Readers may recall this story: Nobel laureate resigns from American Physical Society to protest the organization’s stance on global warming.
He’s back.
From the Observations, Scientific American Blog Network
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting: From the Big Bang to the Big Controversy (aka Climate Change)
Ivar Giaever, who shared the 1973 prize for work on tunneling in superconductors but was to offer a skeptical take on climate change, Molina said that critics aren’t usually the experts. Listening to them, he added, is like going to your dentist when you have a heart problem.
As he took the stage for his turn, Giaever’s immediate remark was, “I am happy I’m allowed to speak for myself.” He derided the Nobel committees for awarding Al Gore and R.K. Pachauri a peace prize, and called agreement with the evidence of climate change a “religion.”
In contrast to Crutzen and Molina, Giaever found the measurement of the global average temperature rise of 0.8 degrees over 150 years remarkably unlikely to be accurate, because of the difficulties with precision for such measurements—and small enough not to matter in any case:
“What does it mean that the temperature has gone up 0.8 degrees? Probably nothing.”
He disagreed that carbon dioxide was involved and showed several charts that asserted, among other things, that climate had even cooled. “I pick and choose when I give this talk just the way the previous speaker picked and chose when he gave his talk,” he added. He finished with a pronouncement:
“Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.”
h/t to Marc Morano of Climate Depot
Video of Ivar Giaevar’s Landau lecture: The Strange Case of Global Warming, 62nd Meeting of Nobel Laureates, 2012. (Requires Silverlight).
_Jim says:
July 4, 2012 at 5:55 pm
> indrdev200 says July 4, 2012 at 1:50 am
> Of course, it is real science. Physical science. But climate change / global warming due to gases is impossible. Gases actually are helping the earth to cool down by convection method of heat transmission. …
> ‘convection method of heat transmission’ to where?
Convection to high enough to be above the IR blocked region of the atmosphere.
> How does the energy ‘leave the planet’; where’s your ‘sink’ (in engineering terms)?
Earth is in a vacuum. All it can do is reflect (albedo) or radiate (block box).
> Same Qs to you mydogsgotnonoose …
> You guys ever see how/when dew forms? You know, like dew on grass or ‘dew’ on a car’s rooftop? Ask yourselves, why no dew on cloudy nights .. get back to me with an answer-any answer …
Clouds reflect both sides now. Up and down. Oh, that’s life. sorry, and apoliges to Judy Collins, and probably Joni Mitchell too.
Clouds reflect IR well – a clear night (or day) means the Earth’s surface manages to get a lot of black body radiation out in the transparent part of the spectrum. On a cloudy night that IR is bounced back to the grass and car tops and they don’t cool as well. Windy nights too – then the lower atmosphere keeps mixing and a temperature inversion doesn’t form, and the temperature doesn’t reach the dew point.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re griping about, but there are answers for you. Personally, I think climate scientists, or at least the CO2 specialists, ignore convection way too much. Heck, Venus can do it, we have a thinner atmosphere….
More life lessons from fictional characters. Holmes’ creator, A. C. Doyle, believed in all sorts of nonsense without data. So apparently he didn’t follow his own fictitious tenets.
“Molina said that critics aren’t usually the experts. Listening to them, he added, is like going to your dentist when you have a heart problem.”
Interesting slip here, since if Mr. Molina knew his medical facts he would have known that dental pain can be a precursor of cardiac problems, something that, if I had known, could have helped me prevent my heart attack. I found this out from my dentist, after the fact.
Henrythethird says
“And that’s always been one problem with “climate scientists”. Their total lack of ability to tell us exactly what scientific disciplines make up the core of the “climate sciences”. Do we listen to mathematicians? Physicists? Statisticians? Chemists? Chemical Engineers? English Lit majors?”
You have encountered one of the deepest, darkest secrets of all fields of study, both scientific and non-scientific — namely, that those who participate in them are all basically members of “mutual admiration societies”. So, how do outsiders judge one of these self-admiring groups? By what the group produces. Is it new and powerful technology, compelling literature, movies everyone has to see? Is it unexpectedly true predictions about the future? Then you too can start admiring the group whose members admire each other. But if the production of a group is not so admirable, then don’t be afraid to see its members for what they are (and it doesn’t really make any difference if they use huge computers and mind-bending mathematics to do their stuff).
” … He disagreed that carbon dioxide was involved … “
I’m going to reuse a comment I made on another topic:
Does he know the difference between the emission spectrum of a black body with an effective temperature of 5780 K and the emission spectrum of a black body with an average temperature of 288 K? And does he know the absorption spectrum of CO2? Yes? No?
I think (and I hope I’m not alone with that) the warming caused by CO2 is much smaller than assumed by “the consensus” – but it is there. And to deny that CO2 warms the globe is as stupid as claiming that CO2 will destroy the world as we know it.
Tony Mach:
Acting as a scientist, one will be unable to claim that CO2 warms the globe until the underlying statistical population is identified, for it is by reference to this population that this claim would be statistically tested.
“””””…..Mooloo says:
July 4, 2012 at 4:27 am
Steve C says:
“Absolutely” – doesn’t leave much room for doubt, that. Doesn’t take a genius to see it, but it’s kind of reassuring when a fully accredited genius agrees with you.
He has a Nobel prize. Whether he is a genius or not is quite a different matter. The Nobel prize is not, and never has been, awarded on the basis of intellectual power.
Several winners have been total idiots when outside their particular field. Linus Pauling managed to get two Nobel prizes (and very nearly a third for the structure of DNA) and still be an idiot when he ventured into medicine……”””””
So enlighten us Mooloo, can you name say five people who were/are geniuses at everything ?
Typically, PhD’s are given to persons who may be geniuses at the subject of their doctoral thesis; But you usually have to have a bit more on the ball to earn a Doctor of Science degree.
In my life, I have known of precisely one DSc; actually a chap from my high school graduating class. His field was Chemistry, just like Linus Pauling.
So where did Pauling screw up in medicine? Are you suggesting his description of the molecular cause of sickle cell anemia is incorrect ?
The only other lecturer I ever heard who was as interesting as Linus Pauling, was Bill Schockley; I never had the opportunity to hear Feynman.
My son works for a small company with at least 46 PhD Physicists; from all the big name schools, and countries; and between the whole bunch of them, they can’t tie a pair of shoe laces; which is why they hired my son; to stop them blowing up the place. But they ARE damned good at what they do; about which, I have nothing to say.
rgbatduke – My earlier comment about the manner in which temperature data should be expressed or processed was prompted by, what appears to me, incorrect processing of actual temperature data rather than what is done in models. I see temperature data presented as daily, monthly or annual means and plotted as running averages. Using any of these figures will result in errors if these average temperatures are ultimately used to look at the energy balance of incoming vs emitted radiation. The average temperature will always be lower than the equivalent constant temperature radiator for any temperature data set that varies. The larger the dev1ation from the mean, the larger that error will be. This error can be significant if the daily variation is large, such as in a desert environment. Although still a seemingly small error, it will cause an error in emitted power that is four times the equivalent black body temperature error. A 0.1% absolute temperature error, for example, would cause a 0.4% emitted power error.
I was concerned that I never see actual temperature measurement data expressed as anything other than an average but that may be due to my own limited familiarity with weather/climate data. Electrical measurements, such as voltage, are generally specifically expressed as either Average or RMS (Root Mean Square) to avoid errors of this type. I also don’t remember ever seeing a method of expressing temperature, or anything else for that matter, that is the forth power equivalent of using RMS, but again that may just be my own unfamiliarity with the subject. Perhaps something like RME4 (root mean exponential 4) could be used.
I think Anthony got it right when he called AGW a form of superstition.
Jim,
I used the rigid-rotater, harmonic oscillator model and spectroscopic data to calculate thermodynamic functions back around 1960. A basic to remember is that radiation is “line of sight and fast as light”. Other mechanisms of energy transport are more likely to be rate controlling.
Reblogged this on P2ALM and commented:
The science behind man-made climate change is not unanimous. Another well-decorated scientist speaks out.
vigelantfish – There is no requirement for subscriber membership. Just register (no charge) and then blast away. Comments sections certainly need more skeptical views and arguments. The warmists have ruled this roost too long. GK
Just a heads up – SciAm imposes a 2 links per comment limit. Anything more gets the comment turfed. GK
GK;
It’s “Hawking”. And he’s way off his reservation.
“83 year old world leader in quantum tunnelling claims that all the experts in some other field of physics are wrong, despite over 100,000 papers having been published in the field.
Who to trust, one Nobel Laureate, or all the others?”
Thats easy… the Nobel Laureate!
Poster Seth never provided any data on his extravagant claim of “…despite over 100,000 papers having been published in the field.”
Okay, in default of his reply, let us make an estimate. The infamous Naomi Oreskes essay of 2004 stated that she examined 928 abstracts of papers published published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, on “global climate change”. This works out to less than 100 per year. Assuming that the field of “global climate change” began back in 1981, that gives a crude estimate of ~2700 papers total published to the present time. While this may underestimate the total number of papers published in recent years, my guess is that the number of papers published in early years would have been much smaller. Even if the estimate of number of papers is low by a factor of 3, it’s clear poster Seth’s extravagant claim is off by an order of magnitude.
As others have commented, while the weight of scientific opinion seems to be on the side of the climate alarmists, science is one area where the so-called “argument from authority” fallacy can be overturned by experimental evidence.
Quite right, thanks. He got the Higgs discovery wrong also (he bet against it). My point was fame is not an indication of accuracy. Heavy hitters can strike out too.
Btw, here is a startling headline:
http://grist.org/list/worlds-most-environmentally-outspoken-president-forced-to-resign-at-gunpoint/
Gaiever makes a good distinction between Real Science and the other varieties –
1. Pathological Science – People who fool themselves.
2. Fraudulent Science – made up results.
3. Junk Science – very poor testing of hypotheses.
4. Pseudo-Science – starts with a hypothesis that is very appealing emotionally, and then looks only for items which support it.
It is the last that Gaiever suggests is what global warming is about. My own view is that CAGW has gone beyond just looking for confirmations. Most of the effort is now on suppressing and attacking the people who point to contrary evidence, or point at why it is mostly pseudo-science.
My earlier comment about the manner in which temperature data should be expressed or processed was prompted by, what appears to me, incorrect processing of actual temperature data rather than what is done in models.
problems. There is the UHI effect. There is an enormous bias of samples from human-populated portions of the surface at the expense of uninhabited areas. There is the lack of reliable samples, or use of reliable sampling methodology, for the 70% of the surface corresponding to the Ocean (and even more horrendous than usual undersampling of the arctic and antarctic polar regions). I suspect there are errors associated with the use of 5×5 degree surface cells on a spherical planet, causing a well-known precision problem due to the mistreatment of the Jacobean. There is “special sauce” — systematic “correction” of data from 80 to 100 years ago that no contemporary human can possibly be justified in altering — the very idea of doing so violates every precept of statistics unless one is certain that one knows precisely what corrections are required (otherwise one hopes the random errors of unknown days past cancel, on average, as being the best you can do and crank your error estimate and reduce the strength of your claims accordingly).
. Area averaging is OK because the outgoing power is the flux of the Poynting vector, which is an area integral. Time averaging is OK because in the end you get precisely the average outgoing clear-sky power (if you multiply by a suitable conversion factor). If you then multiply that by the “average transparency” of the atmosphere and work some math-juju-magic with insolation and outward radiation, you get a simple statement of detailed balance. And taking the fourth root does create a “radiation average temperature” that would have immediate meaning.
dependences in outgoing radiation. Or rather, if they do they should be fired, instantly, and laughed out of the profession.
I agree, although (as I noted) I don’t think the models do it incorrectly at all. What you complain about, quite correctly, is that the average temperature recorded in (fill in the blank — GISS, HadCRUT, etc) is typically some sort of straight-up average over area and time, coarse grained in the latter case with some sort of window. There are innumerable problems with this average — not just
Whether or not one fixes all of these potential problems with the method of creating the average, the idea of evaluating an average is sound enough and — if it were done with good methodology — would yield useful information. Such as the entirely plausible information that the planet has warmed appreciably since the Dalton Minimum, and still more since the Little Ice Age, and might be a tad warmer than it was 1000 or so years ago during the Medieval Optimum, although frankly all estimates of global temperature from that far back are highly questionable and probably have honest error estimates that are a factor of 2 to 10 larger than the ones that are acknowledged, large enough to make it in fact somewhat uncertain that any warming at all has occurred on this sort of time scale. After all, who knows what was going on in Antarctica in 1000 CE?
At best we have some interpreted data from proxies that we use to make a semi-quantitative guess as to the temperature field at that time, we have a handful of samples from a handful of places and pretend that from them we can compute an accurate global temperature then, when armed with direct measurement data from up to thousands of weather stations the keepers of GISS are constantly revising their temperature estimates of the present, let alone the last 150 years.
If it were accurate, it would be informative. It probably is accurate enough to be informative as to the sign of the change and perhaps a bit more.
But you are quite correct. The most informative quantity would be an areal and temporal average of
This still is inadequate to build actual models with, but as I said model builders, I’m quite certain, don’t neglect
rgb
rgbatduke says:
July 5, 2012 at 2:29 pm
“Whether or not one fixes all of these potential problems with the method of creating the average, the idea of evaluating an average is sound enough and — if it were done with good methodology — would yield useful information.”
Do you really think so? I would suggest that a useful average for surface temperatures would have to be a weighted one based on the local heat capacities. This, then, would at least be a proxy for global heat energy. Without that kind of weighting, what does the average of an intensive variable like temperature really mean?
Insightful and interesting comments: Thank you.
I’ve read several on-line articles and two papercopy textbooks on the “conventional” CAGW global circulation models, but still cannot find an absolute summary of the following specific assumptions.
What shape (size and shape) they use for the “not-a-3D-cube” they use for their actual calculation geometries. In engineering, we go to great lengths to divide the “cubes” into as small a size as possible, to keep all cubes consistent across adjacent areas (lengthxwidth) (widthxheight) (heightxlength), to keep all cubes of similar volume, to minimum abstract cubes shapes – especially at regions of interest where sharp edges and transitions are present, to keep all material properties consistent across cubes, to avoid making assumptions about different properties between cubes and across long distances, etc.
In short, NONE of the requirements for validating a 3D stress-strain model or fluid model used (and verified) in engineering analysis is found in any GCM model environment.
They (the GCM) numerical environment grew up from the very limited atmospheric models developed in Colorado for the acid rin analysis in the late 70’s. Based on printed results – and NASA-GISS output maps – they seem to use project ” average solar radiation” onto a average cartesian (rectangle) coordinates on a projected rectangular “average” map of the world. No seas. No land area. No rotation. No currents. No corioless effect. No polar absortion due to effective polar atmospheric thickness up to 11 times greater than at the equator. No sea reflection at high incident angles of the sun. Just plain simple, easy-to-program “average” values of “average” regions.
Now,, if anybody (Mosher? for example) can show a actual grid area polar adjusted with actual atmospheric properties with actual grid “thickness” and actual latitude (spherical coordinates) used to create proper non-rectangular “grids” that actually vary with latitude, that can show the changes at each grid boundary areas and whose boundary diff eqtn functions are changing with latitude and height ….
rgbatduke;
This still is inadequate to build actual models with, but as I said model builders, I’m quite certain, don’t neglect dependences in outgoing radiation. Or rather, if they do they should be fired, instantly, and laughed out of the profession.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh you’re only scratching the surface there Robert. How about Kevin Trenberth coming up with a model that shows that the “missing heat” from his energy balance calculations is being sequestered in the ocean depths? He’s got no explanation for how it gets there, nor can he explain how it gets past the Argo Buoys which monitor the first 700 meters or so without being detected by them. Does his code use T^4? I imagine it does. That paper came out about the time that the editor of Remote Sensing resigned for allowing Roy Spencer’s paper showing properly calculating radiance to space accounted for pretty much all the “missing heat”. Did the editor cite anything wrong with the paper? No, he stated otherwise. Properly peer reviewed by qualified reviewers, no flaws…. so he resigned for letting it be published…. why? Well his excuse was that Spencer should have consulted with the modeling community before publishing. Can we surmise that there was intense pressure from the “modeling community” to force his resignation as a means of disparaging the paper?
We can indeed surmise just that. Shortly after Wolfgang Wagner resigned, Kevin Trenberth bragged that he had received an apology directly from Wagner.
So what does Wolfgang Wagner do other than his former position as editor of Remote Sensing?
Why he’s a researcher at Vienna University of Technology where he studies climate issues that are in part dependant upon both data and funding controlled by…..
Betcha can’t guess.
So I’ve read through most of the comments here and it seems like nobody caught – what I thought at least – was his most fascinating comment. Something along the lines of:
“[don’t you think all the conversion of forest to farmland and pavement we’ve put down might have something to do with it?]”
Climsci is a fad, like behavioral psychology and psychoanalysis. Remember them? They were the consensus too, in their day. Probably also had their 100,000 papers published. Gone with the wind.
As long as no one is allowed to forget that in five years the hundred months to runaway temperature rises will have expired and the climate lobby pretend onehundredmonths .org has never existed.