Global warming 'very likely' man-made-
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070201/ap_on_sc/france_climate_change_15
"The report being released Friday from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments — unanimously portrays the science of global warming as an existing and worsening threat, officials told The Associated Press.
"There's no question that the powerful language is intimately linked to the more powerful science," said study co-author Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria. Weaver said it is all based on science that is rock-solid, peer-reviewed, conservative and consensus"
I was put off by another (the vast majority of articles I found on the subject sound just like this one) assertion of "consensus" about global warming, because I was under the impression global warming itself was even under debate, not just human involvement in it.
Climate chaos? Don't believe it-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml
"The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.
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This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect."
And since I'm sure someone's already being careful and questioning the author's motives...
"The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon."
Apocalypse cancelled-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/05/warm-refs.pdf;jsessionid=DAOV0ACR02WFDQFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0
This is basically the reference and statistics page for the previous article.
"Case for action" climate scientists fear they've "oversold" global warming-
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4487421.html
""Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.
Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected "tension" among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties — a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public."
What I found suggests the UN and IPCC still have plenty more arguments to face within the scientific community, and the debate is far from over. With a disproportionately larger scope of input into the major media outlets, I feel it's wrong for one side to claim that the discussion is over and "trick" the public into thinking there simply isn't an opposing viewpoint. Personally, intuition leads me to put far more stock into an article or study that is honest, and lays all opposing viewpoints out on the table and debunks/discusses them. Why this is still rarely done among mainstream media? Is it just for a more entertaining story, or do members of the media sometimes have hidden agendas? Is there anything we can do to stop this (I don't think repealing the 1st amendment is in order or anything, but could media observational selection be successfully boycotted?)?
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7 comments:
The first article is by Christopher Monckton, who is a journalist and conservative politician, not a climate scientist. Would you want to handle a nuclear weapon created by a journalist? Then why rely on a complex scientific argument by a person unqualified to make the claims he does? It has been thoroughly debunked here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1947246,00.html
Monckton's article also appears in a newspaper article, not in a scientific journal, meaning that there is no review of his science by anyone else to see if it is valid, if he lied, if he made it up or if he just did it wrong.
The other article you include, sespite the heady title, actually says this:
"Nearly all climate scientists believe the Earth is warming and that human activity, by increasing the level of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, has contributed significantly to the warming."
It then goes on to cite one scientist who has some doubts not about the facts of global warming, but about the predictions of the effects, something that every scientist knows is imperfect. And does this one scientist, Vranes, have these concerns because of any research he's done or seen? No, he just has a feeling that he detected some "tension." I hope that didn't actually convince you of anything, because you did much better analysis of this type of thing in other comments.
>What I found suggests the UN and IPCC still have plenty more arguments to face within the scientific community, and the debate is far from over.
One, you didn't look very far, so what you found is not particularly representative. Two, there is, as always, debate over the specific details of how global warming works and its possible effects. There is no debate over its existence and its direct relationship to human activity. How can I make that claim? By reading actual scientific research in an actual peer-reviewed journal: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
"That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).
"The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
Read that last statement again -- there are 0 examples of valid scientific research articles that question the existence of global warming as a human-influenced phenomenon. None. It's possible there were some prior to 1993, but the overwhelming evidence since then would reject early work.
Even if the two articles you presented provided valid scientific evidence to doubt global warming, which they don't, they would be balanced out by the nearly 700 articles in scientific journals that say otherwise.
As for your contention that the media doesn't cover both sides of this story, that's not accurate either: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1978
"From a total of 3,543 articles, we examined a random sample of 636 articles. Our results showed that the majority of these stories were, in fact, structured on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, giving the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global warming."
It seems the major media outlets portray both sides quite frequently on this issue. That's actually a problem though:
"Balanced coverage does not, however, always mean accurate coverage. In terms of the global warming story, "balance" may allow skeptics—many of them funded by carbon-based industry interests—to be frequently consulted and quoted in news reports on climate change. Ross Gelbspan, drawing from his 31-year career as a reporter and editor, charges in his books The Heat Is On and Boiling Point that a failed application of the ethical standard of balanced reporting on issues of fact has contributed to inadequate U.S. press coverage of global warming"
The role of journalists is to report the facts, not be fair to every possible viewpoint. Reporting on global warming skeptics viewpoints is akin to reporting on the viewpoints of holocaust deniers or people who believe that we didn't land on the moon. For the media to give balanced coverage to both sides of this debate is a violation of journalistic principles and does a disservice to the public.
1- His being a journalist is exactly why I included his resource page (2nd link) which contains 6 and 1/4 pages of references, most of which appears to be scientifically peer reviewed.
2- If that's not enough, here's more evidence of controversy...
Cosmic rays blamed for global warming
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/11/warm11.xml
"Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.
This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing."
"there is a growing number of scientists who believe that the effect may be genuine.
Among them is Prof Bob Bingham, a clouds expert from the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils in Rutherford.
He said: "It is a relatively new idea, but there is some evidence there for this effect on clouds.""
>which contains 6 and 1/4 pages of references, most of which appears to be scientifically peer reviewed.
Sure, but none of these articles he cites from peer-reviewed journals agrees with his conclusion and he doesn't have the proper training to accurately evaluate climate science.
I'm familiar with Svensmark. I'm also familiar with the fact that even if all of the cited sources are valid science (which they aren't), that still makes it 1000-3 as far as global warming is concerned. That is not a controversy. That is a few skeptics who appear to be using bad science. "Consensus" doesn't mean 100% agreement. There is rarely any such thing (the desire for certainty fallacy). But when it comes to scientifically peer-reviewed research (the standard by which research is published), there is 100% agreement in the evidence.
"I'm familiar with Svensmark."
That may be, but I'd be interested to know what exactly what it is you know about his research... has this 'new' research already been debunked? Is the article incorrect in claiming that more and more scientists are beginning to see merit in his theory?
More consensus nay-sayers
http://www.sepp.org/
SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY PROJECT
Frederick Seitz, Ph.D, former president of the National Academy of Sciences
David L. Hill, Ph.D
S. Fred Singer, Ph.D
Bruce N. Ames, Ph.D
C.J.F. Böttcher, Ph.D
Tor Ragnar Gerholm, Ph.D
Michael J. Higatsberger, Ph.D
Henry R. Linden, Ph.D
Sir William Mitchell, Ph.D
William A. Nierenberg, Ph.D
Michel Salomon, M.D
Chauncey Starr, Ph.D
http://www.sepp.org/Archive/NewSEPP/Carbon-Bellamy.htm
Dr David Bellamy OBE
Jack Barrett, PhD
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Sallie Baliunas, astrophysicist
Willie Soon, astrophysicist
Richard Siegmund Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT
William M. "Bill" Gray, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University
Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland
Claude Allègre, French geophysicist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris)
Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University:
David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov, at Pulkovskaya Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the supervisor of the Astrometria project of the Russian section of the International Space Station
Robert M. Carter, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia
George V. Chilingar, professor of civil and petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California
Zbigniew Jaworowski, chair of the Scientific Council at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw
David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware
Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin
Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada
Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa
More Than 15,000 Scientists Protest Kyoto Accord; Speak Out Against Global Warming Myth
http://www.sepp.org/Archive/Publications/pressrel/petition.html
I should note that I make zero conclusions based on any of the evidence or suggestions made on global warming. I'm not a climate scientist. In fact, I break ranks with many sharing my ideology in this department, because I believe there should be government institutions that keep an eye on the worldwide climate health and potentially set limits... but I just don't want anybody to get carried away. It certainly wouldn't be the first time an enormous group of experts fell victim to groupthink, in fact it wouldn't be the first time THIS group did it. (As I understand it, the original predictions made at the onset of the C02 greenhouse effect theory, that should have already happened, haven't come true.)
I've heard about Svensmark book and I know that almost everyone who cites it says something other than what he actually says. His book does not say that global warming isn't caused by humans. He, in fact, says specifically that they do. His argument is simply that humans are a smaller factor than widely thought and that cosmic rays play a bigger role than widely thought. I also know that other scientists question his work and that there is, as of yet, nothing to corroborate Svensmark's study, making it anecdotal.
>has this 'new' research already been debunked?
A new book does not mean new research. Prior to publication, books are sent out to scientists and reviewers who respond to the work. Since this book officially came out today, a lot of people have already reviewed it.
>Is the article incorrect in claiming that more and more scientists are beginning to see merit in his theory?
Probably. "More and more" is a common element of journalistic laziness. How does the writer know that "more and more" people agree with Svensmark? The article cites one person and makes no reference to anyone else. From that, we are supposed to conclude "more and more"?
A consensus of people doesn't even begin to matter in the slightest. That would be the argument from authority. It is a consensus of the evidence, which is quite conclusive.
>but I just don't want anybody to get carried away.
Who is getting carried away? Sounds like a straw man to me. Is there anything that pro-global warming people are actually suggesting that would have any harm? If so, I haven't heard about it.
>It certainly wouldn't be the first time an enormous group of experts fell victim to groupthink,
No, but it would be incredibly rare in modern times.
>in fact it wouldn't be the first time THIS group did it. (As I understand it, the original predictions made at the onset of the C02 greenhouse effect theory, that should have already happened, haven't come true.)
True. They had incomplete information and the predictions were wrong. Predictions often are. Science can't predict the future very well -- again, largely because 100% of the information, particularly things that haven't happened yet, is not available. But don't mistakenly think that they were wrong then on one aspect of their predictions and that they started all over from scratch. The earlier information, which was historically correct and correct at the time was supplemented by new information to come to a better conclusion. They key thing they got "wrong" was the expected that we would be in a cooling trend now. And based on the historical evidence, we should be in a cooling trend now. We aren't, though, because global warming (whatever the cause) has overtaken the natural cooling trend.
""Our team ... has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. ... most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover."
-Svensmark
>Is there anything that pro-global warming people are actually suggesting that would have any harm? If so, I haven't heard about it.
The suggestions from sepp.org are that large industries won't foot any of the bill if they are unduly restricted by enviornmental legislation, and it'll directly hit the American wallets instead. Or that the industry will foot the bill, and lay off many many people at once; either scenario hurts economically.
>>It certainly wouldn't be the first time an enormous group of experts fell victim to groupthink,
>No, but it would be incredibly rare in modern times.
Iraqi WMDs? Space Shuttle Challenger? The aforementioned 'early predictions'? I think humanity is getting awfully full of itself, to a point that we think we're too advanced to make whatever mistakes we're currently rushing into.
>During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up.
I'm not sure anybody disputes this.
>... most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover."
What's before the ellipses? Where's the citation?
>Is there anything that pro-global warming people are actually suggesting that would have any harm? If so, I haven't heard about it.
>The suggestions from sepp.org are that large industries won't foot any of the bill if they are unduly restricted by enviornmental legislation, and it'll directly hit the American wallets instead.
Who is SEPP and why is there opinion valid? Who pays for their research and what do the numerous other authorities on the subject say about this slippery slope argument? What "bill" is going to be footed and who is actually proposing legislation to make people pay for this? The most common suggestions I've heard for slowing down global warming are changes in behavior and putting new technology (such as hybrid vehicles) on the market. These things increase profits for corporations, not decrease them. Similarly, if there is a "bill" that corporations will have to foot, it would be easy to pass a law to prevent them from making consumers pay for it. Not saying that is the right solution, just saying that the argument is flawed.
>Or that the industry will foot the bill, and lay off many many people at once; either scenario hurts economically.
This argument is continually made about regulation, yet there's little evidence to suggest that massive layoffs come because of regulation.
>Iraqi WMDs?
There was no enormous group of experts who agreed on this subject. There was huge disagreement, with the only experts with first-hand knowledge (weapons inspectors) saying no such weapons existed. Beyond that, we aren't talking about scientific knowledge, in this example, but politics, big difference.
>Space Shuttle Challenger?
What enormous group of experts are you referring to on this one and how were they wrong?
>The aforementioned 'early predictions'?
Things have changed since those predictions were made. Predictions are made without any knowledge of unforseen changes in the circumstances. There was nothing wrong with those conclusions at the time, new things in the environment changed the outcome.
>I think humanity is getting awfully full of itself, to a point that we think we're too advanced to make whatever mistakes we're currently rushing into.
I'm not even sure what this one means. Seems inconsistent with what you argue elsewhere.
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