Nobel laureate resigns from American Physical Society to protest the organization's stance on global warming

A change of 0.8°C in 150 years is essentially no change, assuming that measurement is outside the noise. Good move in the name of science.

There isn’t a competent numerical modeller that believes you can model century scale simulations of stiff systems of PDE’s with low accuracy and low resolution initial conditions and with incompletely defined boundary conditions.
There isn’t a competent mathematician who thinks you can infill data across a pole.

Stand by for assassination of Giaever’s character by the RealClimate mob.

Good. It would be better, though, if non-retired scientists started to drop out of associations.
Especially non-retired scientists who control significant amounts of grant money.
If that ever happens, things will start to change.
Cui bono, always cui bono.

“bladeshearerJack Maloney says:
September 14, 2011 at 10:45 am
Stand by for assassination of Giaever’s character by the RealClimate mob.”
That won’t be hard. From his wiki page:
“Giaever is an institute professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo (funded by the Norwegian oil and gas company, Statoil”)
I’m sure they’ll be all over that one. Notice that the funding sources for other posts he’s held aren’t listed? I wonder why? Looks like they’ve already picked him out as a trouble-maker, and branded him heretic.

Honor, ethics, and character reign.
It’s worse than they thought. It is going to get much worse.
Would jumping the shark apply here? The tipping point has passed

jorgekafkazar says:
September 14, 2011 at 11:10 am
“Dr. Giaever has taken a stand against evil. What happened to the APS is evil, the blatant prostitution of Science in the service of Politics. The only question is: Why are there not a hundred Giaevers, a thousand? The world has gone mad:”
Exactly my thinking for years. The silence has been inexcusable.

Smokey says:
“More than 30,000 individuals with advanced degrees in the hard sciences, including over 9,000 PhD’s, have co-signed the following statement…”
Smokey – do you have a source so I can document that statement? Like to pass it around…Talk about consensus! Al Gore – eat your heart out.

polistra says:
September 14, 2011 at 11:04 am.
You are right. Those that are on politically motivated grants will likely change their colors only when the grant money stops.

Brave Dr Giaever. Thank heavens for brave people like Dr Giaever: I can only hope that all the WUWT watchers provide you with comfort and support when the warmists get going.

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/09/distinguished-physicist-william-happer.html

IMO, Microbiologist, Gore is motivated by greed, which with many is never satisfied; they never have enough. If he believed CAGW he wouldn’t behave the way he does nor would “carbon trading” be his control scheme of choice.
BTW: Google “cigarette smoke PEL” and you’ll discover that second hand smoke isn’t nearly as dangerous as the anti-smoking lobby has made it out to be.

this is an example of ignorance used by AGW proponents. Verify the science behind your comments. (112m/s = 251mph)
A G Foster says: September 14, 2011 at 10:31 am
Good. There really isn’t a competent scientist on the planet who believes a peregrine falcon can dive at 240mph, and there isn’t a competent scientist on the planet who believes we’re doomed by greenhouse gases. –AGF
abstract excerpt
(…)The top speeds reached during a dive depend on the mass of the bird and the angle and duration of the dive. Given enough time, ideal falcons can reach top speeds of 89-112 m s-1 in a vertical dive, the higher speed for the heaviest bird, when the parasite drag coefficient has a value of 0.18. (…)
Tucker, VA (1998) Gliding flight: speed and acceleration of ideal falcons during diving and pull out.
Journal of Experimental Biology 201, 403-414.

dfbaskwill says:
September 14, 2011 at 12:11 pm
I do wish Richard Feynman was around to weigh in on this issue. He’s someone I’d love to hear from. And I’d carry a pitchfork if the Hockey Team tried to assail him.
Feynman has always been my number one science hero. Whenever someone pipes up with more nonsense about “consensus” science I like to recall that the last book he had published before his death was titled ” What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0393320928/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316033300&sr=1-2

It is a shame that these characters, once they resign.. disappear

Good. There really isn’t a competent scientist on the planet who believes a peregrine falcon can dive at 240mph
Heretic! Unbeliever! Don’t you realize that this is simply a result of the Gore effect?

I found the CCs from the email interesting: “Cc: Robert H. Austin; ‘William Happer’; ‘Larry Gould’; ‘S. Fred Singer’; Roger Cohen”
Happer is a physicist at Princeton; Singer, the founder of the NWS Satellite Division in the 60s, and formerly environmental science prof. at UVa (until he was pushed out for AGW-heresy).
But will anyone enlighten me about the rest?

More doctored video??

~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years
Always nice to see it expressed that way.

Darkinbad the Brightdayler says:
September 14, 2011 at 1:17 pm
One by one they stand up and are counted.
————
In the cc I count 6. Out of the entire membership.
So the agw conspiracy just keeps on getting bigger and bigger.
[REPLY: He explained his choices in his letter. They went to the individuals he was absolutely SURE would use it to advantage. We are looking at one ticked-off Nobel laureate. Now, don’t be so dense. REP, mod}

I was very moved by this and feel obliged to repost the comment I made on BishopHill tonight.
“How difficult must it have been for this elderly gentleman scientist to leave an organisation that he built his working life around and that he once loved deeply?
I admire his principles and courage but I can not even begin to imagine the despair that he must have felt when writing this letter.”

it is understandable that the revulsion felt by long term members of aps over these political shenanigans of the wanna be politicians inside the organization. However, what needs to happen is the voting out of office of these idiologs who have gained control of the organization. This cannot happen by quiting. The aps is too important an organization to allow its decline to meaninglessness.
It’s not just the problem with CAGW. While these fools in the leadership are busy promoting algor, they are not doing their job of promoting physics. For example, public universities in TX are losing the ability to offer undergraduate physics degrees because of the mistaken beliefs that programs at smaller schools that have fewer than 5 graduates per year over the longer term are useless. Meanwhile, CSI tv shows are filling the ranks of crime investigation programs and biology programs continue to fill the fast food burger dumps with their graduates. There’s a shortage of highschool physics teachers to introduce physics to the students and no McGiver tv program or real outreach programs to educate college bound students about physics degrees – things the APS should be promoting big time. So now we are in a scientific and technological society and are not training the physicists we need to maintain such a society.
Considering that over 40% of physics degrees in the state are issued from small universities and that students attending these are not going to attend the handful of major universities that will be left. Rather they will choose another occupation. Since physics tends to be a major source of students for nuclear reactor engineering and for health physics, it should be apparent that the future is not going to be so bright if this continues any longer.

“the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years”
And this is the basis for the AGW panic?
We’re doomed!

Fred Bloggs says:

Is Al Gore the only Nobel laureate who publicly supports AGW.

No…not even close to the only one:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/10/971002070106.htm
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/nobel-prize-winning-0360.html

For those who are praising the “insightful” observation that the temperature has changed from 288 to 288.8 K should at least be aware of the fact that only a few degrees K in global temperature is the difference between our current climate and the worst of the ice ages. “Small” is a subjective term (Most temperature changes seem pretty small compared with absolute 0), and changes in global climate need to be seen in the full context. I’m sorry but its a meaningless observation.
I also fail to understand Giaever’s question “how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?”. Its been done by many different methods, ranging from grids of thermometer readings to satellite data. These have very different and complementary systematics and yet give impressively consistent results. The error on these temperature measurements is small enough to measure a net warming over the last 50 years to a few sigma confidence. I would suspect that Spencer and Christy, two favorites and regulars on WUWT, would no doubt be glad to explain to this poor fellow how you can measure the whole temperature of the whole earth. They’ve spent a large part of their careers doing it.
Finally, it appears the Giaever has not read the complete, up-to-date statement of the APS. In 2010, they appended their original statement with commentary, conceding that the term “incontrovertible” was strong (“because by its very nature science questions prevailing ideas.”), and instead specifying the actual measured value of the temperature change (with its uncertainty) and a source.

@ Smokey, I think a more accurate translation would be
“We used too strong of an adjective, so here is the actual number and its respective uncertainty”
I agree with the claim that the term “incontrovertible” is strong, but even the vast majority of skeptical climate scientists (for example, Lindzen, Christy, Spencer) all concede a measurable warming. The later of those three are responsible for making the measurements that you claim “do not exist”.
As for the McKitrick paper, I should qualify that temperature reconstructions are measurements of the temperature *anomaly*, not some sort of absolute temperature measurement.
To quote NASA-GISS
“Our analysis concerns only temperature anomalies, not absolute temperatures. The temperature anomaly tells us how much warmer or colder than normal it is at a particular place and point in time, the ‘normal temperature’ being the mean over many (30) years (same place, same time of year). It seems obvious that to find the anomaly, you first have to know the current and normal absolute temperatures. This is correct for the temperature at one fixed spot (the location of one thermometer), but not true at all for regional mean temperatures.”
While there may be some interesting ideas in this paper you linked (I will have to read through it), I find it a rather bold claim to suggest that a warming effect from a change in the earth’s energy balance cannot be detected.

Joel Shore says:
September 14, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Shows how much you know about economics, Joel. I don’t think automakers are making, selling, and pricing SUVs (or should) so that they can make all-electric vehicles someday, nor do I think that oil companies are (or should) price their products so that windmill makers can have their massively inefficient and uneconomical businesses (is there a buyer for Solyndra, anyone?). That is true delusion.

Matt
Because there’s no physical definition of an average global temperature,
there can be no physical definiton for differences in average global temperature,
which is all that your ‘anomaly’ is.
The significance of the ice ages wasn’t some lower value of a nonexistent quantity,
but the permanent phase change of vast quantities of water.
As for your ‘global warming’ fantasies, they’re nothing but delusions about partial differential equations you imagine you’re solving numerically.
Put up a weather station that actually measures air temps to 0.1C,
then compare them with the junk piles the Establishment relies upon,
so you realize that a thousand junk piles can’t provide accurate ‘anomalies’.
(I expect that like most Warmistas you assiduously ignore SurfaceStations.org.)
By the way, ‘Climate’ and ‘Climate Change’ are totally synonymous

Smokey says:
September 14, 2011 at 9:23 pm
“Like windmill sellers, eh?”
Heh!! I knew there was a Solyndra angle in there somewhere. Of course, for the half billion dollars we wasted on Solyndra, just THINK of all the fabulous “Climate Products ™” we could have purchased! Oh…yeah…I guess, like Solyndra, we’ve already purchased those too… never mind.
Larry in Texas says:
September 14, 2011 at 11:45 pm
Larry, just remember that when people like Joel want to artificially increase the price of energy, THEY won’t be the ones affected. They have jobs, earn good money (usually at the taxpayer’s expense) – it won’t hurt them. They can afford $10/gallon gas. It’s the poor – the people struggling to make ends meet – who will be harmed. But, then again, since when did the climate elites care about anyone but themselves and their agendas?

Thanks to all for providing me with the information I need.
Something just occurred to me re: the 30,000 scientists with degrees in the hard sciences (9,000 with PhDs) mentioned by Smokey who have signed the Oregon petition: Jon Hunstman in the first GOP debate stated that “98%” of climate scientists support AGW. So – do these 30,000 individuals represent the 2% who don’t? Think on that…

BobW in NC says:
September 15, 2011 at 6:23 am
Thanks to all for providing me with the information I need.
Something just occurred to me re: the 30,000 scientists with degrees in the hard sciences (9,000 with PhDs) mentioned by Smokey who have signed the Oregon petition: Jon Hunstman in the first GOP debate stated that “98%” of climate scientists support AGW. So – do these 30,000 individuals represent the 2% who don’t? Think on that…
===========================================================
Bob, before you take your argument out to the ethersphere, we should refine it a bit. First, notice how Huntsman worded his statement. The words climate scientists is what you want to look towards. The Oregon petition makes no distinction. They are simply scientists. So, the alarmists arguments are that the 30,000 are not climate scientists. Then, let’s look at the 98% figure. That one is entirely fictional. It is likely, however, that he’s trying to quote a poll conducted by a fellow named Doran. See http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
There we’ll see a “97.4%” figure. Amusingly, the 97.4% immediately precedes the raw numbers, “75 of 77”. So, the alarmist community went from the bogus “thousands of scientists” to 75. Interestingly, the questionnaire was sent to “10,257 Earth scientists”.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention a “study” conducted by some alarmists of the scientists engaged in publishing. It seemed little more than a practice of self-affirmation with very little science/math behind the proposition, but you should be prepared to respond to it if you’re going to discuss the views of the majority of scientists/climatologists. There are plenty of examples well documenting the gate-keeping behaviors of the warmista. I’d provide a link, but I’ve seemed to have misplaced it at the moment.
Best wishes,
James

There is incontrovertible evidence that a lot of graduate programs in the sciences will close in the near future if a new source of funding is not found. Getting ahold of the government teat for support of government control of energy would surely take care of that funding shortfall for decades to come. Many people in academic science are desperate and will do anything to gain the desired funding.

“For example, even some smokers might agree that cigarettes should be taxed significantly.”
Joel Shore
You obviously do not live in Canada where a pack of smokes is roughly $10 a pack and gas is $4.50 a gallon. They are taxed to death.
No wonder Americans have been avoiding Canada as a tourist destination.

Smokey says:

Matt, may I translate? Thank you:
“We were caught lying, and so we were forced to retract.” ~ APS.

Your translation skills are very poor indeed. A better translation is, “The word ‘incontrovertible’ is ill-defined and may be taken by some to be too strong. So, it is better to describe in more precise terms exactly what is known regarding the warming.”

And regarding the bunkum of a global temperature, here is Prof McKitrick’s peer reviwed [and never falsified] paper: click

Bill Parsons says:

Along with Ross McKitrick http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/globaltemp/globaltemp.html Giaever seems to be one of the few people unwilling to overlook this.

Some papers are never falsified simply because they are so silly that they are simply ignored by the scientific community. That is the category that the Essex et al. paper falls into.
First of all, their conclusion that the average global temperature is not a rigorously thermodynamically defined quantity is a strawman. It is still a useful quantity to measure. If you want to get technical about it, temperature is only rigorously thermodynamically-defined for a system in equilibrium and since no real physical system is ever in thermal equilibrium, temperature can never be rigorously defined. And, yet, we still find it very useful to measure temperatures.
So, the question comes down to whether the quantity is useful to look at…and, specifically, if different definitions of the temperature anomaly that are reasonable can lead to very different conclusions in regards to the temperature trend.
If you look at Figures 2 and 3 in the Essex et al. paper incautiously, you might be tempted to conclude that they have shown that the average decadal temperature trend from a set of stations can indeed dramatically depend on the way one averages. And in a sense they have, but only by going to utterly ridiculous ways of averaging.
In particular, note their x-axis in Figure 2: They take r-values from -125 to 125, where the r-value is essentially a moment of the distribution. So, r=1 corresponds to the standard arithmetic mean, r=2 corresponds to what is called the “root mean squared”, and even r=4 could conceivably be justified if, e.g., you wanted to average the amount of radiative energy emitted by that region of the atmosphere (which depends on the 4th power of the temperature). However, I don’t see how they can justify the much larger positive and negative powers of r as being at all reasonable. In fact, the reason that their graphs in Figures 2 and 3 seem to asymptotically approach certain values for the decadal trend is that these values are in fact the trend values you get if you look only at the lowest-temperature data point for each month over that period (which is picked out for large negative values of r) or if you look only at the highest-temperature data point for each month over that period (which is picked out for large positive values of r). [A similar story holds for their s-means of Fig. 3 except that now their range of s is even more extreme than their range for the r-means so you see an even broader range over which the decadal trend has essentially hit these asymptotic values!] This is clearly a very stupid way to perform an average!
Using their own example (since they were kind enough to post the data they used on the web), I have reproduced their graph and find that even for r=4, the decadal trend in temperature for their 12 stations (0.056 C per decade) is only a little reduced from the r=1 values (0.060 C per decade)…And, if anything, the change would be much less dramatic if the average were performed over many stations! (Having fewer stations means that there are larger gaps in the temperature data and hence their goofy averaging method more easily picks out essentially just one station for each month.)
Overall, their basic argument seems to hinge on the proposition that if one cannot rigorously (e.g., thermodynamically) justify one particular average as being correct, then any way of doing it is as good as any other. I can only imagine how much of modern science would be thrown out the window if we applied this logic across all of science…We’d be back in the Dark Ages!
The conclusion of the Essex et al. paper ought to be that averages should be done meaningfully…and if you do a really stupid sort of average, like one that completely weights just one station over all of the others…then you will not get a good result. Who’d have thunk it!?!

Ray: You don’t have to measure everywhere to get a good average value, particularly when the quantity in question is correlated over reasonable distances. It turns out that temperature itself is not that well-correlated (imagine the temperature at the top of Mt. Washington vs the temperature at a location in the valley a few miles away) but temperature anomaly is. That is why it is the temperature anomaly that is measured.

Joel, you are not going to defend practices such as measuring temperatures at the airports of Antarctic stations & extrapolating the anomalies over the rest of the continent are you? Or doing the same at a coastal town in the Arctic & extrapolating it 1200 km out to sea? Where you warmists lose the argument is that you do not demand of your heroes that they back up their claims with the replicatable methods & data they use, nor do you condemn the unscientific conduct of those heroes such as I outlined above.

Joel Shore says:
September 15, 2011 at 2:27 pm
The conclusion of the Essex et al. paper ought to be that averages should be done meaningfully…and if you do a really stupid sort of average, like one that completely weights just one station over all of the others…then you will not get a good result. Who’d have thunk it!?!

You mean like bristlecones and Yamal?

Joel Shore says:
September 15, 2011 at 6:46 pm
……….It turns out that temperature itself is not that well-correlated (imagine the temperature at the top of Mt. Washington vs the temperature at a location in the valley a few miles away) but temperature anomaly is. …………
==========================================================
Uhmm, no, it isn’t. For instance, observe the Rocky Mountains during the winter. Fronts get stuck there often. One area, cold as hell, just to the east……not so bad. Your distance/anomaly correlation only works in some spots. Others, not so much.
Joel, quit believing everything you hear. Observe stuff for yourself every once in a while. Assume the posit is incorrect and set about to prove it wrong.

0.8 degrees over ~100 years. That’s a rise of 0.008 degrees/year. How many assumptions have to be off in the order of 0.001 of a degree for a distance of 1200 kilometers over a period of 100 years to change that number?
That’s not to say distance isn’t important, it is! Two temps reading right next to each other compared to a temp reading 500 miles away is silly. But, the two temp readings don’t have a relationship to the one 500 miles away. Averaging, in any fashion, is totally inadequate for this consideration.

bladeshearerJack Maloney says:
September 14, 2011 at 10:45 am
Stand by for assassination of Giaever’s character by the RealClimate mob.
————
Just noticed this on the guardian from a blogger called gpwayne, in response to a mention of Ivar Giaever:
—
“It is sad to see scientists become victims of their age – Plimer, Bellamy and Lovelock immediately come to mind, the latter being a very sad case because I had so much respect for his work, and none at all for his recent, ‘grumpy old man’ outbursts.
As you rightly point out, denialism is the refuge of the retired, middle-management types whose lives do not seem to have gone as well as they might like, leading it seems to the kind of cynicism and bitterness that fuels so much of the smug denialism we are subjected to in CiF and elsewhere (although at least it hasn’t penetrated our political classes in the way it has in the US)…….
Giaever may have done great work in his own field, but when he starts dismissing science without doing the work (and publishing it), he’s just another daft punter with too high an opinion of himself.”
—
looks like we didn’t have to wait too long…

And, within the scientific community, there has been a slow but dramatic shift in the views on climate change over the years: When Hansen made his claim in 1988 that the warming that was occurring was due to greenhouse gases, many scientists thought such a claim was premature, but few would argue that Hansen was wrong now.

That’s because they won’t get funding or papers published if they don’t believe.

Poptech,
A quick search reveals that, in fact, creationists make similar claims about there being peer-reviewed papers that question evolution or support an intelligent design viewpoint. Here is one list that they’ve compiled: http://www.discovery.org/a/2640 and here is a post talking about a paper by a NAS member that is “critical of Darwinism”.
There may not be quantitatively as many such papers; on the other hand, I am not sure that creationists have a whole journal that has basically dedicated itself to publishing anything, no matter how bad, as “Energy & Environment” has for global warming skeptics. And, that list you have there has cast a pretty broad net in what you categorize as papers that support skeptic arguments.
And, as for creationism being a religious issue, that is not how Roy Spencer sees it ( http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2005/08/faith-based-evolution.html ):

…I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.

Jeff Alberts says:

That’s because they won’t get funding or papers published if they don’t believe.

…which is, of course, the exact same sort of arguments that creationists make.

Poptech,
It seems rather extreme to have a criterion that the paper must mention creationism explicitly. I think there is a general agreement (at least among lots of folks) that talking about a biblical creation is not really scientific, which is why the papers that they cite tend to be labeled as supporting creationism because they point out flaws in evolutionary theory.
Certainly, many of the papers that you list among your 900 do not explicitly support a particular view regarding the cause of the warming that has occurred but that doesn’t seem to stop you from listing them. You have also listed papers that are utter embarrassments like Gerlich and Tscheuschner’s garbage, several of the embarrassing papers by Jaworowski, and so forth. How about listing the subset of those papers that you consider to be actually sensible and truly challenging to the current scientific consensus on climate change?

Joel Shore says on September 17, 2011 at 7:27 am

Poptech,
A quick search reveals that, in fact, creationists make similar claims about there being peer-reviewed papers that question evolution or support an intelligent design viewpoint. Here is one list that they’ve compiled: http://www.discovery.org/a/2640 and here is a post talking about a paper by a NAS member that is “critical of Darwinism”.
There may not be quantitatively as many such papers; on the other hand, I am not sure that creationists have a whole journal that has basically dedicated itself to publishing anything, no matter how bad, as “Energy & Environment” has for global warming skeptics. And, that list you have there has cast a pretty broad net in what you categorize as papers that support skeptic arguments.

Ahhhh, still trying to paint skeptics of the AGW religion as somehow equivalent to, or worse than, creationists, I see.
For the record, once again, I find the theory of evolution to be a compelling explanation for the diversity of life on this planet and think that it does not address abiogenesis, and view the whole AGW religion as precisely that: unscientific nonsense with a profoundly political purpose.

Joel Shore:
Here’s some facts about the quality of “Energy & Environment” as a journal: http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/04/energy-and-environment-900-papers

Which has been completely refuted,
Rebuttal to “Energy and Environment – “journal of choice for climate skeptics” Analysing the 900+ skeptic papers part III”
It is important to get your facts straight before Googling for propaganda.

Poptech:

Which has been completely refuted,
Rebuttal to “Energy and Environment – “journal of choice for climate skeptics” Analysing the 900+ skeptic papers part III”

That is not much of a refutation. I would call it a nitpicking. For example, the fact that the article claimed “almost 15%” of the papers on the list are from E&E when the exact figure is 14.1% is supposed to debunk the claim?

Pointing out a flaw in evolution theory does not support another theory. It simply supports skepticism of evolution.

Fine…So, if I amend my claim to say that “skeptics of AGW” make many arguments very similar to “skeptics of evolution” then you would like it better than calling the skeptics of evolution “creationists” (which nearly all of them are)? So, do you believe we should set public policy regarding the teaching of evolution on the basis of the fact that such skeptical articles on evolution exist?

For instance, there are hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on the list supporting a cosmic ray/solar theory of climate change.

Any paper that suggests that the sun plays a role in climate change…or that cosmic rays play a role…does not necessarily contradict the notion that most of the change that we have seen in the latter half of the 20th century through now is due to increasing greenhouse gases. Nobody doubts that the sun plays a role in climate change in general.

G&T’s and Jaworowski’s papers were peer-reviewed in scholarly journals and thus included on the list. The listing of papers has nothing to do with your personal opinion on them. My opinion on individual papers is irrelevant as that is not the purpose of the list. The was created as a resource and to demonstrate that these papers exist.

And, what it demonstrates is that a journal like E&E will publish complete garbage and that if authors shop around for journals well outside of the climate community, they can succeed in getting complete garbage published.

Joel Shore says: “That is not much of a refutation. I would call it a nitpicking. For example, the fact that the article claimed “almost 15%” of the papers on the list are from E&E when the exact figure is 14.1% is supposed to debunk the claim?”

If you cannot be statistically accurate don’t use statistics. That (14.1%) was to demonstrate the incompetence of the author of the source you picked. Either way that was simply one small part of the refutation and the key part there was that there are over 769 papers from 256 other journals besides Energy & Environment on the list.

So, do you believe we should set public policy regarding the teaching of evolution on the basis of the fact that such skeptical articles on evolution exist?

I do not believe the federal government should set public policy on education. As I believe states should be free from the federal government to set their own non-religious school curriculum for public schools and parents should be free to send their children to whatever school they wish. In no way do I support teaching religious beliefs such as creationism or intelligent design in public schools or any science class (public or private). I have no problem with these being taught in religion class in private schools. If a peer-reviewed science paper exists in a science journal challenging some aspect of evolution then I have no problem with that being brought up for discussion in the science class. The fact is none exist in the context of being pro-intelligent design/creationism.

Any paper that suggests that the sun plays a role in climate change…or that cosmic rays play a role…does not necessarily contradict the notion that most of the change that we have seen in the latter half of the 20th century through now is due to increasing greenhouse gases. Nobody doubts that the sun plays a role in climate change in general.

Actually is does support skeptic arguments that contradict the notion that most of the change has been due to AGW, since it supports the argument for a larger influence of natural factors such as the Sun or Cosmic Rays.

And, what it demonstrates is that a journal like E&E will publish complete garbage and that if authors shop around for journals well outside of the climate community, they can succeed in getting complete garbage published.

You have failed to demonstrate any such thing about E&E. If a scientist has a critique of any paper then they should submit it for publication in that journal. E&E has published these in the past with a rebuttal from the original author. It has irrefutably been demonstrated that E&E is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

Poptech:
By the way, have you noticed that when you look at your ThomasReuters link that supposedly shows it to be a “peer-reviewed scholarly journal”, it lists under “coverage”:

Social Sciences Citation Index
Current Contents – Social & Behavioral Sciences

By contrast, Journal of Climate and Geophysical Research Letters list under “coverage”:

Science Citation Index
Science Citation Index Expanded
Current Contents – Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences

Do you think that journal classified as a social science journal is the best place to publish, and have peer-reviewed, technical articles on climate science?

I am not sure if people think they are talking to someone else when they have a conversation with me? These conversations are like a perpetual merry go-round that could be avoided if people simply read the notes preceding and following the list.

Joel Shore, “By the way, have you noticed that when you look at your ThomasReuters link that supposedly shows it to be a “peer-reviewed scholarly journal”, it lists under “coverage”:
Social Sciences Citation Index
Current Contents – Social & Behavioral Sciences”

Yes I am WELL AWARE of this and I have always known that E&E was an interdisciplinary scholarly journal. No argument has ever been made otherwise. What I stated was 100% correct, Energy & Environment is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

By contrast, Journal of Climate and Geophysical Research Letters list under “coverage”:
Science Citation Index
Science Citation Index Expanded
Current Contents – Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences
Do you think that journal classified as a social science journal is the best place to publish, and have peer-reviewed, technical articles on climate science?

I think it is the best place to publish climate papers that also include social-science issues or have policy implications.

Joel Shore, So, you are telling me that the editor, trying to defend her journal, made the statement that
“Several of the most respected ‘climate skeptics’ regularly peer-review IPCC critical papers I publish.”
But that she really meant something like “lots of people review the papers and a few happen to be skeptics”? Yeah…That’s a likely interpretation!

She did not state they are the only reviewers or even that they always review such papers. All that can be interpreted from that statement, is one out of the likely three reviewers on those specific papers may be a respected climate skeptic. All E&E reviewers have the relevant credentials to peer-review the content of the papers they are selected for.
It is fascinating you have a problem with one of the reviewers being a credentialed climate scientist who happens to be a respected skeptic. Do you have the same problems with the reviewers of AGW proponent papers? Because most pro-AGW papers are reviewed by other AGW proponents.

I don’t know where this list comes from but it appears to be a list of all universities that have the journal from any years.

Yes the list comes from WorldCat and it shows any library that has any issue on file. All of which is irrelevant in today’s online word.

That’s a pretty broad criterion. And, I am sure if James Hansen got a paper published in a journal that is listed only in social science databases, you would take the science in it very seriously unless a rebuttal to it appeared?

I don’t take James Hansen’s papers seriously wherever he publishes them.

Orson:
Here’s some info on Robert Austin: http://www.aps.org/about/governance/councillor1.cfm and http://austingroup.princeton.edu/ As I understand it, he was the APS Councillor who actually brought up the issue of changing the APS policy statement at one of the meetings of the APS Councillors.
Poptech says:

It is fascinating you have a problem with one of the reviewers being a credentialed climate scientist who happens to be a respected skeptic.

I don’t have a problem with that…but I also think that this is an extremely generous way to interpret her statement. While her statement is strictly not logically incompatible with your interpretation, it is certainly a bizarre interpretation of what she said, requiring us to believe that she specifically made an argument that tends to undermine her claims of how objective the peer review process is when it is in fact much more objective than she has led us to believe. It is sort of akin to believing that if some place advertises that “all our teachers have at least bachelor’s degrees in what they are teaching” that you might in fact be taught by a Nobel Laureate.
I have to say that I also question the judgement of who is a “respected skeptic” coming from an editor who has Richard S Courtney ( http://www.desmogblog.com/richard-s-courtney ) as a member of the editorial board.

I don’t take James Hansen’s papers seriously wherever he publishes them.

Well, the fact that you refuse to take seriously any work of one of the most respected scientists in the field while actively advertising papers such as G&T’s and Jaworowski’s speaks volumes as to where you are coming from.

Poptech says:

There is nothing bizarre or generous about it, as that is all that can be objectively concluded from her statement. The statement you are focusing on was part of a larger argument defending her “political agenda”.

Well, if she does send papers to a much broader community of climate scientists than just skeptics, why doesn’t she say this in her own defense? If she doesn’t, I am back at my original question of why you think it is reasonable to have papers reviewed only by the tiny minority of actively-publishing climate scientists who share a certain point-of-view?

He is only “respected” by alarmists, I consider him a shrill alarmist scientist who is pushing a political agenda.

Unless you use “alarmists” as a synonym for all but the select few of the scientific community who share your ideological and scientific views, then that statement about him is not correct. You don’t win prestigious awards from AAAS, APS, AGU, AMS, and NASA ( http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/hansencv_201106.pdf ) without being well-respected within the scientific community.
You may not like his point-of-view or agree with all his scientific work, but to deny he is generally highly-respected in the scientific community is simply denying reality.

It’s purpose is to both demonstrate that these papers exist and to provide a resource for skeptics.

I think what it demonstrates is to what extremes AGW skeptics have to go to find papers that they claim agrees with their point-of-view.