Note: if the name below is familiar to you it is because of this article from Monday. This will be a sticky post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one– Anthony
Guest essay by Jonathan Abbott
Please allow me to recount the details of my personal path to CAGW scepticism. I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream and at times it feels quite odd. Perhaps others here have similar experiences? I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.
My own story begins at school in England in the early 80s. Between playing with Bunsen burners and iron filings, I remember being told that some scientists predicted that we would soon enter a new ice age. This sounded quite exciting but I never really thought it would happen; I was too young then to have seen any significant change in the world around me and it all seemed rather far-fetched. A nuclear war seemed far more likely. Soon enough the whole scare melted away.
I grew up into a graduate engineer with an interest in most branches of science but especially physics. I read the usual books by Sagan, Feynman and later Dawkins (whose The Ancestor’s Tale I simply can’t recommend highly enough). I also dipped into philosophy via Bertrand Russell. I like to think this reading helped build upon the basic capabilities for critical thinking my education had provided.
I suppose it was in the early 90s that I first noticed predictions of global warming and the associated dire warnings of calamities to come. Some of these emanated from the Met Office and so I knew should be treated with a pinch of salt but other sources included NASA, which I then personally still very much respected; despite the space shuttle evidently being the wrong concept poorly executed, their basic scientific expertise seemed unquestionable. In general I was looking forward to the warmer climate predicted for the UK, and assumed that the overall effects for the globe wouldn’t necessarily all be bad.
Now, being English I knew all about the vagaries of the weather, but the warnings about CAGW always seemed to be made in the most certain terms. Was it really possible to predict the climate so assuredly? The global climate must be an extremely complex system, and very chaotic. I had recently heard about financial institutions that were spending vast sums of money and picking the very best maths and programming graduates, but still were unable to predict the movements of financial markets with any confidence. Predicting changes to the climate must be at least as difficult, surely? I bet myself climate scientists weren’t being recruited with the sort of signing-on bonuses dangled by Wall Street. I also thought back to the ice age scare, which was not presented as an absolute certainty. Why the unequivocal certainty now that we would only see warming, and to dangerous levels? It all started to sound implausible.
The whole thing also seemed uncertain on the simple grounds of common sense. Could mankind really force such a fundamental change in our environment, and so quickly? I understood that ice ages could come and go with extreme rapidity, and that following the scare of my childhood, no one seriously claimed to be able to predict them. So in terms of previous natural variability, CAGW was demonstrably minor in scale. It seemed obvious that if natural variability suddenly switched to a period of cooling, there would be no CAGW no matter what the effect of mankind on the atmosphere. Even more fundamentally, how could anyone really be certain that the warming then taking place wasn’t just natural variability anyway? The reports I read assured me it wasn’t, but rarely in enough detail to allow me to decide whether I agreed with the data or not.
The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.
Now don’t get me wrong: a scientific theory is correct or not regardless of who supports it. But recognising the most vocal proponents of CAGW for what they were set alarm bells ringing, and made me want to investigate further. I had always been somewhat sympathetic towards Friends of the Earth but much less so towards Greenpeace, by that time obviously a front for luddite socialism and basically shamanistic in outlook. I had deep personal concerns about the environment, having seen reports of terrible industrial pollution in developing countries and the former Eastern Bloc. I had also sailed across the Atlantic twice in a small yacht, and seen for myself floating plastic debris hundreds of miles from land. (I also saw an ‘eco warrior’ yacht in Antigua, lived on by a crusading hippy and daubed with environmental slogans. It was poorly maintained and leaked far more oil into the water than any other boat present.)
So I was quite passionate about the environment, but my focus was on keeping it clean and safe for all life to live in. I wanted people to stop overfishing and manage fish stocks sensibly, I wanted agricultural land to produce the best long-term yields possible, to provide enough food without encroaching on wilderness and wild spaces. I wanted people everywhere to have clean air to breathe and water to drink. I had hoped that the CAGW crusade would somehow also lead to more urgent progress in fighting pollution, and the other environmental issues I cared about. If anything it did the reverse. Why the absolute fixation on reducing CO2 emissions, why was it taken for granted that this was the only way to proceed? Where was the public debate about the balance between prevention and mitigation? The CAGW protagonists always came up with solutions that were anti-industrial, anti-development and always, always required more public money. Where was the encouragement for inventors and entrepreneurs to discover and develop new technologies? And most of all, why oh why not spend some of the huge sums of money thrown at CO2 instead on getting effective pollution controls enacted in developing countries?
It had become quite clear to me that the BBC and similar media organisations would never even discuss whether the science underpinning CAGW was really robust. It had simply become a truism. An occasional doubting voice would be offered a sliver of airtime in the interests of supposed impartiality, but a proponent of CAGW would always be allowed the (much longer) last word. But, if NASA kept having to adjust their course calculations as the Voyager probes entered the outer reaches of the solar system (an utterly trivial problem compared to the complexities of the global climate), how could the science possibly be settled as claimed? Surely the great joy of science is in admitting ignorance, in taking a finely honed theory and sharpening it still further, or even better in realising a fundamental mistake and stepping aside onto a new path? The claimed certainty itself seemed unscientific.
Then in 2007 I saw a trailer on television for the forthcoming documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. I watched it excitedly, for here finally were people publicly addressing the science and the data, but drawing alternative conclusions to the mainstream. There was none of the usual hand-waving and appeals to trust the experts, who magically seemed to be the only doubt-free scientists in recorded history. The backlash against the program told its own story too, being mainly outraged appeals to authority and conscience.
Having recently become a regular user of the internet, I started digging around looking for more information and so, soon after he started it, I found Warren Meyer’s excellent web site climate-skeptic.com. Oh, the joy! Here were links to data I could see and evaluate myself; here was critical dissection of reports and papers accepted elsewhere without demur. From there, I moved onto WUWT, Bishop Hill, Climate Audit and all the other sites that have become part of my daily round of the internet whenever I have access. However late to the party compared with many regulars at WUWT, I could now see fully both sides of the argument.
When the Climategate emails were released, some further scales fell from my eyes. I had hitherto assumed that most of the most prominent scientists supporting CAGW were well intentioned but wrong, akin to those opposing the theory of continental drift. I have taken part in many lengthy email exchanges concerning technically complex projects, and instantly recognised familiar methods used by those playing the political and bureaucratic game, for whom the data is infinitely malleable in order to reach a pre-determined goal. I had fought against this kind of factual distortion myself.
Now at this point, I am sure some (perhaps many?) readers are thinking, ‘Great, an inside view of how someone becomes a believer in a conspiracy theory, perhaps I’ll base a research paper on this idiot’. My response is that like most people I have at times stumbled upon the real conspiracy theory nuts lurking on the internet. But on WUWT and other CAGW-sceptic sites criticism of the position of the website founder isn’t just tolerated but often encouraged. ‘Prove us wrong! Please! It would be fascinating!’ There are many articles and views published on WUWT that I treat with suspicion, or even downright disagree with, but it is all stimulating and usually well argued. Plus, I am an experienced professional engineer and know what real science looks like, and when people are misusing it as a smokescreen. Neil Armstrong was a great man, and most certainly did land on the moon. Right or wrong, WUWT is a site that considers real scientific issues.
So I now find myself wondering where we go from here. The global climate will continue to change, as it has always done, and although I tend to expect some cooling I am pretty agnostic about it. Nature will assuredly do its own thing. The CAGW scare is in the process of burning out, but I do not expect an outright or imminent collapse. I hope to see the deliberate manipulators of data punished, but doubt very much it will ever come to that. Whatever happens next, it will undoubtedly be interesting, and stimulate much discussion and widely varying viewpoints. This is good news, because it means that we are back to doing science.
Barry 27 July 1:15am
Of all the accessible data, papers describing methods, online resources for modeling, code etc, which ‘concealed’ information are you referring to other than proprietary information?
– that described so eloquently in the Hockey Stick Illusion and Hiding the Decline.
Because people keep saying there isn’t one. If it is ‘irrelevant’, why does it get challenged?
– the UK Minister for Energy and “Climate Change” says on national TV that 97% of scientists agree with cAGW and Mike Hulme (not a sceptic, but Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia) has said “The “97% consensus” article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister should cite it.” However, the basic reason for it being irrelevant is because science does not work on consensus. It takes just one lone voice to challenge and show that the consensus view is wrong. Consensus is a completely specious argument.
Feel free to take up any of the points i responded to, but you’ll have to have some patience for my replies, and keep checking upthread, as there is a policy, apparently, to delay admission of my posts (I still have one pending 4 comments above yours). I’m all for open debate if the format is suitable.
– why is the Royal Society so reluctant to debate with the GWPF group? It would be the perfect opportunity for their eminent climate scientists to put forward their arguments in open debate. To my knowledge that debate has been declined in favour of a private discussion with Lord Lawson alone.
@ur momisugly Blade
Being in the USA, I’m still not up-to-speed on what Thatcher actually believed or did, but I am certainly not going to take your word for it. I would guess it is you who is mistaken or lying here considering how you smeared Thatcher shortly after she passed away before she was even buried. So for now I will assume you are doing precisely the same as always and leave it to your fellow British countrymen to set the record straight. Or perhaps Chris Monckton can really clear it up once and for all.
Gareth responds,
Well Blade, you could get off your butt and look at the evidence, there is lots of it out there. Not living in the UK is no excuse I’m afraid, patently you have access to the internet and you could check these things out. And yes, I criticised Thatcher before she died, after she died and during her heartless and ruthless rule which, unlike you, we had to live through. My point is that you and others always jump to the conclusion that concerns about the climate are a left wing commie plot. They are not, and criticism of climate science is not a right wing plot, despite your best efforts to make it so. I criticise climate science on both sides, that does not make me a Communist one day and a Fascist the next. Base your opinions on the evidence, not on some fantasy of political expediency.
Here’s an extract from one article, there are many more out there , I fully understand you will accuse the writer of lying, but there we are.
“An oft forgotten aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure was her stance as a supporter of action against climate change. In her 1988 speech to the royal society she expressed the notion that as a race “we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.” In this instance her interest went further than rhetoric, the succeeding years saw Thatcher support some of the first scientists to investigate climate change. The main issue that disturbs those of us concerned about climate change is the entangled nature of science and politics.
The trend in the rightwing media (good examples being found in the journalism of the likes of James Delingpole and Peter Hitchens) is to play down the debate as a form of left-wing, anti-capitalist hippy propaganda. The inference is that the only reason the large majority of scientists believe that climate change is man-made is because of their involvement in a leftist conspiracy; a conspiracy that presumably intends to turn the whole world into a grey communist landscape littered with wind-powered gulags.
The rhetoric is not only unneeded but downright pathetic. The scientific community is much more apolitical and – unfortunately – amoral than the political and media spheres”
My path is rather different. I talk about it a little bit here (http://paulhager.org/wordpress/?p=105) without explicitly stating that I’m a skeptic. Suffice that I first began to look at Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) back in the late 1970’s. By sometime in the early 1980’s, I considered the evidence “dispositive”. In the cited article, I note that when the issue first became generally known to the public in the late 80’s, the “problem”, based upon what I had learned, it was greatly exaggerated. I began to look critically at AGW – actually Catastrophic AGW (CAGW) – in 1998, as I became aware that satellite and balloon data didn’t match the claims. I was a full-on skeptic by 2000. My position was data driven all the way, from beginning to end.
To me, the most interesting phenomenon here is governmental politicization of science. “Big Science”, “Government Science”, call it what you will, turns out to not produce the best science. This was a painful, disillusioning discovery for me and it attended my journey from Big Government Technocrat to limited government free marketeer.
I too attended Bob Carter’s Canberra book-launch Thursday, and whilst he was signing my copy, mentioned my horror at the heckling he got whilst presenting a talk a decade ago at the Australian National University.
This was from my academic colleagues at its Research School of Earth Sciences.
To my compliments at his keeping cool under such onslaught, he assured that he was used to it.
Such a spectacle was enough for me to delve further, ‘and the rest is history’.
I’m a retired electronics design engineer who worked in the semiconductor equipment industry. Although I’ve always taken science very seriously, the whole global warming thing stayed off my radar until just a few years ago.
My interest was sparked by two articles by Christopher Monckton in the Sunday Telegraph. Al Gore helped, too. His article in response to Monckton’s contained very little science but many personal insults. It didn’t take long to decide whose side I was on!
I believe that CO2 can increase the temperature, but by a negligible amount. I’ve had a lot of experience with feedback mechanisms (what servomechanisms realy want to do is oscillate). The climate (and weather) data strongly suggests a system that is rather unstable but dominated by negative feedbacks. It is rather like a poorly-designed servomechanism that does basically work, but suffers from a lot of short-term instability.
To me the ice core records are incredibly important. They clearly show that the CO2 follows the temperature, due to the action of the oceans. As far as I’m aware, the ice cores contain no examples of a change in CO2 being followed by a corresponding change in the temperature.
Like many people here, I feel a sense of outrage at what has happened. First, the science has been badly corrupted by ‘scientists’ who have a big vested interest in global warming. And governments around the world are squandering trillions of dollars trying to solve a problem that almost certainly doesn’t exist. For example, a large proportion of American cereal production has been switched to biofuels, in effect taking food from empty stomachs in order to feed empty gas tanks. It is not just wrong, it is evil.
The UK government is squandering at least a billion pounds every year on wind farms that don’t work most of the time. This morning all the UK wind farms were generating just 271 megawatts. Yesterday, while travelling from the Lake District to Euston, I spotted four solitary wind turbines. Only one was turning – and that may have been due to its electrinc motor required to prevent distortion of the bearings.
Truly global warming / climate change is a catastrophe for mankind. But that catastrophe has nothing to do with the actual global warming. Ironically the modest global warming and the increase in atmospheric CO2 have been of enormous benefit to manking, just as the warming was during the MWP. It’s what happens when the world gets colder that we should fear.
I’m retired now, and I’m fairly confident that sanity will return, maybe encouraged by the onset of global cooling. But I’m not holding my breath….
Chris
I’ve personally never seen someone “convert” from skeptic to believer. I’ve seen people pretend to be skeptics, or possibly be scientifically illiterate and think they were a skeptic until someone talked them the other way. But the flow of thinking people is from believer to skeptic.
I was a believer, I’d use the term “passive believer” because I never really researched, I just accepted the AGW story as I’d heard it. 1998 was a good year for believing the world was warming. We practically didn’t have a winter, and when we did it involved an unusually massive dump of snow on St. Patrick’s Day.
Anyway, I was working for a company that potentially would be on the receiving end of “carbon credits”, and I did a bit of research about that. Seemed to me to be a great way to make big money. A friend and I were thinking big. We decided to build a website selling carbon offsets, and back it up with trees planted in Canada, in deforested areas, under the supervision of the government. We had actually gone as far as to have contacts at lumber and paper companies, the government, and a few environmental groups, all of whom were more than willing to cooperate (for a fee).
All that was left was to finish the site. As a web developer the backend was no problem, taking money, keeping track of trees planted and calculating “carbon footprints” along with the potential sequestration provided by the right kind of trees for the climate, it was all easy stuff. The only thing I needed to do was get the site content right. I needed to convince the uninformed that they needed to do this, it was a potential global catastrophe if we didn’t all change things.
You probably know what happened next. I started doing research, for real. I wanted the hard numbers, the facts, the details. And I was actually surprised when I realized there were none. Yeah, I avoided the “skeptic sites”, because the few I found were all badly designed, with the kind of ranting style, giant fonts, and grammatical nightmares usually reserved for religious cranks. But one day I found “Still Waiting For Greenhouse”. And I started reading it.
It only took a day or two of cross-checking what John Daly had written with the official “line” for the whole house of cards to fall down in front of me. Not only was there no actual “global warming” effects, like unusual rising sea levels, unusual storms, or any of the other dire effects we were constantly being told about, but I was seeing people using MODELS as data. As a computer guy I knew that was ridiculous. And when I realized they were comparing modern digitally measured temperatures with old mercury thermometer readings I was astounded.
Over a relatively brief time I realized the entire thing was, my word, a scam. I’ve spent almost the last 10 years actually laughing at the ridiculous claims, ludicrous projections, outrageous warnings, and outright fear. None of it has happened. For a while there, everything was “worse than first thought”, which is not possible, since what they “thought” was worse than anything. An Inconvenient Truth was pure entertainment for me (other than the anger at watching that dimwitted former VP lie his face off). I’ve always wondered how the pullback would look, since it was always obvious to me that eventually most people would see through it.
I’m seeing that now. Since Climategate a lot of formerly convinced governments and others have backed off. From what I can see, many are looking for a way to get out of what they were committed to without admitting they were fooled. Not too many politicians (people who might be idiots, but know how to manipulate people and often aware of when they’re being manipulated) are buying the feeble excuses for what Climategate was “really” about. Mostly they’re left “saving face”. Eventually they’ll pick a scapegoat and crucify him. Hopefully it’ll be that dimwitted ex-VP.
So that leaves the current crop of late-to-the-party skimmers, attempting to cash in on what remains of the fear. Like, for example, the dimwitted current President, the worst kind of opportunist. Also like, for example, the kind of fear-mongering science-illiterates that we see many of on here. And the media, who can’t admit they’ve been wrong all along and who tend to have a financial interest in the scare-mongering. When the truth is finally unavoidable they’ll never tell anyone, they’ll just stop talking about it. I so long for that day.
Gareth says
‘And yes, I criticised Thatcher before she died, after she died and during her heartless and ruthless rule which, unlike you, we had to live through. My point is that you and others always jump to the conclusion that concerns about the climate are a left wing commie plot.’
Margaret Thatcher was actually Britain’s most popular Prime Minister but polarised opinion as can be seen In Gareth’s vitriol
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/10/margaret-thatcher-more-po_n_3049755.html
Heartless and ruthless? Certainly not. She gave us back our pride and sense of purpose after a long period of decline, economically and politically. Many who thought the world owed them a living, should be in feather bedded jobs or were Union Barons came to dislike her.
So I fundamentally disagree with Gareth’s first comment. However I do agree that the idea that AGW is some kind of commie plot is very silly.
Margaret Thatcher was a scientist and at the time the scientific indications were that there was a change in the climate towards warming. 20 years earlier the scientific belief had been there was a cooling.
History is not a very well taught subject these days and our short termism and increasingly self centred attitudes perhaps means that anything that happened before we were born can be discounted. Until we recognise that climate has always changed we can not begin to recognise that the present warming is all part of the historic pattern.
tonyb
There are plenty of insults going back and forth on both sides of this argument and plenty of people with vested interests.
I think the discussion needs to be broken down along three dimensions. Too often both sides slip from arguments along one dimension to arguments on the other.
The first dimension is AGW without the C. How much are we warming and how much is warming caused by humans? Among scientists we can probably find a bell curve with outliers on either side. One outlier side thinks we are warming a lot, maybe 6+ degrees by end of the century, and it is caused almost entirely by humans. Another side thinks we are not warming at all or maybe will be cooling and humans have nothing to do with it. This is clearly a scientific question and most scientists fall into the middle range. Most skeptics think there is some AGW but would fall into the group on the lower end of curve. This is where I am. Better and more science will eventually arrive at a better answer but, right now, the models need a lot of work.
The second dimension is impact – the C part. Judgment of impact is influenced by the first dimension but not completely determined by it. One might be on the high side of the curve of the first dimension but still believe the impact to be unimportant or perhaps beneficial or on the lower side of the first dimension but still consider impact to be significant. Impact is even more difficult to model than the first dimension because the effect of warming on sea level, storms, ecological systems, and agriculture cannot be measured directly. We have to combine models of the system that might be impacted with the climate model. Anything under the control of humans and subject to future technological progress can throw off the projections. Many of the alarmist prediction about population growth came true. The predictions about mass starvation did not because of technological progress in agriculture.
The third dimension is what to do about (C)AGW. This is even more difficult to deal with because it is heavily determined by the first two dimensions. If you are on the lower side of the first dimension then you have much less inclination to do anything unless you are on the upper side of the second dimension. This also gets deeply into vested economic interests, considerations of political philosophy, and what is politically feasible.
Unfortunately many people jumble these dimensions together. We have people on the left who see economic interests vested in not doing anything and conclude the science of the high end of dimension one must be right. We have people who dislike liberal policies and conclude the middle ground of science must be wrong and the science is all hogwash.
I think the middle ground of science is mostly right although I fall on the lower side of the curve. Where I find the greatest problems is in the second dimension where the science is much more problematical.
There is a vast difference between a wrong scientific hypothesis and a wrong calculation within the hypothesis.
One can become a denialist of a current social theory like tulip trading for a quick quid, years ago, or one can be a denialist of some of the contradictory measurement methods used to show that the ocean levels on Earth are changing at a certain rate.
I guess I was in my mid-20s (mid 1960s) when I realised this difference and saw it in action. It was because there were so many mistakes being made in climate science methods and calculations, that I inferred (illogically) that the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change was wrong. Man seemed too puny to change nature too easily.
I did not have a time when I thought AGW was right, so there was no epiphany. Like coitus interruptus before you start.
Then I honed my swords for the anti-nuclear mob, for the company I joined in 1973 had found Ranger Uranium in Oct 1969. I went through a near full cycle of activism rebuttal on anti nuclear and got to know a few of the professional agitators, the rent-a-crowd, and was distressed by their forlorn look at the future of any major advance. Next was the anti logging debate, because we also owned a large forestry and paper company. There was also anti-World Heritage stuff, objecting to United Nations intrusion and misuse of Treaties. Two sites we earnestly wanted to explore were made World Heritage and then turned into, or placed adjacent to, military training areas with live ammo.
It just gets more illogical and control freak stuff each passing year.
I’m still waiting for the seminal paper that provides a derived link between greenhouses gas concentrations in the air and the global temperatures that affect them. Or even a reliable paper on pH change of the oceans. Sloppy, ever so sloppy, is this new boy on the block by the self-adopted name of climate science.
“tonyb says:
July 27, 2013 at 5:57 am”
Well said. Thatcher was not only a scientist (Chemist), she was a wife and a mother. People all too readily (Conveniently?) forget what UK life was like during the winter of discontent, the power worker strikes in the 1970’s, general industrial “action” which, effectively, destroyed British manufacturing industry (Hey! We’ll just “offshore” it to somewhere where people will make stuff rather than take “action”). Some people blame Heath in 1974 for taking the UK to the Common Market, well maybe, the Tories did not have a mandate for that. So what?
Britain at that time was labelled “The Dirty Man of Europe” because, primarily, of it’s coal fired industry and power generation, hence the coal mining target. BTW, more mines were closed under Labour Govn’ts before and under Thatcher. Britain was “blamed” for acid rain over European forests. However, Thatcher needed “political science” to back up policies. The UEA CRU was born (To prove “coal is bad”). This is all before North Sea natural gas (NSNG) production began to slope off (circa yr 2000). I even remember when NSNG came online! The rest is history.
When the Discovery documontary “Raising the Mammoth” was aired around 1998,
apparantly not a lot of people did realize that there was a big formidable bug for climate science here. So here is this Yukagir mammoth dwelling on a big productive steppe, together with horses and antelopes in northernmost Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum. No lonely behemoth dragging himself through the howling blizzard pursuid by a pack of hungry wolfs. That’s caricature. Something was clearly wrong here. The Last Glacial Maximum was not that glacial at all.
That’s what started it for me.
Default warmer here. Scientists wouldn’t lie – would they? What turned me towards scepticism was the language employed against such. Why so abusive about science? Why the personal insults? So, like others, I started poking around the internet, doing some reading, and here I am today.
Johnathon,
thanks for the reply.
Ok, you agree with the physics. So it comes down to what degree of warming may occur.
Do you
a) think the magnitude warming from CO2 +feedbacks is too uncertain to say anything concrete?
b) ‘know’ that there will be little response to increasing CO2 levels?
Just making sure I have your views straight before I make my argument.
Whenever someone asks me to believe him only because he is a specialist, I BY DEFAULT become sceptical.
It’s in my genes, you know.
Just ask the pastor of the church I was obliged to visit until I was 18 par ordre du mufti (Dad), how this worked out for him…
Steven Mosher says:
July 25, 2013 at 1:06 pm
Sadly the first person to read all the mails
============
irrelevant. straw-man. appeal to authority. the author didn’t state that ALL emails showed misbehavior. it only takes 1. there were many.
the emails clearly showed the scientists were attempting to direct the findings and results towards an already agreed conclusion. this is contrary to the scientific method, which relies on full disclosure of the evidence, both pro and con. the scientists involved were breaking the fundamental rules of good science.
there is great danger of injustice when evidence is suppressed. thus, in law you cannot withhold evidence, even if it is contrary to your case. under the rules of discovery, you must make all evidence available to the other side, regardless of any harm it might do your case.
@ur momisugly Tontb
Margaret Thatcher was actually Britain’s most popular Prime Minister but polarised opinion as can be seen In Gareth’s vitriol
Gareth responds
Thatcher was indeed very popular with those that benefitted, but not so with the majority who saw all the social achievements of the post war years undermined. She did some good things, but like Blair, her downside outweighed her positive achievements. Reminiscing with rose coloured spectacles gives a distorted view. I do appreciate that she kept climate science out of politics unlike todays right wing commentators. She was indeed worshipped by the hard right, but hated by those who saw her as the most divisive force in UK political history, and no fawning, creeping or hero worship will change that. I suppose at least she was to the left of Obama, but most US citizens would never understand that and would have figuratively burned her at the stake if she had run for office in the US.
In consideration of whether Thatcher was the most popular Prime minister, it may help to read her obituary from a middle of the road newspaper.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/margaret-thatcher-obituary-the-most-divisive-political-leader-of-modern-times-8564559.html
I tend toward the centre left of politics and dislike extremes of either philosophy, but we should recall that the evil men do oft lives after them, the good they do is interred with their bones.
I was involved in the soap biz for awhile and the head of inventory decided that computer modeling was the way to go to predict how many cases of soap would be required. He bought an expensive modeling system and got us to plug in all the historical sales figures, promotions, seasonality, areas of the country, brand, and size. Going forward we were to use the historical data to predict how many cases of soap could be sold using the same promotions, time of year, location, brand and size. Guess what? Couldn’t do it. We could not capture the random factor of nature – human in this case. So, if we can’t predict the sales of something as simple as a box of soap, or as complex as the economy, how the h*ll are we expected to predict the climate?
As young lad learning science, maths, physics et al the basic understanding from the natural sciences of the time was that 14.7C was the average temperature of the world @ur momisugly 1013mb and from memory 29.54 ” of mercury pressure. That was a shipload time ago, more than half a century.
Please can any one here tell me has this 14.7C been exceeded by any amount that could possibly cause trouble? I see anomalies in temperatures in charts and graphs and models, but they tell nothing. What is the new or is it the old guesstimate of the worlds temperature, that is the standard for aircraft and shipping. Has the standard barometric pressure changed?
I have on my wall a thermometer, barometer combination in perfect working order manufactured by a jewelry company in my home town in 1901. In light of recent decades does it need recalibrating to show the new and approved system of measure.
It is not just climate that has been hijacked, science per se has been less than honest and much needs to change.
Interesting that there has been no mention of Arthur Robinson’s pivotal Oregon Petition in the discussion so far…
Gareth
I think you are rewriting history from your own (substantially) left of centre position. I don’t recognise the person you describe. This country was a basket case when she took over. It was very much better (but by no means perfect) by the time she left.
tonyb
That’s a great point about Art Robinson’s pivotal Oregon Petition Project. Here’s the link:
http://www.petitionproject.org/
Thanks Jabba…
Typical of almost every geologist not working for government, I believe CAGW is a complete crock.
Add the rantings of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other pseudo environmental groups and any doubt about the validity of CAGW theory just disappears.
I know a lot of scientists and not one believes in CAGW, but then none of them work for government, where there are obvious employment consequences for not parroting the party line at all times.
Guys like Jai just reinforce my certainty that CAGW advocates are by and large either charlatans or professional peddlers of bad science.
What’s unique about this petition is that you actually mail it in Snail Mail. I would sign, it but I’m not a scientist. Any scientist reading here and agrees should sign it. Here’s the list of the 31,487 that have signed it so far. (I See Don Easterbrook, but can’t find Willie Soon) Is your name on it? :
http://www.petitionproject.org/signers_by_last_name.php?run=all
jchang says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:29 pm
….Stephen Schneider “Climate Change: Is the Science Settled”. He says that as with a lawyer, he is not obligated to cite evidence to the contrary
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he is however required to make it available to the other side, even if it hurts his case. suppression of evidence by a prosecutor is a violation of the 5th amendment to the United States Constitution. This can result in a mistrial and/or the dismissal of the prosecutor.
Barry, I’m afraid you’re trying to frame the question in a way that is not fair. Your suggested stances boil down to:
a) I don’t know anything and so can’t reasonably claim the warmists are wrong, or
b) I’m an anti-science idiot.
So of course I’m going for…
c) It is clear that the natural variability of the global climate greatly exceeds any changes seen since industrialisation, and anyway if it was possible for anything like runaway warming to take place it would have happened millions of years ago, plus it is not possible to run a control Earth, plus I am yet to see a single warmist clarify what it would take to falsify their conjecture, etc etc. Pretty much just read any random thread from WUWT, Climate Audit, Judith Curry etc, it’s all in there.