Quote:
Originally Posted by Rodion Romanovich
I wonder why the global warming deniers on their "list of scientists sceptical to global warming" include so many scientists who are in fact not sceptical to global warming but have merely happened to publish papers that describe non-human factors which cause climate change.
It's because most are not "global warming deniers". They don't deny global warming. What they deny is the emphasis on human causation and/or the emphasis on the possibly catastrophical resuls of global warming.
An example of the latter would be Paul Reiter, chief entomologist at the Louis Pasteur Institute nd a leading expert on malaria. He contributed to the last IPCC assessment studies (working group II) until he discovered that the non-expert authors of the chapter insisted on introducing a causal relationship between global warming and the spread of malaria. He claims the non-experts won, wich turned the chapter into a 'sham'. He asked the IPCC to have his name removed from the official list of '2000 of the world's leading scientists' who reprtedly back the latest assessment. They agreed to scrap him, but did't. In the end Reiter had to threaten a lawsuit to get is name removed.
According to a 2006 testimony from Reiter to Congress:
A galling aspect of the debate is that this spurious 'science' is endorsed in the public forum by influential panels of 'experts.' I refer particularly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every five years, this UN-based organization publishes a 'consensus of the world's top scientists' on all aspects of climate change. Quite apart from the dubious process by which these scientists are selected, such consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science. Science proceeds by observation, hypothesis and experiment. The complexity of this process, and the uncertainties involved, are a major obstacle to a meaningful understanding of scientific issues by non-scientists. In reality, a genuine concern for mankind and the environment demands the inquiry, accuracy and scepticism that are intrinsic to authentic science. A public that is unaware of this is vulnerable to abuse."
Another gentleman in this category would be William Gray, another of the world's leading hurricane experts (I already mentioned Christopher Landsea earlier in the thread). In a 2005 interview with Capitalism magazine he acknowledged global warming, yet denied that it causes increased hurricane activity. And he exlicitly criticises the politicization of his area of expertise under the Clinton administration.
Q: And from a seasonal, monthly point of view, you had been predicting a growing number of hurricanes. Now, my question is in the wake of Katrina and some of the statements that we’ve heard immediately afterwards by advocates of the global warming theory – is global warming behind this increase in hurricanes?
Gray: I am very confident that it’s not. I mean we have had global warming. That’s not a question. The globe has warmed the last 30 years, and the last 10 years in particular. And we’ve had, at least the last 10 years, we’ve had a pick up in the Atlantic basin major storms. But in the earlier period, if we go back from 1970 through the middle ‘90s, that 25 year period – even though the globe was warming slightly, the number of major storms was down, quite a bit down.
Now, another feature of this is that the Atlantic operates differently. The other global storm basins, the Atlantic only has about 12 percent of the global storms. And in the other basins, the last 10 years – even though the Atlantic major storm activity has gone up greatly the last 10 years. In the other global basins, it’s slightly gone down. You know, both frequency and strength of storms have not changed in these other basins. If anything, they’ve slightly gone down. So if this was a global warming thing, you would think, “Well gee, all of the basins should be responding much the same.”
Q: You’re familiar with what your colleagues believe. Do you think many hurricane experts would take a different point of view, and would say, “Oh, it’s global warming that’s causing hurricanes?”
Gray: No. All my colleagues that have been around a long time – I think if you go to ask the last four or five directors of the national hurricane center – we all don’t think this is human-induced global warming. And, the people that say that it is are usually those that know very little about hurricanes. I mean, there’s almost an equation you can write the degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes to increase is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms.
Now there’s a few modelers around who know something about storms, but they would like to have the possibility open that global warming will make for more and intense storms because there’s a lot of money to be made on this. You know, when governments step in and are saying this – particularly when the Clinton administration was in – and our Vice President Gore was involved with things there, they were pushing this a lot. You know, most of meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded.
No amount of home-baked theories about the earth's "chemical equilibrium" is going to convince me that such scientists are per se wrong to deny the so-called consensus. As Reiter stated, the notion of an established consensus in this whole field is as such, i.e. inherently, unscientific.
