Gored again
Aziz P
The Nazi reference attacks on Gore by "climate skeptics" just don't stop coming. Now, acclaimed skeptic Bill Gray, a cantankerous meteorologist who believes that global warming is a natural process and will reverse itself in twenty years, comes out with this gem (in a long article in the WaPo):
Somehow Hitler keeps popping into the discussion. Gore draws a parallel between fighting global warming and fighting the Nazis. Novelist Michael Crichton, in State of Fear , ends with an appendix comparing the theory of global warming to the theory of eugenics — the belief, prominently promoted by Nazis, that the gene pool of the human species was degenerating due to higher reproductive rates of "inferior" people. Both, he contends, are examples of junk science, supported by intellectual elites who will later conveniently forget they signed on to such craziness.
And Gray has no governor on his rhetoric. At one point during our meeting in Colorado he blurts out, "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews."
Is it possible for any skeptic of global warming to make their point as methodically and rationally as the realClimate folks do, without resorting to ad hominem smearing? Frankly I don't think so, else we would actually have seen some by now.
A casual observer might well ask, if the skeptics have such sound rationale for rebutting the global warming message, why don't they actually rebut the message via peer review? Instead they attack the messengers - and apparently when it comes to Al Gore, no intermediate comparisons are warranted, let's just go straight for the Nazi comparison and save time.
In case you're curious, Gray's basis for skepticism is that he believes that computer model simulations are bogus and that the intuition of meterologists "in the field" is superior:
The skeptics scoff at climate models. They're just computer programs. They have to interpret innumerable feedback loops, all the convective forces, the evaporation, the winds, the ocean currents, the changing albedo (reflectivity) of Earth's surface, on and on and on. [...] The models can't even predict the weather in two weeks, much less 100 years, he says. "They sit in this ivory tower, playing around, and they don't tell us if this is going to be a hot summer coming up. Why not? Because the models are no damn good!" [...] Gray's crusade against global warming "hysteria" began in the early 1990s, when he saw enormous sums of federal research money going toward computer modeling rather than his kind of science, the old-fashioned stuff based on direct observation. Gray often cites the ascendancy of Gore to the vice presidency as the start of his own problems with federal funding. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stopped giving him research grants. So did NASA. All the money was going to computer models. The field was going off on this wild tangent.
Numerical models can't predict the future, he says. They don't even pretend to predict the weather in the coming season — "but they make predictions of 50 or 100 years from now and ask you to believe the Earth will get warmer."
The modelers are equation pushers.
"They haven't been down in the trenches, making forecasts and understanding stuff!"
And then the skeptics switch 180 degrees and say that hey - "global warming isn't just not happenning, it's also a Good Thing if it happens". To wit:
Plants like carbon dioxide. Trees devour it. This demonized molecule, CO2, isn't some kind of toxin or contaminant or pollutant — it's fertilizer.
They even have cut an ad - essentially, global warming: don't worry, be happy! The closer?
"Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."
I for one welcome our Ent overlords. Hoom.
What I find particulary interesting in the WaPo piece however is that the skeptics actually keep each other at some arm's length. For example, Gray says of noted skeptic Michael Lindzen, a professor at MIT:
"Lindzen, he's a hard guy to deal with," Gray says. "He doesn't think he can learn anything from me."
Which is correct. Lindzen says of Gray: "His knowledge of theory is frustratingly poor, but he knows more about hurricanes than anyone in the world. I regard him in his own peculiar way as a national resource."
The question comes to mind then, why aren't there anti-warming scientific conferences? Why not a collaboration? Does it really make sense for a scientists to say that there's nothing he/she can learn from another scientist in the same field? Perhaps because they aren't practicing science?
And it's not like these guys are being frozen out of the peer review or being denied funding (as they often like to compain). Lindzen is a professor at MIT. Gray is fully funded by the CEI. Both have extensive media pulpits, books, websites, etc.
The truth is that the skeptics, like with Intelligent Design, can't compete on the level field of peer review. And they know it. So on one hand they fabricate excuses of victimization, and on the other they retreat to that playing field where volume, not content, matters most: the field of public opinion.
Which is why they hate Al Gore. And why in their minds, he really is a Nazi. And that outburst by Gray above reveals in one second the true nature of their crusade - and the rotten foundations of their work.
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Sadly for much of the ideas being "debated", the answer is no. Whether it is junk food, smoking, drinking, drugs, immigration of vairous forms of legality, religion, the designated hitter, etc. you pretty much just can't have a civil conversion if the group extends much beyond 1 person. (And if the 1 person is John Kerry, all bets are off...this is my ad hom to prove the point)
In general, there are many ways one can be anti-something, so anti-something people often don't agree on much.
For instance, I don't care at all for Al Gore's opinion on climate, but I basically agree with your post criticizing some of his critics.
The most famous was when they present a graph on climate change that when mainstream climatologists hsowed it, had both a high end and a low end expect rate of increase in temp: two lines specifying an area of expectation.
Except the skeptics simply deleted the low end estimate line when THEY presented this graph, making it look like the actual increase was much much lower than the supposedly alarmist predicted increase. But of course that was just the high end of an estimate, stripped from the context of it being the top of an area of possible values: in reality, the actual increase fell right in the middle of the estimate.
A counter statment that popped into my head was, "Why are there global warming conferences?" if it's all so confirmed, in the concenssus and all so clear and obvious a threat?
Well becasue it isn't confirmed, in the concensus and clear and obvious. I mean the real inconvineint truth seems to be how unconfirmed it is, how inobvious the threat and how unconvincing the need to stop it, assuming we can.
I'm a global warmign skeptic (obviously), or at least a skeptic of the 'it's all humn's fault' meme. I think and the research I've done seems to indicate that the palnet warms and cools on it own quite well and we have little if any mesuable effect. My favorite analogy to global warning and human effect on it is this.
If all of us, every human on the planet were to line up and take a piss in the mediteranian right now, we'd technically increase the salineity (and other things) but no one would argue that it was a signifigant difference.
As for why there are no climate skeptic conferences: honestly the existence of conferences where people who are all dependent on government funding to continue studying global warming should not surprise. If there were tens of millions of dollars of funding for the study of phrenology doled out every year, I can all but guarantee you that there would be regular conferences of phrenologists and peer reviewed journals of phrenology, and that not many people who doubted phrenology would get any funding from the mostly-anonymous, cloaked in obscurity "peer review boards" who decide whether anyone's funding for further phrenology research should be continued. This problem being one that's increasingly noticeable in several areas of science, and is not sufficiently remarked upon.
I'm quite certain some GW skeptics have been duplicitous. I can also demonstrate where the advocates for it have been duplicitous themselves. [shrug] Overall the evidence seems to favor the assertion that there's a warming trend. I can still think of several things I'd rather spend the money on than emergency efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.
So, here are the questions, in the order in which they must be answered before any sensible policymaking can occur:
1. Is the Earth warming? If so, why?
2. How much of this warming is traceable to activities that human beings can influence?
3. What are the implications, both positive and negative, of increasing global temperatures?
4. If a substantial part of global warming is caused by human activity, and the warming will have negative implications, what can be done to reverse the trend?
Getting to #4 first requires answering #1, #2, and #3. The reason I'm a skeptic on global warming is that a) as I see it, the answers to #1-3 are simply being assumed instead of rigorously proven at every moment, b) there is a Jack Bauer-esque attitude of "we can't go back and check the numbers because WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME," and c) anyone who is skeptical of global warming is assumed to be operating under bad faith (the non-scientists are dumb, and the scientists are all oil-company shills). And those are the kinds of things that put my B.S. detectors up.
thats not true. Conferences are not dependent on government funding - the yearly conference I attend is almost entirely funded for example by attendee fees, registrations, and society memberships. Industry groups contribute but are not main source of funding.
It's a mistake to assume that global warming scientists are all feeding at teh government trough. The NIH surely gives out grants but no one uses grant money to fund a conference, though it s routine to use grant money to pay for attendance at one. But the conferences themselves are NOt funded by the government.
Theres this consistent trope by skeptics like Gray and Lindzen that global warming is some kind of conspiratorial affair and that they are being forzen out by virtue of funding control. But the system of peer review is by its nature independent of funder bias (which is why drug companies prefer to comission their own studies rather than let the science be submitted to peer review journals).
Yet the same skeptics are almost universally funded by teh same gorup of industry sources, and way better funded than anyone on teh science side. If theres a funding conspiracy, its the other way around.
I think this question needs multiple parts. Is the Earth warming more than past hitorical warming? Is it warming more than the observable evidence of other planets in the system would indicate?
The system is dynamic, not static. Over any reasonable period, the Earth is either warming or cooling. So if it happens to be warming right now, that doesn't alarm me. If it happens to be warming in an uncharacteristic way or to an uncharacteristic degree, that will concern me.
Again, the system is dynamic, not static. People who panic because things are changing -- whether it's climate change, species loss, species intrusion, demographic change, or political change -- are in some sense just reactionaries, who believe that the way they knew things is the way things should always be. And that just ain't gonna happen.
On the other hand, people who can meaure or project some plausible sign of real harm aren't reactionaries, they're trying to protect someone or something. Of course, they're often just as impotent as the reactionaries. Some change is just too large to control. The best you can do is cope.
The question is more complicated than that, though, because there may be a non-linear dynamics involved. Now I think that a lot of the people crying non-linear dynamics are really just looking for an irrefutable way to press their case; but they could be right.
Imagine that the climate engine can accommodate a wide range of global warming or cooling, while still remaining essentially meta-stable. In non-linear dynamics, they draw graphs of attractor behavior, where the data will wander back and forth on the graph, but always stick more or less to some definable shape. But if you nudge the device and make it veer too far from that attractor, all of a sudden the data starts wandering off on an entirely new course.
So imagine, say, that the climate engine can cope with massive but slow temperature shifts over time. But then further imagine that a smaller but much faster change can nudge it into a new attractor, with catastrophically different trends. In that case, the human influence could be very small, yet still disastrous.
Do I believe this? No, actually I'm a bit of a global warming skeptic. But I recognize that human impact being small doesn't necessarily prove the alarmists wrong.
Here I'm a big skeptic. I think anyone who predicts the consequences with any confidence whatsoever is promoting an agenda, not practicing science. The system is just too complex for prediction at our current state of knowledge.
And don't forget what you might call the Lomberg question:
5. What is the cost/benefit analysis of trying to reverse the trend? Suppose that it will cost X to prevent harm Y; but that if X were invested in some other cause, we could prevent 10Y in harm. And further suppose that X is all we can spare. Should we spend it on the first harm, or on the second? Or some split between the two?
Oh, and Aziz, I thought you were off base with your earlier posts. Again, citing Goebbels as an example of propaganda is tasteless, but understandable. Goebbels is the universally recognizable example of propaganda against truth. In this case, though, there's no excuse. There were many much better analogies that could be used. This example was just wrong.
BTW, I think other planets are a red herring .. unless they were at the same distance from the sun as Earth and had precisely the same atmospheric components, and also an equal amount of geologic activity..
Aziz: Their distance from the sun doesn't really affect it. The point is that they're getting warmer, not that they are already hotter of colder, absolutely; distance from the sun affects only the latter, not the former. If their temperatures change over the short term, we must assume some change in solari input, if we have good reason to discount geologic activity as causing heating (which we do, for instance, for Mars).
If the other planets are all (or mostly) getting warmer, that suggests very, very strongly that there's a common cause that is utterly unrelated to human activity, as human activity has no possible way to affect their temperatures at this time; even if only a few get warmer, that still tells us that something not-human-caused causes planets to warm, sometimes.
Well, no, it is precisely because they don't that other planets are not a red herring. If we see warming on multiple planets, that would be strong evidence that the warming on our planet was not anthropogenic. The unwillingness of global warming believers to look at such things, just as you do here, fuels my skepticism the same way what you right about re-enforces your belief.
Do the plans that are on the table e.g. the Kyoto Protocol actually advance the ball on ending or reversing whatever human contribution to global warming there is?
One of the reasons that some Americans are skeptics on the issue is that they're convinced that global warming is a stalking horse for hobbling the U. S. economy. I think there are other reasons to be skeptical about the plans on the table as well. For example, why is Europe taken as multiple economies rather than as one for the purposes of Kyoto? Why have so few of the European signatories met their obligations?
I think there are lots of reasons that people get hot under the collar about global warming. For example, although we like to be nice and egalitarian about it, there's no particular reason to believe that one degree of warming has the same effect on climate at the equator as in the arctic. I see no particular reason that exporting our pollution to China is the optimal solution to the problem. Maybe no solution at all. I also don't know that emissions trading actually does anything but shuffle the shells.
I have no problem accepting global warming as a true phenomenon, i.e., #1 above.
The genesis of #1 is very much in dispute though, which leaves #2-#4 completely up in the air, so to speak.
We need to avoid garbage inputs in order to avoid garbage outputs. But we also need to be confident that the machine that process those inputs and outputs isn't itself some sort of garbage. Any machine whose sole process is to give an input a high degree of political spin is going to output garbage, no matter which direction the spin.
#1) Is the Earth warming?
How do we define warming as issues can change temperatures in the water, in the atmosphere, and on the land seperate from each other. So I think before a sane answer can be made how do we define global warming as a trend really is unclear
Sunlight power drops off as distance to the fourth power (not just squared!) so yeah, it makes a big difference.
Tectonics also make a big difference, as does the presence of water, and the composition of the atmosphere. And the mass of the planet as well. All these factors mean that there is absolutely zero inference you can draw from the temperature trends of teh other planets.
In fact if you look at absolute temperature of the other planets, then distance from sun is the overriding factor. Its completely innacurate to point to a (hypothetical) 5% increase in surface temperature on Mars and say "look! some common element to warming with Earth!" when the temperatures in question went from minus 100K to mius 95K over there.
The single biggest factor in the Earth's temperature is the solar input. The sun has a varible output.
Those are actual facts, not opinion, which I usually deal with.
Please do not discount the sun. It's perfectly OK to maintain our climate is changing and that solar output is not the source of the change. But your current argument - that we cannot learn about Earth's climate from other planets - does not make sense.
Yours,
Wince
The fact that the critic of warming in the story dismisses computer models as useful in this regard shoudl set off alarm bells, BTW.
Yes the sun has a variable output, but that variation is modulated by the local conditions (ie the planet atmosphere) as well. From what little I remember of my astronomy/physics major, the actual temperature of the sun is not that variable, but the magnetic fields etc are very much so. Whether that variability translates to surface temperature differences, i really doubt, but am quite interested to see examples from the peer-review literature saying otherwise.
That's not an answer. The quoted skeptic is right in believing that the government's shifting funds from actual field science to computer modeling has done the field a great disservice. He's wrong in discounting models entirely. The question he ought to be asking is, "Why should we trust the models?".
2) When Gore puts out quotes like this one, what little sympathy I have for Gore over name calling evaporates.
Whenever the policy comes before the science, you're pretty much guaranteed to waste vast sums doing the wrong thing.
"Sunlight power drops off as distance to the fourth power (not just squared!)"
In fact sunlight power does drop off as the inverse of the distance squared. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminosity
-Chris
Short form: a Bayesian analysis shows the cost of information. Say a manufacturing company wants to determine the most profitable investment among choices A, B, and C. A Bayesian analysis will tell the company how much that information is worth. It should also give you a good idea of the most profitable choice. If you can spend $200,000 to reduce uncertainty on a $5,000,000 investment, do it. If you have to spend $500,000 to reduce uncertainty on a $50,000 investment, don't.
Long form: go read what Pournelle has to say. By odd coincidence, it is in reference to the argument about global warming.
One possibility is that Bayesian analysis shows that (given actual global warming of X degree(s)/year) reducing said global warming to acceptable rates would cost the US $700 billion a year, while doing nothing would cost $500 billion a year.
Point being that we are not investing in reducing uncertainy; we are not determing the cost of information.
Aziz really drops the ball when he says Um, Aziz, have you studied statistics, or modeling? Unless you know something I don't, to date there has not been one single system which can take (say) 1950 data and predict 1975 weather. It's that simple. And that's a basic principle of testing any model. Take known data, feed it to the simulation, and see how well it replicates a known result. If the model does not (or cannot) replicate historical results, then the simulation is suspect. This is one of the elemental tools used to validate new models.
By odd coincidence the next comment from Jimmie states that the shift from funding field work to modeling was the wrong choice. See above, re: Bayesian analysis. We need to find out which questions to ask.
I'll take a moment here to point out that around 1000 AD Greenland supported diary agriculture, that in the late 17th century Dutch warships were frozen in the sea off the cost of Holland and captured by mounted Hussars (yes, mounted), and that cannon were dragged across the Hudson during the Revolutionary War.
In other words, historical records show a distinct series of variation from normal over the past thousand years. Food for thought.
Aziz really and truly drops the ball with his comments about funding. I won't comment on using grant money to attend confrences, but that misses the point. Who dispenses funds for R&D? How is this money allocated? Who calls the shots? And perhaps most important: how are these people chosen?
I'll make this claim of fact: the US government is the primary funder of basic R&D in this country.
Hell, that's what the Solomon amendment is all about: you don't let ROTC recruiters on campus, you don't get to suck at the government teat. That's exactly why the big universities are up in arms; they're upset about missing a fix.
And Aziz: ask Dean about who gets the funds for R&D on HIV/AIDS, and how it's decided. Yes, it is very political.
Don't forget that all human beings are political (whether the politics are about government, science, religion, or even clothing). Also, scientists are human; hence political. They will, therefore, engage in political behavior even in their chosen field of endeavor. I have no direct source to hand, but I recall that the Frenchman who originally claimed that meteors were extra-terrestrial was originally considered a fantabulist.
Scientists don't play politics just like priests don't play with children, only you don't get arrested for what scientists do; they are, therefore, more blatant in their behavior.
I said that? Not intentionally. I still haven't figured out what a Bayesian analysis is -- and I've been aware of the term for over a decade. It seems to be a mathematical view that I haven't been able to grasp yet. As soon as the word "Bayesian" comes up, I'm over my head.
They empirically measured the climate's sensitivity to changes in radiation reaching the surface. They then used estimates of how much radiation flux CO2 changes might entail to calculate the effect of CO2 increases without having to use any models. Their model is the actual climate itself. How much neater can you get than that?
Of course their measurements are often ignored. I'd like to see an explanation of what's wrong with their studies. They may well be wrong, but I haven't seen anyone prove it yet, or even attempt to. In the absense of disproofs, I'd say actual measurements trump projections any day.
Here is a link to the paper. Read it and tell me you aren't impressed.
The answer by Algore and the climate warming fascists is always the same - we created this mess with our industrialization, we need to be punished by burning less fuel. And only us, not China or India. And, oh yeah, the European countries that are so much purer than we are, and signed Kyoto, keep putting out CO2 at the same rate. And, get this - the USA is emitting less and less CO2 all the time. And, here's the best lie of all - these worthies who feel the need to impoverish our economy by reduction in CO2 are, almost unanimously, against nuclear power which emits exactly none. This fact alone is enough to disbelieve them. They are clearly not seriously scared enough by their own pontifications to allow the easy solution to be advanced.
This is politics, pure and simple. The American people will NEVER give in to such a flawed decision tree. Those who wish to punish us for being bad (rich), Algore and friends, seek power which We the People will never grant to them.
End of story.
What they do, is they work for a living and post the occasional observation on a web site in a furtive way, in between assignments, sometimes getting rushed bacause they know the really SHOULD be working, maybe they feel a tad guilty, realizing that the work IS piling up....
gotta go....
But they ignored the history in their own evidence. What their graph ALSO showed was a cycle of high temperatures on earth occurs about every 75-100,000 years. I missed the part of my ancient history that explained how man caused the earth to warm 400,000 years ago. Surely it was man's greed, gluttony, and carelessness that caused the first warm peak they referenced.
Yes, the Globe is warming. It has been for about the past 50,000 years at about the same rate as it did 80,000 years before that and 100,000 years before that. Very likely man's influence is almost negligible in the grand scheme.
To look at a couple of centuries data from a 100,000 year cycle and draw the dire conclusions that algore and his followers have done is simply silly.
Thief has it right the BS deflectors are up to protect against the arrogance of those who assume man's influence is paramount.