The APS Topical Group on the Physics of Climate: reply to Roger Cohen

Why does he feel it is necessary for scientific organisations to sort out the wheat from the chaff? Why not allow an open debate among scientists, engineers and others who are able and provide a forum where such a discussion can take place? Why indeed, is a bureaucracy needed to define the thruth?
This assumption of his doesn’t square with my understanding of “integrity”.

He did not address Cohen’s points. He came up with something else.
This is not a rebuttal.

I also feel that the APS statement on climate change (with the word “incontrovertible”) was very ill-advised,…
Was? It is still in there, Warren.
… but the controversy focused on one badly-chosen word has harmed science by discouraging other scientific organizations from helping to sort wheat from chaff in this field.
One badly chosen word? Try 157. And all of them, including the one that you admit was “ill advised” are still in there. And all of them, including the one that you admit was “ill advised”, are supported by the 2010 “Commentary”, which is the sort of unquantified, unscientific, ad hoc, ad verecundium, politicized pablum that one certainly does not expect to see coming from physicists. If other scientific organizations have been dissauded from following you down that decidedly unscientific path, then that has helped science. We don’t need any more content free “me too” position statements.
Maybe you should stop making fallacious (and false) ad hom attacks against Cohen, and start listening to him. Until you do, stop whining about attacks on the “integrity” that you are not demonstrating.

Entirely off-topic (appropriate, as you seem to have received a deserved kicking over the on-topic stuff), how do you discern if someone is being friendly or rude when they call out, “Hey, Warren”?

“Is it at all possible that in the intervening six years Dr Cohen has seen the light and changed his mind about AGW ‘science’ and the kinds of people/organisations who support the AGW brief; especially those who – purporting to represent physics and science – come up with a statement that says ‘the’ Science is ‘incontrovertible’, when science is no such thing”
This is to the point I think. Warren warren (rabbit?) has totally missed the point as many supporters of the incontrevertable science seem to. Cohen was, in my opinion absolutely correct and did what I would do (I am no longer a MInstPhys but was). Perhap Mr Warren Warren might consider doing the same thing as his group has singularly failed to get the most unscientific statement to be made by a scientific organistion modified or rescinded.
“Is it at all possible that in the intervening six years Dr Cohen has seen the light and changed his mind about AGW ‘science’
If he has then good for him for that is what a good scientist does. Weighs the evidence over time, does a bit of research and comes to a conclusion.

Neil:
“Why does Roger Cohen’s bio say that he was a lead author on many IPCC chapters? Is there even one?”
Without verifying the case for Cohen, it’s been a practice of the IPCC to retain author’s names in their reports, even if all of the contributions of those authors were edited out, or the authors had them removed. Professor Reiter (an expert in Malaria) had to threaten legal action to have his name removed.

Cohen’s offense is “not towing the party line”. Only political egotistical people are deeply offended by those who openly disagree with them. This response says more about the kind of political animal that is Warren S. Warren than anything else…

Warren S. Warren said,

As a member of both committees, I consider his letter to be a direct attack on my integrity, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

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This confused me for a minute, because I had read Cohen’s post. Given the large number of committee members, I see no way that you could possibly imagine Cohen’s as an attack on your integrity, unless there was something inferred which only members of the committees would understand. Interested readers should refresh their memories by going here….. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/22/more-turmoil-at-the-american-physical-society-over-global-warming-issue/
This only brings me to the conclusion that Cohen didn’t share all that he was frustrated about, and Warren didn’t bother to bring it up, either. But, did take the time to express his indignation. I think the links provided tell some of the untold story.
Cohen mentioned no one by name, except for Dr. James G. Brasseur, to whom his resignation letter was addressed. Warren S. Warren stooped to personal attacks. Enough said.

And if I KNOW that there are many rich people who are afraid of black cats I might just start a consulting business to take advantage of their beliefs!!

kuhnkat;
Well. if I am an animal control expert and someone comes along who believe black cats are bad luck and wants to pay me to round up all the black cats on his plantation, do I try to convince him he is deluded or make the money??
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yeah, when the Y2K scare came along, I patiently explained to a lot of people, even wrote some articles, that the scare was far over blown. When tenders were issued for Y2K audits, I bid on them and won a number of them. That’s not talking out of both sides of my mouth. That’s being honest about the issues, and if someone wants to spend money to obtain my skills regardless, then that’s their choice. There’s nothing two faced about it, and my clients got the services they insisted upon. Had I not taken those contracts, someone else would have, the money was going to be spent either way.

As an ex-APS member myself, I was personally offended by the original statement. I cannot think of one single positive thing to be gained from this sort of statement on the part of what should be the world’s most objective, skeptical, and open minded organization (all at the same time!). Where but in physics would we openly tolerate the “discovery” of neutrinos that go faster than light in spite of our strong opinion that no, they probably don’t? The evidence for the speed of light being the upper limit of speeds of things in our Universe is overwhelming, the theoretical support for this is equally if not more so, it would require the literal rewriting of all of our understanding of nature if it were so, and yet did the APS issue a statement condemning the result as wrong because of the “incontroverible” evidence against it?
Of course not, because it is not true. The history of physics is full of “incontrovertible” results that were, in fact, controverted (is that even a word?) starting with its first modern era discoveries. Doubters should begin with “Saint” Bellarmine’s letter to Galileo, and take the occasional turn through the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics as well as the contemporaneous idiocy of those physicists or public figures who rejected them as “obviously wrong” because they considered the alternative hypotheses incontrovertible. Of all of the scientific groups in the world, the APS should know better. I’m not alone here — I know a number of other members or ex-members of the APS who feel the exact same way. It was a shameful day for the entire organization no matter how the issue turns out!
The simple fact of the matter is that the issue is not only controvertible, the scientific hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming — where every one of these terms has to be true to make the issue “newsworthy” and warrant any sort of statement at all — is supported by the shakiest of arguments. For one thing, climate science is an extension of hydrodynamics, and the Navier-Stokes equations on a good day are the most fiendishly difficult equations in all of physics (in my opinion, anyway). The particular set of them that describe the coupled equations for atmosphere and ocean, rife with state changes, in a thermodynamically open system, with nonlinear drivers, unmeasured parameters, unproven processes, and initialized and parameterized on the basis of quantities (like “global temperature” and “insolation”) known in even the recent historical past only with enormous uncertainties and by means of noisy and questionable proxies on top of these uncertainties before that have to be the most controvertible science on Earth — a place where even a few moderate mistakes well within the limits of reasonable uncertainty would nullify, or significantly weaken, the entire CAGW argument.
That doesn’t make the CAGW false, any more than the arguments and evidence in favor of it make it true. It makes investigating it as a hypothesis science, where good science never fully accepts or rejects any hypothesis, certainly not in an obviously political statement by an organization that remains officially open minded about things with far stronger evidence against them, and hypotheses with far greater support for them than CAGW. Personally, as a professional physicist, ex-member of the APS only out of laziness, not because I don’t qualify and could not rejoin, referee and author of many papers in not only physics but other fields as well, I find the evidence in favor of some measure of GW over the last 150 years “incontrovertible” but irrelevant to both the C and the A, and the A plausible, to some degree, the C highly implausible, and hence reject CAGW as implausible, AGW (to some extent) probable, and am open minded about the degree to which humans and CO_2 have affected it because a) the evidence is rather ambiguous and inconsistent; b) the evidence in favor of it has been both manifestly cherrypicked and in many cases has been supported by the highly dubious use of poor statistical methodology (something I am something of an expert in, and hence am reasonably qualified to judge); and c) the entire discussion has become horribly politicized. It is no longer science, it is religion! On both sides, sadly.
Such as Mann: Trying to have a journal editor fired for publishing an article that you disagree with? Puh-leeeze. That’s why God invented “letters to the editor” or “comments” sections of journals. Fight it out on paper, in public, honestly.
How dare the APS speak for me, speak for all of my other colleagues who have never even considered the question, put the honor and integrity of all physicists for the rest of time on the line on this issue when you couldn’t get a roomful of physicists to completely agree on anything, even things in the textbooks! Because you can bet your sweet ass that if CAGW turns out to be false, if AGW turns out to be false (and it could, even now, be not just irrelevantly true — too weak to matter — but actually false), if global temperatures have the temerity to actually descend with the solar cycle over the next twenty or thirty years, then every member of the APS will be viewed as gullible fools. Science itself will suffer as the integrity and objectivity of even physicists, the one group that should know far better than to endorse anything as certain knowledge, will forever be shown to be corrupt.
If you want me to take you, or your committee in the APS, seriously, Dr. Warren, I would strongly suggest that you do so by publicly rescinding the original statement, in its entirety, and replace it with a public statement to the effect that the science is in fact open like all science and that the APS like all scientists should weigh the evidence and arguments one at a time, on their own merits, and not make public statements on behalf of the imagined beliefs of its members.
If you want something humorous, look at the George Mason survey of members of climate scientists — actual members of the AGU, for example. 15% of them (IIRC) do not accept even AGW as proven fact. Over 2/3 of them do not accept CAGW as proven fact. CAGW isn’t even the opinion of the simple majority of climate scientists, when they are anonymously surveyed, and this is actually reflected in the working groups in the IPCC.
So Dr. Warren, please speak out for the physicists who do not agree with the APS statement — who do not believe that right or wrong it should have been made in the first place, let alone the many APS members whose personal opinion is that it is wrong. Right or wrong, it is political and a horrible risk, horrible because the fair odds that it is wrong aren’t small, things one might consider to be “incontrovertible” odds, one in a thousand (what are the odds that neutrinos go faster than light? you’d need a log scale in decibels to describe them, for most physicists, yet we were respectful when they were experimentally reported and didn’t publish press releases denying the result). Not even one in a hundred. Even climate scientists only support a one in three chance that they are right, and a somewhat greater chance that humans are responsible for some (but who knows how much!) of the warming post Little Ice Age when it was so cold there wasn’t any way to go but up, except of course for further down.
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