Shut Up, They Explained
Katherine Mangu-Ward | December 4, 2006, 12:32pm
Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and John D. Rockefeller (D- W.Va.) can write a mean letter. Witness
this note to the CEO of ExxonMobil, in which they accuse ExxonMobil of all manner of global warming debate-related misdeeds, and none too subtly tell the company to shut the hell up:
In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth.
And this:
This climate change denial confederacy has exerted an influence out of all proportion to its size or relative scientific credibility. Through relentless pressure on the media to present the issue "objectively," and by challenging the consensus on climate change science by misstating both the nature of what "consensus" means and what this particular consensus is, ExxonMobil and its allies have confused the public and given cover to a few senior elected and appointed government officials whose positions and opinions enable them to damage U.S. credibility abroad.
Read the
Wall Street Journal's scathing editorial on the letter
here.
Read the whole letter
here.
John | December 4, 2006, 1:10pm | #
Sam-Hec,
If climatologists would ever do anything but talk to each other, then perhaps their "peer reviewed" papers might carry more weight. Like perhaps let statisticians review their work.
http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_fact_sheet.pdf
Background: On June 23, 2005, following reports of a dispute surrounding two key historical temperature studies prominently used in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 assessment report, the Energy and Commerce Committee wrote the three authors of the studies, the IPCC, and the National Science Foundation for information relating to the use of the studies by IPCC. The studies in question, by Dr. Michael Mann, et al, formed the basis for the IPCC assessment’s conclusion that the increase in 20thcentury Northern Hemisphere temperatures is “likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years” and that the “1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year” of the millennium.Questions about the reliability of the Mann studies were of interest because they raised policy-relevant questions concerning the objectivity of the IPCC and its reliance upon and “promotional” use of the studies’ ‘hockey stick’ shaped historical temperature reconstruction. Following receipt of the letter responses, committee staff informally sought advice from independent statisticians to determine how best to assess the statistical information submitted. Dr. Edward Wegman, a prominent statistics professor at George Mason University who is chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, agreed to independently assess the data on a pro bono basis. Wegman is also a board member of the American Statistical Association. About the Wegman committee: Dr. Wegman assembled a committee of statisticians, including Dr. David Scott of RiceUniversity and Dr. Yasmin Said of The Johns Hopkins University. Also contributing were Denise Reeves of MITRE Corp. and John T. Rigsby of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. All worked independent of the committee, pro bono, at the direction of Wegman. In the course of Wegman’s work, he also discussed and presented to other statisticians on aspects of his analysis, including the Board of the American Statistical Association.- more - Chairman, R-Texas
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U.S. HOUSE COMMITTEE ONENERGY AND COMMERCE PRESS OFFICE, (202) 225-5735,HTTP://ENERGYCOMMERCE.HOUSE.GOVAmong the panel’s findings and recommendations: • Mann et al., misused certain statistical methods in their studies, which inappropriately produce hockey stick shapes in the temperature history. Wegman’s analysis concludes that Mann’s work cannot support claim that the1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium. Report: “Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.” • A social network analysis revealed that the small community of paleoclimate researchers appear to review each other’s work, and reuse many of the same data sets, which calls into question the independence of peer-review and temperature reconstructions. Report: “It is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising thatthe papers would obtain similar results and so cannot really claim to be independent verifications.” • Although the researchers rely heavily on statistical methods, they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Report: “As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.” • Authors of policy-related science assessments should not assess their own work. Report: “Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.”• Policy-related climate science should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review involving statisticians. Federal research should involve interdisciplinary teams to avoid narrowly focused discipline research. Report: “With clinical trials for drugs and devices to be approved for human use by the FDA, reviewand consultation with statisticians is expected. Indeed, it is standard practice to include statisticians in the application-for-approval process. We judge this to be a good policy when public health andalso when substantial amounts of monies are involved, for example, when there are major policy decisions to be made based on statistical assessments. In such cases, evaluation by statisticians should be standard practice. This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and funded accordingly.”• Federal research should emphasize fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of climate change, and should focus on interdisciplinary teams to avoid narrowly focused discipline research. Report: “While the paleoclimate reconstruction has gathered much publicity because it reinforces a policy agenda, it does not provide insight and understanding of the physical mechanisms of climate change… What is needed is deeper understanding of the physical mechanisms of climate change.”
At some point, you have to wonder about this stuff. Not every skeptic is a nutcase and not every climatologist is pure defender of science. They want money and success and tenure just like everyone else and are certainly suceptable to "group think".
madpad | December 4, 2006, 1:13pm | #
Let's compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country.
First, CEI is hardly alone on their side. Alligned with them are...
* The Heritage Foundation
* Fox News
* The CATO Institute
* George C. Marshall Institute
* Tech Central Station Science Foundation
* American Enterprise Institute
* National Center for Policy Analysis
* Independent Institute, Fraser Institute
* Advancement of Sound Science Coalition
* International Policy Network
* Most of the Republican party
and countless other organizations.
As for "
every politically correct journalist in the country... well, all I've got to say about that is what
used to be a slam against people afraid of offending others, is
now it's a pathetic slam by Right Wing writers who are afraid to acknowledge that they can be just as PC on the right as the folks they're accusing.
And the Global Warming skeptics have plenty of big media on their side including virtually every right-wing talk radio boob, National Review, Michael Crichton and others.
On the whole, a defensive, disingenuous piece.
Ron Bailey | December 4, 2006, 2:29pm | #
Sam-Hec: Just one article? How about "On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved?" in Environmental Geology at URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/t341350850360302/
From the article:
The global warming observed during the latest 150 years is just a short episode in
the geologic history. The current global warming is most likely a combined effect of
increased solar and tectonic activities and cannot be attributed to the increased
anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere. Humans may be responsible for less than 0.01°C
(of approximately 0.56°C (1°F) total average atmospheric heating during the last century...
Any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are
condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4-5 orders of
magnitude greater than available human controls.
--L.F. Khilyuk and G.V. Chilingar, Environmental Geology, August 2006
Remember you asked for just one peer-reviewed article.
An interesting gloss on the Environmental Geology article by some "climate change deniers" can be found at URL: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/200336/12/01/are-humans-involved-in-global-warming/
joe, joe, joe: Take a look again at my column "The Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore" and you'll see that I told you and the rest of the world that ExxonMobil has donated around $250,000 since 2000. The company's latest contribution was $20,000 last January. See URL: http://www.reason.com/news/show/36811.html
All: I may have changed my mind recently (based on my best judgement of the balance of the evidence), but there is a legitimate scientific debate over the human contribution to global warming.
Ron Bailey | December 4, 2006, 2:35pm | #
For those who wish to continue to accuse their opponents of bad faith, you might also consider these comments from Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (who is certainly cannot be accused of being a "climate change denier") below:
"Do images of climate-related chaos distort the scientific truth? Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change.
But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change.
It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.
The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change.
This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return".
I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.
It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns."
Complete article at URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6115644.stm
Russell | December 4, 2006, 3:33pm | #
Here's my November 3 WSJ Europe op-ed on science censosorship prefiguring today's lead editorial in the US edition
NULLIUS IN VERBA
In 1663, a group of savants formed a London club to discuss "useful knowledge." John Milton's "Areopagitica" was very much on the minds of those early scientists, for it warned that Puritan control of the press could turn into state control of thought. Dissent could get you killed in Restoration England, at sword's point if gentlemen took umbrage, or on the gallows if it traduced royal policy or Holy Writ. So they were mighty relieved when King Charles II agreed to join them, for, with such a patron, Fellows of the Royal Society would not fear for their necks or purses when speaking truth to power or questioning authority-at least not until today.
The Royal Society's view of the conflict between authority and evidence is made clear by its motto. Nullius in Verba is Latin shorthand for what Harry Truman meant when he said "I'm from Missouri. Show me." It's a notion the full quote from Horace-- Nullius addictus judicare in verba magestri expands into the gold standard of object- ivity: "Not compelled to swear to any master's words."
In political terms that translates into :don't let policy proceed from mere perceptions of authority. Abroad, the Royal Society shares the outrage of American scientists at pious politicians seeking to constrain stem cell research funding. But at home the Royal Society seems bent on stopping research at odds with the environmental agenda of the Labor Party.
Old Labour's hoariest political stratagem, class warfare, collapsed along with communism a generation ago. In that implosion's aftermath, the environment has become New Labour's communitarian fallback excuse for justifying societal intervention. The Royal Society has been a Whig institution since Darwin's day, encompassing a dynasty of left-wing science popularizers going back to J.B.S. Haldane and Bertrand Russell. Now it is trying to establish itself as a virtual Leviathan in the world of Green politics by extending the political correctness of Tony Blair's nanny state into the scientific realm.Its latest outburst is an Orwellian call to defund scientific inquiry instead of defending it.
The Royal Society's senior manager for policy communication, Bob Ward, has tried to browbeat Exxon Mobil into blacklisting 39 groups whose inconvenient dissent casts doubt on the policy agenda shared by the Society and the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change. A letter from Mr. Ward to Exxon leaked to The Guardian reveals that he wants those he deems to have "misrepresented the science of climate change" put on a Do Not Fund List because "[t]he next IPCC report gives people the final push that they need to take action and we can't have people trying to undermine it." In other words, stop gainsaying the science that Green foundations are paying good money to advertise.
The source of political contention is less the science in the IPCC's indigestibly erudite 4,000-page reports than their translation into vivid Green rhetoric by the bureaucratic masters of the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP). Those floridly political "executive summaries" have driven everything from the Kyoto Treaty to EU regulation of refrigerators.
Those who aspire to New Labour's science establishment may feel compelled to swear by such words, lest they end up blackballed from the other London club frequented by the Society's last president , the House of Lords. Lord May owes his peerage to faithful service as Tony Blair's chief science adviser, and echoing Foreign (and past Environment) Minister Margaret Beckett's repetition of whatever Green publicists air. The laboratory cash flow of the honorable Eco-Lord's pals will also swell if the Royal Society can empower UNEP by silencing disloyal whispers that no one knows how to forecast climate 344 years hence.
And silence them it will-protracted scientific controversy about global systems models is tedious, and the authoritarian backroom boys at the Royal Society understandably intend to end it. Mr. Blair's "Yes, Minister" nanny state scorns free speech. True, some of the contrarian organizations on the blacklist are no great loss to science because they are run by registered lobbyists. But their reluctance to acknowledge climate change is no excuse for freezing out freedom of scientific inquiry.
The Royal Society must choose between its motto and using other people's purse strings to throttle dissent-if the motto goes, it must abdicate its divine right to pontificate as well. If it persists in toying with censorship, it deserves to be privatized for seeking to subjugate the Republic of Science to the words of its political masters.
If it wants to reinvent itself as a Green PR firm, fine-let the private foundations pushing the UNEP foot the bill. Perhaps they can underwrite the hostile takeover of scientific independence by selling Royal Society Fellowships, just as New Labour does peerages , for payments in cash or political kind. But what about the clubhouse?
Lord May & Co.'s palatial premises overlooking St. James's Park should of course revert to the crown, whence the late Society's grace and favor so long flowed. Her Majesty's government may want to turn it into condos, like the former Royal Mint, as advertising firms already in the business of selling science would pay handsomely for such a prestigious address, and diehards bent on imposing technical literacy on Parliament (or Congress) can still be locked safely away in its commodious wine cellar. Few in government will notice their absence, because fashionable as talk of politicized science may be, it cannot fairly be said to exist until both sides have some inkling of what it is they are trying to politicize.
No one compelled Thomas Jefferson to swear "eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man." If the recent history of science has anything to teach, it is that there is no place in a free society for a self-appointed Central Committee of Scientific Truth. Until the Royal Society comes to grips with the Enlightenment, its baroque motto deserves a rest.
there's a followup on my blog-- Adamant.typepad.com/seitz
Reasoned Perspective | December 4, 2006, 4:16pm | #
From George Carlin:
We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet?
I'm getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole.
So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that's begun. Don't you think that's already started? I think, to be fair, the planet sees us as a mild threat. Something to be dealt with. And the planet can defend itself in an organized, collective way, the way a beehive or an ant colony can. A collective defense mechanism. The planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet? How would you defend yourself against this troublesome, pesky species? Let's see... Viruses. Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And, uh...viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps, this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus, making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along. And maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.
Well, that's a poetic note. And it's a start. And I can dream, can't I? See I don't worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we're part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron...whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn't punish, it doesn't reward, it doesn't judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while.
MainstreamMan | December 4, 2006, 8:03pm | #
pigwiggle
It is good to read skeptics that have a reason for their doubt. It is rare, however, with this topic for that to be the case.
FWIW, my father has spent his career modeling complex physical systems since the early days of computer modeling and has been skeptical of the climate models until recently. He now feels there is enough converging evidence from the various types of modeling (all leading to similar conclusions) that he thinks they are probably correct, at least in broad strokes.
An important point regarding the broad strokes is that the consequences on the margin of those strokes look pretty bad. Recent work on the causes of the periodic mass extinctions throughout geologic history point to CO2 driven global warming being the most common culprit due to anoxia in the oceans when the globe heats up.
Scientific American has a nifty article on the idea...
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00037A5D-A938-150E-A93883414B7F0000
"But the most critical factor seems to have been the oceans. Heating makes it harder for water to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere; thus, if ancient volcanism raised CO2 and lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and global warming made it more difficult for the remaining oxygen to penetrate the oceans, conditions would have become amenable for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of H2S. Oxygen-breathing ocean life would have been hit first and hardest, whereas the photosynthetic green and purple H2S-consuming bacteria would have been able to thrive at the surface of the anoxic ocean. As the H2S gas choked creatures on land and eroded the planet's protective shield, virtually no form of life on the earth was safe.
Kump's hypothesis of planetary killing provides a link between marine and terrestrial extinctions at the end of the Permian and explains how volcanism and increased CO2 could have triggered both. It also resolves strange findings of sulfur at all end Permian sites. A poisoned ocean and atmosphere would account for the very slow recovery of life after that mass extinction as well.
Finally, this proposed sequence of events pertains not only to the end of the Permian. A minor extinction at the end of the Paleocene epoch 54 million years ago was already--presciently--attributed to an interval of oceanic anoxia somehow triggered by short-term global warming. Biomarkers and geologic evidence of anoxic oceans suggest that is also what may have occurred at the end Triassic, middle Cretaceous and late Devonian, making such extreme greenhouse-effect extinctions possibly a recurring phenomenon in the earth's history.
Most troubling, however, is the question of whether our species has anything to fear from this mechanism in the future: If it happened before, could it happen again? Although estimates of the rates at which carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere during each of the ancient extinctions are still uncertain, the ultimate levels at which the mass deaths took place are known. The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place. How soon after that could there be a new greenhouse extinction? That is something our society should never find out."
