AN ASSAULT ON SCIENCE

Many highly respected and eminently qualified climatologists have severely criticized IPPC reports

Ollie responded: That is simply not true. Check the facts and you will see it's blatantly false.

Have you yet realized that what you positively to be "blatantly false" is instead indubitably true?

I wouldn't be at all sure about that. I think they probably all agree that increased greenhouse gases have a "warming effect." But that hardly proves that the "mean temperature" will increase. There are countless other variables which could create an offsetting (or superseding) lowering of the mean temperature, from what I understand.

I said: Last I heard, the IPCC had, for 17 straight years, "predicted" an increase in mean temperatures. And, for 17 straight years, their predictions were just plumb wrong.

NOAA stated in the State of the Climate 2008 report that climate model simulations "rule out" hiatus periods of 15 years or more. Furthermore, NOAA states that if observations show no surface warming for 15 years or more, the climate models have been falsified at a confidence level of 95%

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chair Raj Pachauri this week denied the well-documented plateau in temperatures during the past 15-plus years. Pachauri’s denialism contradicted his own admission earlier this year that there has been a 17-year plateau in global temperatures.

While Pachauri and the IPCC bureaucracy double down on denial, some IPCC scientists are acknowledging the scientific truth. IPCC Lead Author Hans von Storch, a climate scientist and professor at the Meteorological Institute at the University of Hamburg, acknowledged the ongoing temperature plateau.

”According to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero,” Storch told der Spiegel.

“At my institute, we analyzed how often such a 15-year stagnation in global warming occurred in the simulations. The answer was: in under 2 percent of all the times we ran the simulation. In other words, over 98 percent of forecasts show CO2 emissions as high as we have had in recent years leading to more of a temperature increase,” Storch explained.

The problem for Pachauri and the IPCC is the IPCC’s own scientists, such as Hans von Storch, directly contradict Pachauri’s denialism. And it is not just scientists pointing out Pachaui’s denialism.

There has been criticism of some of the details, and none regarding the central point that human induced climate change is a reality. So your statement was misleading at best.

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

I'm still interested in the subject.

thank you, Rosborne and others.

If we were hit by an asteroid the mean temperature would probably drop. Global warming could cause local cooling, like if the gulf stream shut down: Britain would become more like Canada.

While some stars exhibit dramatic pulsations, wildly yo-yoing in size and brightness, and sometimes even exploding, the luminosity of our own sun varies a measly 0.1% over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate...

Understanding the sun-climate connection requires a breadth of expertise in fields such as plasma physics, solar activity, atmospheric chemistry and fluid dynamics, energetic particle physics, and even terrestrial history. No single researcher has the full range of knowledge required to solve the problem...

Much has been made of the probable connection between the Maunder Minimum, a 70-year deficit of sunspots in the late 17th-early 18th century, and the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters. The mechanism for that regional cooling could have been a drop in the sun’s EUV output...

Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years.

Misleading to whom? All climatologists agree that human activity has some "warming" effects on the planet. No informed person would think they ever denied that.

Out of thousand of pages submitted by scientists, only politicians, striking bargains, etc., reduce the reports to about 25 pages which THEY want to present to the public.

The IPCC was created in essence to support the negotiations, and without the negotiations, without the alarm, there would be no IPCC. It is not unusual that an organization has its own interests.

There is no way you can conveniently summarize 1,000 pages in 13. With respect to the chapter on the physics, we went to considerable pains pointing out all the problems of the models. The summary simply concludes, understanding of climate processes and their incorporation in climate models have improved...

It is frequently said the science is settled. This is often said without any statement as to exactly what is meant by this, and what relevance it has to the forecast being made. In point of fact, there are quite a few areas of agreement, and I think very few, if any of them, in any convincing way
point to disaster, despite scenario creations of the type that Dr. McCarthy spoke of. What is frequently not realized is, the statements are as
consistent with the statement that there will not be a problem as there will be a problem. They have very little substantive content, and yet they are perceived as having content.

This is part of our whole scenario system, where you no longer ask computer models to be correct. It is widely acknowledged that they are not. What you ask instead is that the projections be possible, and here the 1992 framework convention which we signed commits us to something called a precautionary principle, which now says all you have to do is suggest something is possible in order to need to act upon it.

I think it is extremely important in science policy, and that is where I have my own provincial interest, that we figure out how to support science without providing incentives for alarmism.

In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable..There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.

You agree we're warming the climate with our CO2. Now what?

I would be all for funding real research on the subject and keep monitoring the climate while taking the steps that will not cause severe harm...

Just think how much more apocalyptic these SEVERE HEAT THREATS would be if they had run and poured soot all over both poles to melt the ice caps back in 1975, as was suggested by the cooling alarmists of the time, eh?

Criticism of science

Criticism of science is distinct from the academic positions of antiscience or anti-intellectualism which seek to reject entirely the scientific method.

Paul Feyerabend holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge, and that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules is unrealistic, pernicious and detrimental to science itself. Feyerabend advocates a democratic society where science is treated as an equal to other ideologies or social institutions such as religion, and education, or magic and mythology...

Feyerabend also criticized science for not having evidence for its own philosophical precepts. He also contended (along with Imre Lakatos) that the demarcation problem of distinguishing science from pseudoscience on objective grounds is not possible and thus fatal to the notion of science running according to fixed, universal rules.

Historian Jacques Barzun termed science "a faith as fanatical as any in history" and warned against the use of scientific thought to suppress considerations of meaning as integral to human existence.

Sociologist Stanley Aronowitz scrutinizes science for operating with the presumption that the only acceptable criticisms of science are those conducted within the methodological framework that science has set up for itself. Aronowitz alleges that while scientists consider it absurd that Fundamentalist Christianity uses biblical references to bolster their claim that the Bible is true, scientists pull the same tactic by using the tools of science to settle disputes concerning its own validity.

Alan Watts asserts that the idea that the world is a material machine run by law is a presumption just as unscientific as religious doctrines that affirm it is a material machine made and run by a lawmaker.

David Parkin compared the epistemological stance of science to that of divination...science itself can be considered a form of divination that is framed from a Western view of the nature (and thus possible applications) of knowledge.

Robert Anton Wilson stresses that there is no objective vantage point from which science could verify its findings since all findings are relative to begin with.

Critics argue that the biggest bias within science is motivated reasoning, whereby scientists are more likely to accept evidence that supports their hypothesis and more likely to scrutinize findings that do not.[14] Scientists do not practice pure induction but instead often come into science with preconceived ideas and often will, unconsciously or consciously, interpret observations to support their own hypotheses through confirmation bias...Whether produced on purpose or not, all of these issues need to be taken into consideration within scientific research, and peer-reviewed published evidence should not be assumed to be outside of the realm of bias and error; some critics are now claiming that many results in scientific journals are false or exaggerated.

Many issues damage the relationship of science to the media and the use of science and scientific arguments by politicians. As a very broad generalisation, many politicians seek certainties and facts whilst scientists typically offer probabilities and caveats. However, politicians' ability to be heard in the mass media frequently distorts the scientific understanding by the public. Some scientists and philosophers suggest that scientific theories are more or less shaped by the dominant political, economic, or cultural models of the time, even though the scientific community may claim to be exempt from social influences and historical conditions.

Robert Anton Wilson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Paul Feyerabend all thought that the military-industrial complex, large corporations, and the grants that came from them had an immense influence over the research and even results of scientific experiments.

Science wars

The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of scientific theory and intellectual inquiry. In "Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science" (1994), the scientists Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt accused postmodernists of anti-intellectualism, presented the shortcomings of relativism, and suggested that postmodernists knew little about the scientific theories they criticized and practiced poor scholarship for political reasons. The book sparked the so-called science wars.

The historian Dorothy Nelkin characterised Gross and Levitt’s vigorous response as a "call to arms in response to the failed marriage of Science and the State," [diverging from] the scientists’ historical tendency to avoid participating in perceived political threats, such as creation science, the animal rights movement, and anti-abortionists’ attempts to curb fetal research, etc...Nelkin suggested that postmodernist critics were "convenient scapegoats" who diverted attention from problems in science.

Interest in the science wars has waned considerably in recent years. Both sides continue to maintain that the other does not understand their theories, or mistakes constructive criticisms and scholarly investigations for attacks. As Bruno Latour recently put it, "Scientists always stomp around meetings talking about 'bridging the two-culture gap', but when scores of people from outside the sciences begin to build just that bridge, they recoil in horror and want to impose the strangest of all gags on free speech since Socrates: only scientists should speak about science!"

Bogdanov affair

The Bogdanov affair is an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternately spelt Bogdanoff). These papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a proposed theory for describing what occurred at the Big Bang. The debate over whether the work represented a contribution to physics, or instead was meaningless, spread from Usenet to many other Internet forums, including the blogs of notable physicists.

The authors have Ph.D. degrees from the University of Burgundy; Grichka Bogdanov received his degree in mathematics, and Igor Bogdanov received his in theoretical physics (in 1999 and 2002 respectively). Igor Bogdanov failed the defense of his thesis. His advisors subsequently agreed to allow him to obtain a doctorate if he could publish three peer-reviewed journal articles. In 2002, after publishing the requisite articles, Igor was given a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Burgundy.

One of the scientists who approved Igor Bogdanov's thesis, MIT's Roman Jackiw, spoke to New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye. Overbye writes Jackiw was intrigued by the thesis, although it contained many points he did not understand. Jackiw defended the thesis:

"All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."

"In contrast, Ignatios Antoniadis (of the École Polytechnique), who approved Grichka Bogdanov's thesis, later reversed his judgment of it. Antoniadis told Le Monde,

"I had given a favorable opinion for Grichka's defense, based on a rapid and indulgent reading of the thesis text. Alas, I was completely mistaken. The scientific language was just an appearance behind which hid incompetence and ignorance of even basic physics."

John C. Baez stated that the Bogdanov papers are "a mishmash of superficially plausible sentences containing the right buzzwords in approximately the right order. There is no logic or cohesion in what they write."] Jacques Distler voiced a similar opinion, proclaiming "The Bogdanov's [sic] papers consist of buzzwords from various fields of mathematical physics, string theory and quantum gravity, strung together into syntactically correct, but semantically meaningless prose.

"The Bogdanoffs' work is significantly more incoherent than just about anything else being published", wrote Peter Woit. He continued, "But the increasingly low standard of coherence in the whole field is what allowed them to think they were doing something sensible and to get it published."

The most positive comments about the papers themselves came from string theorist Luboš Motl. Writing in his blog almost three years after the heyday of the controversy, Motl stated, "The Bogdanoff brothers are proposing something that has, speculatively, the potential to be an alternative story about quantum gravity ... What they are proposing is a potential new calculational framework for gravity."