WUWT may recall the late Dr. Hal Lewis led the way on this last year as I covered at WUWT and in an op-ed at the Christian Science Monitor.
From Climate Depot, who got the exclusive:
Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears. Climate Depot has obtained the exclusive email Giaever sent to APS Executive Officer Kate Kirby to announce his formal resignation.
Dr. Giaever wrote to Kirby of APS: “Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I cannot live with the (APS) statement below (on global warming): APS: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’
Giaever announced his resignation from APS was due to the group’s belief in man-made global warming fears. Giaever explained in his email to APS: “In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”
Read the full story here at Climate Depot
Here’s the resignation letter:
From: Ivar Giaever [ mailto:giaever@XXXX.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 3:42 PMTo: kirby@xxx.xxx
Cc: Robert H. Austin; ‘William Happer’; ‘Larry Gould’; ‘S. Fred Singer’; Roger Cohen
Subject: I resign from APS
Dear Ms. Kirby Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below: Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.
In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.
Best regards, Ivar Giaever Nobel Laureate 1973 PS. I included a copy to a few people in case they feel like using the information.Ivar Giaever
XXX XXX
XXX
USA
Phone XXX XXX XXX
Fax XXX XXX XXX
================================
h/t to WUWT reader David L. Hagen
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
Scott Covert says:
September 14, 2011 at 10:44 am
I don’t know if I were in your shoes, I would have the guts to take the path you have but I hope I would.
It doesn’t take guts. It takes integrity – and Mr Giaever clearly has this in spades.
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?
Next time Rick Perry gets asked about what scientists share his view of global warming he can say “Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Gaievar, for one, who recently resigned from the American Physical Society because he could find no evidence to support their hyperbolic certainty of anthropogenic climate change”.
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…
Du er en modig og fornuftig mann Ivar. Tusen takk.:-)
Beste hilsen fra Island.
Agust
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
(how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?)
I really wish there were more people willing to challenge the legitimacy of “global” records of temperature. Even scientists who are skeptics of AGW turn right around and refer to the “global temperature anomaly”, or “the northern hemisphere temperature” in their own analyses. How can people credibly talk about such things?
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.
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.
Evidence that the sceptical viewpoint is not lost even on the “common man” I saw just a few days ago during a trip to Germany. In the mens restroom of a small “Gasthaus” (restaurant) I saw a standard poster on the wall (as translated from German):
Underneath the three urinals were labeled by the owner (tongue firmly in cheek) :
The doors of the three “other” stalls were labeled:
“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.
Fox news is giving Dr. Giaever prominent and favorable treatment. Hopefully others will follow suit.
Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Resigns Over Global Warming
Wow, the Flat Earth Society is alive and well, I see.
mikemonaco,
The Flat Earth Society has never changed. They still believe in catastrophic AGW.
All this is handwaving. The ONLY thing that will stop these crazy, uneducated cretins (ie EPA, Australian Warmists, misguided greens etc) is legal sanction and monetary restraint.
Smokey says:
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.”
Bill Parsons says:
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!?!
Joel Shore @ur momisugly 2:27 pm 9/15 – you use an awful lot of words Joel, but any thinking person with even a basic education can easily determine that there is no such thing as a global average temperature. There are not enough thermometers in existence to calculate the average temperature of Lake Superior, or the air above it at any given time, let alone the entire planet. Those who claim otherwise just want to get their hands on lots of easy money from the government to study a problem only they & their mates are qualified to detect – just like the fabled “emperor’s new clothes”.
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, there are simply not enough locations where measurements are made to satisfy this punter that an accurate global average temperature anomaly can be calculated. And an anomaly based on the average of 30 years data is simply not long enough! A little bit of reading reveals there are any number of cyclic variations in atmospheric & oceanic conditions. Variations which range from the 12 hourly tides, 24 hourly day/night changes, to cycles over 100 years long. How many more unknown cycles are there? Can your climate heroes give us a definitive answer? No, I thought not. And guess what, that yellow ball in the sky during the warm part of each 24 hour period on this planet is the controlling influence over the whole shebang.
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.
Ray Boorman,
If Joel Shore had an acceptable Correction to the McKitrick paper he would surely have submitted it, smart guy that he believes he is. Instead, Joel impotently argues on WUWT against the McKitrick et al. peer reviewed-paper, which concludes with:
Try to be tolerant of Joel Shore. He is a first order True Believer in CAGW. Unfortunately for Joel, he has no direct, empirical, testable evidence disputing the fact that CO2 is both harmless and beneficial. None at all.
So Joel gets all wordy, trying to baffle us with BS. That might work on pseudo-science alarmist blogs. But it doesn’t work on WUWT – the internet’s “Best Science” site.
You mean like bristlecones and Yamal?
Eminent Physicists Skeptical of AGW Alarm
“I’m a skeptic. …Global Warming it’s become a new religion. You’re not supposed to be against Global Warming. You have basically no choice. And I tell you how many scientists support that. But the number of scientists is not important. The only thing that’s important is if the scientists are correct; that’s the important part.” – Ivar Giaever
Ivar Giaever, M.E., Norwegian Institute of Technology (1952), Ph.D. Theoretical Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1964), Engineer, Advanced Engineering Program, General Electric Company (1954–1956), Applied Mathematician, Research and Development Center, General Electric Company (1956–1958), Researcher, Research and Development Center, General Electric Company (1958–1988), Guggenheim Fellowship, Biophysics, Cambridge University (1969-1970), Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1965), Nobel Prize in Physics (1973), Member, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1974), Member, National Academy of Science (1974), Member, National Academy of Engineering (1975), Adjunct Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego (1975), Visiting Professor, Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1975), Professor of Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1988-2005), Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Applied BioPhysics (1991-Present), Professor Emeritus of Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2005-Present)
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. …………
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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.