Posted on 12/12/2009 2:12:20 PM PST by Ultra Sonic 007
The following is a guest submission from C4P reader and commenter "Alexonian":
Alan I. Leshner, the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science, does a disservice to science by advancing a politicized agenda in favor of climate science in a recent editorial in the Washington Post. Instead of shepherding the scientific process in a neutral fashion, which should be a key requirement for the publisher of Science, especially in an environment where the very peer review process in climate science has been tarnished by the revelations of the Climategate emails, Leshner doubles down on the gambit of taking a politicized offensive at a time when the stunning Climategate details have seriously eroded the foundation of authority that scientists rely on when they ask the public to trust them simply on their say-so and their interpretation of the data.
Leshner uses Governor Palin's recent editorial in the Washington Post as the target for his attack, an attack overwhelmingly built with logical fallacies. His opening salvo relies on the fallacy of false equivalence by linking testimony of tobacco CEOs that nicotine is not addictive to Governor Palin's statements that question the "settled science." What kind of idiot hopes to persuade thinking people by relying on fallacious arguments? Really, is this statement, especially when used as an opening salvo, supposed to convince anyone?
Now, the American public is again being subjected to those kinds of denials, this time about global climate change.
She distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth's climate is changing, largely as a result of human behaviors. She also badly confused the concepts of daily weather changes and long-term climate trends when she wrote that "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes." Her statement inaccurately suggests that short-term weather fluctuations must be consistent with long-term climate patterns. And it is the long-term patterns that are a cause for concern.
Climate-change science is clear: The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide -- derived mostly from the human activities of fossil-fuel burning and deforestation -- stands at 389 parts per million (ppm). We know from studying ancient Antarctic ice cores that this concentration is higher than it has been for at least the past 650,000 years.
Exhaustive measurements tell us that atmospheric carbon dioxide is rising by 2 ppm every year and that the global temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. Multiple lines of other evidence, including reliable thermometer readings since the 1880s, reveal a clear warming trend.
Thousands of respected scientists at an array of institutions worldwide agree that major health and economic impacts are likely unless we act now to slow greenhouse gas emissions. Already, sea levels are estimated to rise by 1 to 2 meters by the end of this century. Some scientists have said that average temperatures could jump by as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit if the atmospheric carbon dioxide level reaches 450 ppm. We may face even more dangerous impacts at 550 ppm, and above that level, devastating events. U.S. crop productivity would be affected, while European communities might suffer increased fatalities because of intensely hot summers.
Doubters insist that the earth is not warming. This is in stark contrast to the consensus of 18 of the world's most respected scientific organizations, who strongly stated in an Oct. 21 letter to the U.S. Senate that human-induced climate change is real. Still, the doubters try to leverage any remaining points of scientific uncertainty about the details of warming trends to cast doubt on the overall conclusions shared by traditionally cautious, decidedly non-radical science organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which represents an estimated 10 million individual scientists through 262 affiliated societies.
The public and policymakers should not be confused by a few private e-mails that are being selectively publicized and, in any case, remain irrelevant to the broad body of diverse evidence on climate change.
Palin also errs by claiming that America can't afford to reduce greenhouse gases. The highly regarded Stern Commission revealed that inaction could cost us the equivalent of between 5 and 20 percent of global gross domestic product per year. In contrast, the price of slowing emissions was estimated to be 1 percent of GDP. China, meanwhile, reportedly is investing heavily in clean energy technologies.
Now, policymakers must decide whether to act on the evidence or to avoid facing one of the most crucial issues of our generation.
The left has undermined integrity. Integrity in life & behavior. Integrity in science. Integrity of government. Integrity of the individual. Remember the movie Dark Crystal? Good versus evil. It’s here, folks! Do your best. Resist! Resist! Resist!
Many scientists today have taken the role of priests in the past. They think (1) they are the only one who can understand the ‘sacred’ texts’, and (2) whoever challenge them will be condemn to eternal flames.
I was just discussing that scene last night with my neighbor.
Far from being more accessible, it has grown even more technical and abstract. Quantum physics has delved off into the realm of the bizarre, and biology is highly involved and detail oriented, with thousands of details interacting with thousands of others.
Scientists are one of the most respected professions in America. And “scientific” has become a buzzword such that even your shampoo is ‘scientifically formulated’.
I discover treatments for catastrophic diseases. Science is needed and scientists are important. We don't need to stake our credibility upon the word of these chicken little climate frauds to feel important. Climate isn't really science anyway. The Earth is unique and not subject to the experimental process, all they can do is be science-ish; and they failed miserably at that.
Scientists do not use tricks to “hide the decline”.
Scientists do not have to “redefine the peer review process”.
Eugenics. Great post, btw. I, too, will be looking for an opportunity to use "beclowns."
Excellent piece.
Wow! If AGW was real, it wouldn’t cause the kind of destruction to the earth that this rebuttal has done to Leshner-The-Useful-Idiot’s ‘scientific’ editorial. Well done...JFK
I had a why did you drop your membership phone call a few months ago and I told the young lady calling that I did not care for the political direction of what should be factual information.
I did the same thing with Scientific America. The once great magazine has become politicized and science takes a back seat to their political agenda. When I dropped the subscription I also sent a polite letter as to why I would no longer subscribe.
Interesting.
Leshner is a scum Nazi who was born too late to stand on a street corner 70 years ago and scream “Heil Hitler!”
The so-called “environmental” movement can be traced back to Hitler and the Nazis.
The voices are there but are not heard on the MSM. The political far left and the MSM have become a corrupt ruling class.
THE THIRD ESTATE HAS BECOME A FIFTH COLUMN.
Oops! My remarks have rubbed a Scientist-who-is-also-a-FReeper the wrong way. I meant no offense to any scientists present. However, you write:
> Far from being more accessible, it has grown even more technical and abstract.
If you think about it carefully I’m sure you’ll see why I disagree with that. How many people, as a percentage of the population, had any inkling whatsoever about what DNA is and how it works, even as recently as 30 years ago? What about how atomic energy works? What about what Space is made up of (or not made up of, as the case may be)? Or how cloning works?
Or go back 60 years: how many people, as a percentage of the population, could articulate at even a basic level of understanding how Einstein’s theory of relativity works? The basics are taught in Junior Hi School these days.
As well, people take a “black box” approach to science and technology. They do not really care how it works: they care what it can do, and how to use it. And they leverage that into doing amazing things. All by themselves, without a single Scientist in sight.
“Back in the day”, I trained as a computer programmer. I built my first computer with a soldering iron and a few transistors, and programmed it in binary. Later, I programmed in Assembly, and understood at an intimate level how the computer actually did what it did, down to the bit level. If anything broke, out came the soldering iron and I fixed it at a chip level.
None of that matters now: clever people can, at a macro level, utilize computers a million more times powerful than anything I ever programmed to do amazing things — without the foggiest notion of how it actually works inside, and without caring two hoots. They can build their own computers, with parts they buy at Wal*Mart, without a soldering iron or even the foggiest notion of how the parts work or why.
That power is accessible to them — yes, thanks to scientists — without the need for scientists to assist them. Scientists are largely irrelevant to the average computer user: yet these same computer users are doing things that only scientists used to be able to do, “back in the day”.
You may be right about leading-edge science. But I respectfully submit that you are quite wrong about science in general — demonstrably so. Science is accessible and well understood by a huge chunk of the population, whereas it has never been so well understood before.
> Quantum physics has delved off into the realm of the bizarre, and biology is highly involved and detail oriented, with thousands of details interacting with thousands of others.
And even so, these subjects are — at least at a hi-level — explored as electives in Senior Hi School. Quantum Physics did not make up any part of any curriculum of study 100 years ago, and would have been a university-level subject as recently as 30 years ago.
> Scientists are one of the most respected professions in America.
That may be so, but that could change quickly if we manage to clobber the Climate Change scam properly. As I dearly and fervently hope that we shall.
God willing, Science as a profession will be knocked down a peg-or-two, somewhere higher than selling Real Estate and somewhere beneath Teaching. That sounds rude, but when you ask yourself how many times Scientists have been wrong — even when they are following their Science properly — you can see perhaps why it is a fair assessment.
> And scientific has become a buzzword such that even your shampoo is scientifically formulated.
How embarrassing! Have you ever bought shampoo on the basis that a *scientist* formulated it? It would be interesting to see where that criterion would rank in a list of the Top 100 reasons to buy shampoo. I doubt it would crack the Top Ten — but that’s merely speculation.
> I discover treatments for catastrophic diseases. Science is needed and scientists are important.
Thankyou for doing that.
> We don’t need to stake our credibility upon the word of these chicken little climate frauds to feel important.
Perhaps as a credible scientist you don’t, and perhaps your credible colleagues don’t — but it would seem that many of your less credible colleagues do. Otherwise, how do you explain the shenanigans that surrounds Climate Change?
> Climate isn’t really science anyway.
The boffins down at NIWA would surely be disappointed to know that!
> The Earth is unique and not subject to the experimental process, all they can do is be science-ish; and they failed miserably at that.
I put to you that studying the entire Earth’s climate all at once is perhaps a case of the Experiment being too large to manage efficiently and effectively, rather than it being a case of not being capable of being subjected to experimental processes.
Evaporation works: you can do it in your lab. So does condensation. So does thermal convection. So does photosynthesis. All of these perfectly-good bits of Science are implicated in Global Warming. The problem isn’t that climate isn’t “science”, it’s that the laboratory and the experiment is too grand-scale to understand easily.
> Scientists do not use tricks to hide the decline.
Credible scientists might not. But clearly some scientists have — otherwise why did these clowns-who-are-also-scientists fudge the numbers and destroy the data?
> Scientists do not have to redefine the peer review process.
Credible scientists don’t. But clearly some clowns-who-are-also-scientists feel the need to.
Once again, no offense intended.
It not only is "disturbing" in negates all their work. The bedrock of science is the ability for other scientists to replicate the science on which a theory is proved or disproved. These "so called men of science" knew and know that when the data was destroyed all their work meant nothing. It was null and void. In the true sense of science their work never existed or has any meaning.
There is only one reason and one reason only the data would be destroyed. After many years of work it had become obvious that they were wrong. To tell the truth would have destroyed their power and prestige in the world of science and cut off the billions of dollars in research grants from governments around the world. These "men of science" became charlatans and destroyed the data that would prove them to be the charlatans they are.
(grin!) Thanks!
I would have dropped out because they have idiots writing articles. Anthropogenic CO2 accounts for about 3% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere. (Not mostly). Manmade CO2 adds about 0.118% to the greenhouse effect of CO2. Along with other gases we emit, humans add about 0.28% to the toal greenhouse effect.
An interesting comparison would be the daily volume of water vapor vs. carbon dioxide.
Our daily weather is caused by interaction between the Sun and the water cycle.
There are oceans of water, lakes of water, mist, clouds, snow, rain, drizzle, fog, sleet, ice, and hail.
There are no oceans of carbon dioxide. There are no clouds of carbon dioxide. There is no snow, rain, drizzle, fog, sleet, ice, or hail composed of carbon dioxide. It is 100% water in its various forms. And the sheer volume of water vapor dwarfs the trace gas that our alchemist warmers are trying to blame. There is no science to support AGW.
Where is the data from the central Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Anarctic Oceans that was exhaustively measured over the past 100 years? Who measured it? When? Where? How many times? How many stations? These bodies of water account for 70% of the surface of the earth.
Who exhaustively measured the temperatures in the Siberia Tundra, the Sahara Desert, the Australian Outback, the rain forests in South America and Africa, the high latitudes of Canada and Alaska, and both polar ice caps?
No one was there to exhaustively measure these temperatures, outside of perhaps 100 scientific outposts covering over 20,000,000 square miles. They haven't got solid data from the areas they did exhaustively measure, and the oceans can claim perhaps 200 data sets covering 139,000,000 square miles.
In terms of statistics, this is like predicting the odds of a die roll based on one trial. They don't even know how many numbers are on the die, or what the possible outcomes might be. It's beyond interpretation or exaggeration. It's a big, fat lie.
Maybe we should FReep the WaPo insisting they publish this as a reasoned rebuttal to the crap printed from this “scientist”.
A critical factor that needs emphasis in climategate is that there are FOUR major databases for “global” temperature records. One at CRU, another at Goddard? and the other two are satellite-based (NASA) records. Lord Monckton has laid out a strong case establishing collusion between the ground-based “records keeping” AND that the satellite data was “normalized/corrected” to match supposedly “actual” ground temps but we know these were adjusted for oftentimes “non-scientific” purposes.
This means that ALL of the data relied upon by all these warming supporters is based on the manipulations clearly laid out in their own emails and Fortran code for their models.
So it comes down to this: No matter how many scientists reach a conclusion based on AGW - if the data is bad then their findings are worthless.
Its a sad day when I find myself wearing out my “quotation mark” keys because I cannot even put the word “science” in an AGW fraud post without the quotation marks. :-(
Anyone? ;-)
Correct. Water vapor forms about 95% of the greenhouse effect, and it is about 99.999% natural. (I think it was nuclear reactions where we create trace amounts of water).
Good reply to allmendream. My best friend just happens to be a scientist. We share one thing in common, we both love Alaska. I live here and he spends his summers here. We hunt together, fish together.
I am in no way intimidated by something I do not understand, as a matter of fact if I really want to learn about something I spend time researching it myself.
There are some scientists, such as my friend and others I have met in my line of work (they are my clients, I am a guide)who are humble in their approach. They seem to realize that the more we learn, the very little we know.
A narcissistic scientist is a blowhard to me. I don’t give a rats @$$ what they think they have or haven’t discovered.
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