Why Climate Change is Unbearably Naked

What do I find so impossibly sloppy to bear, about Climate Change in its contemporary definition, as the result of human activities (also known as “Anthopogenic Global Warming” or AGW, and usually associated to CO2 emissions caused by humans)?

Yesterday’s incredible (counter-)discovery by Anthony Watts on CO2 measurements getting corrected upwards after having gone downwards “for the first time in history” provides an opportunity for a non-exhaustive list (I may add links to each point next week) of all that depaupers Climate Change of actual meaning:

• Climate models are all based on forcings, something that cannot be measured. The tool has become the cause.
• Those same models are demonstrably “right” whatever happens, either warming or cooling (once again, as all they show is that forcings are supposed to do)
• Proponents are fixated on negativities (not just the newsmedia and the Stern Report…I have some interesting findings about a recent book on Climate Change, and I will publish them this week or next)
• Climate change is improbably comprehensive in its effects, and yet “Attribution”, the ability to pinpoint a particular change as having something to do with Climate Change, is still up in the air
• The IPCC itself cannot see much evidence for change in 2/3 (two-thirds!) of the planet
• The “truth” is that temperatures are going up but if one looks at actual measurements, they are continuously adapted and adjusted. Measurement stations are not increasing in the number, and locations are far from perfect.
• And now of course, on-the-fly upward adjustments of CO2 data appear just as values begin to go “the wrong way”.

I personally agree with Watts when he writes: “While nefarious motives may not be there, its just damn sloppy IMHO, and given this is the crown jewel for CO2 data I expect far better“.

And please don’t get me wrong…I am perfectly aware that such generalized sloppiness is part-and-parcel of modern Science, with genetists looking for Mendelian transmission of what is not Mendelian and a whole generation of Cosmologists trained on calling 96% of the Universe as “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy”, two names for the same thing (”Total Ignorance”).

“Institutionalized Science” is of course 80% rubbish, as per the famous 80/20 rule.

But the whole Climate debate is much more than Science. And for that, there is still so much it needs to be dressed with, before it can be shown as properly thought of, and ready for being a solid basis for a revolution in societal mores.

If I read about “scientists demonstrating that train travel is impossible” I may get a laugh, as people at the time surely did. But when I see all the massive propaganda machine put in place to convince people to turn carbon-free by way of guilt, there isn’t much to be amused of.

If the keys to absolute gullibility are ever found, we may as well all turn back to live up the trees.

Whither a Climate Debate?

Gavin Schmidt writes at RealClimate

“The obvious ineptitude of this contribution underlines quite effectively how little debate there is on the fundamentals if this is the best counter-argument that can be offered.”

But it has been my impression that the main story, Monckton’s press releases notwithstanding, has been (and still is) the FPS Editor remarking that there is a considerable number of scientists skeptical of the IPCC conclusions.

The FPS Executive Committee now states on the FPS July 2008 page that they do not agree with the previous remark, suggesting it is all a matter of opinion.

However, with the APS jumping in against Monckton’s paper with red inks (thankfully now turned to black), and more than one call for the FPS Editor to be “fired” from his volunteer position for the mere reason that he made that remark, I wonder what kind of “debate” could at all be possible?

Actually, I’d rather the APS had replied with Gavin’s words “The obvious ineptitude of this contribution etc etc” challenging any of its readers to come up with something better than Monckton’s.

That would have given debate a chance. As things stand, I pretty much doubt any against-consensus contribution would appear on the FPS in the future, even were such a contribution to surface (and am sure, it won’t: otherwise yet more people’s bosses will receive e-mails asking to “fire the heretics”, an ominous metaphore it there’s ever been one)

Honesty on Nature’s Climate Feedback

I want to thank Olive Heffernan for being so honest: her blog at Nature’s Climate Feedback, that will surely make Lord Lawson proud despite a tad too many personal attacks, is definitely neither cool nor rational. Exactly “what it says on the tin”…

As for Rosenzweig et al.: could anybody please confirm or deny if the “30,000 phenomena” are the same 30,000 phenomena mentioned in AR4-WG2, chapter 1?

Spare a Thought for IATA

They emit very very little CO2 compared to everything else, they have set up a “4-pillar strategy to address climate change”, they have been hardly hit by gigantic fuel prices.

They have also been plagued for decades and decades by poor managerial and cost-control skills, resulting in a multitude of bankruptcies and often disappearance of once-thriving companies.

Still, that’s not enough for the miserabilists at the EU trying to force emission trading schemes on anything that moves. And so today, IATA, the International Air Transport Association, decided to pay for a full-page ad on the International Herald Tribune, detailing their perfectly mainstream ideas about climate change.

Much has been said about coercing evil Big Oil and Big Energy companies into emission trading schemes. Let’s see if airlines will be treated any better: one fears not, as the underlying goal is not so much actual emissions, rather the removal of whatever can provide fun

Why Are Weather Forecasters Skeptical of AGW?

An interesting topic via the Global Warming blog on Accuweather, where Brett Anderson points to an article by Bill Dawson of The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.

Note in a couple of Dawson’s interviewees, a slight-but-steady series of slurs against weathercasters that don’t buy into the AGW faith:

Broadcast meteorologists are so busy disseminating information about near-term weather conditions[...] that they simply don’t have much time to keep up with scientific developments related to longer-term climate conditions

many “naysayers” [...] are coming from a perspective of the policy first

they’re against it because they think it will hurt the economy

[the "naysayers"] are putting their own personal views - sometimes even fundamentalist religious beliefs - first

[they] have no academic training or degrees in meteorology

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Luckily, Messrs Anderson and Dawson don’t engage in such awful rhetoric, with the former publicly declaring

“from what I personally see, there are also a number of current and retired TV meteorologists with a good deal of atmospheric science eduaction/professional background that are also skeptical about man-made global warming”

Myself, I have a weather forecasting background…who knows, that might explain my skepticism about AGW…in any case, I find it natural to respect people whose forecasts are challenged by thousands of viewers against the hard evidence of each day’s weather.

What Have VP Dick Cheney and Activist AGWers Got in Common?

What have VP Dick Cheney and activist AGWers got in common?

They all subscribe to a version of the One per Cent Doctrine, a kind of Precautionary Principle.

As reported by Jeremy Waldron on the London Review of Books commenting “Worst-Case Scenarios” by Cass Sunstein, according to Ron Suskind’s “The One Per Cent Doctrine” (2006) this is what the US Vice-president has to say on how to deal with potential nuclear threats:

If there’s a one per cent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response . . . It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.

It’s way too easy to read in there one of the favorite AGW lines:

If there’s a one per cent chance that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are tipping the planet towards an environmental catastrophe, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response . . . It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.

Readers of this blog may already know that I find all Precautionary Principles as literally abominable, a refusal of what makes us human. All proponents of Precaution as a Principle should just curl up on the floor and happily wait for life eventually to end, without fear of any danger of course.

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Still, as acknowledged by Waldron, there exists the issue of how to deal with unlikely-but-catastrophic problems. On this, I do not think anybody’s got a clear answer yet. The only sure thing is, Precautionary Principles won’t help, as explained by Waldron:

The trouble with the One Per Cent Doctrine, for example, is that it does not say enough about the costs that may be involved in our response [...] we rely on regulatory regimes to investigate the consequences of the introduction of the new product. But the regulatory process takes time, and time may produce its own catastrophes. Many people believe, Sunstein says, that prohibitions on genetic modification or its over-regulation ‘might well result in many deaths’, presumably from hunger in developing countries which the stronger crops might have helped alleviate. [...] The point is to alert us to ‘substitute risks’: ‘hazards that materialise, or are increased, as a result of regulation’. If governments take responsibility for avoiding catastrophic outcomes, they must also take responsibility for the catastrophes that attend their efforts at avoiding these outcomes, including other catastrophes that are not addressed because of the expense of addressing this one. [...]

Interestingly, Waldron ends his review lamenting Sunstein’s “failure to devote more sustained attention to issues of rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged. [...] Worst-Case Scenarios [...] would have been a better book had it spent more time on the issues of distributive and corrective justice that attend the prevention of catastrophic harm“.

Because as things stand at the moment, AGW policies mostly hit the poor…

 

AGW: Three Hoorays for the “Fritzl” Bishop

The Bishop of Stafford, the Right Reverend Gordon Mursell…compared climate change sceptics to the Austrian child abuser Josef Fritzl.

Now why do I feel better? BECAUSE methinks there is isn’t much to worry about climate change, if the bubble needs to be inflated to the point of making a “Josef Fritzl” analogy…

(Does anybody want to guess when a CoE Bishop will finally associate climate change to that other nasty Austrian fellow, Adolf H?)

Italian Examples of AGWers’ Totalitarianism

A period of cooling may or may not lie ahead, but there are signs that the average AGWer’s inability to handle dissent is starting to show in Italy too. Here two examples

(1) A comment by somebody signing up as “ina” in (my) Italian version of Numberwatch’s Warmlist, stating that people that do not believe in AGW are to be blamed for the world going to the dogs

(2) A comment by Marco Ferrari: having found no way to reply to my arguments, Ferrari asks on RealClimate’s Butterflies, tornadoes and climate modelling for help in silencing me, of course after calling me a “negationist”, in true goebbelite fashion

It’s just two examples, but having been mobbed not once but twice in an Italian mailing list when I dared to speak out again the AGW credo, the fact that they happened almost at the same time is not an encouraging sign.

Corrected Text for Friends of the Earth’s Goebbelite Campaign Against Houghton Mifflin

Troubled about Friends of the Earth’s goebbelite campaign in the USA against Houghton Mifflin’s decision to dare suggest to high school pupils that there can be a thing called “debate” about global warming? 

“Goebbelite” in the sense of being yet another attempt at using all means and powers to repress dissent, so that people will eventually come to believe in anthropogenic global warming.

Well, trouble yourself no further: just go to Friends of the Earth’s US website and enter the following text in place of the existing “message”:

Subject (instead of “Teach the truth about the Environment”):

Keep up the good work about the Environment

Message under “Dear Sir, Madam” (instead of a long, incoherent tirade that first asks for censorship by appealing to authority and then claims to uphold the need for people to be provided all information):

I am writing to support Houghton Mifflin against the debate-stifling, coarse, ethically unsound attempts by Friends of the Earth to force Houghton Mifflin to immediately issue a corrective packet to all the school districts currently using the textbook: American Government, 11th edition, by Professors James Q. Wilson and John J. DiIulio, Jr. 

I also ask that Houghton Mifflin keep up in the future too, its consensus-challenging, fact-based outlook that can only enhance the capabilities for critical thinking in high school pupils.

The reason? Chapter 21 on Environmental Policy is a godsend, not a “disgrace” as claimed by Friends of the Earth.

We trust the textbook authors to be fair and speak the truth.  To address global warming as “enmeshed in scientific uncertainty” is to describe things as they are. Far from dismissing the work of the nation’s and the world’s top climate scientists, such text underlines the huge challenges facing them and us in understanding the relationship between humanity and the rest of the planet. 

We need the nation’s youth to be given all the information we have available, not just the so-called “consensus”, so that they are able to make their own well-informed decisions.  For years, Houghton Mifflin has provided that information–and I am encouraged to see that a company with such a highly respected reputation is continuing to publish along the same tradition.

I am copying my governor with this message to ensure that my state knows that there is absolutely no problem whatsoever with this textbook!

Sincerely,

(alas, I do not have a US address as yet, so I took the liberty of putting Hayden Planetarium’s, a place I do consider like home).

Of course, my message is unlikely to reach Houghton Mifflin or Governor Paterson of New York via Friends of the Earth, but who knows? And by the way: here’s a form to send your support to Houghton Mifflin directly.

Many thanks to JunkScience for pointing in this direction. More here about Friends of the Earth’s “contempt for democracy”.

Troubled BBC

The Harrabin-Abbess story has not died yet (here’s Bishop Hill on “Jo Abbess’s fifteen minutes of fame“; a video of Noel Sheppard on CNN’s Glenn Beck Show; and Melanie Phillips on The Spectator hardly containing her glee on the “emerging truth” of the BBC showing its pro-AGW bias for all to see).

In the meanwhile, Freeborn John demonstrates that another BBC journalist, Richard Black, is not immune from that same reporting bias, in matters of climate change (Mr Black knows very well my thoughts on the BBC warming bias); in the process, Freeborn John exposes a curious stealth-editing BBC policy.

======

Folks at “the Beeb” better play it safe on global warming for a few weeks now…because if something else just as fishy pops up, then I can already imagine huge anti-BBC blogging and journalistic armies will be unleashed.

So What has the BBC’s Roger Harrabin Actually Done?

There is considerable buzz about reports that “the BBC has changed the news to accommodate an activist“.

The BBC journalist involved is environmental correspondent Roger Harrabin, with whom I must say I have privately exchanged views in the past (wrong…it was Richard Black).

And the BBC article is “Global temperatures ‘to decrease‘”, Friday April 4, 2008.

The “accusation” regards the contents (and title) of the article having been changed to please an environmental activist, allegedly called “Jo Abbess”.

This being the internet, with Fool’s Day not that much in the past, there is not much one can be sure of. So I have compared the three available version of Mr Harrabin’s article. Versions (1) and (2) as per Jennifer Marohasy’s blog. Version (3) as currently on the BBC web site (I am sorry but I have to take (1) and (2) at face value, hoping they are not the product of fakery).

My conclusions are: Mr Harrabin’s article is clearly biased in favour of AGW but not more than other articles in the past by Harrabin and others (see here for more about BBC’s biased reporting); and the whole evolution of the article’s text is compatible with the story of “Jo Abbess” being true. Despite of that, there is still hope.

=================================

a. Differences between (1) and (2)

Version (1) starts with:

Global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007 due to the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. [...] But experts have also forecast a record high temperature within five years.

Version (2) instead:

Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. [...] But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years. The WMO points out that the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C. While Nasa, the US space agency, cites 2005 as the warmest year, the UK’s Hadley Centre lists it as second to 1998. Researchers say the uncertainty in the observed value for any particular year is larger than these small temperature differences. What matters, they say, is the long-term upward trend.

There is a slight “style” change from “lower” to “drop slightly”. Not sure one can make much of a fuss about that. More important, there is a whole new section reiterating that there is a “long-term warming trend”.

This doesn’t appear much of a “scandal” to yell about, even if it clearly shows the BBC party-line of driving home the “world is warming” message no matter what, perhaps even no matter where.

b. Differences between (2) and (3)

Version (2) starts with:

Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. [...] This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

Version (3) starts with:

Global temperatures for 2008 will be slightly cooler than last year as a result of the cold La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. [...] But this year’s temperatures would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

So we are back to “slightly cooler” instead of “drop slightly”, some sort of “middle way” as AGWers won’t like the use of “cooler” and skeptics will object to “slightly”.

Another change is that there is no more mention, at least at the beginning of the article, of those “questioning climate change theory”. AGWer Ms or Mr “Jo Abbess” will be surely happier.

Furthermore, in the latest version Mr Harrabin has added yet another mention of “greenhouse gases”, in what looks like a clarification: a clarification, that is, that Mr Harrabin’s article really does follow the aforementioned BBC “party-line”.

Conclusions

The BBC article is clearly biased in favour of AGW but no more than previous pieces (see here for more about BBC’s biased reporting). The whole evolution of the text is actually compatible with the story of “Jo Abbess” being true.

There is hope though: Mr Harrabin’s “initial forgetfulness” allegedly corrected after exchanging e-mails with “Jo Abbess” might be a sign that, when free to think, even BBC journalists are not fixated with accusing mankind of burning up the planet.

Former BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse, in fact…

UPDATE: The Register’s Andrew Orlowski has something to say about “blog bully” Jo Abbess

Joe Bastardi: Unbelievable Al Gore

Joe Bastardi, long-range forecast expert at Accuweather.com, responds to Al Gore’s statements on CBS’s 60 Minutes that people skeptical of AGW are “almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat“:

I am absolutely astounded that someone who refuses to publicly debate anyone on this matter and has no training in the field narrated a movie where frames of nuclear explosions were interspersed in a subliminal way in scenes of droughts and flood, among other major gaffes, can say these things and then have them accepted… by anyone.

[...] What gets me most is he goes on unchallenged one-on-one on this. Never in all my years of competition have I seen someone elevated to a level that he is, in any thing, without any face-to-face competition to establish credibility.

[...] anyone that believes he knows absolutely what is going to happen with the climate in the future, well you be the judge as to who is the card carrying member of the flat Earth society, that person, or the skeptic.

84-Year-Old Accused of Future Deaths, Extinctions and Economic Damage

Goebbelism has hit ABC News where AGW skeptic Fred Singer has been accused of being able to delay “government action on global warming by a decade or more by convincing the public through a disinformation campaign that there was an ongoing debate among scientists about global warming”.

Well, for one, I wish I’ll be able to do a tenth of that, when I am 84.

Seriously, NewsBusters is reporting Dr Singer has requested an apology. Let’s see.

But ABC’s shameful portrait of the “grandfather of the global warming skeptics” is just the umpteenth confirmation that the whole Global Warming struggle is not about science, or the environment.

It is about freedom, the freedom AGWers are trying to stifle in all sorts of ways.

Alexander Cockburn on Climate Blasphemy

From Spiked-Online: “Intellectual blasphemy - Alexander Cockburn tells spiked that when he dared to question the climate change consensus he was met by a tsunami of self-righteous fury“

[...] The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests. [...]

The marriage of environmental catastrophism and corporate interests is best captured in the figure of Al Gore. As a politician, he came to public light as a shill for two immense power schemes [...] His arguments, many of which are based on grotesque science and shrill predictions, seem to me to be part of a political and corporate outlook. [...]

Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. [...]

Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted [...]

This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer; of the summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is a witch-hunting element in climate catastrophism [...]

The Dangers of Climate Change as an Ethical Challenge

Josie Appleton on Spiked Online explains why Climate Change (and all other “ecological” issues) should not be treated as ethical challenges:

“Let us bin the moral fable of climate change“

[...] My main concern with eco-ethics is that it allows us to stop thinking about the meaning and point to life. It is like a layer of scaffolding built across society, which allows every individual, and every institution, to avoid the questions that they find hard to answer. Eco-ethics allows us to avoid the question of human purpose, by directing all our actions towards the clouds.

None of this is an inevitable response to environmental emergency. [...] At present we flee from uncertainty, and seek eco-handbooks for living. But there is another option: to grasp this situation as an opportunity. Indeed, in the course of history, it is often the periods of flux and uncertainty that have been the most productive. These are periods where things are rethought from scratch, presumptions questioned, and new schools of thought are born and new ways of living invented.

And that, I guess, is our choice: between a future of managing climactic stability, or the messy, tumultuous business of building our lives on their own foundations.

Wise AGWers (those that aren’t simply looking for an excuse to rebuild society according to their pet social theories) should really support the new, pragmatic stance of Jeffrey D Sachs.

Global Warming’s Incomplete Question

Michael Johnson asks an incomplete question about global warming in today’s IHT (M Johnson, “Is our planet warming up?“, IHT, March 7).

The issue is not simply “is our planet warming up?” but:

“is our planet warming up in a way that would justify the curtailing of civil and economic liberties, and/or the forced upheaval of our way of life in the attempt of slowing down or reversing the warming?“

I am not sure what would Mr Johnson’s answer be, to that question…

Global Warming and the Apollo Moon Hoax

(these are my responses to a blog first published on LiveScience by Robert Roy Britt about a year ago, and that I have “rediscovered” today. RRB clumsily tried to put all global warming skeptics together with the Apollo-is-a-hoax people: sort of the lowest of the low in scientific circles. I have put out a series of challenges at the time, all of them still unmet.)

February 2nd, 2007 at 8:26 am

How about this for logical fallacy: the Apollo mission are historical events, global warming is a forecast (i.e.: it is about the future).

Shame to the scientific mind that is not skeptical of the future!

I am also aghast at your sudden penchant to follow “governments”. From a scientific point of view, who cares what governments have to say about astronomy or particle physics or biology or chemistry or or or?

One wonders what you had to say about Kansas politics deciding the scientific merits of Evolution and intelligent design

So unless you are going to rename this website “LivePolitics”, please do try again at making an intelligent point on climate change

February 6th, 2007 at 5:32 am

I am satistied to see that nobody has picked up the challenge of explaining why, if the evidence of climate change is so unquestionable, we had to get 113 governments approve the first IPCC report after 4 days behind closed doors.

Too bad we have to wait now several months to get to see such “evidence”. One of the few things we have for certain is that, whilst a large number of hurricane experts signed a statement saying there is no definite link between climate change and hurricanes, the IPCC did not think that worthwhile of consideration

Also, nobody has explicitly defended the absurd comparison of climate change skeptics to Moon hoaxers.

What would IPCC supporters say about the lack of difference between Intelligent Design (”there is a God as there are things we cannot explain in biology”) with Anthropogenic Climate Change (”there is human-induced climate change as we cannot explain our data with known mechanisms”)?

Here’s a more serious challenge: find a weather pattern that has changed IN_THE_RECENT_PAST anywhere in the world due to climate change. Rain bands, prevailing winds, weather fronts’ paths, anything would do really.

Now, that would finally give climate change some historical evidence…

Happy hunting!

March 5th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Just to report that when the evidence did come out (IPCC Fourth Assessment Report - Working Group 2 (AR4-WG2), Chapter 1), we’ve learnt that 96% of the reported changes concern just the continent of Europe.

Actually, there are twice as many European changes incompatible with warming, than worldwide changes compatible with it.

Europe, by the way, occupies just 2% of the Earth’s surface.

The “whole picture” on global warming is unbelievably far from complete. Why don’t the IPCC and climate and environmental scientists push for a truly planet-wide assessment?

ps no, the results of a model cannot be used as “evidence”.

Jeffrey D. Sachs Sees The Light on Climate Change

Or part of it, at least.

Jeffrey D. Sachs writes in “Climate Change after Bali“, Scientific American, March 2008

Climate control is not a morality play. It is mainly a practical and solvable technological challenge, which if met correctly, can be combined with the needs and aspirations for a growing global economy.

I do not mind about the technological side of all the “climate control” business. Futile or not, it is bound to bring some good results if only by serendipity.

Perhaps Sachs is not the only one realizing how much less resistance globalwarmers would meet, where they to stop trying to use Climate Change for moral or political blackmail.

Monbiot, Stern and…Schadenfreude

It appears that George Monbiot himself is finally starting to grasp the issue of unintended consequences…

An Exchange of Souls - As government documents show, Sir Nicholas Stern accidentally launched a trade in human lives. by George Monbiot

Will this herald a new era in which things won’t be separated by using the idiotic climate-change-is-bad reference stick?

Climate Debate (4): Laypeople vs AGW Clergy

(fourth and likely final entry in my series of exchanges “On Climate Debate and Debate Climate” with a person genuinely convinced AGW is a settled argument)

This is a list of previous blogs on the topic:

On Climate Debate and Debate Climate (1)

Consensus, Actions and the Sun (2)

The Church of AGW (3)

(again on plausible mechanisms causally linking solar *wind* and terrestrial weather)

I have already specified I don’t particularly subscribe to the “it’s the solar wind” hypothesis. But heaven forbid we discover effects before knowing the “plausible mechanisms” about them.

For a speculation on a direct path for an effect, look at figure 7 (page 5) in the Ørsted satellite results paper (”The Ørsted Satellite Project“, by Peter Stauning, Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), 22.1.2008/PSt-DMI), to see the areas where high-energy radiation is capable to penetrate lower in the atmosphere, to around 700km.

It’s still quite a way to the troposphere, of course.

(on why I do not believe in qualified climatologists)

Because I am free to make out my own opinion.

Boy have some people a problem with that or what? Even if 95% of people agree with AGW, they’re still trying to stamp out the remaining 5%…

(on “lay opinion” vs. “qualified scientists’ opinion”)

In non-scientific matters (such as public health policymaking: the stuff also called “action“…), a “lay opinion” is no better or worse than a “qualified scientist’s”.

It’s called “democracy“.

That’s why people can choose between different economic policies, for example, voting this or that candidate: otherwise it’d all be done behind close doors by a bunch of Professors in Economics.

In scientific matters, any given “lay opinion” is expected to be generally less authoritative than any given “qualified scientist”’s. Obviously it depends on the “qualification”. A geologist’s take on climate is not necessarily any more or less informed than a biologist’s.

In any case: what about the opinion of John Christy, a very qualified scientist, and of others like him, members of the IPCC that do not subscribe to the AGW panic?

What’s wrong with them, or with the IPCC that still gives them credit?

(on my alleged arguing that “lay people” can challenge scientists because science was wrong in the past)

That would be a mistaken mixing up of my arguments.

I have said that lay people can challenge any scientific opinion, and the scientists should not be afraid of accepting the challenge.

This also because a “lay person”, say, in climatology, could very well be an “authority”, say, in systems engineering. And there are obvious similarities between modeling the “climate system” and modeling other kinds of complex system, either natural or man-made.

This applies also to software, as climate models are ultimately bunches of computer codes. Etc etc.

The IPCC itself has recognized this point, and is not limited to climatologists.

Anyway: everybody’s contribution to a topic should always be welcome, and especially so if it potentially has far-fetching policy and lifestyle consequences.

The point about helicobacter and cholesterol is different.

It is about the vast majority of scientists still being capable of being wrong. Other scientists found a way to make progress: but they would not have been able to do so, had they subscribed to the “follow the consensus” strategy.

Now…if anybody keeps refusing to acknowledge the very existence of at least two IPCC Lead Authors, it is not my problem.