Which scientists to trust regarding global warming

Miscellaneous General
21

I said before in a related thread. The economics of profession creates an incentive structure to be partisan rather than scientific. There is no benefit to being a good scientist other than peace of mind.

The benefits to being a good scientist is the same as being a good butcher, baker, candle stick maker, or even any goverment subsidized job. Otherwise, you are just mystifying or doing some sort of “meta” argument on the word scientist and “good”.

Either way I would take my chances with that system than some blogger who is spouting off ideas with little time or monetary investment and an ideological axe to grind. Or even a journalist or entertainer who’s primary function is to rabble rouse rather than concern themselves with the trade in question. “Were the Pyramids made by a Space Alien named Jesus” will sell a lot more than the dry and technical archeology of actual Egyptology.

22

I don’t think that I need to make a meta argument on “good” to portray that as a false analogy. Scientific method is defined. Being a good baker, etc., is supplying people with what they want. “Were the Pyramids made by a Space Alien named Jesus” is exactly what comes out of “that system”, where “good scientist” means supplying demand. If Paul Krugman came out and said, “I changed my mind about everything”, what do you suppose would happen to his career prospects? He would be finished. The incentive is to make up some newfangled junk, regardless whether it makes sense, regardless whether you even believe it yourself, and never change. Not coincidentally, that is innumerably what we have.

Every scientist operates with the knowledge that he can say anything, however seemingly absurd, and the ignorant masses will be cowed into accepting it. The imbalance of knowledge leads to ruthless exploitation of the ignorant by the scholarly, from profiteering on the promotion of wack hypothesis to controlling political choices with fearmongering. What they teach you in school about how science is supposed to work is fantasyland. The way reality works is, BS tends to be publicly promoted above any sound research. That is where the real money is and therefore where scientists are attracted. The sciences proactively supply the entertainment industry. It isn’t a neutral relationship.

23

There is far too much credibility given to the apparent consensus. International organisations and scientific associations contribute towards the problem by accepting the information as factual or as a truth. This then resonates through the academic industry through the means of renowned scientific journals and acclaimed peer reviewed paper. The media uses the credible sources in their articles and press releases and the scientific community uses the media articles as further proof of the consensus. The information then has a consensus as far as the government and mainstream scientific community goes and then it ends up in the centralised academic syllabus. This is not the first time scientific theories or information that is untrue has been accepted as factual and truth by most of the population but is in fact known to be completely incorrect.

The motives behind the people vary from distorted environmentalism, depopulation agenda (carbon taxes), financial gain via academic grants and government budgets and finally for the worst perpetrators of pollution it simultaneously distracts the environmentalist movement and creates a mechanism for them to pollute and sell carbon credits to get away with it.

24

“Almost no one (including me, honestly) understands the science behind the arguments of those debating catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (henceforth CAWG).”

Why not? CO2 traps and reradiates heat, keeping more energy in the climate system, which CAWG supporters say will result in catostrophic warming via net positive feedback mechanisms. Not too hard to grasp at all.

“All I and most people really have to go are the total number of scientists backing each position.”

Science is not decided by democracy. Or rather, it shouldn’t be, but often is. Study the issue enough to generate your own opinion or find someone you trust and argue from authority.

“If I understand the issue right, there are special interests on both sides, which casts doubt on what anyone is saying.”

Yes.

“Do pro-CAWG advocates have anything more to gain/less to lose than anti-CAWG advocates do?”

No way to tell. I think the Competitve Enterprise Group did a study once and found billions upon billions going into GW research. If you count the grants you can get by attaching anything and everything one wants to study with global warming, you probably get a dollar amount that counts as an official metric fuckton. As for the money flowing on the other side, I have no doubt it’s huge but I also have doubts of a massive conspiracy by Big Oil! to discredit this wonderful science by recruiting a few retired weathermen, engineers, and a retired Canadian statistician from the mining industry. If they were really that well funded I think you’d see a ‘different’ approach than a series of unofficial blogs.

“If not, then it makes more sense to me to believe the pro-CAWG fellows, because they’re in the majority as far as I’m aware. Is this true?”

No idea. If you talk to people unofficially, I know a lot of PHD level people in various fields who consider it total bullshit. I know more who honestly don’t know which way to lean, and some who believe it whole heartedly. And almost all of those people regardless of belief will follow the mob in public rather than be ostracized by the PC crowd.

In the end it’s not that hard to decide. Personally I have yet to see anything that convices me the world will end or even change more dramatically than it has in the past. What I do know is that it seems like every other day someone is pointing out some massive exageration, error, or flat out lie in the pro crowd’s supporting material. McIntyre just recently seems to have found another instance of tree ring proxy data being conveniently ‘left out’ of a study. Climategate wasn’t as big a deal as some proclaim, but you did catch a few people behaving badly, potentially violating FOI laws, and we also learned they apparently lost all their original data and only have ‘value added’ data left, leaving others who want to recreate their work to scour the thousands of original sources to try and do so. And when the ‘value’ they’re adding is exactly what’s being questioned, one has to wonder at the convenience of that misplacement. At the very least the pro crowd seems to spend way too much time with at least one thumb up their ass and I’m inclined to trust the more open, and apparently more thorough, skeptics when it comes to the particulars of studies, even if that doesn’t say much about the overall theory.

One thing that would help is if everything wasn’t evidence of catastrophic warming. Too hot? Global Warming! Too cold? Global Warming! Too dry? Global Warming! Too wet? Global Warming! Ten years ago they were warning the norther hemisphere snow line would retreat and snow would be a thing of the past, now they’re claiming the increase in snow and the southerly creeping snow line is because of … global warming. Now they’re even trying to claim more earthquakes are the result of global warming, and I think someone already spotted a headline from a previous news cycle which claimed global warming would stop tectonic plate activity.

So one thing to consider is that if everything is evidence for a theory then it can’t be falsified, which kind of makes it a nontheory. At the very least it shows that its proponents don’t have a good enough understanding of the system they’re theorizing about to make reliable, falsifiable predictions. They may be ‘right’ in some vague sense, however they’re a long way from proving it as far as I can see. I’m not hostile to the idea that belching tons upon tons of gasses into the atmosphere might have some kind of effects on our world, not all positive. It would just be nice if climate ‘scientists’ would stop the Keystone Cops routine, and would be doubly nice if they stopped proposing socialism as the one and only solution for all ills environmental.

25

To answer the thread title question, Richard Lindzen if MIT is one I believe. If you’re really interested, here’s a great lecture.

But even without getting into the science of it, for me, there’s just too much shady happenings for me to put a lot of stock in the whole idea…

I realize this is a touchy subject, especially since it is now officially recognized as a religion, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/06/employment-tribunal-dismissal-climate-change)

..and it’s never goes over well when someone questions the validity of someone’s religion…but when it’s a religion that is supposed to be rooted in science, and which is potentially going to be the sole cause of literally trillions of dollars in cost to everyday people who can’t afford it…before we condemn the world to such a burden, shouldn’t we be little bit more sure than this?..

ClimateGate – This scandal began the latest round of revelations when thousands of leaked documents from Britain’s East Anglia Climate Research Unit showed systematic suppression and discrediting of climate skeptics’ views and discarding of temperature data, suggesting a bias for making the case for warming. Why do such a thing if, as global warming defenders contend, the “science is settled?”

FOIGate – The British government has since determined someone at East Anglia committed a crime by refusing to release global warming documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information Act requests. The CRU is one of three international agencies compiling global temperature data. If their stuff’s so solid, why the secrecy?

ChinaGate – An investigation by the U.K.'s left-leaning Guardian newspaper found evidence that Chinese weather station measurements not only were seriously flawed, but couldn’t be located. “Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?” the paper asked. The paper’s investigation also couldn’t find corroboration of what Chinese scientists turned over to American scientists, leaving unanswered, “how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?” The Guardian contends that researchers covered up the missing data for years.

HimalayaGate – An Indian climate official admitted in January that, as lead author of the IPCC’s Asian report, he intentionally exaggerated when claiming Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 in order to prod governments into action. This fraudulent claim was not based on scientific research or peer-reviewed. Instead it was originally advanced by a researcher, since hired by a global warming research organization, who later admitted it was “speculation” lifted from a popular magazine. This political, not scientific, motivation at least got some researcher funded.

PachauriGate – Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman who accepted with Al Gore the Nobel Prize for scaring people witless, at first defended the Himalaya melting scenario. Critics, he said, practiced “voodoo science.” After the melting-scam perpetrator 'fessed up, Pachauri admitted to making a mistake. But, he insisted, we still should trust him.

PachauriGate II – Pachauri also claimed he didn’t know before the 192-nation climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in December that the bogus Himalayan glacier claim was sheer speculation. But the London Times reported that a prominent science journalist said he had pointed out those errors in several e-mails and discussions to Pachauri, who “decided to overlook it.” Stonewalling? Cover up? Pachauri says he was “preoccupied.” Well, no sense spoiling the Copenhagen party, where countries like Pachauri’s India hoped to wrench billions from countries like the United States to combat global warming’s melting glaciers. Now there are calls for Pachauri’s resignation.

SternGate – One excuse for imposing worldwide climate crackdown has been the U.K.'s 2006 Stern Report, an economic doomsday prediction commissioned by the government. Now the U.K. Telegraph reports that quietly after publication “some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.” Among original claims now deleted were that northwest Australia has had stronger typhoons in recent decades, and that southern Australia lost rainfall because of rising ocean temperatures. Exaggerated claims get headlines. Later, news reporters disclose the truth. Why is that?

SternGate II – A researcher now claims the Stern Report misquoted his work to suggest a firm link between global warming and more-frequent and severe floods and hurricanes. Robert Muir-Wood said his original research showed no such link. He accused Stern of “going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence.” We’re shocked.

AmazonGate – The London Times exposed another shocker: the IPCC claim that global warming will wipe out rain forests was fraudulent, yet advanced as “peer-reveiwed” science. The Times said the assertion actually “was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise,” “authored by two green activists” and lifted from a report from the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group. The “research” was based on a popular science magazine report that didn’t bother to assess rainfall. Instead, it looked at the impact of logging and burning. The original report suggested “up to 40 percent” of Brazilian rain forest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall, but the IPCC expanded that to cover the entire Amazon, the Times reported.

PeerReviewGate – The U.K. Sunday Telegraph has documented at least 16 nonpeer-reviewed reports (so far) from the advocacy group World Wildlife Fund that were used in the IPCC’s climate change bible, which calls for capping manmade greenhouse gases.

RussiaGate – Even when global warming alarmists base claims on scientific measurements, they’ve often had their finger on the scale. Russian think tank investigators evaluated thousands of documents and e-mails leaked from the East Anglia research center and concluded readings from the coldest regions of their nation had been omitted, driving average temperatures up about half a degree.

Russia-Gate II – Speaking of Russia, a presentation last October to the Geological Society of America showed how tree-ring data from Russia indicated cooling after 1961, but was deceptively truncated and only artfully discussed in IPCC publications. Well, at least the tree-ring data made it into the IPCC report, albeit disguised and misrepresented.

U.S.Gate – If Brits can’t be trusted, are Yanks more reliable? The U.S. National Climate Data Center has been manipulating weather data too, say computer expert E. Michael Smith and meteorologist Joesph D’Aleo. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions, just as in the Russian case, resulting in misleading higher average temperatures.

IceGate – Hardly a continent has escaped global warming skewing. The IPCC based its findings of reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa on a feature story of climbers’ anecdotes in a popular mountaineering magazine, and a dissertation by a Switzerland university student, quoting mountain guides. Peer-reviewed? Hype? Worse?

ResearchGate – The global warming camp is reeling so much lately it must have seemed like a major victory when a Penn State University inquiry into climate scientist Michael Mann found no misconduct regarding three accusations of climate research impropriety. But the university did find “further investigation is warranted” to determine whether Mann engaged in actions that “seriously deviated from accepted practices for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” Being investigated for only one fraud is a global warming victory these days.

ReefGate – Let’s not forget the alleged link between climate change and coral reef degradation. The IPCC cited not peer-reviewed literature, but advocacy articles by Greenpeace, the publicity-hungry advocacy group, as its sole source for this claim.

AfricaGate – The IPCC claim that rising temperatures could cut in half agricultural yields in African countries turns out to have come from a 2003 paper published by a Canadian environmental think tank – not a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

DutchGate – The IPCC also claimed rising sea levels endanger the 55 percent of the Netherlands it says is below sea level. The portion of the Netherlands below sea level actually is 20 percent. The Dutch environment minister said she will no longer tolerate climate researchers’ errors.

AlaskaGate – Geologists for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography and their U.S. and Canadian colleagues say previous studies largely overestimated by 40 percent Alaskan glacier loss for 40 years. This flawed data are fed into those computers to predict future warming.

This is all the “hard science” we need? “The debate is over. The science is in.”?

26

Some people might argue the characterization of some of those claims and the credibility of those making them. Not me personally, and overall even allowing for ethical and moral ‘drift’ in some, it does amaze one how much sheer BS you find when you actually look into all that ‘settled science.’