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Renegade
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Registered: May 2001
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
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Re: The Climate Change Climate Change
Ahahahaha she is actually using Steve Fielding as a positive example? As some intrepid skeptic fighting the scientific orthodoxy and whose example is worth emulating the world over? As anyone in Australia will be able to tell you (no matter what side of politics they're on), Fielding is a softcock neophyte who doesn't know his arse from his elbow, but was fortunate enough to walk straight out of his megachurch into a senate seat due to the quirks of the Australian preference allocation system (difficult to explain, but all you need to know was that he got less than 2% of the vote) and then found himself as a crucial swing-vote due to the unfortunate balance of the senate after the 2007 election. He will not be returned after 2010, but due to a set of unlikely coincidences, we now have our climate change policy being dictated by a man whose scientific literacy makes George Bush look like Richard fucking Feynmann
(Although hopefully this won't persist for much longer - the opposition have always said that their opposition to the climate change bill lay not in their skepticism about climate change, but in their belief that we shouldn't threaten our economic competitiveness by moving before the big emitters do. After the US house of reps passed their climate change bill, I think the opposition have signalled that they're now much more receptive the governments bill, which makes Fielding irrelevent.)
But I mean look at this shit:
| quote: | Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn't.
This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on "unconvincing green science." The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter. |
Now either Kimberley is completely unfamiliar with Fielding or she is flat-out making shit up, but her depiction of him as some serious, hard-nosed, scientific renegade, barging into the offices of the administration with a stack of scientific evidence so weighty that it could hardly be carried by just one man, before slamming it down on the table before Mr. Aldy and demanding that the 100 scientific proofs against climate change that he had devised himself after years of intrepidly studying the subject while earning his Phd in Earth Sciences (majoring in Paleoclimatology, naturally), leaving the administration's head-boffins speachless and completely incapable of mounting a challenge to such a compelling, tightly-argued case is, of course, not true. What happened was Steve Fielding went to a conference run by people with dubious scientific credentials with the express purpose of fermenting doubt about climate change, leading Steve - due to his general ignorance concerning the scientific method - to be credulously taken in by it all, before meeting with members of the administration that he had no interest in listening to, and now we're left with that most dangerous of beats: a man who knows nothing but thinks he knows better than everyone else.
This isn't a game. This isn't a subject for a classroom debate where we have to pick a side and stick to it, where the aim is to present our argument with enough rhetorical flourish to beat the other team, irrespective of what the objetive facts may be. This is an issue with real-life consequences, the evidence supporting it is completely unambiguous and universally accepted by literally every credible scientific organisation. Considering how difficult scientific consensus is to build on any issue, let alone one this complex, such a consensus is telling in ways that perhaps people indifferent to the scientific process may not understand. If people want to challenge this consensus then that is their perogative, but it is disingenuous to use one's position as public representative to try to influence the direction of the debate. If you believe the science on global warming is weak, then:
1) Write up a paper indicating your thesis and detail the evidence supporting it.
2) Submit that paper to a journal of scientific review, where - if the science passes muster - it will be published.
3) Hope that your thesis is able to undermine the scientific consensus on the issue.
Climate change skeptics can't even get past step one. All they can do is brainwash gullible, ignorant people who wouldn't understand the scietific method if they were mugged by it on a crowded street (i.e. right-wing politicians) and hope they can create an illusion of doubt and debate within the scientific community for long enough to ensure that their economic interests are not threatened by these pesky, do-gooder environmentalists. It's pathetic, and I can only be thankful that the groundswell of public opinion is raidly shifting against them.
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Jun-30-2009 05:04
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Renegade
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Registered: May 2001
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
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Disgraceful is right:
| quote: | Some parts of the blogosphere, headed up by CEI ("CO2: They call it pollution, we call it life!"), are all a-twitter over an apparently "suppressed" document that supposedly undermines the EPA Endangerment finding about human emissions of carbon dioxide and a basket of other greenhouse gases. Well a draft of this "suppressed" document has been released and we can now all read this allegedly devastating critique of the EPA science. Let's take a look…
First off the authors of the submission; Alan Carlin is an economist and John Davidson is an ex-member of the Carter administration Council of Environmental Quality. Neither are climate scientists. That's not necessarily a problem - perhaps they have mastered multiple fields? - but it is likely an indication that the analysis is not going to be very technical (and so it will prove). Curiously, while the authors work for the NCEE (National Center for Environmental Economics), part of the EPA, they appear to have rather closely collaborated with one Ken Gregory (his inline comments appear at multiple points in the draft). Ken Gregory if you don't know is a leading light of the Friends of Science - an astroturf anti-climate science lobbying group based in Alberta. Indeed, parts of the Carlin and Davidson report appear to be lifted directly from Ken's rambling magnum opus on the FoS site. However, despite this odd pedigree, the scientific points could still be valid.
Their main points are nicely summarised thus: a) the science is so rapidly evolving that IPCC (2007) and CCSP (2009) reports are already out of date, b) the globe is cooling!, c) the consensus on hurricane/global warming connections has moved from uncertain to ambiguous, d) Greenland is not losing mass, no sirree…, e) the recession will save us!, f) water vapour feedback is negative!, and g) Scafetta and West's statistical fit of temperature to an obsolete solar forcing curve means that all other detection and attribution work is wrong. From this "evidence", they then claim that all variations in climate are internal variability, except for the warming trend which is caused by the sun, oh and by the way the globe is cooling.
Devastating eh?
One can see a number of basic flaws here; the complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales, the common but erroneous belief that any attribution of past climate change to solar or other forcing means that CO2 has no radiative effect, and a hopeless lack of familiarity of the basic science of detection and attribution.
But it gets worse, what solid peer reviewed science do they cite for support? A heavily-criticised blog posting showing that there are bi-decadal periods in climate data and that this proves it was the sun wot done it. The work of an award-winning astrologer (one Theodor Landscheidt, who also thought that the rise of Hitler and Stalin were due to cosmic cycles), a classic Courtillot paper we've discussed before, the aforementioned FoS web page, another web page run by Doug Hoyt, a paper by Garth Paltridge reporting on artifacts in the NCEP reanalysis of water vapour that are in contradiction to every other reanalysis, direct observations and satellite data, a complete reprint of another un-peer reviewed paper by William Gray, a nonsense paper by Miskolczi etc. etc. I'm not quite sure how this is supposed to compete with the four rounds of international scientific and governmental review of the IPCC or the rounds of review of the CCSP reports...
They don't even notice the contradictions in their own cites. For instance, they show a figure that demonstrates that galactic cosmic ray and solar trends are non-existent from 1957 on, and yet cheerfully quote Scafetta and West who claim that almost all of the recent trend is solar driven! They claim that climate sensitivity is very small while failing to realise that this implies that solar variability can't have any effect either. They claim that GCM simulations produced trends over the twentieth century of 1.6 to 3.74ºC - which is simply (and bizarrely) wrong (though with all due respect, that one seems to come directly from Mr. Gregory). Even more curious, Carlin appears to be a big fan of geo-engineering, but how this squares with his apparent belief that we know nothing about what drives climate, is puzzling. A sine qua non of geo-engineering is that we need models to be able to predict what is likely to happen, and if you think they are all wrong, how could you have any faith that you could effectively manage a geo-engineering approach?
Finally, they end up with the oddest claim in the submission: That because human welfare has increased over the twentieth century at a time when CO2 was increasing, this somehow implies that no amount of CO2 increases can ever cause a danger to human society. This is just boneheadly stupid.
So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at. Seriously, if that's the best they can do, the EPA's ruling is on pretty safe ground.
If I were the authors, I'd suppress this myself, and then go for a long hike on the Appalachian Trail... |
http://www.realclimate.org/index.ph...2009/06/bubkes/

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Jun-30-2009 05:41
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