Sceptics on global warming a baby-boomer, yuppie thing etc
Submitted by Martin on Tue, 06/06/2006 - 06:12
Long feature in Seattle Times (from Washington Post) looks at global warming skeptics, inc hurricane expert William Gray.
Quote:
By Joel AchenbachWASHINGTON — It should be glorious to be Bill Gray, professor emeritus. He's the guy who predicts the number of hurricanes that will form during the coming tropical-storm season. He works in the atmospheric-science department of Colorado State University. He's mentored dozens of scientists.
But he's also outraged.
Much of his government funding has dried up. He has had to put his own money, more than $100,000, into keeping his research going. If none of his colleagues comes to his funeral, he says, that'll be evidence that he had the courage to say what they were afraid to admit.
Which is this: Global warming is a hoax.
He has testified about this to the U.S. Senate. He has written magazine articles, given speeches, done everything he could to get the message out.
"I've been in meteorology over 50 years. I've worked damn hard, and I've been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who've been around have not been asked about this. It's sort of a baby-boomer, yuppie thing."
Gray believes in observations. Direct measurements. Numerical models can't be trusted. Equation pushers with fancy computers aren't the equals of scientists who fly into hurricanes.
"Few people know what I know. I've been in the tropics, I've flown in airplanes into storms. I've done studies of convection, cloud clusters and how the moist process works. I don't think anybody in the world understands how the atmosphere functions better than me."
In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin to cool again.
He is almost desperate to be heard. His time is short. He is 76 years old.
...
[gives case for warming, including:] The 1990s were the warmest decade on record. The year 1998 set the all-time mark. This decade is on its way to setting a new standard. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global effort involving hundreds of climate scientists, projected in 2001 that, depending on the rate of greenhouse-gas emissions and general climate sensitivities, the global average temperature would rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit between 1990 and 2100. Sea levels could rise just a few inches, or nearly three feet.All of the above is part of the emerging, solidifying scientific consensus on global warming.
The skeptics' view
When you step into the realm of the skeptics, you find yourself on a parallel Earth.
...
Many skeptics work in think tanks, such as the George C. Marshall Institute or the National Center for Policy Analysis. They have the ear of leaders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The skeptics helped scuttle any possibility that the United States would ratify the Kyoto treaty that would have committed the nation to cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. ...There are all these ... anomalies.
...
The skeptics don't have to win the argument. They just have to stay in the game, keep things stirred up and make sure the politicians don't pass any laws that have dangerous climate change as a premise. They're winning that battle. The Senate held hearings this spring but has put off action for now.
...
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. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stopped giving him research grants. So did NASA. All the money was going to computer models. The modelers are equation pushers."They haven't been down in the trenches, making forecasts and understanding stuff!"
The news media are self-interested.
"Media people are all out for Pulitzer Prizes!"
The IPCC is elitist.
"They don't talk to us! I've never been approached by the IPCC."
"People in the fringes"
...
There's a certain kind of skeptic who has no patience for the official consensus, especially if it has the imprimatur of a government, or worse, the United Nations. They focus on ambiguities and mysteries and things that just don't add up. They say the Official Story can't possibly be true, because it doesn't explain the (insert inexplicable data point here). They set a high standard for reality — it must never be fuzzy around the edges.
The Web site Real Climate, run by a loose group of climate scientists, recently published a detailed rebuttal of Gray's theory, saying his claims about the ocean circulation lack evidence. The Web site criticized Gray for not adapting to the modern era of meteorology, "which demands hypotheses soundly grounded in quantitative and consistent physical formulations, not seat-of-the-pants flying."
...
When Gray is asked who his intellectual soul mates are regarding global warming, he responds, "I have nobody really to talk to about this stuff."...
Mainstream climate scientists readily accept that there is natural variation in the system. For example, greenhouse gases alone can't melt the Arctic at the alarming rate that has been observed recently. Americans sorting through this issue may feel constrained by all the unknowns. Perhaps they need to adapt to uncertainty, to see uncertainty as the norm, and not as a sign of scientific failure.Or as an excuse to do nothing.
Global-warming skeptics continue to punch away
Post edited by: Martin, at: 2007/01/03 22:07
Comments
GM vice chairman lutz calls warming a crock of shit
Seems to me there are good 'ol boys attitudes among the global warming deniers.
GM's vice chairman, Bob Lutz, has lately exemplified these:
Lutz, GM's outspoken product development chief, has been under fire from Internet bloggers since last month when he was quoted as making the remark to reporters in Texas.
GM exec stands by calling global warming a 'crock'
The Truth About Denial in Newsweek
Good to see article in Newsweek, which clearly ruffling righties' feathers.
Includes:
The Truth About Denial
American Idiocy rampant among Free Marketeers
God knows what's wrong with American right-wing ranters, who continue to confuse science with politics.
Classic stuff on Free Market News, by Noel Gibeson, Print and Radio Commentator (err, not a scientist of any kind then? 'course not - science is for lefties; right-wingers don't need clean air, clean water, safe environments: heck, perhaps it's true and they are all Cylons).
Includes:
GLOBAL WARMING: A CONVENIENT LIE
I've just submitted comment:
Bet you Free Marketeers also figure gravity's some kind of pinko-liberal plot, along with those nasty evolution conspiracies, plate tectonics and so on.
All cooked up by wishy washy doomsaying gloom-mongers who aim to stop Free Marketeers floating about at will.
I write from Hong Kong - toastiest February I've known in 20 years here.
But this is global warming [I omitted to mention that shouldn't just look at local trends]: means that world temps on the rise, and best fit is with anthropogenic warming, rest merely hand waving, seized on and spread by greedy liars and obfuscators.
You can deny warming like latter-day Canutes willing the tide to stop coming in (or religious berks adhering to notions of heavens revolving around earth), but your idiocy shouldn't be messing with my future, my kid's future.
Dick Cheney an All-American Idiot re warming
Think Progress has item mentioning Dick Cheney has said:
- as TP notes:
Cheney: ‘There Does Not Appear To Be A Consensus’ That Global Warming Is ‘Caused By Man’
ExxonMobil cash for downplaying climate change
From the Guardian:
Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.
...
The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.
The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".
Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study
Loopy Christian halts Al Gore doc showing
Oh dear, the fruitcakes strike again.
In Seattle, a guy has succeeded in stopping showing of An Inconvenient Truth to schoolkids inc his daughter (one of seven kids, notice: this guy has done his part to increase stresses on our planet):
Gore Film Sparks Parents' Anger
Showing 'Inconvenient Truth' Would Require Counterpoint
Boston Globe had good editorial on this. Includes:
and says re one teacher
When science isn't
Post edited by: Martin, at: 2007/01/29 09:40
Alan Caruba insane or greedy or both as befuddles idiots
Just come across batty, right-wing rant from public relations advisor Alan Caruba.
Titled America Goes Insane Over the Weather, it begins:
Continues, including:
Goes on with a whole lot of unsubstantiated nonsense - for after all, his audience is right wing idiots, the sort who can't figure that "weather" (short term) is different from "climate" (longer term).
Tells the idiots that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; but if someone were to fill Mr Caruba's home with nothing else, you might figure he'd complain a tad.
Googling, quickly find that Caruba is a regular propounder of pap.
There's a page dedicated to him on ExxonMobil Secrets, about organisations and people that are sceptical of warming and receive(d) funding from ExxonMobil (it'll be interesting to see what these sceptics do now the company has said it will halt such funding, even started talks re lowering greenhouse gas emissions): Alan Caruba.
Caruba's abundant pap includes article titled Global warming: Lies, lies, damnable lies!, with typically vacuous statements, and even dissing the notion in New York Times editorial that "the seemingly indestructible snows of Kilimanjaro that inspired Ernest Hemingway's famous short story may well disappear in the next 15 years."
Perhaps Caruba is cheefully oblivious to readily available info such as:
Melting snow on Kilimanjaro - where graphics starkly show how in recent decades the once abundant snow and ice at the summit has melted to almost nothing.
See also NASA photos, Snow and ice on Mount Kilimanjaro
In 2005, Caruba wrote another piece for right-wing idiots, It's Getting Colder, Not Warmer.
Based this load of codswallop on one book, Caruba had the gall to assert:
But Caruba's just another self-serving befuddler of idiots, trying to stave off attempts to recognise and maybe moderate the likely impacts of climate change.
Now, he has stooped to insultilng his own nation - calling America "insane" for becoming concerned about climate change.
Tempting to call him insane. But the truth, perhaps, is he's just plain greedy, happy to take energy companies' money and write whatever helps bring in the cheques.
If Caruba has descendants, wonder how they'll feel as the earth warms and impacts are more widely felt.
Post edited by: Martin, at: 2007/01/19 14:01
Exxon spent millions funding sceptical pooh-poohers
Union of Concerned Scientists now criticising Exxon for funding people prone to saying "Warming, what warming?" - and bamboozling the public into believing there is something of a debate among scientists re whether warming is happening, and is probably a major problem.
The report by the science-based nonprofit advocacy group mirrors similar claims by Britain's leading scientific academy. Last September, The Royal Society wrote the oil company asking it to halt support for groups that "misrepresented the science of climate change."
Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the scientific advocacy group's report.
...
Scientists accuse Exxon Mobil of discrediting global warming
On Union of Concerned Scientists' site, see press release, and link to report, at:
Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science
Oil Company Spent Nearly $16 Million to Fund Skeptic Groups, Create Confusion
includes:
Fred Singer puffs hot air on warming
Another skeptic who seems to be flailing is Fred Singer; extracts from an answer he gave to question on global warming:
Tilting at Warming
Oh dear, seems the poor fellow's gotten stuck in a quagmire; almost seems he's thinking of how ridiculous his comments are even as he makes them. Global warming fears aren't about any wishy-washy notion of "optimum climate" - but about major changes to the climate we've long had. As a commenter notes on blog with the quote, we have cities on seacoasts, crops suited to existing climates etc.
Chances high Patrick Michaels has lost the plot
Just come across a bizarre letter to the editor of the Freelance Star, by a doyenne of the global warming skeptics, Patrick Michaels.
Asks,
- and then answers with a truly lunatic piece of logic:
Michaels writes a lengthy missive based on this - which he does not substantiate, and seems as crazy as saying (for instance) that in considering whether the earth is round or flat, or smoking does or does not cause cancer, the chances of the answer being one of these choices is 50%.
Thus, in noting that:
- Michaels is able to say this must be a result of bias. It couldn't be that global warming is indeed serious (for by his reasoning, if it was, half the papers would say it wasn't).
But, perhaps his audience is simply idiots, keen for even the flakiest of pseudo-science to buttress their notions. And, of course, could please his backers in the energy industry.
You can see this at:
No, Virginia, the sky is not falling Warming to debate Are we responsible for the planet's changing climate?
Post edited by: Martin, at: 2006/12/03 15:04
Sceptics out of step, out of arguments and out of time
He said sceptics were "out of step, out of arguments and out of time".
...
"It is increasingly clear that it will cost far less to cut emissions now than to deal with the consequences later," he told the 189-nation meeting in Kenya's capital.
The UN chief said climate change was also a threat to peace and security.
"Changing patterns of rainfall, for example, can heighten competition for resources, setting in motion potentially destabilising tensions and migrations...
"There is evidence that some of this is already occurring; more could well be in the offing."
...
UN chief issues climate warningPost edited by: Martin, at: 2006/11/16 12:00
Sen Inhofe lambasts warming - never mind facts
Back in my univ days in the UK, used to hear of the "Loony Left" for some political types with daft ideas. In UK, not sure how should call the rightwingers - Rabid Righties? - who seem oblivious to facts and commonsense (we know CO2 asorbs heat emitted after sun heats the earth; so add more, and earth is likely to get warmer - err, which part of this can't you understand, rabid ones?)
Just read of a republican senator, Jim Inhofe, who's someohow on senate environmental committee, giving blustering speech saying global warming isn't real.
Over at ThinkProgress - CNN Fact Checks Inhofe’s Diatribe Against Global Warming Sci, there's a blog post inc link to CNN item showing Inhofe was factually incorrect. CNN notes that in recent five-year period, Inhofe received US$850,000 from oil and gas industries.
See also a post on blog at Grist Magazine:
Inhofe's speech and right-wing global warming myths
- comments posted there include quote from book, The Republican War on Science:
Distinguished UK science academy chastises Exxon
The Royal Society said Wednesday that it had written to Exxon asking it to halt support for groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change."
...
Scientists Chide Exxon on Global Warming
The Royal Society website has a section on global warming, inc debunking the apparently contradictory obfuscation from the sceptics.
Climate Change
Climate change deniers will not change the facts
Commentary on Delaware Online is a further demonstration of how notions there is a "debate" about whether global warming is real are just plain wrong.
Global warming: Signed, sealed and delivered
Industry money buys Patrick Michaels' commentaries
More evidence that the global warming "sceptics" are receiving some juicy support from industries involved in producing greenhouse gases:
The Intermountain Rural Electric Association's general manager wrote in a letter to other energy cooperatives that it also helped raise contributions from others for Dr. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the CATO Institute in Washington D.C.
...
"I would say it's smoking gun evidence that industry is trying to buy science to back its anti-environmental propaganda on global warming," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Washington D.C.-environmental group Clean Air Watch.
"Something coming from a Patrick Michaels should carry a warning label," he said. "'Caution: this commentary bought with industry money."'
Power group promoting global warming skeptic
from Washington Post:
Utilities Give Warming Skeptic Big Bucks
- ah yes, the Bush administration...
Global warming a Nazi type lie - US senator
I'd never heard of U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (a scary thought!), but doesn't look like he'll join the pantheon of great intellectuals of our time.
Seems he earlier claimed global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." Now, more wackiness in an interview with Tulsa World. Includes:
"I know the text, and I know they are using old stuff that has been totally discredited," Inhofe said. "Everything on which they based their story, in terms of the facts, has been refuted scientifically."
He offered his point-by-point response to both.
They include such claims as that polar bear populations are shrinking along with their food supplies, and the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing.
Inhofe insists that the number of polar bears is not dropping and that some of the glaciers in the national park are actually getting bigger. [err, scientific references if you please, Senator]
As for the Kilimanjaro glacier, which reportedly is disappearing, Inhofe said the loss can be blamed on the cutting of trees, which once held the moisture.
"One by one, you can refute everything they are saying," Inhofe said.
Heat wave has senator sticking to beliefs
Looks like if you don't bother with actual science, with bothersome things like peer-reviewed papers and suchlike, you can indeed refute everything "they"are saying. Much as you could claim, say, that genetics is a hoax, or that humans and dinosaurs co-existed (latter cited in an Esquire article:
[/url=http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2005/060501_mfe_November_05_Idiot_America_1.html]Greetings from Idiot America[/url];
the senator may wish to read this sometime, including, "In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron").Post edited by: martin, at: 2006/07/27 04:06
Poppycock, bullshit and David Bellamy
I remember David Bellamy as an iconic figure of natural history tv; up to his thighs in bogs, he'd expound on plantlife in the big booming voice beloved of mimics - who also took to his immense beard. He even lectured at my first univ, tho I never saw him around there (I wasn't in botany dept).
Later, when he came to Hong Kong, Bellamy pronounced that China could use 100 [I think it was] cities like Hong Kong, which to me seemed odd, as would hold over 600 million people, and Hong Kong is no model of sustainability. Wondered: has the chap been given too many meals by folk connected to big business.
Recently, come across Bellamy pronouncing on global warming as being "poppycock". Turns out this was two years ago, in Britain's Daily Mail, in an article that included:
you can read the full text of the article on the site called (I'm not making this up) junk science:
Global Warming? What a load of poppycock!
- and maybe note that Junk Science has a major aim of debunking environmental science, and is linked to Exxon funding: googlefight
I tried googling for refutations of Bellamy's baloney; at first unsuccessul, but today come across guff from UK journalist George Monbiot; entertaining, including an exchange of letters, and Bellamy's points re warming - even his ill-founded and since retracted idea that glaciers are on the whole advancing - indeed refuted.
Monbiot had a go at Bellamy in Goodbye, Kind World:
this prompted letter from Bellamy, and letter from Monbiot, then letter from Bellamy, another from Monbiot; Bellamy for some reason mainly covering pros and cons of wind power and not much re global warming:
Correspondence with David Bellamy
Monbiot followed up with another article:
Junk Science
Climate change denial, as David Bellamy’s claims show, is based on pure hocus pocus
this begins:
For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing. ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.”(1) His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?
He is a scientist, formerly a senior lecturer at the University of Durham. He knows, in other words, that you cannot credibly cite data unless it is well-sourced. Could it be that one of the main lines of evidence of the impacts of global warming – the retreat of the world’s glaciers – was wrong?
includes:
Post edited by: martin, at: 2006/07/24 10:41
Exxon funding sceptics, drilling in the Arctic
Just come across webpage that rightly notes:
- continues with info on ExxonMobil funding various global warming sceptics and their organizations.
Who makes up (& funds) the "opposition" to global warming?
Gives link to a site ExposeExxon which says:
- and in turn has a link to a site by Greenpeace:
ExxonSecrets.org - which has a list of global warming sceptic organizations receiving funding from Exxon, plus more info such as on personnel. Whew! - a long, long list, and some such as Greening Earth Society sound like they might be greenies [info says "A project of the Western Fuels Association founded to promote the idea that global warming is beneficial to the planet."!!]
. World Climate Report sounds very grand; but mainly Pat Michaels and some buddies, not all of whom seem too worldly, and with further links to Western Fuels.Post edited by: martin, at: 2006/07/05 16:28
Warming pooh-poohers aren't academically hot
Letter on a US news site includes:
Then they treat the various speakers' opinions equally despite the fact that they don't have equal resumes. How ironic from the network that decries celebrity pundits for their lack of subject-matter expertise.
The problem with the "Earth is fine" folks is that they give this issue scientific latitude that they would not give any other topic.
If you were suffering from angina and you saw a team of 10 doctors, nine of whom were heart specialists who told you that you needed a heart operation immediately or you might die, and one chiropractor who told you that it was unnecessary and you were just suffering from gas, you would go with the opinion of the nine heart specialists.
Warming pooh-poohers aren't academically hot
Global warming: God is in charge
Profoundly stupid conclusion to a rambling, babbling piece on global warming:
Are warnings of global warming the new Tower of Babel?
- so if this guy's house were to catch fire, he wouldn't do anything, just leaving its fate to God?
Trouble is, here we're talking of the planet, not this guy's house.
Deeply troubling that my future, my family's future - and your future - depends partly on idiots like this.
Skeptics groups fancy names mask reality
Union of Concerned Scientists' site has list of some global warming skeptics organizations - which may have fancy names, like Global Cimate Coalition, Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, but are sometimes just pipsqueak groups, and/or backed by conservatives coupled with energy industry.
Responding to Global Warming Skeptics
—Prominent Skeptics Organizations
Global warming: it\'s the sun, temp change small...
For debunking of several of notions put forward to suggest global warming isn't real, or isn't a problem if it is, see this page by US Environmental Defense Fund:
Global Warming: Fact vs. Myth
lest you figure the skeptics are all unbiased folk, also check out the fund's page on (US) global warming skeptics, and their funding; notice Exxon Mobil's name keeps cropping up for funding research:
Global Warming Skeptics: A Primer
Guess Who's Funding the Global Warming Doubt Shops?
Post edited by: martin, at: 2006/07/28 01:55