but not for atrocities such as the Kyoto Accord.
What has that to do with a politician's agenda? If a computer said it, it obviously must be an absolute fact. Computers can't lie you know. </sarcasm>
If a model has shortcomings, scientists and their grad students are working diligently right now to unearth and expose the fallacies.
Hmmm, yep just like Soon & Baliunas. No probs, afterall politicians would never use bad information would they? Nor would they ever attack those who would disagree with the agenda.
http://www.eco.freedom.org/el/20031102/gunter.shtml
Proof exists (that greenhouse does not), but believers would rather denounce than debate
By Lorne Gunter
Too many scientists have based their research, their reputations, and their incomes on the greenhouse theory to let it go now.
So, rather than debate the growing evidence that the greenhouse theory is fundamentally flawed, many greenhouse-believing scientists have begun viciously attacking those who question its conclusions and denouncing any agnostic as a heretic - especially ones presenting uncomfortably challenging proof.
Witness Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Both are noted solar physicists. Earlier this year, they published an exhaustive study of the climate of the past 1,000 years or so in the journal Climate Research. They examined more studies on historic climate trends - 240 in all - than any previous researchers, and concluded the 20th century was not unusually warm. In the past millennium there had been at least one other period when, worldwide, temperatures were as much as 2 - 3 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1990s.
This was not a particularly startling conclusion. There have been literally thousands of papers written by geologists identifying a Medieval Warm Period running from about 800 to 1300 AD, and a Little Ice Age spanning 1300 to about 1850. Soon and Baliunas merely confirmed that these thousands of earlier studies were right.
But Soon and Baliunas were both vehemently attacked. Myths were spread that they had cooked their findings (as good scientists do, they acknowledged in their article the very limitations in their results that have been used to try to discredit them). Three junior editors at the journal that published their study resigned, claiming embarrassment that their employer published shoddy research. Then, the controversy sucked down the editor-in-chief.
However, when an independent review was conducted of the Soon/Baliunas article, no misrepresentation was found, nor any shortcomings with Climate Research's peer-review process. (These latter facts are often left out of news stories on the controversy, though.)
The reason for the hissy fit over Soon/Baliunas is simple though. The pair do not shy from drawing obvious conclusions from their research: if the warming of the 20th century is not unusual, then it is likely natural, meaning the Kyoto accord is an exercise in futility. And, even if the warming is not natural, it is not extreme, and thus nothing to worry about.
This is a threat to the greenhouse religion. Therefore, the pair must be burned at the stake.
Example:
Cox Newspapers, in an article published in May, disclosed that the study by Soon,
Baliunas and three other authors was underwritten by the American Petroleum
Look up some Soon-Baliunas papers in The Astrophysical Journal, and it turns out that the Mount Wilson Observatory of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is supported by Texaco, Exxon Foundation, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the American Petroleum Institute. Soon & Baliunas are associated with and do projects for both. Obviously bad guys working for big energy.
This article leaves out one important aspect of the story. Climate Research lets the authors choose the editor to handle their reviews. Soon, Baliunas et al. chose the one global warming skeptic on the editorial board (Colin de Freitas). The editorial review referred to above indicated that the paper should have been sent back to the authors for extensive revisions.