Catholicism and Climate Change

[JasonSB]

That’s actually a decent response, but it brings up what is for me the biggest hurdle: I simply don’t trust the people involved to tell the truth.

The key point about science is that you don’t need to trust them.

The IPCC does nothing other than summarise the existing scientific literature, so you can always go to the original source yourself and see if their summary is accurate. You can also freely browse all of the reviewer’s comments and the reponses that those comments received. Since the reviewers include people like McIntyre and other well-known “skeptics”, you can be pretty confident that any molehills they uncovered were turned into mountains. If you followed the debate on “dates” for the WA2007 paper you’ll know what I mean.

I think it’s telling that so far the only actual error in the IPCC report was the Himalayan glacier error, and in that instance the report disagreed with itself because WG1 characterised the situation correctly.

If you don’t trust even the peer-reviewed literature, you can often obtain the original data yourself and check it. The temperature record is a really good example – not only can you download the unadjusted data used by all the various groups, you can even download the scanned-in versions of the original paperwork going back 100 years! (I gave the link for this earlier.)

If you don’t feel qualified to do this yourself, or simply don’t have the time, remember this: there are plenty of qualified people out there who do have the motive and the means to verify all of these things, and apart from the odd squeek (like the Y2K bug that McIntyre found in the GISS code) they have been completely silent.

So the only way to sustain a belief that the whole thing is a scam is to assume that McIntyre, Monckton, ExxonMobil, etc., are in on it, too.

At a certain point it just seems to me that it’s best simply to accept the obvious explanation and move on. If there is something nefarious going on, you can be sure that somebody would have noticed by now.

Why would I believe that CO2 is driving the warming we have experienced when it isn’t all that clear how much warming has even occurred? You talk of the models predictions being verified in so many cases, but what of the cases where the models and the data appear to diverge? In this paper by D’Aleo and Watts (scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf) they include graphs (which I am unable to include) showing the divergence between surface temperatures and satellite measurements that, from 1979 to 2008 have grown by almost 0.5 C.

I skimmed through it to find the figures you’re referring to (page 12?) and I can see a number of problems right off the bat:

Why are they comparing NOAA Land to the satellite records in the first graph? The satellite records are for the whole world, land + sea, so why restrict the NOAA trend to land only? That is clearly going to affect the outcome.

Here is a graph of GISTemp vs RSS for the same period that you can play with yourself: woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/plot/rss/offset:0.2 (WoodForTrees doesn’t have NOAA so I used GISS instead.)

Note that I had to offset the satellite record by 0.2 degrees to put them on the same scale. This is necessary because they are comparing anomalies from “normal temperatures” from different baselines. To do it correctly I would actually need to compute the anomalies for a proper baseline and then offset one of them but I arrived at 0.2 after two goes of trial-and-error. The point is clear: if there was a divergence of 0.5 degrees it would be exceedingly obvious! Instead all you can see is that the satellite record is relatively more affected by ENSO than GISTemp is, which was already known.

If you ask WoodForTrees to compute the trend in both data sets you’ll get slope = 0.0165458 per year for GISS and slope = 0.016389 per year for RSS. (Add "Linear trend (OLS) to each under “Processing steps”, then click “Plot graph”, then click on the “raw data” link at the bottom.)

That’s a difference of 0.0001568 degrees per year, or 0.004704 over 30 years. How is it possible Watts’ paper got a difference of 0.5 degrees over 30 years when the actual data shows less than 1/100 that amount?

If you want me to dig further I can try to find out actual values for NOAA, but it seems to me that this argument is a furphy – GISS does not diverge from the satellite records, therefore GISS is reliable.

 

[JasonSB]

While scanning for the graphs you were talking about, I came across this nugget: “Around 1990, NOAA lost more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. It can be shown that country by country, they lost stations with a bias towards higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.”

The first sentence is simply wrong, while the second displays an ignorance of anomalies. Both show that Watts is persisting in pushing a theory that was resoundingly debunked when first raised on his site a year ago.

The first sentence is wrong because NOAA didn’t “lose” anything. Only a small percentage of weather stations in the world are hooked up to the GHCN, and those stations were reporting data before 1990 and have continued to report data ever since.

Around 1990 there was an extra effort put in to manually digitising the records of thousands and thousands of other stations that were not part of GHCN. These old records were retrospectively added to the databases at that time. Since that was a one-off event, none of the records for those stations has been added since.

That is in the process of changing – I understand that another major effort is underway to bring in all those station records from 1990 to the present day so we will once again have all that extra data available – but it has already been comprehensively shown, in graphs I’ve already presented, that it makes no difference because the trend prior to 1990 is the same whether those stations are included or not.

In other words, using only the stations that are still being used today, the pre-1990 record looks the same as the pre-1990 record you get if you use all of the stations available in 1990. In addition, I have already presented a graph comparing the GHCN data to the Global Summary of the Day (GSOD) database, which is completely independent of the data set normally used for global temperature reconstructions:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/compare_gsod_ghcn.png

The second sentence suggests that the warming trend was artifically made higher because the stations that were dropped were cooler. This is silly. The absolute temperature is not important, the anomaly is what’s important. And, as I’ve said, the trend in the “dropped” stations was no different to the trend in the “kept” stations:

rhinohide.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/gistemp-high-alt-high-lat-rural/

Given the shenanigans that appear to be going on both in the selection of and adjustments to the raw surface data, I have little inclination to believe them (C’mon, Charlie Brown, step up and kick it.) Instead, I believe this is a more likely explanation:

These strongly suggest that instead of atmospheric warming from greenhouse effects dominating, surface based warming due to factors such as urbanization and land use changes are driving the observed changes. Since these surface changes are not fully adjusted for, trends from the surface networks are not reliable.

Or, as they state as the very first comment in the paper:

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

Well, not only are they completely wrong but they were already shown to be wrong using their own data. I have already provided a link to the NOAA report that proved this: www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2010.pdf

I note that the paper was updated on the 27th of August 2010 and yet still makes ridiculous claims. (The Darwin one is particularly egregious – if you look at nothing but the raw data then it does look like the rising trend is artificial, but that’s because different stations are being combined without being offset! if Wills had looked into it more he would have discovered that the big “drop” around 1940 was because that’s when Darwin was attacked by the Japanese! The thermometer was moved from the post office in the middle of town to the airport in January 1941. When it was at the post office it was mounted on a horizontal enclosure without back or sides and had to be moved during the day to avoid being hit directly by the tropical sun! If the postmaster forgot or was too busy, the temperature readings would obviously be a lot hotter than they should have been. When it was moved to the Darwin airport it was placed inside a standard Stevenson screen, creating an artificial cooling that needs to be adjusted for.)

Let me put this way: I just quickly browsed that document trying to find the information you were talking about and every single thing I read was not only spectacularly wrong, but it was proven to be wrong and Watts already knows that.

So his entire thesis is built upon claims he knows not to be true. “Rather reliant” on them, you could say.

Do I need to make the obvious point that unlike NOAA’s paper referenced above, this isn’t a peer-reviewed journal paper but rather a publication of the SPPI, a policy group with a well-known anti-AGW stance? So, which is correct? Is NOAA right or do you contest their report and reject their finding?

 

[JasonSB]

I could go on, but the point is this – a low-carbon future isn’t as scary as you might think, and has all sorts of incidental benefits, like energy independence, that leave many of us wondering why on earth we aren’t racing towards it regardless.

OK, one more, this time for Europe.

The Desertec site, talking about compact linear Fresnel solar thermal plants, quotes “2,500 sq km of desert surface for the solar power plants and 3,500 sq km for the high-voltage direct-current transmission lines throughout the entire EU-MENA region” in order to supply “17% of Europe’s energy requirements” in 2050. desertec.org/en/concept/faq/

If, for the sake of argument, we scaled it up to 100% of Europe’s energy requirements (in 2050), the transmission lines would probably not increase much (most of their length is in the distribution) and the solar power plants would scale up to 15,000 sq km. That’s only 4% of Germany’s area, 0.16% of the surface area of the Sahara, and three times the surface area of the Nasser reservoir, created by damming the Nile. If the power plants are situated near the coast, they can also be used for desalinaton at the same time very cost-effectively.

 

[Ender]

One final point I would like to make relates to this idea that reducing CO2 production is somehow very hard, very expensive

Energy density is a problem boutique sources such as solar and wind will never be able to overcome. As your own post showed, to replace the electricity generated by fossil fuels with solar cells it would require panels covering an area roughly the size of Massachusetts. As for wind, there is a nuclear plant in Texas (Comanche Peak) that generates 2,500 MW of power and uses 4000 acres, including a man made cooling lake that doubles as a recreation area. Replacing that single plant with windmills (1.5 MW GE wind turbines) would take about 147,000 acres. Aside from the energy density problem you would still need backup facilities - from fossil fuel plants - to provide energy when the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow. And if these aren’t enough problems, you have transmission issues, especially with wind turbines, as the farms are generally (no surprise here) placed in remote areas. If you want to argue that we could replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear ones I would agree, but since the greens and the rest of the AGW community isn’t pushing for nuclear reactors - which would alleviate all of their CO2 concerns - I don’t take their concerns seriously.

Meanwhile, wind power is being added at an astonishing rate. In mid-2006, China set a target of 5 GW for wind for 2010 and 30 GW for 2020.

For a time China was also adding one new coal powered plant a week and leads the world - by a large margin - in the number of new nuclear plants she is building. The perception that solar or wind can replace traditional power plants is nonsensical.

Ender

 

[portarica]

Energy density is a problem boutique sources such as solar and wind will never be able to overcome. As your own post showed, to replace the electricity generated by fossil fuels with solar cells it would require panels covering an area roughly the size of Massachusetts. As for wind, there is a nuclear plant in Texas (Comanche Peak) that generates 2,500 MW of power and uses 4000 acres, including a man made cooling lake that doubles as a recreation area. Replacing that single plant with windmills (1.5 MW GE wind turbines) would take about 147,000 acres. Aside from the energy density problem you would still need backup facilities - from fossil fuel plants - to provide energy when the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow. And if these aren’t enough problems, you have transmission issues, especially with wind turbines, as the farms are generally (no surprise here) placed in remote areas. If you want to argue that we could replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear ones I would agree, but since the greens and the rest of the AGW community isn’t pushing for nuclear reactors - which would alleviate all of their CO2 concerns - I don’t take their concerns seriously.

For a time China was also adding one new coal powered plant a week and leads the world - by a large margin - in the number of new nuclear plants she is building. The perception that solar or wind can replace traditional power plants is nonsensical.

Ender

Replacing traditional plants with solar or wind is nonsensical if you think it must be done overnight. But if we reduce our energy consumption by 30%, which is a pretty rational number given the amount of waste in the system. And not only shift electrical generation , but space and hot water heating to solar, the gap begins to close quite quickly.

And as we have seen with just about every new technology, increased demand and production will drive efficiencies . Which will create jobs.

So we can stick with what works for the oil companies and utilities right now, or we can be progressive and eliminate our political reliance on the Islamic countries and if we have the foresight to establish the technology here in the US we can start to cut the apron strings now attached with the Chinese proponents of abortion.

It isn’t just a case of doing what is right for our pocketbooks, but a shift away from fossil fuels is a moral imperative as well.

Peace

 

[JasonSB]

Energy density is a problem boutique sources such as solar and wind will never be able to overcome.

That’s a pretty defeatist attitude, isn’t it? It never ceases to amaze me how the same people who think the problems with solar or wind can never be overcome are always so optimistic that the next generation of nuclear powerplants will magically solve all the problems that have plagued them so far.

I already showed that the land area required is about the same as the land area that has already been disturbed by coal mining in the US, and coal mining is often in very valuable land whereas solar thermal really wants to be placed in a desert and wind farms don’t even interfere with the land being used for other purposes at the same time. (Here they are often installed in farmland, with animals grazing below.)

It’s only 6% of the land area that was devoted to simply growing horse feed before the advent of cars.

Five times more area is devoted to growing lawn!

How is it that the amount of area required is a problem that can never be overcome when it comes to wind and solar in order to gain energy independence, but as a nation you’re willing to allocate five times that much area to lawn?

Did I mention that solar thermal power plants have 100 times the energy density of corn ethanol? Somehow Bush felt it was acceptable to inject massive subsidies into that despite it using 100 times as much land as solar thermal would for the same benefit and the land it uses is prime agricultural land rather than desert.

As your own post showed, to replace the electricity generated by fossil fuels with solar cells it would require panels covering an area roughly the size of Massachusetts.

Correction: I was talking about concentrating solar thermal power plants, not solar cells (PV).

You could make the front end of a concentrating solar thermal powerplant out of material you can find at your local hardware store – polished aluminium for mirrors, glass and metal pipework to transfer the water and steam around. (The back end is the same as any other thermal powerplant – coal, gas, nuclear, geothermal, etc. – it’s just a steam turbine. You can take advantage of this fact to build combined solar thermal + gas powerplants that use gas when there isn’t enough sunlight and use the sun to avoid burning gas when there is.)

But yes, you need an area about the size of Massachusetts – or about 10% of the area of Arizona, or about 10% of the area of Nevada. There’s plenty of nice, hot desert with excellent sunshine in that part of the US. (I drove down from Salt Lake City to LA via Vegas a few months ago and actually stopped at one of the SEGS powerplants on the way to see in person what it looks like and what the environment is like.)

Here’s a picture of the 64 MW Nevada Solar One from the air:

http://www.acciona-na.com/getattachment/04d6b096-d0ee-4914-be02-cd7e1ff32fdf/

“In many regions of the world, just one square kilometre of land can generate as much as 100-130 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year from solar thermal technology. This is as much electricity as we would expect from a 50 MW conventional coal- or gas-fired mid-load power plant, and enough to keep the lights on in a town of 25,000 inhabitants in western continental Europe.”
iea.org/impagr/cip/pdf/issue36SolarP.pdf

Call me crazy, but one square km per 25,000 inhabitants seems like a pretty small overhead. I wouldn’t be surprised if shopping malls took up more land!

Solar cells (PV) are also useful, although relatively expensive. They have the advantage that because they’re at the end-user’s site, they avoid transmission losses, and they don’t take up any additional land because you can put them on existing buildings.

As for wind, there is a nuclear plant in Texas (Comanche Peak) that generates 2,500 MW of power and uses 4000 acres, including a man made cooling lake that doubles as a recreation area. Replacing that single plant with windmills (1.5 MW GE wind turbines) would take about 147,000 acres.

Perhaps, and if land use for the generation facility alone was the only concern, nuclear would be a great option.

However, the fact that the windmills are actually spaced apart and the land can be used for other things at the same time and the fact that the windmills would cost half as much while having no fuel cost, no waste disposal issues, no nuclear proliferation concerns, no question about major accidents affecting thousands or even millions of people, and the fact that they can be built piecemeal and start generating revenue within a year of the project commencing make wind a very attractive proposition.

 

[JasonSB]

Aside from the energy density problem you would still need backup facilities - from fossil fuel plants - to provide energy when the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow.

There’s a few things you’re forgetting:

1. Backup facilities don’t need to be fossil fuel, although they can be. (Gas + solar thermal is a good combination and much better environmentally than coal.)
2. Energy can be stored. The 6 million acres reference I gave already was what was required when you have no backup facilities at all – it relied entirely on molten salt heat storage coupled with the fact that demand for electricity in the US was highly correlated with irradiance.
3. “Baseload power” is a concept that exists only because certain technologies are inflexible, not because it reflects what is actually required.

I’d like to expand on point 3 because it’s really important.

The demand for power fluctuates through a range of about 2.5:1. In other words, the peak power requirement during a hot sunny day in a place like California is 2.5 times greater than in the middle of the night in winter.

Coal-fired power stations and nuclear powerplants really like to produce a constant output, both for technical reasons (it’s actually technically difficult to change the output for both plant types) and economic reasons (coal and nuclear powerplants have relatively high capital costs and finite lifetimes so getting a good cost per kWh generated depends on generating as much as possible during the lifetime of the plant).

Because of this mismatch between supply and demand we have “peaking power generators”, like gas, that follow the load and produce more power when the demand is high and less when it is low. Peak power generators have much higher fuel costs compared to capital costs and they pay for themselves by only selling power when the price is right.

This is why many utilities offer pricing schemes where they charge more for power during peak periods and much less for power during off-peak.

With solar power, because the generating behaviour more closely correlates with demand, the gap between what is being generated and what is being demanded is less, and peaking power generators are actually required less often when using solar than when using so-called “baseload power generators” like coal and nuclear.

Now back to storage: molten salt storage for solar thermal powerplants is really efficient and adds ~15% to the cost of the plant to provide about 15 hours of storage, allowing the plant to operate overnight.

Pumped hydro is the best for long-term storage, and the driving force behind the expansion of pumped hydro was nuclear!

The original purpose of the scheme was to deal with the difficulty that National Grid would have had if the large numbers of nuclear power stations, then planned had been built. These are technically and economically inflexible, i.e. ideally they need to run at full output all of the time, and effectively a home was needed for some of the night time power when the demand for power dropped off. An additional station was planned on Exmoor but was never built since the nuclear programme was cut back.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

Pumped hydro providers (which are basically hydroelectric dams that pump water back into the dam to store electricity as potential energy, then let it flow back down again to convert the potential energy back into electricity) typically buy electricity at night from the coal and nuclear power plants when it is really cheap, and resell it again during the day when it is worth a lot more.

Of couse, we have a long way to go before this becomes an issue – until solar and wind penetration exceeds 20% of the grid, we can just use “grid storage” – i.e., use them to displace other sources of power (just like the German example) which is extremely efficient because you’re not really “storing” energy at all, you’re simply avoiding the generation of energy you don’t need.

The other solution, of course, is overcapacity coupled with a widely distributed, interconnected, hetrogenous network, so a single weather event at a single location doesn’t bring your whole grid down (which is precisely how it works now with coal, nuclear, gas, and hydro – it’s not a new problem).

And if these aren’t enough problems, you have transmission issues, especially with wind turbines, as the farms are generally (no surprise here) placed in remote areas.

The US has transmission problems that need to be solved anyway. High Voltage DC is the solution being used right now and has exceedingly low transmission losses (3% per 1,000 km).

 

[JasonSB]

If you want to argue that we could replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear ones I would agree, but since the greens and the rest of the AGW community isn’t pushing for nuclear reactors - which would alleviate all of their CO2 concerns - I don’t take their concerns seriously.

No surprise there: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1017189

They made two versions of a newspaper article reporting a study on climate change by a group of scientific experts. Both versions reported the same scientific results – that the temperature of the earth is increasing, that humans are the source of this condition, and that this change in the earth’s climate could have disastrous environmental economic consequences. The difference between them was that one used those conclusions to advocate tighter emissions controls, while the other used the same conclusions to advocate revitalising the nation’s nuclear power industry.

Individualists and hierarchs (defined in the paper) who read the nuclear power version were less inclined to dismiss the facts than individualists and hierarchs who read the anti-pollution version even though the factual information and its source were the same in both articles.

In fact, individualists and heirarchs who received the anti-pollution version were even more sceptical of the facts than individualists and heirarchs in the control group who did not read any newspaper story at all – IOW, adding evidence, when that evidence was associated with implications they didn’t like, actually reduced their belief in it!

FWIW: To move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, we are going to have to use everything we can, including nuclear. But nuclear has many problems that don’t just disappear simply because carbon has a price tag – it’s still expensive, about as expensive as solar thermal and much more expensive than wind, and there is only enough known and reasonably assured reserves of uranium in the world at the moment to last 80 years at current consumption rates. Nuclear use would have to grow by a factor of 16 to replace current fossil fuel consumption, at which rate the current reserves would last less than a decade.

Now, of course there are probably reserves out there we don’t know about, and exploration has been hindered due to the low price of uranium and the fact that Russia has been selling off its stockpiles, but it’s still a gamble – why invest many billions to build a plant now that won’t start generating revenue for at least a decade, that relies on a limited resource, and relies on a much higher level of technology than a solar thermal power plant that you can start building in a modular fashion today and start earning revenue from within 12-18 months?

(You might be thinking “Aha! What about fast breeders! They don’t consume much fuel at all!”, and you’d be right – if we used fast breeders then the uranium reserves would last a thousand years, at least. However, fast breeders cost about three times as much as the already-very-expensive conventional nuclear powerplants, making them uncompetitive with solar and especially wind; and fast breeders produce, as a normal byproduct, weapons-grade material. Conventional powerplants do not. Any hope we have of being able to detect countries like Iran trying to enrich their uranium to make it suitable for weapons goes out the window if they start using fast breeders.)

For a time China was also adding one new coal powered plant a week and leads the world - by a large margin - in the number of new nuclear plants she is building.

Right. And guess what? China is adding wind power at a faster rate than it is adding nuclear power!

China doesn’t care about greenies, or citizen protests blocking the construction of nuclear power plants, and it is still betting more on wind than on nuclear.

In 2004 China had 7 GW of nuclear generation capacity. Since then that has increased to 9 GW, and won’t change again until at least 2011/2012, and their target for 2020 is 70-80 GW. (25 GW are currently approved.)

In 2005 China had 1 GW of wind power capacity. Since then that has increased to 25 GW, and their target for 2020 is now 100-150 GW.

Both are dwarfed by hydro electric, of course – Three Gorges Dam all by itself is over 18 GW, twice the entire nuclear industry of China, and Yellow River Dam is 16 GW. China added 20 GW of hydro capacity in 2008 alone, bringing the hydro-electric total to about 165 GW.

The perception that solar or wind can replace traditional power plants is nonsensical.

The perception that they cannot is ignoring the bleeding obvious that they are. Wind power accounted for 42% of all new electrical capacity added to the US electrical system in 2008. It’s hardly a “boutique” energy source.

 

[Biff_Hooper]

Hi Jason,

Thank you for your detailed and comprehensive (even overwhelming) reply.

I come at this as a layman whose last hard science course was in high school, and that was 39 years ago. But I do enjoy reading about scientific issues and have some grounding in the scientific method and the philosophy of science.

I also–living as I do within shouting distance of the Bakken Formation–am starting to enjoy the economic benefits of oil development. There were even some coal projects in our area that were scheduled to be started about now, but which were shelved prior to the 2008 election because of uncertainties as to how CO2 was going to be regulated in the new polictical environment.

In general we inhabitants of the high plains have embraced the economic development the fossil fuel industry has brought to our area and the promise of more. Our neck of the woods is highly dependant on agriculture, and that industry has had its ups and downs (mostly downs since the 80’s), with devastating impact on all the very small towns we have out here.

So when global warming politics started to impact our local economy, I took notice. Forgoing the benefits of fossil fuel energy development is something I would be willing to do if necessary. But is it necessary? Back when cap n trade was a live possiiblity, I asked “What all has to be true before adopting cap n trade makes any sense?” In other words, what are the scientific and policy elements which make the case for imposing cap n trade (or whatever else). It occurred to me that they all have to be true before the proposed remedy can be rationally be adopted. Given that there are uncertainties with each element, it seems to me that the probability that the case has been made must be pretty small.

 

[John21652]

The Martin Luther of Global Warming

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist…
… This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

 

[4elise]

The Martin Luther of Global Warming

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist…
… This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

An interesting article - and one that certainly points to Hal Lewis beliefs - he objects to the ‘poison word incontrovertible’ of those who speak of climate change with his own ‘incontrovertible conclusion’ — the direction (as JasonSB has pointed out with numerous articles, charts and responses) that the ‘certainty’ of the science is in fact moving is to a greater need to act aaas.confex.com/aaas/2010/webprogram/Paper1639.html — true there is ALWAYS a need for further research… and the result of that further research:

“New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected,” strongly supporting the ASC perspective rather than the usual framing of the issue in the U.S. mass media.”

 

[MikeSar]

Dear friends,
This is my first post on this website, thanks for your answers.
I’m a committed Catholic from Sydney, Australia, and last night I was having a good conversation with a friend who is an athiest-humanist. He actually didn’t put the question to me directly, but if he did, I wouldn’t actually have known what to say:
What is the Catholic Church’s position on climate change? Why aren’t more Christian leaders committed to climate change, when the science so clearly points out that it is real and the planet’s fate depends on the climate? Is the answer that we are still not convinced of the science? Or that we are already quite active?
Or that there are more pressing moral issues to be dealt with, such as abortion and other life issues? Or is the answer that the climate is such a big thing, that it is really beyond human control, and something that is really in God’s hands?
Is the answer that the climate will change depending on the degree of sin in the world - perhaps it is changing now because of the unprecedented wholesale change in the abandonment of God in western society?
Thanks for your help, God bless,
Jason.

I do not believe the Catholic Church has a position on Climate Change, it is, in itself a question for science and the Church is not about repeat the problem with Galileo.
Incidentally, Pope John Paul II wrote, to the effect, that the Church was wrong in passing judgement on a purely scientific issue. The good Pope quietly ignored all the falsehoods by Galileo. He did not invent the telescope, his own telescope, was found in the 1900s to have the hidden name of the true inventor Dutchman Hans Lippershey (1608). Also, he did not invent the Solar Centered Heliocentric Theory, he only repeated what the good monk Copernicus had written but the good monk admitted it was his proposal, not a scientific fact. It was not until 1835 that telescopes were good enough to factually prove the helicentric hypothesis. Actually it was a Greek, Seleucus (190 BC) who first proposed it but nobody gives him the credit. All this by way of saying, scientist are often unethical.
However, there is a moral issue in our right to put at risk the survival of the human race. Our actions could, in moral terms, exceed Hitler’s by a factor of one thousand, or more. Does anyone have the right to put humanity at such a deadly risk?
Consider a simpler question. Do we have the obligation to teach the harm from, for example, smoking to children? Can we say, let them smoke and when they have lung cancer, they will know what they should have done? Can we “wash our hands” on that, like Pilatus?
Your ethics and morals is the basis by which YOU will be judged by God, not by me.
However, insofar as Global Warming poses a real threat to my children and your grand children, your indifference has moral implications. Would you be indifferent if some were drinking alcohol in your own home, children that is? I think not.
Yet, to claim that since I do not accept the science of global warming, there is no moral issue, is too flimsy an excuse. Have you read “The Physical Science behind Climate Change” in the Scientific American issue of August, 2007, Pg. 64?
Surely, they have a good reputation in science, right?
At any rate, the only question you have to answer is Who is guilty of inaction?
The fellow that build the oven, the one that lit the fire, the one that brought the Jews to Auschwitz, or only Officer in Charge of the place where Blessed Saints Father Kolbe and Edith Stein (St. Benedicta of the Cross) were incinerated?
My view, with no claim of any authority, indifference can be sin if it causes the death of a single child. To lay waste of the world created by God must be the worst sin possible by anyone.
Want to see current data? Look at the show NOW in PBS and look for the segment on the Ganges River basin. About a billion people depend on one glacier that is retreating one football field in length per year, and has for over 20 years.
Want two more examples? The Russian wildfires and the Pakistani floods. It is a shame there have been no public request to help the destitute in both areas. Is that because of their religion? Is our religion governed by their religion?
By 2020, Glacier Park is expected to lose all their glaciers. There is much more data out there, surf the web and you will find the truth and God IS Truth, He said and we believe.

 

[kimmielittle]

You’re missing the point:

Only if I subscribe to the belief that, “the ends justify the means”. Again, as a Catholic, could you, please, point me to Church teachings that this is moral or ethical?

If you (or Ender) consider their actions bad enough to prove your point, then simply say exactly what they did.

I thought I had been clear. I asked you did they trespass with intent to disrupt? Did they do so knowingly? Did the do damage to property not owned by them? Did they admit to these?

These by definition, are sabotage acts.

Choosing to use a vague emotionally-laden word instead, that covers many possible actions, makes it look like you’re trying to over-dramatise the event to support your case.

Support your case, here please. I gave you definitions of sabotage

the deliberate destruction, disruption, or damage of equipment, a public service, etc, as by enemy agents, dissatisfied employees,etc 2. any similar action or behaviour

Until you prove otherwise, my statement stands.

What ever reasons they hid behind, they admitted to sabotage. Mr Hansen, knowing this, supported their defense / reason. Mr. Hansen endorsed the “ends justify the means” - The “means” was, in this case… sabotage.

The fact that such indirect and arguable evidence is sufficient to convince you of Hansen’s beliefs makes an interesting contrast to your failure to accept AGW based on all the observations and evidence presented so far.

Nice try

As you well know, NONE of your “evidences” have addressed the relationship of IPCC to such outlandish views and (name removed by moderator)ut allowed, by NGO groups - activist groups. Neither, have you explained, successfully, the acts outlined in the Climategate emails. Not that you haven’t tried to excuse the ends justify the means ] them of everything.

Or, the case for ‘sensitivity’ being all over the scale - could it be, because of the values issued feedback’s? And those feedbacks are issued as “positives” And guesstimates, when they could in fact be “Negatives”? Could it be, because, truth be known…it isn’t known?

You see the problem, here? Why should I accept what you say, when you are only trying to “justify” everyone, everything, in association with the AGW movement? If you actually believe in AGW, tell us what you intend to do, or what you think needs be done, to change perspectives, we rightfully have, of those behind IPCC / UN / CRU / AGW…not make feeble attempts at excuses.

,

 

[4elise]

Consider a simpler question. Do we have the obligation to teach the harm from, for example, smoking to children? Can we say, let them smoke and when they have lung cancer, they will know what they should have done? Can we “wash our hands” on that, like Pilatus?

Your ethics and morals is the basis by which YOU will be judged by God, not by me.
However, insofar as Global Warming poses a real threat to my children and your grand children, your indifference has moral implications. Would you be indifferent if some were drinking alcohol in your own home, children that is? I think not.

Yet, to claim that since I do not accept the science of global warming, there is no moral issue, is too flimsy an excuse. Have you read “The Physical Science behind Climate Change” in the Scientific American issue of August, 2007, Pg. 64?
Surely, they have a good reputation in science, right?

At any rate, the only question you have to answer is Who is guilty of inaction?
The fellow that build the oven, the one that lit the fire, the one that brought the Jews to Auschwitz, or only Officer in Charge of the place where Blessed Saints Father Kolbe and Edith Stein (St. Benedicta of the Cross) were incinerated?
My view, with no claim of any authority, **indifference can be sin if it causes the death of a single child. To lay waste of the world created by God must be the worst sin possible by anyone.
**
Want to see current data? Look at the show NOW in PBS and look for the segment on the Ganges River basin. About a billion people depend on one glacier that is retreating one football field in length per year, and has for over 20 years.
Want two more examples? The Russian wildfires and the Pakistani floods. It is a shame there have been no public request to help the destitute in both areas. Is that because of their religion? Is our religion governed by their religion?
By 2020, Glacier Park is expected to lose all their glaciers. There is much more data out there, surf the web and you will find the truth and God IS Truth, He said and we believe.

:flowers:
Thank you for this post - and this is why the Church is speaking to the moral issue - the needs of the poor around the world.

 

[markbrumbaugh]

I do not believe the Catholic Church has a position on Climate Change, it is, in itself a question for science and the Church is not about repeat the problem with Galileo.
Incidentally, Pope John Paul II wrote, to the effect, that the Church was wrong in passing judgement on a purely scientific issue. The good Pope quietly ignored all the falsehoods by Galileo. He did not invent the telescope, his own telescope, was found in the 1900s to have the hidden name of the true inventor Dutchman Hans Lippershey (1608). Also, he did not invent the Solar Centered Heliocentric Theory, he only repeated what the good monk Copernicus had written but the good monk admitted it was his proposal, not a scientific fact. It was not until 1835 that telescopes were good enough to factually prove the helicentric hypothesis. Actually it was a Greek, Seleucus (190 BC) who first proposed it but nobody gives him the credit. All this by way of saying, scientist are often unethical.
However, there is a moral issue in our right to put at risk the survival of the human race. Our actions could, in moral terms, exceed Hitler’s by a factor of one thousand, or more. Does anyone have the right to put humanity at such a deadly risk?
Consider a simpler question. Do we have the obligation to teach the harm from, for example, smoking to children? Can we say, let them smoke and when they have lung cancer, they will know what they should have done? Can we “wash our hands” on that, like Pilatus?
Your ethics and morals is the basis by which YOU will be judged by God, not by me.
However, insofar as Global Warming poses a real threat to my children and your grand children, your indifference has moral implications. Would you be indifferent if some were drinking alcohol in your own home, children that is? I think not.
Yet, to claim that since I do not accept the science of global warming, there is no moral issue, is too flimsy an excuse. Have you read “The Physical Science behind Climate Change” in the Scientific American issue of August, 2007, Pg. 64?
Surely, they have a good reputation in science, right?
At any rate, the only question you have to answer is Who is guilty of inaction?
The fellow that build the oven, the one that lit the fire, the one that brought the Jews to Auschwitz, or only Officer in Charge of the place where Blessed Saints Father Kolbe and Edith Stein (St. Benedicta of the Cross) were incinerated?
My view, with no claim of any authority, indifference can be sin if it causes the death of a single child. To lay waste of the world created by God must be the worst sin possible by anyone.
Want to see current data? Look at the show NOW in PBS and look for the segment on the Ganges River basin. About a billion people depend on one glacier that is retreating one football field in length per year, and has for over 20 years.
Want two more examples? The Russian wildfires and the Pakistani floods. It is a shame there have been no public request to help the destitute in both areas. Is that because of their religion? Is our religion governed by their religion?
By 2020, Glacier Park is expected to lose all their glaciers. There is much more data out there, surf the web and you will find the truth and God IS Truth, He said and we believe.

Mike…you may be interested in knowing that ice has been retreating in North American since the peak of the last ice age. I don’t think there is much we could have done about it then, nor now. Actually, wait until the next cycle restarts. Then, as we approach another ice age, where we may have as much as 3 miles of ice over North America, we WILL have a problem…Well, except that Glacier Park will have glaciers again.

 

[JasonSB]

Only if I subscribe to the belief that, “the ends justify the means”. Again, as a Catholic, could you, please, point me to Church teachings that this is moral or ethical?

You still don’t get it.

Rather than hide behind vague and emotive words, simply state the facts. If your conclusions about what those facts imply are correct, others will come to the same conclusions. You don’t need to over-dramatise to support your case if your case has merit.

I thought I had been clear. I asked you did they trespass with intent to disrupt? Did they do so knowingly? Did the do damage to property not owned by them? Did they admit to these? These by definition, are sabotage acts.

And I thought I had been clear – just because something can be described by some general term doesn’t always mean it should be; using vague and emotionally-laden words instead of stating the facts makes it appear you are trying to generate an emotional response that you don’t think the facts alone would generate.

If the claim that “Hansen endorses sabotage” boils down to a statement that “Hansen is willing to testify as an expert witness in cases where protestors knowingly disrupt the normal operations of coal-fired power plants and even damage them by painting graffiti on them” then I’m afraid the reality is quite different to the picture the original claim painted in my mind. If that’s the best you can do to support your opinion of Hansen then it helps me calibrate your views a lot more than it helps me judge Hansen’s.

As you well know, NONE of your “evidences” have addressed the relationship of IPCC to such outlandish views and (name removed by moderator)ut allowed, by NGO groups - activist groups.

Because there are no “outlandish views”. I haven’t seen any evidence from you of anything other than suggestions that just because Greenpeace donate money to scientific research there must be something nefarious going on, while at the same time ignoring the blantant requests for money from vested interests by the people who create the arguments that you copy-and-paste without understanding.

Neither, have you explained, successfully, the acts outlined in the Climategate emails.

Sure I have. You must have missed my posts. Which acts outlined in the Climategate emails do you think still need explaining?

Not that you haven’t tried to excuse the ends justify the means ] them of everything.

I haven’t tried to excuse them of anything. I agreed that they withheld information from people they didn’t want to share information with. That’s a simple matter of fact. It’s also a simple matter of fact that they did have confidentiality agreements with certain data providers, which have been publicly released so everyone can see that it’s true, but I actually see that as besides the point: It doesn’t particularly bother me that they refused to co-operate with certain people because nobody needs that information to verify their results and those people were not asking for the information so that they could verify their results.

If there was no other way to check what they were saying and they were asking us to trust what they were saying anyway then I would have reservations, but the simple fact of the matter is that anybody can check what they have been saying and they have been able to since the very beginning. I think it is better for people to independently analyse the raw data and arrive at their own conclusions than to download somebody else’s source code, run it once or twice, verify it gives the same results, and move on.

The bottom line is this: If the method described in the papers could not be applied to publicly-available data to derive the same results, then we would have reason to be sceptical and we would want to investigate to find out why. But since they can, and have been applied multiple times by many different people (including “skeptics”), the only motive for bothering them is disruption and I have no sympathy if it’s unsuccessful.

 

[JasonSB]

Or, the case for ‘sensitivity’ being all over the scale - could it be, because of the values issued feedback’s?

No, the uncertainty is a signal to noise ratio problem due to the uncertainties in forcings and temperatures. The values for the feedbacks aren’t an “(name removed by moderator)ut” into those analyses, it’s the overall change in climate (which obviously therefore already includes all feedbacks) in response to the overall change in forcing that derives the value for the sensitivity.

And those feedbacks are issued as “positives” And guesstimates, when they could in fact be “Negatives”? Could it be, because, truth be known…it isn’t known?

No. With the exception of clouds, the known-but-unaccounted-for feedbacks are all positive, and they are obviously going to be positive.

This isn’t even hard to understand so I wish you’d at least try.

Consider the frozen methane in the permafrost. As the permafrost melts, the frozen methane escapes into the atmosphere. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Warming causes melting permafronst causes methane to escape causes more warming: positive feedback.

What about the ice sheets? Ice has a high albedo, reflecting away a large proportion of the sun’s energy before it is absorbed. As the ice melts, the underlying surface is exposed, and the underlying surface has a lower albedo, causing more of the sun’s energy to be absorbed. Warming causes melting ice causes more radiation to be absorbed causes more warming: positive feedback.

(Before anyone gets excited, there’s a difference between a positive feedback, which has a factor greater than 0, and a runaway positive feedback, which has a factor greater than 1. Values between 0 and 1 imply amplification of the signal, resulting in a temperature higher than it would have been without feedbacks.)

They’re all like this, except clouds. If clouds increase it could go two ways:

1. More warming causes more clouds causes higher albedo causes more of the sun’s energy to be reflected before it is absorbed causing less warming. (Clouds during the day tend to cool.)
2. More warming causes more clouds causes enhanced greenhouse effect causes more warming. (Clouds at night tend to warm.)

Right now nobody is sure if more warming will cause more clouds, and, if it does, whether it will be a positive feedback or a negative one overall. Either way, it can’t change the overall climate sensitivity of about 3C per doubled CO2 because that’s the overall measured sensitivity with all feedbacks already included. As Richard Alley’s talk mentioned, even going back half a billion years you still get a climate sensitivity of about 2.8 C/doubling of CO2, and conditions have varied enormously during that time.

You see the problem, here? Why should I accept what you say, when you are only trying to “justify” everyone, everything, in association with the AGW movement?

Justify that, please. My belief was that I have been presenting direct empirical evidence, theory, and logic to explain why I accept AGW. In each case I have provided links to supporting evidence that ultimately leads back to peer-revied scientific literature.

You must have missed all those posts.

You must have also missed all my attempts to get you to understand what I was actually saying, and what Gavin’s climate model means, and where you can access the raw data for yourself so you can check for yourself what it says.

I have even linked to “skeptics” who say the same thing.

I don’t want you to “accept” what I have to say, I want you to learn how to convince yourself, and learn how to distinguish between reliable sources of information and those with obvious agendas.

Sadly, any attempt to show you support for a statement is erroneously described as an appeal to authority, and any attempt to point out the flaws in an unreliable source is erroneously described as an ad hominem.

If you actually believe in AGW, tell us what you intend to do, or what you think needs be done, to change perspectives, we rightfully have, of those behind IPCC / UN / CRU / AGW…not make feeble attempts at excuses.

I’ve done everything I can reasonably think of. Perhaps you can tell me what it would take to convince you that the perspective that you think you “rightfully” have is completely wrong? What sort of argument is required to make you see that your view that PR campaigns by vested interests are inherently more trustworthy than actual science until the money spent on those campaigns exceeds the money spent on the science is fundamentally flawed?

On the latter front I have pointed out that most of the money is spent on very expensive equipment, like satellites, to make measurements with no a-priori expectations of what those measurements will reveal. I have pointed out that none of the money is allocated based on whether the research claims it will “prove” or “disprove” AGW. I have linked to articles where “skeptical” scientists have said they have no problem accessing research funding. I have explained how researchers get paid the same salary regardless. And yet you assign more credibility to the statements put out by PR firms who actively seek funding from vested interests to pay for those PR activities than you do to the peer-reviewed science that results from that science funding.

If you can’t even begin to see what is wrong with that picture then I honestly don’t think there is anything I could say that would make you “accept” AGW.

 

[JasonSB]

Mike…you may be interested in knowing that ice has been retreating in North American since the peak of the last ice age.

Just because lightning causes bushfires doesn’t mean that arson isn’t a problem.

Your information is also incorrect. The retreat from the last ice age actually peaked about 6,000 years ago and glaciers had been advancing in fits and starts since then as the world cooled from the Holocene Maximum, reaching a maximum in the late 19th/early 20th century, before starting to retreat again – this time thanks to AGW. (E.g. web.cortland.edu/barclayd/publications/QSR_2009.pdf)

The >20% mass loss of glaciers worldwide since 1945 is easily explained by AGW. As is the fact that the mass loss from 1996 to 2005 is more than double the mass loss from 1986 to 1995 and over four times the mass loss from 1976 to 1985.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Global_Glacier_Mass_Change.gif

skepticalscience.com/himalayan-glaciers-growing-intermediate.htm

 

[JasonSB]

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
…]
Hal

John21652,

Just because thousands and thousands of scientists in different fields working on different problems all arrive at a conclusion that you disagree with does not make them members of a vast conspiracy; and just because a handful of scientists agree with a belief you hold does not make them right.

Hal Lewis has, to the best of my knowledge, never published a paper on climate change, and the only publications I can confirm he contributed to date to the 1980s and before. That puts him into the second category from the left in this graph:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/poll_scientists.gif

and not even represented in this one:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Consensus_publications.gif

Since nearly 10% of the people in that category could be called “skeptics”, the very fact of his existence doesn’t prove anything.

But what about what he says?

Firstly, he describes global warming as a “scam” with “(literally) trillions of dollars driving it”, corrupting scientists.

“(literally)” means he wants to make it clear he is not exaggerating. Even kimmielittle would only go so far as to say “billions”, and that includes a lot of money for AGW-agnostic equipment like satellites. Even GISS only gets about $10 million per year.

So, the amount of money is ludicrously overblown. What about the claims of corruption?

To corrupt scientists, the scientists would have to believe that they need to give the right answers or they will be denied funding. Yet a “skeptical” scientist had this to say:

Professor Begemann’s claim that on universities it is not possible to present a different opinion about climate change in any case isn’t true for the University of Amsterdam. In my professional environment so far there nobody has ever tried to correct me (a sceptic with an opinion based on strong arguments)

In the past 10 years, neither did i ever have a problem with finding funding for research on the role of the sun on climate changes in the past. It is (also) because of this research i started having an alternative opinion on what’s going on with the present-day climate : i still believe that natural variability is much more important than changes caused by mankind.

Dr Bas van Geel, UvA

Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Roy Spencer, William Gray, and plenty of other “skeptical” scientists also seem to have no difficulty attracting substantial funding; indeed, given Pat Michaels simply asked a group of power companies for money and they gave him $150,000 in response, and ExxonMobil-funded think tank American Enterprise Institute was offering $10,000 to each IPCC scientist if they would simply write a paper undermining AGW, I would say that being a “skeptic” is far more lucrative. It certainly makes you far more prominent!

And as I already pointed out, if you’re a real scientist working at a real university, you don’t actually get to keep the grant money yourself!

profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/taking-the-money-for-granted-%E2%80%93-part-i/

profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/taking-the-money-for-granted-%E2%80%93-part-ii/

So not only is the amount of money ludicrously overblown, actually getting your hands on some money does not require you to accept AGW!

Yet he offered absolutely no evidence to support his attacks on the credibility or honesty of the scientists he denigrates with such gusto – his entire thesis is that they disagree with him and they get (literally) trillions of dollars therefore they must be corrupt. QED.

Next he claims Montford’s book “organizes the facts very well”. Really? realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/

Of course, long before ClimateGate he had already managed to convince himself the whole thing was a hoax and a scam. For example, in 2009 he signed a letter to Congress claiming that they are being decieved about global warming: examiner.com/weather-in-baltimore/read-scientists-open-letter-to-congress-you-are-being-decieved-about-global-warming

In that letter they repeat the well-known fallacy that the world was cooling, the obvious red herring that climate models did not “predict” this, and the ridiculous idea that if meteorologists cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance nobody can predict climate for the rest of the century. That’s like saying I cannot predict that summer will be hotter than winter or that Miami’s annual average is higher than New York’s because I cannot predict the weather next week; it demonstrates a lack of intellectual sophistication that is completely unexpected in someone of those supposed credentials.

Interestingly, back in 2009 there were only “billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken” – apparently someone has found 1,000 times as much money to bribe climate scientists with in the last 15 months!

And, of course, back in December of last year, Lewis was co-author of a letter to the members of the APS (co-authored by none other than a former Manager of Strategic Planning at ExxonMobil) asking them to urge APS to withdraw its Policy Statement “based on admittedly corrupted science”. Apparently, since they did not, he now views the APS itself as corrupt as well.

It seems that everyone is corrupt except him, and the only way to prove you are not is to hold the same views that he holds. As 4elise already noted, his conviction that he is right seems at odds with his concern about the use of the word “incontrovertible”.

 

[John21652]

One of the world’s most famous AGW advocates is Scientist Tom Flannery, who has spent the last decade flying around the globe preaching doom and gloom and quuoting from the “computer models”. In a 2007 articlehe stated, again backed up by the ‘computer modelling’, that Australia’s drought was not a drought, because droughts are transient, and that Australia had to now come to terms with a ‘new climate’. Oh, such doom and gloom. He ignored the historical data which showed that such droughts had occured before and with equal severity. Nope, he just had to preach doom and gloom. He pushed hard for desalinisation plants in the major capital cities, telling all who would listen that the populations faced severe water shortages unless urgent action was taken.

Last week, near Brisbane in Queensland, a brand new desal plant was commissioned and handed over to the state government. There’s just one catch. Queeensland has had its normal monsoon rains return and with a vengeance. In 2007 Flannery said they were lost forever, based on the computer modelling! Right now, wet season rains have filled dams and there is enough water to last until 2018 even if it doesn’t rain again! Read about it here ! The real irony is the new desal plant coming online only lat week. Oh, and the computer modelling which Flannery says can’t explain a lot of things. But I posted that earlier, didn’t I.

I’ll show you how myths are spread. Read this interview with film maker George Miller. If you recall, he made the animated hit ‘Happy Feet’. In this interview he makes outrageous claims about Sydney’s real estate being threatened by rising sea levels, of how Australia has the highest skin cancer rate in the world and of how Australia has no ozone!! Well, the hole in the ozone is over the Antarctic, which is a long way south of Australia. Sydney harbour sea levels have not risen. In fact, on the south coast of Tasmania, there is a tide mark that was chiselled into a rock by early British Naval officers. Today it shows no sign of having been submerged by rising sea levels. As for the skin cancer bit, he fails to mention that statistically, Australians spend more time out doors than any other people and of course the climate is hot. However, never let the facts get in the way of a good myth!! Ironically, Miller wants to make another Mad Max film and he wants to re-film it around the barren wastelands of western New South Wales, If you read this article, what was once a barren wasteland is now a “wonderful flower garden”.