A Lesson in Good Science (and Humility) for Global Warming Faithful from CERN Scientists

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” said last Friday cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees soon after a team of scientists working at CERN (European Scientific Research Organization), published a research paper in which they announced that neutrinos generated at the CERN research facility located in Switzerland were found to travel faster than the speed of light. Which was indeed an “extraordinary claim,” and in fact the team—a collaboration between France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory—took many months to carefully check, recheck and check some more their data before deciding that they could not disprove what their own eyes were telling them. As a matter of fact, as the so-called “scientific method” demands, a good scientist never says “never.” That’s also why Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team, said: “We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation.”

Never say never. But now, if we expand our field of vision to include the issue of global warming and climate change, a question arises spontaneously:

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if left-wing politicians, the environmental left and the mainstream media took a minute to reflect that if something so set in stone as the absoluteness of the speed of light might be overturned, perhaps these claims that the “science is settled” when it comes to global warming are a bit misplaced? Wouldn’t it be nice if all of those people put some effort into understanding the scientific research that tends to refute the alarmists – and there’s plenty of it out there – rather than turning the issue into a show of hands?

If This Is High School Physics (According to Al Gore)

Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever

Ehi folks, the evidence of man-made global warming is INCONTROVERTIBLE (as the American Physical Society states). And this is how Nobel laureate Al Gore—for those who don’t already know, the man who invented both the internet and anthropogenic global warming—described the science of climate change last Wednesday in a telephone interview: “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics!”

Yet, unfortunately for him, another Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever, resigned last week from the American Physical Society in protest of the group’s insistence on that very thing. In an email message to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the APS, Giaever wrote:

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of a proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?
The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me . . . that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.

And again unfortunately for Al Gore (and the APS), public perception of climate change has steadily fallen since late 2009. According to a Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll released on August 31, 57 percent of adults believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009.

Bjørn Lomborg's Movie. Alternative Ways To Protecting The Environment

Bjørn Lomborg

Before becoming the “Skeptical Environmentalist” by antonomasia, Danish author Bjørn Lomborg was a pro-environmentalist and a Greenpeace supporter who began his research as an attempt to counter some of the most common anti-ecological arguments. But he was bound to change his mind very soon after starting to analyze the data. And that’s how The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World came to be.

In his influential and controversial book—first published in Danish in 1998 and translated into English in 2001—Lomborg argues that claims on overpopulation, declining energy resources, deforestation, species loss, water shortages, certain aspects of global warming, and a variety of other global environmental issues are unsupported by analysis of the relevant data.

Now Lomborg’s most recent book, Cool It (2007), has become a film-documentary. Directed by filmmaker Ondi Timoner, Cool It follows Lomborg on his mission to bring the smartest solutions to climate change, environmental pollution, and other major problems in the world. “Global warming is real, but it’s not the scary, end-of-all-things that it's been made out to be in Al Gore’s film,” Lomborg told in an interview. “And in some way that’s crucial, because that scare diminishes life quality. I mean, we talk to kids who think they’re going to die because of global warming right now.”

Here is the trailer of the movie:




Lomborg is the founder and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a globally respected think tank that brings together the world’s leading economists to prioritize major global problems—among them malaria, the lack of potable water and HIV/AIDS—based upon a cost/benefit analysis of available solutions.

Hal Lewis’ Resignation—Global Warming Is a Scam

A letter—first published here and re-published in yesterday's Telegraph—to the American Physical Society by Professor Emeritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara shows once more that (man-made) global warming is a scam.

“Please accept my resignation,” writes Hal Lewis, “APS no longer represents me.” It is at once a historical document and a passionate and powerful j’accuse against “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare.”

Climategate - How the science of global warming was compromised

It was James Delingpole who, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, namely, the conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth, and the greatest scientific scandal of our age. “The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents,” he said, “is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

To refresh everyone’s memory on what this whole thing is all about, here is the accurate reconstruction of what happened provided by Spiegel Online International, the English edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel: How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised (and how the conflict between climate researchers and climate skeptics could be resolved).

One more tip for those looking for a different perspective on the climate debate than the MSM gives you: be sure to tune in to PJTV.com/ICCC: LIVE coverage of the Heartland Institute’s 4th Annual International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-4)—a worldwide gathering of global warming “realists”—on May 16-18 (direct interviews with participants and live streaming the keynote speakers).

First written for The Metaphysical Peregrine

Something’s rotten in Denmark (but also in East Anglia, Asheville, and New York City)

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” So spoke Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, first performed between 1600 and 1601, at the start of the Little Ice Age. Four centuries later things haven’t changed that much, according to Joseph D’Aleo, who is Executive Director of ICECAP, a former professor of meteorology and climatology, the First Director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel, and a fellow of the American Meteorology Society. The focus belongs not just on CRU, but on all of the organizations which gather temperature data, he says. And all now show evidence of fraud:
Climategate: Something’s Rotten in Denmark … and East Anglia, Asheville, and New York City

It's A Climategate Christmas

“Oh Climategate Oh Climategate those hacked emails have sealed your fate

Oh Climategate Oh Climategate micheals trick was really great

Medieval Warming now is done, Also the Maunder Minimum

Oh Climategate Oh Climategate maybe now we can debate. […]”


Minnesotans For Global Warming announces their new Christmas Album “It’s A Climategate Christmas.” Actually there is no album: all they have is the commercial.., but it’s very cool all the same, and it’s worth a smile—well, one can smile out of happiness, joy, kindness, hypocrisy, and sometimes to hide disappointment, frustration, sadness.. you decide!




Hat tip: Cambidistagione

And science became a casualty of politics

Cathy Young has a fair and balanced piece on Climategate:

There is no doubt that refusal to accept human-made climate change is often self-serving. But the other side has blinders and selfish motives of its own. "Going green" has turned into a vast industry in its own right—as well as a religion with its own brand of zealotry. For many, global warming is the secular equivalent of a biblical disaster sent by God to punish humankind for its errant (capitalist) ways. Those who embrace environmentalism as a faith have no interest in scientific and technological solutions to climate change—such as nuclear power—that do not include imposing drastic regulations on markets and curbs on consumption.

In theory, science should be above such motives. Yet, at the very least, the scientists who back strong measures against global warming have not objected to the alarmism, the political fanaticism, or the pseudo-spiritual drivel promoted by many of the crusaders in this cause.

Public trust is something scientists must work hard to maintain. When it comes to science and public policy, the average citizen usually has to trust scientists—whose word he or she has to take on faith almost as much as a religious believer takes the word of a priest. Once that trust is undermined, as it has been in recent years, science becomes a casualty of politics.

[Via Glenn Reynolds]

Climategate - 5 (updated)

I - Derek Lowe offers a working scientist’s view (Via Glenn Reynolds):

I've been on long-running projects, especially some years ago, where people start to lose track of which numbers came from where (and when), where the underlying raw data are stored, and the history of various assumptions and corrections that were made along the way. That much is normal human behavior. But this goes beyond that.
Those of us who work in the drug industry know that we have to keep track of such things, because we're making decisions that could eventually run into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money. And eventually we're going to be reviewed by regulatory agencies that are not staffed with our friends, and who are perfectly capable of telling us that they don't like our numbers and want us to go spend another couple of years (and another fifty or hundred million dollars) generating better ones for them. The regulatory-level lab and manufacturing protocols (GLP and GMP) generate a blizzard of paperwork for just these reasons.
But the stakes for climate research are even higher. The economic decisions involved make drug research programs look like roundoff errors. The data involved have to be very damned good and convincing, given the potential impact on the world economy, through both the possible effects of global warming itself and the effects of trying to ameliorate it. Looking inside the CRU does not make me confident that their data come anywhere close to that standard:
[…]
No matter what you think about climate change, if you respect the scientific endeavor, this is very bad news. Respect has to be earned. And it can be lost.

II - New York Times columnist Paul Krugman found “not a single smoking gun” in those e-mail messages. He also said that “there is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter.” Well, he must have missed this article in the Telegraph (titled “Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire”):

Last year Mr Gore’s venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology.
The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.
The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

And here are some more counter arguments.

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UPDATE: Dec. 2, 2009, 4:45 pm

Yet another interesting piece, from the series “You don’t have to agree with the skeptics to be appalled…” (via Enzo Reale and The Boston Globe).

Eduardo Zorita:

“By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication. […] The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas. These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere—and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now—editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed.” [Italics mine]

Climategate - 4

There has been no particularly relevant news item in the last few days, except Christopher Booker’s superb summary of the Climategate story so far, and the fact that the reaction to the Climategate scandal has grown exponentially in the US, mainly thanks to Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, and the blogosphere. At the same time the silence of the MSM has been deafening.

Furthermore, James Delingpole wonders what is going on at Google:

I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal.
It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation – 430 comments and counting – yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature. Instead, the top-featured item is a blogger pushing Al Gore’s AGW agenda. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this. Perhaps some Google-savvy reader can enlighten me…..

Yes, perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this, though.. Enough, let’s look ahead, to be precise when Air Force One will head to Copenhagen for the climate summit (Dec. 9). Here is what Michael Barone has to say about it.

Climategate - 3 (updated)

Yet another update on Climategate. As we have already learned from the previous episodes of the series, CRU hacked emails reveal a pattern by prominent climate alarmist scientists of concealing evidence contradictory to the theory of man-made global warming, manipulating scientific data, preventing conflicting reports from being published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report, etc. Here is a couple of examples.

CRU head Phil Jones, in response to an article challenging global warming, writes that Climate Research, the journal which had published the article, needs to “rid themselves of this troublesome editor.” And here is Michael E. Mann’s reply (Mann is director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate):

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

As Robert Tracinski points out in a very thoughtful post at Real Clear Politics, it is to be noted

the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”

But this scandal, says Tracinski, goes beyond strictly scientific journals and into other media.. for example, RealClimate.org, a website which much of the mainstream media has relied on for climate science developments and which has been billed—at least until some time ago, in particular (I presume) until before this article by Roger Pielke Sr.—as an objective website and as a place where both global warming activists and skeptics can engage in an impartial debate. Yet, in another email, Michael E. Mann, on behalf of the CRU people, boasts that RealClimate is pretty well under control..

I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through […]. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include. […]
You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don’t’get to use the RC comments as a megaphone...

Well, I don’t really know what else to say about this, other than the pattern emerging is simple enough:

In any discussion of global warming, either in the scientific literature or in the mainstream media, the outcome is always predetermined. Just as the temperature graphs produced by the CRU are always tricked out to show an upward-sloping "hockey stick," every discussion of global warming has to show that it is occurring and that humans are responsible. And any data or any scientific paper that tends to disprove that conclusion is smeared as "unscientific" precisely because it threatens the established dogma.
For more than a decade, we've been told that there is a scientific "consensus" that humans are causing global warming, that "the debate is over" and all "legitimate" scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this "consensus" really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

Needless to say, this has little to do, in itself, with one’s honest and sincere convictions about the “Anthropogenic Global Warming” doctrine, or about the opposite (and equally respectable) view according to which global warming is a natural phenomenon, correlated to solar flare activity. And no matter if in the 1300’s grapes were grown in the south of England and parts of Norway could cultivate wheat, and when they discovered Greenland, they called it Greenland because there wasn’t as much ice or snow as there is now.. But the fact remains that now the CRU people (if not all those arguing the case for man-made global warming) seem to be afraid of open and honest debate. Which makes them (at least) far less reliable than what was thought previously.

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UPDATE: Nov. 25, 2009

Even British writer George Monbiot, a leading environmentalist and a columnist for The Guardian, has admitted to being “dismayed and deeply shaken” by some of the emails:

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.
[…]
The hacked emails are a hard knock, but the science of global warming withstands much more than that.

Of course George Monbiot doesn’t think these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is “the final nail in the coffin” of global warming theory. Yet, nobody was expecting him to suddenly change his mind about the whole matter. Intellectual honesty is enough of a reason, for me, to recommend a thorough reading of this article. Monbiot has taken an intellectually honest stance, and I really appreciate him for that.

Climategate - 2 (updated)

“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

A short supplement and a marginal note on what could turn out to be the greatest scandal in modern science. The following case, in my opinion, shows that there is something suspect about the media’s coverage of global warming.

Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute is one of the most prominent climate modellers in the world—he earned several international climate-study prizes—and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To be more precise, Latif has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that mankind’s addiction to burning fossil fuels is rapidly changing the climate. The idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, and that they would subsequently let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land, is exactly what the global warming theory has been based on.

Yet, at the last UN’s World Climate Conference in Geneva (August 31-September 4, 2009), Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. An “inconvenient truth” for global warming alarmists, who since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, have been telling us that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100. But most of the media ignored Latif’s remarks. This was the analogy made by columnist Lorne Gunter in the Calgary Herald:

Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?
[…] When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.
So why was a speech […] by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Most members of the mainstream media, in the United States and the rest of the world, seem to be interested only in viewpoints that conform with the global warming myth that they have been promoting for the past few years.

Of course this story has no direct relation with “Climategate,” but you might want to let the info be of some use.

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UPDATE: November 22, 2009, 11:45pm

This is an interesting variation on the theme:

How the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science
(The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, BBC)

But, you know,

As Upton Sinclair once said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
So don’t expect this scandal to be written up in the MSM any time soon. But why would you want to anyway? It’s all here, where the free spirits and independent thinkers are, on the Blogosphere.

Read also Climate Depot for links to all the latest updates, and An Elegant Chaos for a full reading of those potentially incriminating emails (made available in searchable form!).

Climategate. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth

“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies,” writes James Delingpole in his blog for the Daily Telegraph, “I should start dumping them NOW.” Why on earth? Just ask Anthony Watts of Watt’s Up With That? and Stephen McIntrye of Climate Audit, who broke the story this morning of the hacking break-in at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. The story of how the conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has been brutally exposed after a heap of very confidential files, emails, etc. have been made available on the internet.

It is no exaggeration to say that this scandal could turn out to be the greatest in modern science, with stories of conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims, and, last but not least, how to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with the Anthropogenic Global Warming can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
[Thanks: Michelle Malkin]