What Real Scientists Do: Global Warming Science vs. Global Whining Scientists
Filed Under: Environmental News, Green Politics on March 17, 2010
According to M. Mitchell Waldrop, editorial page editor for Nature, “global-warming deniers . . . are sowing doubts about the fundamental [climate change] science.” Further, Waldrop argues in his op-ed “Climate of Fear, “scientists’ reputations have taken a hit.”
Let’s ignore the snarky reference to “deniers” and ask: is science and are scientists under attack? The answer is Yes. But in an intellectual sense, isn’t this the essence of falsifiable, non-verifiable physical science?
Climategate (et al.) is not simply about “deniers” and Waldrop’s complaint that skeptics are “stok[ing] the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like.” It’s much more nuanced than that.
As a quick aside, perhaps Dr. Waldrop can be forgiven for failing to see the big picture. To critics (can he tolerate them?), he is a deer in the headlights of universal, Internet-quick scientific scrutiny. And there are a lot of smart ‘amateurs’ mixing it up with the pros (who likes competition?). Consider the view of his colleague-in-arms Paul Ehrlich, who profoundly stated in the same March 10th editorial: “Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do.”
Perhaps we can help them.
Three Key Issues
Sorting this out, there are three important issues:
(1) Is science under attack?
(2) Are scientists under attack? and
(3) Who is doing the attacking?
The third questions is by far the most interesting, but let us first dispose of questions one and two.
Is Science Under Attack?
To question one, the answer is of course it is. That’s how science works. One of the simplest explanations of this is often used by Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry-–in other words, a real scientist. He writes:
The difference between a scientist and propagandist is clear. If a scientist has a theory, he searches diligently for data that might contradict it so that he can test it further or refine it. The propagandist carefully selects only the data that agrees with his theory and dutifully ignores any that contradicts it. The global warming alarmists don’t even bother with data! All they have are half-baked computer models that are totally out of touch with reality and have already been proven to be false.
Science is always under attack, and the best science is under attack by the very scientists who construct the hypotheses at issue. Sadly, this is not what is generally going on with climate change.
To help our climate science friends, which would include anyone who worked on the IPCC Work Group I report, here are just two hypotheses that they might wish to diligently examine:
- There is no evidence of historic temperature increases or temperature levels similar to what we have observed in the past 40 years that could arise from natural causes.
- The climate models upon which the IPCC reports rely fully incorporate the influences of water vapor, the El Nino southern, the Pacific decadal oscillation, the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation, the Arctic oscillation, and the causes of long-term (1,500, 5,000 and 20,000 year) climate variation, thus eliminating the potential to mistake a natural cause in climate variation with a man-made cause of variation.
If the IPCC scientists were able to falsify either of these, then the entire basis for alarmism about climate change would fall apart, as these are the “fundamental” climate science about which Dr. Waldrop is so concerned.
There is some hope, however. After being bludgeoned by criticism and demands for data from scientists outside his personal circle of climate alarmists, and apparently a scientist within his own offices who released the now infamous Climategate emails, Dr. Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University, and IPCC scion, has admitted the following (as summarized by Indur Goklany):
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- Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
- There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
- The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
- This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
- The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
- The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
- There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.
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Are Scientists Under Attack?
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