Several physicists are asking the American Physical Society to rescind its 2007 endorsement of AGW:
In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)
If I were a working scientist, I would be most insulted by the insinuation, which seems to be their current main defense, that “everyone does it,” and “this is the way that science works.” I’ve seen blog commenters try this game, and I think it’s an outrageous slur on the thousands of scientists who actually do science with integrity.
[Update a few minutes later]
Roger Simon has a plausible theory as to why the president delayed his trip to Copenhagen. It buys him time to decide not to go at all, as the whole enterprise (finally and thankfully) begins to unravel.
[Another update a couple minutes later]
Like me, Eric Raymond is popping the corn. I think we’ll see a lot more of this:
My favorite recent entry on the CRU mob is a screed from a professor of mathematics in Canada: “All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.”
Now that the curtain has been pulled back, and the great Oz revealed as a fraud, expect a lot of previously cowed people to speak up, and even pile on. It’s not going to be pretty, but it’s no less than they’ll deserve.
[Update a few minutes later]
The (still) faithful gather in Copenhagen:
…it’s already clear that being here during the next few days is going to be very much like attending some kind of massive religious gathering. The faithful — over 16,000 strong — are here, of course, for the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference, a.k.a. COP15 (“COP” as in Copenhagen), at which they supposedly hope to achieve a provisional international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus rescue our beloved blue planet from the fate envisioned in any number of bad Roland Emmerich movies.
I say “supposedly” because at this point, lacking a polygraph, it’s hard to know for sure what any of these professional climate folks really think or believe or aspire to.
Oh, I think we can guess.
A news commentator said one impact of “Climategate” is that hard science was one of the last fields where the public thought people actually could be trusted. They believed at least scientists stated facts or opinion based on evidence and reason; and now with global warming – one of the biggest scientific issues of our age – being shown to be based on politics and suppression of outsider ideas, cynicism and mysticism could become a lot more respectable.
Expect creationists to benefit, since the public will be more suspicious of any claim of scientific certainty.
Creationists don’t really worry me, because they don’t have any research programs worthy of note. Until and unless they figure out some aspect of their theories that they can test experimentally they won’t get people like high school science teachers interested in their idea.
Of course, if they DO find some aspect of creationism that can be scientifically tested, and can start performing experiments that have interesting results, why, then I’d be delighted to hear what they have to say. With that stipulation, it would all be good for science.
Indeed, and the short-sighted Climategate apologists are just making things worse.
Rand, I think this may be why they’re going to Gopenhagen…
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,665182,00.html
You really couldn’t make this stuff up, especially the bit about being “sustainable” 🙂
I’m always interested to see the pro- and anti- AGW groups broken down by their field/profession. The pros are all journos, pols, and sociologists. The antis are geologists, engineers, physicists and chemists. I think there’s a lesson there. Probably several.
Today we are having a media bombardment over this meeting. As usual the main theme was “think of the children”.
If we are going to splurge money into “solving” a Roland Emmerich movie, why not build more nuclear weapons to defend against the aliens in Stargate or laser weapons to fend off the aliens in Independence Day. Oh and computer viruses.
I disagree — polygraphs are also bunk.
I liked this interview with Lord Monckton regarding global warming. The guy makes a pretty coherent argument against AGW:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKrw6ih8Gto
The Oz metaphor may be more fitting than you think. In the book Emerald City residents and visitors had to wear special eyewear purported to protect the viewers’ eyes from the city’s majestic awesomeness, or something like that. In reality they were wearing green-tinted sunglasses; the unfiltered Emerald City wasn’t really emerald.
@Mark I don’t think you appreciate the public perception. Are you aware that in the US more people believe in anthropogenic global warming than believe in evolution (by nearly a 2 to 1 margin)? The public does not have an accurate perception of science and is easily misled into non-scientific beliefs. This AGW scandal will likely only make that worse.
Robin, it’s only fair — AGW was the Left’s answer to “Creation science.”
A news commentator said one impact of “Climategate” is that hard science was one of the last fields where the public thought people actually could be trusted
WTF? Since when is “climate science” hard science. Listen up. Hard science is where we can do the experiment to prove or disprove the theory, and we do. If your science consists entirely of theory plus post-facto rationalization (Look! The theory explains all these measurements which were done once, but cannot be repeated!) then you do not have a “science” that is any “harder” than history or sociology or psychology.
Nothing against those fields, mind you. But we have all recognized that theory in history, say, or social psychology, is in a much more delicate state than it is in chemistry or solid-state physics, because we can’t do the experiments necessary to prove or disprove it. We can’t run the Civil War over again, this time keeping Stonewall Jackson alive, and see whether the South wins. We can’t raise a generation of children without any contact at all with their fathers, to see whether they turn out just fine anyway.
Climate science is in exactly the same boat. Never mind that it is a theory in which the behaviour of molecules is the grounding issue. Never mind that it involves measurements — temperature, atmospheric pressure of CO2, et cetera. The important point is that it is not possible to do the experiments that would prove or disprove the theory. We cannot emit petatons of CO2 over the next century, verify it does/does not cause the polar caps to melt and the end of civilization, then rewind history and try something else.
The only thing we can do, as in the study of history or social psychology, is see whether the theory is consistent with the facts of the past as we know them. That’s not worthless, but it’s not very good empirical science. Your control of the experimental parameters sucks, and you have no way at all to eliminate observer bias. There’s no such thing as a “double blind” study, so to speak. It barely qualifies for the word “science,” honestly. It’s as bad as if you called “history” “historical science” because, well, it has theories that are consistent with the facts of history! They must be true! Science says so.
It would be more honest to call this field “climate studies,” to emphasize the fact that its empirical underpinnings are weak. And it’s certainly a disfavor to the truly sound empirical sciences to call this area of endeavor a “hard” science merely because you use thermometers and SI units in discussing it.
Post-script: I should say, my objection does not apply to things like atmospheric chemistry, or photochemistry, or any of the components of climate studies. These things can generally be subjected to empirical test. I can measure the absorption specturm of CO2 under various conditions. I can check out the reactions that occur in the stratosphere, measure them with balloons and airplanes and such.
But when you put it all together and make predictions about climate — about the whole damn planetary system over centuries — then you can no longer make the tests. You can no longer do the experiments. (And, no, “experiments” that consist of computer modeling don’t count, any more than succeeding at video games equals succeeding in real life.)
A journalist or other intellectual flyweight might say: who cares? If each part is tested, why do we need to test the assembled whole? Surely if each part works, the whole should, too. I assume in the company of engineers I do not need to point out the folly and ignorance in that statement.
What? Unanticipated interactions in a chaotic system?
Racist!
PeeCee Myers has started a second thread on ClimateGate. This time, one of the commentators actually says ,”Scientists should only release their work to those who can understand it.”
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/watson_vs_morano.php#comment-2130677
An irritating aspect of Climate Science is: One of the aspects that could be hard science is just such a joke. The ground temperature measurements and the corrections for various issues just aren’t performed in anything like a serious fashion. This seems so irrelevant… but the ground measurements are the only available test data for the much higher tech and vaster spread of the satellite measurements. Plus the ground measurements are what the other, softer techniques are calibrated against.
As an example: The Urban Heat Island adjustment is there to adjust for the fact that the modern instruments have had cities grow around them. But the instruments we’ve got are weather stations – not climate stations. The goal of the station from a climate perspective is to determine the average gridcell temperature. The current UHI adjustment takes the approach that the current value must be correct – it is (supposedly) taken with the most accurate instruments and best trained observers… so we’ll call “now” the best measurements.
So all adjustments will be made to the ancient data – not the current data. But the addition of the city is elevating the instrument’s value relative to the gridcell’s value. (Most cities are insignificant fractions of their gridcell). But the adjustments are instead depressing historic values.
This has a net effect of ‘pushing’ the instrumental temperature records in exactly the wrong direction. And the scale of the push is comparable in magnitude to the entire observed warming over the period in the first place.
This is, in effect, why we can have “1998 is hottest ever…” Wait… no… “1930 hottest ever!” Wait… back to 1998 hottest ever! The adjustments are artificially depressing the available historical information.
Seminal article on UHI: Phil Jones.
Bravo Carl,
You read my mind. It isn’t hard Science!
So Darwin looks at these birds on an isolated island, all with different sizes and styles of beak for eating different things, and he hits on the idea that these birds all Evolved from a common ancestor that made it to that island, and then he publishes this book on Evolution (or Origin of Species or some such thing).
This starts of this enormous debate, first between him and some bishop who calculated a young age of the Earth based on adding ages of Biblical patriarchs, but then between him and this physicist, who cannot account for the long age of the Earth required for Darwin’s theory because the physics folks haven’t discovered radioactivity and nuclear processes yet.
Along the way, people find fossils or even sequences of fossils giving evidence of Evolution in Action, famously the evolution of the horse from this creature the size of a medium-sized dog. Also along the way, people “believe” that these evolutionary processes applied to human kind, but fossils of human ancestors prove hard to find, so people “make stuff up” — like “Nebraska Man” and “Piltdown Man.” It took years and years of believing in Evolution before the Leakeys start finding early human ancestor “missing link” fossils for real.
Even then, the fossil record is spotty with many “gaps” in the intermediate forms between animals that Darwin posited should be there, and Stephen Jay Gould and other “neo-Darwinists” come along and say there are no intermediate forms, that species just “spontaneously appear” as a result of genetic mutations creating “hopeful monsters” that are then subject to the winnowing of Survival of the Fittest. I am not making this up people, I was there is a lecture hall on the Bell Labs campus in 1981, where a young Stephen Jay Gould was explaining to a skeptical audience of scientists of all disciplines of this theory of “punctuated equalibrium” along with some speculations on genetic mechanisms by which mutations could bring new species into being.
Even today, there is tremendous uncertainty about certain stages in evolution. One is the question of abiogenesis, how life came to be out of the non-life of the “pre-biotic soup.” Some speculation is that it happened on account of an exceedingly rare chance event that took eons of trials before life was brought into being. Other speculation is that life began early, base in part on some controversial fossils, in part because of molecular clocks, suggesting that abiogenisis was an inevitability and happened quickly once conditions were right, with further speculation that we cannot observe abiogensis today because living organisms are so pervasive that the pre-biotic soup cannot exist without being metabolized by some bacterium or archeium (archeo-bacteria).
The other questions are the procaryote-to-eucaryote transition and the single-cell to highly-differentiated multi-cell organism transition. Life was content to be nothing more than slime for at least 3 billion years when 1/2 billion years ago, multicellular organisms along all of the known body plans just popped into being in the geologic twinkling of an eye.
Far be it from me to invoke panspermia or Scientific Creationism for any of this. But whereas Evolution is a compelling theoretical framework in which to understand Natural History as we are able to reconstruct it, it is far from perfectly understood, with respect to abiogenesis, life from non-life, the organization of cells into multi-cellular organisms, or even the genetic mechanisms by which species that are not cross-breedable with their ancestors came into being. Darwin’s original ideas of slow imperceptable changes runs up against the discovery of DNA and the largish changes, perhaps too largish for survival, from tinkering with small numbers of genes.
By analogy, the history of human kind since it evolved into being is one of slow but nevertheless exponential growth in population and utilization of energy resources. Continuing trends of exponential growth will run into limits of resource exhaustion or environmental destruction. At some point.
Our future is perhaps to find some limit to population, at least here on Earth. Perhaps our future is to find an end to growth in energy utilization, or at least to make a transition to some combination of solar, geothermal, and nuclear power in various forms. These conclusions are as self-evident as the ones Darwin made about evolution. But there is a lot of detail to sort out.
But we were warned about impending doom from population, Malthusian starvation, resource exhaustion, and environmental disaster — back in the early 1970’s, and by those calculations, we were supposed to be “finished” by now. Part of what “went wrong” is that a gifted individual by the name of Norman Borlaug didn’t “give up” and regard the “impending catastrophe” as a given, and he worked as hard as he could, supported in part by “foundation money” from the “greedy capitalists” of times past to avert that disaster. What he did was a kind of “bio-engineering” (people called it the Green Revolution), and some people are derisive of what he did, heaping the same scorn on the putative “geo-engineering” proposed to deal with CO2.
Even Norman Borlaug intimated that his efforts “bought us some time” and that human kind at some point would have to deal with population growth and resource exhaustion.
But another visionary named Julian Simon approached the threat of collapse of the human race from another tack. As an economist, he hypothesized that the models of resource-depletion driven doom had a false view of what constituted a resource — that a resource was a social and an economic construct. Back when whales were “going to run out”, oil and kerosene was this icky, smelly substance that bubbled out of the ground in places and no one had a use for. A burgeoning population with enough wealth to cultivate the kind of idleness I engage in (I am a research engineer and a teacher) would develop new resources at an accelerating pace. This phenomenon has even been given the name “Singularity.”
So my moral view is that the hydrocarbon fuels are a gift from our Creator (are we even allowed to say that?), to use for the purpose of alleviating human poverty and misery, yes, even to make people comfortable with warm homes, cold food storage, transportation to access good jobs, so that human kind could bring even greater plenty into being, perhaps of a solar or nuclear nature, for following generations. It is my view that hydrocarbons should be used for this purpose, not hoarding them for our children and children’s children and the 10’th generation, but using them to be prosperous until the Next Thing comes along, but exercising some judgement not to exhaust them before we are ready or to despoil the natural environment.
The situation is we have a platoon of Jeremiah’s out there saying that not only will we exhaust petroleum, we have exhausted it NOW (am I violating my distaste for all-caps in Web posts?). Not only will we reach the carrying capacity of the environment, but we have reached in NOW, the Earth has a FEVER!
Well, count me skeptical of Peak Oil, and count me skeptical of imminent danger from CO2. Am I part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy? I have been called worse things. I want people to have liberty and prosperity and hope for the future, and maybe to burn hydrocarbons for another generation is a reasonable thing to do. These recent revelation, along with they hyperventilating on the Left, add to my skepticism of the Imminent Danger.
Carl Pham @ December 7th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
“I assume in the company of engineers I do not need to point out the folly and ignorance in that statement.”
No, indeed! It is both a blessing and a curse; to know this, to have lived it, agonized and triumphed over it, yet to be unable to impart the hard-earned wisdom to the laity.
>Mark-the good one- Says:
>
> December 7th, 2009 at 9:22 am
> Creationists don’t really worry me, because they don’t
> have any research programs worthy of note. == they
> won’t get people like high school science teachers
> interested in their idea.
High school teacher can’t choose what they teach. Voters ellect school boards who do.
> Carl Pham Says:
> WTF? Since when is “climate science” hard science?
Since the press said it was. Doesn’t mater if the models always predict the wrong thing, adn the ghraphs leave out everything from the little ice age to the Medeval Optimum – its SCIENCE, and only evil republicans would question it.
I pointed out to one guy I knew that the other planets with any detectable climate paterns, all show warming and cooling in sync with Earth, and I don’t think Pres Bush sent them Hummers. — He agreed the other planets must be effected by the Sun, but it was just a coincidence that it lines up with our human caused global warming.