Global Warming Dissenters Suppressed? 928
sycodon writes "Global Warming has become more than just a scientific issue and has been portrayed as nothing less than the End of the World by some. However, despite all the hoopla from Hollywood, Politicians and Science Bureaucrats, there is another side, but it's being suppressed according to Richard Lindzen, an Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. From the article: 'Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.'"
None conformist (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, what if we are looking at the problem in slightly the wrong way.
How about in the last 100 or so years mankind has built more large structures on the face of the earth and diverted the wind (due to butterfly wing -> hurricane thinking...) into different places than usual.
What if the problem wasn't just the fuel burning we use to heat the building, but the size and location of the building itself that was the problem?
Most of us have stood between 2 manmade skyscrapers and been blown off our feet, that wind pattern has to directly affect the weather patterns in another part of the world. Theres no need to pore over detailed chemical tables or discuss possible scenarios, we each affect the climate simply by being here.
Theres my "none conformist" view on global climate change take it as you like.
Oh, now there's an unbiased opinion. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are very few dissenters... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Possibly (Score:3, Interesting)
Ocean surface temperature under a hurricane determines it's maximum possible strength - it's also a generial indicator of it's probable strength. As ocean surface temperatures rise that creates larger areas with higher levels of potential energy, and temperatures above the minimum to hold enough potential energy to spawn hurricanes (about 80F) last for more in the year.
So as the planet warms more tropical storm systems will occur (longer season in which they can), they will be on average stronger and last longer (having more area with higher potential energy)
This all being IIRC, it's been a while since I cracked open any of my books that covers tropical weather.
Re:Lindzen apparently has no trouble securing fund (Score:5, Interesting)
EdGCM [columbia.edu] is a NASA GCM that has been ported to run on Mac and Windows, and given a GUI interface. Want to turn the sun down by 2% or add some CO2? Just point and click and drag. Then, hit play, wait a day or two, and you'll have your own GCM outputs, complete with a visualization utility to view them with.
Re:New Orleans is sinking (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but exactly whose rectum did you retrieve those numbers from? I've never seen any such study, ever. You are just making up nonsense. Over the last 100 years, the tempreture has gone up, on average, 1 degree celsius? That's what? 3%? Tops? Three percent is pretty far from 1000%.
I will entertain your incredibly simplisitic mental science experiment, for my own amusement. You need to realize that storms aren't about the AMOUNT of energy, they are about the redistribution of energy. It is much the same way a steam engine works. It has nothing to do with the temperature of the steam that produces the power... it has to do with the temperature differential.. the FLOW of heat is what produces the power.
Re:Greenhouse Denial Industry (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the way it works:
1. You say "hey, this thing is more complex than we thought, let's try to understand it"
2. Your are labeled an "enemy of the planet" by those who review grant money
3. You get no further funding
4. You go to the sources that WILL fund your research
5. Because you are now backed by evil corporations your are branded a stooge
6. Your peers ignore your data and input
Isn't it great how we're not surpressing anyone's research?
PS: "enemy of the planet" is a direct quote from those reviewing funding for a friend of mine who was in solar astrophysics at the time. His lab had dared to propose a model by which the sun could power observed warming.
Re:Honestly (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:3, Interesting)
Paleoclimate research is about the past, and 'past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results', especially when you've got people mucking around with the variables.
Is Prof. Carter even qualified to discuss what may or may not happen in the future? His specialty is the deep past....
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:3, Interesting)
Great, at least one moderator doesn't know what "noise" on a curve is.
Re:Oh, now there's an unbiased opinion. (Score:1, Interesting)
It seems to me that he got his feelings hurt when other scientists called him a bad scientist. He provides no information about his actual study, other than saying:
"When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2."
I, being a budding climatologist, would like to read this study. However, he provides no information as to where to find it, what data he based it off of, or even what Journal it was published in. I have no basis upon which to weigh his claims. Further, he states:
Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited."
Again, same problem as before. He doesn't state where these papers appeared, how he determined them to be "hastily prepared", nor if the claims to errors in his paper were justified. He speaks of how criticism is "Normally" handled. But, without providing the name of the Journal this paper was published in, we have no way to see if the way in which responses to his paper were handled represent standard operating procedure for the journal in question, or if this normative behavior he speaks of is normal at all. All we are left to do is to take the scientist's word for it. Doesn't his point, though, revolve around questioning the validity of a scientist's word?
I tend to take this article with a grain of salt becuase he provides too few details for me to refute his claims from a logical basis. His argument seems to be pure emotion and name-calling, rather than a rational response to injustice in the scientific community.
Whatever boat you happen to be in... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is something that he points out (in a roundabout way) that needs to be said: There is a lot of bad science going on in this debate. Both sides.
Now, granted, I'm a lowly Ph.D. student in Atmospheric Sciences studying hurricanes... what would I know about this, right? (Yes, that's slightly sarcastic.)
"Science" and "Nature" are hack journals nowadays. The only reason that one publishes in those is for publicity. Pure and simple. I haven't seen an article pertaining to atmospheric science come through there that I haven't been able to poke significant holes in for years now. (I speak mainly for atmospheric science articles in those journals. Other articles may be fine... I don't know.)
The real science happens in the less-public journals. And, believe it or not, the actual science always leads to more questions than answers. There are details that aren't covered in science news coverage that are vital to making valid conclusions in these issues. But, the nature of the "publish-or-perish" funding makes careful science difficult to do.
So, we're left with more questions than answers. Look at Dr. Denning's carbon cycle findings ( http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/globalcarbonc
I'm not claiming that the scientists in this debate are bad scientists... I'm claiming that they're getting caught up in a problem that is so incredibly complex that we're far from having a more-than-cursory handle on. A lot of this is pioneering work... and even pioneers in sciences can get things wrong or not understand everything (how many refinements of Einstein's relativity theory have there been in the last couple decades, for example?).
It's not just about politics or philosophy or science or anything like that. It's seeing the maturation of a whole discipline of science. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that alarmists may be taking things too far. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that there are politics involved here. He may be off-base in a number of points, but cooler heads will prevail eventually. This is an exciting time to watch all this... it's like our generation's relativity (20's and 30's) or nuclear chemistry (late-40's to 60's).
Those who are getting up in arms about all this... settle down. Seriously. Your hyperventilations are only speeding up the global warming process!
-Jellisky
Global warming based on statistical ridiculousness (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway? Probably driven underground by the latest "Sky is Falling" group known as the Global Warming evangelists.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
I guess the press doesn't want to report on the failings of these wackjobs since the press was the ones who gave them credence in the first damn place.
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Global warming is going to follow the same stupid path. Tomorrow there will be a new threat and billions will be spent on that problem, meanwhile we'll be paying $10.00 / gallon for gas and no one will be solving the real problems.
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that position is not without its critics. There is evidence to suggest that the way the data was collected was not adjusted for changes in the technology they used to gather it, and when it was collected -- specifically, how the heat-shielding to rule out the effects of sunlight warming has been improved over time without that being factored into the analysis.
This blog [blogspot.com] gives a nice summary of what happened, as well as a bunch of relevant links. (The author [utoronto.ca] is an astrophysicist, so he's not without some ability to read science papers and follow the math.)
From this article [economist.com]:
In short, since the heat shielding on the measuring devices became more effective, the daytime measurements were skewed downward, while the nighttime readings showed a warming trend.
So if the improved technology skews the data, you need to look a little harder at the way the data was generated.
This issue is by no means settled, but what you cite is one possible interpretation which may not fully fit the inherent issues in the way the data was collected.
Cheers.
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:2, Interesting)
Aside from proving that poisonous gasses can kill you in small spaces, it proves nothing.
Establishing Credibility in Global Warming (Score:2, Interesting)
There is much discussion of a "mountain of scientific evidence", but where is it actually? To actually build a complete picture of global warming requires a fair amount of research in and of itself, and, even worse, most of the papers on global warming are being published in journals whose subscriptions run thousands of dollars of year. It is no wonder that someone might be skeptical about global warming, simply because you have to pay so much to see the "proof". I went to try and find out, for example, what the CO2 emissions from the midatlantic ridge are. Are there any? What's the proof, what experiment did they do? What about gigantic limestone formations? Anything there? What's the impact of Mt. Everest on the climate? Any papers? Or what is the CO2 consumption per acre of a tropical rain forest, or of a North American forest? Or a superhighway? Finding any of this information is impossible and the best Google gives you is a bunch of fanboy environmental sites that make statements as to each but often have no indications as to how they were measured. The information is simply not there, and, that, more than anything else, leads me to believe that so much of global warming is not only made up, its being made up by people with a vested interest in screwing my life up and wrecking the United States.
Unfortunately, I think the perception of political bias in the scientific community cannot be overcome at all, because it is partially true, and, any global warming policy is going to be the result of an intensive power struggle. However, the notion of science in global warming can be overcome by a brute force gathering of all of the global warming measurements into a single, giant project plan that is organized in a format that is believable, reproducable, in a standardized, McFormat, and is properly edited to separate speculation of the scientist from the actual experimental results.
Specifically, the earth needs to be divided up into hundreds of climate zones, if not thousands, and the results of those zones must be placed online, and in a consistent format. Each zone would have with it a characterization of the zone's gross chemistry, steps to establish CO2 content, and, what other zones that CO2 propogates into. Each zone, in other words, will have the total CO2 emitted or consumed, per a standardized unit of measure, say, cubic miles for atmosphere, square miles for various surface types, and some sort of a square mile by a rectangular depth range for both ocean and ground. In the cases of the ocean, the sea might be divided into 300 meter depths, and the same for the atmosphere. Finally, the frequency with which each zone occurs should be identified, and a total made. Thus, we could exactly know that, yes, the superhighway zones are producing xyz tons of CO2 per year, because here's the calculated emissions based on gasoline consumed, and furthermore, there are no other hidden zones producing CO2.
The point is ultimately that global warming is NOT a human CO2 production problem, it is a planetwide CO2 management problem. The goal is to balance the CO2 in the atmosphere to a level that is geopolitically advantageous to the United States and her allies, however, we cannot do that without an understanding as to how to do that. It might turn out, for example, that there's some goofy thing going on on the bottom of the ocean, in the midatlantic ridge, in a bacteria living in rocks a mile underground, that we simply do not know about, and efforts to control the climate by reducing CO2 production are a waste of time. I think what we really need to learn is to how to sink CO2 better, and, understanding how CO2 works, planet wide, and in a consistent way, provides the best overall tool for policy makers, skeptics, and advocates, to understand climate management on the same page.
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:3, Interesting)
Riight. A six year trendline that is flat is 'noice on a curve'
Yes, as a matter of fact, when you're looking at the timescales of climate fluctuations (natural or otherwise) six years is a piddling little blink of the eye. There are many other variables at play (and natural upswings/downswings) that may - nay, will definitely - mask the overall trend. Even looking at the last 200 years (still short but much much longer than six years) there is a very definite trend of continually increasing temperatures. (PS if you're going to counter-argue (as many do) that 200 years is too short to tell anything concrete, then that would anihilate the argument that 6 years is long enough.)
Whether or not you 'believe' global warming is happening or is a problem, it's clear that something funny is happening, something that could have devastating consequences and warrants sh*t-loads more research and a good deal of caution.
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:3, Interesting)
> something funny is happening, something that could have devastating consequences and
> warrants sh*t-loads more research and a good deal of caution.
Agreed. But for all too many psuedoscientists the question is already settled, Global Warming is happening, humans are causing it and if we don't adopt Kyoto (and thereby destroy Western Civilization, which just happens to be another stated goal of most of the Green lobby, total coincidence of course) we will all DIE HORRIBLY!!!!
Since the psuedo intellectuals and Green political hacks are running most of the government and university sources of research funding it isn't possible to do real science on the issue. Something we desperately need.
Look, Global Warming might be real. Who cares if we caused it or we are entering a period of natural warming. If it can be proven that it is really happening we need to be looking at ways to negate the more nasty effects. But once we discard the Gaian Religion and the Green Politics we can look at more politically possible solutions than dismantling our Civilization. If the problem is too much energy input we could simply take steps to lower the solar input to the Earth. Fly a few square miles of mylar in low orbit for example. It would probably only take shading a fraction of a percent of the surface to balance the equation.
Re:Whatever boat you happen to be in... (Score:3, Interesting)
But, the holes are being worked on. They get brought up in the parts of science a lot of people don't get to hear about: the colloqium discussions, the interpersonal meetings, conferences. Like I said, cooler heads will prevail in the end.
-Jellisky
Re:Whatever boat you happen to be in... (Score:5, Interesting)
There IS some quality data out there, but a lot of it just is not that great. And much of the really great data hasn't been accumulated long enough to really show long-term trends, since it has only been collected in the last 10-20 years. A lot of the issues in the field of climate are just being brought up and handled. That's why I said that it's an exciting time to be watching this field closely. Climatologists are just beginning to get some clout and truly innovative and solid ideas in the last couple decades. It's a field that is maturing literally in front of our eyes. In about a decade or two, we should have a lot more understanding as to how the climate system is working. And a lot of that will just come from the better data that will have some time to accumulate. And from some incredible ideas and great minds.
Read up on many science history books... you'll see the parallel sort of issues between the growth of current climate change science and other sciences as they began to mature. This is a rough, rough period with a lot of conflicting ideas, philosophies, and beliefs. But, it's exciting to watch and be a part of! Eventually, we'll understand what's happening better. Until then, enjoy the ride! I know I am.
-Jellisky
Re:Political science (Score:5, Interesting)
The science opposing global warming is "suppressed" by peer review in prestigious journals.
You can easily figure out from that one where the scientific community stands on the issue.
(Note that his complaint isn't even that these people can't publish their work at all, it's that it's hard to publish these results in the most prestigious journals. That's kind of like saying that your human rights are being violated because Britney Spears refuses to date you.)
Re:Blowing Hot Air (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure humans are yet capable of producing the quantities of pollutants necessary to create significant changes in the earths' climate.
With reports like this http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/greenhouse_
and others like it (I recall reading somewhere that, globally, volcanic eruptions during a more active year can expel more pollutants than the human race has since we discovered fire..can't find the quote/report dangit) along with a realisation of what an enormously large system we're talking about, and the enormous amount of "inertia" to be overcome making any significant change to such a system, I have a feeling we may be giving ourselves too much credit, that we may not be able to significantly change climate patterns even if we tried.
Cheers!
Strat
Re:Global warming taking its place... (Score:3, Interesting)
According to Tim Harford, in "The Undercover Economist" (a really great read), the EPA took advantage of the free market to do it. The industries were claiming that it would cost about $1500 to scrub a ton of sulfur emissions from the atmosphere. So the EPA set up an auction of sulfur blocks, allowing polluters to buy the right to pollute.
The auction determined that the cost of cleaning up sulfur emissions was about $70/ton, because nobody was willing to pay more than that for the right to keep pumping out sulfur.
Score one for the free market and government regulation. I'd like to see the government use more techniques like that.
Re:Are you by any chance a Republican? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then I remember reading the details and the controversy, that numerous scientists exclaimed they were mis-represented. That larger scores said they're analysis seemed to indicate a global warming trend but they were not assured such was due to man nor abnormal.
Funny, as I recall, we were supposed to currently be plunging into an ice age due to all our pollution. And I believe we had the same debate.
"So whatever happens on Mars is bat-shit irrelevant to what's happening here."
Typical liberal, dismiss the facts, read only the sentences out of context that support your argument. Bitch about people ignoring science but dismiss anything contradictory.