This article contends that there is so much government money to be made promoting Man-made global warming that the scientists on the dole will stop at nothing.
But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that “I’ll be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor,” Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: “I think we should stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”
Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that “I think the community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute.”
Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I’m hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it’s becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that’s nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.
Of course, Mr. Russell didn’t look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That’s because they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.
On the other hand, people are already being displaced from their homes by sea level rise.
http://tinyurl.com/24ght4q
Even if you don’t believe that the 250,000 people who relocated after Katrina were the world’s first climate refugees, it is now time to admit that the 17cm rise in sea level is already displacing people from some islands.
Here’s an article making the case that Katrina’s refugees are the first climate refugees. Remember as you read this though, that even if you don’t agree with this second article, the first link above is hard to dispute.
http://tinyurl.com/le6yvy
So, either way, we must now accept that climate change is real and is already displacing people or simply continue to bury our heads in the sand. For those who choose to do the latter, might I suggest finding sand on high ground rather than on an ocean beach?
Wait, perhaps I should suggest an ocean beach, just above the full moon high tide line. We’ll come back and check on you in a couple of years and see how you’re doing.
John, step away from the right wing media. It makes you stupid.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
“Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 percent and 64 percent, respectively, believing in human involvement. ”
“The strongest consensus on the causes of global warming came from climatologists who are active in climate research, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role.”
I think you may have got the wrong end of the ‘conspiracy’. The oil/coal/gas industry have clear incentives. Your constant explanation of scientists incentive of grants is very weak I think. Scientists get off on trying to find truths. And nothing would make them happier than finding proof of the opposite of the prevailing view.
freddybobs68k,
Petroleum geologists doubt climate warming?!?!
I’m shocked! SHOCKED, I tell you! How could that be?
And, let me guess, do the meteorologists work for Clear Channel?
… anyway, good post. There never was any “Climategate”.
It was always just a cynical right wing talking point, crafted for people who get their science from Sarah Palin and Russian hackers (in this case.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/science/earth/08climate.html?_r=1&src=mv
The original “climategate” turned out to be no big deal.
Dvorak, I’m a big fan of yours, but it does make me sad that you choose to live in denial about this. The larger the conspiracy, the harder it is to pull off. Thinking that so many independent scientists from around the world are all part of one to lie to the public is insane.
Here is an expert form “Bogus Stories of 2009”
Snark bests science
11. The right claimed hacked e-mails proved liberals are lying about global warming, and the media fell for it
Note to conservatives: Just because you put the word “gate” after a story, doesn’t put it on par with Watergate, particularly when the story is mostly bunk in the first place.
Take “Climategate,” the hullabaloo stirred up by a hacker, right-wing Web sites and a bunch of people who don’t understand science or scientific terminology, like Sen. James Inhofe (who, if there is any justice in the universe, will one day meet face to face with an angry, hungry polar bear).
In November, hackers published e-mail correspondence between top climate scientists. Some conservatives seized on the language in a couple of the e-mails as proof of the existence of a giant, international scientific cabal to hoodwink the world into reducing carbon emissions.
In a statement, Inhofe said the e-mails showed that the jig was up. “It appears that the basis of federal programs, pending E.P.A. rulemakings, and cap-and-trade legislation was contrived and fabricated,” he announced. The right-wing blogosphere exploded.
The next thing you know, CNN was back to 1990 mode, reporting climate change as a he-said-she-said. CNN’s Campbell Brown reported that because of the e-mails, a “scandal is hanging” over U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen. In the National Review, Victor Davis Hanson said the discovery doomed U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen: “A satirist could not dream up Copenhagen. Icy-cold temperatures and snow descend on both Copenhagen and Washington at the time of the conference. It is preceded by one of the great scandals in recent academic history with Climategate and the fabrication of climate-change evidence,” Hanson told his right-wing readers.
Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, wrote in one e-mail the sentence that Inhofe and Hansen claim is the smoking gun that killed the global climate change consensus: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The problem is that scientists often use the word “trick” to describe the use of proxy data, from ice cores, or lake pollen trapped in sediment, in combination with data from real temperature readings. And the “decline” almost certainly refers to a well-known oddity in tree ring data after 1961, not in temperatures.
“We have always had a very vocal minority of people who have long since decided to ignore the science and the data and take a deliberately and completely contrarian view, and who have always and constantly accused (all) climate scientists of falsehood and being in it for the money,” Andy Ridgwell, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol told the Guardian about the whole controversy. “They have been playing Chicken Little and claiming the sky is falling in on climate science for a decade. There is nothing left that is new or different that they can (falsely) claim or accuse us of.”
Never mind that, Inhofe says. And never mind that the warmest decade ever is coming to a close, and scientists almost universally agree about why. The right used the “scandal” to challenge scientific consensus that global warming is human-made, and worsening. And too much of the media fell for it.
http://tinyurl.com/2epjhxl
Of course this would be more meaningful if it didn’t come from a known denier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Michaels
Next you will post the shocking news from a creationist claiming evolution is a lie…
>> pedro said, on July 12th, 2010 at 6:44 am
>> #2 Riiiiight. The right wing media is at fault on the ice ages & their consequent melting.
Climategate was a bogus story cynically manufactured by the right wing media intended to deceive you.
Your summary of my point (as quoted above) is typical right wing spin. There is no way you can insinuate what YOU said from MY post.
What you said is not even logical.
#1 Misanthropic Scott said, “Here’s an article making the case that Katrina’s refugees are the first climate refugees.”
I have no idea why you put a link to this crap in your comments.
1. It is outdated (August 2006).
2. It disregards facts or bends them to it’s own version of the “truth”
3. Hurricane Katrina was peripheral to the problems New Orleans suffered. We can hang most of it on The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for crap levees and lack of response by FEMA when they broke AFTER the hurricane. We can also give extra credit to our local politicians for not doing their jobs and the major oil companies for destroying our marshlands.
I would like to see how much money is in the business of “Environmental Ethics”. The history of the business from what I can discern is relatively short. I am always stunned by the amount of money required to perform an Environmental Impact report. I believe the cost of an EIR is an inflated number and is used as a tool of prevention, rather than reason. I would argue that it has caused more corruption in policy than in helping the environment. Either way there is money to be made in “defense” of the earth. In the end the “Earth” will survive and will only have to shake the fleas off.
@#1 Climate change is real. However, all the hoopla is about the primary cause: human activity or natural fluctuations.
Secondary issue is magnitude of climate change. Human caused change proponents have unfortunately went beyond the science and artificially inflated the observations and predictions. Practical examples: Measurements: for the decade of 1990s the whole Siberia appeared to be warming, drastically. Climate scientists used this data without checking the validity. It turned out that Russians didn’t have money for maintaining their measurement systems and the results were false loop of last good measurement from one late Summer in the past… No one noticed for a decade. Because they didn’t want to. Processing: Our own NOAA fudged measured data. Fudging data by small amount to correct for known errors is acceptable. However, for the late part of 20th Century NOAA fudged data for 400%! Bit too much fudge there. Modeling/predictions: until just two years ago software used for modeling future climate change and rise in CO2 assumed INFINITE atmosphere. Not just about 60 miles up as it is, not just up to the Moon or “just” up to the Sun… Infinite. With paradoxical consequences, supporting human caused global warming but way out of sync with reality. It took independent (non-climate) physicists to find this and yell “emperor has no clothes”.
Three simple observed and non-fudged facts supporting non-human caused warming:
1) Simultaneous warming across the Solar system coinciding with highest Solar activity ever observed.
2) Decrease in global temperatures since 2002-2004 until now, following drop in Solar activity during the same time and going opposite vs. still increasing CO2 concentrations.
3) Long term ice core data showing that the increase in CO2 follows temperature increase through eons. Lagging for about 700 yrs. Making higher CO2 levels consequence and not the cause of the warming.
>> LorenzoRojo said, on July 12th, 2010 at 7:05 am
>> I would like to see how much money is in the business of “Environmental Ethics”.
OK, you have a problem with business. So do a lot of us.
Does this mean you start getting your science from Sarah Palin?
The vast majority _real_ scientists are strongly warning that climate warming is real, accelerated by humans and likely catastrophic.
You gonna ignore all that because you hate the cost of environmental impact reports?
Or hate Al Gore?
Or think Sarah Palin is a hotty?
Or have some BP stocks in your IRA?
That’s basically what the right wing is doing.
>> dusanmal said, on July 12th, 2010 at 7:18 am
>> Three simple observed and non-fudged facts supporting non-human caused warming:
You conveniently forgot to mention the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of TONS of greenhouse gasses humans are putting into the atmosphere EVERY YEAR.
Something like 30 Billion tons of just CO2, alone. (Google it.)
Only blithering idiots and bought-off cynics would claim this is inconsequential to global warming.
And, yet, this is exactly what Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck claim. And millions of right wingers parrot it.
I’ll let you decide which is which.
GregAllen,
I am not siding with the right wing. I am just trying to deconstruct the information that is presented.
If I have money in BP stock it is because they will profit more from a Cap and Trade tax. Big business will absorb the cost and pass it down to me.
Al Gore is a tool. I would have voted for Howard Dean.
Sarah Palin is hot, (44 year old male perspective)
What I am saying is that more money is to be made in Environmental Ethics on the protectionist side. My opinions have been impacted by my Dad’s career. A Forester (Cal Berkeley) who made a living in land management, and could not endure the “battle” to cut trees on private land. Stewardship of the land became a battle on a micro level in the name of protecting the earth.
So now everything I read with a soon to be banned grain a salt, I do with skepticism. We are living in a world of government fees and permits. In that world both the right and left wing win, because they get what they want, which is the ability to say no, unless you pay them.
Anyone else wonder of John D. is planning his “golden years” as a nutty media geezers?
If you’re a liberal, they drum you out of the profession for accidentally getting a story wrong or saying extremist conspiracy theory. (ala Pierre Salinger, Dan Rather or Helen Thomas.)
But if you’re a right winger, you get paid fantastically for INTENTIONALLY getting stories wrong and spreading wacky extremist conspiracy theory. For racism you get a bonus! (ala Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and far too many others to name.)
So, John, if you’re going to go cranky-crazy in your dowager years, definitively go right wing with it!
It’s strange that I didn’t see any stories here last week around Muir Russell’s findings. That’s very odd indeed.
LorenzoRojo,
I won’t discount what you say. Yes, Palin is a hottie and yes your dad got hassled when he wanted to burn some trees down.
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE.
When you throw up all this dust in the air around the SCIENCE to confuse the facts of the matter, you’re being a right wing tool.
And YOUR grandkids are going to suffer because of OUR GENERATION’S greed, stupidity and inaction.
What lessons they going to learn from you? Did you do the right thing and make the sacrifices or did you get blinded by the right wing dust thrown in the air?
Well, I gotta get off-line.
#10 Mextli,
From my first post:
So, I take it from the fact that you couldn’t dispute the main point of my post, that people are being displaced from islands in Panama right now, but instead attacked me for posting an article claiming that people had already been displaced from their homes by Katrina, that you accept as fact that people right now are being displaced from their island homes due to sea level rise associated with climate change, correct?
Wait. That’s probably too complex a sentence for you.
You didn’t dispute the first article. So, you accept that Panamanians are being displaced from the islands. You also didn’t dispute the 17cm sea level rise over the last 100 years.
So, you agree that climate change is displacing people from their homes right now.
Right?
Re#1 and #19, MScott…
The point being made to your comments is that no one… NO ONE… disputes climate change. Your argument is nothing more than an observation of a changing climate.
The topic at hand is whether there is dishonesty in the climate science community. The PROOF is that there is…
—“Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed.”
The topic at hand is whether the independent review of that dishonesty was unbiased. The facts PROVE that it was biased. The bias is as clear as climate change.
—“Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that “Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find.”
No links? One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”
#12 – dusanmal
Practical examples: Measurements: for the decade of 1990s the whole Siberia appeared to be warming, drastically. Climate scientists used this data without checking the validity. It turned out that Russians didn’t have money for maintaining their measurement systems and the results were false loop of last good measurement from one late Summer in the past…
I wish you were correct. In fact, you may even be correct about there being issues with the thermometers. So, how do you explain the methane clathrates on the north slope of Siberia already melting and releasing methane into the atmosphere? This is true on the north slope of Alaska as well.
http://tinyurl.com/yddcos2
#12 – dusanmal
1) Simultaneous warming across the Solar system coinciding with highest Solar activity ever observed.
Link please? I’ve got one that says otherwise. Do you have one to support your case?
http://tinyurl.com/e77gu
#12 – dusanmal
2) Decrease in global temperatures since 2002-2004 until now, following drop in Solar activity during the same time and going opposite vs. still increasing CO2 concentrations.
You have a warped definition of decreasing temperatures.
http://tinyurl.com/yddcos2
#12 – dusanmal
3) Long term ice core data showing that the increase in CO2 follows temperature increase through eons. Lagging for about 700 yrs. Making higher CO2 levels consequence and not the cause of the warming.
http://tinyurl.com/2ssxek
Dvorak, what’s wrong with you?
To #1
Of course there is climate change. Nobody denies the climate changes. Every 20,000 years or so the
Sahara shifts from wet to dry and has been doing this for some time. The question is should you do anything other that what humans have always done which is adapt or die. For example the current literature suggests that humans emerged in Africa during a time of major dramatic climate fluctuation occurring at a time when the genus may not have mastered fire.
The Sahara goes from dry to wet among other cycles and the growth of the Himalayas seems to have touched off the current ice age cycles along with uplift in East Africa. The factors controlling this are poorly understood at best.
The question is how much does the CO2 in the atmosphere contribute to current climate conditions and that is a huge unknown. The main target in Climategate ended up saying that the climate hasn’t gotten any warmer in the last 15 years and that the seas aren’t rising so far as he can tell. The computer modals completely broke down and they were fudging it to hid the fact. I read the articles. He said it. Those are his expressed views as the previous leader of the man made global warming camp.
The last time a CO2 er posted that we are all going to drown, I checked the data and the Earth that got washed away was created out of sediment during a Cyclone and it got leveled by wind and waves after a few decades. Big deal. Such barrier islands come and go.
Florence is going under because it is built on mud and mud compresses. You need to build higher or you are going under.
Part of New Orleans is below sea level because mud compresses and they pumped water out from under the city. The entire Mississippi delta is vanishing because the core of engineers is keeping the shipping canal open and stealing the sediment that once maintained the delta and dumping said sediment in much deeper water as a side effect, however they are preventing the main channel of the Mississippi from changing course land locking New Orleans. In other words they made a choice and the knew what the results would be when they made the choice.
The coral islands of the pacific are sinking but a recent study showed that coral debris was raising them faster than they were sinking. Please note the islands which were once volcanoes are actually sinking for geologic reasons and coral growth and breakup is more than off setting it for now.
The islands in the Hawaiian chain are just wearing away and sinking just like always. The older ones to the west went under millions of years ago.
The coasts of Oregon and Washington slowly sink for hundreds of years then do a major earthquake and rise about 14 feet before the cycle repeats. The reason is plate tectonics.
Bangladesh is going under because people have cut the mangrove forests and they are messing with the sedimentation patterns that created the land from sediment in the first place.
The computerized climate modals don’t work. The basic assumptions was high level atmospheric warming would occur due to a sharp increase in water vapor in the air at a certain level and that isn’t occurring. Of course those modals are all over the place. Very few of them predict the end of all life you guys are talking about.
The thing you guys had better be watching is solar storms or absence of same. A major down turn in those is followed by a major hunk of the human race freezing or starving to death (The little ice age is rather well documented.) while an upturn proceeds a major warming event. Of course there are thousands of other factors in play and that is the problem. We do not have enough long term observations that aren’t total crap as much guess work as anything especially about why.
Any dullard that tries to tie the climate of this planet to a minor increase in one factor without the ability to properly evaluate the other factors and some accurate long term observations to tie them into has no probability of being correct for any reasonable time frame.
Yes it gets warmer. Yes it gets colder. Exactly what is going on where to cause what is the great mystery.
You think the climatologists have it sorted out? You sir have already bought the Brooklyn Bridge, you have been scammed, conned, hustled, played for a fool, etc.
One more thing. Bill Clinton is still setting on the money donated for Hatti relief. Doesn’t it make you feel good knowing how much good your donation did to desperate, devastated, needy people?
I loath saying this but scamming people because of some disaster or other, real or imaginary hardly matters, is becoming the way of life of a great many very wealthy and powerful people. It is a major growth industry.
Prove Climate Change deniers to be correct, and all we have to do is eat crow. Prove climate change deniers wrong and we still have a huge problem, aggravated by years of inaction.
Err on the side of caution… it is the future of your children that we are talking about, not the outcome of some football game.
If you look hard enough to prove a point, you will still find scientists that deny that smoking is bad for you, or that seatbelts save lives, or whatever. They have no credibility, but they certainly can be quoted. At this point there is firm consensus amongst real climate scientists that the planet is getting warmer and that the warming can only be accounted for due to human influence. You will find some deniers, but they are a statistically insignificant number.
Will proof change deniers minds. No. Studies show that even when shown full evidence of their error, it is nearly impossible to make a political activist change his or her mind about their mistake. Show a creationist tons of evidence that they are wrong, and they just dismiss the evidence as “that can’t be right”. Creationists and climate change deniers are one and the same… show them they are wrong and they will stubbornly cling to their beliefs in an even stronger way.
Old senile folk do that too. Yes, I am looking at you.
GregAllen, you said:
“You conveniently forgot to mention the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of TONS of greenhouse gasses humans are putting into the atmosphere EVERY YEAR.
Something like 30 Billion tons of just CO2, alone. (Google it.)
Only blithering idiots and bought-off cynics would claim this is inconsequential to global warming.
– 1 part per million (volume) of CO2 = 2.13 billion tons of carbon. It is easy for anyone who wants to acknowledge it, that a billion tons of anything compared to the mass of the atmosphere is extremely minute. From 1850 to 2000, the total increase of CO2 has been calculated at 81ppmv or 172 billion tons. Your claim of 30 billion tons of anthropogenic CO2 / year is simply ridiculous. In fact I would categorize you post into the “blithering idiot” category that you mentioned.
Lets keep your alarmist ranting in perspective, OK?
@26 deowll
That’s all very interesting and all. Are you a professional climatologists?
Basically my problem is – how do I reconcile your position with…
“The strongest consensus on the causes of global warming came from climatologists who are active in climate research, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role.”
What are they missing? Its there profession to understand and be experts on this stuff.
Note if your answer substantially rests on…
o Funding
o Conspiracy
o ‘Faulty computer models’
o New world order
I’m probably not going to find it too convincing.
Still I hope you are a climatologist and you have some good scientific based proof. That’d be great.
Since “Climategate”, every time I read an article on Slashdot or a science/tech blog about climate change, the majority of comments seem to be generally skeptical of AGW, or at the very least admitting that the CRU emails are very damning. Did one report clearing them of scientific misconduct change peoples minds even after reading the emails, or is it just that a few true believers on this blog had a lot of extra time on their hands today?
freddybobs68k said, “The strongest consensus on the causes of global warming came from climatologists who are active in climate research, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role.”
Well there goes THAT argument. That figure has been shown to be fake. There was never a comprehensive poll taken.