Talk about inconvenient truths.....
I saw on Fox News earlier this week that the average global temperature dropped in 2008.
Oops. Sorry Al!
In fact, the story continued, global temperatures have been falling for the past six consecutive years!
Perfect timing for the New Messiah to publicly anoint Warm Boy Al Gore our new national climate conscience. And to announce serious Federal government efforts to tackle the suddenly-vanished 'global warming' trend.
So much for honesty, when bad science and denial work better for persisting in the need to 'solve' a non-existent problem. And, if existent, one that may well not be, and has yet to be proven to be, caused by human behavior.
Showing posts with label Bad Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bad Science. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
More Doubts About Global Warming
Friday's Wall Street Journal printed an editorial by Patrick Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at UVA, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, entitled "Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess."
Essentially, Michaels convincingly argues that the UN' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been restating climate data fast and furiously, the better to provide further, more dramatic appearance of a recent global warming trend.
As Michaels writes in the editorial,
"The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.
For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.
These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records. They are the surface record from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the satellite-sensed temperatures originally published by University of Alabama's John Christy, and the weather-balloon records originally published by James Angell of the U.S. Commerce Department.
The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more warming – from largely the same data."
So we see the beginning of a trend at the IPCC- scrub, restate and selectively omit prior data in order to result in one-way temperature change estimates. Always higher.
Michaels continues,
"The balloon temperatures got a similar treatment. While these originally showed no warming since the late 1970s, inclusion of all the data beginning in 1958 resulted in a slight warming trend. In 2003, some tropical balloon data, largely from poor countries, were removed because their records seemed to vary too much from year to year. This change also resulted in an increased warming trend. Another check for quality control in 2005 created further warming, doubling the initial overall rate.
Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don't last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none.
There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small."
Michaels' last point is pretty compelling. The chance that all corrections to a data series, ex post, would be in one direction, is pretty unlikely. This begs the question that more than random 'restatements' are occurring. There's almost certainly an agenda to get those temperatures rising faster in recent years.
Upon looking into the actual conditions of some of the sources of the alleged 'errors' found by the IPCC, Michaels writes,
"The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don't do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation, which is precisely what University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and I did. Last year we published our results in the Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that "non-climatic" effects in land-surface temperatures – GDP per capita, among other things – exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.'s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth's surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.
Another interesting thing happens to the U.N.'s data when it's adjusted for the non-climatic factors. The frequency of very warm months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite data, which show fewer very hot months. That's a pretty good sign that there are fundamental problems with the surface temperature history. At any rate, our findings have not been incorporated into the IPCC's history, and they probably never will be."
So Michaels reports that, when actual conditions of the data sources are investigated, and adjustments made, much of the putative warming trends in restated data simple vanish. But you won't be seeing those results in further IPCC publications.
However, perhaps the most ludicrous finding by Michaels comes at the close of his piece. He writes of the alleged warming of Greenland,
"The fear of a sudden loss of ice from Greenland also makes a lot of news. A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of "Warming Island," a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water. Hence Warming Island, which some said hadn't been uncovered for thousands of years. CNN, ABC and the BBC made field trips to the island.
Warming Island has a very distinctive shape, and it lies off of Carlsbad Fjord, in eastern Greenland. My colleague Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, "Arctic Riviera," published in 1957 (near the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There's a map in his book: It shows Warming Island.
The mechanism for the Greenland disaster is that summer warming creates rivers, called moulins, that descend into the ice cap, lubricating a rapid collapse and raising sea levels by 20 feet in the next 90 years. In Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth," there's a wonderful picture of a moulin on page 193, with the text stating "These photographs from Greenland illustrate some of the dramatic changes now happening on the ice there."
Really? There's a photograph in the journal "Arctic," published in 1953 by R.H. Katz, captioned "River disappearing in 40-foot deep gorge," on Greenland's Adolf Hoels Glacier. It's all there in the open literature, but apparently that's too inconvenient to bring up. Greenland didn't shed its ice then. There was no acceleration of the rise in sea level."
So we see that our modern media, with little appreciation for history, is mistaking natural climate cycles, and their effects on, for instance, Greenland, with allegedly heretofore unexperienced effects of recent warming.
Michaels' final story is about the discovery of ancient trees in the Arctic tundra, noting,
"Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn't Greenland shed its ice?"
He concludes his editorial with these sentiments,
"This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?
But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland's ice – we should be talking about reality."
Once again, we see human behavior at work in the global warming issue. But not spewing more carbon. Rather, altering data to insure that the many politically-correct people now being lavishly paid to study 'global warming' and its effects continue to have employment- no matter what the truth of the matter.
Essentially, Michaels convincingly argues that the UN' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been restating climate data fast and furiously, the better to provide further, more dramatic appearance of a recent global warming trend.
As Michaels writes in the editorial,
"The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.
For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.
These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records. They are the surface record from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the satellite-sensed temperatures originally published by University of Alabama's John Christy, and the weather-balloon records originally published by James Angell of the U.S. Commerce Department.
The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more warming – from largely the same data."
So we see the beginning of a trend at the IPCC- scrub, restate and selectively omit prior data in order to result in one-way temperature change estimates. Always higher.
Michaels continues,
"The balloon temperatures got a similar treatment. While these originally showed no warming since the late 1970s, inclusion of all the data beginning in 1958 resulted in a slight warming trend. In 2003, some tropical balloon data, largely from poor countries, were removed because their records seemed to vary too much from year to year. This change also resulted in an increased warming trend. Another check for quality control in 2005 created further warming, doubling the initial overall rate.
Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don't last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none.
There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small."
Michaels' last point is pretty compelling. The chance that all corrections to a data series, ex post, would be in one direction, is pretty unlikely. This begs the question that more than random 'restatements' are occurring. There's almost certainly an agenda to get those temperatures rising faster in recent years.
Upon looking into the actual conditions of some of the sources of the alleged 'errors' found by the IPCC, Michaels writes,
"The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don't do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation, which is precisely what University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and I did. Last year we published our results in the Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that "non-climatic" effects in land-surface temperatures – GDP per capita, among other things – exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.'s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth's surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.
Another interesting thing happens to the U.N.'s data when it's adjusted for the non-climatic factors. The frequency of very warm months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite data, which show fewer very hot months. That's a pretty good sign that there are fundamental problems with the surface temperature history. At any rate, our findings have not been incorporated into the IPCC's history, and they probably never will be."
So Michaels reports that, when actual conditions of the data sources are investigated, and adjustments made, much of the putative warming trends in restated data simple vanish. But you won't be seeing those results in further IPCC publications.
However, perhaps the most ludicrous finding by Michaels comes at the close of his piece. He writes of the alleged warming of Greenland,
"The fear of a sudden loss of ice from Greenland also makes a lot of news. A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of "Warming Island," a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water. Hence Warming Island, which some said hadn't been uncovered for thousands of years. CNN, ABC and the BBC made field trips to the island.
Warming Island has a very distinctive shape, and it lies off of Carlsbad Fjord, in eastern Greenland. My colleague Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, "Arctic Riviera," published in 1957 (near the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There's a map in his book: It shows Warming Island.
The mechanism for the Greenland disaster is that summer warming creates rivers, called moulins, that descend into the ice cap, lubricating a rapid collapse and raising sea levels by 20 feet in the next 90 years. In Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth," there's a wonderful picture of a moulin on page 193, with the text stating "These photographs from Greenland illustrate some of the dramatic changes now happening on the ice there."
Really? There's a photograph in the journal "Arctic," published in 1953 by R.H. Katz, captioned "River disappearing in 40-foot deep gorge," on Greenland's Adolf Hoels Glacier. It's all there in the open literature, but apparently that's too inconvenient to bring up. Greenland didn't shed its ice then. There was no acceleration of the rise in sea level."
So we see that our modern media, with little appreciation for history, is mistaking natural climate cycles, and their effects on, for instance, Greenland, with allegedly heretofore unexperienced effects of recent warming.
Michaels' final story is about the discovery of ancient trees in the Arctic tundra, noting,
"Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn't Greenland shed its ice?"
He concludes his editorial with these sentiments,
"This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?
But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland's ice – we should be talking about reality."
Once again, we see human behavior at work in the global warming issue. But not spewing more carbon. Rather, altering data to insure that the many politically-correct people now being lavishly paid to study 'global warming' and its effects continue to have employment- no matter what the truth of the matter.
Monday, October 29, 2007
More Inconvenient Truth About Ethanol
Holman Jenkins' Wednesday Wall Street Journal article about the far left castigating Toyota for its stand on CAFE standards. Standing with other auto manufacturers who rely on large, less fuel-efficient, profitable cars that people actually want, to fund the sale of the "profitless Prius," Toyota is catching flack from the same greenies who buy its hybrid car.
To provide us with a better understanding of the issue, Holman distills it thusly,
"As car companies do, it sold Prius customers a car that met their needs and/or flattered their vanity. For other customers whose hot buttons lie elsewhere, Toyota has the Tundra, its giant, fuel-consuming pickup. Auto companies only achieve efficient scale by appealing to different consumer appetites. The profitless Prius wouldn't exist if not for the non-hybrids that keep Toyota in business. Indeed, Toyota supports the House bill over the Senate bill only because it would let auto makers continue to make big vehicles that happen to be the ones Americans, with their dollars, show they actually want.
But the 32-year-old CAFE rules have become a fetish of environmental groups, a talisman of their clout, a ticket to a seat at a table in Washington. The policy itself has no value: It doesn't reduce oil imports. It doesn't meaningfully curb fossil-fuel use.
In the nature of things, auto buyers amortize their forced investment in fuel economy by driving more miles, burning more gas. The impressive reliability gains of the auto makers over the past 30 years are in part a reflection of this consumer demand for more miles. Ditto the conspicuous increase in vehicle size and comfort, partly a function of the increased time motorists spend in their cars."
To illustrate an as-yet unrealized hypocrisy, Jenkins notes, further down in the piece, this tasty little morsel concerning what converting to ethanol will do for total greenhouse gas emissions,
"A recently passed Senate bill would require motorists to buy 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, up from 7.5 billion gallons under current law.
At least this would benefit the atmosphere, right? Think again. A research team featuring Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, recently showed that the intensive cultivation of biofuels in the U.S. and Europe produces up to 70% more greenhouse effect than the fossil fuels they displace (nitrous oxide, a byproduct of the fertilizers used, has nearly 300 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide).
Passenger cars can burn fuel consisting of 10% ethanol. If our goal were really to displace conventional gasoline, we'd open our coastal markets to sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil and other Southern Hemisphere countries, produced by less intensive methods that result -- irony alert -- in a genuine reduction in greenhouse emissions.
But Washington blocks imported ethanol with a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to protect domestic ethanol profits. So let's sum up the ways you're paying to prop up an industry that's bad for energy security and bad for climate worries: higher taxes, higher gas prices and higher food prices. Did we mention the 3% mileage penalty that comes from burning gasoline with a 10% ethanol content, thanks to ethanol's inferior BTU value compared to gasoline?"
I have to admit, I love the naive hypocrisy of the populist environmentalists.
They want less oil usage. They want to buy expensive hybrid technology cars cheaply, even though the cars still don't make economic sense to operate. They want fewer greenhouse emissions while also advocating ethanol.
But, as Crutzen's work demonstrates, there's a contradiction. Moe ethanol means more greenhouse gases to cultivate the biofuels, not to mention soil erosion and forest depletion, as mentioned here. In fact, I've read an article, the exact location of which escapes me just now, that more widespread use of ethanol is likely to lead to the accelerated disappearance of South American rainforests, the better to be replanted with biofuels.
Call me crazy, but isn't it nonsensical to use a lot of a major food source to replace a more efficiently-burning fossil fuel? We can't eat oil.
Between the water-intensive nature of ethanol production, its relative inefficiency for power generation, compared to petroleum-based products, and the devastation of more land to plant corn for ethanol, the green lobby and its citizen-followers are likely to wake up to an environmental mess sooner, rather than later.
Then there's the inflation in food costs that will result from this switch of a major consumable, corn, from foodstuff to auto fuel.
Hitting voters hard in their wallets is never a good way to secure their long term support for a still-unproven 'crisis,' i.e., scientifically proven, human-caused global warming.
To provide us with a better understanding of the issue, Holman distills it thusly,
"As car companies do, it sold Prius customers a car that met their needs and/or flattered their vanity. For other customers whose hot buttons lie elsewhere, Toyota has the Tundra, its giant, fuel-consuming pickup. Auto companies only achieve efficient scale by appealing to different consumer appetites. The profitless Prius wouldn't exist if not for the non-hybrids that keep Toyota in business. Indeed, Toyota supports the House bill over the Senate bill only because it would let auto makers continue to make big vehicles that happen to be the ones Americans, with their dollars, show they actually want.
But the 32-year-old CAFE rules have become a fetish of environmental groups, a talisman of their clout, a ticket to a seat at a table in Washington. The policy itself has no value: It doesn't reduce oil imports. It doesn't meaningfully curb fossil-fuel use.
In the nature of things, auto buyers amortize their forced investment in fuel economy by driving more miles, burning more gas. The impressive reliability gains of the auto makers over the past 30 years are in part a reflection of this consumer demand for more miles. Ditto the conspicuous increase in vehicle size and comfort, partly a function of the increased time motorists spend in their cars."
To illustrate an as-yet unrealized hypocrisy, Jenkins notes, further down in the piece, this tasty little morsel concerning what converting to ethanol will do for total greenhouse gas emissions,
"A recently passed Senate bill would require motorists to buy 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, up from 7.5 billion gallons under current law.
At least this would benefit the atmosphere, right? Think again. A research team featuring Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, recently showed that the intensive cultivation of biofuels in the U.S. and Europe produces up to 70% more greenhouse effect than the fossil fuels they displace (nitrous oxide, a byproduct of the fertilizers used, has nearly 300 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide).
Passenger cars can burn fuel consisting of 10% ethanol. If our goal were really to displace conventional gasoline, we'd open our coastal markets to sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil and other Southern Hemisphere countries, produced by less intensive methods that result -- irony alert -- in a genuine reduction in greenhouse emissions.
But Washington blocks imported ethanol with a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to protect domestic ethanol profits. So let's sum up the ways you're paying to prop up an industry that's bad for energy security and bad for climate worries: higher taxes, higher gas prices and higher food prices. Did we mention the 3% mileage penalty that comes from burning gasoline with a 10% ethanol content, thanks to ethanol's inferior BTU value compared to gasoline?"
I have to admit, I love the naive hypocrisy of the populist environmentalists.
They want less oil usage. They want to buy expensive hybrid technology cars cheaply, even though the cars still don't make economic sense to operate. They want fewer greenhouse emissions while also advocating ethanol.
But, as Crutzen's work demonstrates, there's a contradiction. Moe ethanol means more greenhouse gases to cultivate the biofuels, not to mention soil erosion and forest depletion, as mentioned here. In fact, I've read an article, the exact location of which escapes me just now, that more widespread use of ethanol is likely to lead to the accelerated disappearance of South American rainforests, the better to be replanted with biofuels.
Call me crazy, but isn't it nonsensical to use a lot of a major food source to replace a more efficiently-burning fossil fuel? We can't eat oil.
Between the water-intensive nature of ethanol production, its relative inefficiency for power generation, compared to petroleum-based products, and the devastation of more land to plant corn for ethanol, the green lobby and its citizen-followers are likely to wake up to an environmental mess sooner, rather than later.
Then there's the inflation in food costs that will result from this switch of a major consumable, corn, from foodstuff to auto fuel.
Hitting voters hard in their wallets is never a good way to secure their long term support for a still-unproven 'crisis,' i.e., scientifically proven, human-caused global warming.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Some Global Warming Observations
Last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal printed an editorial entitled "Global Warming Delusions," by Daniel Botkin, a scientist with 40 years of experience working in environmental sciences, and currently president of the Center for the Study of the Environment.
In this piece, Mr. Botkin describes the delusional fixation some of his brethren have developed for causing near-hysterical concern about global warming. He writes, in part,
"And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.
Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20%-30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming -- a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age -- saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.
Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.
Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change."
Mr. Botkin describes an article in which the author explains the melting of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro as due to radiant heat, not air temperature. Because his conclusions did not fit the global warming views of many other scientists, Botkin writes that the scientist's paper "is scorned by the true believers in global warming."
Botkin goes on to provide examples of significant environmental changes that are not due to the earth's air temperature. He bemoans his colleagues obsession with raising consciousness on the subject at any cost,
"My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.
Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves."
When someone who is both a scientist and an environmentalist holds these views, you know the global warming craze has gone too far.
In this piece, Mr. Botkin describes the delusional fixation some of his brethren have developed for causing near-hysterical concern about global warming. He writes, in part,
"And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.
Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20%-30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming -- a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age -- saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.
Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.
Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change."
Mr. Botkin describes an article in which the author explains the melting of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro as due to radiant heat, not air temperature. Because his conclusions did not fit the global warming views of many other scientists, Botkin writes that the scientist's paper "is scorned by the true believers in global warming."
Botkin goes on to provide examples of significant environmental changes that are not due to the earth's air temperature. He bemoans his colleagues obsession with raising consciousness on the subject at any cost,
"My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.
Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves."
When someone who is both a scientist and an environmentalist holds these views, you know the global warming craze has gone too far.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Bad Science, Sloppy Analysis
The Wall Street Journal, in its Friday "Science Journal" column on September 14th, reported on medical scholar John Ioannidis' review of 'scientific research, ' both published and, especially troubling, refereed.
The headline on this topic is that much published science is misleading, inaccurate, and/or simply wrong. Ioannidis found flaws in miscalculations, inept study design, and self-serving data analyses. In the Journal piece, he is quoted as saying,
"There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."
Dr. Ioannidis goes on to warn that the 'hotter' the field, the more suspect are the research findings claims.
As I was reading this article, one topic kept coming to mind. Of course, it's global warming.
Of all the recent junk science claims, global warming would seem to most fit Dr. Ionannidis' description of poorly done, dubious claims.
Little of the supporting "evidence" comes from refereed papers or Journal articles. Instead, those who would dispute any global warming findings are shouted down as in the pocket of big business, or having the wrong politics.
Environmental change is perhaps, currently, the penultimate 'hot' field. Each new finding supporting global warming is front page news. Conflicting findings are often simply ignored.
For instance, the recent discovery that this century's hottest year was actually early on, in the first two decades, poked a major hole in on Federal government scientist's contentions regarding recent warming trends. When confronted with his mistake, he alleged that recent temperature trends were not the basis on which he had made various claims.
Dr. Ioannidis' own research is both refreshing, and troubling. Refreshing for daring to find that many scientists' work is poorly done, mistake-laden, and suspect. Troubling, in that much government policy and public perception are shaped by such incorrect published scientific work.
The headline on this topic is that much published science is misleading, inaccurate, and/or simply wrong. Ioannidis found flaws in miscalculations, inept study design, and self-serving data analyses. In the Journal piece, he is quoted as saying,
"There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."
Dr. Ioannidis goes on to warn that the 'hotter' the field, the more suspect are the research findings claims.
As I was reading this article, one topic kept coming to mind. Of course, it's global warming.
Of all the recent junk science claims, global warming would seem to most fit Dr. Ionannidis' description of poorly done, dubious claims.
Little of the supporting "evidence" comes from refereed papers or Journal articles. Instead, those who would dispute any global warming findings are shouted down as in the pocket of big business, or having the wrong politics.
Environmental change is perhaps, currently, the penultimate 'hot' field. Each new finding supporting global warming is front page news. Conflicting findings are often simply ignored.
For instance, the recent discovery that this century's hottest year was actually early on, in the first two decades, poked a major hole in on Federal government scientist's contentions regarding recent warming trends. When confronted with his mistake, he alleged that recent temperature trends were not the basis on which he had made various claims.
Dr. Ioannidis' own research is both refreshing, and troubling. Refreshing for daring to find that many scientists' work is poorly done, mistake-laden, and suspect. Troubling, in that much government policy and public perception are shaped by such incorrect published scientific work.
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