freeman3 wrote:Ah, we get to the heart of the matter. "Most published science ends up being wrong, anyway"..."there are many things they cannot explain"...
It is certainly healthy to be skeptical; it is one of the rights/ requirements of being a citizen in a democracy to be skeptical of what the powers that be are telling you. However, the anti-science bias that is manifest in a good part of the opposition to climate change is not valid in my mind.

RJ and I might disagree about climate change and the methods used to address it, but at the end of the day it is just a problem to be solved and not a stand-in for larger issues. Science has ushered in the amazing progress we have seen over the past several hundred years--not religion.

The persistence of religion, in spite of scientific undercutting of its validity, is a testament that religion continues to provide things largely missing in modern society (meaning, a sense of community, shared values, solace for old age and fear of death, etc). Science will continue its search for truth instead of received truth.

And it is still the best way to a better society. And while it is understandable why those that are religious would be eager to point out the limitations of science, that anti-science bias driving at least some of the climate change opposition is a cause for concern

Sassenach wrote:We do it daily. Just ask the Dutch, for example.

Doctor Fate wrote:Part of our hubris is believing we know that the Earth is incapable of adapting in ways we don't foresee.

Again, if a scientist, or many of them, can see that their models are not accurate, then isn't there reason to do more research and more thinking, rather than just assume that the science that led to flawed modeling is "settled?"

It's not 'conquered' so much as held at bay. When we don't keep up the work, or muck about, you get the Somerset Levels.

Sassenach wrote:This is just semantics. My point is that we're not just slaves to our environment, we have the capacity to shape it through technology.

The green lobby is way too dogmatic in my view. They endlessly harp on about the need to cut emissions and yet at the same time refuse to countenance the two forms of energy we currently have (gas and nuclear) which have proven to be most successful in effecting a cut in carbon.

I'm very reluctant to see my bills spiral out of control and see thousands of jobs disappear from my country to more lax regimes so we can be sacrificed on the altar of 'sustainability'.

America is pretty much the only major economy to have cut carbon emissions in recent years and it hasn't done that by moving to renewables, it's done it by the move to gas from highly polluting coal as an interim measure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Regional_trends_in_annual_per_capita_carbon_dioxide_emissions_from_fuel_combustion_between_1971_and_2009.png

My point is that we're not just slaves to our environment, we have the capacity to shape it through technology.

This is a different take on a story I posted the other day

In their desperation to find even a tiny shred of peer-reviewed science to challenge the volumes of research from around the world about human-caused climate change, deniers have often held up Willie Soon's work.

Dr. Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for studies that purportedly show that the sun, and not CO2 emissions from human activity, is the main factor in climate change, and that climate change in the 20th century wasn't that unusual to begin with. He has also argued that mercury emissions from burning coal are no big deal.

Now, in response to a Greenpeace investigation, Dr. Soon has admitted that U.S. oil and coal companies, including ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries, and the world's largest coal-burning utility, Southern Company, have contributed more than $1 million over the past decade to his research. According to Greenpeace, every grant Dr. Soon has received since 2002 has been from oil or coal interests. This despite the fact that he once told a U.S. Senate hearing that he had not been hired by, employed by, or received grants from any organization "that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change."

Dr. Soon has also been affiliated with a number of industry front groups, including the coal-funded Greening Earth Society, and Koch-Exxon-Scaife-funded groups including the George C. Marshall Institute, the Science and Public Policy Institute, the Center for Science and Public Policy, the Heartland Institute, and Canada's Fraser Institute.

Correspondence uncovered by Greenpeace also found that Dr. Soon led a plan in 2003 to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report years before it was even released in 2007.

It's not news that the fossil fuel industry has funded an ongoing campaign of doubt and misinformation about the effects of its products and about the dangers of climate change -- people and organizations from science historian Naomi Oreskes (author of Merchants of Doubt) to Greenpeace have been exposing these efforts for years. From hiring trolls and front groups to post comments on websites, submit letters to editors, and write opinion columns to sponsoring "scientific" research and holding conferences, it's all been well documented. (The same tactics have also been used by the tobacco industry.)

The latest revelation is a bit of an embarrassment for oil giant Exxon, though. The world's largest oil company had admitted that it funded these efforts but promised in 2008 it would stop giving money to groups that lobbied against the need to find clean energy sources.

It's also an embarrassment for those who, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, deny the existence of climate change -- or admit that it's happening but say we can't and shouldn't do anything about it. Of course, they will continue to repeat the same discredited points about "climategate" and medieval warm periods and CO2 as plant food, and they'll continue to take the advice of industry shills like Tom Harris to bombard the media with opinion articles and letters to editors and to post numerous comments under online articles.

Some rightly point out that we should look at the science and not at who is paying for the research. So what about Dr. Soon's science? Well, let's consider one paper that Dr. Soon published with colleague Sallie Baliunas, which attempted to discredit the work of Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. Three editors of the publication that ran the study resigned in protest, including incoming editor-in-chief Hans von Storch. He said "the conclusions [were] not supported by the evidence presented in the paper." Greenpeace notes also that 13 of the scientists cited in the paper published rebuttals stating that Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas had misinterpreted their work.

After all their digging, deniers have only been able to find a few minor errors in the volumes of peer-reviewed science about climate change, and have had to rely on manufactured scandals and conspiracy theories to bolster their arguments. It only takes a bit of investigating to poke holes in the scant bits of research that have attempted to discredit real climate science. Let's stop wasting our time on deniers. It would be better spent trying to resolve the serious problems we have created.

Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation editorial and communications specialist Ian Hanington.

Where did this 97 percent figure come from? This story has become interesting over the last few days. The most prominent form of it comes from Prof. John Cook of the University of Queensland in a paper published last year that purported to have reviewed over 11,000 climate science articles. Does anyone really believe that Cook and his eight co-authors actually read through all 11,000 articles? Actually, the abstract of the paper supports the point I made above that most papers don’t actually deal with what the Climatistas say:

We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming], 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. [Emphasis added.]

Pause here and note that it is odd to see that some folks apparently haven’t gotten the memo that you’re not supposed to call it “global warming”—“climate change” is the term of art now. Anyway, to continue, read this slowly and carefully:

Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.

Let’s translate: Among the one-third of papers that “endorse” the “consensus,” there is near unanimity. In other words, among people who agree with the consensus, nearly all of them agree with the consensus. Again—the only mystery here is that the number isn’t 100 percent. Perhaps this would have been too embarrassing to report, like a North Korean election. For this exercise all climate scientists may as well be called named Kim Jong Il.

The plot thickens. Prof. Cook refused to share his data with anyone. Shades of the East Anglia mob and their tree ring data. But also like the East Anglia mob, someone at the University of Queensland left the data in the ether of the internet, and blogger Brandon Shollenberger came across it and starting noting its weaknesses. Then the predictable thing happened: the University of Queensland claims that the data was hacked, and sent Shollenbeger a cease-and-desist letter. That just speaks lots of confidence and transparency, doesn’t it?

rickyp wrote:Fate . . .

This blog was previously published here.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/

1. If coal and oil invest in research, you presume it is biased. However, if government invests in research ALL OF ONE TYPE (pro-AGW), you presume it is unbiased. It seems to me you might be biased.

2. Your long quote has nothing to do with Lennart Bengtsson, who was the subject of my post

rickyp wrote:fate

1. If coal and oil invest in research, you presume it is biased. However, if government invests in research ALL OF ONE TYPE (pro-AGW), you presume it is unbiased. It seems to me you might be biased.

Is it a safe presumption that research paid for by oil and gas might be biased?
If governments, or universities, invest in research to learn about changes in the atmosphere and its effects on climate ... is that presumably biased? What we know about Dr. Soons work indicates this is the case.

There is a large financial reward to be gained by the oil and gas industry..... (and the coal industry)
Researchers who do good research, that produces reputable reports that pass peer review.... will be rewarded with future support. But there is no evidence that the results of the research must be predetermined... (If you can find some Fate, have at it. All I've ever seen is inuendo)

In fact, if there was credible, ground breaking work that disputed the current consensus, that could hold up to scrutiny and review, its likely that the scientists would gain more than if their work added to the consensus. Because genuine discovery comes with rewards...

Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading and one of the authors of the study, said he suspected that intolerance of dissenting views on climate science was preventing his paper from being published. “The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist,” he added.

Professor Bengtsson’s paper challenged the finding of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double. It suggested that the climate might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than had been claimed by the IPCC in its report last September, and recommended that more work be carried out “to reduce the underlying uncertainty”.

The five contributing scientists, from America and Sweden, submitted the paper to Environmental Research Letters, one of the most highly regarded journals, at the end of last year but were told in February that it had been rejected.

A scientist asked by the journal to assess the paper under the peer review process wrote that he strongly advised against publishing it because it was “less than helpful”. The unnamed scientist concluded: “Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate sceptics media side.”

Professor Bengtsson resigned from the advisory board of Lord Lawson of Blaby’s climate sceptic think-tank this week after being subjected to what he described as McCarthy-style pressure from fellow academics. . .

Professor Bengtsson, the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, said he accepted that emissions would increase the global average temperature but the key question was how quickly.

He added that it was “utterly unacceptable” to advise against publishing a paper on the ground that the findings might be used by climate sceptics to advance their arguments. “It is an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views. The reality hasn’t been keeping up with the [computer] models. Therefore, if people are proposing to do major changes to the world’s economic system we must have much more solid information.”

fate

2. Your long quote has nothing to do with Lennart Bengtsson, who was the subject of my post

.
Yeah it does...
Lennart's being shunned by his community for ignoring reality.
If he had joined the Flat Earth society, he would be shunned too.

Its interesting that there is some similarity here concerning our conversation about tolerance...
Apparently the scientific community finds Lennarts (sic) position intolerable. That is something they can't tolerate.
And they've pressured him, through criticism mostly, that he can't handle. Apparently because he really doesn't have the evidence to support his scepticism that hols (sic) up to the scrutiny he's receiving...

Now, it might be said that at some point many scientists were lone voices expressing new ideas that the majority of their peers would not accept... (Gallileo for instance. Though in truth the Greeks knew the world was a globe, and he was just rediscovering a fact.)
The difference is that as Galileo's information was scrutinized it held up. And as new inquiries into the area added information, the truth of his position became ever more clear.

Lennart's being shunned by his community for ignoring reality.
If he had joined the Flat Earth society, he would be shunned too.