My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Freeman Dyson.
The significance of the divergence problem is immediately obvious, and seeking to hide it is quite simply wrong. Professor Jonathon Jones (Physics – Oxford University)
They don't take into account the climate of the oceans to any great extent, or the responses of the living stuff on the planet. So I don't see how they can accurately predict the climate. James Lovelock
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the
history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will
feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese
Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental
physical chemist.
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem
there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into
anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric
Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research
Division of NOAA.
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” -
Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
"Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equal four. If that is given, all else follows"
George Orwell, 1984
This page is about scientists who have been critical of climate alarmism or the political manipulation of the IPCC process. There is no suggestion that AGW is not happening, merely that contrary to the IPCC and the corporate media, there is a great deal of informed and intelligent scepticism. The issues are :-
1) Scepticism about the usefulness of computer models amongst scientists like Freeman Dyson (recognised as one of the greatest science minds of the age) and many others, including two nobel prize winning physicists.
2). Scepticism about the temperature record itself. Exposed by Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford and the USA's top statistician Edward Wegeman. Particularly in relation to the so called hockey stick by Michael Mann and his team, along with Real Climate connected scientists which sought to hide the fact that it was warmer in medieval times than it is now. The Real Climate website was set up to defend the hockey stick, a direct attack on the principles of scientific objectivity. Gavin Schmidt, the creator is an employee of NASA GISS, in the same department as James Hansen is head.
3) Professor Phil Jones of UEA wrote that the rate of warming in the late twentieth century is the same as it was in the late ninteenth century. Between that and the medieval warm period, the picture that emerges is that current temperatures are not exceptional..
4) The climategate emails clearly revealed the major players in the climate science community to be involved in a Richard Nixon style campaign of dirty tricks against what they regarded as their opponents. That is not science, that is tribal warfare and corrupt practice.
5) The manipulative nature of the IPCC process itself and its reliance on information from environmental pressure groups like WWF and Greenpeace.
6) The total support of a corporate media propaganda campaign funded by advertising from beneficiaries of climate policy. Namely the carbon trading industry, a multi trillion dollar financial scam invented by Enron and supported by BP, Conoco Philips, Shell, E.ON, EDF, Gazprom, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley. See the finance page.
.
Freeman Dyson (reputed to be the greatest scientist not to win a Nobel Prize)
“My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.” –
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf
Freeman Dyson - Independent newspaper interview
First, the computer models are very good at solving the equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly. Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer. Third, there are many other causes of climate change besides human activities, as we know from studying the past. Fourth, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is strongly coupled with other carbon reservoirs in the biosphere, vegetation and top-soil, which are as large or larger. It is misleading to consider only the atmosphere and ocean, as the climate models do, and ignore the other reservoirs. Fifth, the biological effects of CO2 in the atmosphere are beneficial, both to food crops and to natural vegetation. The biological effects are better known and probably more important than the climatic effects. Sixth, summing up the other five reasons, the climate of the earth is an immensely complicated system and nobody is close to understanding it.
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain. On the other hand, the remedies proposed by the experts are enormously costly and damaging, especially to China and other developing countries. On a smaller scale, we have seen great harm done to poor people around the world by the conversion of maize from a food crop to an energy crop. This harm resulted directly from the political alliance between American farmers and global-warming politicians. Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science. If it happens that I am wrong and the climate experts are right, it is still true that the remedies are far worse than the disease that they claim to cure.
On the intolerance of Warmists:
You complain that people who
are sceptical about the party line do not agree about other
things. Why should we agree? The whole point of science is to
encourage disagreement and keep an open mind. That is why I
blame The Independent for seriously misleading your readers. You
give them the party line and discourage them from disagreeing.
Professor Phil Jones (Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia)
Please note that 0.12C per decade is not enough to require
any CO2 reduction.
The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to
Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate
sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the
co-operation of UEA's press office.
Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no
statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period
1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not
significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is
quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical
significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer
periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has
been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this
time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not
statistically significant.
Do you agree that according to the global temperature record
used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880,
1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
An initial point to make is that in the responses to these
questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global
temperature record, you mean the record that combines the
estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions
of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met
Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.
Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain,
because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th
Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length.
As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates
are not statistically significantly different (see numbers
below).
I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009,
which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4
periods are similar and not statistically significantly
different from each other.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm
Professor Jonathon Jones (Physics
– Oxford University)
People have asked why mainstream scientists are keeping silent on these issues. As a scientist who has largely kept silent, at least in public, I have more sympathy for silence than most people here. It’s not for the obvious reason, that speaking out leads to immediate attacks, not just from Gavin and friends, but also from some of the more excitable commentators here.
Far more importantly most scientists are reluctant to speak out on topics which are not their field. We tend to trust our colleagues, perhaps unreasonably so, and are also well aware that most scientific questions are considerably more complex than outsiders think, and that it is entirely possible that we have missed some subtle but critical point.
However, “hide the decline” is an entirely different matter. This is not a complicated technical matter on which reasonable people can disagree: it is a straightforward and blatant breach of the fundamental principles of honesty and self-criticism that lie at the heart of all true science. The significance of the divergence problem is immediately obvious, and seeking to hide it is quite simply wrong. The recent public statements by supposed leaders of UK science, declaring that hiding the decline is standard scientific practice are on a par with declarations that black is white and up is down. I don’t know who they think they are speaking for, but they certainly aren’t speaking for me.
I have watched Judy Curry with considerable interest since she first went public on her doubts about some aspects of climate science, an area where she is far more qualified than I am to have an opinion. Her latest post has clearly kicked up a remarkable furore, but she was right to make it.
The decision to hide the decline, and the dogged refusal to admit that this was an error, has endangered the credibility of the whole of climate science. If the rot is not stopped then the credibility of the whole of science will eventually come into question.
Judy’s decision to try to call a halt to this mess before it’s too late is brave and good. So please cut her some slack; she has more than enough problems to deal with at the moment.
If you’re wondering who I am, then you can find me at the Physics Department at Oxford University. Feb 23, 2011 at 10:29 PM | Jonathan Jones
http://www.realclimategate.org/2011/02/hide-the-decline-2-pictures-for-2000-comments/
Petr Chylek
To blame the current warming on humans, there was a perceived need to “prove” that the current global average temperature is higher than it was at any other time in recent history (the last few thousand years). This task is one of the main topics of the released CRU emails.
Some people were soeager to prove this point that it became more important than scientific integrity.The next step was to show that this “unprecedented high current temperature” has to be a result of the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
The fact that the Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models are not able to explain the post-1970 temperature increase by natural forcing was interpreted as proof that it was caused by humans. It is more logical to admit that the models are not yet good enough to capture natural climate variability (how much or how little do we understand aerosol and clouds,and ocean circulation?), even though we can all agree that part of theobserved post-1970 warming is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Thus, two of the three pillars of the global warming and carbon dioxide paradigm are open to reinvestigation.The damage has been done. The public trust in climate science has been eroded. At least a part of the IPCC 2007 report has been put in question. We cannot blame it on a few irresponsible individuals. The entire esteemed climate research community has to take responsibility.
Laboratory Fellow, Remote Sensing Team Leader, ISR-2 MS-B244
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Chylek has published over 100 scientific papers in remote
sensing, atmospheric radiation, climate change, cloud and
aerosol physics, applied laser physics and ice core analysis.
His work has been cited more than 3000 times. Chylek is best
known for his work in remote sensing, water vapor, aerosols and
their relation to climate change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Chylek
Jeffrey Marque, editor of Physics & Society, published by the American Physical Society wrote
There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/editor.cfm
Hal Lewis
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth,
and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics
research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the
support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons
that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS
Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am
forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation
from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally)
trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many
scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It
is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I
have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the
faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the
ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book
organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real
physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion.
I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word
scientist.
http://thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/1670-hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society.html
Judith Curry
Nevertheless, the policy cart was put before the scientific horse, justified by the precautionary principle. Once the UNFCCC treaty was a done deal, the IPCC and its scientific conclusions were set on a track to become a self fulfilling prophecy. The entire framing of the IPCC was designed around identifying sufficient evidence so that the human-induced greenhouse warming could be declared unequivocal, and so providing the rationale for developing the political will to implement and enforce carbon stabilization targets. National and international science programs were funded to support the IPCC objectives. What should have been a political debate about energy policy, environmental quality, and reducing vulnerability to weather and climate disasters, became a debate about the nuances of climate science, with climate scientists as the pawns and whipping boys.
So were the scientists innocent victims and pawns in all this? Were they just hardworking scientists doing their best to address the impossible expectations of the policy makers? Well, many of them were. However, at the heart of the IPCC is a cadre of scientists whose careers have been made by the IPCC. These scientists have used the IPCC to jump the normal meritocracy process by which scientists achieve influence over the politics of science and policy. Not only has this brought some relatively unknown, inexperienced and possibly dubious people into positions of influence, but these people become vested in protecting the IPCC, which has become central to their own career and legitimizes playing power politics with their expertise.
http://judithcurry.com/2010/11/03/reversing-the-direction-of-the-positive-feedback-loop/
James Lovelock in the Guardian on Climategate and its implications
on CRU scientists
I was utterly disgusted. My
second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to
happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely
vocational. Back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything
else other than be a scientist. They're not like that nowadays.
They don't give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced
universities and churn them out. They say: "Science is a good
career. You can get a job for life doing government work."
That's no way to do science.
I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been
warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science
in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements
being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently
done
on computer models
I remember when the Americans sent up a satellite to measure
ozone and it started saying that a hole was developing over the
South Pole. But the damn fool scientists were so mad on the
models that they said the satellite must have a fault. We tend
to now get carried away by our giant computer models. But
they're not complete models. They're based more or less entirely
on geophysics. They don't take into account the climate of the
oceans to any great extent, or the responses of the living stuff
on the planet. So I don't see how they can accurately predict
the climate.
on sceptics
there are some sceptics that I fully respect. Nigel Lawson is one. He writes sensibly and well.
on predicting temperatures
If you look back on climate history it sometimes took anything
up to 1,000 years before a change in one of the variables kicked
in and had an effect. And during those 1,000 years the
temperature could have gone in the other direction to what you
thought it should have done. What right have the scientists with
their models to say that in 2100 the temperature will have risen
by 5C?
The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they're scared stiff of the fact that they don't really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. They could be absolutely running the show. We haven't got the physics worked out yet. One of the chiefs once said to me that he agreed that they should include the biology in their models, but he said they hadn't got the physics right yet and it would be five years before they do. So why on earth are the politicians spending a fortune of our money when we can least afford it on doing things to prevent events 50 years from now? They've employed scientists to tell them what they want to hear.
on scientists
Sometimes their view might be quite right, but it might also be pure propaganda. This is wrong. They should ask the scientists, but the problem is scientists won't speak. If we had some really good scientists it wouldn't be a problem, but we've got so many dumbos who just can't say anything, or who are afraid to say anything. They're not free agents.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock
Steven
Goddard,’ the man behind ‘Real Science,’ a prominent anti-global
warming blog, admits his real identity is Tony Heller, a former
US government climate modeler. Heller broke the astonishing news
on his website (June 27, 2014) declaring he is a life-long
committed environmentalist sickened by the orchestrated campaign
of misinformation pumped out by governments.
Among a list of gripes Heller writes,
“The claims of 97% consensus are a massive lie. Only 52% of
American Meteorological Society members believe that man is the
primary contributor to global warming.”
Governments Know Carbon Dioxide
Cannot Cause Warming
But without doubt the greatest of
Heller's revelations from the climate modelling community is
that it is well known by insiders that increases in levels of
atmospheric carbon dioxide will not cause global warming.
He explains, “The radiative transfer
models used by government climate scientists show that going up
to 550 PPM or even 1000 PPM CO2 will make minimal difference to
the radiative balance of the atmosphere. The knee of the CO2
curve is at about 30 PPM, and additional CO2 has little first
order effect. This is because almost all radiation in the CO2
absorption spectra is already being absorbed by H2O or CO2
molecules.
Adding more CO2 has minimal effect, because there is not much
radiation left to be absorbed. (This is a bit of an
oversimplification because of second order effects, but those
are also small.) There is no indication from the radiative
transfer models used by government scientists that additional
CO2 will cause large amounts of heating.”
Climategate 'hide the decline' explained by Berkeley professor Richard A. Muller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk&feature=player_embedded#at=26
Roger Pielke senior severely critiquing a multi-decadal climate
model projections paper on basic methodology.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00205.1
THE UN's climate change
chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in
global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain's Met
Office, but said it would need to last "30 to 40 years at least"
to break the long-term global warming trend.
Dr Pachauri, the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, said that open discussion about controversial
science and politically incorrect views was an essential part of
tackling climate change.
Jenny Murray asked Christine Rice about her early career as a scientist researching “global warming.”
Rice replied:
I was amazed really by the inadequacy of what we had, because we’re talking about climate change which is over tens of thousands of years as opposed to the twenty years of data that we had. So in a way we were putting out a lot of ideas and not really having concrete scientific research to support it, and I suppose at that point I did lose a little bit of my spark, thinking well I could propose an idea and I could probably draft a thesis that would support it and yet I wouldn’t really convince myself necessarily.
What did you do after graduating?
I started a DPhil in the atmospheric physics department at
Oxford because I had some idealistic notion of contributing to
the world’s knowledge of global warming and its potential
dangers. I was rather dismayed to discover how fervently
scientists on both sides of the climate-change argument could
argue their particular thesis and manipulate the data to prove
their conclusions. It seemed a little like religious faith — if
you believed a thing to be true, then it could be — and I got
the distinct impression that I was about to embark on the same
process. Once I got stuck into being at the computer every day,
I knew this was not the right place for me.
http://www.iop.org/careers/workinglife/profiles/page_37727.html
Solar forcing
NASA
Jan. 8, 2013: In the galactic scheme of things, the Sun is a
remarkably constant star. While some stars exhibit dramatic
pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and
sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a
measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle.
There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that
even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant
effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the
National Research Council (NRC), "The Effects of Solar
Variability on Earth's Climate," lays out some of the
surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself
felt on our planet.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/
CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment
The chief of the world's leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva
has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major
experiment. The CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets")
experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep
space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN's proton
synchrotron to examine nucleation.
CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that
the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the
latest experiment.
"I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but
not to interpret them,"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/18/cern_cosmic_ray_gag/
*****************************************
Yamal and Hide-the-Decline
The effect of using “all the data to hand” is potentially quite dramatic. The graphic below compares the Briffa 2009 chronology (red) to the average of site RCS chronologies for the 20 Vaganov sites in the 10-degree box. As you can see, there is considerable correlation between the two chronologies, though the Briffa version is spikier than the much larger Vaganov network. The discrepancy becomes very pronounced from the 1970s on – the Vagnov network shows the characteristic “decline” in the late 20th century that also characterized the large Schweingruber network, while the Briffa Limited Hangout network surges to new records.
Figure 4. Comparison of Briffa 2009 chronology and regional
chronology from Vaganov data.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/04/09/yamal-and-hide-the-decline/
IPCC manipulation
UN climate change panel to be warned over reports
A review of the practices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been conducted in response to intense criticism of the body, whose reports are used by governments to inform policy decisions on global warming.
The findings of the review are due to be handed to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tomorrow.
Conducted by a committee of representatives from the world's leading scientific bodies, the analysis is expected to recommend a number of changes to the way the IPCC compiles and checks its extensive 1,000 page reports.
The committee, which is made up of scientific organisations that form the InterAcademy Council, is also expected to recommend changes to help the IPCC keep its reports, which take around six years to complete, more up to date with current science.
Evidence given to the committee has also called for a tightening of the way facts and references are checked before the reports are published.
The IPCC has been under scrutiny after it admitted making an error in its 2007 report, that stated Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 – a statement that was wrong by over 300 years.
The panel has also been criticised over the sources of information it used to compile the report after a number of statements were found to be based on information taken from reports by environmental lobby groups, magazine articles and student dissertations.
IPCC Third Assessment Report - Climate Change 2001
In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate
research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing
with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the
long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.
The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the
probability distribution of the system's future possible states
by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces
climate change to the discernment of significant differences in
the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model
ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased
computer resources and the application of new methods of model
diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of
climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical
information is essential.
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/505.htm
Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017907.ece
Memorandum by Professor Paul Reiter, Institut Pasteur; Paris
20. The issue of consensus
is key to understanding the limitations of IPCC pronouncements. Consensus
is the stuff of politics, not of science. Science
proceeds by observation, hypothesis and experiment. Professional
scientists rarely draw firm conclusions from a single article,
but consider its contribution in the context of other
publications and their own experience, knowledge, and
speculations. The complexity of this process, and the
uncertainties involved, are a major obstacle to meaningful
understanding of scientific issues by non-scientists.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we21.htm
House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs
THE IPCC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION
Memorandum by Professor Paul Reiter, Institut Pasteur; Paris
14. The amateurish text of
the chapter reflected the limited knowledge of the 22 authors.
Much of the emphasis was on "changes in geographic range
(latitude and altitude) and incidence (intensity and
seasonality) of many vector-borne diseases" as "predicted" by
computer models. Extensive coverage was given to these models,
although they were all based on a highly simplistic model
originally developed as an aid to malaria control campaigns. The
authors acknowledged that the models did not take into account
"the influence of local demographic, socioeconomic, and
technical circumstances".
15. Glaring indicators of
the ignorance of the authors included the statement that
"although anopheline mosquito species that transmit malaria do
not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops
below 16-18ºC, some higher latitude species are able to
hibernate in sheltered sites". In truth, many tropical species
must survive in temperature below this limit, and many temperate
species can survive temperatures of -25ºC, even in "relatively
exposed" places.
16. The authors also claimed that climate change was already causing malaria to move to higher altitudes (eg in Rwanda). They quoted information published by non-specialists that had been roundly denounced in the scientific literature
19. These confident
pronouncements, untrammelled by details of the complexity of the
subject and the limitations of these models, were widely quoted
as "the consensus
of 1,500 of the world's top scientists" (occasionally
the number quoted was 2,500). This clearly did not apply to the
chapter on human health, yet at the time, eight out of nine
major web sites that I checked placed these diseases at the top
of the list of adverse impacts of climate change, quoting the
IPCC.
20. The issue of
consensus is key to understanding the limitations of IPCC
pronouncements. Consensus
is the stuff of politics, not of science. Science
proceeds by observation, hypothesis and experiment. Professional
scientists rarely draw firm conclusions from a single article,
but consider its contribution in the context of other
publications and their own experience, knowledge, and
speculations. The complexity of this process, and the
uncertainties involved, are a major obstacle to meaningful
understanding of scientific issues by non-scientists.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we21.htm
Chris Landsea (Resignation Letter of Chris Landsea from IPCC)
Dear colleagues,
After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Landsea
In fact, a prominent UN scientist questioned the reliability of
such climate models. In a recent candid statement, IPCC
scientist Dr. Jim Renwick—a lead author of the IPCC 4th
Assessment Report—publicly admitted that the computer models
that predict a coming catastrophe may not be so reliable after
all. Renwick stated, "Half of the variability in the climate
system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically
well."
Let me repeat: a UN scientist admitted, "Half of the variability
in the climate system is not predictable."
A leading scientific skeptic, meteorologist Dr. Hendrik
Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical
weather prediction and former director of research at The
Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently
took the critique of climate computer models one step further.
Tennekes said in February 2007, "I am of the opinion that most
scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of
climate models are in fact software engineers. They are
unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to
society."
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.Facts&ContentRecord_id=E1BEFFF7-802A-23AD-4794-179EB41CF348
Dr Renwick now tells us get
it right only half the time. Worse, he
tells us they are unable to predict weather beyond a week or
two, yet in
conjunction with the IPCC they presume to tell us what to expect
over the
next few decades.
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=32