About that global warming consensus (again) …
July 3rd, 2008, 1:29 pm · 8 Comments · posted by Mark Landsbaum
They want you to believe the science is “settled,” that there’s a “consensus” that global warming is occurring, it’s harmful, it will be destructive and it’s caused by you.
Well, not quite. From our friends at the Heartland Institute, just one installment of the myriad refutations of that lie:
“A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares.
“More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun’s irradiance.
“This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850,” said Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery.”
RELATED BLOGS:
Back in the global warming saddle again
Most Britons doubt humans cause climate change
What we admire most about the global warming alarmists is their duplicity
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:10 pm
It’s good to have refutations from some scientists. It would be scary to think that the global warming campaign is ’settled’ and that it is occuring absolutely. It not a done deal and there is not an overall consesus, but busy body policy makers are sure to change laws and make matters worse for everyday working people.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Well here we go again . . .
To review: Mr. Landsbaum wants (one would assume) to convince people that his point of view on this issue is correct. Fair enough. The quality of his reasoning, and of the sources he cites in support of that point of view, thus become a necessary object of inquiry - if they’re obviously biased, flaky, or otherwise untrustworthy, why should we necessarily believe them (or Mr. Landsbaum, who cites them, for that matter)?
So: Dennis Avery is a fellow with the Hudson and the Heartland Institutes. His background is in agricultural economics, a field in which he served during the Reagan Administration. The institutes in question are well known, as are their philosophical political biases. Nuff said there.
Avery himself appears to divide his time between claiming global warming is a fraud and arguing that organic food is more dangerous than pesticide and fertilizer-produced products. One of his most recent forays on this issue was a Heartland Institute article that claimed some 500 or so scientists had signed a paper doubting the mainstream-accepted climate change hypothesis. Unfortunately, a large number of those scientists denied signing the paper, or that the paper accurately represented their thinking on the subject. Apparently the names had been compiled by perusing various biliographies online and picking them out. The Heartland Institute later conceded the inaccuracy of the signatory list, but declined to apologize to the objecting scientists. The paper remains up on their website, with the signature list (I believe) unchanged.
That’s what Mr. Landsbaum is citing to, apparently.
Now I leave it to the reader, especially one interested in checking into facts (this, again, took me about five minutes to unearth) to decide if the Heartland Institute’s paper or its author/compiler are worthy of serious trust. My simple question, then is: why should any rational openminded person believe Mr. Landsbaum’s point of view, or take him at his word on the subject, or take him seriously, or retain respect for his abilities as a journalist (for which occupation fact checking is supposed to be sine qua non), when he backs it up with such shoddy material?
Now, Mr. Landsbaum will reply that I’m engaging in an ad hominem attack. This is for him a useful all-purpose term, to be yanked out of the hat whenever someone points out obvious flaws in his sources. In fact it’s nothing of the kind, and he knows it: fact checking is not a personal attack. But if he really believes it is, then I have a fun little intellectual exercise for him:
I have decided (being the radical pinko liberal etc etc that I am) that life in the old Soviet Union was the best. Absolutely peachy, the bee’s knees. It’s only the enforced conformity of mainstream political and historical thought that has suppressed the truth about what a wonderful Eden the ol’ USSR was. But I’m going to uncover the truth they don;t want you to see and hear. How?? Well, I have innumerable sources to back me up. There so many articles from Pravda and Izvheztia asserting this point that I’m fairly swimming in them. I also have speeches and statements from prominent world leaders, from Stalin to Brezhnev to Mao (to name just a few), and annual reports from Soviet government ministries about how well they always did in meeting their goals and five year plans. Yup, no doubt about it, I’m going to deny the mainstream view with these sources and expose the truth at last.
Now, that’s nuts, right?
But if someone, in the process of putting a blanket over my shoulders and leading me off to recover in some cool quiet place, mentions that my use of sources like Stalin, Pravda etc to prove my point is a tad, well, unwise, are they making an ad hominem attack on Joe Stalin? (Not that Stalin doesn’t deserve one). Isn’t such a critique rather a rational evaluation of the reliability of the source cited?
So, if I’m making an ad hominem attack on Mr. Landsbaum, or his sources, in this post, then watch out: my paper on the idyll of the USSR is coming soon, and you’ll have no basis for attacking it. You’d be engaging in an ad hominem attack, you nasty people you . . .
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I read these blogs and imagine a great idea machine, one that keeps spitting out the same text, in various prose, but all saying the same thing.
Don’t believe. It doesn’t really matter what is actually happening, just “don’t believe” that you have any influence on your environment.
The new kick is to say 500 or 30000 scientists signed something saying something, so, don’t believe.
Some great fiction writer wrote something, don’t believe. Even someone who once said we had an impact on the rainfall patterns now says, don’t believe.
Now I have to scatch my head and ask why this same person would believe what some people wrote 2000 years ago, before there were PHD’s and scientists, and then turn around and say don’t believe what the other 6 billion people know for a fact, your fecal matters.
July 4th, 2008 at 4:33 am
There is a lot of bogus information on the web. Since rlh never gives any sources for his/her comments it obscures whether he/she taps in to that agenda-driven bogus information . . . or is just making stuff up. The agenda is driven by ’scientists’ whose jobs (funded by government grants) depend on making ominous predictions that must be studied further and others who will profit from carbon trading. Notice the large fraction of retired climatologists who speak out that humans have no significant influence on climate. They no longer need to suppress their knowledge to keep their jobs.
July 4th, 2008 at 7:44 am
rlh,
I noticed it took you only 5 minutes to “unearth” background information that you presented here to discredit the source(s) of information.
Why don’t you “unearth” background information on the IPCC scientists that worked on the part of the GW report that deals with how CO2 causes warming?
July 4th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Messrs. Pangburn and Mark - I’m not advocating for a point view, am I? Have I once said in any post that anthrpogenic climate change is what most scientists have told us it is - a danger to be addressed? Have I not rather said how I have real questions about the issue? We can’t have a legitimate discussion if one side throws a so-called “expert” into the mix (what layman can argue with an “expert,” after all) who turns out to be, more or less, a charlatan. The touting of papers and people here by Mr. Landsbaum has been so smug and shrill that it fairly begs for someone to look into the baclground of the sources he cites.
For this one, Google sufficed quite nicely, including on the first screen the remarks from the head of the Heartland Institute (from early May, by the way, so Mr. Landsbaum can’t claim the information was too new for him to find) noting the signature “problem” (let’s call it).
When people start citing to IPCC or other scientists in a shrill fashion to support their claims, I’ll probably go look at them too. Mr. Landsbaum is fond of trying to come up with people supposedly associated with IPCC who question its position, though that association tends to be on the order of riding the same train to work with IPCC people.
As for CO2 caising warming in the atmosphere, that’s a given - century old science that I don’t think any rational person can connect to some dark IPCC conspiracy. Mr. Landsbaum’s occasional slips claiming that the gas doesn’t even cause warming are, well, ignorant.
And as for the vested interest/government grant notion, I’ll just note the striking congruence between right wing “conservative” political groups and global warming “deniers”, as well as the massive amounts of corporate money behind those efforts. To imply, as many posts like Mr. Pangburn’s does, that deniers are a plucky few pushing like insurgents against an implacable establishment is pie-eyed naivete. There’s plenty of money backing their side - just, apparently, not much else.
By contrast, look at the fellow Mr. Bock brought before us last week, and the good solid discussion it generated. I don’t know that I agree with that guy entirely (I’d need of course to read a lot more of what he has tpo say), but his position as briefly outlined by Mr. Bock, and in the material I quickly referenced, was evenhanded, and (dare I say it) nuanced - the work of someone without an axe to grind. That’s what we should be examining - not piffle from people who forge scientists’ names and claim organic food is poison. I can get that sort of nonsense at the foot of most freeway offramps.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Although not divulged (why is that?), the website referred to is probably http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=23207 for anyone who would like to see what it really says. The contrary statements are probably from DeSmogBlog, a website created to attack conservative and free-market nonprofit organizations. DeSmogBlog emailed some of the people on the list and got about a third back who didn’t want to be on the list. No mention was made as to whether being on the list might put their jobs in jeopardy. The only result of all this fuss was a change in title of the report from “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” to “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares.” Apparently some of the researchers were so intent in their preconceived convictions that they did not even notice that their research actually refuted them.
It is certainly true that the radiative-convective process has been recognized for a long time. Everything that I have found says that all the radiation energy that is ever absorbed by carbon dioxide atoms gets absorbed and shared with the much more prevalent nitrogen and oxygen atoms in less than 24 meters from the surface. I have been unable to find where this is adequately accounted for in the GCMs.
Rlh refers to “massive amounts of corporate money” with, as usual, no specifics. Less than 1% of the money spent on the Global Warming issue is ‘corporate money’. The rest comes from on-going government grants in response to assertions by ‘climate researchers’ of ominous concerns that need more funding for continued research. See e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/28/climatechange.fossilfuels and http://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/foia/index3/arms_761.pdf .
Recent average global temperatures placed in context with global climate history should result in better understanding (That the temperature rise for the last 130 years is consistent with recovery from the Little Ice Age that bottomed out around 1700. That temperatures since the industrial revolution are consistent with temperatures prior to the industrial revolution and added atmospheric carbon dioxide has no significant influence on climate). This is done at different time scales with four graphs that were constructed from NOAA and other government provided data at http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/pangburn.html. All data-source internet sites are given.
DeSmogBlog claims that the list of over 31,000 other scientists and engineers who have determined that human activity has no significant influence on climate is phony. I can’t vouch for the rest but they spelled my name correctly.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:00 am
“Extreme heat” events could double in Southern California
OC REgister, July 11th, 2008, Gary Robbins, aka “Sciencedude”
The number of “extreme heat” events that greater Los Angeles experiences during the summer could double over the next 20 years and increase eight-fold by the end of the century, says a new UC Berkeley study on the impact of climate change.
Such heat could exceed the ability of power companies to provide enough energy to run air conditioners, and the dry weather would worsen local wildfire conditions, researchers say.
“We could reach the point (by 2099) where the entire summer is warmer than the hottest days we know today,” said Norman Miller, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and co-author of the study.
Scientists define “extreme heat” as temperatures that rise to the highest 10 percent of temperatures that were recorded during the summer months from 1961-90. Los Angeles enters the extreme heat range when the temperature goes above 91.4 degrees. In Sacramento, the figure is 100.4 degrees.
Miller and collaborator Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech produced the following estimates of increases in extreme heat events if the burning of fossil fuels isn’t curtailed. The figures refer to average events period year during the stated time period.