Climate Sciences

[jackofallgeeks]

This editorial brings up a lot of the points that I find troublesome in regards to the whole global-warming/climate-change thing.

Comments

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

- The analogy to the tobacco companies is seriously strained. Tobacco companies had scientists directly on payroll, with instructions to find "evidence" that smoking was OK for you. Even if it's true that there are some general incentives (e.g., a consensus in the field that would make a more skeptical eye turn towards dissenting data - which, if there were that kind of consensus among environmental scientists, would undercut his point) for environmental scientists to publish things supporting the idea of climate change, there's no way they'll be that direct. It's not as if the Sierra Club is keeping lots of scientists on staff and they're putting out all the reports. Many of the prominent folks work for governments or academia, where they'd probably do just as well if they had solid evidence against climate change they could publish.

If you want a conspiracy theory, Philip Cooney, the guy who "edited" climate change documents for the Bush administration (Rick Piltz, the whistleblower on him, is a member of my congregation) was a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute before going into government (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/politics/11cooney.long.html?ei=5088&en=ed76c8cb7d540f10&ex=1276142400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1203046541-M2mQqtJVgayezeB6poBS+A), and then went on to become a lobbyist for Exxon Mobil after he resigned.

- A quick look at the core team that put together the UN's recent climate change report (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press-ar4/synthesis-report/syr-core-writing-team.pdf) also reveals that most of them aren't identified as "climate scientists." For instance, 30 seconds with Google reveals that Cynthia Rosenzweig (one of the Americans) has a degree in Plant, Soil, and Environmental Sciences (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/crosenzweig.html). James Hansen, the guy whose Congrssional testimony in the 1980s helped to raise the initial profile of climate change, is a physicist. Unless you're willing to say that pretty much all fields of environmental study are johnny-come-latelys, the idea that "climate science" is some nouveau thing doesn't hold water. "Climate scientists" are mostly just scientists (and engineers) who happen to focus on climate.

- The UN report relied on at least 100 years of climate data (plus core samples from ice packs, to get carbon concentration data). I'm not sure on what the author is basing his claim that the data is only reliable 30 years back.

- I don't know enough about the modeling aspects to comment on them, and he's not kind enough to give any pointers to these lots of geologists, engineers, etc. who dispute the scientific method used. There apparently aren't enough of them to constitute a voting majority in the National Academy of Sciences, which signed on to a 2005 statement urging action on climate change (http://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=20742), and which has geology, geophysics, engineering, and environmental (but no climate) sciences sections (http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ABOUT_classes_sections)