Guest post by Michael Lewis, Ph.D.
The current issue of the elitist “science” journal, Science, contains an article in its “Perspectives” section (not in the “Research” section): Earth’s hot past could be prologue to future climate | UCAR. Here’s a video from that page:
Author Jeffrey Kiehl, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), speculates on relationships between CO2 levels and average global surface temperature 30 million to 100 million years ago, and currently observed CO2 levels. To no one ‘s surprise, Kiehl assumes, without evidence, that atmospheric CO2 drives global average surface temperatures, and includes this bias in climate models, projecting an increase of atmospheric CO2 to 1,000 ppm by the end of the 21st Century, with temperatures soaring tens of degrees above the 20th Century average (whatever that means).
Since Science requires membership or hefty fees to access their publications, the average interested person cannot access the original article to verify the conclusions described in the “Perspectives” article.
However, it is clear from the tone of the article on the NCAR web site that this is ideologically driven publication, not scientific research. “If we don’t start seriously working toward a reduction of carbon emissions, we are putting our planet on a trajectory that the human species has never experienced,” says Kiehl. Thus government funded research is used to advance a political agenda.
The research cited in the article was funded by the National Science Foundation, which has a large Climate Change and Paleoclimate program. Researchers shopping for grant opportunities can go to the NSF web site and browse through the many funding programs, find one that fits and submit an application, or, as usually happens, many of them.
There’s nothing wrong with funding your favorite research with government grants. However, when that funding is used as a basis for political propaganda, such as advocating for political responses to climate change, a significant line has been crossed by the researcher, his or her employers and the funding agency itself. The researcher becomes a pawn in the interplay of government agencies, private research firms and economic interests, the science suffers from distorted interpretation and the public ends up with little or no understanding of the reality of the world around them.
Science must be conducted in the confines of the ivory tower, then released, naked and uninterpreted, into the clear light of day.
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onion says:
January 14, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Kiehl’s point is that we are driving CO2 to levels not seen since the time of the dinosaurs
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onion, what you should be asking yourself is why not
Why were CO2 levels that high and then crashed.
What is going on that CO2 levels have fallen to levels that preceeded mass extinctions.
What kind of idiots would build a science around record low CO2 levels, and who is stupid enough to believe that.
A thought:
The earth has experienced 1000 ppm of CO2 in the past and has survived!
Earth has done this without human.
What is than the problem?
I guess becuse we humans producing it. Are we not part of nature or what?
I just noticed that my last heating bill this winter (so far) is much higher than before. Where is this warming. It doesn’t look like global.
Guess what, my CO2 footprint has increased because of this abnormal cold winter.
I sincerely with these non geologists would confine themselves to their numeric models and leave us empirical scientists alone. This is no better then the great global cooling that was being predicted (I think by so of the same people) in the 70’s. It was BS then and is BS now. The one constant in all this is the small.
No one is listening anymore. It will soon be over – I hope;>).
Anthropogenic Global Yawning. Brrrrrrr! Zzzzzzz!
The merry-go-round of AGW logic never ceases to amaze. GCMs have great difficulty in reproducing the observed diurnal cycle of surface temperatures and the observed lapse rate on a day to-day-basis. But this doesn’t deter Kiel from “calculating the greenhouse effect”for millions of years in the past and talking about the results as if they were the product of a physical experiment. How long will such mind games be taken seriously?
From Jack Greer on January 14, 2011 at 3:15 pm:
I choose temporal grounds.
The Earth has been here billions of years. The “excess” man-made emissions have only been happening about a hundred years. The next glaciation is coming, we cannot stop it, and there will be many more after it.
Chart out the temperature record of Earth a million years from now, down to a resolution of 500 years or so. Any sentient studying it would be hard pressed to determine mankind was here at all, let alone had any material impact on Earth’s climate at any point whatsoever.
We don’t have the ability to materially impact the Earth’s climate. As far as the Earth is concerned, anything we’ve done has been lost in the noise.
Trenberth is also at NCAR…
Yes carbo-revisionnism is another aspect of the cult. Not happy with manipulating todays data, they now rewrite the recorded history archives so they fit the paradigm, in Europe for instance.
Now they push it to paleoclimates and geological records.
Science must be conducted in the confines of the ivory tower, then released, naked and uninterpreted, into the clear light of day.
I couldn’t agree more.
But that is not the approach that the doctrine called Post Normal Science believes in. It is a doctrine which is the corruption of science and the corruption of scientists.
It is apparently common now in UK academia and Prof Hulme of UEA and the founder of the Tyndal Centre on Climate Change is an adherent of this doctrine or discipline. Perhaps that explains a lot about CRU and the climategate emails.
In Hulme’s own words as reported at http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/ :
“…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.”
“Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…”
“The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.”
“We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us…we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit”
That doctrine explains what is wrong and why. It holds that scientists can and should tailor results to suit what is the ‘right thing to do’ for mankind or society and gives them the freedom to decide what that is and to act as advocates for it.
If it permeates throughout science then it will be the death of honesty and truth in science.
“Since Science requires membership or hefty fees to access their publications, the average interested person cannot access the original article to verify the conclusions described in the “Perspectives” article.”
No. You can go to the nearest research university library and buy a courtesy card.
“The current issue of the elitist “science” journal, Science, …”
So is the NBA the elitist basketball association?
@kadaka (KD Knoebel) said January 14, 2011 at 4:30 pm:
You seem to have very serious difficulty with the scale of timelines … the implication of our, perhaps, profound impact on human existence on Earth over the next few hundred years vs. the timeline and impact of Earth’s orbital features. Don’t feel bad, sadly you’re not alone here.
I don’t have access to the actual paper but it is clear every statement in the video and in the press reports made by Kiehl is a completely ridiculous exaggeration.
The paper is not available, but there are two charts available on the Science website and I believe I have the data he is using. Kiehl’s chart below.
http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/5420/science2011jan331601415.gif
Well, here is the actual CO2 data it seems Kiehl used (there are a few discrepancies but it is close enough) and the temperature data over the same period (Sorry, but Excel does not like doing charts with time going in the same direction as Kiehl’s chart – so mine are in the other direction).
http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/2844/tempco2ppm45m.png
And here is the CO2 data at 3.0C per doubling – off by a major amount – 1.5C per doubling seems to be closer.
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/4869/tempco230cdoubling45m.png
Kiehl is trying to say that the Earth’s temperature was 16.0C above today at some point in the period (or perhaps 100 Mya I don’t know) but it was not even close to that.
Kiehl’s math is really saying that the CO2 sensitivity is 5.5C per doubling. His calculator might not be working right. Does he think that people will not check these ridiculous claims?
I note he is often partners with Trenberth so it seems this might be part of a propaganda campaign where the pro-AGW set just accept every claim made without actually checking how far off of reality they are. Kiehl and Trenberth are really just playing to the believers anyway, not to the people who check claims and numbers.
He says that on longer time scales the effect of CO2 is twice what it is on shorter time scales. I don’t know exactly what the response time of a CO2 moleecule is in exerting its greenhouse effect. But I do know that it doesn’t take a thousand years to do an IR spectrum. So if his “observation” is correct I think that the extended time scale is clear evidence against CO2 as the cause.
Mike asks: January 14, 2011 at 5:21 pm
As a matter of fact, yes.
Maybe it’s been a good thing that we intervened to arrest the catastrophic decline in carbon dioxide concentrations, which otherwise would eventually have fallen to levels incapable of supporting life.
Bill Illis:
If your graph is correct then over the period 25Mya to 35Mya temperature is falling while CO2 is rising. So CO2 is innocent.
$3 a week, $12 a month, $144 a year is a LOT of money for me: semi-retired, working part-time.
Besides, this research was funded with our tax dollars. We’ve already paid for it! Where does Science magazine get off charging us to read OUR research?
I think I’m going to start making up all sorts of stuff. It’s so much easier than making substantiated or verifiable claims.
Bill Illis says:
January 14, 2011 at 6:48 pm
“The paper is not available,….” to people who are too lazy to go to a library.
“….I believe I have the data he is using.”
Surely any non-elitist reviewer would accept that claim.
Hey, let’s take a bunch of bloggers and form a basketball team and watch what happens when they try to play any NBA team. Oh, and in NBA games they use real referees.
Michael A. Lewis, Ph.D. says:
January 14, 2011 at 7:40 pm
$3 a week, $12 a month, $144 a year is a LOT of money for me: semi-retired, working part-time.
Besides, this research was funded with our tax dollars. We’ve already paid for it! Where does Science magazine get off charging us to read OUR research?
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I love to watch the free enterprise types get all upset when they have to pay for something!
Once more, deluded inversion of cause and effect. This is a new low for ‘Science’. The trend line is ominous.
I think at least one of his assumptions are incorrect. He mentioned that with our current fossil fuel consumption that by 2100 CO2 will be about 1000ppm (0:43 in video). My understanding was current levels are about 390ppm rising approx 2ppm per annum or 180ppm over the next 90 years. He’s implying an increase of 610ppm over the 90 years. 1000ppm or 570ppm?
What a grand example of a opportunistic liar, or idi-t …or both. Please, make revolution or something against giving such people and projects any government money!
The correlation between temperature and CO2 in the ice age cycle (the “Al Gore diagrams”) that poor man knows for sure is the other way around.
Mike January 14, 2011 at 10:01 pm says:
“I love to watch the free enterprise types get all upset when they have to pay for something!”.
You choose to have sarcasm against pro-free market people and to pay for this. (I don’t think everyone against the lie CAGW is pro-free markets.) But this isn’t to pay any bill. It’s to pay government to promote lies, which are used to ultimately transform society to control the economy, which will at least restrain free enterprise! Even you should understand the logic here.
My criticism is just against that any tax payer should pay for this BS. Since you criticism against me as opposing this is criticism against me as a prommoter of free enterprise, I guess you don’t promote free enterprise. It seems as if many CAGW activists are highly critical to, and/or against free markets (capitalism).
Whoosh. That’s the sound of the point of this article going right over the heads of WUWT posters. It’s not one crappy paper that’s the problem but the whole peer review process. Small wonder that the cargo cult scientists spout it’s wonders to behold. It’s because peer review is eminently corruptible.
You pay for the privilege of headline grabbing “research” but are not allowed to examine the full paper without subscribing too a privately owned and profit oriented media outlet.
Do you as a taxpayer feel this farce should continue?
Oh yes there is, *if* those are taxpayer funded grants (as opposed to grants from some private foundations or maybe private corporations). The taxpayers, which are actually a small percentage of the entire public are writing these checks. It’s about time we get some respect, and we will, eventually.
Now you’re getting the hang of it! It is my opinion that this type of argument with its healthy dose of righteous indignation is the most productive. Political Scientists that waste our money targeting our very way of life and our children’s, represent the ripe low hanging fruit and easiest to pick.
I’m with you brother, and believe me the number of people is really growing. It is clear that the warmies are going to make it easy for us now, with their endless obsessive compulsive rants even during a winter of epic proportions. Changes are coming. One might say a sea-level change but not the kind they’re expecting.
Ironically when that sea change is complete, that of a new paradigm of defunded institutions, the warmies will only have themselves to blame. Not only have they made laughingstocks of themselves, but they have made a mockery of the taxpayers that work endless hours to feed their families and pay for a roof over their heads (shelter from the horrific global warming this winter). They have also made a mockery of everything noble that Science as an institution has fought so hard for, for several millennia. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and endless list of pioneers are rolling over in their graves.