AN ASSAULT ON SCIENCE

Tesyeux already mentioned in this thread that anti-vaccination nutters and anti-GMO nutters are well known in the UK.

The Sierra Club are a bunch of power mad fools, in my never humble opinion. Years ago, they successfully blocked a hydro-electric project in Bnagladesh which would have required international funding. They blocked the funding. They opposed it because it would have drowned some land in order to make the reservoir which would have been needed to regulate the flow of the water. They wanted to "save" the forest which would have been drowned. Ironically, it is possible that an equivalent acreage of forest has been cut down since then for firewood--many Bengalis use firewood for cooking and heating. (I say possibly because the source where i read this is a fanatical anti-Sierra Club site, so i don't consider them to necessarily be a reliable source.) Of course, with electricity, they wouldn't need to burn wood for fuel and heating.

“The FBI said that 1,100 criminal acts have been committed since 1976 by the Animal Rights Movement and that "animal rights and eco-extremists" are "the FBI's No. 1 domestic terrorism priority."

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually.

Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather....If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.

When the scientific community comes together to reach such a broad consensus and speaks with such an urgent voice, it is correct (and has historically been correct),

“A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950.”

“The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, found the true consensus among published cientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%. “

Dr Legates said: “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%. It is still more astonishing that the IPCC should claim 95% certainty about the climate consensus…

when so small a fraction of published papers explicitly endorse the consensus as the IPCC defines it.”

"Dr William Briggs said: "Cooks paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed."

"Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, an expert reviewer for the IPCCs imminent Fifth Assessment Report, who found the errors in Cooks data, said: "It is unscientific to assume that most scientists believe what they have neither said nor written."

“The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist,” (Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, one of the study’s authors)

Broad consensus? Where?

Dr Stephen Schneider, of Stanford University, is a well-respected climatologist who is also quite active in the media and politics – chances are you’ve seen him in something like The 11th Hour, read one of his books, or read an interview with him in the newspaper. Chances are, you’ve also seen the following quote attributed to him:

Quote:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In a January 2002 Scientific American article Schneider wrote:

I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems. Even the most credible international assessment body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has refused to attempt subjective probabilistic estimates of future temperatures. This has forced politicians to make their own guesses about the likelihood of various degrees of global warming.

I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems. Even the most credible international assessment body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has refused to attempt subjective probabilistic estimates of future temperatures.

Schneider’s more recent papers recognize the limi­tation of this discussion and distinguish between objective and subjective uncertainty:


"Scientists deal with different types of uncertainty and respond to them differently, and we must keep that in mind…. However, there is a second kind of probability that involves judgments: subjective probability. This occurs when scientists deal with complex systems, as I do in studying a climate-environmental system or with those who study health systems. In these complex systems, when there are many interconnected subcom­ponents, scientists often are uncertain about the extent and magnitude of these interconnections. As a result, they have to make judgments about these interconnec­tions and, consequently, underlying assumptions are subjective."

Schneider coauthored a 1971 article in the journal Science about atmospheric aerosols—floating particles of soil dust, volcanic ash, and human-made pollutants. His research suggested that industrial aerosols could block sunlight and reduce global temperatures enough to overcome the effects of greenhouse gases, possibly triggering an ice age.

In 1975 Newsweek wrote of "ominous signs" that temperatures were dipping, and a year later National Geographic suggested the possibility of a worldwide chilling trend. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, recalls those stories well. "I was one of the ones who talked about global cooling," he says. "I was also the one who said what was wrong with that idea within three years."

we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.

I am interested to know what people here think of the idea.