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
Joel,
If you took 365 photographic exposures of my backyard, and tried to overlay the negatives, the resulting image would be pretty fuzzy. There is no one representative image in that multiple exposure, and it would be a fool’s errand to try to extract it from the blur of dots on the film.
Taking a daily temperature reading in my backyard, at a height of 5 feet off the ground, over a 365-day period, from June 21 to June 21, might allow you to draw a graph of temperatures at that exact spot. But the following year’s graph will look different. And if you continued to graph daily temperatures, it’s likely the trend lines between summer solstices would vary significantly from one year to the next. Perhaps, averaging all the numbers over a decade, you get a trend line going down. But this is still a “short term” (and geographically limited) database for the scientists who want to make prognostications about not only my entire back yard, but the world.
Different scientists are claiming insights into what the next decade, next century, and next millennium will be like. And they aren’t limiting their insights to fuzzy generalities, either. Like Nostradamus, they are predicting how high the seas will rise, what parts of the ice fields in Antarctica and Greenland will vanish, and, within a few degrees of uncertainty, what (specifically higher) temperatures we’ll achieve by certain dates in the future. To draw a trend line that is that predictive of the future, you must start with very exacting records of the past, and make some pretty heroic assumptions about your predictive ability. Putting aside the technical problems of maintaining such long, accurate records over the desired period, and the human fallibility in skill and veracity in handling the data — it seems to me the real problem begins with where these scientist start their trend line.
One artist of paleo-climates, CR Scotese, graphs temps in a world which, over the last 600 million or so years, has fluctuated between 10 and 25 degree centigrade, temperatures which have induced global ice-house and hot-house conditions. In the time period shown here http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm five ice ages have occurred. My understanding is that, even in the present ice age “recovery” we’ve seen temperatures both much warmer, and much colder than the present day.
Drawing a trend line through any of these exteme periods (or just through selective phases in the last century) naturally yields different angles, and therefore seriously skews predictions about the temperature in my back yard next year, next decade, and in the next century.
McKitrick says:
I can believe that data gathered from the past can yield both snapshots and general trends about the past climate, but that it’s value in making predictions about the future is limited. Put another way, the angles created by scientists and statisticians, based on scant evidence, is more of a “forcing” than any actual climate factor.
You might think you have found a way of dealing with this problem mathematically. But you have a long way to go before you can convince even the average American that they need to pay up big time for government policies based on this kind of selective mining of past climate data.
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.
Actually, it’s 97%. Of 79. Equals 77. That’s the sample size in the student paper that everyone is referring to.
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…
It occurred to me that I haven’t seen any news of a prominent “denier” changing sides and accepting the consensus on CAGW. Has anyone else seen news of this sort?
And this fellow has a real Nobel Prize, not the green knock-offs they have been handing out lately.
DMA: Have you seen a prominent creationist change sides and accept the scientific consensus on evolution? I would suggest that it is pretty rare for pretty much the same reasons. That being said, Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine has come around to a certain extent.
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.
That is a very poor analogy as creationism is a religious not scientific issue, they do not have any support for their arguments in the peer-reviewed literature while climate skeptics do,
900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skeptic Arguments Against ACC/AGW Alarm
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 ):
Jeff Alberts says:
…which is, of course, the exact same sort of arguments that creationists make.
Joel, they make these claims but you will not find any actual peer-reviewed papers in science or non-religious social-science journals supporting creationism. I am well aware of what the Discovery institute claims but their list does not support their claim as those papers are either in worthless creationist journals not recognized by any scientific community or the paper makes no mention of creationism. Your argument does not apply to Global Warming skeptics.
Energy & Environment is a legitimate scholarly peer-reviewed journal,
http://science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER&ISSN=0958-305X
I am well aware of Dr. Spencer’s position on the issue and do not agree with him on it.
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?
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
Joel Shore says on September 17, 2011 at 7:27 am
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.
Richard,
Needless to say, just like you think AGW is a religion, so too do creationists think that evolution is a religion: http://creationists.org/evolutionism-is-a-religion.html
That is why we have scientific organizations like the National Academy of Sciences to adjudicate between science and pseudo-scientific nonsense. Unfortunately, the people who are on the losing side of that adjudication just “blame the refs”.
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.
But that is my whole point. There are no peer-reviewed papers in scientific or non-religious social science peer-reviewed journals that explicitly supports creationism because it is a religious belief. Pointing out a flaw in evolution theory does not support another theory. It simply supports skepticism of evolution.
Strawman, my list of 900+ papers makes no such claim. The list is explicitly titled: “900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skeptic Arguments Against ACC/AGW Alarm”. Alarmist arguments are many so the list tries to cover the most common as well as supporting competing theories which still falls under the same title. For instance, there are hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on the list supporting a cosmic ray/solar theory of climate change. While you have ZERO supporting creationism.
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. If a scientist has a problem with a paper then they should submit a response for publication in the same journal so the author can respond. I have seen no evidence of any such consensus.
Poptech:
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?
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?
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.
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.
“The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years”
Use of the phrase “degree Kelvin” by a Nobel Laureate in physics?” I’ll remember that next time I am criticized for that slip of the tongue.
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.
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.
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.
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 says:
I hardly think that referring to a value of 14.1% as “almost 15%” indicates statistical incompetence.
No…It doesn’t. Nobody argues that natural factors have not played a role in climate change in the past. To argue that natural factors can actually account for most of the warming since the 1950s, one actually has to demonstrate this…i.e., one has to show that the magnitude of the effect, and the actual solar / cosmic ray trends are such that this can be accounted for.
Believe it or not, scientists have better things to do with their time than rebut nonsense that appears in a journal of extremely low stature. In most cases outside of climate science, bad science is not rebutted but is just ignored. It is only in the politicized world in which climate science lives that this bad science gets publicized within the ideological echo chamber and takes on a life of its own even though the scientific community knows it is garbage.
Your own statement from the editor of the journal says:
So, in other words, at best what one can hope for (i.e., if she does not simply make the editorial decision herself) is that she will send the papers to a ‘climate skeptic’ for review, meaning that she is restricting review to a minutely-small proportion of the scientific community that actually publishes in the field of climate science! No wonder E&E has earned the horrible reputation that it enjoys. By the way, would you care to tell us how many libraries around the world carry this 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”:
By contrast, Journal of Climate and Geophysical Research Letters list under “coverage”:
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?
Sure it does. If you are going to use statistics, get the numbers right. It also demonstrated that he failed to count the papers on the list, which is a fatal flaw with those that attempt to criticize it.
These are all arguments of degrees. As the argument on this point varies for “most” from 50.1-99.9%. Those are vastly different positions. Papers that support skeptic arguments for a larger natural influence also argue for a reduced anthropogenic influence.
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.
This is a nice excuse but is baseless and meaningless. Let me know when the scientists address their arguments in the peer-reviewed literature.
She made no such claim that they are the only reviewers on papers. E&E has not “earned a horrible reputation”, alarmist scientists and climate activists have simply tried to smear the journal.
Energy & Environment is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary scholarly journal (ISSN: 0958-305X)
– Found at 173 libraries and universities worldwide in print and electronic form. These include; Cambridge University, Cornell University, British Library, Dartmouth College, Library of Congress, National Library of Australia, Ohio University, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, University of California, University of Delaware, University of Oxford, University of Virginia, and MIT.
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.
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.
I think it is the best place to publish climate papers that also include social-science issues or have policy implications.
So, you are telling me that the editor, trying to defend her journal, made the statement that
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!
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. I just went to the Cornell catalogue and it says their subscription was cancelled in 1995; Penn State apparently canceled theirs in 2008. Also, for journals who get an electronic subscription, one would want to determine if they are paying separately for it or if it is getting bundled in as a package deal with other journals published by Multiscience.
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?