Don't shoot the messenger
Monday, December 7, marks the opening of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. At that meeting, the leaders of the world will gather to negotiate an agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The new agreement will be the world's road map for dealing with climate change, and the stakes are huge. It is fitting that the conference begins on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for the Copenhagen conference is sure to be an epic political battle. Indeed, the battle has already been underway for several weeks, with most of the action centering on a PR assault launched by the anti-CO2 regulation forces that sensationalized the contents of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia. The Wall Street Journal has long been at the forefront of the battle to discredit the science of climate change and the scientists involved, and last week they launched a major offensive, publishing multiple opinion pieces. I'll critique one of these, a December 1 editorial by Bret Stephens which accuses climate scientists of having a vested interest in promoting alarmist views of the climate in order to get research funding. "All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God", Stephens wrote.
Money
It's always wise to follow the money when analyzing the motivations of people. However, Ph.D. atmospheric scientists are less motivated by money than, say, the typical reader of the Wall Street Journal. I am an example of that. Nobody owns more shares of Wunderground.com than I do, yet here I am criticizing the Wall Street Journal and some of the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet--hardly the sort of action that will generate more revenue for my company. Our top climate scientists are some of the most brilliant people on the planet. They could have easily made fortunes on Wall Street devising intricate schemes to hawk sub-prime mortgages or leverage obscure derivatives. Yet these people chose climate science as a career, out of a genuine curiosity about how the world works and desire to help find the truth of whether human-caused climate change poses a significant threat to humanity. The charges that these scientists are exaggerating the danger of human-caused global warming to get more funding is a personal attack on their integrity--a typical politician's ploy to avoid talking about the issues, when one has no valid arguments to bolster one's position. In my 29 years in the weather business, I've had the honor of working with many of the world's top weather and climate scientists. I can personally vouch for their integrity and commitment to pursue the scientific truth, no matter what that truth turns out to be. These are honest, incredibly hard-working public servants who are enduring a punishing assault on their integrity because they are the bearers of bad news. The Earth has plenty of pressing problems requiring the services of brilliant scientists; these public servants will always have a job, and have no need to exaggerate dangers or invent new threats in order to get more research funding. If one reads through the entire set of 3,000 emails hacked from the University of East Anglia--not just the choice few lines excerpted from chosen emails, and then spun by the anti-CO2 regulation lobby to make the scientists look bad--you will see that these scientists are the good guys. Never once is there a mention of fabricating data or fudging results to try to get more research funding. There is no conspiring to perpetate the massive "hoax" of human-caused global warming they have been accused of. Rather, we see a picture of some very smart, hardworking, and very human and imperfect scientists that are doing their best to learn the truth, and pass that information on to the rest of us. You don't get ahead in scince by fudging the data. It's publish or perish. While the peer-review system of publication is not perfect, it generally does an excellent job of rewarding those scientists who seek to publish the truth, and rejects those who do not. Published papers that turn out to be false will, in time, crumble under the weight of subsequent studies that do uncover the truth. Smart scientists tend to have big egos and hate being wrong, so there is additional motivation to publish truthful studies that will withstand the test of time and be validated by subsequent research.
Alarmism
Mr. Stephens uses the words "alarm" or "alarmist" four times in the editorial, and he is clearly trying to provoke an emotional reaction against those Chicken Littles guilty of raising the alarm. Speaking as an atmospheric scientist, I can tell you from long experience that we are not the wild-eyed, alarmist lot that the Wall Street Journal makes us out to be. This makes for some very dull parties (if you're not excited about discussing quasi-geostrophic theory), when we get together for a big bash. Very little alarming behavior takes place. (In fact, after I dragged my wife to three straight devastatingly dull departmental Christmas parties while I was in graduate school, she forbade me from ever requiring her to go to another.) Atmospheric scientists are not an alarmist lot--put us in quiet room with a window and give us a computer and pile of data to analyze, and we'll be as happy as a clam at high tide. The portrayal of climate scientists as alarmist, money-grubbing, dishonest hucksters out to destroy the economy to further their own selfish desires for money or fame is a common theme in climate change denial attacks, and is a very narrow-minded and ignorant one. It's more convenient to shoot the messenger than to acknowledge the truth of the bad news they're bringing.
Toleration of false alarms
It is possible that the alarms climate scientists are raising over climate change will turn out to be false. Environmental scientists have in the past issued false alarms over environmental problems that did not materialize as expected. However, we should expect and tolerate some degree of false alarms, given the uncertainty in forecasting these events. If our scientists never issue a false alarm, then the tolerance for issuing alarms is not correct. Would you criticize the National Weather Service for issuing a tornado warning when a possible tornado signature is spotted on Doppler radar, since less than half of these signatures result in in an actual tornado touchdown? Or the National Hurricane Center for issuing a hurricane warning, since only 25% of the warned coast receives hurricane-force winds, on average? No, some degree of false alarms must be tolerated. Our weather forecasters are dedicated public servants, doing their job of warning the public when their best scientific judgment indicates that there might be a significant threat. It is no different with our climate scientists. They are predicting that there is a greater than 90% chance that most of the observed global warming is due to human causes. Climate scientists are extremely concerned about what their scientific results are saying, and are doing their utmost to warn a public resistant to acknowledging the danger. This resistance runs very deep among conservatives. A 2008 Pew Center poll found that 75% of Democrats with a college education believed that humans were responsible for global warming, while only 19% of college educated Republicans believed that. Conservatives' core belief that a capitalist, free market economy with limited regulation is the best economic system in the world is challenged by acknowledging that human-caused global warming is real and a threat. I greatly respect conservatives who can objectively evaluate the validity of global warming science while holding that core belief, for it is difficult to accept that the best economic system in the world could spawn such a self-destructive force. But as I detailed in a post last week, corporations, by law, exist to make a profit. If scientific research shows that a corporation's products may be harmful to the public health, it the obligation of the company to its shareholders to employ whatever legal means possible to cast doubt on this science, in order to protect profits. The profits of the richest and most powerful industry the planet has ever seen--the fossil fuel industry--are currently so threatened. Thus, we are being subject to history's greatest campaign to deny science, and it is keeping us from much-needed action to curb the danger. These voices are telling us what we want to hear--the danger is not real, the scientists are corrupt and are falsifying their data, the uncertainties are great, and that we cannot afford to change. But the laws of physics don't care about ideology or free market economies or election cycles. The overwhelming majority of our top climate scientists are saying that the laws of physics dictate that massive amounts of greenhouse gases, when added to the atmosphere, will cause warming that will be very damaging to civilization. If we are to limit that damage, we must act soon, for the approaching storm will grow ever stronger the longer we wait. Don't shoot the messengers-- they are on your side.
Other posts in this series
Embattled UK climate scientist steps down
The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
Is more CO2 beneficial for Earth's ecosystems?
Next post
My timing of my next post will depend upon the weather.
Our Climate Change expert, Dr. Ricky Rood, is in Copenhagen for this week's crucial COP15 climate change treaty negotiations. Be sure to tune into his blog for updates on the talks. Wunderground has provided financial support for several University of Michigan students to attend the talks, and I may be featuring portions of their blogs over the coming weeks.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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(Still can't figure out the logic of the cut trees.....)
Not at Joe Robbie Stadium, or whatever they're calling it now. There you drive asphalt into the parking lot but park on grass! (Funny-looking, for sure, and I couldn't believe it, first time I went.)
What??
And make all the buildings ugly with solar panels jutting off of the roofs??
Get a grip there Baha.
:-)
That looks like an interesting website. Here's its article on global warming: Link
Cool concept.
What do u say to kids 50 years from now who say things like, "OOh, look at those nasty looking dark roofs pple used to have in the old days.....". LOL
Exactly!
lobbying and speaking out as well as making your own personal changes, kudos to u. This is more of what we need.
(Still can't figure out the logic of the cut trees.....)
If we only wrote corporations as much as we wrote the gov.
Then the companies would change to match our wants.
And be able to keep the jobs here.
Our actions/response to/the purchase or non purchase of the goods that companies produce have a better response from said companies than any regulated forcing.
Dont get me wrong of course regulation is needed.
But regulation should be a floor.
Not a ceiling.
Saints. Intercept.
Yeah, who'da thunk it?
http://www.wattsupwiththat.com and http://climateaudit.org. these two sites and the people who run them have had the legitmate questions about the process behind numerous assertions of global warming; especailly the data and model... i think many people have concerns about the agendas that are being pushed that are using data and models that appear to not be what they are advertised to be.
I have in the past found whatsupw/
A very interesting site.
Actually, they moved all the native trees and relocated sensitive species.
No they did not!
Animals yes they made sure of.
But I drive past that site every workday!
And trust me it was cut down and not dug!
Ok sorry yes sensitive orchids and some other plants and animals.
But Bromeliads that are dying by the hundreds of thousands due to an introduced weevil were swept away with pine trees and palmettos,Along with other common native species.
And there were other areas full of INVASIVE Maleuka trees that may have been a better choice for clearcut.
As I said, they moved the native trees and other sensitive species. They had very sound reasons for not using rooftops. There is newer solar technology that will be commercially available in the next 5 years or so. It will be lighter weight and better suited to rooftop installation, and they are saving the rooftops to install those panels in their next phase of solar implementation instead of putting old technology up there now, knowing that it would be far more difficult and costly to replace.
Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline
some excerpts:
climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.
They then employ complex computer programs to combine such “proxy” data sampled throughout a region to plot that area’s annual relative changes in temperature hundreds or even thousands of years prior. By then combining the datasets, they believe they can accurately reproduce hemispheric and global temperature trends of the previous millennia.
And while reconstructions -- as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called -- can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past.
Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be.
and I always love a happy ending:
Of course, asking Americans to pay reparations based on the claim they’ve done harm to other nations by spoiling the climate is like asking me to pay damages to my neighbor based on his claim that he can’t sell his house because my great-grandmother’s ghost is haunting it.
As many have known and Climategate has proven, either would be equally preposterous.
But at least belief in ghosts is only marginally inspired by fraud.
They cleared all the invasive/non-native trees and bushes. They moved the natives.
Simpson stopper,Cocoplum,Bald cypress,Necklace pod,Florida Red Maple.
All destroyed!
I dont care what you read!
I saw it!
When I found out what they were doing is when I started writing and calling local radio!
Who dat say gonna beat dem SAINTS????!!!!!!
But natives were slaughtered!
Yeah, I know.
My daugher-in-law was one of those students who helped remove the non-native trees and is still paying for it.
She thought it would be cute to kick the smaller logs over to the pick-up piles and hurt her hip in the process. She was limping like a 90 year old for months. Yes, she learned her lesson.
I've no dog in that fight, but, um, Peyton?
Bring it on!!!
Big Time--can't wait to see it, just for the love of the game.
i used to be a student at FGCU (was majoring in marine biology) and i can attest that FGCU is one of the most eco friendly campuses in america. its entire mission statement is dependant on survival of the environment.
while i dont doubt a few native plants were taken away, so were multitudes of australian pines. plus, the solar panels will go along way towards making FGCU energy independent.
And now a possible cooling that shows some evidence of happening now.
Remember old = moderated graphing.
New =sharper graphing.
Oh and did the whomever create the warming 12 to 15 thousand years ago?
And generally speaking.
The end of a given cycle sometimes shows the most rapid acceleration of said change before reversal.
Come on folks lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Lets not reduce the wealth of the world in order to reduce mmgw that is not proven.
That wealth could be used later to better clean benefit.
its called "lakeshark" and the phins WON!!!!!!!!
Oh of course FGCU is fantastic with environmental progress.
Thats why As I watched I was shocked.
Now I am even more shocked as to the fallacy that they relocated native plants.
What relocated 1 for every 1000?
This needs more investigation.
Did they recieve funds for said removal?
Because that is not what happened.
I was tempted to retrieve some of the plants for my own yard!
But was afraid I would get arrested.
Someone show me where even 1 acre of native plants were moved to and what was the survival rate?
Actually, it's currently Landshark. (Jimmy Buffett has his brewery in Jax which at first glance appears incomprehensible, until you remember its distinguished history of brewing.)
And yes, Our Fish hung tough. Perhaps this is what rebuilding looks like.
Oil is making some powerful corporations rich while polluting our enviroment. Why continue to support that. You could be making energy at your house & selling it to the grid, powering your car~ spending your money on other things. Oil was the final straw that ruined the economy when gas skyrocketed & the price of everything shipped including food then went crazy. It's time to not let that happen again & move on.
I have a theory, myself. It is not scientific.
They will not have a winning season until they change their stupid, offensive name. BAD karma!
Go ahead and hit me with your "overly PC" label!
I just think a name change would be keeping up with the times and common courtesy.
There are no teams named blackskins, whiteskins, yellowskins, or purple skins (can't forget the purple dancing hippo)...and that's a very good thing.
WHOOOOOOO WHO DAT!!! Thats all I gotz to say about that!
Congrats to the Dolphins for sockin it to Brady!
Yes to all the above.
I truly understand.
But please dont go down the path of Gov will fix.
Gov can help create the environment that clears the way for the consumer and the producer go the cleaner way.
But forced direction = assured failure and prolonging the best result.
We already beat one Manning, bring it!!
First 7.8pH is far from being acidic. That the worst projection "if CO2 blah blah"
The worry is over animals, diatoms, etc being able to form exo skeletons.
Corals are over 500 million years old. Diatoms, etc are even older. If you have ever used diatomaceous earth for anything, that is mined on land because they settled to the bottom of the sea millions of years ago.
In millions of years CO2 has been higher/lower, temps have been higher/lower and they did just fine.
Even when things changed a lot faster than the worst projections right now.
There is nothing to back up those projections of what the oceans may or may not do. It's just different hypothesis of what it "might" do.
Deep ocean has a much lower pH. Upwellings can bring that low pH water right up to the reef, and does. But the pH goes right back up because of calcium carbonate (aragonite).
There is a reason that people with salt water aquariums use aragonite gravel. The calcium carbonate buffers the water. Just like it does in the ocean.
You have nothing to worry about.
Sorry, resume normal broadcasting. :-)
As long as it was pure market forces that drove fuel prices up that would be fine.
But (just my assumption)There were many more governmental factors that played into the increase in price.
So here we are.
What direction will produce the overall best outcome?
Climategate summary
american thinker
sorry.. it's Joe Robbie's stadium and always will.. go Fins! I wouldn't mind an Indy NO SB.. both teams are class acts and it wouldn't wound me to see them join us in the undefeated ranks.. just not the patsies.
Goldman Sachs got into the oil speculation bidness.. and it cost us.. they just invested in carbon credits.. we'll be paying for that too if they have their way
So concerned students did the correct thing and moved small saplings to a better place.
Great that is concerned citicens doing the correct thing.
BUT!
The old growth was completely destroyed.
As I said not more than an acre of the 16+ acres relocated.
But congrats to the concerned active students.
Link
The governments of the world came together & seriously curbed ozone destroying pollutants. I don't support cap & trade. If the governments would just stop subsidizing & defending these corporations that would be enough for me.
Lat~ Please read the link I left..undersaturation of calcium carbonate. Imagine your saltwater tank without enough calcium carbonate. It's already happening.
Home wind turbine $1050..these have improved so much.
Improved dendroclimatology techniques may help end climatic speculation related to tree ring analysis
The Smoking Code, part 2
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