Fascinating Source of Climate Change Skepticism

Ronald Bailey | June 23, 2005

Yury Izrael, Director of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences and UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Vice President opines, "There is no proven link between human activity and global warming."

Hat tip to Benny Peiser.

Comments

|6.23.05 @ 11:27AM|#

Obviously a lackey of the fossil-fuel industry.

drf|6.23.05 @ 11:32AM|#

Hi Ron:
I can't get the link to work

http://http//www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm

even taking all the hppt stuff off doesn't work. clearly i picked the wrong day to quit being a neoluddite

(don't ask about the temper tantrum i threw yesterday over the new phone -- the damn thing doesn't ring normally, and the friggin thing TALKS to you to tell you who is calling. argh!)

ahem. sorry about that. (see Wm Schattner's Moon Base Commander meltdown in Airplane II: "blinking and beeping")

anyhow, the link doesn't work.

i blame Bjoern Lundborg. He's baaaack now. Let's see if he switched sides.

:)

cheers,
drf

|6.23.05 @ 11:37AM|#

skeptical bob: You may mean it sarcastically but in fact the Russian Academy of Sciences under both communism and post-communism is heavily influenced by the Russian government-- which controls the fossil-fuel indsutry there, and which does not like Kyoto...

|6.23.05 @ 11:41AM|#

"Obviously a lackey of the fossil-fuel industry."

In Russia? After the government seized the petroleum monopoly? Nooooo....

|6.23.05 @ 11:45AM|#

So if you can't attack his arguments you are going to attack the man?

|6.23.05 @ 12:02PM|#

So if you can't attack his arguments you are going to attack the man?

Ooh; winner!

Mike H.|6.23.05 @ 12:22PM|#

which does not like Kyoto...

Can anyone provide a logical reason to like Kyoto?

|6.23.05 @ 1:05PM|#

The guy probably favors Lamarck's theory of evolution over Darwin's, too...

|6.23.05 @ 1:12PM|#

The link to the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" is http://www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm
This info is collaborated at the Junk Science site http://junkscience.com/ and has been for some time.

drf|6.23.05 @ 1:19PM|#

Thanks, Zero. the site in question didn't want my browser to leave off the "www"... hrumph.

|6.23.05 @ 1:32PM|#

It's often interesting to see a contrarian viewpoint, especially on this subject.
There are some problems with his comments, though.
1. At one point he says sea levels will rise 47 cm in he 21st century. Like, it's no big deal. That's 20 inches, which can be a lot for people living along the shoreline in places like Florida. (On the other hand, people who live near the shore in these areas deserve the disasters they get for putting themselves in harms' way.)
2. Later he says the sea level will rise 1 to 2 cm in the first several hundred years. Seems contradictory with the 47 cm comment noted above. Maybe he is speaking just about the Greenland ice, but he doesn't make that clear.
3. The 6000 PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere during the Carboniferous probably didn't bother the humans living at the time -- because there weren't any. Sure life went on--for the plants and dinosaurs (at least until a big rock hit the Yucatan). Not very relevant to the modern world.
His most interesting comment (as I understood it)was that, if you burned everything combustible on Earth, you would still only get a rise of 800 PPM (which he later implies is a maximum value, not the delta over the current value--which is it?).
If this is true, then the Kyoto limits do seem draconian. An awful lot of money wasted for very little improvement in CO2 levels, if any.

|6.23.05 @ 1:34PM|#

"So if you can't attack his arguments you are going to attack the man?"

Uh, no, I'm going to refute the pre-emptive insistence that his objectivity cannot be impeached contained in "Skeptical Bob's" sarcastic post.

6Gun, "Ooh; winner!" Uh, yeah. Remind me not to back my car into the street based on your assurance that it's clear.

|6.23.05 @ 1:45PM|#

I'm going to refute the pre-emptive insistence that his objectivity cannot be impeached...

joe the mindreader strikes again.

I would have a harder time being skeptical of the anti crowd if so much if their funding did not come from industry sources. On the other hand I do not believe that such connections are an automatic impeachment which you apparently do.

On the other hand I would have a harder time being skeptical of the of the pro side if so many members of the IPCC were not going public telling us that the simplistic media version of their "findings" were not what they found at all.

|6.23.05 @ 4:35PM|#

Ron,

This is not strictly on topic but you seem like the science guy around here and I have a question.

I don't follow the climate debate closely but I do have a basic understanding of statistics, meteorology and geological time. It strikes me that the "global warming" debate is wrongly focused on relatively small changes in averages that are difficult to detect scientifically let alone through personal observation.

Based on my understanding, I should not notice significant changes in weather patterns within my relatively puny human lifespan. However, I have noticed obvious, radical changes in 40 years.

Why don�t we hear about changes in volatility (i.e., the standard deviation as opposed to the average)? It seems like this would be much easier to measure reliably and would also have more dire implications.

|6.23.05 @ 5:36PM|#

Fact is neither side can be trusted, if having an ulterior motive is an automatic impeachment. The pro-global warming groups have just as much or more at stake than industry. Their funding comes from, and is entirely dependent on, the perception of enviromental crisis. If Greenpeace issued a press release along the lines of "Hey, it's not so bad. Nothing we can't deal with" their donation base would disappear.

So, in short, neither side can be completely trusted to be upfront. God knows that enviromental groups like to lie their asses off if they think it will benefit them.

|6.23.05 @ 5:36PM|#

slainte'--

I read the 1-2cm part as the amount of sea level rise that can be attributed to the melting of Greenland ice, assuming the scenario he describes. That would not necessarily be inconsistent with the earlier statement.

That actually seemed like a rather low number to me, but I did a (very!) rough calculation and I got a little over 1 cm as the sea level rise from the entire Greenland cap melting. I did not take into account the difference in water's density between solid and liquid form, and did not bother to look up precise values of things like the radius of the earth.

|6.23.05 @ 5:59PM|#

Toxic at June 23, 2005 05:36 PM

Uh-huh!

But some people have no problem dismissing "industry shills" trying to maintain the stus quo, while giving a free pass to bureaucrats who stand to benefit from greatly expanded government power or (as you point out) the eviros (and also academics) looking at huge income streams.

|6.23.05 @ 6:21PM|#

Really, Ron !
What's become of your cold war memory ?

Twenty years ago , Party propaganda chief Boris Ponomareyev encouraged Yuri and sundry othe Modeling Central hacks to second Carl Sagan on' Nuclear Winter' by co authoring a book entitled "Nuclear Night :Scientists Warning ".

It was not a labor of love or scientific enthusiasm- Vladimir Alexandrov had just been dissappeared for failing to get with the program at a Freeze Movement conference in Cordoba, and 20 years later, he's still as dead as Franco.


So whatever your taste in climate change, do inquire into who's paying - or prodding , the old line aparatchiks pro and con.

|6.23.05 @ 11:21PM|#

The problem with positing a link between human activity and global warming is that there have been periods of global warming that human activity couldn't *possibly* explain and these warming periods correlated well to solar activity as do more recent warming episodes, including the current one.

|6.23.05 @ 11:29PM|#

Sciences under both communism and post-communism is heavily influenced by the Russian government-- which controls the fossil-fuel indsutry there, and which does not like Kyoto...


1st part, true, the Russian Govt is skeptical of anything which holds its economy back. 2nd part: all smart, thinking people are against kyoto, so what?

Paul

|6.24.05 @ 10:21PM|#

Can anyone provide a logical reason to like Kyoto?

Probably a great place for sushi. And girlwatching, especially if you dig Asian chicks.

Oh, the treaty...