Todd you're a little unfair here about the Earth being round. That is hardly a "theory." On the other hand even the IPCC states that it is very likely (90% certain) that global warming is human-induced. I'd go higher, I'd say it's maybe 98% certain, but it's not 100% and I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Unless one takes a position that 90% is not beyond a "reasonable" doubt, then this is astonishing. It can't be lack of knowledge of the issues. Is this a case of modern-day Lysenkoism where science is subordinate to party doctrine? What other cause could there be?

I would be inclined to agree with this except that the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard is different from saying "100% certain". It is 100% certain the earth is round. On the other hand, as you point out, we are only 90% certain that human activity causes global warming. I would call 90% certain "beyond a reasonable doubt" but others may not.

Now in their defense, the Republicans polled may not have known about the latest IPCC report at the time they were asked the question. Until the report came out, the level of certainty was lower (although still high).

At least for me, as well as other naturally skeptical people, the shadow of past environmental doom-mongering looms over this issue. Environmentalists have a long, long history of pressing the panic button over problems that eventually proved to be manageable. I'm not saying that this is a reason to be skeptical of the science around global warming. Nor am I saying that we should remain complacent. Only that it may be a reason to be skeptical of various doom scenarios.

:-) Actually, the Earth is not round (i.e., like a baseball), as direct observation from space, satellite orbits, and gravity field measurements show. It's an oblate spheroid, somewhat squished at the poles, more like a tangerine than a baseball.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Whether doubt is reasonable depends the consequences. For a capital case, any doubt is unreasonable. For climate, it's the other way around.

Since we are likely to see more of the same warming with no action, action is the best choice. What is there to lose if we act?

I think we can blame the knee-jerk response on fears of regulation on carbon. These are mostly people that hate all limits on business activity.

To show that the foundations of disbelief in science (or belief in belief) are complicated, consider my friend the libertarian/conservative engineer and small businessman. He still resists accepting human-caused warming, but is eager to see regulations on mileage and disincentives on big SUVs. He doesn't accept climate science but does accept evolution (perhaps with help, like Behe). He does see the huge potential in alternative energy and actively researches its opportunities. So this fellow would be glad to go along with reductions in carbon output but don't talk climate to him.

A telling comment was, in referring to Kyoto, his "that's our economy" that would be reduced along with carbon. Since he is a total cheapskate he would love to go off the grid and he drives small, high-mpg cars. But he did that long ago, not in response to climate worries. It's likely the unwillingness to put the economy under restriction, I guess, that drives the apparent disbelief. Admitting the science, like saying sorry in a civil suit, would expose business to limits placed on it.

While he might be happy with an incentive, personally, he would chafe at limits, and I think this skews his thinking. He always mentions an apparent eagerness on the part of climate guys, to "blame humans for everything". I suspect a religious underpinning: If we are made in God's image, etc. why are we bad for the planet? It must hurt too much to accept that no one is minding the store and we have to manage it ourselves.

So if we can take a lesson from this, it is Amory Lovins' emphasis on the profit in green power. If politics is the art of the possible, let's artfully steer the country toward alternative energy and incidentally reduce our carbon output.

Real political fights will be over how much to intervene in a positive way, by methods such as introducing aerosols into the atmosphere or huge space projects like sunshades. Ideas like these will have unavoidable risks of unkown consequences. but they will not be proposed seriously until conditions are serious. So the fight will be over action or accomodation.

This is just beginning. It will be a political football beyond our grandchildren's time.

"That's just what I believe", they say.

In the faith-based community that is good enough! These are the same ones who blindly trust a guy who looked into Putin's eyes and didn't see a thug, but rather, a really good guy...someone who doesn't listen to people with practical experience because his "heavenly father" told him to go to war (still waiting on the explanation as to why the same dude told the Pope that war was a real BAD idea)...someone who makes decisions based on his gut reactions...someone whose administration has benefitted no one except the profoundly rich, and who has hurt (physically, financially, and for years to come) everyone else.

Why rely on science when guessing is so much more fun?

Jan Knaus

The problem with this report is the wording of it. There is a 90% chance that global warming is CAUSED by human activity. It's more accurate to say the planet has gone through warming/cooling trends for millineum now, and we may be contributing to the current one.

When you say that humans are causing global warming, you are proposing the idea that if humans stopped their heat-inducing activities, global warming would stop. Anybody want to bet their retirement fund on that? If the globe was going through a cooling phase, would these same scientists suggest spewing carbon into the air to heat it up? I address these to Mike In Ohio above to provide some support for the skeptics.

Mike, see my post below.

Whether doubt is reasonable depends the consequences. For a capital case, any doubt is unreasonable. For climate, it's the other way around.

Just to make sure I understand, is this the other way around?  That is, did you mean to say that any doubt is reasonable if a defendant's life is at stake, and unreasonable if the consequences of entertaining it are the lives of all?

Keep your first paragraph in mind, and then listen to this.

Our shuttle astronauts all know that the odds on getting back down are about 49 chances in 50. Every flight has roughly a 2% chance of not working correctly in a fatal manner. NASA prefers that they not say that in public, but they all know it.

Would you bet your life on a 98% chance of getting back alive if you could take a Shuttle ride? I would. In a heart beat.

I agree with your further discussion of global warming, and could not have said it as well myself.

Funny how different the two ways of describing chances are.  My wife and I met with a genetic counselor, because that's what you do these days, when she was pregnant - we were told that 1 in 200 babies are born with a genetic deformity, and I thought 'that's a lot!,' or in other words, the counselor continued, you have a .5% chance of having a baby with genetic problems, and I thought 'that's not much!'

Supposedly, some psychologists did a study a few years ago - on the hypothesis that our ancestors in their adaptive environment would have been reasonably good at estimating how often, say, certain prey passed by their hide-out - and found that we are very good at estimating frequency, and very bad at estimating percentage, even though they are the same thing. 

I suspect a religious underpinning: If we are made in God's image, etc. why are we bad for the planet? It must hurt too much to accept that no one is minding the store and we have to manage it ourselves.

Just a thought on this.  I know a fair number of religious people who consider the earth, like their children, part of their "stewardship."  That is, they've been given responsibility for it by God.  And the majority of these people are looking for a way to be more environmentally conscious, to do a better job with their tasks. 

I keep wanting to see a broader coalition on environmental issues.  I don't know if it's possible, but it seems like this -- of all possible issues -- would be the most likely to cross traditional political divides.

I was born in Newark, about which Nietzche may have written, "that which does not destroy us makes us the stranger." People from northern New Jersey look around, see an environment incompatible with human life, and develop a certain equanimity about Armageddon. To borrow from Robert A. Heinlein, the comment applied to the Jersey Meadows, "If this is Armageddon, armageddon sick of it."

As Brian sang while being crucified, "always look on the bright side of life", which, I suppose, is the logic that explains as "good" a Friday that starts with being crucified, as giving you sure knowledge the day can't get worse. When I lived in DC during the more active protests of the late sixties and early seventies, I grew to like the smell of tear gas in the morning. In mild doses, it was just the thing to clear the sinuses.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Ask a poorly crafted question and you get inconclusive results. The proper question to put to those who think that the globe is warming is --

"Do you believe it has been proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that human activity contributes to the warming of the globe?"

N.B. A more interesting question is -- "Do you believe it has been proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that global warming, whatever its cause, is a bad thing?"

I know a fair number of religious people who consider the earth, like their children, part of their "stewardship." That is, they've been given responsibility for it by God. And the majority of these people are looking for a way to be more environmentally conscious, to do a better job with their tasks.

Unfortunately, the strongest voices against this way of thinking (other than the big oil voice, which is a sneaky one) are the religious right who are looking to be "raptured" and are gleefully anticipating armageddon. They are the ones who don't believe in global warming because they "just don't."

If you are looking for those who care about the earth and future generations, the religious community is not a stellar example.

Jan Knaus

Re: You can't put extra CO2 into the atmosphere and it not be warmer than it would be without that extra load.

In principle you could. CO2 only absorbs certain wavelengths of infrared radiation. An atompshere could exist with enough CO2 in it that every last photon of that wavelength was absorbed so adding more CO2 would not increase warming.
I don't know how close we are to this point; I do rather doubt we are particularly close to it though.

Just goes to show that there are still a lot of non-human morons in congress. The last election was just a start. Of course there is also the problem of the roughly 200 million non-human morons living in the US.

Once again, the new IPCC report concludes that human influences on climate have 'very likely' (> 90% chance) been detected in the observational record. It is NOT absolutely 100% established, given all of the uncertainties in these observations.

That's irrelevent for public policy of course, where the outcome of ANY course of action is never certain. CUT THAT CO2! Of course I must say that so far global warming has been quite pleasant here in upstate NY.

the current warming trend is exponentially larger

 I will win no accolades for this, but I will say it anyway.  This is an example of why we find it hard to be taken seriously on this serious issue.  "Exponential" has a very specific mathematical meaning.  Loose use, as in this case, sounds hysterical.  It is in fact the case that ANY multiplication can be recast as an exponential.  If the exponent is small enough or negative it isn't very worrisome, at least not from a growing like gonzo point of view.

Vivane and everyone else, choose your words wisely to avoid seeming like the neighborhood paranoid.

If I hadn't gotten off the environmental bandwagon by last Friday morning, I'd sure gotten off by Friday evening, after the evening news opened with the ringing assertion: "The global warming debate is over. Mankind is to blame."

Sorry, but if the debate is over, then it's not science any more: it's dogma. Nor does it matter if a 'consensus' of scientists believes something: Isaac Newton wasn't a consensus scientist when he wrote Principia.

I don't doubt that human activities contribute to some global warming. But I seriously doubt that climate scientists know very much about it. I'm not even sure that what they do is science. I posted something like the following on one of their message boards today:

Some questions about climate science.

Science, according to my understanding, proceeds both empirically and theoretically, the two going hand in hand.

For example, the gas law known as Boyle's law ( P.V = k ) was empirically derived by expanding and contracting a fixed amount of real gas inside a real container. A few centuries later, the kinetic theory of gases, which regarded gases as consisting of particles bouncing around inside a container, produced agreement with Boyle's law (with some provisos). If the kinetic theory of gases had disagreed, then the theory would have been wrong, and the theoreticians would have had to go look at their equations again.

The same applies to heat flow in buildings. A real bricks-and-mortar building gets built, and is wired up with instrumentation to measure temperature, humidity, air speed, insolation, etc. This provides empirical data about how a building actually behaves over a year or two. When computer simulation models are constructed of the same building, using the best available physics, these models should show good agreement with the empirical data. If they don't, then there's something wrong with them.

Now, my question about climate science. As best I understand it, climate scientists construct computer simulation studies of climate behaviour using the best available physics. But where is the empirical data confirming their results? How many planets have climate scientists built, and wired up with instrumentation, to empirically study their behaviour over a few centuries, and check their theoretical simulation models' results against?

The answer, to the best of my knowledge, is none, nada, zero, zilch.

So how do we have confidence that climate scientists' theoretical models have solid empirical support? The answer is that we can't have any confidence at all, because there is no long term empirical data against which to test their models. Maybe after a few hundred years of empirical study of the behaviour of the Earth, we might begin to feel some small degree of confidence. But right now we don't have those empirical studies, and can't have that confidence.

OK, someone tell me where I went wrong there.

I doubt if I'll get a reply.

Yeah. And the world is flat, too. There's hardly enough evidence to change the popular perception.

If you stick your head in a deeeeeeep hole.

CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com

Above, someone is asking whether p=.02 is sufficient for betting his life.  Apparently he isn't aware that in stats that is damn near the traditional standard.  You, on the other hand, seem to think that only God can answer questions about complex systems.  That fatalism would leave us all to die.  Thank you.  

Please don't ask us all to do your homework for you. Why don't you just rent "An Inconvenient Truth" and start there?

There is plenty of science to help you get some confidence. You have obviously not read any of the relevent literature, so just start with Al Gore and he'll point you in the right direction. Tell me SPECIFICALLY where I went wrong here.

I doubt if I get a SCIENTIFICALLY realistic reply. Hint: buildings are not the same as the EARTH!

Jan Knaus

I think you're being a little too harsh on idlex.

Global warming has been going on a long time. When I lived in Tucson, Az, I was told that Arizona used to be a tidal basin. Today, we know that all that water evaporated.

We know from thermodynamics that if you have hot and cold, then hot becomes colder and cold becomes hotter.

idlex points out a weakness of "global warming science" because scientists don't have a control group for their experiment! so, really, we're forced to go on faith!

I have no doubt that "global warming" is partly caused by human activity. What I doubt is that humans will change their behavior enough to make much of a difference.

In Tucson, AZ, the newspapers reported that blacktop stored a lot of heat during the day and the stored heat was released at night. Thus, this caused storm systems to be pushed out of Tucson because of the rising heat at night.

I mention this because during the past few centuries, man has created more and more heat absorbing black surfaces and cut down trees which shaded water stores, etc...

In my mind, if man really took environmental problems seriously, we'd try to give back, to nature, every square inch we could. But I don't think we'll do that. One reason: ethanol production will continue to force more and more acres into agriculture; everybody wants big houses; everybody likes to consume.

To get an idea of how little "climate scientists know," consider the Biosphere near Tucson, Az. The scientists there failed to create a self contained biosphere that could even sustain a handful of people!

I hope we all start appreciating what we have before it's too late!

HERE ARE SOME REASONS NOT TO SEE THE MOVIE OR, AT LEAST, NOT FALL IN LOVE WITH IT! I ENJOYED IT TREMENDOUSLY, BUT WAS DEPRESSED AFTER READING THE REBUTTLE BELOW:

Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental Crisis
Listen Gore
By MITCHEL COHEN
CounterPunch, February 2, 2007

Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," raises the issue of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers, as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly earth-shaking.

The former Vice-President does a good job of presenting the graphic evidence, exquisite and terrifying pictures that document the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species, new diseases, and rising ocean levels.

But, typically, the solutions Gore offers are standard Democratic Party fare. You'd never know by watching this film that Gore and Clinton ran this country for 8 years and that their policies-as much as those of the Bush regime - helped pave the way for the crisis we face today.

Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis. At one point, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on U.S. oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What it all comes down to, for Gore and the Democrats, is that we need to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.

Even there, Gore and Clinton did nothing to improve fuel efficiency in the U.S. - a topic which Gore talks about in the movie without any hint that he'd once actually been in a position to do something about it. The question Gore poses is, Who can best manage the relatively minor solutions he recommends, the Democrats or Republicans? For Gore, it's sort of "trust US, not THEM, to deal with this situation because they are liars and we're not." Well, should we trust him?

As Joshua Frank writes, during the campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised a group of supporters that the Clinton-Gore EPA would never approve a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. "Only three months into Clinton's tenure," Frank writes, "the EPA issued an operating permit for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly, most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton-Gore's top campaign contributors."(1)

But failing to shut down toxic incinerators is just the tip of their great betrayal. In the film, Gore references the Kyoto Accords and states that he personally went to Kyoto during the negotiations, giving the impression that he was a key figure in fighting to reduce air pollution emissions that destroy the ozone layer. What he omits is that his mission in going to Kyoto was to scuttle the Accords, to block them from moving forward. And he succeeded.

The Clinton-Gore years were anything but environment-friendly. Under Clinton-Gore, more old growth forests were cut down than under any other recent U.S. administration. "Wise Use" committees - set up by the lumber industry - were permitted to clearcut whole mountain ranges, while Clinton-Gore helped to "greenwash" their activities for public consumption.

Under Clinton-Gore, the biotech industry was given carte blanche to write the US government's regulations (paltry as they are) on genetic engineering of agriculture, and to move full speed ahead with implementing the private patenting of genetic sequences with nary a qualm passing Gore's lips.

You'd think watching this film that Gore is just some concerned professor who never had access to power or held hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Occidental Petroleum (driving the U'wa off their lands in Colombia), let alone was the Number Two man actually running the U.S. government!

"Gore, like Clinton who quipped that 'the invisible hand has a green thumb,' extolled a free-market attitude toward environmental issues, "writes Frank, who goes on to quote Jeffrey St. Clair: "Since the mid-1980s Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy now bearing down on the global environment. He is a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia."(2)

Before Kyoto, before the Clinton-Gore massive depleted uranium bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq, before their missile "deconstruction" of the only existing pharmaceutical production facility in northern Africa in the Sudan (which exacerbated the very serious problems there, as we're seeing in Darfur today), there was NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The task of Clinton-Gore was to push through this legislation which not even strong Republican administrations under Reagan or Bush Sr. had been able to do. Since its inception, NAFTA has undermined U.S. environmental laws, chased production facilities out of the U.S. and across the borders, vastly increased pollution from Maquilladoras (enterprise zones) along the U.S./Mexico border and helped to undermine the indigenous sustainable agrarian-based communities in southern Mexico - as predicted by leftists in both countries, leading to the Zapatista uprising from those communities on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect.

Clinton-Gore also approved the destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida arranged by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, which doomed the Everglades. (In fact, Clinton was on the phone with Alfonso Fanjul, Jr., the chief of the sugar barons, while Monica Lewinsky was busy doing her thing in her famous blue dress under Clinton's desk.)

Early in Clinton-Gore's first administration, they pledged they would stop the plunder of the Northwest forests, writes former Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway. "They then double crossed their environmental backers. Under Bush Sr., the courts had enjoined logging in the Northwest habitats of the spotted owl. Clinton-Gore persuaded environmentalists to join them in axing the injunction. The Clinton administration went before a Reagan-appointed judge who had a record as a stalwart environmentalist and with the eco toadies in tow, got him to remove the injunction, and with it the moratorium on existing timber sales."(3) Then Gore and Clinton "capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving the timber industry its get rich wish."(4)

Gore and Clinton sent to Congress the infamous Salvage Rider, known to radical environmentalists as the "Logging without Laws" bill, "perhaps the most gruesome legislation ever enacted under the pretext of preserving ecosystem health." Like Bush's "Healthy Forests" plan, the Clinton-Gore act "was chock full of deception and special interest pandering. 'When [the Salvage Rider] bill was given to me, I was told that the timber industry was circulating this language among the Northwest Congressional delegation and others to try to get it attached as a rider to the fiscal year Interior Spending Bill,' environmental lawyer Kevin Kirchner says. 'There is no question that representatives of the timber industry had a role in promoting this rider. That is no secret.'"(5) What the Salvage Rider did was to "temporarily exempt ... salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review," according to the Wilderness Society - long enough for multinational lumber and paper corporations to clear-cut all but a sliver of the U.S.'s remaining old growth forests.

"Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington's Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana's Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington's majestic Olympic Peninsula - home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta - were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service."(6)

The assault on nature continued with Gore's blessing.

Around the same time, Clinton-Gore appointee Carol Browner, head of the EPA, was quoted in the NY Times as having said that the administration would be "relaxing" the Delaney Clause (named after its author, Congressman James Delaney, D-NY). Congress had inserted this clause into section 409 of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1958. It prohibited FDA approval of any food additive found to cause cancer in humans or animals. Alone among all food-related directives, this legislation put the onus on the manufacturers to demonstrate that their products were safe before they were allowed to become commercially available. (7) A federal appeals court in July 1992 expanded the jurisdiction of the Delaney Clause, ruling that it was applicable to cancer-causing pesticides in processed food. Browner retracted her comment, claiming she'd never said it, but the proof was in the pudding. The ban on cancer-causing additives (the "Precautionary Principle") that had held through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations was finally removed, not by the Republicans but by the Clinton-Gore administration. Instead of expanding the Delaney clause to protect produce and other unprocessed foods, the new Food Quality Protection Act legislation permitted "safe" amounts of carcinogenic chemicals (as designated by the Environmental Protection Agency) to be added to all food. (According to Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Weekly, "no one knows how 'safe amounts' of carcinogens can be established, especially when several carcinogens and other poisons are added simultaneously to the food of tens of millions of people.) Nevertheless, the Clinton-Gore administration spun this as "progress."

The Clinton administration, with guidance from Gore's office, also cut numerous deals over the pesticide Methyl Bromide despite its reported effects of contributing to Ozone depletion and its devastating health consequences on farm workers picking strawberries.

Much is being made these days about the need to save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But Clinton-Gore opened the National Petroleum Reserve " 24 million untouched acres adjacent to the refuge, home to a large caribou herd and numerous arctic species " to oil drilling. The chief beneficiaary of this was Arco, a major ($1.4 million) contributor to the Democratic Party. At the same time, writes James Ridgeway, "Clinton dropped the ban on selling Alaskan oil abroad. This also benefits Arco, which is opening refineries in China. So although the oil companies won the right to exploit Alaskan oil on grounds that to do so would benefit national development, Clinton-Gore unilaterally changed the agreement so that it benefits China's industrial growth."(8)

Not once in the entire film does Gore criticize this awful environmental record or raise the critical questions we need to answer if we are to effectively reverse global warming: Is it really the case that the vast destruction of our environment that went on under his watch and, continuing today, is simply a result of poor consumer choices and ineffective government policies? Is the global environmental devastation we are facing today rectifiable with some simple tuning-up, as Gore proposes?

Neither he - as point man for the Clinton administration on environmental issues - nor Clinton-Gore's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson (with major ties to Occidental Petroleum), nor the Democratic Party in general offer anything more than putting a tiny Band-Aid on the earth's gaping wounds, which they themselves helped to gash open.

Clearly, the vast destruction of the global ecology is a consequence not just of poor governmental policies but of the capitalist system's fundamental drive towards Growth and what passes for Development - Grow or Die. Environmental activists won't find in Gore the kind of systemic analysis that is needed to stop global warming. Instead, we need to look elsewhere for that sort of deep systemic critique.

Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens.
He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

NOTES

1. Joshua Frank, Counterpunch, May 31, 2006, Frank is the author of Left
Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and edits, www.BrickBurner.org

2. Jeffrey St. Clair, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, Common Courage Press, 2004.

3. James Ridgeway, "Eco Spaniel Kennedy: Nipping at Nader's Heels," Village Voice, Aug. 16-22, 2000.

4,5,6 Joshua Frank.

7. The battle over the Delaney Clause has been ably documented by Rachel's Weekly, at www.rachel.org

8. Ridgeway, op cit.

[Let us hear no more about how Dems are going to save America, when they have been key to its trashing. This leaves us without a major party to turn to - which is why so many live in denial as they turn to the Dems. -ed]

idlex posted 10+ inches of rant against a science he seems not to understand very well.  Many of us are trained in one science or another.  I talk with dozens of PhDs in a variety of disciplines.  When I recommend simple methods that are not their standard methods to answer program evaluation questions, they become confused about how, for exampling, sampling will answer questions where the desire is to know everything (patient explanation that everything cannot and will not be known and that sampling will lead to an unbiased basis for estimating what is desired has little effect).  Although some (philosophers of science, methodologists, not sure who else) are better able to cross disciplines with respect to understanding methods than others, everyone will run into something that seems foreign to them if they cross too many disciplines.

idlex is just demonstrating a lack of knowledge.  In other language, that is called demonstrating ignorance. 

One reason that there is doubt about global warming is that scientists have cried wolf about the earth being in dire straits in the past.
For my own education, could people give examples of groups of environmental scientists/climatologists warning of environmental doom that were proven to be grossly in error.
I remember Rachel Carson and her warnings about DDT. Carson talked about possible consequences of DDT. As I recall she wanted closer monitoring, not a ban on DDT.
Can you help me out by documenting gross errors made by environmental/climate science groups? I am really looking for large groups of environmental scientists publishing reports that were found to be junk science.
Thanks in advance for your help

So, mcs, by your rating of my post below, I take it that you are adequately knowledgeable to cross any discipline and assert your full and complete comprehension of its methods?  I doubt it.  I have training both in methodology and in philosophy of science and I wouldn't make that claim although I have been a practitioner of several sciences of substantially different forms for decades.

I take it your "rating" amounts to disliking the message.  "No control" talk is just the sort of silly ranting one expects from people untrained or lightly trained in science complaining about someone else's different methods.  It should be used when it is appropriate.  If you don't know or understand the method, you should keep your silly assertions to yourself.  And, only cowards respond by down rating messages solely because they don't like the message. 

I take it that you are adequately knowledgeable to cross any discipline

of course not. and I don't believe that anybody really does understand global warming.

some scientists, for example, say that there is so much heat trapped in the ocean that even if no more C02 is produced, the impacts of global warming can't be be stopped.

I think that idlex made an important point and you dismissed it: he noted that "scientific prediction" is flawed because there is no "control group." Without a "control group," science becomes faith.

some say that "science is self correcting" and that means that when scientific prediction fails, scientists start looking for another explaination.

mypoint: regardless of background, man isn't omniscient....

As greenhouse gases go, there is carbon dioxide, and then there is methane. Methane is 20 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas. Methane may oxidize into carbon dioxide within a 12 year period, but some studies have suggested that larger amounts of methane may take hundreds of years to accomplish oxidation.

The theory is called Thermal Maximum, which was believed to have caused global warming during the Late Paleocene, some 55 million years ago. At that time, it is thought that the movement of continental plates gave cause to a release of frozen methane from beneath the sea floor. As the atmosphere warmed, more methane burps occurred.

Some scientists speculate that a carbon dioxide greenhouse effect could eventually again cause the release of large amounts of methane. The bad news is that back in August of 2005, a team of scientists from Oxford and Tomsk universities announced that a massive Siberian peat bog the size of Germany and France combined is now melting, all the while releasing billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere.

The Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum apparently resulted in massive extinctions of various marine fauna. (Picture methane bubbles popping forth from the oceans on a large scale) The warming period lasted about 100,000 years. Unfortunately, there was increased evidence of volcanic activity, but perhaps that was due to tectonic plate activity. Many of the mammalian lines known today were both engendered during this time and appeared to have undertaken continental migrations.

Today, what we call rain forests also sprouted forth in massive concentrations, and many of our current day tropical plants appeared. There is some evidence to suggest a period where mammals “downsized,” but it did not seem to be a constant. Whether prior mammalians became extinct is uncertain, as the fossil record for the preceding epoch is rather sparse and scarce for comparative analysis. In short, this period of global warming led to a planet greener than before and teeming with life.

And humanity was but a gleam in a lemur’s eye.

Great, so 2 hours of naive effort makes you a climate scientist.  You are likely on par with some of the doubters that Inofe has dug up.  If the rePublicans were still in power, you might be able to make a buck.  Here, however, you only make yourself more of a fool.

1. Huggins is just one of the MANY Pre-20th century astronomers....  NONE of whom used empirical statistical methods of the 20th century, because the method arose in the last century of the 19th century and wasn't firmly developed until about 1920.

2. Kepler didn't know statistics, because MOST of the math of statistics was created in the 19th and 20th centuries.  However, he did use simultaneous equations, which is the ancestor of statistics.

3. Tycho Brahe's "long series of empirical observations" are NO MATCH to the hundreds of thousands of empirical observations that underly the current models of global warming.  I guess you are selective about which empirical observations that are worthy of counting as science.

So far you are still digging your self deeper into the ignorance hole. 

idlex makes up shit again. Here is a slightly more reliable account:

In the early years of the modern scientific era, the source of the Sun's energy was a significant puzzle. Lord Kelvin suggested that the Sun was a gradually cooling liquid body that was radiating an internal store of heat.[25] Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz then proposed the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism to explain the energy output. Unfortunately the resulting age estimate was only 20 million years, well short of the time span of several billion years suggested by geology. In 1890 Joseph Lockyer, the discoverer of helium in the solar spectrum, proposed a meteoritic hypothesis for the formation and evolution of the sun.[26]

 

It would be 1904 before a potential solution was offered. Ernest Rutherford suggested that the energy could be maintained by an internal source of heat, and suggested radioactive decay as the source.[27]

This comes from the moderately reliable Wikipedia entry. While Wikipedia is not the place I would look for technical information, it likely gives an adequate account of this little bit of information.

made of burning coal

That's a good one idlex. You are just chock full of fairy tales tonight.

Here is an example of the 336 years of data that are currently available for analysis of weather.  You are just make a bigger and bigger fool of yourself.  Tycho made observations, but not for 336 years.  Before sticking your foot in your mouth again, you could at least search the net with your browser and see if the contradiction is not plain in front of your face.

Television, the great equalizer. Turn it off before what is left of your brain rots.

On the other hand, maybe it is true.  After all, in some states it was illegal to teach about Evolution well into the 20th century, and creationists still try to get into the textbook.  I can imagine some Coal King or Pentecostal minister in Kentucky or Arkansas making up that stuff and having half the state believing it.  The typical banker rePublican still believes s/he was born with a silver spoon in his/her mouth because s/he deserves it.

I can imagine some Coal King or Pentecostal minister in Kentucky or Arkansas making up that stuff

It didn't need them. It just needed the established science of the time.

G'nite America. I love you a lot.

I may be at fault for misleading a number who posted here, though if they had clicked over to the Think Progress piece they would have found the comparative figures that tell the tale. Of the Democrats who answered the question, 95 percent said yes. That's 95 percent of Dems against 13 percent of Repubs.

The wording of the question is surely flawed. But the Dems could take the science seriously and the Repubs couldn't. Don't tell me it's because the Repubs are more scrupulous in their use of the English language.

Todd Gitlin

I'm trying to find out instances in the modern scientific era (say since 1970, for review purposes) where environmental scientists/climatologist organizations (not individuals) have issued position papers that have proven to be junk science.
I ask because the common response to a scientific report such as the one on global warming is that "they have cried wolf in the past and been wrong". I'm looking for documentation of this hypothesis. Is the science too young for the "cried wolf" statement to be true, or have they "cried wolf" and actually have been found to be wrong?
Sen Inhofe, who has a background in real estate, will comment on global warming studies by citing a paper that showed a "hockey stick curve" depicting global temperatures as the basis for the global warming hysteria. In truth, one study leads to other studies which either refute or support the prior study. Compiled data is used to make a conclusion. These are techniques not used eons ago. I'm looking for data to support scientists in the modern era have "cried wolf" and been wrong when they have collectively issued a position statement.

Computer simulatons were performed based on mathematics. The control group was the computer.

The computer is not a control group--it generates a control. Rather, the computer generates a number of theoretical tests measured against specific variable changes. The control is the fundamental model (or equation) you start with, assuming no intervention. The questions to ask is how good the original model is to begin with and how reliably does it reflect reality. Because we are dealing with theoretical models, it won't be exact. The Earth is a complex place and many factors contribute to its ecosystem. The question then becomes, given all the natural factors that contribute to the balancing act, are there any factors that can tip the balance to a point where it can no longer recover.

Eco-cynics like to use cow flatus, that generates a lot of methane, and argue that cattle are far more dangerous to the ecosystem than humans. The problem with that argument is that cattle breeding is a human activity. What is more, at 6 billion and counting, humans are the most prolific non-insect, non-microbial species on Earth, and the only one whose impact on the ecosystem has changed significantly over the course of its existence within this ecosystem. Unless you want to argue that another species has managed to convert resources to energy in increasing quantities (yes, exponentially), humans will have to stand alone in this respect.

Finally, "junk science" is a problematic term because it doesn't refer to what you think it does. Junk science is any kind of research that dresses itself up as science without adhering to the guidelines of scientific inquiry. If a theory argues that the sun is fueled by coal, it is only junk science if it is based purely upon speculation, then insulates itself from scrutiny. The fact that this theory was disproved (much sooner than the mid-20th Century, by the way) doesn't mean it was the product of junk science. It just means that the theory was tested, using scientific methods, and sufficiently refuted to the satisfaction of most scientists. Arguing that the Earth is in no danger because there are mysterious mechanisms that steady the ecological invisible hand--that IS junk science.

Apparently, you think you are omniscient however. Enough so, at least, to understand a discipline you seem to know nothing about.

Well, you talk about astronomy because you think its undebateable and I agree. However, we're talking about "global warming" here.

What's your opinion on the Biosphere in Arizona?

The scientists were UNABLE to design a self contained biosphere that supported just a handful of people.

If scientists really understood the interactions of this small, isolated test case, then, surely, the experiment would have worked? Right?

Some of the research about "global warming" is well understood but some is still prophecy!, in my opinion of course.

Excuse me for being tired and misreading the date.  I guess Tycho MAY have collected data for 310 years.

Depends on whether there is a raging fire consuming all the earth behind me.  But apparently you would jump into the fire.

I've had medical procedures where there is population experience, but not any clinical experience with my set of symptoms. The population, as a whole, might have a 3-5% rate of complications. After reflection on the alternatives, I took the risk. So far, my heart is much improved, but I did lose the hearing in one ear as a result of a clot from bypass surgery.

While I'm not physically qualified for spaceflight, if I could, I might well take an Al Gore spaceflight. Some gentlemen named Grissom and White took up a Gemini spacecraft without an orbital test. Grissom and White, along with Chafee, died during a test on the launchpad. After that disaster, and no full orbital test of Apollo, Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham went up successfully. Armstrong and Aldrin made, and almost crashed, the first lunar landing without a test of the lander or even that close of a look.

Funny how, with knowledge, people kept strapping on helmets. There are a lot of situations where there is considerable known risk, but people still step into the situation. I'm staying with a commercial fisherman, an occupation which is more dangerous than firefighting.

I wonder who ate the first raw oyster? (For the record, I don't find raw oysters have much taste, but I love sea urchin. Unfortunately, my ex and I tried it together, and she threw up over the sushi bar)

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

The same argument that we are guessing without a control depends on the fact that no replacement Earth is handy.

If the science is wrong, then is it not possible that measures taken using such wrong science may be potentially disastrous in other, unforeseen ways?

What if there turns out to be no global warming over the next 100 years, but instead global cooling (the ice age theory)? All our attempts to minimze CO2 production may look stupid in 100 years time, and quite possibly disastrous. Like getting ready for a hot summer, and having no winter clothes.

My own view is that we should respond to events as they happen. If sea levels start rising, does it matter whether it was predicted or not? 20,000 years ago, as the last glaciation ended, our ancestors faced a much greater rise in sea level than we face today, even in current worst estimates. They didn't try to stop it happening: they adapted and survived. That's what humans have been doing throughout their existence.

"No control" talk is just the sort of silly ranting one expects from people untrained or lightly trained in science complaining about someone else's different methods.

I think that you don't understand what idlex and I are focusing on!

As an example, consider "exercise"-- the major pharmaceuticals don't benchmark the performance of their drugs against "exercise" because they want to stack the deck and compare something "totally ineffective" to something that they'll market as being "totally effective."

If you read the pharmaceutical industry's research, it's initially impressive but, once you do a broader analysis and ask questions like, "how effective is your solution compared to dieting and exercise," they don't have answers.

Recently, many drugs were taken off the market because they caused "potentially bigger problems" then they solved. For example: people now worry that Viagra might cause blindness; an article in the NyTimes Magazine recently noted that we've focused too much on the components of health, like vitamins, instead of health itself-- so it escapes us; phen-phen was a failure because of heart valve defects; and my mother's health was impacted negatively by statins-- as people like her step forward, they've forced scientists to rethink what they know about statins!

Even with "astronomy," there was a "control group" because, as I was told: "something in science isn't considered true until the experiment can be replicated over and over again, with the same results, by other scientists.

Remember cold fusion? Since nobody in the control group (other scientists) could replicate the results, it was deemed that the reported results were bogus.

The solution to "global warming" is very complex and I sit on the edge of my seat and I'm very excited to see how mankind (and womankind) work through it... In my mind, there will be a lot of layers to work through...

Concerning junk science, I have heard multiple people state that scientists had cried wolf before and were later found to be in error. I am asking for examples of organized climatology/environmental science groups issuing position papers that were later found to be in error. Has this happened or is it an urban legend. I think the general public would consider a hypothesis that fell flat as junk science.

String theory is elegant math. However there are parts of the theory that are not holding up. To a significant portion of the public the term "junk science" would apply.

Again I use the term "junk science" as the general public would. I was attempting to use terms easily understood by the public in general. Basically KISS "theory".

Junk science is digging in the Arizona desert for evidence of Noah's Flood, or setting out with an agenda like "I'm going to prove that Global Warming is real." When you have already made a predetermination of what your evidence will say and you tailor your evidence to fit that (like, Iraq has an active WMD program), you are practicing junk science. If, however, you are examining the climatological data and you find an accelerating warming trend which defies fossil evidence of past events and you start to consider what significant changes in global parameters could account for it, it is reasonable to pose the hypothesis that industrialization and its spread across the globe (i.e. Europe outward)could be a culprit.

If one model contradicts your hypothesis, it is reasonable to consider how that model arrives at its conclusions and why they differ from your own, but that contradiction does not in itself render your model "junk science".

Addendum:

The equations produced the desired result. My desire was to point out that you did not need a physical control.

I can't provide anything on climate science, because it's a young science. We'll find out in due course whether they are right or wrong.

All I would remark is that the history of science isn't one of majestic progress, but of slow and painful progress, sometimes going backwards. We are forever thinking that we know everything, only to discover that we don't actually know very much at all.

One example is the 'science' of eugenics (described here by Michael Crichton) that was wildly popular a century ago, and which turned out to be utterly disastrous, and nobody mentions it any more. In its heyday, it was regarded as science. Now we'd call it 'junk science'. In some ways, 'junk science' is simply the name we give to our many failed scientific endeavors, as we look back on them retrospectively from the safe distance of a few hundred years.

But we shouldn't laugh at those failed endeavors. It's an important part of science to make mistakes, to get things wrong. Back in the days of the old Earth-centred Ptolemaic cosmology, as it gradually got called into question, all sorts of new systems were devised to replace it. The Copernican system was the one that emerged. But that doesn't mean that the non-Copernican theorists were fools or charlatans, doing 'junk science'.

I think that the goal of reducing dependence on petroleum as a matter of foreign policy is a far better reason to take steps to do so, in what is quite apparently an increasingly politically unstable world. So, yes, we don't need to invoke global warming to take steps that are sensible for more pressingly urgent reasons.

Now can we get back to global warming?

Here, let me get you started.

Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat.

The problem here isn't specifically the science; it's the journalism. The first couple of paragraphs refer to "scientists" and "experts" but doesn't actually attribute the words "critical mass" to any scientific body. The attributable statements refer to irrefutable statements like, "It's inevitable. A significant piece of debris will run into an old rocket body, and that will create more debris. It’s a bad situation." There is nothing wrong with the statement, but it isn't a direct support of the journalistic claims of the writer.

I have a feeling what you will find is that any report claiming to definitively prove or disprove the phenomenon of Global Warming makes the claim as a product of journalism, rather than science. That's why the report put out last week stated that 90% certainty was the conclusion. An alarmist organization with an eco-agenda would be likely to state that the report confirms or all but confirms that man is the root cause of Global Warming. A skeptical, anti-Global Warming organization would say the report was inconclusive and that debate rages on.

The only thing that rages on is intellectual dishonesty.

Don't worry, I'm not claiming that the story is complete hokum. I'm just pointing out that the hyperbole of journalism sometimes gets mistaken for the claims of science. There is certainly something to be concerned about, but the use of "critical mass" to describe the debris field appears to be an invention of the writer.

The only thing that rages on is intellectual dishonesty.

I suppose that it all depends on what you believe is causing "global warming."

I tend to believe its "over population" and the associated strain on our ecosystem. Al Gore briefly discusses "over population" in his movie but most people keep focus on "carbon emissions" which, in my mind, are just a derivative of "over population."

Political Ennui said:
I have a feeling what you will find is that any report claiming to definitively prove or disprove the phenomenon of Global Warming makes the claim as a product of journalism, rather than science.

The belief that scientific groups have raised environmental concerns in the past and were shown to have been incorrect is accepted as truth by a large segment of the population. Some critics of global warming theory will use this argument which goes unchallenged. It is an urban legend.
One argument about global warming has been simplified to making the point that predictions of weather one week ahead is problematic, yet there are predictions of climatic catastrophe 100 years in the future.
This could be compared to the oncologist who sees a pulmonary lesion has metastasized to the liver and is growing despite therapy. The oncologist can give an ominous long-term forecast, but cannot state with 100% accuracy the exact date death would occur.

I'm not entirely sure what your position is in this discussion, but I think I'm starting to see where you are going.

One argument about global warming has been simplified to making the point that predictions of weather one week ahead is problematic, yet there are predictions of climatic catastrophe 100 years in the future.

One thing to note, however, is that when these scientists are wrong they revisit the data and their models and try to figure out why they were wrong. The hope is that they can generate a better model next time. Much of the reason for the below average hurricane year of 2006 has been attributed to increased sandstorm activity in Africa. Until about a decade or so ago, there was no connection made between the weather in Africa and the weather in the Caribbean. Now it is widely accepted that they are closely tied. But don't lose sight, however, of the fact that increased weather activity in Africa fits the larger global trend of more chaotic weather.

In fact that very point, the chaos of the weather, is the crux of the climate change/global warming argument. One of the most dramatic scenes from the film "The Day After Tomorrow" doesn't involve heat, it depicts brutal cold. Say what you want about the quality of the movie or its agenda, one thing it gets right is that the Earth's climate is stabilized by stable patterns. Warming doesn't just mean that the entire planet gets hot. It means that convection systems, like that Atlantic flow that keeps Rome much balmier than New York although they are on the same latitude, get upended.

My home region of New England has generally enjoyed a much warmer than usual winter, while the Western States have been pummeled by record snowfall and cold. Britain and Europe have recently been hit with a winter storm that, for all intents and purposes, was a hurricane. Florida just got nailed by a night of tornadoes, even though it really isn't tornado season. And, in case you missed it, Jakarta in Indonesia has been nailed with record flooding that has made 340,000 people homeless.

It is unlikely that glacial ice, particularly at the poles, will disappear completely in the near future, but they do signal some radical changes that will make winters shorter, summers more intense, and storm systems that will be more brutal. In essence, imagine the kind of electricity you might build up walking across a carpet while wearing rubber soled shoes, then discharge when you touch a doorknob or a light switch. The shock might startle you, but its nothing to be worried about. Now imagine that something happened to create more static build up because there is more energy in your carpet and the next time you flick the switch you get a shock that is ten times as intense. That's what global warming will unleash with every storm...if the models are correct.

Tom, here's a blip from American Daily explaining that NASA has also confirmed warming on Mars and Pluto.

"People seem to have ignored very recent scientific data proving that cosmic radiation from deep space directly increases cloud formation, which directly impacts warming. The sun’s magnetic field fluctuates, and when it is stronger(as it is now) tends to protect the earth and reduce cosmic radiation. The sun’s radiant heat and cosmic ray levels affect planetary warming and cooling as well. Multiple scientific studies(NASA & California Institute and Jet Propulsion Laboratory) show that Mars and Pluto are also undergoing ‘global warming’ at coinciding times. They’re pretty sure manmade influences there are not the culprit."

Funny that Jim Hansen, NASA's top climate guy, doesn't factor that in. How big is that signal? I heard about the cosmic-ray/cloud correlation, but haven't heard that anyone serious thinks it is a major factor.

The American Daily is a rag. I just read the "In  Support of Global Warming" article. It's full of howlers. How about this one: "Warmth is energy. Global warming will, quite naturally, increase the amount of alternative energy available to mankind." Way wrong. Temperature differences are useful; everything hot is not useful. That's a high-entropy condition.

Another howler: "The melting ice caps and glaciers will provide vast opportunities for centuries of hydroelectric power." Not if there is very limited head to drive turbines. And the runoff river will keep changing course. Elsewhere they argue that this will mean more freshwater availability. I howl, since it's pure ecomomics that makes water an issue. It is not, as the writer suggests, that our technology can't melt ice caps for drinking water (pure baloney) but that no one that needs water can pay for it. It would be way cheaper to simply desalinate, but that is at the moment rather expensive. (Not a problem with expected inexpensive high-efficiency photovoltaics.)

How about this: "Huge areas of the world that are currently uninhabitable will become inhabitable." Ignoring that more likely a larger area of currently inhabitable land will become unusable, mainly by being underwater. Other areas will become pestilential, with warmer temps allowing larger populations of mosquitos, etc.  

Yes, Russia's Siberian tundra will warm, but that means it will become an unusable mush and release a crapload of very greenhouse methane.

When we see major court battles here over simple things like flood damage, you think a warming process will be a nice thing? How about a Bangladeshi terrorist gunning for us because we didn't even try?

You are verbose.
Actually, the statement I heard was made by William Gray of CSU on Lou Dobbs of 2/2/07

WILLIAM GRAY, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY: If these models were so good, they would be predicting next season. The reason they don't, because they don't have skill at that range. But they tell us what's going to happen 50, 100 years from now.

This statement was countered by a one from a Scientist from NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Center whose name escapes me. The Goddard scientist's point was that sometimes in science, it takes a while for "old" ideas to die out and for new ideas to come to the fore. Dr Gray was noticeably older than the Goddard scientist.
I do happen to believe global warming is occuring and that more humans living in more industrialized centers are a factor.
As a wine lover, I am aware of climate changes affecting planting and harvesting of grapes, as well as planning for what grape varieties successfully grow in an area.
Central California, Chianti and Barolo in Italy, Rioja in Spain and parts of Chile have vineyards already experiencing warmer temperatures. These changes speed ripening, but diminish fruit flavor development. The result is a less worthy wine. English Burgundies may be in the norm in the future if trends continue.
I was addressing some points made by skeptics/critics of global warming.

IT WAS A METAPHOR HOWARD!!!!!

That said, Lions are actually stalkers and pouncers; it is Cheetas that are sprinters, and they have nearly evolved themselves to death. They are so sleek and lean that if they use of all of their reserve in a particular sprint and the prey gets away, and this happends a couple of times, they may die before they can recover.

I leave it to others to draw a lesson from this nature tale.

Jan Knaus