It is fair, however, to note that Lindzen is very much a minority voice.
This does not make him wrong. Nor does it make the financial conflict-of-interest issues he raises irrelevant. But, he is still a minority voice.
On the other hand, there was recently a third party, government-sponsored audit on a lot of this data that turned up some pretty damning info. A Dean's World commentere mentioned it before but I seem to have lost it. Anyone remember that report?
The issue here isn't at all whether or not he's a minority voice -- as I hinted in my posting, there are a lot of minority positions out there that either turn out to be right or, regarding, say, AIDS/HIV, at least someone around here believes are worth listening to. He's also got a pretty prominent perch for a minority voice.
The issue here is the herd mentality and the actual insistence that there is not, cannot be, and will not be debate on this issue. That is not science.
But yes, in my experience legitimate scientists do welcome debate. On most subjects. ASSUMING you've got someone who's fully qualified in the field.
They will occasionally take the position that a minority voice is so small that it can be effectively dismissed, but even then most will admit that it isn't healthy to stigmatize the lone dissenter, especially since many of the great discoveries of science in history have been small dissenting voices.
A red flag to me is always the demand that the dissenting voice be silenced and ignored rather than answered.
Neither Lindzen or Seitz are a minority voice. What we have here is HIV Orthodoxy redux played-out in the anthropogenic warming model being sold by a economically vested group of scientists that have hijacked one narrow niche of the Sciences, and have their pack-dogs of true believer journos to beat the flames and fan the political fires for partisan manipulation and continued funding. Their are a preponderance of scientists that see the athropogenic carbon warming debate as being far from concluded.
Ah. And now I'm reminded that it was Willem, and that the report in question was from the National Academy of Sciences, from an NAS panel chaired by Professor Edward Wegman of George Mason University, and including "Dr. David Scott of Rice University and Dr. Yasmin Said of The Johns Hopkins University. Also contributing were Denise Reeves of MITRE Corp. and John T. Rigsby of the Naval Surface Warfare Center."
I've only just sat down to start reading the report in the last half hour but already the conclusions are absolutely devastating. Here's an incredible paragraph:
"It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis."
And that's just on Mann. Their indictment of the way the whole "peer review" system works in this clique of paleoclimatologists is horrendous.
So I take back my comments about Lindzen. He IS a minority voice among paleoclimatologists, but NOT among scientists who have knowledge in this area. It appears that we're seeing here what we're increasingly seeing in other areas of science: a completely bogus "Peer Review" system for funding.
Once again--broken FUNDING system of "Peer Review." It's pretty damned clear what's going on here: a small clique of scientists who all know each other sit on so-called "anonymous peer review" boards where they routinely lock out any serious dissenters.
Screw it, now I'm really mad, and am on Lindzen's side.
"In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue."
My god, Gerald Pollack is right. This kind of crap is popping up everywhere in our supposed "peer review" system for doling out government money!
Aziz, yeah, I read that. I found it more than a little weak in parts, especially the stuff about conspiracies.
No conspiracy need apply, when, as the Wegman report found, the "peer review" system is nothing but a crony network of Good Old Boys who all agree with each other and refuse to fund dissenters or even give reasonable data that professional statisticians can verify as valid. The guys at Climate Audit have a lot of their own critiques, but forget that. Read the Wegman report.
This kind of crap is popping up everywhere in our supposed "peer review" system for doling out government money!
It's a pity there's not, like, some sort of publicly searchable database to make it easier for taxpayers to look into how that money gets doled out, and thus educate themselves. Congress should do something about that.
So I give them credit for it, Aziz. But note how many commenters express unhappiness at the "publicity" given to the Lindzen by their actually engaging him -- which, again, is my point here (I am utterly unable to follow the scientific debate).
Ron, science isnt politics. You dont get to debate just because you disagree - you have to bring your game. The Lindzen camp has no robust science to prove thir point, so they call foul and with wegman even try to undermine the referee.
in politics, debate is good. The best idea wins by merit of convincing persuasion.
In science, debate is irrelevant. What counts is results. publish or perish.
so yeah count me in the camp that thinks that Lindzen's supporter shouldnt be engaged because they dont bring anything to the table. They havent shown themselves to be worthy of debate. Iff they cam produce results that actually support their hypotheses, then they are worth listening to. Crying about being shut out and about conspiiracies doesn't cut it.
Unlike you, Aziz, I'm simply not in a position to judge whether Lindzen has got game.
I find it amazing that someone with this credentials and his post would be not have it, but not inconceivable.
In terms of "publish or perish," that's one thing I can comment on, having an advanced degree and some familiarity with academia myself: It's baloney. The journals are as politicized as the funding as the speech codes as the tenure committees.
I find it amazing that someone with this credentials and his post would be not have it, but not inconceivable.
credentials are what you have done; it gets you in the door. that is it.
I have met many, many, many impeccably crecdentialed scientists who were total morons. Most of them gravitate away from teh science and towards political positions (department heads, etc).
In terms of "publish or perish," that's one thing I can comment on, having an advanced degree and some familiarity with academia myself: It's baloney. The journals are as politicized as the funding as the speech codes as the tenure committees.
way too much an overgenrealization. Sure some journals may be politicized, to some degree. But youre painting with far too broad a brush. and the high profile journals are rock solid precisely because of the exposure.
If whatyou said was even fractionally true then science would never produce anything. Yet heresies become dogma contnually. science always harnesses and embraces the heresis that are sound - the ones that bring their game.
That's a tautology, Aziz. The journal articles must be right because look, there are journal articles!
Some science can be judged by its works. This doesn't happen to be one of those branches of science. So we only have peer review to assure us that peer review works. Isn't the inherent bias there obvious? To the contrary, the more deeply interlocked the peer reviewers are, the less incentive they have to be critical of each other's work.
This is all the more true when an entire field of research is premised on an accepted view. Who wants to let in the guy who threatens to upset everyone else' apple cart?
I increasingly find that your confidence in this matter is unwarranted, Aziz.
The Wegman report is devastating, and the RealClimate answer is the lamest thing I've ever seen.
They document shoddy practices all throughout the field. All you have to do is read this report. Their desire to change the subject is understandable--it points to a complete corruption in their field and its standards and practices.
Furthermore, the claim that debate is irrelevant in science is total bunk. It strikes me that whoever taught you that nonsense must be people who are used to the same corrupt and inpenetrable peer review system that looks increasingly to be the norm here: you don't "bring your game" in much science these days, you get together with a clique of your buddies who all agree with each other and you systematically lock out any dissenters in your field who might possibly be a threat to your reputation.
Science used to regularly be about debate. Only in the last 20 years or so has that honestly changed--and as we can see from the Wegman report and many other sources, it hasn't changed things for the better.
Wegman &Co. just stripped the RealClimate goofballs naked and made fun of them, and all they want to do is claim it's irrelvant and change the subject? This is corrupt as hell.
And it damn well does involved politics, because it involves taxpayer money, and broad claims with sweeping policy proposal changes that the voters must be informed about.
If they don't want the dirty, dirty politics in their science, then let them stop accepting the dirty, dirty taxpayer funding. Until then we as taxpayers have every right to demand greater transparency, greater accountability, and to be furious at mealy-mouthed responses like the RealClimate guys give to this devastating report.
Aziz, I don't think anyone is saying "science" is corrupt or weak. "Science" is not a person or an institution; it's a body of knowledge or, alternatively, a system for advancing knowledge.
But as to any given scientific establishment's or institution's merits, why should skeptics give you the evidence? Why is any group of science professionals entitled to a presumption not just of being right, but being so right that multi-, multi-billion or even trillion dollar decisions should be made based on their recommendations?
This isn't only a left/right thing. But the academy as a whole is so in the tank for the left and so anti-business that that is unquestionably part of the equation... part that doesn't show up in Greek letters.
And odder still if scientists didn't think they were immune. Realizing ones own failings is hard for all of us. Science is structured to drastically minimize the impact of that lack of self-knowledge, but it ain't perfect.
First, McCarthy was right. A lot of people seem to forget that.
Second, Dean's "HIV does not lead to AIDS" scientists are also in the minority.
Third, AIDS, global warming and ID are inexorbly tied to political and/or sociological perceptions. People in the majority have built their careers upon the idea that they are right. "Scientists" are just a willing to play fast and loose with the facts as any politician. Additionally, the idea that the consensus could be wrong entails concequences most people would rather ignore.
Tailgunner Joe was playing out this anti-communism stuff as a sort of publicity stunt for his own re-election to the US Senate in 1952, if I remember my dates correctly. He wasn't exactly strong on issues, and sort of picked up the legislative struggle against communist influence from watching the success of the spectacular cases of real soviet espionage that came to light in the late 1940s. At least that was the way it described by reporters who got together with him for his numerous and sometimes continuous drinking sessions.
The evil genius who did more than his share of pushing McCarthy into all this was Roy Cohn, one of his key staffers, who all but destroyed McCarthy by his antics with G David Schine, McCarthy's other young assistant, who had gotten drafted into the US Army during the Korea war.
Cohn complained to his boss that the training center where his buddy Schine was sent to was mistreating him, and he asked the senator to intervene. What eventually came of that mistaken tactic was the famed Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 that destroyed McCarthy's reputation, leading shortly to his censure before the US Senate, accelerated his alcohol consumption, and killed him.
2) Melting icebergs.
The only positive test that can be used to measure current worldwide global warming is the specific level of the oceans that cover most of the surface of this planet.
Ocean levels have gone up and done over eons of time. Sometimes relatively drastically. Right now, ocean levels are rising, apparently at a rate of a couple of feet per century. Bad luck for our american Atlantis, the Big Easy. Worse luck for some of the chains of coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans, which are disappearing.
But whether there is specific evidence that we are in a permanent period of global warming has not been fully established, and the supposedly scientific conjecture about this topic all too frequently turn into the polite academic equivalent of spitball contents.
True Science is all about questions, and finding the answers to those questions.
Cimate change is not well understood, no matter what some want us to believe. Weather is not even well understood yet. We can not even predict the Weather with any accuracy, for a given length of time. General changes in the weather can be predicted, but specific, forget it.
Another example of science progress....Newtons theroy of gravity...which was expanded upon with the theroy of relativity....then the special theroy of relativity...and now Hawkins radiation.... Discoveries continue to be made, by individuals who question the current science.
Now for all those climatologist who say man made carbon is warming up the planet, I will say hogwash. One single volcano can and has affected the climate of the world far more than man has in the last 100 years. It is a very complex problem that does need to be studied, and questions asked, even of those question that we percieve as solved.
The exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, and the land, has been happening from the begining, and will continue to happen no matter what man does or does not do. Man really is not all that important in the great scheme of things in the universe, for we are but an eye blink in time.
I recall that Aziz's response to the evidence for global warming on Mars was dismissive, despite the fact that it points to a possible common factor in temperature increase on Earth. Aziz decided it wasn't relevant, all by his lonesome and without any evidence that I can remember.
I see the same response here. I don't know what "La la la, I can't hear you" is, but it ain't science.
Science used to regularly be about debate. Only in the last 20 years or so has that honestly changed
Have you ever read Timeline by Heinlein? He is fairly rough on a science academy. How about anything about Galileo? He wasn't persecuted by the Church, it was other scientists driving it.
Science regularly goes through periods where it becomes ossified. That might even be the dominant position that is only occasionally broken by intrepid outsiders.
This does not make him wrong. Nor does it make the financial conflict-of-interest issues he raises irrelevant. But, he is still a minority voice.
On the other hand, there was recently a third party, government-sponsored audit on a lot of this data that turned up some pretty damning info. A Dean's World commentere mentioned it before but I seem to have lost it. Anyone remember that report?
The issue here is the herd mentality and the actual insistence that there is not, cannot be, and will not be debate on this issue. That is not science.
They will occasionally take the position that a minority voice is so small that it can be effectively dismissed, but even then most will admit that it isn't healthy to stigmatize the lone dissenter, especially since many of the great discoveries of science in history have been small dissenting voices.
A red flag to me is always the demand that the dissenting voice be silenced and ignored rather than answered.
I've only just sat down to start reading the report in the last half hour but already the conclusions are absolutely devastating. Here's an incredible paragraph:
"It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis."
And that's just on Mann. Their indictment of the way the whole "peer review" system works in this clique of paleoclimatologists is horrendous.
So I take back my comments about Lindzen. He IS a minority voice among paleoclimatologists, but NOT among scientists who have knowledge in this area. It appears that we're seeing here what we're increasingly seeing in other areas of science: a completely bogus "Peer Review" system for funding.
Once again--broken FUNDING system of "Peer Review." It's pretty damned clear what's going on here: a small clique of scientists who all know each other sit on so-called "anonymous peer review" boards where they routinely lock out any serious dissenters.
Screw it, now I'm really mad, and am on Lindzen's side.
"In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue."
My god, Gerald Pollack is right. This kind of crap is popping up everywhere in our supposed "peer review" system for doling out government money!
No conspiracy need apply, when, as the Wegman report found, the "peer review" system is nothing but a crony network of Good Old Boys who all agree with each other and refuse to fund dissenters or even give reasonable data that professional statisticians can verify as valid. The guys at Climate Audit have a lot of their own critiques, but forget that. Read the Wegman report.
It's a pity there's not, like, some sort of publicly searchable database to make it easier for taxpayers to look into how that money gets doled out, and thus educate themselves. Congress should do something about that.
(I love synchronicity...)
See another point of view here and here, though (mostly non-scientists) from what I can tell.
in politics, debate is good. The best idea wins by merit of convincing persuasion.
In science, debate is irrelevant. What counts is results. publish or perish.
so yeah count me in the camp that thinks that Lindzen's supporter shouldnt be engaged because they dont bring anything to the table. They havent shown themselves to be worthy of debate. Iff they cam produce results that actually support their hypotheses, then they are worth listening to. Crying about being shut out and about conspiiracies doesn't cut it.
I find it amazing that someone with this credentials and his post would be not have it, but not inconceivable.
In terms of "publish or perish," that's one thing I can comment on, having an advanced degree and some familiarity with academia myself: It's baloney. The journals are as politicized as the funding as the speech codes as the tenure committees.
credentials are what you have done; it gets you in the door. that is it.
I have met many, many, many impeccably crecdentialed scientists who were total morons. Most of them gravitate away from teh science and towards political positions (department heads, etc).
In terms of "publish or perish," that's one thing I can comment on, having an advanced degree and some familiarity with academia myself: It's baloney. The journals are as politicized as the funding as the speech codes as the tenure committees.
way too much an overgenrealization. Sure some journals may be politicized, to some degree. But youre painting with far too broad a brush. and the high profile journals are rock solid precisely because of the exposure.
If whatyou said was even fractionally true then science would never produce anything. Yet heresies become dogma contnually. science always harnesses and embraces the heresis that are sound - the ones that bring their game.
Some science can be judged by its works. This doesn't happen to be one of those branches of science. So we only have peer review to assure us that peer review works. Isn't the inherent bias there obvious? To the contrary, the more deeply interlocked the peer reviewers are, the less incentive they have to be critical of each other's work.
This is all the more true when an entire field of research is premised on an accepted view. Who wants to let in the guy who threatens to upset everyone else' apple cart?
The Wegman report is devastating, and the RealClimate answer is the lamest thing I've ever seen.
They document shoddy practices all throughout the field. All you have to do is read this report. Their desire to change the subject is understandable--it points to a complete corruption in their field and its standards and practices.
Furthermore, the claim that debate is irrelevant in science is total bunk. It strikes me that whoever taught you that nonsense must be people who are used to the same corrupt and inpenetrable peer review system that looks increasingly to be the norm here: you don't "bring your game" in much science these days, you get together with a clique of your buddies who all agree with each other and you systematically lock out any dissenters in your field who might possibly be a threat to your reputation.
Science used to regularly be about debate. Only in the last 20 years or so has that honestly changed--and as we can see from the Wegman report and many other sources, it hasn't changed things for the better.
Wegman &Co. just stripped the RealClimate goofballs naked and made fun of them, and all they want to do is claim it's irrelvant and change the subject? This is corrupt as hell.
And it damn well does involved politics, because it involves taxpayer money, and broad claims with sweeping policy proposal changes that the voters must be informed about.
If they don't want the dirty, dirty politics in their science, then let them stop accepting the dirty, dirty taxpayer funding. Until then we as taxpayers have every right to demand greater transparency, greater accountability, and to be furious at mealy-mouthed responses like the RealClimate guys give to this devastating report.
But as to any given scientific establishment's or institution's merits, why should skeptics give you the evidence? Why is any group of science professionals entitled to a presumption not just of being right, but being so right that multi-, multi-billion or even trillion dollar decisions should be made based on their recommendations?
This isn't only a left/right thing. But the academy as a whole is so in the tank for the left and so anti-business that that is unquestionably part of the equation... part that doesn't show up in Greek letters.
Yours,
Wince
Second, Dean's "HIV does not lead to AIDS" scientists are also in the minority.
Third, AIDS, global warming and ID are inexorbly tied to political and/or sociological perceptions. People in the majority have built their careers upon the idea that they are right. "Scientists" are just a willing to play fast and loose with the facts as any politician. Additionally, the idea that the consensus could be wrong entails concequences most people would rather ignore.
Science is all about specifics, Kevin!
But we do agree...
Tailgunner Joe was playing out this anti-communism stuff as a sort of publicity stunt for his own re-election to the US Senate in 1952, if I remember my dates correctly. He wasn't exactly strong on issues, and sort of picked up the legislative struggle against communist influence from watching the success of the spectacular cases of real soviet espionage that came to light in the late 1940s. At least that was the way it described by reporters who got together with him for his numerous and sometimes continuous drinking sessions.
The evil genius who did more than his share of pushing McCarthy into all this was Roy Cohn, one of his key staffers, who all but destroyed McCarthy by his antics with G David Schine, McCarthy's other young assistant, who had gotten drafted into the US Army during the Korea war.
Cohn complained to his boss that the training center where his buddy Schine was sent to was mistreating him, and he asked the senator to intervene. What eventually came of that mistaken tactic was the famed Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 that destroyed McCarthy's reputation, leading shortly to his censure before the US Senate, accelerated his alcohol consumption, and killed him.
2) Melting icebergs.
The only positive test that can be used to measure current worldwide global warming is the specific level of the oceans that cover most of the surface of this planet.
Ocean levels have gone up and done over eons of time. Sometimes relatively drastically. Right now, ocean levels are rising, apparently at a rate of a couple of feet per century. Bad luck for our american Atlantis, the Big Easy. Worse luck for some of the chains of coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans, which are disappearing.
But whether there is specific evidence that we are in a permanent period of global warming has not been fully established, and the supposedly scientific conjecture about this topic all too frequently turn into the polite academic equivalent of spitball contents.
Question everything, lest you be deceived.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Cimate change is not well understood, no matter what some want us to believe. Weather is not even well understood yet. We can not even predict the Weather with any accuracy, for a given length of time. General changes in the weather can be predicted, but specific, forget it.
Another example of science progress....Newtons theroy of gravity...which was expanded upon with the theroy of relativity....then the special theroy of relativity...and now Hawkins radiation.... Discoveries continue to be made, by individuals who question the current science.
Now for all those climatologist who say man made carbon is warming up the planet, I will say hogwash. One single volcano can and has affected the climate of the world far more than man has in the last 100 years. It is a very complex problem that does need to be studied, and questions asked, even of those question that we percieve as solved.
The exchange of carbon between the atmosphere, and the land, has been happening from the begining, and will continue to happen no matter what man does or does not do. Man really is not all that important in the great scheme of things in the universe, for we are but an eye blink in time.
Scott
It will not be nice.
I see the same response here. I don't know what "La la la, I can't hear you" is, but it ain't science.
Have you ever read Timeline by Heinlein? He is fairly rough on a science academy. How about anything about Galileo? He wasn't persecuted by the Church, it was other scientists driving it.
Science regularly goes through periods where it becomes ossified. That might even be the dominant position that is only occasionally broken by intrepid outsiders.