Skeptical Science Comments

Comment on CO2 levels during the late Ordovician

Marcus

From everything I've read on the subject, though, the temperatures at which glaciation occurred during the Ordovician Era were higher than the temperatures at which similar glaciation occurred during the entirety of the Quaternary Era.

Comment on CO2 levels during the late Ordovician

nerndt

Can someone please give the real scientific explanation why CO2 drives global warming? Correlation does not guarantee cause. Put C)2 in a large glass chamber and measure the change in the rate of heat dissipation compared to nitrogen and it will not alter the rate of heat transferrance. Can someone create a valid scientific experiment to prove or disprove this?

Thanks.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

gallopingcamel

Tom Dayton (#5), consensus is unimportant in science. I cannot say it any better than the first Einstein quote in (#62). You might claim that there was consensus about the validity of Newton's "Laws of Motion" for almost 300 years until Einstein's theories of Relativity were published.

(#63), demeanor is not the issue; it is what these scientists say that determines their credibility.

John Cook, you do a good job defending Trenberth but I am unconvinced. On the very first page of the paper you cited, the author states:
"Given that global warming is unequivocally happening".

I agree that this is slightly better than Bob Watson who assures us that "climate change" is happening. He can hardly be wrong on that one!

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

Tom Dayton

gallopingcamel, once again you have used your perception of people's demeanor in TV appearances as "evidence" against the objective scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change. That is inappropriate for this Skeptical Science site.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

gallopingcamel

While the number of scientist heads does not matter, the quality of the heads does. Let's consider a couple of prominent scientists who are much quoted on AGW issues.

Take a look at Bob Watson defending the IPCC on TV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzb8FljvGGI&feature=player_embedded

Professor Robinson expresses complete certainty in a way that shows he does not understand what science is about. Watson could use a lesson in humility and clarity from a great scientist:

âNo amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.â Albert Einstein

Here is a quote from Kevin Trenberth (UCAR), October 12, 2009:
"We canât account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we canât."

This is in sharp contrast to Trenberth's public statements.

Albert Einstein has something to say about integrity:
"Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters."

Comment on iPhone app version 1.1 - now with search, image viewer and Twitter!

sammysoul

Phantastic app!!!
Just one little thing that should be changed is the format of the bit.ly links. Instead of starting with "www.bit.ly" they should start with "http://bit.ly" instead. That way Twitter will format them into a hyperlink. Right now the links are not clickable in Twitter, which is a bit of a nuisance, especially since we all want for as many people as possible to easily download the app.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

yocta

RE: 54 suibhne lol, It may seem that way but I don't. I have enormous respect for Paul Ehrlich and James Lovelock... i'm just thinking it just might take a generational change for skeptics to lose their weighting in the mainstream media.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

Ned

chriscanaris writes: However, I accept that people have the right to ignore me sometimes with serious consequences.

Well, one could make the argument that there are some fields where the consequences of ignoring the experts are worse than others. In this particular field, our current policy of ignoring (or worse yet attacking) the experts is likely to lead to increased misery for future generations especially in countries more vulnerable to environmental change, and to a drastically increased rate of extinction worldwide.

That said, I agree with you that no group or profession should exist without scrutiny and oversight. The question is, what are reasonable mechanisms for that kind of oversight? Scientists working in universities are subject to the review of their departmental colleagues, tenure committees, deans, external funding agencies, etc. Scientists working for the private sector or for government have their own versions of these.

What's unique (and problematic) is the fact that the entire field of climate science is being attacked (not merely "scrutinized") by people who are actively hostile to the fundamental nature of the field as it exists today. I know there are those who are sincerely motivated by honest skepticism or curiosity. But it should be obvious to everyone by now that those voices are far outnumbered by others who are convinced that the whole climate science thing is a scam and everyone associated with it needs to be run out of town on a rail.

Near the beginning of his talk at AGU last December, Richard Alley showed an email that was sent to the administration of his university:

"Dr. Alley's work on ... CO2 levels in ice cores has confirmed that CO2 lags earth's temperature.... This one scientific fact alone proves that CO2 is not the cause of recent warming, yet ... Dr Alley continue[s] to mislead the scientific community and the general public about 'global warming' ... I await your prompt response confirming that an investigation into ... Dr Alley's activities will ... start prior to the end of this year. (His) crimes against the scientific community, [Pennsylvania State University], the citizens of this great country, and the citizens of the world are significant and must be dealt with severely to stop such shameful activities in the future."

Now, the author of that email might be dismissed as one lone and unimportant individual ... except that over the past few years, and increasingly now, these kinds of attacks are becoming mainstreamed in the media and on the internet.

Ultimately, in a democracy, "scrutiny" of every profession comes from the public at large. But most people have no direct experience or interactions with climate scientists, and so their views are shaped by the media, blogs, etc. In the current environment, a large and growing fraction of that "information environment" is being shaped by voices that have a gut-level hatred for the entire field and want to see it and everyone working in it utterly destroyed. That's rather different from the normal social oversight that most fields and professions are subject to

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

Mike

I think the question of political affiliation is quite valid.

Political influence and interference doesn't just apply to climate science, but many other scientific disciplines as well. Evolutionary Biology. Medical research. The list goes on.

While it's true that not everyone can be lumped into the same camp and there are exceptions on both sides, there is a very clear pattern of how certain "sides" of politics treat scientific results that they don't like.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

Tony O

Do we know how thoroughly OISM checked the respondents? Do all of the signatories exist, have the degree stated and are the actual person stated?

Can we access the list still?

Here id deltoids take
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/05/oregonpetition.php

Comment on Medieval Warm Period was warmer

scaddenp

Perhaps look at the cites for that paper. Eg
Jones & Mann 2004, and Crowley & Lowery 2000.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

chriscanaris

robhon: Being subjected to scrutiny is one thing. Being made the object of a witch hunt is completely another.

Well yes, sounds like psychiatry in the Soviet Union.

Or the dominance of the Lysenko evolutionary paradigm in the Soviet Union.

Or the rejection of Jewish science in Nazi Germany.

Power tends to corrupt. Scientific bodies are not exempt from its corrupting influence, whether warmist or denialist.

Again, one would hope that appropriate scrutiny by the Courts will protect.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

robhon

chriscanaris... Being subjected to scrutiny is one thing. Being made the object of a witch hunt is completely another. Don't forget that people like Sen. Inhofe and others are literally trying to get people thrown in prison for practicing science that comes to a conclusions they object to politically.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

chriscanaris

angliss & shdwsnlite

I am quite used to having my professional opinions ignored by folk who know much les about my subject than I do. Sometimes it annoys me because I am human. However, I accept that people have the right to ignore me sometimes with serious consequences. Besides, on occasions, my profession (I mean psychiatry) has perpetrated some serious atrocities. Firthermore, I daily read reports by colleagues acting as 'hired guns' for insurance companies - a situation that my professional organisations has singularly failed to address.

In the end, oversight by the courts (non-expert judges trained in law assisted by lawyers skilled in evaluating evcidence) has been the only corrective.

So to get back on topic, climate scientists need to be subject to scrutiny just like everyone else.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

suibhne

yocta
You seem to have it in for "old guys" remember Beethoven wrote his best music near the end of his life!

Comment on Accelerating ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland

GFW

Some quick math. If you take the current sea level rise as 3mm/y, apply 0.17mm/y^2, and run that out 90 years, you get a total sea level rise of 0.97 meters. So meter scale sea level rise by 2100 is perfectly in line with these observations.

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

NewYorkJ

"I am not the only one, for example Gavin Schmidt has a degree and a PhD in (applied) mathematics, I'm sure you wouldn't want to ignore his views. "

To be clear, here are Gavin's credentials (from RC):

"He received a BA (Hons) in Mathematics from Oxford University, a PhD in Applied Mathematics from University College London and was a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change Research. He serves on the CLIVAR/PAGES Intersection Panel and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Climate. He was cited by Scientific American as one of the 50 Research Leaders of 2004, and has worked on Education and Outreach with the American Museum of Natural History, the College de France and the New York Academy of Sciences. He has over 60 peer-reviewed publications. "

I think some are missing the main point of this post. No matter which criteria (debatable or not) one uses (stringent or lax), with any remotely reasonable criteria, the resulting numerator / denominator indicates a very small percentage of the scientific community are "skeptics". Those who move the goalposts with a "consensus isn't fact" argument are seemingly entirely oblivious to the main thesis put forth by Petition Project or Inhofe 700 style arguments (focusing on the numerator and ignore the denominator): that there is widespread dissent and a raging scientific debate over the key issues. It's an argument refuted nicely here, but one much of the public buys into.

Comment on Medieval Warm Period was warmer

Marcel Bökstedt

I just looked at the OISM petition project. They present a number of not very strong argument against AGW, one of them being that the Medieval Warm Period was about 1 degree warmer than today. That would in itself not contradict AGW, but lets not go there now. Anyhow, being biased, I would prefer that there was some solid reason for dismissing the claim...:)

They quote the paper "The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in the Sargasso Sea Lloyd D. Keigwin, Science, New Series, Vol. 274, No. 5292 (Nov. 29, 1996), pp. 1504-1508". I looked at it, and it seems that by using sediment cores he can give some evidence that at least locally, at the "Bermuda rise" in the Sargasso sea, the MWP was indeed 1 degree warmer. Of course that does not prove too much about global temperature, especially since there is a lot of evidence to the contrary which is not mentioned in the OISM advertisment.

What intrigues me is that Keigwin's paper is neither mentioned nor contested in the paper by Mann et al. which is the basis for the temperature map above. Is the Mann paper cherry picking and spitting out Keigwin's sediments at this point (which would seriously damage its credibility), or is there some good reason for dismissing Keigwin's results, and painting the Sargasso sea in cool colors on the world map of the year 1000? (There is also a map in fig 2 of the paper that makes it clear that sediment records from the Sargasso have not been used).

Or am I just missing something obvious here?

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

hadfield

"At this point itâs literally impossible to know because the names and degrees on the list cannot be verified by anyone outside the OISM."

Why not? Has a list of the names not been published? Has the code by which the statistics were calculated not been published? Surely not!

Comment on Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

yocta

RE#31-Robhon I have to say I agree with you there. Performing a survey about which supposedly qualified person believes what is clearly not the best approach to bring prove anything to people. They can always be manipulated and misquoted by anyone in the media.
âScience is not done by consensusâ Policy is and requires weighting of the scientific evidence and action on it.

RE#39,47-1077 What is your point? It is the science that should be judged not what peoples politics (assuming they live in a country with the freedom to choose) or lifestyles. Being forced to tick a box makes so many assumptions of people that it would be superfluous to the discussion of AGW.

The whole discussion in the comments only highlights how poor such a survey would be.