Other voices on climate change

Physicist Frank J. Tipler writes on the definition of “science” by the great physicist Richard P. Feynman–a definition that, alas, escapes most climate scientists. Feynman’s essay is available online in Google Book’s “preview” of his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. “What Is Science” is on page 177; “Cargo Cult Science” is on page 205.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” is how the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman defined science in his article “What is Science?” Feynman emphasized this definition by repeating it in a stand-alone sentence in extra large typeface in his article.

Immediately after his definition of science, Feynman wrote: “When someone says, ‘Science teaches such and such,’ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you should ask, ‘How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’ It should not be ‘science has shown.’ And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but be patient and listen to all the evidence) to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”

And I say, Amen. Notice that “you” is the average person. You have the right to hear the evidence, and you have the right to judge whether the evidence supports the conclusion. We now use the phrase “scientific consensus,” or “peer review,” rather than “science has shown.” By whatever name, the idea is balderdash. Feynman was absolutely correct.

When the attorney general of Virginia sued to force Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to provide the raw data he used, and the complete computer program used to analyze the data, so that “you” could decide, the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia (where Mann was a professor at the time he defended the hockey stick) declared this request — Feynman’s request — to be an outrage. You peons, the Faculty Senate decreed, must simply accept the conclusions of any “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards.” Feynman’s — and the attorney general’s and my own and other scientists’ — request for the raw data, so we can “judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at,” would, according to the Faculty Senate, “send a chilling message to scientists … and indeed scholars in any discipline.”

To read the whole article from Pajamas Media, click here.

Climatologist Judith Curry is interviewed on why she was attacked by alarmist bloggers like Joe Romm (Climate Progress) and RealClimate for suggesting climatologists read Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion:

The level of vitriol in the climate blogs reflects the last gasp of those who thought they could influence national and international energy policy through the power politics of climate science expertise. The politics of expertise is about how scientific information is used in the policy making process, including how diverging viewpoints are interpreted and how science is weighed relative to values and politics in the policy debate.  The problem comes in when the “power” politics of expertise are played.

Signals of the “power” play include: hiding uncertainties and never admitting a mistake; developing a consensus with a high level of confidence; demanding that the consensus receive extreme deference relative to other view points; insisting that that science demands a particular policy; discrediting scientists holding other view points by dismissing them as cranks, trivializing their credentials and say that they are not qualified to hold an opinion; and attacking the motives of anyone that challenges the consensus. Sound familiar?

In the case of climate change, the authoritarianism of “science tells us we should . . . ”  could not withstand the public perception of scientists engaging with pressure groups, lack of transparency that meant people were unable to evaluate the information themselves, and then the climategate affair that raised questions about the integrity of the scientists….

There is an increasing backlash from scientists and engineers from other fields, who think that climate science is lacking credibility because of the politicization of the subject and the high confidence levels in the IPCC report.  While these scientists and engineers are not experts in climate science, they understand the process and required rigor and the many mistakes that need to be made and false paths that get followed.

For the rest of this interview from Collide-a-Scape, click here.

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore. Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

For the rest of this article by Harold Ambler, click here.

Game show host Pat Sajak offers a solution for those who want to change the world:

Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.

Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.

Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically.

How about it? Why wait for governments to change us?

For the rest of this article, click here.

From Clive Crook, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a believer in anthropogenic warming:

I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause….

It’s not the extreme or otherwise ill-advised policy recommendations of the greens that have turned opinion against action of any kind, though I grant you they’re no help. It’s the diminished credibility of the claim that we have a problem in the first place. That is why Climategate mattered. And that is why these absurd “vindications” of the climate scientists involved also matter.

The economic burdens of mitigating climate change will not be shouldered until a sufficient number of voters believe the problem is real, serious, and pressing. Restoring confidence in climate science has to come first. That, in turn, means trusting voters with all of the doubts and unanswered questions — with inconvenient data as well as data that confirm the story — instead of misleading them (unintentionally, of course) into believing that everything is cut and dried. The inquiries could have started that process. They have further delayed it.

For the rest of this article from The Atlantic, click here.

Science has been changed forever by the so-called “climategate” saga, leading researchers have said ahead of publication of an inquiry into the affair – and mostly it has been changed for the better.

This Wednesday sees the publication of the Muir Russell report into the conduct of scientists from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), whose emails caused a furore in November after they were hacked into and published online.

Critics say the emails reveal evasion of freedom of information law, secret deals done during the writing of reports for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a cover-up of uncertainties in key research findings and the misuse of scientific peer review to silence critics.

But whatever Sir Muir Russell, the chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, concludes on these charges, senior climate scientists say their world has been dramatically changed by the affair.

“The release of the emails was a turning point, a game-changer,” said Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia. “The community has been brought up short by the row over their science. Already there is a new tone. Researchers are more upfront, open and explicit about their uncertainties, for instance.”

For the rest of this article from The Guardian, click here.

From physicist Syun Akasofu, published on Benny Peiser’s CCNet, June 10, 2010.

Recently, a group of scientists expressed their concern: “We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand…”(Science, 7 May 2010). Foreseeing such a problem related to climate science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I warned the IPCC in my article in EOS (American Geophysical Union Weekly publication) under the title ” A suggestion to Climate Scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ” in March, 2008 by stating: “Because there has been so much misrepresentation about climate change, I am also concerned about the inevitable backlash against science and scientists when the public ultimately learns the correct information”.

However, the problem is not with the populace. Reigning as if it were the world authority on climate change, the IPCC promoted its carbon dioxide hypothesis and prediction of potential disasters resulting from global warming; the IPCC presented this statement as the “consensus” of 2500 world experts on climate change. World news media took their statement like an oracle and spread it globally. A great fear of catastrophe put the whole world into a global warming hysteria. The heads of a large number of nations have met many times in order to try to avert the predicted disaster as if the issue were a future world war.

At that time, the IPCC in effect stated that scientists had done already all they could do and it was now up to politicians to take up the issue. By 2007, the deviation of the IPCC leadership from science and scientific practice was out of control, as recently revealed by Climategate. Even the journal “Science” stated in an editorial: “Climate, Game Over” (Science, 27 July 2007). Those scientists who doubted the IPCC hypothesis were treated like second-class citizens. High-level scientific organizations should have stopped this IPCC behavior long time ago, since such a behavior is not the common scientific practice. Instead, they were silent or went along it.

The carbon dioxide theory is just a hypothesis, which I respect as an idea among other possibilities, such as natural changes. However, at least some of what the IPCC presented as ‘facts’ are now in doubt, deemed an exaggeration, or proven incorrect. In addition, the warming stopped during the first decade of 21st century, despite the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is still increasing.

After Climategate, more than 40% of citizens in the U.S., U.K. and Germany have some doubt about the predicted catastrophe. Obviously, the citizens have become wary of science and scientists, who led them to believe in global catastrophe and disasters. On the other hand, it should be remembered that the public accepts genuine scientists who can go wrong at times.

Environmentalist Peter Green comments on the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis:

The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 – and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science.

In my book on biodiversity, Beyond Conservation, I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original science upon which today’s models are based.

I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.

For the rest of this article in Spiked, click here.

The statement we often hear from authorities like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that “climate change is accelerating at a much faster pace than was previously thought by scientists” is incorrect.

Thanks for the release of private emails of climate scientists, we can now learn from their own words whether global warming “is accelerating at a much faster pace” or not. In an email dated 3-Jan-2009, Mike MacCracken wrote to Phil Jones, Folland and Chris:

I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability–that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.

…

We all, and you all in particular, need to be prepared.

Similarly, in an email dated 24-Oct-2008, Mick Kelly wrote to Phil Jones [5]:

Just updated my global temperature trend graphic for a public talk and noted that the level has really been quite stable since 2000 or so and 2008 doesn’t look too hot.

…

Be awkward if we went through a early 1940s type swing!

The above statements from the climategate emails conclusively prove that the widely used phrase by authorities in public that global warming “is accelerating at a much faster pace” is supported neither by climate scientists in private nor by the observed data.

For the full article from Watts Up With That, click here.

Phil Jones, former head of the Climatic Research Unit and a major figure in the “Climategate” emails, was interviewed by the BBC and the interview was published on Feb. 13. In it, Jones says the following:

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

BBC: Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

Jones: No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

For the full interview, click here.

So, according to Jones, the planet’s warming is not statistically significant, and the planet’s cooling is not statistically significant. But, at least a major climate scientist has now admitted the obvious: the planet isn’t warming at the moment, hasn’t for at least a decade, and may be cooling.

And here’s further evidence of cooling. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website has a gadget that allows you to get a temperature trend for any set of dates in the Continental United States between 1895 and 2010. The website is http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html. Here’s the trend (green line) for 1997-2010. It’s cooling, and the later  you set the date, the greater the degree of cooling. Since the U.S. has the world’s best temperature data, it’s likely this is the global trend as well.

NOAA