Posted on 07/24/2008 10:22:35 AM PDT by jazusamo
Maybe you've noticed this, too. The less sure people are of their views, the more inclined they are to name-call, yell and bully. I've noticed this when it comes to religion and politics and life in general, but I've had trouble getting used to it when it comes to science.
Science is supposed to be about irreducible facts, the discipline of the scientific method, repeatable experiments, rigorous analysis and solid conclusions rather than sound bites, insults, threats and public relations campaigns. But look at global warming and climate change.
The Weather Channel's top climatologist says broadcast meteorologists who voice skepticism about man-made climate change should be stripped of their certification. A renewable energy lobbyist writes an e-mail to a climate change skeptic saying he intends "to destroy your career." The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's James Hansen, a global warming guru, calls skeptics "court jesters," and Al Gore likens them to "flat-Earth" advocates. The bid to enforce a global warming consensus has added "climate-change deniers" to our lexicon. You know, like "Holocaust deniers."
Curious. Why all the loaded verbiage? Why the insistence on consensus in an arena that relies on challenging conventional wisdom? Why all the anger?
Why, indeed. This past week witnessed the great breakup not of the icebergs, but of the global warming consensus. What's existed beneath the surface, apparent to those who dug, exploded into public view.
"With this issue . . . we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the [the United Nations] International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) . . .," wrote Jeffrey Marque, editor of The American Physical Society's Physics & Society forum. "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."
Imagine, a debate because a considerable presence within the scientific community disputes that man-made (anthropogenic) emissions are primarily responsible for global warming. Either court jesters and flat-Earthers are making a comeback or the climate change consensus isn't what it's cracked up to be. I'll bet on the latter. Marque kicks off the debate with the publication of a paper by Britain's Christopher Monckton on the IPCC's errors and exaggerations in estimating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the rate of temperature change.
Elsewhere, a former climate change alarmist detailed what you might call his change of science. David Evans was a consultant to the "Australian Greenhouse Office" from 1999 to 2005. He helped craft the carbon accounting model measuring Australia's Kyoto Protocol compliance.
"When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good . . .," he wrote recently in The Australian. "The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? . . . But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming."
Evans notes a few telling facts: One, scientists have looked for hot spots in the atmosphere -- places where a possible cause of global warming occurs first and most -- and have found . . . none: "If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming." Two, he points out what scientists have found: Ice-core samples showing the six global warmings over the past half-million years occurred an average of 800 years before any uptick in atmospheric carbon, satellite temperature readings showing the recent warming trend ended in 2001, and the temperature has fallen about 0.6 C in the past year -- to the 1980 level.
But isn't the sky falling or, at least, the Arctic ice melting? According to the latest data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, "sea ice extent" on July 16 was 3.44 million square miles -- a half-million square miles more than what it was in July 2007.
The only thing that's heating up, it seems, is the debate about global warming, and a good thing, too.
Maybe it's time we all chill out
Ping!
GW high priests and their acolytes are sounding like Y2K doom and gloomers on 1/2/2000.
Actually, before the Monckton paper, there was another one that stated that there was no doubt about GW. Further, the Physics and Society publication put a giant red disclamer before the Monckton article stating they didn’t agree with it and that it had not been peer reviewed.
Monckton responded with a letter to the publication pointing out all of the review the paper had, in fact, undergone.
Reading all of this is instructive. The polemics in the paper prior to Monckton’s in the publication should be an eye opener to a lot of people.
And the consensus folks are "Solar Deniers".
Thought you might enjoy this thread
I think it’s interesting that the global warming crowd has changed their rant to climate change for the most part.
The primary evidence, the essential necessary evidence, that the greenhouse effect, and by extension CO2, is causing global warming doesn't exist. If the planet is warming this is proof positive that it isn't because of the greenhouse effect.
No Smoking Hot Spot (The Australian)
This is a short and easily understandable article showing the plain truth. The hinge pin that links global temperature to the greenhouse effect is missing. It is easily measurable and hundreds of probes have done so.
Written by the man who "DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office."
Thanks for linking that, it’s a good article.
read later
My pleasure. That is the end of this “greenhouse” BS. It just needs wider exposure and expansion on the theme.
Science is about facts. There are many pseudo-scientists today who have already formed their conclusions and use a few idiotic experiments to “prove” their ideas.
IMHO, science ceased to be a science and relegated itself back to an art way back in the 60’s and 70’s. It has joined my own academic discipline (psychology) which still acknowledges that it is merely an art.
Science is proven/proveable. Art is more about opinion/best guesses based on incomplete evidence.
There is a more subtle point about science to keep in mind. Science is always and only at the edge of human understanding. We do experiments on things we DON’T understand. That’s why you do an experiment in the first place.
That is also why so many scientists are reluctant to draw conclusions, even from a large body of data. The methods can create false conclusions. The data may not be accurate. The analysis of the results may be focusing on the wrong aspect of some phenomena.
In the fullness of time, I trust, Al Gore’s megalomaniacal arrogance will become crystal clear to historians and future scientists. A cautionary tale for all to consider at length.
Al Gore, the divinity college drop out, has spoken with all the credibility of a televangelist. Send him all your money in forgiveness for destroying our planet. You didn’t think you were seen throwing that CFC bulb in a dumpster, did you?
By the way, you can get extra carbon credits at a reduced rate by sending him your first born child. They will be trained in the “science” of global warming, global cooling or whatever the current crisis fad may be.
My tagline usta be "Men defend most violently not the things they know to true, but those they fear are false."
The early FLDS threads prove it happens at FR too.
Signed: Balding_Eagle, Founding member of the Rapists of FR
I got that name from questionig the Constitutionally of the the raids.
I thought Dennis Miller was brilliant last night on O’Reilly. When asked about Big Al he said he didn’t think that Al believed any of the stuff he was selling, but he was making a lot of money(last count $1-300,000,000) and getting a lot of love everywhere he went and was loving it.
ping for later
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