J Klompus: "Remember when reading these emails; This is the primary research institution that feeds the UN's IPCC. The top cop so to speak."
as noted above by Farwest1 and oe, there is no such thing as "the primary research institution that feeds the UN's IPCC". the IPCC and its reports are the consequence of "consensus" science. that this, they are debated, argued, collated and resolved to come to an agreement on a position that can be supported by 10s, if not 100s of climate and related scientists. therefore, their conclusions, by methodological nature, are conservative and based on the lowest common position of agreement.
can you say the same for your sceptics??
you are also wrong about China and india. China is undertaking more dramatic climate change mitigation than the USA. This not being done for "feel good" reasons,. but because it makes economic and development sense. In fact, USA corporations are starting to follow the same course - more so than government - because the economic and development of business benefits are greater than the status quo.
so, keep to your nostalgia for being able to do anything you want at anytime, and assume that this is a question of freedom and choice.
one day you may see that it is a question of responsibility.
The consensus science, as in peer reviewed reports, you speak of no longer has credibility:
"The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.
That is a big problem. The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming. If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.
Obviously, this also casts their reluctance to conform with FOI requests in a slightly different light.
That's not reason to abandon efforts to control our carbon emissions--as I say, they're still very likely to be problematic. But if the model turns out to be as bad as initial reports seem to imply, we should probably hold off on policy recommendations until we have a slightly better handle on the likely outcomes."
The Chinese government has adjusted its policy drastically in the last year or two. It's now tackling climate change in a more systematic way than the US is.
Unfortunately, Flat-Earthers such as yourself, Jack Klompus, may lead to the US being left behind in a global economy that's shifting increasingly to carbon neutral technologies.
The old Oil Neanderthals like Joe Barton and James Inhofe are screwing over the future of our country for some short term oil profits for them and their friends. Congrats.
Flat Earther? Neanderthal? Old Oil? Arent we being a bit extreme here? Why is it the alarmist camp is the most extremely vocal?
Regarding the flat earth, many people did believe it was flat including a lot of the top men of science at the time and it was heretical to go against them or the church. Among the sailors however it was common knowledge the earth was round but nobody cared to listen. Every sailor in once losing sight of shore has no problem seeing the curvature of the planet. But alas a sailor sailing for mere profit, what does he know?
It wasn't the scientists, but the men of religion, of the status quo, of those for whom a different WORLD view was intimidating and suspect that held to the flat world... sound familiar.
Diabase, if you read the comment after the article in the Atlantic, you'll see that a number of respondents have a far more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the science and scientific method at stake than the author of the article. Peer review reports do not lack credibility. This is exactly the game being played - not to provide counter evidence, but to call into question the hard research of others. The estimates are not unreliable - rather, the exactitude can never be guaranteed or finitely determined. there is every likelihood that the results are far more conservative than they they are overly alarmist - that is the nature of consensus science.
Peer review processes do lack credibility if they inteferred with or stacked to generate favourable outcomes - and there is plenty of evidence of this in the emails.
And independent repeatibility of findings I would have thought is a key quality factor in scientific method.
And I think Jack's claim that the CRU is a leading provider of scientific content is valid.
FYI:
"Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.
Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”
Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.
Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Regarding the flat earth, many people did believe it was flat including a lot of the top men of science at the time and it was heretical to go against them or the church. Among the sailors however it was common knowledge the earth was round but nobody cared to listen. Every sailor in once losing sight of shore has no problem seeing the curvature of the planet. But alas a sailor sailing for mere profit, what does he know?
I love this factoid! Supposedly the reason everyone told Columbus he was an idiot to sail west was that they had already more or less accurately predicted the circumference of the earth, and knew that if you set off in that direction with the quantity of provisions Columbus did, youd starve to death before you got there. Unless of course, you ran into some magic never-heard-of continent or something..
Oh, sorry. We should carry on with this focused discussion on the fate of the earth.
There is a fundamental difference between conservative/libertarian political advocacy groups such as Cato, Marshall, and Heartland Institutes, and the vast majority of people doing legitimate science out there.
Namely, the conservative/libertarian advocacy groups are paid for by a political perspective, and by people who stand to benefit financially from being climate change deniers (i.e. oil companies and oil barons.) This is a fundamental conflict of interest. I don't dismiss anything coming from the Cato Institute as a fabrication--I dismiss it as a conflict of interest.
Legitimate scientists are interested in clarifying scientific knowledge through peer-reviewed research. They are not interested in enriching themselves or their friends. Most climate researchers in no way profit from their work, nor do they necessarily begin with a political perspective and feed that into their research (unlike the API-owned researchers at the conservative/libertarian "think tanks" mentioned above.)
The legitimate science you speak of I'm afraid is now deeply questionable. And of course, grants to academic institutions are given in an 'elightenment-type' spirit of progress and understanding.
I always thought that money and power were the prime 'base' motivations that promote corruption - I agree that the pro-AGW faction has little interest in money.
But I'm glad that we have the whole issue sorted.
I will stop thinking and investigating - after all, I am a mere architect with no scientific background. I dare not question any points of the science out there on this subject. I will humbly let those better placed than I am to guide me in the right direction.
I do not have the right to ask questions about how certain conclusions were reached. It is my duty to accept, accomodate and pay for any remittance deemed necessary to save us from complete annhiliation.
Any view not held by those authorised to expouse the science should be ignored. Any claims that the science is not settled should be dismissed as a claim of a vast dark conspiracy.
Any other course of action is anti-science. I see that now.
As a member of a democratic, liberal society, you have the right to question whatever you want, Diabase. You can question gravity if you want. No one will stop you.
However, forgive me and everyone else for not believing your quickly-formulated opinions about climate science. You are not a climate scientist, and while I'm sure you can read a few articles on Wikipedia about it (as can I) you are not qualified to tell everyone else whether climate change exists or not.
That is the job of the tens of thousands of scientists who work on climate change daily.
I bet theres a lot less than 10,000 climate scientists and even fewer with the access to the funds and equip to verify the climate change data for certain
"However, forgive me and everyone else for not believing your quickly-formulated opinions about climate science. You are not a climate scientist, and while I'm sure you can read a few articles on Wikipedia about it (as can I) you are not qualified to tell everyone else whether climate change exists or not."
Somewhere, I hear the sound of a pot calling a kettle black....
Can anyone address farwest's wife's comment: As my wife--a very moderate person politically--said last night, "even if it turns out the globe isn't warming, isn't curbing our use of fossil fuels and trying to live in a more carbon neutral way a good thing regardless?"
I'm appreciating this discussion and feel like I'm learning a lot from people who know more about global relationships than I do. But can someone from each side answer why this simple point of view isn't receiving much attention?
There must be tons of science showing that excess carbon production is not only unhealthy for animals and plants, but also that fossil fuels are finite, so why not develop alternatives?
Reminds me of what Tom Friedman said after the infamous "Drill, baby, drill" chant: it's like a group of people, when the personal computer was first introduced, standing there shaking their fists and shouting "typewriters, baby, typewriters!"
Not at all LB bot all. Of course reducing CO2 emissions and polluting less is a good thing, look how far we've come. What is being proposed is a cap on output based on how large your consumption is currently. Those that consume more get less, those that consume less get more. This is never works well and usually ends up very very bad.
Lets reduce emissions on our own, not by force. There's too much that could go wrong.
LB - the draft proposals of the upcoming Copenhagen "Treaty", interesting choice of words, I didnt realize this was a war, contain some very disturbing language. From the draft:
"17. [[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:]
(a) Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees;
(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures."
This is why its a big deal on how we proceed. Do we reduce on our own or by the "rule", however unenforceable, of a globe trotting organization of ever changing appointees not elected by us? This stuff is cute on college campuses but is deadly to nation states.
The corrupt political leaders of Africa will be further rewarded for keeping their populace in abject poverty ( low carbon footprint per capita!) despite the burgeoning wealth of natural resources and richness of those resources for the benefit of the political elite. Great System for international corporations. We pay, they play.
Lets reduce emissions on our own, not by force. There's too much that could go wrong.
we have the technology to be building houses that consumer 90% less energy for as much, or slightly more, than they already cost.
we should be mandating significant energy reductions for our buildings, if we care to leave anything but a burnt out hulk of shit to our grandkids.
on our own, no one's going to do squat until it's too late (which is just what the oil/coal/repukes want)
what can go wrong from mandating significant energy reductions now?
absolutely nothing.
what can go wrong from not mandating significant energy reductions now?
as we've already seen, a world of hurt.
This stuff is cute on college campuses but is deadly to nation states.
the same could be said for retarded neo-con fantasies which have done nothing to improve the majority of americans and leave us falling further other countries.
america used to be a place of innovation and healthy competition - e.g. space race.
today, with the 'party of no' sitting on their delicate, psuedo-fundie, oil-funded heineys, we're left with a bunch of morons preventing us from being the leaders of the 21st century, further squashing future chances at wealth. the irony is the repukes preventing america from becoming the leader of CO2 reductions, energy efficiency, etc - will be a transfer of wealth in the hundreds of billions to those countries that have the steadfastness to shoot for the moon.
mr. Klompus, why should the US keep on being dependant on oil from undemocratic regimes in the Middle East, when there are renewable alternatives available? What's wrong with using solar/wind/tidal/etc. energy. Why pay for something if you can get it for 'free'?
Also politically speaking, think about the possibilities when the US would not be depending on Arab oil. What would this mean for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or for the democratisation of the Middle East?
Also if anybody thinks there's nothing wrong with burning oil and it's harmless, put your lips around the exhaust pipe of your car and breathe in deeply while the motor is running...
This tread has degenerated to a pointless diatribe on the level of who's god is better, who's penis is bigger, etc. Can we just agree to disagree on this subject, get off politics and get back to talking about architecture? Or at least how this topic relates to architecture. Good lord!
zoo, I'm a parent, you think I haven't looked into the autism-vaccine myth?
Everyone reading this: zoolander will never take off his tinfoil hat, no matter what anyone who challenges his pre-determined worldview shows him, but if any parents are reading this please know that the vaccine-autism link has been completely disproven, despite what Jim Carrey says. It's a myth.
Spacing the vaccines out isn't bad - it's not necessary, just not harmful, and might give you peace of mind. But the vaccines themselves are so much safer than not vaccinating. This is a case of taking on the responsibility of living in a society: everyone has to do it, or it won't work. If you choose not to vaccinate, then you owe it to the community in which you live to quarantine yourself and your family so as not to cause anyone else harm.
This thread has degenerated into nonsense. The speaks to the issues I am trying to point out - there is much hysteria over this issue which clouds judgements, and closes down genuine debate.
I think the leaked CRU emails point to, at the very least, flaws on the pro-AGW side and this is vitally important. It starts to remove the moral high ground that seems to be adopted in any argument that goes on. People can't just now dismiss contrarian views due to perceived conflicts or vested interest, or 'bad science'. Its happening on both sides.
I think it should be a worry when, in the context of scientific discovery, people try and end discussion and then revert to name calling and hysteria. As I mentioned above, when did we all start becoming totalitarian? And how valid are any of the claims on this board? Any comment from anyone here is the result of learning, not doing.
I hope to show that through my comments, even though I am not a scientist, I have enough common sense to start questioning things and not take what I hear verbatim. That is not to say I am a 'denier' -I think of myself as curious and a natural contrarian. I am keenly interested in both sides of this issue.
I do not have a predetermined view of the world.
In the past I shared very much the same opinions as yourself (i.e. the general concensus on most topics formed from reading mass media and mixing with the middle classes).
However, something didn't seem right, and on researching many topics it became evident that we are being herded about like sheep, given our views by bombardment by the media, who are paid by the government and big business.
It is an economic system.
Global warming is going to create trillions of dollars for the elites, vaccinations is a billions dollar industry.
They scare the life out of young mothers who rush down to the clinic to have their child jabbed with countless injections, creating big profits in the process. They vaccines have serious side effects.
VIRUSES FOR IDIOTS
November 19, 2009. The love for, and fascination with, viruses is a fun pastime. “Here’s a virus, there’s a virus, there’s another virus.” Wonderful.
In political terms, this means these virus lovers are VERY suggestible every time the CDC or the World Health Organization decides to announce a new threat, a new epidemic, a new pandemic, a new plague.
“It’s a virus, called H13cXy27.” Wow. Hypnotize me some more.
Instead, try looking at it from another angle. Let’s say we accept the oft-cited global figure of 300,000 to 500,000 deaths from the flu every year. Ordinary flu. Every year.
So, if you’re a public health agency searching for more power, you can cut into that big death statistic and carve out a piece of it and claim it’s…NEW. Never been seen before. You go right in there and chop off a hunk for yourself.
You call it Buffalo Flu.
You claim researchers in your tight little circle of labs have isolated a new, never-seen-before buffalo virus…and the threat is huge because there is no natural human immunity to it anywhere on the planet. It could sweep across Earth and kill millions.
You discover BV (buffalo virus) in a cluster of cases in, say, Texas. Small town just outside a ranch in Texas. Five people have died there.
You ignore the fact that lately there has been a lot of spraying of pesticide on the ranch. Nasty pesticide. You ignore the fact that every year, 5-10 people die in that general area, when the wind blows south. Their lungs collapse and bleed.
Who cares? It’s a virus. You find it in those five dead people. BV. Of course, you never see how much of it, the virus, is in those people. You find a trace here and there, and you say it’s enough. The dead people’s lungs were inflamed to beat the band and the lungs were green or purple or black or a bright orange. The virus did that. That’s what you say.
And you can find a trace of that virus from Mongolia to Argentina, because it’s everywhere. It’s actually been everywhere for 50 million years. You just never saw it before. People with decent immune systems don’t even get sick from BV. They don’t.
But now you’ve got a hot deal. Now you can start cutting into that 300,000 to 500,000 flu-death stat and removing pieces of it for yourself, and you can call it BV. You’re in like Flynn. You’re golden. You’ve cooked up the specter of a new disease.
Meanwhile, people all over the world get sick and die, just like they do every year. Every single year. A lot of it is called flu. If you really want to scare the hell out of everybody, you cut yourself a really big fat piece of that 300,000 to 500,000 death stat. You don’t even test anybody for BV anymore. You say “the pandemic has been established” and you just start throwing around big numbers. You say “tens of millions” of people in the US alone are infected with BV.
And if enough people believe you, you’re in.
And your pharmaceutical allies can start working on the BV vaccine. Billions of dollars available. You offer these companies complete immunity from prosecution in cases where the vaccine severely injures or kills people. You guarantee the companies their money upfront and you offer them total legal protection. It’s a con worthy of organized religion.
And you know what? It IS a religion. The vaccine is the sacrament. The men in white coats are the working priests. The CDC and WHO are the cathedrals of lies. Medical treatment doled out by the certified priests is salvation. BV is the devil.
If some other folks who don’t wear the official white coats say they can keep people healthy with unapproved “sacraments,” you can move in, like the Inquisitors, and hold their feet to the fire. You can say these rebels, these heretics, are crazy and they are from Hell. They’re diverting the needy from the true sacrament that will bring them salvation.
You come down hard on these heretics, because they’re claiming they don’t need your sacrament. They don’t even need to pay attention to the devil, the virus. They can go way beyond that and help people establish their own power (immunity). This last claim, you say, is proof they come from Satan, because that’s what Satan always promises. Power. Independence. Self-sufficiency.
You’ve got your bases covered.
You sure do.
Until people start waking up.
Telling you they don’t need your priests or your arcane knowledge or your hocus-pocus for BV.
Telling you they see BV is just another one of your phony scare tactics that might work on children—but they’re all grown up now.
Their juvenile fascination with viruses doesn’t give them a kick anymore. They can get their excitement somewhere else. The viral movie is over.
How many times do you have to hear of another corrupt politician/banker/scientist/(read any EXPERT) before you put them all in the same basket?
Derek, this is exactly the problem: every "expert" is not the same. If you distrust everything you hear on Good Morning America (which trust me I don't watch - it sickens me), then why don't you also distrust everything you read on think twice dot org? Anyone can start up a website, after all.
I can't argue this with you any longer. But re: vaccines, which I know is way off topic, I addressed this earlier: yes, some kids will die after getting a vaccination. Yes, some kids will "turn" autistic after getting a shot. There is not necessarily correlation between these events.
Every action has risks. You never know, when you walk into a doctor's office, or into a mall for that matter, what stew of events is going to combine to create a disaster or a miracle.
But it's like speed limits: we, as a society, weigh the risks. Every year in the US over 40,000 people die in car crashes, millions more are injured. We could institute a 15mph nation wide speed limit and probably reduce that number to nearly zero. But we decide, as a society, that 40,000 deaths is worth the speed of movement that we want.
Vaccine administration will, due to lots of unpredictable circumstances, be implicated in some deaths, certainly, in any given year. Maybe the child was already sick, their immune system became overloaded, or they had an unforeseen allergic reaction, etc. But that can happen the first time you give a kid a strawberry, too - every new exposure for an infant is a risk.
But in the meantime, when 95% or more kids are vaccinated, we've managed to essentially eradicate polio, whooping cough, and measles, which used to kill thousands of children every year. This isn't a rumor, it's not hype: ask your grandparents or great-grandparents if they know anyone who died or was crippled as a child due to polio and they will likely say yes.
I see that your comment pasted from the Wired article uses the phrase "phony scare tactics". Can you at least admit that the anti-vaccine crowd might be using phony scare tactics to argue their case?
"The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start."
When I was a kid the World News Tonight was on during dinner and they announced the Chernobyl accident and I was scared out of my mind that a nuclear cloud would encircle the earth and that a molten radioactive core would eat away the planet. Thats how the news is to children especially when presented in so shocking a tone. When I say scared I mean really scared, like when you wont come out of your room for hours. About the same time the Ozone Layer was making news and I went to scared level Def Con 5. I stopped eating, I became withdrawn at school and thought any day now we are going to be drowned by a tidalwave of melting Antarctic ice, and Im in the midwest. I can vividly remember going to my room to pray - yes pray, that's messed up right -that God wouldn't melt the ice from the Ozone Hole and kill us all. I wouldn't go swimming in the summer and had the uneasy feeling the world was going to end. This lasted from about 3rd grade to 8th grade. Looking back the hysteria being spewed across TV and in the classroom robbed me of a normal childhood. No kid should believe they are going to die from solar radiation anymore so than nuclear anihilation and especially to the point they go pray. I developed a deep mistrust of popular movements and consensus ever since then. These are the tactics that have turned much of my cohorts into mouthpieces for Mr. Gore and his ilk, I suggest a deep probing of each of your brains for early seeds of this debate from the late 1970s through 80s. Weekly reader articles in class, films on man's destruction of the environment etc. Its all there if your willing to look.
Youre right! Whats really wrong here is we should be treating grown adults as if they were children.
Jack. Come on man. Youre too smart to believe in this shit. I mean do you see whos agreeing with you here^? Do you understand what they think you are saying? Its true, climate science is extraordinarily difficult, and peer-review is a messy process. But you know, fucking full-well, what is being described is not whether this is happening, but how bad its going to be. You also know that none of what has been proposed as public policy is capable of combating even the most optimistic legitimate scientific assessments. You bemoan this "lack of consensus" knowing full well the disagreement at hand doesnt fucking help you at all. You are being dishonest and you are deliberately deceiving people.
Now, if you want to have a discussion about just how much energy and money is appropriate to be spent, or on the importance of scientific rigor and transparency, then fine. But to imply this is one big hoax and nothing is happening is patently, measurably false.
If its not one thing to scare the life outta us its the next.
If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."
I've come to the conclusion that all (apart from the really really naieve) believers are getting paid one way or another by jumping on the climate change bandwagon (much like the scientists).
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com
end of discussion everybody, mr. Delingpole is right about everything.
In the lead up to Copenhagen the silence is defining about this unraveling scandal. The IPCC has refused to let scientists other than their own into this debate and now the Copenhagen treaty is up for ratification. This is the scam of the century.
JKlompus, The silence is deafening because it's not ultimately a scandal, beyond the fact that data and emails were illegally hacked. (I hope they discover that it was James Inhofe himself who hacked the files, along with his gay lover.)
The science historian Spencer R. Weart, interviewed in the Washington Post, commented that the theft of the e-mails and the reaction to them was "a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers."
Thank you, Mr. Weart. The skeptics are indeed crackpots. They should be regarded in the same way that we'd regard a person on the street wandering around with a toilet seat in his pants and a tinfoil hat on his head, muttering about conspiracy.
[UPDATE, 11:30 p.m.:] Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and author of “ Why We Disagree About Climate Change,” has weighed in with these thoughts about the significance of the leaked files and emails:
The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the I.P.C.C. does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.
This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public - and maybe that is no bad thing.
But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.
It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
Now holz, thats not very nice. Skepticism has noble roots and a place in society. But yes, Zoolander does seem to have a few issues there.
I could equally jump to the same conclusion when in the past you have seen anti-globalization protesters throwing in their lot with all number of loosely related fringe/nutloop affiliates - particularly fire jugglers.
I would say my position is best described by Mike Hulme's quote above:
"The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive."
For my own part, in my comments above and elsewhere, I concentrate on being rational and pro-science - which at its heart is experimental and inclusive.
What is clear from the conservations in these emails is that not only is the science not settled but there was a systematic attempt by these scientists to keep any contrary viewpoints out of the media, published literature, and the political arena. Does this sound like people genuinely seeking after truth or just scientists trying to protect their own turf, reputations, and agenda – whatever the cost?
In another email, the director of the East Anglia climate center, Phil Jones, suggested that we:
“will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
What is clear here is that it is not people who question so called climate change, but the enviro nutters who believe whole heartedly (read bankbalance) who are unwilling to engage in any civilised debate about the topic.
This is the biggest scam in the history of mankind.
1. it's yet to be proven as a scam.
2. pales in comparison to the scam of religion
Maybe the fact that the climate is not being altered by mankind?
wow, i didn't know you were a scientist now, zoolander.
What is clear from the conservations in these emails is that not only is the science not settled but there was a systematic attempt by these scientists to keep any contrary viewpoints out of the media
wow, you extrapolated that from less than 1% of emails written by these guys over a 10 year period?
What is clear here is that it is not people who question so called climate change, but the enviro nutters who believe whole heartedly (read bankbalance) who are unwilling to engage in any civilised debate about the topic.
enviro-nutters - oooh, that's rich! please define 'civilized debate' - and please tell me how you debate people who's funding is solely arrived from fossil-fuel backed companies? you really think there is room for debate between legitimate science (yay enviro nutters) and crackpots hell bent on keeping us in the 19th century?
Climategate Master Criminal Phil Jones Collected $22.6m in Grants.
and? are the hundreds of cancer research centers receiving tens of millions of dollars in funding any less valid because they received more funding? asinine.
Climate Change Emails Hacked
J Klompus: "Remember when reading these emails; This is the primary research institution that feeds the UN's IPCC. The top cop so to speak."
as noted above by Farwest1 and oe, there is no such thing as "the primary research institution that feeds the UN's IPCC". the IPCC and its reports are the consequence of "consensus" science. that this, they are debated, argued, collated and resolved to come to an agreement on a position that can be supported by 10s, if not 100s of climate and related scientists. therefore, their conclusions, by methodological nature, are conservative and based on the lowest common position of agreement.
can you say the same for your sceptics??
you are also wrong about China and india. China is undertaking more dramatic climate change mitigation than the USA. This not being done for "feel good" reasons,. but because it makes economic and development sense. In fact, USA corporations are starting to follow the same course - more so than government - because the economic and development of business benefits are greater than the status quo.
so, keep to your nostalgia for being able to do anything you want at anytime, and assume that this is a question of freedom and choice.
one day you may see that it is a question of responsibility.
My ass China is taking more drastic measures to curb CO2 output. They build 6 coal plants every month.
The consensus science, as in peer reviewed reports, you speak of no longer has credibility:
"The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data. These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.
That is a big problem. The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming. If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.
Obviously, this also casts their reluctance to conform with FOI requests in a slightly different light.
That's not reason to abandon efforts to control our carbon emissions--as I say, they're still very likely to be problematic. But if the model turns out to be as bad as initial reports seem to imply, we should probably hold off on policy recommendations until we have a slightly better handle on the likely outcomes."
Excerted from here: http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/11/the_real_problem_with_the_climate_science_emails.php
And those 6 coal plants are more efficient than the ones we're building in the US.
read this.
The Chinese government has adjusted its policy drastically in the last year or two. It's now tackling climate change in a more systematic way than the US is.
Unfortunately, Flat-Earthers such as yourself, Jack Klompus, may lead to the US being left behind in a global economy that's shifting increasingly to carbon neutral technologies.
The old Oil Neanderthals like Joe Barton and James Inhofe are screwing over the future of our country for some short term oil profits for them and their friends. Congrats.
Flat Earther? Neanderthal? Old Oil? Arent we being a bit extreme here? Why is it the alarmist camp is the most extremely vocal?
Regarding the flat earth, many people did believe it was flat including a lot of the top men of science at the time and it was heretical to go against them or the church. Among the sailors however it was common knowledge the earth was round but nobody cared to listen. Every sailor in once losing sight of shore has no problem seeing the curvature of the planet. But alas a sailor sailing for mere profit, what does he know?
I fear we have stepped into the same pile.
It wasn't the scientists, but the men of religion, of the status quo, of those for whom a different WORLD view was intimidating and suspect that held to the flat world... sound familiar.
Diabase, if you read the comment after the article in the Atlantic, you'll see that a number of respondents have a far more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the science and scientific method at stake than the author of the article. Peer review reports do not lack credibility. This is exactly the game being played - not to provide counter evidence, but to call into question the hard research of others. The estimates are not unreliable - rather, the exactitude can never be guaranteed or finitely determined. there is every likelihood that the results are far more conservative than they they are overly alarmist - that is the nature of consensus science.
Peer review processes do lack credibility if they inteferred with or stacked to generate favourable outcomes - and there is plenty of evidence of this in the emails.
And independent repeatibility of findings I would have thought is a key quality factor in scientific method.
And I think Jack's claim that the CRU is a leading provider of scientific content is valid.
FYI:
"Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.
Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”
Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.
Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Excerpted from: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTBiMTRlMDQxNzEyMmRhZjU3ZmYzODI5MGY4ZWI5OWM=&w=MA==
Of course, that article comes from someone at the Cato Institute, so feel free to completely dismiss it all as a complete fabrication.
I love this factoid! Supposedly the reason everyone told Columbus he was an idiot to sail west was that they had already more or less accurately predicted the circumference of the earth, and knew that if you set off in that direction with the quantity of provisions Columbus did, youd starve to death before you got there. Unless of course, you ran into some magic never-heard-of continent or something..
Oh, sorry. We should carry on with this focused discussion on the fate of the earth.
There is a fundamental difference between conservative/libertarian political advocacy groups such as Cato, Marshall, and Heartland Institutes, and the vast majority of people doing legitimate science out there.
Namely, the conservative/libertarian advocacy groups are paid for by a political perspective, and by people who stand to benefit financially from being climate change deniers (i.e. oil companies and oil barons.) This is a fundamental conflict of interest. I don't dismiss anything coming from the Cato Institute as a fabrication--I dismiss it as a conflict of interest.
Legitimate scientists are interested in clarifying scientific knowledge through peer-reviewed research. They are not interested in enriching themselves or their friends. Most climate researchers in no way profit from their work, nor do they necessarily begin with a political perspective and feed that into their research (unlike the API-owned researchers at the conservative/libertarian "think tanks" mentioned above.)
The legitimate science you speak of I'm afraid is now deeply questionable. And of course, grants to academic institutions are given in an 'elightenment-type' spirit of progress and understanding.
I always thought that money and power were the prime 'base' motivations that promote corruption - I agree that the pro-AGW faction has little interest in money.
But I'm glad that we have the whole issue sorted.
I will stop thinking and investigating - after all, I am a mere architect with no scientific background. I dare not question any points of the science out there on this subject. I will humbly let those better placed than I am to guide me in the right direction.
I do not have the right to ask questions about how certain conclusions were reached. It is my duty to accept, accomodate and pay for any remittance deemed necessary to save us from complete annhiliation.
Any view not held by those authorised to expouse the science should be ignored. Any claims that the science is not settled should be dismissed as a claim of a vast dark conspiracy.
Any other course of action is anti-science. I see that now.
As a member of a democratic, liberal society, you have the right to question whatever you want, Diabase. You can question gravity if you want. No one will stop you.
However, forgive me and everyone else for not believing your quickly-formulated opinions about climate science. You are not a climate scientist, and while I'm sure you can read a few articles on Wikipedia about it (as can I) you are not qualified to tell everyone else whether climate change exists or not.
That is the job of the tens of thousands of scientists who work on climate change daily.
I bet theres a lot less than 10,000 climate scientists and even fewer with the access to the funds and equip to verify the climate change data for certain
Also, does anyone else watching coverage of this whole thing find themselves wanting to yell at the screen "COOLING TOWERS DONT RELEASE CO2!!"
Sorry. That shit kills me.
"However, forgive me and everyone else for not believing your quickly-formulated opinions about climate science. You are not a climate scientist, and while I'm sure you can read a few articles on Wikipedia about it (as can I) you are not qualified to tell everyone else whether climate change exists or not."
Somewhere, I hear the sound of a pot calling a kettle black....
Can anyone address farwest's wife's comment: As my wife--a very moderate person politically--said last night, "even if it turns out the globe isn't warming, isn't curbing our use of fossil fuels and trying to live in a more carbon neutral way a good thing regardless?"
I'm appreciating this discussion and feel like I'm learning a lot from people who know more about global relationships than I do. But can someone from each side answer why this simple point of view isn't receiving much attention?
There must be tons of science showing that excess carbon production is not only unhealthy for animals and plants, but also that fossil fuels are finite, so why not develop alternatives?
Reminds me of what Tom Friedman said after the infamous "Drill, baby, drill" chant: it's like a group of people, when the personal computer was first introduced, standing there shaking their fists and shouting "typewriters, baby, typewriters!"
Not at all LB bot all. Of course reducing CO2 emissions and polluting less is a good thing, look how far we've come. What is being proposed is a cap on output based on how large your consumption is currently. Those that consume more get less, those that consume less get more. This is never works well and usually ends up very very bad.
Lets reduce emissions on our own, not by force. There's too much that could go wrong.
LB - the draft proposals of the upcoming Copenhagen "Treaty", interesting choice of words, I didnt realize this was a war, contain some very disturbing language. From the draft:
"17. [[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:]
(a) Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees;
(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures."
This is why its a big deal on how we proceed. Do we reduce on our own or by the "rule", however unenforceable, of a globe trotting organization of ever changing appointees not elected by us? This stuff is cute on college campuses but is deadly to nation states.
The corrupt political leaders of Africa will be further rewarded for keeping their populace in abject poverty ( low carbon footprint per capita!) despite the burgeoning wealth of natural resources and richness of those resources for the benefit of the political elite. Great System for international corporations. We pay, they play.
And further to farwest1, one must question gravity, because despite its obvious ubiquity it remains largely theoretically unaccounted for.
But thats another subject I have no authority in.
we have the technology to be building houses that consumer 90% less energy for as much, or slightly more, than they already cost.
we should be mandating significant energy reductions for our buildings, if we care to leave anything but a burnt out hulk of shit to our grandkids.
on our own, no one's going to do squat until it's too late (which is just what the oil/coal/repukes want)
what can go wrong from mandating significant energy reductions now?
absolutely nothing.
what can go wrong from not mandating significant energy reductions now?
as we've already seen, a world of hurt.
This stuff is cute on college campuses but is deadly to nation states.
the same could be said for retarded neo-con fantasies which have done nothing to improve the majority of americans and leave us falling further other countries.
america used to be a place of innovation and healthy competition - e.g. space race.
today, with the 'party of no' sitting on their delicate, psuedo-fundie, oil-funded heineys, we're left with a bunch of morons preventing us from being the leaders of the 21st century, further squashing future chances at wealth. the irony is the repukes preventing america from becoming the leader of CO2 reductions, energy efficiency, etc - will be a transfer of wealth in the hundreds of billions to those countries that have the steadfastness to shoot for the moon.
I see your bringing your open mind to the table, care to offer any other incite?
mr. Klompus, why should the US keep on being dependant on oil from undemocratic regimes in the Middle East, when there are renewable alternatives available? What's wrong with using solar/wind/tidal/etc. energy. Why pay for something if you can get it for 'free'?
Also politically speaking, think about the possibilities when the US would not be depending on Arab oil. What would this mean for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or for the democratisation of the Middle East?
Also if anybody thinks there's nothing wrong with burning oil and it's harmless, put your lips around the exhaust pipe of your car and breathe in deeply while the motor is running...
This tread has degenerated to a pointless diatribe on the level of who's god is better, who's penis is bigger, etc. Can we just agree to disagree on this subject, get off politics and get back to talking about architecture? Or at least how this topic relates to architecture. Good lord!
LB,
Look into vaccines at their ill-effects.
Look into the link between childrens vaccines and the rise in autism.
I'm never taking a vaccination.
I dont believe gov hype about swine flu (plus im not a pig).
Anyone with a winter cold is being diagnosed with SWINE FLU, without even taking tests.
Its all a con the same as climate change.
Dereck
zoo, I'm a parent, you think I haven't looked into the autism-vaccine myth?
Everyone reading this: zoolander will never take off his tinfoil hat, no matter what anyone who challenges his pre-determined worldview shows him, but if any parents are reading this please know that the vaccine-autism link has been completely disproven, despite what Jim Carrey says. It's a myth.
Spacing the vaccines out isn't bad - it's not necessary, just not harmful, and might give you peace of mind. But the vaccines themselves are so much safer than not vaccinating. This is a case of taking on the responsibility of living in a society: everyone has to do it, or it won't work. If you choose not to vaccinate, then you owe it to the community in which you live to quarantine yourself and your family so as not to cause anyone else harm.
Yes,
This thread has degenerated into nonsense. The speaks to the issues I am trying to point out - there is much hysteria over this issue which clouds judgements, and closes down genuine debate.
I think the leaked CRU emails point to, at the very least, flaws on the pro-AGW side and this is vitally important. It starts to remove the moral high ground that seems to be adopted in any argument that goes on. People can't just now dismiss contrarian views due to perceived conflicts or vested interest, or 'bad science'. Its happening on both sides.
I think it should be a worry when, in the context of scientific discovery, people try and end discussion and then revert to name calling and hysteria. As I mentioned above, when did we all start becoming totalitarian? And how valid are any of the claims on this board? Any comment from anyone here is the result of learning, not doing.
I hope to show that through my comments, even though I am not a scientist, I have enough common sense to start questioning things and not take what I hear verbatim. That is not to say I am a 'denier' -I think of myself as curious and a natural contrarian. I am keenly interested in both sides of this issue.
Vacciniation is one of those subjects that crates fierce black and white debate. Like lb, as a parent, I am provaccination.
Wired has a good article on this. But read the comments on that and you realise we share the world with people with very 'interesting' views.
LB,
I do not have a predetermined view of the world.
In the past I shared very much the same opinions as yourself (i.e. the general concensus on most topics formed from reading mass media and mixing with the middle classes).
However, something didn't seem right, and on researching many topics it became evident that we are being herded about like sheep, given our views by bombardment by the media, who are paid by the government and big business.
It is an economic system.
Global warming is going to create trillions of dollars for the elites, vaccinations is a billions dollar industry.
They scare the life out of young mothers who rush down to the clinic to have their child jabbed with countless injections, creating big profits in the process. They vaccines have serious side effects.
SAY NO TO CARBON TAXES.
Derek
Whether its selling carbon credits / vaccinations or taxing the public for carbon taxes, it is simply an economic scam.
http://www.amazon.com/Whistleblower-Confessions-Healthcare-Hitman/dp/193336839X
How anyone cannot see such blatant fraud is beyond me.
How many times do you have to hear of another corrupt politician/banker/scientist/(read any EXPERT) before you put them all in the same basket?
EXCELLENT POST TAKEN FROM WIRED MAG COMMENT:
VIRUSES FOR IDIOTS
November 19, 2009. The love for, and fascination with, viruses is a fun pastime. “Here’s a virus, there’s a virus, there’s another virus.” Wonderful.
In political terms, this means these virus lovers are VERY suggestible every time the CDC or the World Health Organization decides to announce a new threat, a new epidemic, a new pandemic, a new plague.
“It’s a virus, called H13cXy27.” Wow. Hypnotize me some more.
Instead, try looking at it from another angle. Let’s say we accept the oft-cited global figure of 300,000 to 500,000 deaths from the flu every year. Ordinary flu. Every year.
So, if you’re a public health agency searching for more power, you can cut into that big death statistic and carve out a piece of it and claim it’s…NEW. Never been seen before. You go right in there and chop off a hunk for yourself.
You call it Buffalo Flu.
You claim researchers in your tight little circle of labs have isolated a new, never-seen-before buffalo virus…and the threat is huge because there is no natural human immunity to it anywhere on the planet. It could sweep across Earth and kill millions.
You discover BV (buffalo virus) in a cluster of cases in, say, Texas. Small town just outside a ranch in Texas. Five people have died there.
You ignore the fact that lately there has been a lot of spraying of pesticide on the ranch. Nasty pesticide. You ignore the fact that every year, 5-10 people die in that general area, when the wind blows south. Their lungs collapse and bleed.
Who cares? It’s a virus. You find it in those five dead people. BV. Of course, you never see how much of it, the virus, is in those people. You find a trace here and there, and you say it’s enough. The dead people’s lungs were inflamed to beat the band and the lungs were green or purple or black or a bright orange. The virus did that. That’s what you say.
And you can find a trace of that virus from Mongolia to Argentina, because it’s everywhere. It’s actually been everywhere for 50 million years. You just never saw it before. People with decent immune systems don’t even get sick from BV. They don’t.
But now you’ve got a hot deal. Now you can start cutting into that 300,000 to 500,000 flu-death stat and removing pieces of it for yourself, and you can call it BV. You’re in like Flynn. You’re golden. You’ve cooked up the specter of a new disease.
Meanwhile, people all over the world get sick and die, just like they do every year. Every single year. A lot of it is called flu. If you really want to scare the hell out of everybody, you cut yourself a really big fat piece of that 300,000 to 500,000 death stat. You don’t even test anybody for BV anymore. You say “the pandemic has been established” and you just start throwing around big numbers. You say “tens of millions” of people in the US alone are infected with BV.
And if enough people believe you, you’re in.
And your pharmaceutical allies can start working on the BV vaccine. Billions of dollars available. You offer these companies complete immunity from prosecution in cases where the vaccine severely injures or kills people. You guarantee the companies their money upfront and you offer them total legal protection. It’s a con worthy of organized religion.
And you know what? It IS a religion. The vaccine is the sacrament. The men in white coats are the working priests. The CDC and WHO are the cathedrals of lies. Medical treatment doled out by the certified priests is salvation. BV is the devil.
If some other folks who don’t wear the official white coats say they can keep people healthy with unapproved “sacraments,” you can move in, like the Inquisitors, and hold their feet to the fire. You can say these rebels, these heretics, are crazy and they are from Hell. They’re diverting the needy from the true sacrament that will bring them salvation.
You come down hard on these heretics, because they’re claiming they don’t need your sacrament. They don’t even need to pay attention to the devil, the virus. They can go way beyond that and help people establish their own power (immunity). This last claim, you say, is proof they come from Satan, because that’s what Satan always promises. Power. Independence. Self-sufficiency.
You’ve got your bases covered.
You sure do.
Until people start waking up.
Telling you they don’t need your priests or your arcane knowledge or your hocus-pocus for BV.
Telling you they see BV is just another one of your phony scare tactics that might work on children—but they’re all grown up now.
Their juvenile fascination with viruses doesn’t give them a kick anymore. They can get their excitement somewhere else. The viral movie is over.
Derek, this is exactly the problem: every "expert" is not the same. If you distrust everything you hear on Good Morning America (which trust me I don't watch - it sickens me), then why don't you also distrust everything you read on think twice dot org? Anyone can start up a website, after all.
I can't argue this with you any longer. But re: vaccines, which I know is way off topic, I addressed this earlier: yes, some kids will die after getting a vaccination. Yes, some kids will "turn" autistic after getting a shot. There is not necessarily correlation between these events.
Every action has risks. You never know, when you walk into a doctor's office, or into a mall for that matter, what stew of events is going to combine to create a disaster or a miracle.
But it's like speed limits: we, as a society, weigh the risks. Every year in the US over 40,000 people die in car crashes, millions more are injured. We could institute a 15mph nation wide speed limit and probably reduce that number to nearly zero. But we decide, as a society, that 40,000 deaths is worth the speed of movement that we want.
Vaccine administration will, due to lots of unpredictable circumstances, be implicated in some deaths, certainly, in any given year. Maybe the child was already sick, their immune system became overloaded, or they had an unforeseen allergic reaction, etc. But that can happen the first time you give a kid a strawberry, too - every new exposure for an infant is a risk.
But in the meantime, when 95% or more kids are vaccinated, we've managed to essentially eradicate polio, whooping cough, and measles, which used to kill thousands of children every year. This isn't a rumor, it's not hype: ask your grandparents or great-grandparents if they know anyone who died or was crippled as a child due to polio and they will likely say yes.
I see that your comment pasted from the Wired article uses the phrase "phony scare tactics". Can you at least admit that the anti-vaccine crowd might be using phony scare tactics to argue their case?
Well it looks like this story is finally getting across the pond. The Wall Street Journal has weighed in:
How to Forge a Consensus
The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559630382048494.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
"The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start."
When I was a kid the World News Tonight was on during dinner and they announced the Chernobyl accident and I was scared out of my mind that a nuclear cloud would encircle the earth and that a molten radioactive core would eat away the planet. Thats how the news is to children especially when presented in so shocking a tone. When I say scared I mean really scared, like when you wont come out of your room for hours. About the same time the Ozone Layer was making news and I went to scared level Def Con 5. I stopped eating, I became withdrawn at school and thought any day now we are going to be drowned by a tidalwave of melting Antarctic ice, and Im in the midwest. I can vividly remember going to my room to pray - yes pray, that's messed up right -that God wouldn't melt the ice from the Ozone Hole and kill us all. I wouldn't go swimming in the summer and had the uneasy feeling the world was going to end. This lasted from about 3rd grade to 8th grade. Looking back the hysteria being spewed across TV and in the classroom robbed me of a normal childhood. No kid should believe they are going to die from solar radiation anymore so than nuclear anihilation and especially to the point they go pray. I developed a deep mistrust of popular movements and consensus ever since then. These are the tactics that have turned much of my cohorts into mouthpieces for Mr. Gore and his ilk, I suggest a deep probing of each of your brains for early seeds of this debate from the late 1970s through 80s. Weekly reader articles in class, films on man's destruction of the environment etc. Its all there if your willing to look.
Youre right! Whats really wrong here is we should be treating grown adults as if they were children.
Jack. Come on man. Youre too smart to believe in this shit. I mean do you see whos agreeing with you here^? Do you understand what they think you are saying? Its true, climate science is extraordinarily difficult, and peer-review is a messy process. But you know, fucking full-well, what is being described is not whether this is happening, but how bad its going to be. You also know that none of what has been proposed as public policy is capable of combating even the most optimistic legitimate scientific assessments. You bemoan this "lack of consensus" knowing full well the disagreement at hand doesnt fucking help you at all. You are being dishonest and you are deliberately deceiving people.
Now, if you want to have a discussion about just how much energy and money is appropriate to be spent, or on the importance of scientific rigor and transparency, then fine. But to imply this is one big hoax and nothing is happening is patently, measurably false.
Excellent post manbearpig.
If its not one thing to scare the life outta us its the next.
If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."
They never have.
(The above is from this excellent article)
http://www.ottawasun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/11/26/11929441-sun.html
You greenies are being had.
As one elite once said "If your going to tell a lie, make sure its so big the masses won't even comprehend such outright blatant lies"
As another said "If you want to hide something, put it out in the open (along with some spin)"
Derek
The RAW data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-raw-data-in-new-zealand-tells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/#more-13215
People starting to waken up:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018056/climategate-this-is-our-berlin-wall-moment/
I've come to the conclusion that all (apart from the really really naieve) believers are getting paid one way or another by jumping on the climate change bandwagon (much like the scientists).
Derek
intro to the last article that zoolander posted:
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com
end of discussion everybody, mr. Delingpole is right about everything.
The CRU scientists dumped all the raw temp data, the data that fed their models and now it cant be checked.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
In the lead up to Copenhagen the silence is defining about this unraveling scandal. The IPCC has refused to let scientists other than their own into this debate and now the Copenhagen treaty is up for ratification. This is the scam of the century.
JKlompus, The silence is deafening because it's not ultimately a scandal, beyond the fact that data and emails were illegally hacked. (I hope they discover that it was James Inhofe himself who hacked the files, along with his gay lover.)
The science historian Spencer R. Weart, interviewed in the Washington Post, commented that the theft of the e-mails and the reaction to them was "a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers."
Thank you, Mr. Weart. The skeptics are indeed crackpots. They should be regarded in the same way that we'd regard a person on the street wandering around with a toilet seat in his pants and a tinfoil hat on his head, muttering about conspiracy.
This is a very interesting response:
[UPDATE, 11:30 p.m.:] Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and author of “ Why We Disagree About Climate Change,” has weighed in with these thoughts about the significance of the leaked files and emails:
The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the I.P.C.C. does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.
This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public - and maybe that is no bad thing.
But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.
It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
Excerpted from: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/a-climate-scientist-on-climate-skeptics/#more-11377
birthers, truthers, creationists and holocaust deniers all seem to run togethor - twinges of desperation running deeply through all.
Now holz, thats not very nice. Skepticism has noble roots and a place in society. But yes, Zoolander does seem to have a few issues there.
I could equally jump to the same conclusion when in the past you have seen anti-globalization protesters throwing in their lot with all number of loosely related fringe/nutloop affiliates - particularly fire jugglers.
I would say my position is best described by Mike Hulme's quote above:
"The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive."
For my own part, in my comments above and elsewhere, I concentrate on being rational and pro-science - which at its heart is experimental and inclusive.
This is the biggest scam in the history of mankind.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
Good point raised in the above article:
"What are they so anxious to hide?"
Maybe the fact that the climate is not being altered by mankind?
The weather is quite nice today.
They have been exposed and liars and frauds, how can anyone argue otherwise?
What is clear from the conservations in these emails is that not only is the science not settled but there was a systematic attempt by these scientists to keep any contrary viewpoints out of the media, published literature, and the political arena. Does this sound like people genuinely seeking after truth or just scientists trying to protect their own turf, reputations, and agenda – whatever the cost?
In another email, the director of the East Anglia climate center, Phil Jones, suggested that we:
“will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
What is clear here is that it is not people who question so called climate change, but the enviro nutters who believe whole heartedly (read bankbalance) who are unwilling to engage in any civilised debate about the topic.
Climategate Master Criminal Phil Jones Collected $22.6m in Grants.
1. it's yet to be proven as a scam.
2. pales in comparison to the scam of religion
Maybe the fact that the climate is not being altered by mankind?
wow, i didn't know you were a scientist now, zoolander.
What is clear from the conservations in these emails is that not only is the science not settled but there was a systematic attempt by these scientists to keep any contrary viewpoints out of the media
wow, you extrapolated that from less than 1% of emails written by these guys over a 10 year period?
What is clear here is that it is not people who question so called climate change, but the enviro nutters who believe whole heartedly (read bankbalance) who are unwilling to engage in any civilised debate about the topic.
enviro-nutters - oooh, that's rich! please define 'civilized debate' - and please tell me how you debate people who's funding is solely arrived from fossil-fuel backed companies? you really think there is room for debate between legitimate science (yay enviro nutters) and crackpots hell bent on keeping us in the 19th century?
Climategate Master Criminal Phil Jones Collected $22.6m in Grants.
and? are the hundreds of cancer research centers receiving tens of millions of dollars in funding any less valid because they received more funding? asinine.
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