CNN poll misrepresents scientific consensus on climate change as view of "some people"

C'mon Mary. The only reputable climate scientist that you would believe would be a lefty. The only talking points I post are my own, and I stand by them. NY is not underwater, polar bears have not floated away, and we are no worse off then we were yesterday. And my bubble is huge, as well as the cost of going green, but rest assured, it will not be absorbed by the corp, they will pass it on to the poor consumer.

Didn't MMFA make this a "Left - Right thing" by posting articles like this one? Does that mean they're delusional?

What is questionable is your statement about doing "serious reading by reputable scientists on this subject." Most of us "deniers" didn't get there by a genetic traight or a predisposition toward mass insanity in spite of what your side seems to assume. We got here by following scientific methodology, rejecting the call to consider this as "finished science", (a concept foreign to scientific method), and looking at the evidence of not just the advocates, but the critics as well.

The evidence against MMGW is so overwhelming that no serious scientist should not doubt MMGW, but, anybody that knows anything about science knows it never works that way on any subject.

"Once your incompetence is exposed you really shouldn't revel in it."
So true. Perfectly said, thanks.

Beautiful

Wonderfully stated.

Heinz Lycklama? The guy isn't a meteorologist. He's a physicist and a creationist to boot.

So you have put up the OPINION of a physicist NOT a climatologist to refute WHAT? Where is his research? Where is his peer reviewed study? This is not how science is done. It isnt I THINK and prefer to continue to THINK that I dont like YOUR opinion. It is to write PEER REVIEWED STUDIES. When you have one by a climatologist get back to us.

Or how about this. You can read the full article here http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25434631-7583,00.html

The IPCC has now delivered four scientific assessment reports, each accompanied by an increasingly urgent call to action regarding climate change driven by greenhouse gases. National governments, which are signatories to the UNFCCC, have almost without exception bought into the alarm, modulating it only to accord better with their own political philosophies. This, combined with the allocation research funding according to policy relevance, means governments now attempt to predetermine the findings of scientific research.

For many years climate researchers have understood that their proposals will only be funded if they are pitched in line with government policy. Even worse, unless some aspect of their results appears to perpetuate government thinking, renewal of their funding is unlikely. Other climatologists are acutely aware of the potential consequences for their employers and their own employment prospects should they speak out in criticism of the dominant alarmist paradigm. Scientists who have criticised the hypothesis of human-caused climate change have had their funding curtailed or employment terminated.

Climate modellers have been very aware that their expensive and powerful computing facilities would be supported only if their research produced alarmist climate predictions. This notwithstanding, these models often produced results that were not in good agreement with historical data, perhaps because they poorly replicated or even omitted variations in climate.

These deficiencies and more have been papered over by reviving outdated and inaccurate research about the warming effect of carbon dioxide. The numbers still didn't add up but the inclusion of some "positive feedbacks" masked the problem, and the models were declared "proof" of a significant human influence on climate.

The peer-review process was originally a sanity check for the editors of scientific journals but has always been open to abuse by reviewers who wish to support or suppress a particular line of argument. The recent narrow focus of climate research funding has caused an outburst of scientific papers that support the IPCC's alarmist beliefs and relatively few papers that contradict it. Reviewers with vested interests suppress contradictory papers and support the "official" line.

Vested interests now dominate climate science. Whether climatologists, their employers and other people believe the government-approved line has become irrelevant, because they all wish to retain an income stream and whatever reputations they've established. These people advise governments, which subsequently set policy and research funding regardless of any contradiction with observational data.

Climate science is no longer an impartial truth but a slave to the yoke of politics and opportunism. If this continues, society will be the inevitable loser.

John McLean is a climate data analyst and a member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition.

A Nuclear Physicist is not a Climatologist.

That's why "appeal to authority" is a logical fallacy.

Who is this guy? What is his name?

An anonymous research chemist is not a Climatologist.

Once again, the "appeal to authority" fails.

How about this? Dr Spencer is a climatologist and former NASA scientist or does any scientist that does not agree with you unqualified?

Climate Model Predictions: It’s Time for a Reality Check
May 2nd, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

The fear of anthropogenic global warming is based almost entirely upon computerized climate model simulations of how the global atmosphere will respond to slowly increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. There are now over 20 models being tracked by the IPCC, and they project levels of warming ranging from pretty significant to catastrophic by late in this century. The following graph shows an example of those models’ forecasts based upon assumed increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide this century.

ipcc-ar4-model-projections

While there is considerable spread among the models, it can be seen that all of them now produce levels of global warming that can not be ignored.

But what is the basis for such large amounts of warming? Is it because we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and so increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 will cause warming? NO!…virtually everyone now agrees that the direct warming effect from extra CO2 is relatively small – too small to be of much practical concern.

No, the main reason the models produce so much warming depends upon uncertain assumptions regarding how clouds will respond to warming. Low and middle-level clouds provide a ‘sun shade’ for the Earth, and the climate models predict that those clouds will dissipate with warming, thereby letting more sunlight in and making the warming worse.

[High-altitude (cirrus) clouds have the opposite effect, and so a dissipation of those clouds would instead counteract the CO2 warming with cooling, which is the basis for Richard Lindzen's 'Infrared Iris' theory. The warming in the models, however, is now known to be mostly controlled by the low and middle level clouds – the “sun shade” clouds.]

But is this the way nature works? Our latest evidence from satellite measurements says “no”. One would think that understanding how the real world works would be a primary concern of climate researchers, but it is not. Rather than trying to understand how nature works, climate modelers spend most of their time trying to get the models to better mimic average weather patterns on the Earth and how those patterns change with the seasons. The unstated assumption is that if the models do a better job of mimicking average weather and the seasons, then they will do a better job of forecasting global warming.

But this assumption can not be rigorously supported. To forecast global warming, we need to know how the average climate state — and especially clouds — will change in response to the little bit of warming from the extra CO2. Indeed, the model that best replicates the average climate of the Earth might be the worst one at predicting future warming.

This fact gets glossed over – or totally ignored – as the IPCC dazzles us with the level of effort that has been invested in computer modeling of the climate system over the last 20 years. The IPCC can show how many people they have working on improving the models, how many years and how much money has been invested, how big and fast their computers are, and how many peer-reviewed scientific publications have resulted.

But unless we know how clouds change with warming, it is all a waste of time from the standpoint of knowing how serious manmade global warming will be. Even the IPCC admits this is their biggest uncertainty…so why is so little work being done trying to answer that question?

AN APPEAL TO THE DECISION MAKERS

We now have billions of dollars in satellite assets orbiting the Earth, continuously collecting high-quality data on natural, year-to-year changes in climate. I believe that these satellite measurements contain the key to understanding whether manmade global warming will be catastrophic, or merely lost in the noise of natural climate variability.

That is why I spend as much time as I can spare trying to understand those satellite measurements. But we need many more people working on this effort. Despite its importance, I have yet to meet anyone who is trying to do what I am doing.

To be fair, the modelers do indeed compare their models to satellite measurements. But those comparisons have not been detailed enough to answer the most important questions…like how clouds respond to warming.

The comparisons they have done have been confusing and inconclusive, which is part of the reason why they don’t rely on the satellite measurements very much. The modelers claim that the satellite measurements have been too ambiguous, and so they increasingly rely only upon the models.

But I will continue to assert (until I am blue in the face or die, whichever comes first) that their confusion stems from a very simple issue they have overlooked: mixing up cause and effect. The previous satellite observations that showed clouds tend to decrease with warming does not mean that warming causes clouds to decrease!

We have recently submitted to Journal of Geophysical Research a research paper that shows how one can tell the difference between cause and effect — between clouds causing a temperature change, and temperature causing a cloud change. And when this is done during the analysis of satellite data, it is clear that warming causes an increase in the sunshade effect of clouds. (While the data did suggest strong positive water vapor feedback, which enhances warming, that was far exceeded by the cooling effect of negative feedback from cloud changes.)

These results suggest that the climate system has a strong thermostatic control mechanism – exactly opposite to the way the IPCC models have been programmed to behave — and that the widespread concern over manmade global warming might well be a false alarm.

The potential importance of this result to the global warming debate demands a reexamination of all of the satellite data that have been collected over the last 25 years, with the best minds the science community can spare. Simply asserting that ‘Dr. Spencer does not know what he is talking about’ will not cut it any more.

We now have two papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that paved the way for this work (here and here), and so one can not simply dismiss the issue based upon some claim that we ‘skeptics’ do not publish our work.

I just presented our latest results at the NASA CERES Team meeting to about 100 attendees, and there were no major objections voiced to my analysis of the results. (CERES is the instrument that monitors how global cloud changes affect the energy balance of the Earth). I was pleased to see that there are still some scientists who are interested in the science.

Rather than simply asserting that I am wrong, why not take a fresh look at the data that have been collected over the years? Given the importance of the issue, it would seem to be the prudent thing to do. A red team-blue team approach is needed here, with the red team specifically looking for evidence that the IPCC has been wrong in their previous evaluation of the satellite data.

I suggested this years ago in congressional testimony, but one thing I’ve learned is that most congressional hearings are not designed to uncover the truth.

Maybe those in control of the research dollars are afraid of what might be found if the research community looked too closely at the satellite measurements. There are now billions — if not trillions — of dollars in future taxes, economic growth, and transfers of wealth between countries that are riding on the climate models being correct.

Scientific debate has all been shut down. The science of climate change was long ago taken over by political interests, and I am not hopeful that the situation will improve anytime soon. But I will continue to try to change that.

One last thought.

Don't use science to get round politics, says Hulme

Interview Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you'd expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall - and as we found out in a telephone interview - he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN's IPCC, the "consensus", the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called "deniers" to contribute to those debates.

As Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, Hulme remains one of the UK's most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists. In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, he explores how the issue of climate change has come to be such a dominant issue in modern politics. He treats climate change not as a problem that we need to solve – indeed, he believes that the complexity of the issue means that it cannot be solved, only lived with – and instead considers it as much of a cultural idea as a physical phenomenon."

Perhaps the most surprising thing to hear from a climate scientist writing about climate change is that climate science has for too long had the monopoly in climate change debates. When we spoke to him on the phone, Hulme cited as evidence the 2007 protests against Heathrow’s third runway, where marchers made their case by waving a research paper at the TV cameras under a banner bearing the slogan “We are armed only with peer reviewed science”. [The paper wasn't actually peer-reviewed science - see Bootnote]
“To me, that's the most dispiriting position,” says Hulme. “For these people who feel so passionately about this, their ultimate authority is a report from a group of scientists, and they’re saying ‘this is where we stand, forget about our moral concerns, forget about our ethical positions, forget about whether we are Right, Left or centre, forget about whether we are Christians or Buddists, no, none of that matters.’ The only thing that matters is that they’re holding a report from peer-reviewed science that in itself justifies their position."

“To hide behind the dubious precision of scientific numbers, and not actually expose one’s own ideologies or beliefs or values and judgements is undermining both politics and science”

And it’s not just protesters who are hiding behind the authority of science. World leaders are doing it, too.

"Uncertainty, and things like that"
Hulme despairs over the comments made to the Copenhagen climate conference in March by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then the Danish Prime Minister. Rasmussen told delegates that "science should be the basis for decision-making in this field", and asked scientists to keep it simple, "not to provide us with too many moving targets...and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.”

“That's just classic,” says Hulme. “Here's this politician telling the scientists ‘we can't do this without you. Give us the numbers. But by the way, make them simple, and make them precise.’”

Hulme believes that this dependence of politics on science expects too much of science’s ability to explain and to predict, and that this is a burden that science cannot carry. Science is exposing its vulnerabilities, he says. And in overselling itself, the risks are very substantial. “It's like the classic case of the dodgy dossier”.

For garcut.
The new layout is still weirding me out.