Posted on 02/21/2007 7:12:25 AM PST by GMMAC
David Suzuki vs. Michael Crichton
Barbara Kay, National Post
Published: Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Last Thursday, environmentalist guru David Suzuki stormed out of a Toronto AM640 radio interview with host John Oakley because Oakley dared to suggest that global warming might not be the "totally settled issue" Suzuki insisted it was.
Oakley only reported a fact: Many accredited scientists -- some full professors from top universities, including Nobel prize winners and a former president of the National Academy of Sciences -- would argue that "global warning is at best unproven and at worst pure fantasy," according to novelist and independent scientific researcher Michael Crichton, author of the best-selling 2004 environmental techno-thriller, State of Fear.
Crichton, one of the first to expand on the theme of environmentalism-as-religion, would doubtless see Suzuki's gesture as a result of confusion of his role as environmental advocate with that of chief of Morals Police. Suzuki's very public censure of Oakley for his perceived blasphemy is disquieting because it smacks of the totalitarian impulse to silence and humiliate the dissenter --or even, as in this case, the dissenter's messenger.
Suzuki keeps high-profile company in his tendency to suppress environmental infidels. Al Gore called skeptics "global warming deniers," evoking (if only unintentionally) invidious and fallacious comparison with Holocaust denial. Rejecting the historical record of what has actually happened in the past is one thing ; expressing skepticism about events that are predicted to happen in the future on the basis of computer simulations is quite another. But once you get into the realm of reigning ideologies, such rational distinctions fall by the wayside. The object is to shame the one who questions the received wisdom.
Suzuki would have better served his cause if he had addressed skeptics' actual concerns. Such as:
- Why was climatologist James Hansen -- the father of global warming--off by 200% in his prediction that temperatures would increase by 0.35 degrees Celsius by 2008 (the actual increase has been .11 degrees); and why did he (and colleagues) say in 2001 that "the longterm prediction of future climate states is not possible"?
- Of the world's 160,000 glaciers, some are shrinking. But many --in Iceland, for example --have "surged" in the last few years, while most of Antarctica is getting colder; if warming is "global," why?
- Why haven't sea levels risen to the extent predicted? Why have the waters off the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean not only experienced no rise over several centuries, but an actual fall in the last 20 years?
- Where is the predicted "extreme weather?" There has been no global increase, and in many cases a decrease, of extreme weather patterns.
- From 1940-70, carbon dioxide levels went way up, but temperatures went down so abruptly that a new Ice Age was the prevailing fear; wherefore this disparity?
- The Sahara Desert is shrinking--purportedly due to the greening effects caused by man-made global warming; but isn't the greening of the desert a good thing? I know to ask these questions only because I've read State of Fear. And as the environmental hysteria burgeons, I continue to press the book on everyone I know. Forget the silly (but riveting) plot, which is to the embedded environmental science in the novel as blini to caviar. You cannot read State of Fear with an open mind and continue to believe global warming is a "totally settled issue."
Nor should readers be put off by Crichton's status as a "mere" novelist. Crichton's scientific research on environmental issues is so impressive he was invited to address the U.S. Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works. Even Crichton's most frenzied critics (the Los Angeles Times called State of Fear "the first neocon novel") did not repudiate his peer reviewed, impeccably sourced data.
Amongst the hundreds of books, journal articles and scientific reports in his bibliography, (no mention of Suzuki, strangely), Crichton lists every publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its formation. He has read them all, and in the end humbly "guesses" -- the most one can do -- that we are experiencing mild warming, possibly more beneficial than harmful.
The remorseless pressure on Canadians to sign up for environmental orthodoxies that they are not cognitively equipped to judge is demoralizing and divisive. Tantrums by self anointed prophets do not help the situation. Whatever the eventual outcome on the global warming front, we could all use a little non-partisanship, maturity and attitudinal cooling on the behavioural front.
Bkay@videotron.ca
© National Post 2007
Most of the articles have an author attribution.
More importantly, there is a breathtaking lapse in that the Climate Scientists contributing to that blog are not identified. Al Gore calls himself a "climate scientist". How seriously are we to take their anonymous contributions if they won't (or can't) even identify themselves?
Regular contributors are on the right side. There are also authored guest contributions.
* Gavin Schmidt
* Michael Mann
* Eric Steig
* William Connolley
* Ray Bradley
* Stefan Rahmstorf
* Rasmus Benestad
* Caspar Ammann
* Thibault de Garidel
* David Archer
* Ray Pierrehumbert
I Googled a couple just to provide more info on who they are.
Finally, linking to isolated remarks by anonymous authors without providing the complete context of the remarks is dissimulation in the extreme, and simply more background noise in the discussion.
I provided links to the articles I quoted from, and as you can see, attributions are given.
"Gavin" and "Mike"?
You're kidding, right?
You can't figure out who wrote the articles from that information? C'mon.
"there is a vast number of Germans who are absolutely uneducated beyond their high school "dump" of information. They rely heavily upon news organizations to inform them and to "know" the facts."
A friend of mine has lived in Germany for 20 years, was recently back and essentially agreed with you. She also made the point that Germans do not like change and want their lives to stay exactly as they are now. Day in and day out. This makes them bissfully happy.
I suspect that she, her German husband and HER FIVE CHILDREN will bemoving back to the US shortly. She doesn't like the dispproving stares that she gets when the whole family goes out together.
I don't particularly enjoy wild goose chases, but I did go this extra step, which is as far as I'm going...
From this gem (from Gavin Schmidt): Is this clown serious?
"Like the recent movie "The Day After Tomorrow", the novel addresses real scientific issues and controversies, but is similarly selective (and occasionally mistaken) about the basic science."
That's all I need to know about this guy's judgement, never mind his bureaucratic "science". Computer modelling is "science"? Give me a break.
Anyone who would compare The Day After Tomorrow (I missed the bibliography on that one!) with State of Fear has got to have a screw loose. If nothing else, I would question his judgement.
The creators of "The Day After..." admitted that they made stuff up with no regard for science, but just for the drama a la Godzilla movies...
That absurd comparison speaks volumes about this guy's exaggerated opinion of himself.
Hardly the source for unbiased scientific validation about anything.
Allow me to clarify. If the "expert" has produced sound scientific research results, it would be unassailable by non-experts such as Crighton. Instead, this Suzuki fellow reacts very badly to amateur criticism. Maybe he's worried that man-made global warming will be revealed as a false construct, and that he'll lose his phoney-baloney job.
Thanks for the bio.
That's all I need to know about this guy's judgement, never mind his bureaucratic "science". Computer modelling is "science"? Give me a break.
Modelling, computer or not, is a basic function of science. I used this example previously. Say you are titrating 100 ml of 1 molar HCL with a solution of unknown NaOH concentration. You use 200 ml of the solution to neutralize the 100 ml of HCL (phenophthalein indicator, of course). You calculate the concentration of the NaOH to be 0.5 molar.
How did you do the calculation? You constructed a model of the system. It was a pretty basic (ha) and very simple model, but it was a model nonetheless. A scientific model is a mathematical expression of relationships within a system. Computer models just tend to have more relationships.
Hardly the source for unbiased scientific validation about anything.
I never said he was unbiased (and that wasn't the claim I was addressing I was addressing whether or not the contributions to RealClimate were anonymous). I have a very strong bias against people that use misleading arguments and twisted data interpretations to influence public opinion, especially the opinions of people that trust people with a veneer of expertise -- like Crichton. I kinda hope you do, too.
Me too. The guy is a 1500 MW Smug Generator and it looks like he just had a melt-down.
My experience
has been that EVERYBODY
in "modern" debates
uses misleading
arguments, twisted data
and oddball appeals
to sway public thought.
The main choice the "public" has
is to choose between
people doing it --
i.e., who does it less and
least offensively.
When my daughter was that age, she loved looking at dinosaur books and could tell you the names of every one and if they were "plant eaters" or carnivorous. I thought she must be ready for a trip to the museum and figured she would love to see the dinosaurs there. Wrong. When she caught her first glimpse of one, she screamed and jumped into my arms and damn near choked me she held on so tight. She said "Daddy --- it's going to eat me."
Three year old kids are not good a separating reality from imagination and the problem most of these Greenies have is they still have childhood mentalities.
Attacks on Crichton
have sometimes gotten quite weird
since his "State of Fear."
Cock and Bull, by Michael Crowley
"He wasn't successful, because he was inaccurate and misleading. He got publicity, that's all ... Maybe he wants publicity for being wrong."
Perfect description of Al Gore!
All are part and parcel of the Left's relentless totalitarian impulse. As for Suzuki, he's always been nothing more than an egotistical, dictatorial, smug, politically-correct Marxist pain in the a$$. It's Lysenkoists like him who are making a joke of the scientific method.
The criticism of models is legitimate and based on a skepticism not that models arent useful, but that they are not reliably predictive:
How can one postulate 4 degrees Celcius increase from doubling C02 when it relies on very uncertain models of cloud cover, that no scientist can credibly rely on?
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1135#more-1135 quotes 1979 NAS assessment and confirming assessment in latest IPCC:
"For a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the resulting change in net heating of the roposhere, oceans and land (which is equivalent to a change in the net radiative flux at the tropopause) would amount to a global average of about dQ = 4 wm-2 if all other properties of the atmosphere remained unchanged [Ramanathan et al JGR 1979] For the simplest case in which only the temperature change is considered and the earth is assumed to be effectively a black body, the value of dQ/dT = 4(sigma) T^3 is readily computed to be about 4 wm-2 K-1. For such a case, doubled CO2 produces a temperature increase of 1 deg C."
That's right CO2 doubling leads to a *mere* 1 deg C increase based on radiative forcing! Why isn't the public made aware of this simple fact!?!?
So what's the big deal? When climate-change 'skeptics' discount the 'models', they are discounting the fact that it require contortions and extrapolations in climate models to turn a stright 1 degree C 'forcing' (a benign scenario) into a 4 degrees C 'forcing'...
After all, if doubling CO2 (from current 370 to over 700ppm) would merely increase temperature by 1C, all the doomsday scenarios from Al Gore would fall apart.
So the models assume a number of feedback loops that magnify the impact of CO2 increase: water vapor
The only way to postulate doomsday scenarios is to create /construct models that are at best postulates. This is not comparable to models formed from a lab experiment because there is no way to check these models, no way to validate the hypothesis, except via proxy historical data. There is not straight line because the models are *both quite complex and untested*.
Climateaudit.org quotes AR4 WG1: "The reason that such large discrepancies in radiative fluxes have not seriously distorted model predictions of current climate is simply that most climate models are heavily tuned to give the “right answer” for current climate conditions."
They also cite WG1 saying: "Similarly, the underprediction of low-level and mid-level clouds presumably affects the magnitude of the radiative response to climate warming in the widespread regions of subsidence. Modelling assumptions controlling the cloud water phase (liquid, ice or mixed) are known to be critical for the prediction of climate sensitivity. However the evaluation of these assumptions is just beginning (Doutriaux-Boucher and Quaas, 2004; Naud et al., 2006)."
I've been a stock investor, and this smacks not of certainty but of the kind of stock-picking techniques that try to estimate next years winners based on past year performance (hint: it rarely works). The only test is against historical data which runs into a classic problem of fitting a model to past data, irrespective of whether it is accurately modelling the underlying factors correctly.
A commenter on http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1135#more-1135 points out:
"In the case of a forcing of 4 W/m^2 and an average solar flux of 342 W/m^2 I get:
dT = (dS/S)*T/4 = (4/342)*(287/4) = 0.84 C
Notice how they rounded this up to 1°C.
Imagine for arguments sake that through positive feedback you could get a temperature rise of 4°C. This is equivalent to an increase in flux of 19 W/m^2. This means that positive feedback must have an amplifying factor of around 5. You put 1 W/m^2 in, positive feedback gives you 5 W/m^2 out, and of course this works both ways. I have to say they sure are relying a lot on very strong positive feedback. Do they have any proof at all for a feedback of five times?!"
And where is most of that feeback - in very unreliable cloud cover models ...
http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity
"There is however one HUGE drawback, because of which GCMs are not suited for predicting future change in the global temperature. The sensitivity obtained by running different GCMs can vary by more than a factor of 3 between different climate models!
The above figure explains why this large uncertainty exists. Plotted are the sensitivities obtained in different GCMs (in 1989, but the situations today is very similar), as a function of the contribution of the changed cloud cover to the energy budget, as quantified using dQcloud/dT.
One can clearly see from fig. 1 that the cloud cover contribution is the primary variable which determines the overall sensitivity of the models. Moreover, because the value of this feedback mechanism varies from model to model, so does the prediction of the overall climate sensitivity. Clearly, if we were to know dQcloud/dT to higher accuracy, the sensitivity would have been known much better. But this is not the case. "
Richard Lindzen said this in the Telegraph:
“As the primary “consensus” document, the Scientific Assessment of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes, modellers at the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre had to cancel two-thirds of the model warming in order to simulate the observed warming.
So the warming alarm is based on models that overestimate the observed warming by a factor of three or more, and have to cancel most of the warming in order to match observations.
Rather than entertaining the rather obvious possibility that the models are over-reacting to increasing greenhouse gases, advocates are assuming that the cancellation will disappear in the future. Why might models be over-reacting?
The answer is actually fairly simple. Carbon dioxide and methane are minor greenhouse gases (and methane has, for unknown reasons stopped increasing, during the last five years). Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would, all else held constant, only lead to about 1C of warming; quadrupling carbon dioxide would only add another 1C (there is a diminishing return in warming per unit carbon dioxide).
The greater response arises because in current models, the most important greenhouse substances, water vapour and clouds, act so as to amplify the impact of increasing carbon dioxide. But, as the previously cited IPCC document notes, water vapour and especially clouds are major sources of uncertainty in models.”
So we have models that:
1) Cannot be lab-tested but only 'validated' against historical data.
2) There is a reliance on high-leverage feedback loops that magnify the impact of CO2 by a factor of 4-5.
3) Several previous errors and wide range of scenarios in previous models. The biggest error is in sensitivity to cloud cover ...
4) Models have already been shown to over-predict temperature changes already, lending support to the notion that the feedback cycles (and hence temp changes) are not as great as the doomsday models predict
It's not good to pretend models are anything more than a hypothesis. They are *not* proven; they are *not* validated. *That* is the scientific basis for 'global warming skepticism'. The models are a hypothesis, not a conclusion.
The correct answer to the question:
"What would be the climate impact from doubling CO2 in our atmosphere?"
Is *not* "4 deg C +/- 1.5 deg C"
it is "we dont yet know".
Wanna compare him to the abundance of Hollywood types as far as wealth or publicity?
What about comparing him to Algore, born into money(oil money), lived in the Watergate but claimed to be a man of the people that could pick cotton with the best of them.
Who jets around the world, rides in limos and SUVs then spouts off about you and me driving big cars, wasting fuel and emitting CO2.
Who thought he was robbed of the presidency and would love to have it but will settle for an Oscar.
Let's compare.
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