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gallopingcamel at 17:04 PM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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!Response: Trenberth has probably written as many papers as anyone on satellite data of outgoing and incoming radiation - if there was anyone who would know whether the global warming was happening (eg - that the planet is in positive energy imbalance), it would be Trenberth. -
Tom Dayton at 15:41 PM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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. -
gallopingcamel at 15:18 PM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Albert Einstein Here is a quote from Kevin Trenberth (UCAR), October 12, 2009: "We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t." 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."Response: "This is in sharp contrast to Trenberth's public statements"
Actually, Trenberth's "can't account for the lack of warming" theme is expounded in frank, clear detail in the peer-reviewed paper An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global energy (Trenberth 2009). This paper is the topic of the email where that quote is taken from. Unfortunately, most people fail to read the full email. Certainly very few people read the paper he was refering to. I would highly recommend reading the paper or at the very least, this summation of the paper and what Trenberth was getting at. -
sammysoul at 14:12 PM on 12 March 2010iPhone app version 1.1 - now with search, image viewer and Twitter!
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. -
yocta at 13:45 PM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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. -
Ned at 12:21 PM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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 -
Mike1637 at 12:09 PM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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. -
Tony O at 12:09 PM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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 -
scaddenp at 12:02 PM on 12 March 2010Medieval Warm Period was warmer
Perhaps look at the cites for that paper. Eg Jones & Mann 2004, and Crowley & Lowery 2000. -
chris1204 at 11:59 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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. -
Rob Honeycutt at 11:40 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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. -
chris1204 at 10:47 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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. -
suibhne at 10:39 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
yocta You seem to have it in for "old guys" remember Beethoven wrote his best music near the end of his life! -
GFW at 09:41 AM on 12 March 2010Accelerating ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland
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. -
NewYorkJ at 09:39 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
"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. -
Marcel Bökstedt at 09:37 AM on 12 March 2010Medieval Warm Period was warmer
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? -
hadfield at 09:26 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
"At this point it’s 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! -
yocta at 09:22 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
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. “Science is not done by consensus” 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. -
J Bowers at 09:22 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
The people who make and promote such a thing as the Oregon Petition don't seem to realise that historians of the not so distant future will be scrutinising it even more than here. Literally every name will be looked at and checked out. -
NewYorkJ at 09:01 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Good post. My first thought when thinking of the Petition Project is how large the denominator must be given such lax criteria (I suspected it was in the millions). Thanks for crunching the hard numbers on this. It's arguably much higher since the names aren't verifiable. Theoretically, it's infinite, and thus the percentage of skeptical scientists approaches zero from this technique. I know many individuals who could be on that list who know very little about climate science. -
Jack_Kelly at 08:50 AM on 12 March 2010There's no empirical evidence
Excellent article. Just a quick housekeeping note: the link to Griggs 2004 no longer works (the university have updated their website)Response: Thanks for the tip. It's a shame, a full paper of Griggs 2004 no longer seems to be online so I had to link to the abstract. -
dhogaza at 08:09 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
"Statistically, if "science" was indeed the ultimate object of the exercise, one may reasonably use the hypothesis that science is apolitical and therefore the political affiliation of those on one or the other of the AGW is randomly distributed. Thus the poll should yield an equal percentage of liberal and conservative sympathizers on both sides of the controversy." Let's see ... Inhofe wants to jail climate scientists, the right wing in this country is on a witch hunt against climate scientists, and you think that unless 50% of climate scientists are Republicans it will prove that *climate scientists* are politically driven? Why would you expect climate scientists to join a party whose leaders talk about, among other things, criminalizing their work? -
scatter at 08:08 AM on 12 March 2010iPhone app version 1.1 - now with search, image viewer and Twitter!
Good work Shine on producing an Android version! Looking forward to it. -
1077 at 07:33 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Steven Sullivan under 42 is striking an appropriately disparaging tone but avoids responding to my suggestion for a poll. Anyone willing to guess as to how the results may fall out? Statistically, if "science" was indeed the ultimate object of the exercise, one may reasonably use the hypothesis that science is apolitical and therefore the political affiliation of those on one or the other of the AGW is randomly distributed. Thus the poll should yield an equal percentage of liberal and conservative sympathizers on both sides of the controversy. Anecdotal evidence indicates that this may not be the case. Hence a "scientific" poll may be in order... and also relevant, regardless of "who started it?" issue which is better left to the playground of those who are striving to mature. -
Dennis at 07:30 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
"Of couse if you are going to exclude on the basis of formal qualifications, then the skeptics should be able to leave out the opinions of all IPCC authors who are engineers, computer sceintists, mathematicians etc" I believe that IPCC authors are nominated and selected based on their formal qualifications. -
Ani at 07:19 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
I just read an article at about.com that talked about a study by UW Madison and WHO that stated 150000 people dying a year because of warming. My gut feeling is that it would be significant to them. -
angliss at 05:31 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
DIkran Marsupial (#47) - Thank you for clarifying, and now that I understand your point better, I'll concede it. -
Dikran Marsupial at 05:11 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
angliss @ 40 You are missing my point, if someone can have an informed opinion that is independent of their formal qualifications then deleting names from the list based solely on formal qualification is an obviois source of bias and weakens the argument. If you are going to do that, then why leave in the phycisists, chemists and biologists - none of those qualifications is a guarantee of informed opinion on climatology either, and the skeptic list would be even shorter. Of couse if you are going to exclude on the basis of formal qualifications, then the skeptics should be able to leave out the opinions of all IPCC authors who are engineers, computer sceintists, mathematicians etc. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The point is if you are going to argue against a rhetorical/political assertion, it is best not to use a counter that has any visible, let alone obvious bias, as it invites the obvious complaint of "bias! bias!". Much better to show that the skeptics are wrong, even with a generous interpretation of the evidence, which in this case, they are. -
Steven Sullivan at 05:08 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
1077 wrote in 42: "So if the discussion is now openly political, which it always was anyway, wouldn’t it be relevant to start a poll as to what the political affiliation is of those who support AGW vs. those who oppose it and those who are on the fence?" Nice attempt at framing here. The discussion wasn't always political, and it's not ONLY political, now. And you conveniently neglect to note who has been driving the 'politics' of this. Historically, long before Al Gore;'s movie, the ones with POLITICAL objections to climate science have been the right wing/conservative/free marketeers. And that's where most of the blogospheric and mainstream media 'critiques' of climate science come from today. -
kwinters79 at 04:54 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
In his book "Premature Factulation", Philip Hansten argues quite convincingly that scientists addressing complex issues outside of their own field of expertise are often wrong. Because of their prestige and arrogance (often well deserved in their own field), they fool themselves into thinking they are better informed on other subjects than they really are. Though he's very intelligent, I would no more give credence to my surgeon neighbor's view on AGW than I would ask a brilliant PhD EE friend for advice on cancer treatment. -
Riccardo at 04:53 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
Marcel Bökstedt, definitely we will never know for sure untill it will happen, or not happen for that matter. But we know a lot more things of the past climate than you are admitting. They tell us that at least to a first order aproximation if forcing increases so does temperature. (ok, it's clearly an over-simplification, but i hope it gives the idea). I can not see any room for chaotic behaviour of climate, it can just be an abstract hypothesis; to become a real one there have to be something pointing in this direction. Maybe in the future, who knows; but as far as actual knowledge is concerned it's still abstract. -
kwinters79 at 04:42 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
Dennis (27) wrote: "There is an important angle to the manner in which the petition was originally circulated that is worth repeating ... Whether intentional or not, it was clearly misleading to some people." Exactly. There's some additional points that need to be recognized: 1) Many signatures came from 1997. This was well before most scientists outside of the field had any reasonable understanding of the on-going research and the evidence was far less solid even to practicing climate scientists. 2) When Scientific American randomly contacted 26 of the signatures with related PhD's, only 11 (1 active researcher, 2 with relevant experience, and 8 based on an informal evaluation) said they still agreed with the petition. 6 would not sign it now, 3 don't remember ever signing it, 1 died, and 5 did not respond. gallopingcamel (1) wrote: "The folks who wrote this post need to lighten up; this is something to laugh about." It would be funny if it weren't repeatedly brought up and deceiving so many people. Having been raised on a farm I know that if someone keeps throwing cow manure against the barn wall, some is bound to stick. Unless you regularly scrape off the manure, your barn will start to look pretty bad (no matter how solid the structure). The same is true for communicating the reality of AGW to the general public. Sadly, it's necessary to repeatedly clean up the manure repeatedly thrown at it. -
1077 at 04:32 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
The very discussion triggered by this article indicated the essentially political nature of the subject, with polling and efforts to infuence and evaluate them and with “science” being nothing more than a tool. And an imperfect one as any reasonable person should be willing to admit at this stage. So if the discussion is now openly political, which it always was anyway, wouldn’t it be relevant to start a poll as to what the political affiliation is of those who support AGW vs. those who oppose it and those who are on the fence? Assuming that a clever pollster can get predominantly honest answers, the results might be worth beholding. How about “Skeptical Science” trying its hand at it? -
shawnhet at 04:30 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
As to the issue of the cost of reducing emissions, that is primarily a function of technology IMO. At current technology levels, reducing CO2 would be **massively** expensive. Arguably the most effective countries at actually reducing carbon emissions are the Europeans and their emissions are still going **up**, even while supposedly being committed. Presumably, most of those countries "green"-spending has been directed towards the low-hanging fruit. That is to say that the spending so far has most likely gone to the most cost effective ways of reducing GH gases. Future spending will, thus, most likely be much less cost-effective than past spending(this is the fundamental flaw with the Kyoto-type approach IMO). Luckily, however, technology does not stand still. Google Kurweil solar power exponential if you want some further detail. Cheers, :) -
angliss at 04:16 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
DIkran Marsupial (#35) - you said "Actually no, I have worked (and published) with climatologists in the past and had to learn enough of the science to be worth collaborating with." Thank you for supporting my point that engineers etc. don't have the inherent expertise that the OISM assumes. After all, if you had to learn the climate science yourself before climatologists would consider collaborating with you, then other engineers etc. would also have to learn enough climate science. The OISM offers no way to know and no guarantees that their signatories are qualified. As an EE myself, I'm not going to denigrate engineers or claim that they have nothing to offer climate science. I'm saying that there is nothing inherent in their degree that ensures that they are qualified. Ultimately, however, I think you've latched onto a secondary point here. The primary point is, by the OISM's own criteria, they cannot justify the claim that their petition disproves the IPCC consensus claim. Including or rejecting engineers et al does not affect that conclusion. -
Marcel Bökstedt at 04:10 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
Ned> Thanks! You are absolutely right, I was confusing the two blog posts. That's a relief ...:) It's true as you say that I did get an answer from the guest poster in the sense that my name was mentioned in a post. I must have forgotten about it because I did not really understand how it was an answer to my post. That is probably, my own fault, I'll give it a new try now. Ricardo> The point I tried to make about the ENSO is different. I think that we agree that we cannot accurately predict an el Nino events. So we cannot predict climate on a scale of one year (typical timescale of el Nino events), or to put it more formally: If we tentatively define climate as "average of weather over 1 year", we cannot predict climate. Of course we can lengthen the time scale, and define climate as "average of weather over twenty years". That would more or less even out the el Nino peaks, but how do we know that there are not longer term fluctuations which we still cannot predict? It seems to me that the only sensible answer would be "because we have studied the climate for a time much longer than 20 years, and we did not see any long term variations". However, we haven't yet observed weather on a global scale for timescales significantly bigger than 20 years, so how do we know for sure? -
Ian Forrester at 04:02 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
I'd like to emphasize what Dennis said in #27. That is that the initial package (1997-1999) included a fraudulent and bogus "paper" made to look like it was published in PNAS. It should be noted that that paper was quickly exchanged for a very similar (but equally disingenuous) paper published in Climate Research in 1999. That is not the S&B paper which caused the resignation of the editors, even though it was as bad as the 2003 paper. If we now jump forward to the most recent version we find reference to another "peer reviewed research paper" published in that "highly respected" and "rigorous" "research journal" Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Not a lot of scientific credibility associated with that fraudulent petition. Here are links to the 3 papers referred to above: http://web.archive.org/web/20070321030056/www.oism.org/pproject/review.pdf http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr/13/c013p149.pdf http://www.oism.org/pproject/GWReview_OISM150.pdf -
Jeff Freymueller at 04:02 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#98 RSVP, if the temperature averaged over the entire planet is warming, then global warming is an accurate description, although global climate change would also be true. If it was not warming overall, but climate is changing in most regions, then global climate change would still be accurate but obviously warming would not be in that case. -
Rob Honeycutt at 04:00 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
robrtl... But is there a scientific consensus that the theory of general relativity is good? A consensus on the theory of evolution? Gravity? Science does work on certain levels of consensus. Science must always remain skeptical but that can't mean conclusions can't be reached (even temporary ones). Even the peer review process is a process of consensus. Reviewers have to come to some level of consensus that a paper is worthy to be published. When you have 97% of the scientists working in a particular field agreeing on the science, that is a powerful message. That 0.3% of the broadly defined scientific community (as with the Oregon Petition) rejects those findings is virtually meaningless. -
Jeff Freymueller at 03:58 AM on 12 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#92 RSVP, if you want to know how Antarctica loses ice at -17C or whatever sub-freezing temperature, re-read #74. It isn't a matter of melting. As for albedo, the changes in snow/ice cover in Antartica are small compared to the loss of Arctic sea ice. Don't forget to average over the globe. -
Argus at 03:55 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
If we question the expert status of all the alleged scientists signing a petition, we should be even more critical towards non-experts actually writing parts of the IPCC report. Dr Mörner, who (according to himself) was an expert reviewer of the chapter on Sea Level Changes in the IPCC report in 1999, claims that none of the 22 authors to that chapter was classified as a sea level specialist. That doesn't sound so good. In a posted comment in another thread, somebody claimed that one of the authors actually was a sea level expert. Even if so, that is still not very impressive. -
robrtl at 03:50 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
my consensus shows that scientists shpuld not look at consensus... -
Riccardo at 03:43 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
Marcel Bökstedt, the physics is the same for both weather and climate by definition. They both describe the movement of air and water masses and the chemical/physical interactions between them and with the land subject to some input of energy. The actual calculations might differ somewhat due to computational restrictions as, for example, when climate models use parametrizations to save computing time. Climate models have their own variability, although somewhat different between models, that reflect what is actually seen. Obviously, you should not expect to have a temporal match between, say, calculated and actual El Nino events; but theese so called oscillations are indeed more or less reproduced by models. As for the over-emphasis on chaos, it looks like invoking chaotic behaviour in physical systems may be used to inflate uncertainties much beyond any reasonable expectation. Do we have any reason to believe that our sun will suddenly collapse or expand disproportionally beyond what we already know it does? There's a lot of chaos inside our star but that's not the whole story. The same is true for climate, we have no reason to think that our climate will suddenly go weird (chaotic). For weather it is different in what models try to forecast phenomena confined both in time and space, but we can still predict warmer air temperatures next summer or the seasonal arrival of the monsoon. The only thing that might "go weird" with climate is the passing of a so called tipping point, quite hard to predict. Someone may be tempeted to call its effect chaotic behaviour, but sure it's not. -
Dikran Marsupial at 03:40 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
angliss @ 33 "As an MSEE myself, I'm not inherently qualified by way of my education to have an informed opinion on climate disruption. The same is true of anyone in a similar position, including you." Actually no, I have worked (and published) with climatologists in the past and had to learn enough of the science to be worth collaborating with. I suspect there are many who are qualified by having read the litterature, e.g. Tim Lambert, without needing a formal qualification. The point is that even if the OISM approach has no indication of a quality check, discarding the views of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians without checking their background is no kind of quality check either and worse introduces a bias into the analysis that favours the view expressed. Engineering, computing and mathematical skills are essential to climate work and arbitrarily deleting them is a bogus step that devalues the point being made. It is bias either way, not quality control, you only get quality control by checking on a case by case basis. The best science is conducted the way a chess player plays chess, you don't play the best move you can see, you play the best move that your opponent can't refute (i.e. you minimise his maximum advantage). The analysis above goes against that maxim by deleting half of his opponents evidence, without giving a sound reason, even though the results would still show that climate skepticism is a minority view. A stronger more would just be to show it is a minority view, even if you assume the sample is representative. Having said which, it isn't (or at least shouldn't be) a popularity contest. A scientific argument stands or falls on its own merits. However, that isn't to say it isn't worthwhile demonstrating that a rhetorical argument is false (and point out that it is a rhetorical/political rather than a scientific point). -
Ned at 03:36 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
Marcel Bökstedt writes: Tom Dayton> I'm aware of that post. Actually I posted a comment to it along similar lines as here - asking : how do we know that climate is not chaotic? I don't think that I got a response, and it seems that the comment has now been deleted. Is it possible that the comment you're remembering was in the other thread about chaos? It's a bit confusing -- there are often pairs of posts on similar topics at the same time, one a "blog post" (where there's usually more discussion among commenters) and one a "response to skeptical argument". For example, on Friday, 22 January, 2010, there was a blog post titled The chaos of confusing the concepts. I see that you do have a comment in that thread (here), which hasn't been deleted, and there was in fact a reply by the guest author of the original post. The link Tom Dayton provided was to a "skeptical argument" by the same guest author at about the same time: Chaos theory and global warming: can climate be predicted? which only got one comment. -
Argus at 03:22 AM on 12 March 2010Visual depictions of Sea Level Rise
It is interesting that in the 1980 report (#61, Peter Hogarth) the author discards all the tide gauge stations that do not show any significant trend, and keep those 247 stations out of more than 725 stations that do. -
Ned at 03:20 AM on 12 March 2010Misinterpreting a retraction of rising sea level predictions
RealClimate has a new post about predictions of sea level rise, which refers to the retraction of the Siddell paper. Stefan is trying to contrast the bizarre and distorted way that the media has been hyping various trivial and/or misrepresented claims of errors in the IPCC AR4, but has completely ignored cases where the AR4 is "erring" on the side of underestimating the severity of impacts from AGW. As Stefan points out, there are internal pressures within IPCC to be "conservative" and to risk understating rather than overstating most claims. This is something that very few outsiders seem to understand. -
Rob Honeycutt at 03:13 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
I keep saying, there are two things going on today with regards to climate. 1) There is the science of climate change. The hard detailed work of understanding what is really going on. Messy, complicated science. 2) There is a massive political campaign targeting the science of global climate change. Ugly, vitriolic politics. The Oregon Petition is one of the many political ploys used to obfuscate the science. It doesn't really have anything to do with the opinions of the people who sign the petition. It's a tactic. -
Marcel Bökstedt at 03:05 AM on 12 March 2010Scientists can't even predict weather
I'm delighted - three comments within a day to a post made at a comparatively obscure place! This site is impressive. Riccardo > Actually, the physics is not similar. Allow me to be a bit longwinded. There is an explicit mathematical model for weather. This model is of course only a simplified model. It will not give completely correct answers, but it is quite sufficent for predicting the weather for the next few days. There is a catch though. The model depends is very sensible to small variations in the initial conditions, so that a small cause today will lead to a big effect a month from now. That's the main reason we cannot make long term predictions of weather. "Climate" is a kind of averaged weather. In physics, it is sometimes true that if you form the average over a large number of systems, the averaged system will behave in a deterministic way. This is how thermodynamics works. The thermodynamical laws used to predict weather are actually in themselves "averages" over a overwhelmingly huge number of systems consisting of individual molecules. But there is no a priori guarantee that an "averaged" system must behave in a deterministic way. Especially if the averaging is done over a small number of systems. So lets look carefully at how we do the averaging. We can try to say "We take average weather over a year, and call that climate". Now, this procedure will fail to give a deterministic system. We know that there are systematic variations of the time scale of a year. These variations do not seem to be easy to model - I don't think that we can make reliable predictions of when the next el Nino will happen. Next, we can try to average over a larger time intervall. We could hope that if we average over a decade, then we get a deterministic system, or maybe even that the "climate" is completely determined by various forcing. That is, it could be that at this time scale there is no dynamics of climate. Maybe this is so, but now we are getting unconfortably close to the time scale of the entire history of reliable measurments of global climate. So how can we know that there are not "chaotic" variations of the climate on larger time scales? (There are definitions of various level of precision of the word "chaos" - I assume that what we are talking about here is "a huge sensitivity to initial conditions"). Doug_bostrom> Yes, the history is quite interesting, thanks for giving the link! But I am not sure exactly which misunderstandings you expect the link to clear up. Maybe you could be more specific? Actually, Weart is quite careful about the uncertainty of climate models. He states for instance "However, experience shows that scientists tend to be too optimistic about their level of certainty." and "For all the millions of hours the modelers had devoted to their computations, in the end they could not say exactly how serious future global warming would be." Tom Dayton> I'm aware of that post. Actually I posted a comment to it along similar lines as here - asking : how do we know that climate is not chaotic? I don't think that I got a response, and it seems that the comment has now been deleted. -
angliss at 03:01 AM on 12 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
DIkran Marsupial (#25) - One of the problems with the OISM approach is that there is no indication that they performed a quality check on the people who signed their petition. They didn't verify that the electrical enginers, the computer scientists, the mathematicians, etc. who signed their petition were qualified to do so. As an MSEE myself, I'm not inherently qualified by way of my education to have an informed opinion on climate disruption. The same is true of anyone in a similar position, including you. What qualifications you or I have are derived not from our having a Bachelor of Science degree, but rather from the work we've done educating ourselves on the subject of climate science. While an engineer or computer scientist or statistician may be qualified to have an informed opinion on the science underlying climate disruption, there is nothing inherent in the earning of the degree that makes them qualified. However, the OISM's own selection criteria assumes that the engineer, computer scientist, and statistician are equally qualified as people like Schmidt or Santer or Lindzen or Spencer who conduct climate science every day.
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