comparing that sort of bad behavior from Dr. Jones to a fellow throwing out some boxes of old papers from when he moved isn’t even close.
Your point still fails, badly. – Anthony
James Sexton says:
October 13, 2010 at 5:57 pm
In the same vein, can some of the CO2 experts tell me if all the CO2 molecules uniformly lay on their backs or bellies? If they lay on their bellies, do they only absorb from their backs and then emit from their bellies, or do they, like like the girls on the beaches of Florida turn every half hour and emit and absorb from the same side?
In other words, can someone, without the vehement rhetoric, explain if a CO2 molecule absorbs and emits uniformly, and if extraterrestrial IR is the primary source of heat, how is more CO2 will allow the same IR to pass through and not reflect it as it comes in, but reflect it more as it tries to escape?
=======================================================
Ahahaha, I’ve developed like like a stutter in my typing! But seriously. I’d like a legit answer.
The sun emits IR which is our primary source of heat. CO2 absorbs and then upon excitement, releases heat, uniformly. Right? So, the sun emits, CO2 absorbs, half goes back out to the cosmos, the other half comes to the earth. The earth bounces some back to CO2, and CO2 does again the same thing. Uniformly in and out. If the sun emits 100 sexton units of energy, how does increasing or decreasing atmospheric CO2 change the total units of energy kept on the earth?
Anthony: A few more examples of attack on Jones which according to your last post should not have happened:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/23/taking-a-bite-out-of-climate-data/
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/08/we-lost-original-data.html
Harry Lu,
‘Losing’ data is incompetence, if not deliberate scientific misconduct.
There isn’t much of the scientist in Mr Jones.
Harry Lu: “Attack” is a strong word. Do you mean critisize or question?
Harry Lu says:
October 13, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Anthony: A few more examples of attack on Jones which according to your last post should not have happened:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/23/taking-a-bite-out-of-climate-data/
====================================
What do you mean an attack on Jones???
I see most sane people here, including Dr. Michaels, only “attacking” his piss poor science and refusal to make public his data.
Speaking of “attack”…
I seem to recall one of the emails from last November which reveals one of the Hockey Team’s Ben Santer threatening to “beat the crap out of” Michaels.
That is an “attack”.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
“Smokey says:
October 13, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Harry Lu,
Losing’ data is incompetence, if not deliberate scientific misconduct.”
So you are accusing Dr. Hal Lewis of deliberate scientific misconduct also? That seems fair to me then.
\harry
Harry Lu,
No, Hal Lewis is a hero. But thanx for the interesting red herring argument.
Harry Lu says:
October 13, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Harry, what I think Anthony is trying to say……….., in 2005 Phil Jones acknowledges “a couple of people” want a peak at publicly owned data that he helped accumulate. Further, by inference, he acknowledges an obligation to provide it, yet he affirms he will not. Also, by stating he will not comply with the law, he’s implying he is in possession of the data. He also goes through the trouble of telling his colleagues not to let other people know about his legal obligation to provide said data.
In late 2009, these correspondences are made public. In early 2010, suddenly the data is “lost” according to our friend Phil. Which is odd considering the the archives of some of the servers apparently went back as far as the 1990s.
Yeh Harry, that’s a lot like losing paperwork in a move.
Luboš Motl says:
October 13, 2010 at 12:42 pm
It’s just totally disgusting. The first thing is that Callan, instead of answering himself, gave the task to his bodyguard who has no idea about science and who just wrote a meaningless and dishonest stream of intimidation.
But Tawanda apparently knows Climate Science just about as well as any other Climate Scientist!
Harry Lu says:
October 13, 2010 at 8:59 pm
So you are accusing Dr. Hal Lewis of deliberate scientific misconduct also?
========================================================
Are there no bounds in which you will not go? Really? You’re going to attempt to dig up dirt on a person making a statement through his principals? An elderly man that wishes nothing more than integrity restored to a society of which he’s been a long time member. Honestly? Do you believe this will sway anyone?……..Well, it will, only not to the opinion you’d wish. Is there any wonder why one can almost hear the spit when they type “alarmist”? Or when one can almost palpate the disgust when they type “climate disruption”? There is no reason to wonder, you are part of and a reason why this happens.
Smokey says:
October 13, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Harry Lu,
No, Hal Lewis is a hero. But thanx for the interesting red herring argument.
===============================
Smokey you are being too generous. It ain’t even a red herring.
And it definitely ain’t “interesting”.
It is a bold face “does not follow”…non sequitur.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Harry Lu:
I take it that you would now retract your insinuations that Jones acted unscientifically by losing data?
Harry, no data = no temp. reconstruction = no science. No “materials and methods”. See also the “Harry readme” file for Jones’ “methods”.
Jones had no science and he knew it, but he instead claimed he did and continued to tell this lie to the rest of the World until he was finally caught, and not by Climate Scientists. Comprende?
gryposaurus said: “And I mean a closed system, where the energy budget is balanced.”
Can you clarify what you mean by a “closed system where the energy budget is balanced?” What would you consider the system to be: the surface and atmosphere of the earth; the entire earth (including hydrocarbons extracted from below the surface and burned at the surface); the entire Sun/earth system? And how is the particular definition of the “closed system” relevant to the question of whether or not there are amplifying feedbacks that would drive the temperature higher than CO2 alone?
Hal Lewis worked on reactor safety
No data = bang (big)
REPLY: My gosh, you are an incorrigible fool. Reactor safety isn’t dependent on some boxes of old papers stored in his closet he tossed out. His studies were incorporated into the knowledge base. I’m snipping any further posts from you on this topic because they have fallen below the minimum ride height. – Anthony
“…the IPCC says these feedback effects are in aggregate large and positive, giving rise to their most recent estimate of 2 to 4.5 deg. C for doubling, with a most likely value of 3 deg. C…”
For goodness sake, we’ve already had 60 years of what IPCC likes to call ‘global warming’.
Surely that’s enough time (not to mention the billions of dollars spent) for the devotees of ‘the science’ to come up with a more precise prediction for their likely temperature rise this century (and it should look like ~1°C).
Wikipedia has some uses, as in its list of indicators of possible presence of pseudoscience:
# Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims ✓
# Over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation ✓
# Lack of openness to testing by other experts ✓
# Absence of progress ✓
# Personalization of issues ✓
# Use of misleading language viz. climate change, climate disruption, CO2 pollution ✓
# Absence from citation databases, they get over this by citing each other ✓
The phenomenon of the relatively mediocre seeking power thru climbing the political structures of professional or any other sort organization is a constant problem . It’s described by Hayek in his chapter “Why the worst get on top” in his classic “Road to Serfdom” .
I got sucked into battling this global fraud because it seemed to violate the most basic temperature physics I learned in the 1950s reading boy’s science books . It continues to appear that few understand that the temperature calculated by simply adding up the energy impinging on our planet gives the temperature of a flat spectrum , gray , ball , no matter how light or dark , in our orbit , and that temperature , about 279 kelvin , is 3 times closer to our observed temperature than the ubiquitously parroted 33c “greenhouse effect” .
Mike Haseler , above , noted that to the same extent that CO2 is a good absorber of some IR frequencies , it is a good emitter of those same frequencies . Thus its temperature , or the temperature of any substance with any particular spectrum won’t “runaway” . It will come to a very computable equilibrium .
But I have yet to see any indication that “climate scientists” even know how to compute the temperature of a simple radiantly heated colored ball . Simply doing that for the earth’s observed spectrum would go a long way towards explaining the 9 or 10 degree difference between our observed temperature and that of a gray ball , without even getting into the complexities of our shallow gas skin .
It has also been commented above , that there are no experiments demonstrating any of the asserted physics . It seems that the art of doing simple little experiments has been lost in an age of multi-billion dollar apparatus .
Overall , the APS seems to have presided over a significant decline in the general understanding of some very basic physics over the last half century .
The main issue with this topic is not the basic physics, it is the fact that the supposedly detrimental impacts are not appearing – drought patterns are little changed, other factors are making Pacific Islands grow not drown, Antarctic sea ice continues to extend, tropical storm activity is at a 30 year low, the scare stories about infectious diseases have been categorically refuted…….the reasons for action are completely discounted. Any one calling for action in CO2 reduction in these circumstances is talking politics, not science.
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 13, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Lucy, Lucy, haven’t you read my 4 papers on the source of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere?
There is little doubt that the increase in the atmosphere is human induced: all main natural items are net sinks for CO2: the biosphere is a net sink (as the O2 use shows) and the oceans are a net sink (as the increase of CO2 in the oceans + d13C decrease shows). Thus what is left? Human emissions. The more that only half of the emissions (in quantity) shows up in the atmosphere. As long as the increase in the atmosphere is not larger than the emissions, then the emissions are the only cause of the increase. It is that simple. For those interested, here are the four posts, with a lively discussion:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/05/why-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-1/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/20/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-2/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-3/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/24/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-4/
James Sexton says:
October 13, 2010 at 7:56 pm
The sun emits IR which is our primary source of heat. CO2 absorbs and then upon excitement, releases heat, uniformly. Right? So, the sun emits, CO2 absorbs, half goes back out to the cosmos, the other half comes to the earth. The earth bounces some back to CO2, and CO2 does again the same thing. Uniformly in and out. If the sun emits 100 sexton units of energy, how does increasing or decreasing atmospheric CO2 change the total units of energy kept on the earth?
The sun emits IR, but that is at higher frequency (near visible) and the main CO2 absorption band is below these frequencies, there is some absorption, but that is minor. The outgoing IR from the warmed earth is at much lower frequencies, and the main IR absorption band (not overlapping by water absorption) is in that range (15 micometer). Thus incoming IR is hardly filtered out by CO2, but outgoing IR is. That makes the difference if CO2 increases. If that is a real problem (or beneficial), including feedbacks, that is a entirely different question. See:
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/slides/climate/absorption.gif