Comments On The Hill’s Post “Scientists Ask Congress To Put Aside Politics, Take ‘Fresh Look’ At Climate Data”
By Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.
There is an article in The Hill’s Energy and Environment Blog on February 1 2011 by Andrew Restuccia titled [h/t/ Bob Ferguson]
Scientists ask Congress to put aside politics, take ‘fresh look’ at climate data
The news article starts with the text
More than a dozen scientists took aim at climate skeptics in a letter to members of Congress late last week, calling on lawmakers to put aside politics and focus on the science behind climate change.
In the Jan. 28 letter, 18 scientists from various universities and research centers called on lawmakers to take a “fresh look” at climate change.
“Political philosophy has a legitimate role in policy debates, but not in the underlying climate science,” the scientists said in the letter. “There are no Democratic or Republican carbon dioxide molecules; they are all invisible and they all trap heat.”
Other excerpts from the news article read [with my comments right below each excerpt]
“The scientists took aim at climate skeptics. “Climate change deniers cloak themselves in scientific language, selectively critiquing aspects of mainstream climate science,” the scientists said. “Sometimes they present alternative hypotheses as an explanation of a particular point, as if the body of evidence were a house of cards standing or falling on one detail; but the edifice of climate science instead rests on a concrete foundation.”
My Comment
Actually, the focus almost exclusively on the radiative effect of CO2 and a few other grenhouse gases is a house of cards. As we documented in our paper (in which each author is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union)
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union
“In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, other first-order human climate forcings are important to understanding the future behavior of Earth’s climate. These forcings are spatially heterogeneous and include the effect of aerosols on clouds and associated precipitation [e.g., Rosenfeld et al., 2008], the influence of aerosol deposition (e.g., black carbon (soot) [Flanner et al. 2007] and reactive nitrogen [Galloway et al., 2004]), and the role of changes in land use/land cover [e.g., Takata et al., 2009]. Among their effects is their role in altering atmospheric and ocean circulation features away from what they would be in the natural climate system [NRC, 2005]. As with CO2, the lengths of time that they affect the climate are estimated to be on multidecadal time scales and longer.
Therefore, the cost-benefit analyses regarding the mitigation of CO2 and other greenhouse gases need to be considered along with the other human climate forcings in a broader environmental context, as well as with respect to their role in the climate system.”
and
“The evidence predominantly suggests that humans are significantly altering the global environment, and thus climate, in a variety of diverse ways beyond the effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases, including CO2…….Because global climate models do not accurately simulate (or even include) several of these other first-order human climate forcings, policy makers must be made aware of the inability of the current generation of models to accurately forecast regional climate risks to resources on multidecadal time scales.”
The failure of this group of climate scientists to consider this broader perspective illustrates their inappropriately narrow view of climate including the role of humans in affecting it, as well as of other social and environmental threats as discussed in the weblog post
A Way Forward In Climate Science Based On A Bottom-Up Resource-Based Perspective
The Hill post also writes
“Congress should, we believe, hold hearings to understand climate science and what it says about the likely costs and benefits of action and inaction,” the scientists wrote. “It should not hold hearings to attempt to intimidate scientists or to substitute ideological judgments for scientific ones.”
The letter of January 28, 2011 to the Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate is from
John Abraham, University of St. Thomas
Barry Bickmore, Brigham Young University
Gretchen Daily,* Stanford University
G. Brent Dalrymple,* Oregon State University
Andrew Dessler, Texas A&M University
Peter Gleick,* Pacific Institute
John Kutzbach,* University of Wisconsin-Madison
Syukuro Manabe,* Princeton University
Michael Mann, Penn State University
Pamela Matson,* Stanford University
Harold Mooney,* Stanford University
Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton University
Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Richard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Warren Washington, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Gary Yohe, Wesleyan University
George Woodwell,* The Woods Hole Research Center
*Member of the National Academy of Sciences
The letter is reproduced in the news article and has the following excerpts which I will comment on.
First, two excerpts separated by a few paragraphs illustrates an inconstant claim of the above individuals. They write
“It is not our role as scientists to determine how to deal with problems like climate change. That is a policy matter and rightly must be left to our elected leaders in discussion with all Americans. But, as scientists, we have an obligation to evaluate, report, and explain the science behind climate change.”
but then later state
“We and our colleagues are prepared to assist you as you work to develop a rational and practical national policy to address this important issue.”
My Comment
It’s actually hard to find a more self-contradictory statement!
The next excerpt is
“But no one who argues against the science of climate change has ever provided an alternative scientific theory that adequately satisfies the observable evidence or conforms to our understanding of physics, chemistry, and climate dynamics.”
The authors of the letter do not even define what is “the science of climate change”. From the context of the letter, however, they clearly mean the dominance of the radiative effect of CO2 and a few other gases as being the primary forcing that alters long-term weather statistics and other aspects of the climate. However, it is straightforward to refute this hypothesis as we did in our paper listed above [Pielke et al, 2009] where we documented that the hypothesis
Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and are dominated by the emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, the most important of which is CO2. The adverse impact of these gases on regional and global climate constitutes the primary climate issue for the coming decades.
has been rejected.
The only hypothesis that has not been rejected is
“Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first-order climate forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human influences on regional and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming decades.”
We agree that “human activity is changing the climate” e.g. see
Inadvertent Weather Modification: An Information Statement of the American Meteorological Society
(Adopted by the AMS Council on 2 November 2010)
but this statement documents that the influence of humans on the local, regional and global scale is much more than due to the radiative effect of CO2 and a few other greenhouse gases. The narrow perspective presented by the authors of the letter to Congress is not supported by the current scientific knowledge.
The next excerpt is
“Climate change deniers cloak themselves in scientific language, selectively critiquing aspects of mainstream climate science. Sometimes they present alternative hypotheses as an explanation of a particular point, as if the body of evidence were a house of cards standing or falling on one detail; but the edifice of climate science instead rests on a concrete foundation. As an open letter from 255 NAS members noted in the May 2010 Science magazine, no research results have produced any evidence that challenges the overall scientific understanding of what is happening to our planet’s climate and why.”
My Comment
Without commenting on their very inappropriate use of the term “denier”, their claim that “no research results have produced any evidence that challenges the overall scientific understanding of what is happening to our planet’s climate and why”, is blatantly wrong. Examples of major international assessment reports that refute their claim include
Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system. Springer, Berlin, Global Change – The IGBP Series, 566 pp
and
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp
In National Research Council (2005) it is written
“…..the traditional global mean TOA radiative forcing concept has some important limitations, which have come increasingly to light over the past decade. The concept is inadequate for some forcing agents, such as absorbing aerosols and land-use changes, that may have regional climate impacts much greater than would be predicted from TOA radiative forcing. Also, it diagnoses only one measure of climate change—global mean surface temperature response—while offering little information on regional climate change or precipitation. These limitations can be addressed by expanding the radiative forcing concept and through the introduction of additional forcing metrics. In particular, the concept needs to be extended to account for (1) the vertical structure of radiative forcing, (2) regional variability in radiative forcing, and (3) nonradiative forcing.”
“Regional variations in radiative forcing may have important regional and global climatic implications that are not resolved by the concept of global mean radiative forcing. Tropospheric aerosols and landscape changes have particularly heterogeneous forcings. To date, there have been only limited studies of regional radiative forcing and response. Indeed, it is not clear how best to diagnose a regional forcing and response in the observational record; regional forcings can lead to global climate responses, while global forcings can be associated with regional climate responses. Regional diabatic heating can also cause atmospheric teleconnections that influence regional climate thousands of kilometers away from the point of forcing. Improving societally relevant projections of regional climate impacts will require a better understanding of the magnitudes of regional forcings and the associated climate responses.”
“Several types of forcings—most notably aerosols, land-use and land-cover change, and modifications to biogeochemistry—impact the climate system in nonradiative ways, in particular by modifying the hydrological cycle and vegetation dynamics. Aerosols exert a forcing on the hydrological cycle by modifying cloud condensation nuclei, ice nuclei, precipitation efficiency, and the ratio between solar direct and diffuse radiation received. Other nonradiative forcings modify the biological components of the climate system by changing the fluxes of trace gases and heat between vegetation, soils, and the atmosphere and by modifying the amount and types of vegetation. No metrics for quantifying such nonradiative forcings have been accepted. Nonradiative forcings have eventual radiative impacts, so one option would be to quantify these radiative impacts. However, this approach may not convey appropriately the impacts of nonradiative forcings on societally relevant climate variables such as precipitation or ecosystem function. Any new metrics must also be able to characterize the regional structure in nonradiative forcing and climate response.”
The authors of the letter to the Members of Congress have failed to communicate these issues to them in their communication.
Summary
The authors of this letter to Congress clearly are advocates for particular policy actions based on their (in my view) inaccurately narrow view of the role of humans within the climate system. They are trying to claim they are only focusing on the science issues, but even a casual examination of their letter shows they are advocates. They still, unfortunately, have not read my son’s book
Pielke, R. A. Jr, 2007: The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2007) should be required reading to determine the role that each AGU member wants to serve with respect to their interface with the political process.
in order to educate them on the role they have chosen when interfacing with policymakers.
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Douglas says:
February 4, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Theo Goodwin says:
February 4, 2011 at 12:43 pm
William Gray says:
February 4, 2011 at 11:26 am
“Theo Goodwin. Would you please define what you mean by the ‘indigenous populations’ of Europe and the USA.”
Inuits and Scot-Irish.
When will “scientists” understand this simple truth:
“‘Global Warming’ refers to an obscure statistical quantity, globally averaged temperature anomaly, the small residue of far larger and mostly uncorrelated local anomalies. This quantity is highly uncertain, but may be on the order of 0.7C over the past 150 years. This quantity is always varying at this level and there have been periods of both warming and cooling on virtually all time scales. On the time scale of from 1 year to 100 years, there is no need for any externally specified forcing. The climate system is never in equilibrium because, among other things, the ocean transports heat between the surface and the depths. To be sure, however, there are other sources of internal variability as well.”
Dr. Richard Lindzen MIT
Having studied this issue for a few years now, it is beyond me why anyone thinks there is anything that needs explained in any of the weather we have seen for the last 150 years.
It is pretty obvious that none of the gang of 18 have ever taken a class in heat transfer.
If they have they must not have completed it satisfactorily or have slept since then.
These boys are just not too smart. Very glib but not smart.
I would be willing to hazard a guess on their political leanings.
.
Noelle: “……. I don’t see how you can make your ‘a house of cards’ reference when the authors reference the conclusions of this vast array of organizations, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Are you challenging the conclusions of these organizations?”
Challenging the conclusions of government-funded scientific organizations is ultimately what it’s all about.
This is what climate skeptics must ultimately do if they are to go over the heads of the government-funded climate change alarmists directly to the voting public.
That’s a very tall order, but one which is fully achievable if climate skeptics are willing to systematically organize and present their data, their knowledge, and their conclusions using a disciplined, professional, and fully transparent approach.
Some in the skeptic community are already there, but many others are not.
There needs to be something which we might think of as a Counter-IPCC Climate Science Knowledge Base, one which is organized according to sound knowledge management principles and which is completely transparent as to its data sources and its data management practices.
The money is in the carbon tax, so any idea why these ‘climate scientists’ would focus on that?
I wonder if Dr. Trenberth will bring his missing heat with him when he fronts up.
Dr Mann must surely bring those upsidedown proxies, I think.
And with all that scientific horsepower the lot of them ought to be able to find that pesky missing Tropospheric Hotspot and have it tag along, too, one would hope.
Regg says:
February 4, 2011 at 1:39 pm
“To prevent a flood you build dams/levy/dikes – they cost a lot, but it’s less than flooding otherwise you have to assume the risk the higher cost when flooding comes in. That’s basic economic.”
Logic fault. In areas where flooding has historically occurred, you may choose to build dikes and other flood control devices, if it is desireable and economically feasible. Yet, in your analogy, you argue that we must ‘build dams’ to prevent ‘flooding’ that has NOT historically occured. That illustrates a very strong case of hydrophobia, but would not be a rational or economically reasonable thing to do!
The debate over the AGW hypothesis is whether there has been ANY true climate warming effect attributable to the industrial age of the human race on this beautiful planet. The more we look at the data, analyses, debatable temperature proxies, the inaccuracies of historical and current temperature measuring devices and data sets, the siting and urban heat island effects distorting those temperature measurements, the inaccuracy for decades of AGW models and proponents claims of impending global warming ‘disasters’, and the now exposed collusion and skulldugery of some of the most ardent AGW proponents, the greater and greater the total weight of the evidence becomes refuting the AGW hypothesis.
It takes a leap of faith to conclude otherwise. And, in a nutshell, that is where we are today. We have reasoned rejection of the AGW hypothesis on the one side and the well indoctrinated AGW faithful on the other.
We would be criminally unconscionable to destroy the industrial strengths of our maturing planetary society, based on a faithfully adhered to but irrational fear of 0.039 or even 0.050 per cent atmospheric CO2. Exploration of the solar system beckons to our children and the stars twinkle invitations to the generations beyond. You would hamstring our toddling efforts to crawl off this planet, denying use of energy intensive resources because of your fears. No combination of solar, wind, grain alcohol, or other pie in the sky power can get us there! You would deny all of those current and future generations their birthright, to serve your phobia of increases to a climate benign atmospheric trace gas that enhances fecundity of all flora on this planet, and thereby provides increasing fodder and oxygen for all fauna as well.
You would do this, based on the poorly supported AGW hypothesis. It is not rational.
Regg says:
“Just look at the graph from RSpencer posted some days ago on this web site. January 2011 is the second warmest ”La Nina” January since 1979 (41 years is’nt). The warmest being the 1999, but it is disputable as other sources are showing Jan 2011 to be at +0.83 (not -0.009). If it’s the case, then 2011 would really be the warmest January La Nina.”
=============================================================
What “other sources”?
Kindly provide a link if you do not want to be exposed as a liar and a fraud.
I’m sure all those people in New Mexico who’s gas supply has been cut off are feeling good about how much carbon emissions they are saving. You don’t need heat, just that warm fuzzy feeling about how you are contributing to ‘saving the planet.’
I read that article at “the hill” and what a pack of lies. You can take every reference to skeptical scientist and denier and replace it with ‘climate scientist’ and it would be very close to the truth!
A recent meeting held on 23 NOV 2010 sponsed by the California Energy Commission (CEC) http://www.energy.ca.gov/2011_energypolicy/documents/#11232010 entitled ” Joint Committee Workshop on Electricity Infrastructure Need Assessment” discussed infarstructure needs to meet the 33%RES, enacted via an administrative law requirment by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), by 2020 in CA. The Californial Energy Storage Association stressed the need for energy storage to address the intermittent nature of most forms of renewable energy (wind and solar) in a public comment http://www.energy.ca.gov/2011_energypolicy/documents/2010-11-23_workshop/comments/California_Energy_Storage_Association_TN-59287.pdf The CESA comment had a particularly insightful comment on page 4-
…
“Finally, the timing for including energy storage as a fundamental component of California’s
electricity infrastructure has never been greater. At the November 30, 2010 CPUC LTPP
workshop, CAISO presented their findings related to full RPS Implementation, and found that the
33% in state RPS scenario resulted in a small INCREASE in MMBTU of fuel burn in California.
According to Mark Rothleder, Director of Market Analysis and Development CAISO, “The primary
reasons for this are a result of two things:
1) increased regulation and load following requirements resulting in resources with
flexibility being committed online more in the 33% reference case over other cases and
2) lower level net imports from outside of CA in the 33% reference case. This result may
change for depending on the ultimate source of flexibility.” (BOLD, underline added by M. Miller)
I am sharing this information on Watts Up With That as the CA legislature (vs CARB) is currently considering putting the force of legislative law behind the 33%RES mandate. http://www.sacbee.com/2011/02/03/3373329/democrats-launch-green-energy.html Unfortunately, the CA legislature has not been capable of providing guidance to our bureaucracies (CARB, CEC) on what is an acceptable price for the electrical customers in the state to pay for removing CO2 from the electrical generation facilities. My personal feeling is that the CARB’s “The cost-effectiveness of the proposal is estimated to be about $200/MMTCO2E in 2020. (page ES-3) ” is not cost effective.
I have not re read the CARB report http://www.cal-span.org/cgi-bin/archive.php?owner=CARB&date=2010-09-23–
STAFF REPORT: INITIAL STATEMENT OF REASONS
PROPOSED REGULATION FOR A
CALIFORNIA RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY STANDARD
Public Hearing to Consider the Proposed Regulation
to Implement the Renewable Electricity Standard
Date of Release: June 3, 2010
Scheduled for Consideration: July 22-23, 2010
justifying the move from the current legislated 20%RES to 33% to see if the concerns of the CASIO noted above were considered in the analysis. If you live in CA please contact your state representatives to ask them to provide input to the bureaucracies in regards to what is an acceptable price for us to be paying to remove a ton of CO2.
Can you say Post Normal Science?
You see this kind of thing doesnt happen in Normal science.
Regg says:
“Just look at the graph from RSpencer posted some days ago on this web site. January 2011 is the second warmest ”La Nina” January since 1979 (41 years is’nt). The warmest being the 1999, but it is disputable as other sources are showing Jan 2011 to be at +0.83 (not -0.009). If it’s the case, then 2011 would really be the warmest January La Nina.”
=============================================================
If your “other sources” include the RSS data base, they show the monthly anomaly as +0.083C, not +0.83C.
Darned tricky, those decimal points………
eadler is crazier’n Barrie Harrop. You couldn’t get 97% of any group of people to agree that the Pope is Catholic.
Regg:
However, the outcome is the same – it’s warming and warming fast.
Regg, you must be a Post Normal Scientist: panic makes you smarter.
The name of the game is accounting the plausible problems and what/how it cost to metigate them – and see what’s the most economic. But if we simply ignores everything and continue the ”no result chatting”, the cost will be higher and the ”disturbance” will be worst. That’s how i see it. To prevent a flood you build dams/levy/dikes – they cost a lot, but it’s less than flooding otherwise you have to assume the risk the higher cost when flooding comes in. That’s basic economic.
QED? Especially since now CO2=CAGW “plausibly” causes every disaster imaginable, therefore we’ll have to get ready for everything? “Before it’s too late!”?
Get a grip, Regg, the alleged cure to the alleged CO2=CAGW disease is much worse than the alleged disease; so much so that India and China are even using the alleged cause of CO2CAGW, increasing fossil fuel combustion, as the cure for their current catastrophic disease = underdevelopment – a condition which the panicked Post Normal Scientists in contrast want to actually reproduce in the developed countries, even as “good”!
Scott Brim says:
February 4, 2011 at 4:21 pm
.
“Challenging the conclusions of government-funded scientific organizations is ultimately what it’s all about. This is what climate skeptics must ultimately do if they are to go over the heads of the government-funded climate change alarmists directly to the voting public.”
This is not necessary in the USA where more than a healthy majority oppose “Cap and Trade” and the EPA’s regulation of CO2. It might be really helpful in Britain, though that train left the station some time ago.
Excerpt from their statement: “But no one who argues against the science of climate change has ever provided an alternative scientific theory that adequately satisfies the observable evidence or conforms to our understanding of physics, chemistry, and climate dynamics.”
This is manifestly untrue. They deny the existence of contrary scientific evidence which nullifies their claim that greenhouse warming exists. The evidence against it is empirical, meaning that theories in disagreement with it must be abandoned unless the empirical observation is shown to be in error.
Let’s start with the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect. You may recall that this is what Hansen built his case upon when he testified to the Senate in 1988. Ferenc Miskolczi has shown, using NOAA weather balloon data going back to 1948, that the average infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere has not changed for 61 years. This means that constant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for all these years has not changed the transparency of the atmosphere to infrared radiation that carbon dioxide absorbs.
This totally contradicts the IPCC claim that putting more CO2 into the atmosphere causes more absorption of radiation, that “radiative forcing” they babble about. They have to prove that Miskolczi is wrong or take back their claim that more CO2 means more radiative forcing. The Miskolczi paper has been out for a year and so far no peer-reviewed criticism of it has appeared.
Secondly, their claim that warming started in the late seventies and continued through the eighties and nineties is simply factually wrong. I have proven that this so-called “late twentieth century warming“ never existed and that temperature curves showing it are cooked. That is because satellite temperature measurements, which are far more accurate than the secretive sources they use to construct their own curves, simply do not show this warming. There were just temperature ascillations, up and down for half a degree for twenty years, but no warming.
And that makes a lie of Hansen’s testimony in 1988 that warming had started. For details read What Warming? available on Amazon.com. When these guys come out with an outrageous claim that their science has not been questioned this is the information you should throw that back at them. It is not a peripheral issue but goes to the heart of their claim that global warming exists.
R2 says:
February 4, 2011 at 10:11 am
’18 Scientists’ = a consensus!
How many consensus’s in an unequivocal?
How many unequivocal’s in a unanimous?
Heck, I don’t even know how many Olympic size pools in a Manhattan.
/sarc
Smokey: 1100 scientists were surveyed. After throwing out the 1000 that disagreed, the 100 that remained consisted of 3 children and 97 IPCC lead authors. They kept the 3 since they’re easier to refute for PR points.
Mark
Dr. Pielke/mods:
Change needed in Summary paragraph: “…They are trying to claim they are only focusing on the science issues, but even a causal examination….” I believe casual is the word intended, not causal.
Eadler,
I presume your assertion of 97% comes from the document titled “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” You really need to read the document in full instead of twisting its results. A few points:
10,000+ earth scientists were sent a survey. (no physicists, no engineers, etc)
3,000+ responded, from the survey; “With survey participants asked to select a single category, the most common areas of expertise reported were geochemistry (15.5%), geophysics (12%), and oceanography (10.5%). General geology, hydrology/hydrogeology, and paleontology each accounted for 5–7% of the total respondents. Approximately 5% of the respondents were climate scientists, and 8.5% of the respondents indicated that more than 50% of their peer-reviewed publications
in the past 5 years have been on the subject of climate change.”
Only 90% agreed with the statement that the earth has warmed. In other words 300+ don’t even believe the earth has warmed!!!!!!!!!
Only 82% agreed that human activity was a significant contributing factor. The survey did not define what “significant” meant. In any case over 550 did not agree with this poorly worded question.
The only way you get 97% is if you count only those who are “climate scientists” and have been publishing climate research papers as their primary focus recently.
The results merely confirm that there is a strong consensus within the closely knit group that call themselves climate scientists. Hardly a surprise, it is this groups butchering of the science that skeptics have been arguing against.
… because that is the job of climate scientists!
Sure, I can believe that there are several things humans are doing that have some effect on climate, whether to make it colder or hotter. However, the thing that stands out to me is that, although the “science” (the radiative properties of polyatomic gases) is understood, the next unscientific step – modeling and forecasting – are simply so much BS. The very idea that these guys have a full grasp on the complexity of the earth’s surficial processes and have programmed computers to mimic it, is preposterous.
This is the area to attack. Make them, as Dr. Pielke notes above, define “the science” and then refute, ridicule and mock their puerile use of it via these damned models.
Theo Goodwin says:February 4, 2011 at 12:43 pm
[In Europe and the USA, the indigenous populations have experienced birth rates dangerously below replacement level for at least 40 years. This fact should be treated as a health crisis of the first order by all nations].
Theo Goodwin says: February 4, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Inuits and Scot-Irish.
————————————————————————–
Theo Goodwin. Thank you for your definition but I don’t think that the diminution of these races is any more of a concern than that of the Europeans generally. In any event it seems to me to be part of an evolutionary trend – some races are being replaced by others. There seems to be a distinct possibility that the breeding rate of Europeans is so low that they are likely to be replaced by immigrants from Asia during this century.
I don’t know that this is a health crisis unless you are referring to the whisky swilling Scots!
Douglas
““There are no Democratic or Republican carbon dioxide molecules; they are all invisible and they all trap heat.””
Waxing lyrically over the physical properties of something invisible is somewhat problematical, the notion that a molecule can trap heat makes it bizarre and as it’s written for an audience of politicians, it’s also patronising.
I wonder if the think atomic absorption is like a kitchen sponge….