[Rupert Wood]

andre, on 08 February 2012 - 15:01, said:

I'm afraid the appeal to authority is worn down nowadays, John, Judith Curry explains why. Joanne Nova is a bit more radical.

A few years on after I last bothered looking here, nothing has changed! I invite any "antis" to try their luck at NZ's "Hot Topic" - dismemberment of sceptic lies a speciality!

[John Mason]

An investigation into Vahrenholt and the claims made within his new book and an interview with him at Der Spiegel:

http://www.skeptical...ate-change.html

Cheers - John

[John Mason]

It has indeed changed Vill, yet you are making exactly the same statements as you were in the distant past. The evidence continues to build up and the denial gets shriller and ever-more desperate. The organised political opposition - and I use 'political' advisedly, because it does not involve a shred of credible science - in the meantime has changed course significantly, no longer denying that the greenhouse effect is real and Mankind can cause the climate to warm by emitting greenhouse gases in large quantities: the official line is now twisting things one way and another to argue the amount of climate sensitivity for 2 pCO2. Of course there are the diehards who stick with the old conspiracy-theories, but the herd has moved on.

Meanwhile, the one thing every schoolboy knows - that you only poke a wasps nest with a stick so many times before they come out and start stinging - has been ignored by those activists who also ignored the good advice to play the ball, not the player. Scientists have finally woken up to the reality that politics is a streetfight where dirty tricks are par for the course. But this isn't the backlash that those who peddle the same messages of doubt as those used in the pro-tobacco and pro-asbestos campaigns of the past should really fear. I figure they know this, and they're betting on being long-since departed from Earth by the time the proverbial really starts hitting the fan, with only history remaining to judge their careers and morals (or more correctly lack of). But that outcome depends on what happens next up in the Arctic.....

Cheers - John

[John Mason]

Village, on 05 March 2012 - 11:52, said:

Very sorry John, but I dont follow your thinking. Can you explain;

You are saying that the IPCC is not a political organisation?

The IPCC changing their headline promotion from "global warming" to "climate change" had nothing to do with politics?

Was this change not driven by the grounswell of sceptical scientists with counter arguments just like the thread subject anounces?

Bit in bold, folks.

I think Vill wins the award of Funniest Post on UKww 2012.

The IPCC was founded in 1988, Vill. If you don't know what the CC bit stands for you'd better go look it up.

In fact, increased usage of "climate change" elsewhere came in during the Bush era. Here's Republican political strategist Frank Luntz in a controversial memo to the Bush administration in 2002, advising conservative politicians on communicating about the environment: "It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation. “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

So it was nothing to do with the science - it was Conservative communication-strategising. In science, global warming and climate change have both been used for a long time and still are. Global warming simply refers to the increased average global temperature: climate change refers to its effects, whether benevolent or malignant. It is the effects that the IPCC exist to advise upon, though it is still down to governments and generally inept politicians to do anything about it.

Cheers - John

[John Mason]

Chris, the following graphic from Skeptical Science should counter "John, how can you provide science that something doesn't exist when it it can't be proved in the first place?":



Now show me a similar graphic that tells us how much we know about the likelihood of life on other planets!

Cheers - John

[John Mason]

Chris, if you start with Arrhenius about a hundred years ago and work towards the present day there is a VAST body of evidence that burning fossil fuels, thereby changing the equilibrium of the carbon cycle, is causing the planet to warm. I'm only academically interested in certain aspects of climate science yet I accumulate hundreds of PDFs of peer-reviewed papers a year. To state otherwise - "there is no proof" - is to wilfully ignore that VAST body of science. Furthermore, the last paragraph of your post is conspiracy-theory stuff. The arguments have moved on - and yes it is a war in a sense - but the idea that the scientists are in it for the money, trying to save face and so on is the stuff of the Truthers and Birthers. If these guys wanted to rake in the dosh, they'd have gone over and worked for Heartland, who were paying one such guy $11,000 a month for spreading his nonsense. Now THAT'S what I call serious money!

Edit: the Drake equation has been criticised as being at least partly based upon conjecture. The graphic above is all stuff that has been empirically observed and measured. That's one heck of a difference.

Cheers - John

[John Mason]

Sorry to confuse you Vill!

The "CO2 theory you ape" is over 100 years old although I do not know Arrhenius' political affiliations and have not got time to go and look them up. It is science, not politics, though political activists from Greenpeace to the Tea-Party have having a right old ding-dong over it.

The IPCC is multi-governmental and though advised by scientists a lot of its output has political overtones and furthermore has been increasingly criticised in recent years for being over-conservative - an example of many being Arctic sea-ice which is reducing both in terms of extent and volume way faster than the last IPCC report (AR4) suggested it would do. Indeed, I'd say that this is rather a lot more serious than e.g. a typo on Himalayan glaciers that in a sub-sub section of a sub-report that nobody even spotted for over 2 years!

I suppose you were going to lead on to say that the IPCC wants to install a socialist world government, but as I said earlier, in the opposition movement such conspiracy-theories have long been abandoned because even they have realised that they have to come up with something better than that to even sound semi-plausible!

Cheers - John

[John Mason]

Someone on Skeptical Science has just reminded me of this useful link to a page on the NASA website WRT the usage of the terms "Climate Change" and "Global Warming":

http://www.nasa.gov/...other_name.html

Cheers - John

[ldavidcooke]

Hey Vil,

The change in opinion of several scientists are generally due to the way controversial ideas were addressed by the IPCC, not by the science, exactly... Many ideas have been brought up only to be dismissed out of hand that should have gotten more scruntiny. That the ideas that were passed over described the weather/synoptics of a warmer world with a lesser difference in temperature across latitudes, was not the focus of the IPCC at the time.

There comes a time in any document you have to decide the intent or plot. Though the theme was not different between the ideas being examined, the plot was different. One was to suggest the result of a given action by tbe dominat magafauna species, the other was to define the conditions that would exist in the resulting world. The two idea sets were not necessarily wrong, they only had different intents. That anyone who had as much education could not see the reason for the decisions made, begins to suggest that there may be a bit of "sour grapes" in play, not that, that is true; but could be construed so. If the individuals in question did not explore both points of view, when they made their declariation, it may suggest that they were not considering all aspects of the issue.

[John Mason]

Back to the conspiracy-theorising again, Vill.

I'll just post this summary of the IPCC from Realclimate with my points in bold, as it's hardly worth wasting time typing something much the same:

Let’s start with a few basic facts about the IPCC. The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in four technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. A large fraction of the relevant scientific community is thus involved in the effort. The three working groups are:




Working Group 1 (WG1), which deals with the physical climate science basis, as assessed by the climatologists, including several of the Realclimate authors.

Working Group 2 (WG2), which deals with impacts of climate change on society and ecosystems, as assessed by social scientists, ecologists, etc.

Working Group 3 (WG3) , which deals with mitigation options for limiting global warming, as assessed by energy experts, economists, etc.




Assessment reports are published every six or seven years and writing them takes about three years. Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was published in 2007. Its three volumes are almost a thousand pages each, in small print. They were written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors; most were not previous IPCC authors. There are three stages of review involving more than 2,500 expert reviewers who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts. These, together with the authors’ responses to them, are all in the public record (see here and here for WG1 and WG2 respectively).

That should clear that one up.

Cheers - John

[ldavidcooke]

Hey Vil,

So what, would you have the IPCC scientists elected... Or maybe you can choose them by qualifications, whoops, great minds on narrow subjects may not be great organizers. Hmmm..., it seems you would be required to create some form of examination then. Who creates the questions or scenarios? Do you simply create a unwieldly panel of each nations top scientists... Hmmm..., how are each nations top weather, climate and physics scientists choosen anyway...?