Saturday, December 12, 2009

In today's Globular Warmering "Act now or we're all gonna DIE!"* post,

we start with this article at the NYEffin' Times. Which largely consists of bits like this
“The truth is that the e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change. But they do hand a powerful political card to skeptics at the start of perhaps the most important environmental summit in history. Still don’t know what to make of it?”
to which the followup is
As far as Walsh is concerned, the big lesson is that “in the aftermath of the e-mails, climate scientists and advocates will need to rethink how they engage with critics.”
Nothing to really deal with the rather inconvenient-to-the-cause information about data being massaged(to put it politely) and faked and threats to illegally destroy data rather than let a 'doubter'(i.e., an actual scientist who wants to see if the data holds up to repeated examination) get hold of it.

I will say that it is a fairly good article, in that it points out that a lot of scientists are really bugged by the way the CRU and associated people/groups are so actively hostile to actual peer review and have tried to destroy the careers of people who won't fall into line; but it keeps coming back to that overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change crap. And, again, glosses over the problems with the data the CRU put out, and the effects it has on all the others being used. Primary thrust is "Scientists need to wear down the skeptics by open debate. Which would be great; open debate and open access to the data is what a lot of the 'skeptics' wanted in the first place, and it was the True Believers denying that that caused the damned problem. Article closes with this:
Perhaps the lesson of Copenhagen is that raw politics and thinking critically don’t mix. One hopes, however, that the politics of science allow some room for open debate. That doesn’t mean letting your opponents run roughshod over the facts. Nor does it involve shutting off their microphones.
with the strong hint that the people doubting AGW are 'running roughshod over the facts', which is kind of hard when A: they weren't allowed to let their infidel eyes gaze upon the Holy Raw Data and B: in science, the data is SUPPOSED to be run over with roughness; tried over and over, in different ways, to see if it holds up to the examination.


Second thing is this over at Flopping Aces, in which one of the 'not a real scientist' people has something to say about the e-mails:
“The recent ‘ClimateGate’ revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years,” said Colorado State University’s Dr. William Gray.

His are the annual hurricane forecasts that are the standard for weather prognostications. His work pioneered the science of forecasting hurricanes and he has served as weather forecaster for the United States Air Force. He is Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at CSU and heads the school’s Department
of Atmospheric Sciences Tropical Meteorology Project
.
Remember, this is one of the people derided as 'bought off' and 'not a REAL scientist' for not going along with that Holy Consensus on AGW. FA also has a link to a piece by Roy Spencer, I'll borrow one part:
4. Skeptics are not unified with an alternative explanation for global warming. Well, that’s the way science works in a field as immature as climate change science. The biggest problem is that we really don’t understand what causes natural climate variability. Kevin Trenberth has now famously admitted as much in one of the Climategate emails, where said it’s a “travesty” that we don’t know why warming has stopped in the last 7 to 10 years. For century-time-scale changes, some believe it is cloud cover being modulated by cosmic ray activity, which is in turn affected by sunspot activity. A few others think it is changes in the total energy output of the sun (possible, but I personally doubt it). In my opinion, it is internal, chaotic variability in the ocean and atmosphere circulation causing small changes in cloud cover. Since clouds are a natural sunshade, changing their coverage of the Earth will cause warming or cooling. The IPCC simply assumes this does not happen. If they did, they would have to admit that natural climate change happens, which means they would have to address the possibility that most of the warming in the last 50 has been largely natural in origin.
Also this one, on those pesky glaciers:
5. But the glaciers are melting! Many glaciers which have been monitored around the world for a long time have been retreating since the 1800’s, before humans could have been responsible. A few retreating glaciers are even revealing old tree stumps…how did those get there? Planted by skeptics?

I have to take note of that line in 4 about 'unified with an alternative explanation'; what the HELL does 'unified' have to do with dealing with facts? A lot of scientists and doctors have been screwed over mightily by others 'unified' in the knowledge that this new idea is obviously bullshit; thus things like germ theory and vaccinations, for instance, did not become what they are as early as they could. Being 'unified' behind an idea doesn't make it right, and claiming otherwise is crap.


*Reminds me of the people in the 80's screaming "Nuclear freeze or FRY!"

1 comment:

Keith said...

On the subject of nukes, I hope the AGW crap gets settled before britain gets to fire up its 8 or 10 planned new nuke power stations.

They're going to be a bugger to safely dismantle before the next glaciation reaches them and spreads their contents around,

far easier not to build them in the first place.

Trust me, it may be 20,000 to 30,000 years away, but we will get it, and more after it.