Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus

[gunnut]

Damn this global warming. It's less than 50F outside my house at night and it's not even winter yet. Northeast is completely frozen. Schools are out and 16 people are dead so far due to cold weather.

[dalem]

Bush lied, people got snowed in.

The debate is over.

Ron Paul.

-dale

[ArmchairGeneral]

I think most of what climate change we are experiencing is natural with the exception of the depletion of the South Polar Ozone layer. That I attribute to the massive deforestation of South America and Southern Africa. Without those tall rain forests, you do not have rain. Without rain you do not have thunderstorms. Without thunderstorms you do not have lightning. Without lightning you do not have ozone.

But that's only my pet peeve.

The ozone layer is generated by UV radiation from the sun, not lightning.

Also, while there is probably some feedback, in general the rain causes the rainforests, not the other way around. The rain is caused by air circulation patterns. Large masses of warm, moist air rise at the equator, which causes them to cool. Cooling leads condensation, e.g. rain.

[Feanor]

Damn this global warming. It's less than 50F outside my house at night and it's not even winter yet. Northeast is completely frozen. Schools are out and 16 people are dead so far due to cold weather.

16 dead due to cold weather? When did you move to northern Siberia gunnut?

[gunnut]

16 dead due to cold weather? When did you move to northern Siberia gunnut?

Heard it on the news. That's the number in the entire northeast region over the weekend.

Just today 2 people died in Oregon due to storm.

[Julie]

Damn this global warming. It's less than 50F outside my house at night and it's not even winter yet. Northeast is completely frozen. Schools are out and 16 people are dead so far due to cold weather.

You forgot that they are inundated by rain, and they are in a state of emergency. National Guard are evacuating them.

[gunnut]

You forgot that they are inundated by rain, and they are in a state of emergency. National Guard are evacuating them.

The crappy thing is it never rains where needed. You guys are down to washing your cars with beer and Texas got 2 feet of rain in a hour.

Oregon gets enough rain to flood half the state and the forecaster never saw it coming.

California had 4" of rain for the year. White water rafting sucked balls this year.

[clackers]

Almost missed this
National Center for Policy Analysis
Science & Environmental Policy Project
Marshall Institute
Heartland Institute
NCPA
Harvard University
CATO Institute

I'd hardly call these 'individuals'

But with one exception, Pari, they're right-wing think tanks or lobbyists! We can't include any of those (and you've put the NCPA in twice - I assume you don't mean the National Collegiate Paintball Association ;) ), or we'd have to include similar organisations from 'the other side' like Greenpeace or Al Gore's Save Our Selves outfit. And we don't want to do that.

By comparison, the science academies of all eight nations of the G8 group have reached a broad consensus on this issue.

The odd one out on your list? Harvard University - I'm intrigued. Can you show us that institution's position statement?

[clackers]

But none of those other scientific issues are asking me to elect politicians or spend billions of dollars, are they?

Well, belief that smoking causes, not just correlates, with cancer is something that you can quantify in the cost of treating people at the end of their lives ... belief in an economy without rules can lead to an S&L or sub-prime disaster, and so on ...

But you're quite right in that if these models are proven correct, Dale, they will involve remedies that will impact on the economies of nations and the standard of living of all of us as individuals ...

[clackers]

Damn this global warming. It's less than 50F outside my house at night and it's not even winter yet.

Remember, GN, that a rise in average global temperature certainly doesn't mean that locally everyone gets hotter ... the earth isn't uniform ... models may show that weather patterns shift locations, or greater extremes (hot and cold) may be experienced according to region ...

An example is that the rainfall in my part of the woods (southern continental edge of Australia) may decline, but it's counterbalanced by an increase in the rainfall into the sea even further south. Same amount of water, just of little use to the farmers ...

[Parihaka]

But with one exception, Pari, they're right-wing think tanks or lobbyists! We can't include any of those (and you've put the NCPA in twice - I assume you don't mean the National Collegiate Paintball Association ;) ), or we'd have to include similar organisations from 'the other side' like Greenpeace or Al Gore's Save Our Selves outfit. And we don't want to do that.

By comparison, the science academies of all eight nations of the G8 group have reached a broad consensus on this issue.

The odd one out on your list? Harvard University - I'm intrigued. Can you show us that institution's position statement?

LOL, every single group you've posted is a political institution that don't of themselves generate science.
All they do is rabbit the same Al Gore 'all scientists agree' political statement and disperse the billions of dollars in grants they get in return.
True to form, all you can come up with is a wiki article and the usual banal assassinations of anyone who disagrees. like I asked here

Whats next? Are you going to call them "deniers"? Or tell me they're all in the pay of Exxon?

and true to form, that's what you do.


here's another wee piece by Lindzen for you to read.

I'll just remind you Lindzen was a contributor to the original IPCC report, I'll highlight the juicy bits to aid your comprehension.

The original denier: into the cold

December 22, 2006

Most scientists who are labelled as "deniers" for their views on global warming don't embrace this role. They cringe at the thought of disagreeing with colleagues who think that the science is settled, they do their best to avoid making waves, and they fear being marginalized as cranks who disagree with the scientific consensus. Dr. Richard Lindzen is an exception.

Dr. Lindzen is one of the original deniers -- among the first to criticize the scientific bureaucracy, and scientists themselves, for claims about global warming that he views as unfounded and alarmist. While he does not welcome the role he's acquired, he also does not shrink from it. Dr. Lindzen takes his protests about the abuse of science to the public, to the press, and to government.

His detractors can't dismiss him as a crank from the fringe, however, much as they might wish. Dr. Lindzen is a critic from within, one of the most distinguished climate scientists in the world: a past professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a lead author in a landmark report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the very organization that established global warming as an issue of paramount importance.

Dr. Lindzen is proud of his contribution, and that of his colleagues, to the IPCC chapter they worked on. His pride in this work matches his dismay at seeing it misrepresented. "[Almost all reading and coverage of the IPCC is restricted to the highly publicized Summaries for Policymakers which are written by representatives from governments, NGOs and business; the full reports, written by participating scientists, are largely ignored," he told the United States Senate committee on environment and public works in 2001. These unscientific summaries, often written to further political or business agendas, then become the basis of public understanding.

As an example, Dr. Lindzen provided the committee with the summary that was created for Chapter 7, which he worked on. "Understanding of climate processes and their incorporation in climate models have improved, including water vapour, sea-ice dynamics, and ocean heat transport," the summary stated, creating the impression that the climate models were reliable. The actual report by the scientists indicated just the opposite. Dr. Lindzen testified that the scientists had "found numerous problems with model treatments -- including those of clouds and water vapor."

When the IPCC was stung by criticism that the summaries were being written with little or no input by the scientists themselves, the IPCC had a subset of the scientists review a subsequent draft summary -- an improvement in the process. Except that the final version, when later released at a Shanghai press conference, had surprising changes to the draft that scientists had seen.

The version that emerged from Shanghai concludes, "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations." Yet the draft was rife with qualifiers making it clear the science was very much in doubt because "the accuracy of these estimates continues to be limited by uncertainties in estimates of internal variability, natural and anthropogenic forcing, and the climate response to external forcing."

The summaries' distortion of the IPCC chapters compounds another distortion that occurred in the very writing of the scientific chapters themselves. Dr. Lindzen's description of the conditions under which the climate scientists worked conjures up a scene worthy of a totalitarian state: "throughout the drafting sessions, IPCC 'coordinators' would go around insisting that criticism of models be toned down, and that 'motherhood' statements be inserted to the effect that models might still be correct despite the cited faults. Refusals were occasionally met with ad hominem attacks. I personally witnessed coauthors forced to assert their 'green' credentials in defense of their statements."

To better understand the issue of climate change, including the controversies over the IPCC summary documents, the White House asked the National Academy of Sciences, the country's premier scientific organization, to assemble a panel on climate change. The 11 members of the panel, which included Richard Lindzen, concluded that the science is far from settled: "Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)."

The press's spin on the NAS report? CNN, in language typical of other reportage, stated that it represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."

Despite such obtuseness Lindzen fights on, defending the science at what is undoubtedly a very considerable personal cost. Those who toe the party line are publicly praised and have grants ladled out to them from a funding pot that overflows with US$1.7-billion per year in the U.S. alone. As Lindzen wrote earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal, "there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis."

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. Email: Lawrence [email protected].

CV OF A DENIER:

Richard Lindzen received his PhD in applied mathematics in 1964 from Harvard University. A professor of meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. He is also a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger, and Charney Awards, and AGU's Macelwane Medal. He is author or coauthor of over 200 scholarly papers and books.

So sneer all you want and condescend all you like, use as many dismissive terms, libels and put downs as you like, dismiss 10s of 1000's of scientists opinions, dismiss people such as Lindzen who is actually one of the premier climatologists alive, but the simple point is that neither you, nor your priesthood can provide a single piece of scientific research that proves in real life that anthropogenic CO2 causes global warming.

All you've done thus far is prove Lindzen et al right: dissent, no matter what the mana of the dissenter, will not be tolerated.

So go on. Post some science rather than character assassination and politics, I dare you.:))

[Parihaka]

Remember, GN, that a rise in average global temperature certainly doesn't mean that locally everyone gets hotter ... the earth isn't uniform ... models may show that weather patterns shift locations, or greater extremes (hot and cold) may be experienced according to region ...

An example is that the rainfall in my part of the woods (southern continental edge of Australia) may decline, but it's counterbalanced by an increase in the rainfall into the sea even further south. Same amount of water, just of little use to the farmers ...

Oh by the way, being so clever n' all, you are aware global temperatures (for what that measurement is worth) has been tracking down since 1998 aren't you? That like um for the past 8 years the globe has been cooling?

[Parihaka]

While I'm in the mood, another piece on the vilification of any deviation from the 'true science'

Chilling Effect

Environment: Newsweek equates global warming skeptics with Holocaust deniers and accuses reputable scientists of being paid to create confusion in the face of consensus. Galileo is once again on trial.

Related Topics: Global Warming

Even the supporters of global warming hype found the title of Newsweek's Aug. 13 attack on skeptics, "The Truth About Denial," offensive. The use of the word "denier" is deliberate, an attempt to paint as either crazy or corrupt what Al Gore has proclaimed as Truth. Reputable scientists have been accused by a major news magazine of being paid to lie.

"Let's be blunt," said Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. "This allusion is an affront to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. This allusion has no place in the discourse on climate change. I say this as someone fully convinced of a significant human role in the behavior of the climate system."

Newsweek says "the denial machine is running at full throttle" and is a "well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists."

How well-funded? Newsweek cites Exxon Mobil "giving $19 million over the years to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)" to produce what eminent climatologist Sen. Jay Rockefeller is quoted as calling "very questionable data" on climate change.

No mention is made of the $3 billion contribution to the global warming crusade by Virgin Air's gazillionaire owner Richard Branson alone. Donations such as these are the reason the 2004 budgets of the Sierra Club Foundation and the National Resources Defense Council were $91 million and $57 million respectively.

Newsweek portrays James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as untainted by corporate bribery.

Hansen was once profiled on CBS' "60 Minutes" as the "world's leading researcher on global warming." Not mentioned by Newsweek was that Hansen had acted as a consultant to Al Gore's slide-show presentations on global warming, that he had endorsed John Kerry for president, and had received a $250,000 grant from the foundation headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Newsweek reporter and editorial, uh, article co-author Eve Conant was provided, during her interview with Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., documentation of the overwhelming funding advantage enjoyed by those who promote fear of climate change. Newsweek chose to ignore it.

In a Sept. 25, 2006, Senate floor speech, Inhofe noted: "The fact remains that political campaign funding by environmental groups to promote climate and environmental alarmism dwarfs spending by the fossil fuel industry by a 3-to-1 ratio."

Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter testified before Inhofe's Environment and Public Works Committee: "In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $50 billion on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one."

Nor did Newsweek put a dollar value on the 75 hours of free airtime that corporate cousin NBC gave Al Gore on its various stations, starting with NBC and including CNBC, Bravo, the Sundance Channel, Universal HD and Telemundo. We bet it is more than Exxon's $19 million or CEI's meager $3.6 million annual budget.

It is in fact the high priests of global warming that have had a, uh, chilling effect on free scientific inquiry. Richard Lindzen, a professor of Atmospheric Science at M.I.T., says, "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges."

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial "for holding as true a false doctrine taught by many," namely that the earth moved around the sun. In Newsweek's view, Galileo was a "denier" of the accepted "consensus." You know the type — hacks like Copernicus, who disputed the fact that Earth was the center of the universe, or Columbus, who disputed the international consensus that Earth was flat.

Deniers all.

[Patch]

...can provide a single piece of scientific research that proves in real life that anthropogenic CO2 causes global warming.

This is just incidental, but science never has nor ever will prove anything. Science can only disprove. This is an interesting topic, and I'd like to contribute more than just the above soundbite, but I've got a hell of a lot of work on. When I'm done, I'll go and look for some papers that are representative of current research.

N.B. that last sentence is not to devalue what has already been posted, but to indicate that I will attempt to gather papers in an objective, non-partisan manner.

[Parihaka]

And if the previous Lindzen piece seems a little too incestuous for the thread or perhaps 2006 was a little dated..

Dr Vincent Gray, a member of the UN IPCC Expert Reviewers Panel since its inception, has written to Professor David Henderson, to support the latter’s call for a review of the IPCC and its procedures. But Dr Gray goes further: calling for IPCC's abolition.

Dr Gray wrote:

Thank you for your latest article containing your analysis of the limitations of the IPCC and your belief that it is possible for it to be reformed.

I have been an "Expert Reviewer" for the IPCC right from the start and I have submitted a very large number of comments on their drafts. It has recently been revealed that I submitted 1,898 comments on the Final Draft of the current Report. Over the period I have made an intensive study of the data and procedures used by IPCC contributors throughout their whole study range. I have a large library of reprints, books and comments and have published many comments of my own in published papers, a book, and in my occasional newsletter, the current number being 157.

I began with a belief in scientific ethics, that scientists would answer queries honestly, that scientific argument would take place purely on the basis of facts, logic and established scientific and mathematical principles.

Right from the beginning I have had difficulty with this procedure. Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation, and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.

Over the years, as I have learned more about the data and procedures of the IPCC I have found increasing opposition by them to providing explanations, until I have been forced to the conclusion that for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound. Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organisation from the very beginning. I therefore consider that the IPCC is fundamentally corrupt. The only "reform" I could envisage, would be its abolition.

I wonder whether I could summarize briefly some of the reasons why the scientific procedures followed by the IPCC are fundamentally unsound. Some of you may have received more detail if you received my recent NZClimate Truth Newsletters (see under “Links” on this website).

The two main "scientific" claims of the IPCC are the claim that "the globe is warming" and "Increases in carbon dioxide emissions are responsible". Evidence for both of these claims is fatally flawed.

To start with the "global warming" claim. It is based on a graph showing that "mean annual global temperature" has been increasing.

This claim fails from two fundamental facts

1. No average temperature of any part of the earth's surface, over any period, has ever been made.

How can you derive a "global average" when you do not even have a single "local" average?

What they actually use is the procedure used from 1850, which is to make one measurement a day at the weather station from a maximum/minimum thermometer. The mean of these two is taken to be the average. No statistician could agree that a plausible average can be obtained this way. The potential bias is more than the claimed "global warming.

2. The sample is grossly unrepresentative of the earth's surface, mostly near to towns. No statistician could accept an "average" based on such a poor sample. It cannot possibly be "corrected"

It is of interest that frantic efforts to "correct" for these uncorrectable errors have produced mean temperature records for the USA and China which show no overall "warming" at all. If they were able to "correct" the rest, the same result is likely

And, then after all, there has been no "global warming", however measured, for eight years, and this year is all set to be cooling. As a result it is now politically incorrect to speak of "global warming". The buzzword is "Climate Change" which is still blamed on the non-existent "warming"

The other flagship set of data promoted by the IPCC are the figures showing the increase in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. They have manipulated the data in such a way to persuade us (including most scientists) that this concentration is constant throughout the atmosphere. In order to do this, they refrain from publishing any results which they do not like, and they have suppressed no less than 90,000 measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide made in the last 150 years. Some of these were made by Nobel Prizewinners and all were published in the best scientific journals. Ernst Beck has published on the net all the actual papers.

Why did they do it? It is very subtle. Brush up your maths. In order to calculate the radiative effects of carbon dioxide you have to use a formula involving a logarithm. When such a formula is applied to a set of figures, the low figures have a greater weight in the final average radiation. The figure obtained from the so-called "background figure" is therefore biased in an upwards direction.

My main complaint with the IPCC is in the methods used to "evaluate" computer models. Proper "validation" of models should involve proved evidence that they are capable of future prediction within the range required, and to a satisfactory level of accuracy. Without this procedure, no self-respecting computer engineer would dare to make use of a model for prediction.

No computer climate model has ever been tested in this way, so none should be used for prediction. They sort of accept this by never permitting the use of the term "prediction", only "projection". But they then go ahead predicting anyway.

There is a basic logical principle that a correlation, however convincing, is not proof of causation. Most scientists pay at least lip service to this principle, but its widespread lack of acceptance by the general public have led to IPCC to explore it as one of their methods of "evaluating" models.

The models are so full of inaccurately known parameters and equations that it is comparatively easy to "fudge" an approximate fit to the few climate sequences that might respond. This sort of evidence is the main feature of most of the current promotional lectures.

The most elaborate of all their "evaluation" techniques is far more dubious. Since they have failed to show that any models are actually capable of prediction, they have decided to "evaluate" them by asking the opinions of those who originate them, people with a financial interest in their success. This has become so complex that many have failed to notice that it has no scientific basis, but is just an assembly of the "gut feelings" of self-styled "experts". It has been developed to a complex web of "likelihoods", all of which are assigned fake "probability" levels.

By drawing attention to these obvious facts I have now found myself persona non grata with most of my local professional associations, Surely, I am questioning the integrity of these award-winning scientific leaders of the local science establishment. When you get down to it, that is what is involved.

I somehow understood that the threshold had been passed when I viewed "The Great Global Warming Swindle". Yes, we have to face it. The whole process is a swindle, The IPCC from the beginning was given the licence to use whatever methods would be necessary to provide "evidence" that carbon dioxide increases are harming the climate, even if this involves manipulation of dubious data and using peoples' opinions instead of science to "prove" their case.

The disappearance of the IPCC in disgrace is not only desirable but inevitable. The reason is, that the world will slowly realise that the "predictions" emanating from the IPCC will not happen. The absence of any "global warming" for the past eight years is just the beginning. Sooner or later all of us will come to realise that this organisation, and the thinking behind it, is phony. Unfortunately severe economic damage is likely to be done by its influence before that happens.