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Scientists are political people too: changing minds about climate change? — 55 Comments

1. “it’s a very technical and specialized subject about which I’m unfortunately unable to come to any firm conclusion at the moment”

   Neo, this is not your fault; specialists in the field are in the same situation, and those who are honest enough express the same opinion. Too many known unknowns. More understandable is public reaction on the subject. The most contagious ideas are traditionally associated with expecting end of the world and expecting some magic salvation, so they are most attractive to charlatans. In our days these are catastrophic climat change and panacea of stem cell magic cure. Fear and hope are all-time best-sellers, and no journalist can resist temptation to use them to improve circulation.

2. The problem is that the mass media, seeking headlines as always, has inflated the issue far beyond the available science. I’m reminded of a cover article in Time magazine in 1974, in which the imminent danger of a “new ice age” was being discussed by some of the leading meteorological scientists of the age. We were all destined to need parkas and igloos in the “very near future”.

   Recently, a scientist affiliated with the Russian Academy of Science predicted a coming “little Ice Age” (http://www.physorg.com/news75818795.html), and proposed putting off the “Kyoto initiatives.”

   The sad truth is, NOBODY KNOWS ENOUGH about the science involved to really be definitive about what should be done with regard to climate change. We don’t have enough data over enough time to really model climate effectively, and making policy decisions based on the tissue-thin existing science is just foolish.

   Another case of people reacting emotionally to scientific issues for which they have no background.

3. “Pielke says he has felt pressure from his peers: A prominent scientist angrily accused him of being a skeptic…”

   The one thing that has really jumped out for me in the last few months is this use of the word skeptic. Amongst the scientists one could count as ‘global warming alarmists’, skepticism is now a BAD thing! Skeptics within their own scientific ranks are villified – for being skeptical.

   Call me crazy, but I was taught that skepticism has always been considered a vital part of science.

4. There is a common name to mass psychoses of this type – eschatological heresy. They began circulate when society loses sense of stability, and general anxiety level rise. Lost of faith grossly enhances susceptibility to such mental infections, just as AIDS makes peoples vulnerable to microbes which otherwise are not pathogenic. Something is in the air, and this is not greenhouse gases; more probably, presentiment of world war.

5. Research grants and commercial marketing opportunities can be an obvious motivation. Oh the cats out of the bag now 🙁

6. Actually, somebody does have all the answers. Unfortunately, we have no idea of who he might be.

7. One of the biggest problems is that Al Gore could mutate to an enormous size and obtain superpowers, thereby unleashing ManBearPig on an unsuspecting world.

8. In Thomas S. Kuhn’s book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” which I read many years ago, he argues, if I ‘m not mistaken, that science advances not because scientists hew to the idealistic and rational scientific method we were taught in school but, quite the contrary, science advances when older, established scientists–who vigorously defend and hold tightly to the theories they were taught and on which their careers were built– die, to make room for a new generation of scientists and their newer received theories.

9. Stambly, go not worry too much: the article you cited was written almost year ago, when Moscow winter was especially severe, and is an journalist spin about it. The key phrase in it was:
   “In both cases, temperature rise or fall will not exeed 1 Celsius degree in 50 years”. Author is not a climatologist, he is astrophysicist, and has no idea how Earth climat system works.

10. just out of curiosity, how many of the climate change sceptics are funded by companies who pollute? Sc ience is not a matter of most supporters equals the right view. But, when the minority view is supported by organisations with clear self interest in the matter then there is a need to be suspicious.
    http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/mg19125712.400

11. sorry but here is the full text to the above link which is a supscription site

    AMONG climate researchers, the consensus is growing that global warming may be close to a tipping point beyond which runaway feedbacks could take hold, creating what George W. Bush’s top climate modeller this week calls “a different planet” (see “‘One degree and we’re done for'”). Yet the political discourse that should be helping us find ways to respond to such warnings remains a mess.

    Last week, the Royal Society in London sent a measured complaint to the oil company ExxonMobil, asking it to end its long-standing and extensive funding of lobby groups that the society says “misinform the public” on climate change. What response does it get? Nothing from ExxonMobil and its lobbyists, whose contempt for one of the world’s oldest scientific institutions seems to rival their contempt for good science. Instead, we get lectures from climate change sceptics, such as the UK-based Scientific Alliance, which claims the Royal Society wants to “close down debate”. It further charges that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the cornerstone of scientific consensus-building on the issue, has become politicised.

    This is farcical. The Scientific Alliance and its ilk have done more than anyone to politicise this debate, and now they have the cheek to claim purity of purpose. There is plenty of room to discuss the nature and extent of climate change, but the politically and commercially motivated abuse of science carried out by some climate change sceptics and those who back them needs to be exposed for what it is. Let the contrarians speak, by all means. But bullying, like censorship, has no place in scientific debate.

12. I don’t have a problem with making a serious effort to conseve energy and develop sustainable energy sources. My problem is that most of the activists push half-baked solutions that ignore economic factors. Subsidizing wind energy has resulted in windmills being built in areas with little wind and has neglected the problem of compensatory energy sources when there is no wind.

    Carbon credits on an international scale is corruption just waiting to happen. I read recently that Russia has boosted the level of carbon emissions on which the credits would be based. This would allow them sell credits for carbon no longer being produced because the factories were closed long ago.

    Solar energy is a great idea, but my roof doesn’t face south. I can’t take advantage of programs that encourage rooftop solar collectors although my taxes help finance the programs.

    I want the best economists and engineers to recommend sensible solutions. I am sick of the feel good ideas of professional protestors.

13. neoneoconned–Your assertion may cover some cases of skepticism, but it doesn’t account for scientific bias against scientists like Pielke.

    Nor does it account for little facts mentioned in the Chronicle article, like the 1930’s heat waves being hotter than current heat waves.

    Or the known historical progression from Medieval Climate Optimum to the Little Ice Age to the current age.

    There is almost nothing in the way of historical records on the variance in the Sun’s energy output–yet this variance has a direct effect on all global-climate models.

    Count me skeptical–the science of global climate is still finding all the important factors, and cannot provide meaningful predictions.

    Worse, the Laboratory for this science consists almost entirely of one sample, with no ability to run a control test. Thus, no matter how hard the scientific facts, repeatable laboratory observations are almost impossible.

    Do you know how long it took chemists and physicists to figure out that the “phlogiston/caloric fluid” theory of heat was untenable? It took at least a century.

14. Sergey, no worries. I just cited the article to show that the “science” is anything but conclusive either way.

15. Here is a good link for articles on “global warming”

    http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/

16. I am a skeptic, for a couple of reasons. First off, the same jackasses braying about Global Warming were the same jackasses predicting the Global Ice age in 1969 as well as all sorts of other calamities, all man made in the West of course, and the same breathless media hysterics to accompany it.

    Secondly ,since I work with weather and have for close to thirty years , I have seen all kinds of meteorlogical phenomeana, sometimes more than once, why, almost like a natural cycle, which damn near everything out there is.

    Last point, I think the number of scientists who think this new Religion is bunk actually exceeds the true believers.

    Now, one last thing, some time ago a very deep core sample was taken from the bottom of Lake Tanganyika. Surprisingly enough, it indicated some serious climatic upheaval , including indications of severe climate change a good 10,000 years before man dropped in, though i am sure George W Bush was driving his SUV in the area with the a/c blasting away even then .

17. William Ruddiman’s recent book Plows, Plagues, & Petroleum argues that we have been warming climate for 8,000 years, since the beginning of agriculture, and that this has been beneficial to the point of necessity. He remains concerned about the speed at which fossil-fuel burning warms climate currently, however. A recently retired professor of Environmental Science at UVA, his arguments, which have something to encourage and dismay both extremes in this debate, are quite persuasive.

    http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2007/01/plows-plagues-petroleum.html

18. Here is another book about another field of science altogether (theoretical physics) and how it went totally off the rails with String Theory (totally untestable, yet the juggernaut continues on).

    The scientists’ motives this time were not international politics but hope that the Theory Of Everything was finally within their grasp. But the denial of tenure, grants, and status afforded to “non-believers” is pretty much the same as it ever was.

19. “commercially motivated abuse of science”

    The believers dismiss the opinions of researchers funded by energy companies but see no conflict of interest with researchers who are funded by gov’t and foundation grants. I’d be curious to know which ‘pot’ of money is bigger but I’d guess it’s the latter.

    And the ‘social’ driven distortions are surely dominated by believers. The recent Weather Channel episode where one of the program hosts actually suggested witholding credentials for those unwilling to conform. Accordingly, if there’s incentive to ‘cook the books’ it’s far greater on the side to cook them to the believers satisfaction.

20. A few of things I have noticed over the last several years in the ‘dialog’ on global warming. First, a great many of the scientists who evangelize about it are not specialists in weather sciences, but often are from other fields. I will assume that their involvement comes from their concerns of how the areas of science that they study (such as rainforest ecology or ocean biodiversity) would be impacted by severe global warming. However, their concerns don’t make them climatologists. To use a common example, if I need a root canal, I want an oral surgeon, not a podiatrist, as much as the podiatrist cares about my overall health.

    Secondly, I have read much of the IPCC reports (specifically looking at the US and at Europe sections, and skimming through Africa, much of it is necessarily repetitive) and it is filled with qualifiers. Maybe this, probably that, et cetera. The statistical analysis is rather wooly, and relies in a great part on a fairly small amount of samplings taken in many cases in cities where the environment has radically changed (read, paved over) since the records were begun.

    Thirdly, everyone talks about atmospheric carbon, and the additions made by people from burning fuels. The largest greenhouse gas of all has not to my knowledge been studied in the climate models, and that is water vapor, which from what I’ve read amounts to up to 90% of all greenhouse gasses. If I understand correctly, the reason it’s not been added into the models is no one yet knows how it behaves exactly.

    If we are indeed living in a time of global warming, the question is if it indeed is anthropomorphically induced. If it’s not, there’s not much we can do about it. If it is, the question remains is whether it will really be cumulatively bad enough for the kinds of draconian policies that individuals like Mr. Gore envision. The history of large-scale restriction and centralized planning of economies is one that has lead to greater pollution and destruction of the ecology than in free societies. The Soviet Union left a legacy of environmental catastrophe second to no other in history.

21. If the scientists were correct about global warming then they should be able to input data, say from 2001, into the computer models and come up with the data to match that year. Surprise, they cannot do it because, among other reasons, the computer models do not account for sunspot activities and thusly cannot predict past weather occurences. The hottest day in Chicago history was recorded in the mid 1930’s. I’m sure that can be explained by global warming too.

22. neo: The problem with global warming is that, if the alarmists are correct, we need to act soon. And the actions required aren’t minor, they are major and involve a certain amount of sacrifice.

    My understanding is that, even if the alarmists are correct, there’s little difference between acting now and acting 20 years from, when more of the uncertainties might be more clear. And, when it comes to uncertainties, computer models are only a part of the problem. Let’s make a list:

    First there’s some small amount of uncertainty remaining over whether the phenomenon of climatic warming is actually occurring at all — though not just the scientific “consensus” but the bulk of the evidence is that it is.

    Second, given that the warming is happening, there’s also a small but greater amount of uncertainty over whether it’s actually caused, or at least primarily caused, by human action — again, we can grant that the bulk of the evidence says it is, but the uncertainties are growing.

    Third, given that warming is happening, and that it’s largely anthropogenic, there’s then a much larger amount of uncertainty over its actual costs, and this is exacerbated by the blanket refusal of warming believers even to consider the possibility that there might be any offsetting benefits to the warming — e.g., in making arable and livable huge areas of the earth that had always been too forebidding for extensive human settlement. This cost-benefit uncertainty is further worsened in that we also don’t have any real handle on the costs of proposed solutions like Kyoto (which would, even if fully implemented by every state, have only a negligable effect on the warming, according to the computer models themselves). It would be one of history’s nastier ironies if we bankrupted ourselves through abrupt economic change in an effort to prevent an occurrence that would have been largely beneficial.

    Fourth, the greatest uncertainty of all, in the kind of time frames we’re talking about here, is just the future — even if all the previous uncertainties didn’t exist, even if we knew for certain that the costs of global warming would vastly outweigh the benefits, we don’t now know how best to mitigate those costs, and we don’t know how another 20 or 30 years would improve that knowledge, at very little cost in further warming. It’s like people a couple of centuries ago worrying about projections showing that, 200 years from then, the increase in city traffic will have us all neck deep in horse dung.

    Given all that uncertainty, we might really wonder what lies behind the frantic, and often vicious scare tactics pursued by the believers. It goes well beyond the sort of controversies that have always characterized science, even those involved in Kuhnian paradigm shifts. I think it can only be explained by the sense of a powerful ideological opportunity here. No doubt the vast majority of believers, including the scientists who, as neo points out,

23. (cont.)

    No doubt the vast majority of believers, including the scientists who, as neo points out, are as susceptible to political influence as anyone, are simply ideologically naive bien-pensants. But many of those trying to spook the herd are recognizable as the old, familiar suspects, who have simply shifted their anti-capitalist endeavors to new ground. If they have their way, the actions “required” won’t be minor indeed.

24. This is so typical of politicised debates in this country. The environmental movement glommed onto this issue back in the 70s when the projections were that we were cooling. It fit their ideas that it was all man’s fault because we were polluting the atmosphere. They had been searching for reasons why we must quit embracing modern ways of using energy for our own good. This fit their agenda like a glove.

    We are warming up , no doubt about it. But, as many have pointed out here, the evidence that it is due to CO2 from fossil fuel burning is circumstantial. Yes, CO2 could be causing some component of warming or all of it, but nobody knows definitely how much. They also don’t know whether suddenly slowing CO2 emissions by a large amount if it would stop the warming.

    The enviros believe that if everyone would conserve energy by buying high mileage cars, installing solar heating, turning down the thermostat, building wind energy farms, and using alternative fuels that would solve the problem. Wrong!! That might solve 15 or 20% of the problem. The real solution, should we care to attempt it, is all of the above, plus building a massive number of nuclear power plants, and, where geographically feasible, maximizing our hydro power.

    The other big problem is that the U.S., Europe, and Japan are in a position where we could, at great cost, carry out such a program. However, India, China, and the rest of the Third World would just continue to pump C02 into the air.

    If the doomsday scenarios are true, unless the ENTIRE world embarks on a strenuous CO2 reduction program, things are going to get dicey in 30 -50 years. At that time a massive world wide CO2 reduction program might become possible just because it becomes widely accepted that it is necessary for survival.

    If, as some scientists predict, the warming is not mostly due to fossil fuel burning, then there is little that can be done except adjust and recognize that the Earth’s climate, like the stock market, fluctuates.

25. Yes, yes, those fool scientists; what do they know? After all, all they have is evidence. Neo, on the other hand, learned long ago that if you believe hard enough, even the most fearsome facts could melt away like glaciers in the Arctic circle.

26. I went through my Al Gore moment on global cooling, then global warming, in the late 70s and 80s, as I was finishing up a BE in civil and environment engineering.

    Also read everything I could get my hands on about the population bomb (we should all be living on 10 sq. ft of land by now) which, of course, never happened.

    I have finally come to believe that the world may certainly be in a warming trend, but only a small percent–if any–is man-made.

    I can’t and won’t get back into the feeding frenzy of panic about the whole thing and how the government alone must save us from ourselves.

    Like you breaking with the group-think of psychotherapists, I have broken with many of my old colleagues in the environmental world where I once lived and worked for decades. They are appalled at my growing conservatism, and I am bored to tears with their one issue fanatism and global warming hysteria.

    So we just don’t talk about it anymore.

    I believe we’ve got several other “perfect storms” brewing in our collective future that will make global warming pale in comparison if we don’t start dealing with them.

    So glad you had the fortitude to take a whack at this. Better thee than me.

27. During the Medieval Warm Period, when Greenland was farmed and the Norse raised cattle, things were warmer than now.
    Just exactly how bad was it?
    Anybody got any evidence that it was a catastrophe?
    Did things improve with the Little Ice Age?

28. The biggest problem I have is that it is terrible scientific method. Currently it has two main problems, reliance on models and the inability to be wrong.

    The first, models, isn’t necessarily bad. It is the treatment of the models. You can start one a few years back and run it forward and adjust until they get it correct, then extrapolate forward many years. So far, none have held up and had to be changed, yet after every go the new one is actually “correct” and should be followed. No other branch of science takes models to be this strong, even much much simpler branches of science.

    Secondly is the inability to be wrong. When the earth warms – obviously global warming is correct. When it stays the same – well that’s OK two (after all, the models show that). Then we had a period of global cooling and that is only to be expected – after all it can not always warm. There is not a single condition that invalidates the theory (and is why it is now referred to as “global climate change” instead of “global warming” – to reflect this new understanding).

    That is horrid science. Though the majority of climatologist do not adhere to this (and are not strong supporters of global warming), the loudest and most read are. I worked at ORNL in the computing center, of the 5 or six weather people that ran on our clusters only one was strong – the rest were inconclusive.

    We know that climate changes, we know we have an impact, we know the system is self correcting, and we know we are no where near an extreme (even most of the alarmist “we are all going to die” people scenario isn’t any where close to the mesozoic era.

    I’ve never really understood why people go so hard at it. It is too easy to poke holes in (partially because it is so over hyped). It may be true, it may not. If it is true then the current people pushing it (like Gores “Inconvenient Truth”) have done more to cause skepticism by flat out lying and sensationalizing everything than if they had just told it like the middle of the road people think. I’m not going to trust someone making these ultra-wide sweeping accusations when they can not even get the simple facts that their idea is based on correct.

    They could have probably already gotten many of the changes they want had they not been alarmist and instead focused generally on air quality. But then, the same ones can not do that rationally either when they have tried. Personally I think it is more a certain type of personality that likes doing this and tends to go overboard no matter the cause.

29. karrde, actually, there is a substantial amount of information available about paleoclimate and its relation to carbon dioxide and solar activity. I have wondered for a long time why the global warming discussion paid so little attention to the paleoclimate studies of John Eddy, who had an extremely informative article in the June, 1977 issue of Scientific American (when the magazine was less politicized than now) that referenced the papers he had published in refereed journals on the climate effect of solar variations over the past few thousand years, and how he had determined what had occurred. Now, thanks to M. Simon, I find that in the Eighties Eddy and a collaborator extended his earlier work, as you can see from the figures here. Also, there is a discussion here of estimated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past several hundred million years. I don’t know how confident to be about the reliability of the carbon dioxide plot, but I am confident in Eddy’s thoroughness, since his earlier work combined information from many sources to support his conclusions. There is a lot more I could write about all of this, and if I ever get to the point of having my own blog, I intend to do so. Meanwhile, I hope the links are informative.

    Best regards,
    John Hamilton Leibniz

30. By an interesting coincidence, (GMTA?) I just wrote my “magnum opus” on this very subject…

31. One thing I do know about the alarmists is that they don’t act like they are alarmed when the rubber meets the road, that is, compared to their own real world acts.

    The ipcc excludes countries containing 5 billion of the Earth’s 6.5 billion people from having to follow the Kyoto Protocols. It does not recommend nuclear energy as a solution to its claimed disaster-cause mechanism. It specifically does not study the costs and possible ill-effects of its own alleged cure to its own alleged disease.

    So how can the ipcc be taken seriously?

    India and China are embarking upon a massive program to develop 800-1200 coal-fired electricity generating plants over the next decade or so, adding the equivalent of about one more U.S. worth of CO2 to the atmosphere. China and India just do not believe that adding this CO2 will result in more of a disaster to themselves than not adding it will.

    Individual alarmists are notorious for not doing anything other than token acts in their own lives to reduce their own use of CO2 generating products. So I conclude they also really don’t believe their own disaster-cause mechanism regarding GW.

    Therefore, there appears to be no “consensus” that GW will be a net disaster and that fossil fuel CO2 would be the cause, except that the “consensus” is wrong, if judged by acts instead of statements.

32. King Arthur: Climate Change!
    Sir Bedivere: Climate Change!
    Sir Robin: Climate Change!
    Squire: It’s only a model.

33. “The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes “a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the climate,” said co-chair Susan Solomon, a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report Monday.”

    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/science/4490228.html

34. I am not a climatologist, but incidentally many key pieces of this very large zig-zag puzzle of climat change belong to several domains of my personal expertise, namely fluid dynamics, thermodinamics of systems far from equilibrium, mathematical modelling, non-linear dynamical systems and statistics. (I have graduated Chair of Hydrodynamics and Chemical Mechanics of MSU.) But scientific aspects of this discussion reqire more space that is available for comments. So I dare contribute only one conclusion: the problem is really enormously complicated and now is beyond reach of all existing methods of rigor assessment. It is intractable by any known mathematical approach listed above. Only some educated guesses are possible, and no one can be reliably substantuated.

35. It isn’t Climate Change that projects to be a disaster – the disaster would be what its religious adherents propose to do to the rest of us.

36. Sergey, For some unknown reason, fluid mechanics was my most favorite course in engineering school…and I loved working with Bernoulli’s equation.

37. I was particularly interested in recent news that a UN study concluded that cow emissions contributed twice as much climate harming methane to the atmosphere than SUVs did.

38. Climate change is a great example of how politics has poisoned a whole field of science.

    Right now, all I can tell from climatology papers is who the scientists voted for in 2000. That’s it. Both sides now seem to be “spinning” their scientific findings.

    If there is a problem, nobody’s doing anything to actually solve it — because the “believers” are too busy exaggerating the dangers and minimizing the costs, while the “skeptics” are doing the reverse. Nobody’s coming up with ways to balance costs and benefits.

    What we will get out this will be either:

    1) Incredibly expensive programs to reduce carbon emissions which turn out to be useless or actually counterproductive, or

    2) Incredibly expensive last-minute programs to deal with the effects of climate change which turn out to be useless or actually counterproductive, and

    3) A permanent politicization of science which will spread into other fields; it’s already starting to happen to biology and neuroscience.

    On a personal note, I’d find the arguments of the warming “believers” a lot more convincing if more of them were mentioning nuclear power as a replacement for coal. The echoing silence on that subject makes me think the issue is dominated by environmental ideologues.

39. Politization of science already spoiled ethical climate of scientific community. Recent example: Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of “Science”, published in 2006 four personal op-eds about climate change expressing angry criticism of US government policy. He is a cell biologist, with no expertise in any field associated with this problem. I do not know exactly is it normal by modern American standards, but in Russia such behavior would be viewed as absolutely unacceptable (not for critique of government, but for public expression of opinions outside domain of expertise and misuse of position).

40. In most estimates really harmful effects of CC will not materialize before 2050 in business as usual scenario. But really this scenario is virtually impossible. Lots of technology changes are expected until this time, including thermonuclear energy, advent of electrical cars and complete rejection of internal combustion engine. Most of technologic innovations for such prolonged period is impossible to imagine. This is just as absurd as discuss in 19 century expected level of horse dung on London streets in 21 century (as one commenter here already indicated).

41. the earth as a whole was NOT warmer during the Midieval Warm Period as it is now. That’s one of the biggest mistakes global-wamring ‘skeptics’ make: they assume global wamring is everywhere at once. In fact, actual climate scientists have often made the point that one of the effects of global warming is to make other places colder while the overall temperature rises.

    And that the earth is warming is a fact absolutely no one can deny. If you want to say humans aren’t causing it, 99% of the scientific community disagrees, and it is the right-wing politicians and polluting industries which have tried to bury those studiesm so don’t delude yourselves into thinking you’re clear-eyed skeptics standing against the panicky mob.

42. See also
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6289367.stm

    It looks like panic among leading US energy corporation’s CEO. They are humans, too, and susceptible to mass psychoses. But not CEO, just ordinary folks in US would pay extra money for everything if energy company arose prices for energy.

43. Another form of European hypocrisy: at pretext of environment concerns, bureaucracy and politicians plan to extract extra money from your pockets:

    He thinks increased petrol taxes are extremely unlikely: “They are the most difficult to increase of all because they are so visible.”

    But, he says, a cap-and-trade mechanism like the European Union’s carbon-trading scheme could do the job equally well.

    “If it’s a well-designed cap-and-trade, it doesn’t work any differently from a tax – but it doesn’t have the word ‘tax’ in it.”

44. The second ipcc report was called “SAR”, the third “TAR”, the fourth, “4AR”.

    As reported in the “[FAR] Report has ‘smoking gun’ Chronicle article linked above:

    “They said that the 12-page summary for policymakers will be edited in secret word-by-word by governments officials for several days next week [no doubt as were the words of the ipcc scientist-spokespeople quoted] and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first report from scientists will come out months later.”

    Well that’s three more smoking guns right there. Even the “smoking gun” slant is a smoking gun to anyone having a nose for propaganda.

    Nor will the smoke of the contradictory rubber-meeting-the-road real acts of “scientific” entities such as the ipcc, Nations, and individuals be noted in FAR.

    The emission of propaganda is what’s fouling the “ipcc” process. It wreaks of mendacity.

45. …the “[FAR] Report has ‘smoking gun’ on climate” Chronicle….

46. Loyal Achates, you are wrong in this assertion. Midieval Warm Period ended when Small Ice Age began, and the latter was brought by Maurer minimum, that is decline of solar radiation. This cooling was certainly global, and ice records of both Greenland and Antarctic ice shields prove this. We now live in more cool global climate, the ancient Romans and medieval Europeans. Nothing is known about redistribution of temperature for periods predating meteorological observations, and these began only in 19 century.

47. Global warming happens. So does global cooling. We live on a dynamic planet receiving energy from both the sun and our own molten core (BTW, how would you regulate CO2 emissions from volcanoes?). The great thing about humanity is our ability to adapt to changing environments—or in some cases changing environments to suit ourselves. Systemic stress (wars, natural disasters) tend to foster innovation and change..

    We’ve reached a tipping point in human evolution where we WILL continue to come up with answers to environmental issues. But fear mongering and fostering panic for political gain is not a solution. Neither is blaming all woes on humanity; climate is NOT static. And personally, I’d rather have a warmer earth than a colder earth—but then again, I don’t own beachfront property anywhere or live in New Orleans. -cp

48. “It looks like panic among leading US energy corporation’s CEO.”
    Sergey

    But what do Oil Companies have to lose by taking a pro-ghg cap stance? They don’t actually emit much CO2 themselves – correct me if I’m wrong.

    Consumers do emit a lot of CO2 in using petroleum, so they are the ones who would pay the cap-tax on petroleum product use.

    Fossil fuel electricity plants emit a lot of CO2, but they will simply pass the cap-cost on to all consumers, as occurs in Europe.

    And up to 57% of electricity in the U.S. comes from coal-fired plants.

    Regardless, Bush knows that damping down consumer spending will threaten to stifle the U.S. economy, our growth, our strength, and our prosperity. People might actually become truely poor.

    So, as Tony Snow suggested, Bush is not going to advocate ghg caps, and “Big Oil” no doubt knew it.

49. For some reason, probably owing to my inexperience with Haloscan, I have found that the links I put in my previous comment were changed. What I intended was to link to Simon’s Power and Control blog here:

    http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/

    and the two West Virginia webpages here:

    http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

    http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
    Sorry,
    John Hamilton Leibniz

50. The Little Ice Age lasted from approximately the 15th century to the mid 19th century. Scientists say it was caused by a combination of decreased solar activity and increased volcanic activity. How are we at predicting decreases in solar activity and increases in volcanic activity? How are we at predicting next week’s weather?

51. Thanks for the links, John Hamilton.

52. One way to think about solar activity is to realize that every time a newspaper announces a major solar flare, think of a blow-torch being turned on earth. I still haven’t read anyone address the observed global warming on Mars. Also read somewhere that insects emit more CO2 than human activity. Can that be confirmed?

53. Yes,it can. Not so about co2, but about methan, which is more potent infrared absorption agent, and is emitted in vast quantities by termits (there are trillions of them). This also can be said about cows. But methan circulation and production in biospere is very poorly understood yet. This is important, because changing of these natural emission with climate is powerful possible negative feedback, totally ignored in models; and we know now, that biosphere has profound homeostatic effect on temperature, atmosphere composition, albedo (reflection coeefficient) of ongoing radiation and other controlling parameters of radiation balance. Exactly this makes climate prognoses from models so unrelible. This also makes impossible to speak about human “contribution” to global warming: in non-linear systems effects of different forcings can not be just “added”, they interact in more complex fashion.

54. The Little Ice Age corresponded with the Maunder Minimum.
    The best reference I’ve found on the impact of the Sun on climate is at ACRIM.

55. I’m glad you come to the climate debate with an open mind. However, after witnessing the behavior of “skeptics” and corporate interest groups such as the CEI. For example, prominent “skeptic” Dr. Pat Michaels testified to congress and removed two future scenarios (those that most accurately projected CO2 levels) to argue that climate models did not perform well. This is documented and any interested parties can find the original James Hansen paper and the Michaels testimony (available at the Cato Institute website).

    There are many examples of such behavior from the skeptic side, so if anyone has tarnished the word it is them.

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