Tuesday, September 28, 2010

“Folks, its about to become very dangerous to be a climate scientist”


“..or for that matter, any kind of scientist.”
That’s what one of the world’s most well known climate scientists recently
told friends.
This article in Politico is the case in point.
In the event the House of representatives shifts to republicans, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a foe of progress, reason and science, will become chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
He has vowed to obstruct the pursuit of truth about climate change, and intimidate those foolish enough to ask questions and seek answers about the real world.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind - Ben Santer 2/24/10

This is an excellent talk given by Ben Santer and no matter how often I listen to it, the guy makes sense, he speaks clearly and yes I find him believable.

Tragically most Americans, particularly your Republican/Libertarian types, would rather listen to theatrics from the likes of Lord Christopher Monckton and an actor Topher (50 to 1 Project) with their transparent political entertainment that doles out soothing bromides and the promise that nothing needs to change.

For a taste of the scientific understanding behind the considered educated opinion of experts who are actively working in the field of climatology, check out these videos which are followed by an interesting commentary by Dr. Santer.




Added 8/4/2013
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The following is pilfered from RealClimate.org.
You can find it at:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/close-encounters-of-the-absurd-kind/
Filed under:
• Climate Science
• IPCC
• skeptics
— 24 February 2010

Guest commentary from Ben Santer

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Part 2 of a series discussing the recent Guardian articles.

A recent story by Fred Pearce in the February 9th online edition of the Guardian (“Victory for openness as IPCC climate scientist opens up lab doors”) covers some of the more publicized aspects of the last 14 years of my scientific career. I am glad that Mr. Pearce’s account illuminates some of the non-scientific difficulties I have faced. However, his account also repeats unfounded allegations that I engaged in dubious professional conduct. In a number of instances, Mr Pearce provides links to these allegations, but does not provide a balanced account of the rebuttals to them. Nor does he give links to locations where these rebuttals can be found. I am taking this opportunity to correct Mr. Pearce’s omissions, to reply to the key allegations, and to supply links to more detailed responses.

Another concern relates to Mr. Pearce’s discussion of the “openness” issue mentioned in the title and sub-title of his story. A naïve reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might infer from the sub-title (“Ben Santer had a change of heart about data transparency…”) that my scientific research was not conducted in an open and transparent manner until I experienced “a change of heart”.

This inference would be completely incorrect.

Has Monckton finally arrived at his Waterloo?

A group of scientists has put together a detailed study of Mr. Lord Monckton’s Congressional testimony, unlike LM’s many lectures and blogs, LM was under oath while giving false testimony to the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Hopefully, we can finally see the court trial that the good Lord keeps threatening.

With him as defendant !
{hope springs eternal}
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Visit - Professor Scott Mandia website: Global Warming: Man or Myth?
Monckton Testimony at US Congress: Ignorance or Perjury?

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

{#11c} Lord Monckton, Mr. Ferguson, SPPI, v. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri (IPCC) - anatomy of a character assassination

Previously, I wrote about the anatomy of Ben Santer’s character assassination. In this next example, we have the added element of “tactical set up.” But, first a look at a couple quotes regarding Dr. Pachauri’s qualifications:

10/14/9 MFMI 46:05
“And now here is the truth.”
“Do you know that the guy who runs the science panel of the UN’s climate panel, is he a climatologist? Nope. Is he a physicist? Nope. Is he mathematician? Nope. He is a railroad engineer. So we have removed his railroad lines from this graph and we’ve added His Lordship’s much grander purple lines and we’ll see they all run in parallel.”

SPPI Blog, Monckton’s Pachauri Letter

“Though you are chairman of the IPCC, whose principal task is to evaluate and present
climatological results, you are a railroad engineer by origin and may be unaware that the technique is a statistical abuse. Therefore, we will now show, using the same technique on the same data but selecting different endpoints, that it is possible to generate opposite results, demonstrating the technique to be defective. . .”

Unfortunately, once again Lord Monckton what you’re saying is not the truth. Pachauri is no more a “railroad engineer” than you are a member of the House of Lords! I dare you to look at his accomplishments:

Sunday, September 19, 2010

{#11b} Lord Monckton, Mr. Ferguson, SPPI, v. Dr. Ben Santer - anatomy of a character assassination

Lord Monckton, and SPPI's Mr. Ferguson,

In this email I want to look at how some lies never die. In particular, today's reincarnation of the Wall Street Journal's travesty, with it's relentless, substance lacking, attacks on Dr. Benjamin Santer.

From SPPI’s Blogwatch: “Science ad rem, not politics ad hominem”
“However, a single scientist – Ben Santer – was asked by the IPCC substantially to alter the scientists’ final draft. He did so, crossing out five references to the absence of any evidence of a human influence on climate, and substituting the directly opposite conclusion.... the contrarian opinion of a single scientist who was willing to write what the IPCC’s bureaucrats wanted.”

10/14/9 MFMI 43:00
“Now we come on to a lie we find in the 1995 report. And this is one of the most extraordinary lies of the lot. Time and again, the scientists in that report said “We can not find any anthropogenic, or human signal, in the climate record. We are having no effect on temperature so far as we can see.” They said it five times very clearly, here’s one sample of it, here’s another. And now watch this, here is what the bureaucrats did. They rewrote the final draft, yet again, after it had been cleared and signed off by the scientists, to say the exact opposite: The body of evidence now points to a discernible human influence upon climate. And, that has been the official line ever since.”

Lord Monckton you often repeat this meme. To do so you ignore reams of contrary evidence. Why should we take your word for it?

Beyond that, why must you paint climate scientists like foreign enemies? In my last email I documented how these charges against Professor Ben Santer were shown to be gross falsehoods. Yet, here we are nearly fifteen years later and the same knowingly false charges are still being advertised. What a stellar example of the Monckton brand of “fidelity to the truth.”

Friday, September 17, 2010

{#11a} SPPI, Monckton, Seitz, WSJ - anatomy of a character assassination

Containing:
Seitz’s Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996, Op-Ed

Ben Santer’s censored reply ~ Wall Street Journal letter to Ed, June 25, 1996

IPCC’s censored reply ~ Wall Street Journal letter to Ed, June 25, 1996


{in red}
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Lord Monckton, Mr Ferguson, SPPI, (and Dr. Seitz),
This letter cuts to the heart of your AGWHoax storyline, its fabrication and propagation. To fully appreciate this story, we need to review some history first and look at someone who can be considered your intellectual mentor, one Dr. Seitz.

In particular, his June 12, 1996 Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal: “A Major Deception on Global Warming.” Even the title is audacious in its open hostility.


The following WSJ letter can be found at.
http://www.sepp.org/Archive/controv/ipcccont/Item05.htm



"A Major Deception on Global Warming"
Op-Ed by Frederick Seitz
Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996

Monday, September 13, 2010

Guest blog: How science works: or why climate change is not a religion

The following comes from Watching The Denier blog, out of Australia.

It does a nice job of addressing the charge of AGW science being a religion.
I'll admit I would have preferred a different example of hard science accommodating new data, still Watching the Deniers does get the point across - that claiming science is a religion, reflects a deep unfamiliarity with what science is or how it works.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from.” – Wikipedia

Is climate science a religion?

Saturday, September 11, 2010

{#10} SPPI and Lord Monckton, The Data Creates the AGW Consensus

I got a little ahead of myself in sending out this email in that I didn't do my usual detailed double check of Monckton's MFMI presentation quotes. None of my errors altered Monckton's substance, but in the interest of accuracy I have gone through this post and corrected my few errors in my Monckton quotes. . . my apologies Peter M.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In my last email {#9} I claimed that increased snow fall in Greenland is tied to AGW and does nothing to support Lord Monckton’s thesis that manmade global warming is a hoax. So, I thought this tenth email should review some of the evidence leading to the AGW consensus.


After spending sometime researching I realized there is no way I can improve upon the work done by John Cook over at SkepticalScience.com. They clearly lay out the arguments and point the way to verifying studies and data. In this email I will shamelessly reproduce SkepticalScience.com search results including links.

Here is John Cook’s introduction to his site:
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge and improve their understanding.

Yet this isn't what happens in global warming skepticism. Skeptics vigorously criticize any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet uncritically embrace any argument, op-ed piece, blog or study that refutes global warming.

So this website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
Also, Lord Monckton, despite your shrill and colorful objections to the contrary Professor John Abraham's presentation "Abraham v. Monckton" does do an excellent job of exposing many misleading scientific claims in your 10/14/9 MFMI talk.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Why Bother To Vote?

I've submitted the following essay to the Four Corners Free Press,
but they allow me to retain the rights.
And, I welcome anyone to borrow as they see fit.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

May I suggest a simple, left v. right distinction between people... voters.

The one group believes in a God of their own image; sitting on a throne; possessing those familiar human lordly passions of jealousy, judgment, vengeance, occasionally love... a lord who is directly involved in, even controlling, our lives.

The other group, contains a much larger spectrum. Beginning with people who firmly believe in God and her/his presence, but, who also appreciate God is beyond our human ability to grasp. As for knowing God’s mind... or plan, forget about it! Can a toddler hope to understand Einstein?

From there the spectrum of perspectives follows the whole gamut of wonder and curiosity about our creation and god... all the way to folks who are revolted by any notion of a god, heaven or hell. At the furthest end of this spectrum of humanity are folks who genuinely believe there’s only emptiness beyond this moment and find peace in that.

This is a politically important, if under appreciated, distinction with profound implications. Today, America is in the midst of a revolutionary struggle, driven by a seemingly unopposed ground swell of scared and passionate “believing” people. Where folks actually see themselves as God’s personal agents, convinced it’s their duty to conquer our government and then remake it in their heavenly inspired image.

When listening to what comes over the air waves, Tea Partiers along with more and more Republicans are shunning rational dialogue. They seem to resent science, its rules of discussion and its observation/fact based findings by twisting and tweaking, misrepresenting and ignoring all that doesn’t fit into their dogma driven messages. Tactics fine tuned within the Global Warming “debate” and broadcast over right wing media outlets everywhere.

I bring this up because we have an election coming up where it is sounding like most liberal leaning voters just can’t get too excited and are tired of dealing with all those creepy politicians anyways, so to heck with it, we’ll sit this one out. Just can’t work up the energy to get out and vote... You know who you are.

But, don’t you realize, it’s no good pretending those angry faith-based Tea Parties aren’t for real and big and dangerous? That old song keeps echoing in my mind: “America where are you now, don’t you care about your sons and daughters? Don’t you know, we need you now?”

Who’s going to defend our government, if you won’t? Who’s going to speak up for science, rational evaluation of information and willingness to learn new lessons? Who’s going to demand that our twenty-first century problems receive twenty-first century realism, instead of scapegoating?

For example, lets play imagine for a moment... go back ten years. There was that one day when, if only a few more liberal thinking people had gotten motivated enough to vote. We’d have had President Gore. Along with the excellent argument that the whole Iraq “war of choice” spawned horrors, costs and damage to our Nation, and the world would never have happened - heck, 9/11 probably wouldn’t have happened!

Why? Because Gore would have been listening to his national terrorist experts. Thus, the entire intelligence bureaucracy would have been paying attention. Thus, those incoming intelligence signals would have percolated, with the warnings they gave off being heeded and tracked down.

Instead, USA had a faith-based administration preoccupied with old grudges and no interest in anyone else’s opinion. This Republican Administration ignored our nation’s qualified terrorist experts. Why? Because, Bush et al. had God on their side. See what that’s gotten us. A war that has only succeeded, over the endless years, to elevate the true enemy’s abilities to unimagined levels, plus introduce privatized corporate warriors into our US military. All this at a horrific cost in blood, materials, money, world authority plus goodwill, and homeland civility.

Even had the 9/11 atrocity happen. Gore would have focused on getting the real perpetrators, Bin Laden, his band and material supporters, not easy, for sure. But, with all USA’s energy focused on that goal - rather than a diversion - plus that worldwide goodwill USA possessed at the time, there could have been no other outcome. Imagine the lesson USA could have taught the power-politics world.

Back to today, most Republicans remain incapable of even admitting they, we, did anything wrong, let alone that we actually have serious real world lessons to learn. Instead, acting as though this is how life was supposed to have played out. Becoming defensive at any critique and hardening in their dogmatic: my way...“God’s” way, or no way, attitude.

OK, there’s no going back, but surely we, enlightened folk, should heed this hard lesson. We need to challenge handing over our government to folks who despise it. We can go ahead and scoff that Democrats suck in a hundred and one ways, but they’re all we got! On this one out of 730 days, the only day when your opinion actually matters, please be pragmatic - motivate and VOTE.

Please do your part and help in this struggle of rationality over dogma driven, emotion fueled politics of faith over reason. And, bring a few family and friends along with you.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

{#9} SPPI & Monckton’s claim regarding Greenland's Cryosphere being OK - examined

In this, my ninth email, we’ll examine SPPI and Monckton's claim: “I find it hard to discern anything to worry about in Greenland’s ice.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From SPPI's blog essay "Science ad rem, not politics ad Hominem":
“Professor Cliff Ollier, whom I have also consulted, says that the vast bulk of the Greenland ice is in a bowl surrounded by mountains and that, therefore, changes in ice-mass balance are influenced very little indeed by short-run changes in Arctic temperature.”

Lord Monckton, if you are going to use the “bowl” analogy, why not include the many cracks running along the rim of that bowl; with long glacial tongues draining through them? To educate, shouldn’t the discussion include the dynamics of coastal glaciers and ice-shelves and how they act as buttresses up against the downward thrust of the flowing ice coming out of Greenland’s highland glacier filled bowl?

Saturday, September 4, 2010

{#8} SPPI & Monckton’s claims regarding David’s: “The Down To Earth Guide to Global Warming” - Examined

MFMI 54:15
(#79) “And they are lying to children as well. They lie even to children....”
MFMI 54:25
“What she (Laurie David) did was to switch the captions on the graphs for temperature and CO2 going back 650,000 years so that she could show that it was CO2 that had changed first and temperature that had followed.”

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

{#7b}Appendix to {email #7} Church et al. 2006, highlights

I received an email this morning, short and sweet, but worth sharing:

Church, J.A., N.J. White and J.R. Hunter. 2006. Sea level rise at tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean islands. Global and Planetary Change, 53, 155-168, doi:10.1016/j.glopacha.2006.04.001.
(http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_pubs_peer.html)

...is the definitive rebuttal of Mörner.

Keep up the good work!
==================
I did include Church et al. 2006 in my previous email to SPPI - but, this email has inspired me to share some of its content: