Friday 12 December 2008

Report Unreported

Except by Fabius Maximus:

Over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore. This new 231-page U.S. Senate Minority Report — updated from 2007’s groundbreaking report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus” — features the skeptical voices of over 650 prominent international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC.

This updated report includes an additional 250 (and growing) scientists and climate researchers since the initial release in December 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grow louder in 2008 as a steady stream of peer reviewed studies, analyses, real world data, and inconvenient developments challenged the UN and former Vice President Al Gore’s claims that the “science is settled” and there is a “consensus.” On a range of issues, 2008 proved to be challenging for the promoters of man-made climate fears. Promoters of anthropogenic warming fears endured the following:

1. Global temperatures failing to warm,
2. Peer-reviwed studies predicting a continued lack of warming,
3. A failed attempt to revive the discredited “Hockey Stick,
4. Inconvenient developments, and
5. Studies regarding CO2, the Sun; clouds, Antarctica, the Arctic, Greenland, Mount Kilimanjaro, hurricanes, extreme storms, floods, ocean acidification, polar bears, lack of atmosphieric dust, the failure of oceans to warm, and rise as predicted.

In addition, the following developments further secured 2008 as the year the “consensus” collapsed.

1. Russian scientists “rejected the very idea that carbon dioxide may be responsible for global warming”.
An American Physical Society editor conceded that a considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exist.
2. An International team of scientists countered the UN IPCC, declaring: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate”.
3. India issued a report challenging global warming fears.
4. International scientists demanded the UN IPCC “be called to account and cease its deceptive practices,” and
5. A canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed 68% disagree that global warming science is “settled.”

The arguments against high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs, and thus against the economic basis that these provide for paternal authority within the family and the community; against energy independence, an integral part of national sovereignty; against ordinary people's opportunities to travel; and against the economic development of the poorest parts of the world; are, to put it at its politest, unproven.

11 comments:

  1. Hi David,

    What science qualifications do you have? What is your basis for evaluating these competing claims about the reality of man-made global warming?

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  2. None to compare with those of the 650 signatories to this report to the US Congress even individually, never mind all together. What about yours? Are you a better-qualified scientist than all 650 of them put together?

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  3. What have I got to do with it? I'm not expressing a view one way or the other.

    You have no qualifications to compare with the thousands of scientists who disagree with the 650 you mention, either. So what's your basis for evaluating the competing claims?

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  4. "the thousands of scientists who disagree"

    Ah, them. I wondered how long it would take.

    Who are they? Where are they? Every time a body of named individuals dissents from this purely political, and in those terms rather nasty, project, out come "the thousands of scientists who disagree". But who are they? (George Monbiot? Pull the other one!) Where are they?

    It is rather like stem cell research, where all the actually scientific work is being done on adult and cord blood stem cells, but where the scientifically useless "research" on embryonic stem cells is held up as the "scientific" side of the argument because it is the ideologically approved side.

    For whatever reason, you don't want high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for our own working classes in general, and for working-class men in particular. I do.

    For whatever reason, you don't want energy independence. I do.

    For whatever reason, you don't want ordinary people to be able to travel. I do.

    And for whatever reason, you don't want the poorest parts of the world to develop economically. I do.

    Fair enough, let's have the debate. But it is a debate about politics, not science.

    And in that political debate, it is the four causes that I set out above which are absolute and non-negotiable. Technology has to be designed around our economic, social, cultural and political needs and aspirations. As, of course, it always has been.

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  5. Monbiot has a strangehold on the debate in this country. This totally unqualified too-rich-to-need-to-worker is beyond question.

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  6. Not here, he isn't.

    Whether there is climate change or whether there isn't, and whether it is global warming or whether it isn't, proper jobs, proper fatherhood guaranteed by such jobs, energy independence, travel opportunities, and global economic development are the framework within which whatever there is must be addressed.

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  7. The scientists on the other side do exist as you no doubt know.

    But they have the political motivations that you describe, at least when writing on this issue. And they are often barely or not at all qualified in this field. Their convenient political agenda gives them a hearing, though.

    Someone will no doubt send you a great long list of the relevant bodies. Ignore it. They are all the same people on all of them. And they are all as I set out above.

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  8. Thanks, Jack.

    As I said before, this is a political debate, in which I regard certain public policy goods as non-negotiable.

    If the global warming lobby can show me how their anti-CO2 (also, and very tellingly, their anti-nuclear) demands can be met while securing proper jobs, proper fatherhood guaranteed by such jobs, energy independence, travel opportunities, and global economic development, then fine.

    If not, then they have nothing to say to me.

    So, over to them.

    I'll be back tomorrow afternoon.

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  9. Jack's right. The scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the InterAcademy Council, the national science academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Network of African Science Academies, the National Research Council (US), the European Science Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Scientists, the World Meteorological Organization, the American Meteorological Society, the Royal Meteorological Society, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the International Union for Quaternary Research, the American Quaternary Association, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the International Union of Geological Sciences, the European Geosciences Union, the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences, the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Society for Microbiology, the Institute of Biology, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Public Health Association, the American Medical Association, the American Statistical Association, Engineers Australia, the Water Environment Federation, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, the Federal Climate Change Science Program are all the same people, and most of them aren't qualified at all.

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  10. I've no great opinion either way about this. But surely you recognise that simply having 650 people opposed to something doesn't make them equally valid to 650 people supporting something? The whole essense of scentific method is to weigh up the strength of competing claims.

    If I got 649 of my mates together and we wrote to Congress saying "we are sceptical of the claims that the world is round", then that wouldn't make us equally valid as 650 people saying "er, yes it is".

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  11. Thank you for proving Jack's point, Charlie.

    "But surely you recognise that simply having 650 people opposed to something doesn't make them equally valid to 650 people supporting something?"

    It depends though they are.

    The point here is that the much-vaunted "consensus" on this, with all its implicit and explicit demands with regard to public policy and private behaviour, simply does not exist.

    And even if it did, how would proper jobs, proper fatherhood guaranteed by such jobs, energy independence, travel opportunities, and global economic development continue to be secured?

    THAT is what matters.

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