Is Pope Francis right on climate change?

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ferdgoodfellow said:
In general, yes. But you have to admit that are circumstances where individual scientists, and even entire communities of them, should not be trusted. For example, let’s imagine that we are on a jury where Michael Mann has been called as an expert witness. He has been called to testify on the unprecedented warming in the latter part of the 20th century. He has been qualified as expert witness by citing all his degrees, publications, status as an IPCC lead author, etc. He gives his testimony and cites his studies and the work of all his colleagues. He then delivers the money quote: The warming in the latter part of the 20th century was unprecedented in 1,000-2,000 years.

But then via cross-examination and the testimony of other witnesses we learn the following:
  1. He materially misrepresented his data and methods in his famous 1998 Hockey Stick study.
  2. He was guilty of conduct unbecoming a scientist in that he impeded efforts to replicate his study.
  3. He did not disclose results which contradicted his conclusions and he spoke falsely about the fact that his reconstructions failed key verification tests.
  4. Two expert panels, including one very friendly to him (the NAS panel), agreed that his his hockey stick was an artifact of his faulty statistical methods.
  5. The NAS panel also dinged him for using certain proxies (bristlecone pine) which are inappropriate for temperature reconstructions.
  6. He continued to use bristlecone proxies in subsequent studies.
  7. He encouraged a fellow scientist to delete emails in order to thwart a FOIA request.
  8. He conspired with other scientists to prevent skeptical articles from being published in journals.
  9. The paleo-community, of which he is the undisputed leader, is very close-knit and insular. Friends’ review each other’s work.
  10. There is a culture of cherry picking the data.
  11. Mann’s colleagues all follow Mann’s lead and stonewall efforts to audit their work.
  12. They all tend to use the same data over and over again.
    and so on.
Given all this, wouldn’t you, as an honest juror, have doubts about the trustworthiness of Mann’s testimony?
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When I passed on some gossip some 30 years ago to my husband’s uncle, who was a parish priest in India, he told me this fable:

There was a man who saw another man vomiting and he told a 3rd man, “His vomit was a black as a crow.” The 3rd man passed it on to another man, who passed it on to another man, and so on, until the story became, “He vomited crows.”
 
Hi Lynn,

Your husband is from India? What part? My wife and I will be travelling to India in November. Among other places, we will visit Goa and Kerala. Any recommendations?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by ferdgoodfellow View Post
Sure. But we have at least established in principle how a scientist can be discredited to the point where we don’t trust his testimony.

Leaf replied:
I never doubted that point for a minute.
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So would you also agree that a community of scientists can be similarly discredited?
 
ferdgoodfellow said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by ferdgoodfellow View Post
Sure. But we have at least established in principle how a scientist can be discredited to the point where we don’t trust his testimony.

Leaf replied:

So would you also agree that a community of scientists can be similarly discredited?
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It is much less likely than a few of them being discredited.
 
Karen107 said:
Because the rainforests are disappearing and not replenished and places that used to be sustainable areas for animals and humans have now become dry dustbowls with little replenishment of fresh water and lack of vegetation. And what little supplies of water that is available is often toxic from human or animal waste or chemicals. The poor don’t have access to modern filtration systems so they need help and education on how to obtain clean water sent out to them at a reasonable cost or there are heavy impacts on the city or many dead, children being the most vulnerable.
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Poor farming practices, pollution and corrupt/inept governance, as well as wars, have much more to do with what you mention here. Of course the Pope is absolutely right that the poor are more affected by all of these and more. BUT all the remedies proposed so far for so-called “manmade” global warming do little or nothing toward their (stated) goal of actually reducing CO2 emissions. Would be much more effective to plant trees and stop the rainforest destruction as well as poor farming practice. Besides wasting LOTS of money on the climate change “remedies” it’s the less advertised MAIN goal of population reduction and control that is the most dangerous (especially to the poor). What’s to stop the wealth - redistributors of the climate-change who have large governments to back them up, from concentrating on their main goal of population decrease and control? Especially when their remedies to climate change are useless and waste money that could help the poor?
 
Zoltan_Cobalt said:
Too late for that now…Real scientists have concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.

I recall that the earth has built up heat before…and cooled down…many times in it’s billion year lifespan…with or without man.

That is assuming that your idea of an unhealthy lifestyle is the cause of the “illness”.

No, I believe that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. The one who speaks of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
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EXACTLY! Also note the utter hypocrisy of the would be masters like Al Gore - Carbon footprint like a small city…just him!
 
Zoltan_Cobalt said:
Too late for that now…Real scientists have concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong…
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Where there’s life there’s hope. We must never fail to keep striving to prevent harms & save lives.

There is no silver bullet for this problem of AGW. It requires many strategies from all people.

One thing to keep in mind is that the earth systems – the flora of the earth on land and in the oceans – draw down about half of the CO2 we emit. So the aim is for us to do our part to reduce worldwide by at least half, which means the richer nations need to reduce by more in order that the poorer nations can live decent and healthy lives with adequate energy to accomplish that.

One prong is energy & resource efficiency and conservation, which could help Americans to reduce their GHG emissions by 30 to 50%.

There is renewable energy, and we are nowhere near capacity for that.

And there are various ways of helping to draw down CO2, such as thru biochar and peridotite, etc. More on this later…
 
Plant trees and don’t pollute! No problem! seriously! But then, no profits for the agw crowd and the governmental empire builders who give them their grants!!! It’s really NOT about fixing CO2. Follow the money!
 
Okay, enough ranting against the IPCC. Its reports are wonderful and tremendous works put together by 100s of top scientists presenting 1000s of very good studies and data on many 1000s of pages in 3 major sections – “Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis,” “Working Group II: The Impacts, Adaptations, and Vulnerabilities,” and “Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change.”

It is the gold standard of climate science.

I suggest that each one of you who is knocking it to read ALL its pages and all of the 1000s of studies it cites on which it is based, both the 2014 and 2007 reports, then give your honest opinion. And remember God is watching and I mean honest opinion. See ipcc.ch/

Have the writers of the reports made a few mistakes? Yes. It is absolutely ridiculous to expect them to be God, perfect and omniscient. When the mistakes were pointed out – and they were pointed out by climate scientists, not by denialist industry hacks – they were corrected.

I myself found the most famous mistake well before anyone else, because shortly after the 2007 report came out I was writing a paper on CC impacts on food productivity. I read on pg. 493 of “Chapter 10 - Asia” of the WGII Impacts section that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, and was shocked, because some years earlier I was working on a futuristic screenplay and had asked some climate scientists when the glaciers would all melt and the sea level rise and they told me 100s of years. It takes a very long time for all that ice to melt, even if the world becomes very hot within a shorter time.

So I looked up the source of that claim – a World Wildlife Fund report. Now usually those types of reports by NGOs are pretty good, using good sources to synthesize information for the public about issues. So I downloaded the report and looked up its source for that 2035 claim – New Scientist, which is not a high-standard academic journal (it gets into cutting edge issues but not always backed by vigorous studies).

At that point I decided not to use that claim in my own peer-reviewed article. Then sometime later a glaciologist (not a CC denialist) found that error and brought it to public attention. In fact that is in line with the way science works – scientists find flaws and errors and do better work, which supersedes previous works.

The upshot is NO HARM DONE by that claim that was caught by the glaciologist BEFORE it became widespread and public. No one, including myself, actually used that 2035 claim or presented it to the public as fact, because no one except me and the glaciologist who found it even knew about that claim. Why? Because no one really gives a #%&# about CC’s impact on Asia or whether people there live or die. THAT IS THE REAL SAD STORY of “glaciergate,” not that a mistake was made on pg. 493 of the Asia chapter in the WGII section.

Furthermore the glaciers ARE melting pretty fast for glaciers – that is not in dispute. And since AGW is a moral issue it doesn’t really matter from a moral standpoint when they melt and fail to provide water for agriculture, causing mass starvation. The deeds we are doing now by ensuring that happens are the main issue – our faults, short-comings and sins – not which generations in the future these will mostly harm. People who will be living in 2300 and 2400 are just as precious in God’s eyes as people living in the 2000s.

Is Pope Francis right on climate change and using such sources as IPCC reports? Absolutely!
 
Hi Leaf,

On discrediting the climate science establishment, Part 1:

Following the principal of “the fish rots at the head,” I would begin with an expose’ of the IPCC. The development of climate science in recent decades cannot be explained apart from this organization. No less an authority than Lynn (see above) calls the IPCC the gold standard. President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, tells us that the IPCC is the source of “the most important conclusions” about climate change and that these conclusions rest on: “…an immense edifice of painstaking studies published in the world’s leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. They have been vetted and documented in excruciating detail by the largest, longest, costliest, most international, most interdisciplinary, and most thorough formal review of a scientific topic ever conducted.” Other bodies have weighed in on global warming from time to time, but only the IPCC has undertaken such a massive, systematic, comprehensive, world-wide, and long term effort. So the IPCC has positioned itself as the premiere authority on the state of climate science, the world’s most expert witness, if you will.

I would drag Rajendra Pachauri out of retirement and put him through the wringer. See the cross-x of Dr. P early in this thread. I would call investigative journalist Donna Laframboise and have her testify. Donna is a one-woman wrecking crew when it comes to destroying the scientific pretensions of the IPCC. It is easy to show the bias of the IPCC. After all, from its inception its purpose was to serve a climate treaty dedicated to finding human CO2 emissions guilty of causing catastrophic global warming. It has acted in accordance with its bias in ways too numerous to count.

Also helpful in demolishing the credibility of the IPCC would be tireless citizen investigators like Stephen McIntyre, the debunker of the Hockey Stick. The Hockey Stick scandal richly illustrates the corrupt practices inherent in the IPCC’s review process, normal peer review, and the paleo community in general.

And of course we would drag in all the IPCC bigwigs and insiders, the perpetrators of “Hide the Decline”, and use their own emails to show how they manipulated data, conspired to evade FOIA requests, tamper with the integrity of journals…

For good measure we would have the InterAcademy Council testify about all the defects in the IPCC process they found during their review and how few of their recommendations have been actually followed by the IPCC.

Anyway, you get the idea.

to be continued
 
I should have said, with respect to the IPCC, “The fish rots from the head.”
 
lynnvinc said:
Where there’s life there’s hope. We must never fail to keep striving to prevent harms & save lives.
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I agree. But I don’t agree with your solution to a non-existent problem
There is no silver bullet for this problem of AGW. It requires many strategies from all people.
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I would agree…IF it were a problem.
One thing to keep in mind is that the earth systems – the flora of the earth on land and in the oceans – draw down about half of the CO2 we emit. So the aim is for us to do our part to reduce worldwide by at least half, which means the richer nations need to reduce by more in order that the poorer nations can live decent and healthy lives with adequate energy to accomplish that.
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This reminds me of the United Nations Kyoto Protocol Extortion Racket. I remember representatives from developing nations demanding that Europe and North America foot the bill for the lion’s share of reducing carbon emissions, while developing countries be allowed unlimited emissions, presumably until reaching economic parity with the West.

Now if I understand the UNKPER correctly:… The world as we know it is in danger of being destroyed (according to Al Gore and UN IPPC) unless carbon emissions are greatly reduced, but the cost of reducing these emissions should be borne by industrialized nations and developing nations can continue to create carbon emissions until they achieve economic parity, or at least have their initiatives to reduce carbon emissions paid for by wealthier countries. (?)

Really…if the situation were as dire as the climate change hysterics claim, then it wouldn’t really matter who pays for the carbon emission reductions, so long as there is a dramatic reduction. Seems to me that the United Nations is not about climate change. It is about a massive transfer of wealth from industrialized countries to developing countries.
One prong is energy & resource efficiency and conservation, which could help Americans to reduce their GHG emissions by 30 to 50%.
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IF that is necessary…
There is renewable energy, and we are nowhere near capacity for that.
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True.
And there are various ways of helping to draw down CO2, such as thru biochar and peridotite, etc. More on this later…
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I have no idea what biochar and peridotite, are…but I do know what President Ronald Reagan said: “Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources”.
 
ferdgoodfellow said:
Hi Leaf,

On discrediting the climate science establishment, Part 1:

Following the principal of “the fish rots at the head,” I would begin with an expose’ of the IPCC. The development of climate science in recent decades cannot be explained apart from this organization. No less an authority than Lynn (see above) calls the IPCC the gold standard. President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, tells us that the IPCC is the source of “the most important conclusions” about climate change and that these conclusions rest on: “…an immense edifice of painstaking studies published in the world’s leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. They have been vetted and documented in excruciating detail by the largest, longest, costliest, most international, most interdisciplinary, and most thorough formal review of a scientific topic ever conducted.” Other bodies have weighed in on global warming from time to time, but only the IPCC has undertaken such a massive, systematic, comprehensive, world-wide, and long term effort.
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Which is not surprising, given that climate change is their only mission, and they enjoy world-wide support. But if the IPCC is the driver of a fraud, then wouldn’t you think that when the “other bodies” you mentioned did weigh in, they would all be saying “Whoa there! The IPCC is dead wrong.” Does no scientist outside of the IPCC agree with them?
So the IPCC has positioned itself as the premiere authority on the state of climate science, the world’s most expert witness, if you will.
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But not the only expert witness.
I would drag Rajendra Pachauri out of retirement and put him through the wringer. See the cross-x of Dr. P early in this thread. I would call investigative journalist Donna Laframboise and have her testify. Donna is a one-woman wrecking crew when it comes to destroying the scientific pretensions of the IPCC. It is easy to show the bias of the IPCC…
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As I said before, I will not be dragged into a debate over the merits of the IPCC, so stop beating that dead horse. The scientists that work for the IPCC are first and foremost scientists, interested, as I said, in their reputations more than anything else. It strains credulity to imagine how a few ideologically corrupt leaders of the IPCC could coerce all these scientists to support a position they know in their heart of hearts is wrong, and it likely to lead to their disgrace when it proven wrong, as it most surely will, because that’s how science is self-correcting, and all scientists know that.
 
Zoltan_Cobalt said:
Then they are fools. As are those who followed Chicken Little…🙂
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Well this time the climate deniers are being misguided because our earth is already experiencing climate change due to global warming and it’s only going to get worse.
 
Zoltan_Cobalt said:
In some cases…yes. Other times proved beneficial. The mild summers and winters of the Medieval Warm Period led to good harvests in much of Europe. Wheat cultivation and vineyards flourished at far higher latitudes and elevations than today. Norse colonies in Iceland and Greenland prospered.

That was followed by the Little Ice Age. Alpine glaciers advanced far below their previous (and present) limits, obliterating farms, churches, and villages in Switzerland, France, and elsewhere. Frequent cold winters and cool, wet summers ruined wine harvests and led to crop failures and famines over much of northern and central Europe. The North Atlantic cod fisheries declined as ocean temperatures fell in the 17th century. The Norse colonies on the coast of Greenland were cut off from the rest of Norse civilization during the early 15th century as pack ice and storminess increased in the North Atlantic. The western colony of Greenland collapsed through starvation, and the eastern colony was abandoned. In addition, Iceland became increasingly isolated from Scandinavia.

All of this in the last 1900 years…not millions of years. Also since this happened before I bought my first SUV…what caused it?

:
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The causes for global warming in the past were natural, the causes now are unnatural. And the global warming will far surpass any global warming in the past which makes sense because our carbon gases in the atmosphere far surpass any in the past. It will not make our grape crops better, it will devastate them as already is being seen. California now is experiencing record drought… So there will be competition for water. grapes or people. I say people will get it and will pay top dollar for it.
 
Hi Leaf,

U sed:
But if the IPCC is the driver of a fraud, then wouldn’t you think that when the “other bodies” you mentioned did weigh in, they would all be saying “Whoa there! The IPCC is dead wrong.” Does no scientist outside of the IPCC agree with them?
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I am sure there are lots of individual scientists who support the IPCC position. There are even a whole bunch of other bodies that agree with them, or at least their leadership supports the IPCC no matter what the rank and file say. For example, the American Meteorlogical Association. But do they do anything but parrot the same findings. For example, the National Climate Assessment. Or are they so intertwined that one can’t tell one from the other. For example, NOAA, which has a large number of its scientists who participate in the IPCC. Anyway, you get the idea.

The point is governments fund most of the climate science research and everyone knows which way the funding winds blow. And it is no small matter that the Obama Admin is very pro climate alarmism.

And even though there is no profit in it, there are lots of scientists who are outside the IPCC who voice their dissent. Deniers, they call them. Let me name names: Freeman Dyson, Robert Carter, Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen, Vincent Gray, Nir Shaviv, Henrick Svensmark, …
 
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