Posted on 01/30/2010 6:06:13 AM PST by Titus-Maximus
CopenhagenEven under this citys low, leaden skies, at least one thing remained clear as leaders from 193 countries gathered to negotiate climate agreements: one ton of carbon dioxide emitted in the U.S. has the same effect as one ton emitted in India or anywhere else. That simple truism is part of a huge body of data pointing to humanitys effect on climate, and for most negotiators, the weight of that evidence seems to have crushed any doubt they may have felt in the wake of the 1,000-plus e-mails and computer code stolen from the University of East Anglias Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
The theft made headlines as Climategate in November, and many private correspondences among scientists became public. Climate contrarians and politicians, including Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, have claimed that the messages show that climate science was far from settled, that tricks were used and that researchers hid unfavorable data.
In fact, nothing in the stolen material undermines the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that humans are to blame. Heat-trapping properties can be verified by any undergraduate in any lab, notes climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. The detection of climate change, and its attribution to human causes, rests on numerous lines of evidence. They include melting ice sheets, retreating glaciers, rising sea levels and earlier onset of spring, not to mention higher average global temperatures.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
"Shame on SA for publishing such a blatantly biased apology for what appear to have been long lasting and willful manipulations on an issue of the greatest importance to us all. Casual dismissal of Climategate as "a record of how Science is actually done" is deeply offensive to me. No this is not the way Science is actually done! Climategate has brought to public light all kinds of behaviors anathema to Science: Groupthink, restricted and/or proprietary access to data, significant use of poorly documented yet "highly complex" data processing techniques, primary reliance on extrapolations or "proxies", and most damningly, offhand dismissal of skeptics as crackpots, quickly come to my mind. As a scientifically trained person, I am genuinely embarrassed that the Wall Street Journal, as opposed to SA, has understood the great concerns raised by Climategate.
Dr Thierry Copie Ph.D Physics 1988, Cornell U."
Scientific American, once an absolute jewel of culture, a place in which the finest scientists in the world published their life’s work, has become a joke. A sick, cruel joke to those of us who loved what it once was.
Mark Sanford supports John Edwards?
Scientific American has been filled with Leftist claptrap for a couple decades, and this just puts the lid on it. Much like National Geographic.
It’s a shame, they were both once fine publications.
The comment secion is excellent.
I am the long lost King of France.
I don’t need to show my evidence to you peasants.
I whole heartily agree. SA used to be a great scientific read. I don’t remember when the train wreck occurred, but it might have been two decades ago. I think I dropped my long time subscription in the late 1980s.
Best Global warming/”Climate Change” post ever. Love the comments. Thanks for posting.
I went through the comments and recorded the percentage of critical ones. That scientific community is running 4:1 against AGW. There is a consensus. AGW is a scam.
SA better wake up.
In fact, nothing in the stolen material undermines the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that humans are to blame.Of course it does - since it directly undermines one of the MAIN figures (the "hockey stick") used as evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This figure is one of the cornerstones of the IPCC reports on "climate change" (AGW).
Heat-trapping properties can be verified by any undergraduate in any lab, notes climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University.What a load of BS! While true, the entire point of climate realism is that the climate is highly complex, with non-obvious feedback mechanisms. Just as a for instance, if higher temperatures cause additional water vapor to enter the atmosphere, that may well cause more daytime cloud cover, reflecting a LOT more solar energy back into space. This effect probably does account for the Earth recovering from earlier high average temperature episodes (you know, the ones where humans were CLEARLY not a factor!).
The detection of climate change, and its attribution to human causes, rests on numerous lines of evidence. They include melting ice sheets, retreating glaciers, rising sea levels and earlier onset of spring, not to mention higher average global temperatures."First of all, many of these "lines of evidence" are indeed in question. Have you seen the recent articles on the complete fabrication of a Himalayan melting glacier crisis? Others, such as rising sea levels, have been occurring since long before there could possibly have been a human influence.
Second, not ONE of those "lines of evidence" points to human causation of warming. We're in an interglacial period, temperatures have been rising for thousands of years. What we should all be dreading is the abrupt downturn into the NEXT ice age!
Shame on you Katharine Hayhoe, you clearly don't deserve the title "scientist". You need to go back to school and learn a lot more about the scientific method, as well as paleoclimatology.
David Biello, the author, is a shameless whore.
Here's how I remember it.
Back in the '70's (from about 1970 until I left home in 1979) I had a subscription to SciAm. Sometime around 1978, they published a very strange thing. It was a sort of an advertisement, but it was an advertisement sponsored by Scientific American itself. It wasn't an advertisement for the magazine, or for anything directly related to science at all. It was an advertisement for a member of congress. It was an advertisement for a congressman: Les Aspin.
The text of the ad promoted Aspin as a great man, a fine representitive with a futuristic outlook, a man ahead of his time.
I doted on SciAm almost religiously at that time. I devoured each issue; the articles, the columns (I lived for The Amateur Scientist and Mathematical Games, although C.L. Strong passed away in 1977). When the wierd "Les Aspin" commercial appeared, I thought "what an odd thing to have in Scientific American."
From that moment forward, I watched the magazine slowly deteriorate (from my point of view). Fewer articles about hard science, about cutting-edge technology. More articles about nuclear disarmement, nuclear winter, delivering medical care to third-world countries, and the like. During the 1980s, SciAm was a champion of the "Star Wars is a dangerous fantasy of an ideological ignoramous" meme. Every MIT professor who had something to say to bash the idea got his turn at bat. By then, I no longer subscribed, but I did buy the magazine from time to time at newsstands in the Philadelphia area, where I lived. It became more and more like Omni every year.
It's a shame. I still know where I can go to read those old copies (I'll not say where), and I use them for research all the time. As I grow older, I appreciate them all the more, and miss the old Scientific American.
But the ones defending AGW were either pedantically attacking typos or re-mouthing their talking point mantras - they never engaged the detailed and compelling arguments of the skeptics who are crushing this Bullcraft.
I am reminded of the magazine POPULAR SCIENCE. For years they had talked about the posibility of the “Greenhouse Effect”, then in the late 1970s they had an editorial that they would never use that term again as it was wrong(Ice age coming).
Then about ten or fifteen years later they began the mantra of “Global Warming”.
The following paper
will explain why all press releases from NOAAs NCDC, NASAs GISS, and Hadley/
CRU should henceforth be ignored. The terrestrial datasets have become seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted for climate trend assessment.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
BBTTT.
Scientific American, once an absolute jewel of culture, a place in which the finest scientists in the world published their lifes work, has become a joke. A sick, cruel joke to those of us who loved what it once was.
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