Bishop Hill writes:
Fred Pearce is on the receiving end of the full fury of the warmosphere for his article about the Lisbon conference in New Scientist. Pearce, discussing who had agreed to turn up, said this:
But the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig, including NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so there was nothing to discuss.
Now Josh’s take:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I have to agree with Joe Romm on one point, and that is any meeting which Steve Goddard attends will not be bothered with by warmists. Anyone who doesn’t get that, just isn’t a player.
Apologies. I have come late to this thread. (It’s the weekend; the lawns need mowing and the hedges clipping!)
Jeremy, in the first post, makes an interesting point about his experience with teachers, whom he contrasts with Dr Schmidt and his colleagues. There is more in this than one might think.
Regardless of our discipline, when we stand in front of a class of students we are under pressure to communicate clearly and to do this we must sort out our ideas. We must defend them against those who do not initially understand them, let alone agree with them. Graduate students are better at this, but even first year undergraduates ask difficult questions that expose gaps in logic and the limitations of the theories being propound. They are likely to ask awkward questions like ‘Where is the missing hot spot your models predict?’, ‘Why is the result so dependent upon bristlecones?’, and ‘There appears to be a divergence between the temperature record and the proxies; why is that?’
These guys (and they are mostly guys) tend to be in ‘research-only’ posts. They escape this daily interrogation. They work in teams and there is much mirroring and bolstering against outsiders, while at the same time there is vigorous internal debate over details (‘we can’t account for the missing heat, and it’s a travesty that we can’t’) They even start to sound like and look like each other! (Could anyone pick Michael Mann from Gavin Schmidt in a line-up if the former wasn’t posing with tree rings??).
Teaching (as opposed to marking 200 first year essays) is good for research for these reasons. Leave aside the corrupting influence of holding a research-only post at a research institute the budget of which is dependent on there being a particular set of results, this is one of the biggest problems with climate science. (Pat Michaels, I think, pointed out a decade or so ago that teaching scientists could not so readily participate in the IPCC process because they had teaching responsibilities; that was my experience with my first invitation – aside f[ro]m the fact that it arrived by snail mail only shortly before the deadline!)
An old and very distinguished friend of mine, Ted Lowi, from Cornell, in his first visit to Australia 20 years ago visited some other universities including the Australian National University whose Institute of Advanced Studies then did no undergraduate teaching. (Old ANU joke: Q: Why do they object at the ANU to classes being scheduled on a Wednesday? A: Because it interferes with both weekends.) Upon return from ANU he said” ‘I get the idea they don’t do anywhere enough teaching at ANU.’
Let me give the final word to Lord Rutherford, who put it well (if in the gendered language of his time (not an exact quote): ‘If the scientist can’t explain to the cleaning lady what he is doing, he doesn’t know what he is doing.’ Think of students as educated cleaners.
I found this sentence to be a refreshing admission:
“The fundamental conflict is of what (if anything) we should do about greenhouse gas emissions (and other assorted pollutants), not what the weather was like 1000 years ago.”
As I recall, it was the alarmists who sought to justify their policy position via a comparative timeline, yet now it does not suit them. The whole point of their exercise was to justify policies to do “something” about greenhouse gases. Who is to say that “something” did not include finding a way to profit off the sale of indulgences.
I hear NASA’s GISS just developed a new sales pitch to get funds from Congress:
“With every purchase of our Propaganda, Agitation, Alarmism and Middle Eastern Self-Esteem, receive a feigned nod towards Aeronautics FREE!”
thegoodlocust says:
February 5, 2011 at 3:14 pm
“I think Gavin learned that an open debate is bad for his side from his experience in the Intelligence Squared debate on the subject:”
My thoughts exactly.
Aynsley Kellow says:
February 5, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Well said! Students are experts at exposing what one did not know one did not know. (Yikes – sorry about the sentence construction!) Even after teaching the same course for 10 years, they ask questions you don’t anticipate, and sometimes lead to very fruitful new ideas. One of the questions we always ask job candidates is how they see the relationship between teaching and research, and the answer is that they indeed reinforce each other. When you teach, you are forced to look at material outside your normal research zone, and the connections that are made can take you in wonderful directions. Being in a research-only environment must be dreadfully narrowing, especially if one consorts only with experts in the field.
I have to agree with what Pamela Gray said too: these pampered researchers like Mann and Gavin do come across as spoiled children: when the real rules of the game get pointed out or imposed, they refuse to play any more.
For those who may not already have a clear understanding of how Gavin Schmidt operates. This helps.
https://public.me.com/ix/williseschenbach/Svalbard.pdf
10) To shut off the scientific questions entirely, they closed down the thread after only
six days.
“the leaders of mainstream climate science”
I must have missed that particular vote.
Schmidt, who said the science was settled so there was nothing to discuss.
————
Seems like the “reading comprehension challenged” are out in force today. Or those too bone lazy to follow a hyperlink.
Apparently Gavin DID NOT say this. It was either made up by Fred Pearce or made up by someone else at the Lisbon conference and lazily reported by Fred Pearce.
So guys, engage brain and develop some skepticism before shooting mouth off.
thegoodlocust 3:14 p.m.: Perhaps a better video of the debate:
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/global-warming-is-not-a-crisis/#dm-col-a
Gosh, ‘The Medieval Warm Period’ on the Agenda.
Like Climate Supermen trying to deal with Kryptonite.
I thought the scientists were supposed to do the science and publish there results and then the politicians were left to implement policy.It seems now the scientists want to do both.
I am absolutely certain that Gavin could conceivable have thought what he did not say.
The tipping point could have come when the flat earthers denied the possible quote that was probably 70% correct or maybe 60% incorrect as likely as the met office forecast. Therefore you (not me) should spend your last dollar to prove that in 1 billion years I could, conceivably, have been wrong. There, it is settled.
Aynsley Kellow :
February 5, 2011 at 6:34 pm
I also come late to this thread. I agree with your view of the necessity of teaching for researchers. My professional life ( I am a retired particle physicist) was spent in research institutes, but luckily there was a graduate studies program in conjunction with universities, taking PhD students, and participating in teaching a common graduate course. You are right, preparing a lecture and facing the students really makes you work over assumptions and principles.
After this climate “science” debacle maybe governments would wake up and force researchers to teach, part time at least.
Gavin will not engage because he would lose any debate in short order, so quickly in fact he would be made to look a complete fool.
The so called consensus is so rickety and full of holes he could not defend it even if he tried. The only possible way to defend the CAGW consensus is not to open the can of worms, close down the debate and smear those who try. Its science Jim but not as we know it, you could call it Scientology only Scientology has a firmer base and is run by people with a much better grasp of reality.
The only way to defend CAGW is to attack its critics while spreading sound bite propaganda to all their agents in the MSM.
ge0050, that is a brilliantly insightful point! Well worth repeating far and wide – in fact, I think I shall!
With reference to the 1,000 years comment; Of course he doesn’t want to talk about anything that might refute his position. The past must remain static. Unfortunately for him it is not the elephant in the room, but the penguin on the telly !!!!
LazyTeenager says:
So guys, engage brain and develop some skepticism before shooting mouth off.
I would love to be skeptical and be able to counter what Gavin or the team believes but any type of weather pattern is just a result of global warming as the scare was known way back in 2007. How much 4 few years change the thinking of many people on the streets. Read this article explaining the warm winter that was being experienced in 2007 and compare the team’s quotes to those in recent articles about this cold winter. It really doesn’t matter what anyone say to the contrary to what the teams says because every type of weather points to global warming so they might as well just come out and say the “the science is settled.”
This is the link to the 2007 article quoting both Gavin & Michael Mann. BTW I love how the internet makes these older articles available.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/070125_gw_weather.html
This is the link to a recent article quoting Michael Mann showing that this cold winter also shows that climate change is occurring. Note the same terms like “loaded dice” from the 2007 article but also note the change from global warming to climate change.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41393090/ns/technology_and_science-science/
I would like LazyTeenager to please explain to me how the same examples can be used to explain both global warming and climate change and also how mild winters and severe winters can also explain the same thing? After all aren’t global warming and climate the same thing?
I find it hard to engage with anything Gavin says because it is always intellectually defunct of meaning. This person appears to dwell in another dimension where politically defined objectives rule the lexicon. I recall, for example, the novel “1984”.
This is Gavin’s world. And he is cursed to endure it for the next really cold – cold – cold winters of the next 20-30 years or so. Poor guy. Maybe Gore’s warming induced snow and cold will help him feel warmer.
Gavin Schmidt was educated at The Corsham School, earned a BA (Hons) in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford, and a PhD in applied mathematics at University College London.
He’s a mathematician. He’s never made a weather forecast in his life. Everything he knows about climate he has picked up second hand. He is NOT a climate expert. He spends most of his time writing computer code. He is also a [snip – ~jove, mod].
I put a lot of the blame for the appalling atmosphere and the suppression of debate on him and that small circle at RC.
Even when they admit to getting it wrong they call it “Getting things right”.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/getting-things-right/
Two different errors appear in this discussion, one of fact, one of conceptual inadequacy.
1) As has already been pointed out Gavin Schmidt did NOT say ‘the science is settled’ that was Fred Pearce. The ‘science is settled’ meme is attributed to scientists by skeptics. Interpreting the claims made by AGW theory research as claims ALL the science is settled is an error of the second type…
2) The unstated assumption behind ‘the science is settled’ quote is that it is a bipolar, yes/no dichotmomy that can be applied to everything.
Science is never entirely settled, but the utility of science comes from its ability to ‘settle’ some issues to the point that useful predictions and exploitation of the understanding reached can be made.
A few centuries ago the science was settled for the Heliocentric solar system. No further evidence is going to refute that settled science. That did not mean that the mechanism that explains the settled science of the Sun at the center was certain, the full explanation of all the observed aspects of the Heliocentric system like the precession of the perihelion of Mercury only got explained in the last century.
But the unsettled aspect of Mercury’s orbit did not cause the heliocentric model of the solar system to be doubted, that was settled, it was aspects of the detail of that understanding that required further development.
Science is a human endeavor that can settle some aspects of a problem definitively, but that knowledge is always incomplete. How much of the science is settled is never a whole number, always a fraction. In any field there will be some aspects of knowledge that are beyond reasonable doubt. Heliocentric solar system, evolution by natural selection, HIV resulting from a virus infection, the ozone whole resulting from CFC’s etc, all these are settled, but that does not mean that all the details about those processes are settled. Science always has a large field of further uncertainty about the details of the settled aspects. And of course there are aspects of most areas of science that are far from settled, with little firm knowledge of what is happening or robust explanations of the observations.
The skeptic claim that scientists think that the science of AGW is settled TOTALLY and then pointing to aspects which are not settled to justify the assertion that NONE of it is smacks of a rhetorical trope. The amount of ‘settlement’ in science is always a changing fraction, not a 1/0 – either/or simplistic dichotomy.
And for those that think that some science is settled such as the Heliocentric solar system, well not everyone would agree…. –
http://www.fixedearth.com/
LazyTeenager says:
Seems like the “reading comprehension challenged” are out in force today. Or those too bone lazy to follow a hyperlink.
I have read the piece and my reading of it was that the only thing that was left to do was to work out the policies to deal with the problem.Now to my small understanding that was saying that the science was settled.
So with your much more superior comprehension skills maybe you could tell us exactly what Gavin said.
Mark II says:
February 5, 2011 at 2:59 pm
I’m happy with all three. Gave me a good laugh before breakfast.
Steve Allen says: February 5, 2011 at 4:59 pm
Vukcevic Interesting graphs. I probably am missing your point, but can you explain/provide links of the physics behind the link between GMF intensity in the z-axis and arctic temperature anomaly?
On this one I appear to be a one-man band, trying to open a new front in the climate research.
Immediate effect is, as I see it, through stratospheric ionisation and the GMF acting in concert. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
The longer term it has to be via ocean currents, and that is the next stage of this project as shown in here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CDr.htm and
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PDO-ENSO.htm
Although in the polar regions Z component is more than 95% of total field, that is not the case in the Equatorial area where Bz drops to zero, and defines the magnetic Equator. There appear to be some correlation too:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
Dr. L.S. declares all this ‘just coincidence’, but climatologist Dr. J. Curry has expressed some interest.
Sorry, can not be of more help for time being.