Dr. Harold Lewis sent this today via email with a request to make it public here. I’m happy to oblige. Read the letter to understand the movie poster.- Anthony
Dear Curt:
When on October 6 I sent you my letter of resignation from APS , I of course expected the Empire to strike back in one way or another. It pleased me however, when I read your response, to find a very minimum of ad hominem attacks, confined mostly to apparently irresistible eruptions of “Lewis is a liar.” (“His statements are all false” is the equivalent.) So I thank you for that courtesy.
What took me by surprise was the pusillanimous, almost puerile, tone of the comment, which reads more like an ad for a used-car lot than as a declaration of a great scientific society. All our products have passed a complete inspection by our factory-trained mechanics. We’re making no money on this, take it and be thankful. Etc. Not a single major issue confronted in any substantive way. Yet everyone knows about the sloppy handling of the 2007 statement; everyone knows about the financial investments of many of the major players; there is plenty of dirt in the public domain, yet you continue to pretend it is all in a different universe.
Curt, you cannot have written such a shabby document.
Roger Cohen has written an incisive deconstruction of your response, and I can add little, so let me turn to the repair options. For the record, though my resignation from APS gives me no standing, my objective here is to help slow the APS rush toward the cliff. This is what I think must be done at the proximate meeting of the Council.
1.The 2007 statement should be simply withdrawn. No excuses, no caveats, no unnecessary embarrassment, no statement of principles, no references to future research, simply withdrawn. It was a mistake. This is the sine qua non for restoring the honor of APS.
2. The Council should promulgate a transparent confict-of-interest policy, comparable to those used by the government. Those offended by this might even serve under reasonable constraints. Others should not serve. Many know how to do this. It is insane to have people with millions of dollars at stake determining APS policy on such matters.
3.The APS management has become a conglomerate force in itself. This is largely through neglect, because the Council is drawn too specifically through its major fields, and in all too many cases the policies are drawn by very few members, often with an axe to grind. It is too easy to push them through the Council, the members of which are in the dark. There is a wise observation (not due to Archimedes) that if any organization is left alone, the lightweights will rise to the top.
Cheers,
Hal
Dear Curt:
When on October 6 I sent you my letter of resignation from APS , I of course expected the Empire to strike back in one way or another. It pleased me however, when I read your response, to find a very minimum of ad hominem attacks, confined mostly to apparently irresistible eruptions of “Lewis is a liar.” (“His statements are all false” is the equivalent.) So I thank you for that courtesy.
What took me by surprise was the pusillanimous, almost puerile, tone of the comment, which reads more like an ad for a used-car lot than as a declaration of a great scientific society. All our products have passed a complete inspection by our factory-trained mechanics. We’re making no money on this, take it and be thankful. Etc. Not a single major issue confronted in any substantive way. Yet everyone knows about the sloppy handling of the 2007 statement; everyone knows about the financial investments of many of the major players; there is plenty of dirt in the public domain, yet you continue to pretend it is all in a different universe.
Curt, you cannot have written such a shabby document.
Roger Cohen has written an incisive deconstruction of your response, and I can add little, so let me turn to the repair options. For the record, though my resignation from APS gives me no standing, my objective here is to help slow the APS rush toward the cliff. This is what I think must be done at the proximate meeting of the Council.
1.The 2007 statement should be simply redrawn. No excuses, no caveats, no unnecessary embarrassment, no statement of principles, no references to future research, simply withdrawn. It was a mistake. This is the sine qua non for restoring the honor of APS.
2. The Council should promulgate a transparent confict-of-interest policy, comparable to those used by the government. Those offended by this might even serve under reasonable constraints. Others should not serve. Many know how to do this. It is insane to have people with millions of dollars at stake determining APS policy on such matters.
3.The APS management has become a conglomerate force in itself. This is largely through neglect, because the Council is drawn too specifically though its major fields, and in all too many cases the policies are drawn by very few members, often with an axe to grind. It is too easy to push them through the Council, the members of which are in the dark. There is a wise observation (not due to Archimedes) that if any organization is left alone, the lightweights will rise to the top.
Cheers,
Hal
The part of this letter I like the most is the way Lewis back-handed or rather, b*tch slapped, Cullen by thanking him for keeping the ad homs to a minimum. I almost fell off my chair when I read that. It was a very nice take on the concept of “damning someone with faint praise”.
Well played indeed Dr. Lewis!
Smokey says:
November 7, 2010 at 7:54 p
Your statement in the above post about the dwell time of CO2 not being hundreds of years is dead wrong.
This is proven by Susan Solomon’s paper in which she shows that CO2, which will be at high levels in the atmosphere due to imbalances created by human emissions at current rates over the course of a century, will take many hundreds of years to clear out of the atmosphere.
See the link to her paper in the PNAS proceedings that I have given in above.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/06/another-letter-from-hal-lewis-to-the-american-physical-society/#comment-525173
eadler, your arguments assume that nothing else happens. But it may. More clouds may form and reflect radiation back to space. More plants may grow and absorb CO2. The world is a more complex place than present models can know.
Very level-headed and non-emotional comment by Dr. Hal Lewis. Should push the APS nearer the cliff.
To echo BA Cullen, “Hurrah for Dr Lewis!”.
Dr Lewis’s latest missive has a superbly erudite and gentlemanly flavour which is almost out of fashion in this age of brisk rudeness. Despite the erudition and the gentlemanly manner, Dr Lewis’s intent is very obviously steeled by his honesty, his knowledge of physics and his disgust at the behaviour of the officers of the professional association that he graced with his membership for so many decades.
eadler;
[snip] As far as Solomon’s nonsense goes, it is well-known, all right: for its preposterous conclusions (1,000 yr. dwell time, irreversable changes, yada yada) following from its googy computer model parametrized assumptions (fixed unrecycling base of CO2, ignoring of daily, month, annual fluctuations, etc.).
As summarized here: http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php
Heh. Edit: “googy computer model” ==>”goofy computer model”.
‘Note to self: Preview is your friend!‘
Brian H,
You are confusing the residence time of an individual CO2 molecule in the air, with the dwell time meant by the APS letter. The fact that the oceans and land emit and absorb large amounts of CO2 in a year, doesn’t mean that high concentrations won’t last in the atmosphere for a long time.
Mathematically the average residence time of a molecule in the atmosphere is given by Rtm= Na/AR, where Rtm is the residence time of a molecule, Na is the number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere, and AR is the absorption rate of CO2 molecules by land and oceans.
The net annual change in the number of molecules of CO2 in the atmosphere is given by
CN= ER-AR, where ER is the emission rate.
CN determines the time it takes for high concentrations of CO2 to reduce, which is what is meant by the “dwell time for CO2 in the atmosphere”.
If the temperature of the ocean and the land is high, the absorption rate of CO2 by land and oceans, AR, will not increase enough above the emission rate , to reduce the high concentration quickly. This is what Solomon’s paper shows.
Whether Susan Solomon’s modelling is correct or not is not the issue.
The rebuttal by Cohen and et al confuses two obviously different variables residence time for an individual moleculeconcept, and the dwell time of high concentrations. This is basic stuff that a high school student should be able to understand. The fact that Lewis, Segalstadt and their supporters are confused about it, and are confusing their followers about this is highly disturbing, and would appear to be evidence of incompetence or a calculated campaign of disinformation.
These people should know better.
The likeliest explanation for this phenomenon is psychological in origin, a combination of the Dunning Kruger effect and avoidance of cognitive dissonance.
Robert Morris says:
November 6, 2010 at 10:07 pm
Be rude, but also answer this: Did Hal’s letter of resignation contain any ad hominen attacks or was it dead center on the issues?
That’s where we differ.
There is nothing to be worried about: Expected answers. As Desmond Morris, the author of “The Naked Ape” would tell us: Those traits of social grooming, mutual caressing, self indulgence are the common characteristics of apes’ societies behavior, where the “egregore” (Greek: egrêgorein, to watch, “an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people”), i.e. the predominance of a group soul, by contrast to individual intelligence, behavior or reasoning. In other words, la “raison d’etre” of weak individuals associating in a bigger body which can protect them from the surrounding environment (in this case of the danger implied by free thinking individual “skeptics”.
Please educate yourself on what argumentum ad hominem actually means. “His statements are false” is not an ad hominem attack, even if your statements are not actually false. It is only ad hominem if they base their argument on your personal characteristics, which they did not do.
Perhaps some examples would help?
* Not ad hominem: “His statements are false.”
* Also not ad hominem: “His statements are false because they are contradicted by these facts.”
* Still not ad hominem: “His statements are false. Also, he is a Communist.”
* Ad hominem: “His statements are false because he is a Communist.”
Wikipedia can give you many more examples. BTW, “your statements are false because you remind me of a used-car salesman” is ad hominem.
So can a comment be regarded as an “ad hominem” argument if it is aimed at an anonymous “debater” ?
Since such an argument would not be referring to the personal characteristics of any known source; it could hardly be regarded as ad hominem !
RockyRoad says:
That’s a good question, so I looked again at Dr. Lewis’s resignation letter. While it contains many insults (“The giants no longer walk the earth,” “pseudoscientific fraud,” “apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch,” “pompous and asinine advice,” etc.), it doesn’t make much attempt to defend any of its statements or opinions. With no logical argument, there can be no logical fallacies.
Dr. Lewis does strongly imply that AGW theory is unreliable merely because lots of money has been invested in its research. This would indeed be an argumentum ad hominem, but it’s not stated explicitly and he backpedals just enough (“this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives”) to avoid the label, in my opinion.
George E. Smith says:
Of course it can. Anonymity itself can be (and often is on this site) disparaged as a reason to ignore an opponent. So let me add another example to the list:
* Ad hominem: “Your argument is invalid because you are posting anonymously.”
John Game – Thanks for saying so eloquently what I have been thinking. Using “Carbon” as shorthand for CO2 is a “meme” as the say in the media that is simultaneously misleading, manipulative and wrong. It’s like saying Sodium when you really mean Sodium Chloride (actually, the health police have been making that mistake for years now that I think about it).
Robb876 – As I am sure you aware, virtually all the carbon in “fossil fuels” was probably in the atmosphere before it was absorbed by the plants and algae now “fossilized” (another inaccurate expression in my book), so even they are technically “carbon neutral” – it’s just the time lag and release rate that is different. That is of course unless you believe in the theory of abiogenic petroleum.
Enneagram says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:43 am
“There is nothing to be worried about: Expected answers. As Desmond Morris, the author of “The Naked Ape” would tell us: Those traits of social grooming, mutual caressing, self indulgence are the common characteristics of apes’ societies behavior, where the “egregore” (Greek: egrêgorein, to watch, “an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people”), i.e. the predominance of a group soul, by contrast to individual intelligence, behavior or reasoning. In other words, la “raison d’etre” of weak individuals associating in a bigger body which can protect them from the surrounding environment (in this case of the danger implied by free thinking individual “skeptics”.”
[Snip. Gratuitous insult. ~dbs, mod.]
Enneagram says:
November 8, 2010 at 7:43 am
“There is nothing to be worried about: Expected answers. As Desmond Morris, the author of “The Naked Ape” would tell us: Those traits of social grooming, mutual caressing, self indulgence are the common characteristics of apes’ societies behavior, where the “egregore” (Greek: egrêgorein, to watch, “an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people”), i.e. the predominance of a group soul, by contrast to individual intelligence, behavior or reasoning. In other words, la “raison d’etre” of weak individuals associating in a bigger body which can protect them from the surrounding environment (in this case of the danger implied by free thinking individual “skeptics”.”
Theoretical arguments such as this are weak argument best. The same could be said of the reasons motivating AGW skeptics to flock at WUWT.
The fact that scientists who accept AGW as a correct theory are in the overwhelming majority doesn’t prove that they are wrong.
REPLY: And Eric, consensus proves nothing in science either. Plate techtonics showed just how flawed scientific “consensus” can be. – Anthony
REPLY: And Eric, consensus proves nothing in science either. Plate techtonics showed just how flawed scientific “consensus” can be. – Anthony
I agree. . Some scientific ideas that gained general acceptance were eventually overthrown. This was especially true in the early days of science, when careful experimental evidence was not generally demanded.
There is a lot of experimental evidence and observations to support AGW at present, and the overwhelming majority of researchers in the field believe that humans are heating the planet significantly. Observations show that less long wave radiation was leaving the atmosphere in 1996 than in 1972, and the major changes were in the absorption lines of CO2, CH4 and O3.
The mere fact of concsensus does not definitively rule out the possibility that this is wrong, but it does put the burden of proof on the opponents.
Can anybody comment on this blog that says 0.45% of APS have signed the petition:
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/only-0-45-of-physicists-sign-denier-petition/
I am still waiting for Lewis to explain EXACTLY why he believes AGW is a hoax. And if he would be so kind, what climate science credentials he has. From what I understand, he is an administrator who hasn’t published any research — of any kind — in 40 years.