Deniers Continue Copenhagen Hijack Attack

Read time: 3 mins

Richard Littlemore | December 8, 2009

By Richard Littlemore • Tuesday, December 8, 2009 - 14:34

While the well-intentioned legions settled into the first full day of wrangling the minutaie of what may emerge as a Copenhagen climate accord, a well-aged rump of climate change deniers continued the campaign to hijack the talks Tuesday.

The most obvious denier effort was the first of a two-day alternative conference in the elegant Danish Writers' Union building in downtown Copenhagen. There, a greying, mostly male crowd, numbering between 30 and 50 through the day, gathered to deny the science and denounce the 15,000+ conference goers across town.

But regardless that the assembled codgers and their mostly superannuated speakers are howling in the scientific wilderness - denying sea level rises that are already occurring and celebrating the robust nature of glaciers already in retreat - the denier frenzy continues to disrupt productivity in the modern conference centre a couple of kilometres away.

It's not just the vision of Bjorn Lomborg, heading onto enemy territory to do his climate change stand-up routine for Al Jazeera. It's the fact that people like Dr. Rejandra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly feel that they have to take time away from their intended purpose to discuss and dismiss the emails that were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Pachauri began a major briefing today on the evolution of the coming Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC by mentioning the emails and reaffirming his conviction in the science.

The other thing that continues to muddy the picture is the unabated journalistic interest in the email story, and the apparent acceptance that its outbreak, mere weeks before the climate conference, was somehow a coincidence. When the story broke and people like Marc Morano from the denial site ClimateDepot.com and Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute offered themselves out for instant interviews, no one asked how these curiously well-informed commentators came to know so much about the stolen emails - or whether they knew anything about how they came to be public. No one seems to have asked the Cato Institute's oil-soaked Pat Michaels how he was ready with his money quote (“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”) when the New York Times' Andrew Revkin called for a reaction.

No, instead the of “balanced” journalism carries on unabated. The London Times and the Telegraph (at least) covered the denier fest. (But, with apologies, NOT the Mail, contrary to an earlier reference here). The times was taunting. They pointed out some of the scientific falacies. The Telegraph at least mentioned that the conference was funded by the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, an Exxon recipient of record. The question no one ever seems to answer, though, is this: if everyone knows that the deniers are agenda-driven, science-challenged and, in so many cases, stained with oil money, why do they cover them at all?

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Comments

Phlogiston replied on

Dr Petr Chylek is a climate scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
This is what he thinks of “Climategate” and “Climate Change”

Read and enjoy.
Petr Chylek [[email protected]]
http://www.thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/218-petr-chylek-open-letter-to-the-climate-research-community.html
I am sure that most of you are aware of the incident that took place recently at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The identity of the whistle-blower or hacker is still not known.
The selected release of emails contains correspondence between CRU scientists and scientists at other climate research institutions. My own purely technical exchange of emails with CRU director Professor Phil Jones is, as far as I know, not included.
I published my first climate-related paper in 1974 (Chylek and Coakley, Aerosol and Climate, Science 183, 75-77). I was privileged to supervise Ph. D. theses of some exceptional scientists - people like J. Kiehl, V. Ramaswamy and J. Li among others. I have published well over 100 peer-reviewed papers, and I am a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Optical Society of America, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within the last few years I was also honored to be included in Wikipedia’s blacklist of “climate skeptics”.
For me, science is the search for truth, the never-ending path towards finding out how things are arranged in this world so that they can work as they do. That search is never finished.
It seems that the climate research community has betrayed that mighty goal in science. They have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view. It seems that some of the most prominent leaders of the climate research community, like prophets of Old Israel, believed that they could see the future of humankind and that the only remaining task was to convince or force all others to accept and follow. They have almost succeeded in that effort.
Yes, there have been cases of misbehavior and direct fraud committed by scientists in other fields: physics, medicine, and biology to name a few. However, it was misbehavior of individuals, not of a considerable part of the scientific community.
Climate research made significant advancements during the last few decades, thanks to your diligent work. This includes the construction of the HadCRUT and NASA GISS datasets documenting the rise of globally averaged temperature during the last century. I do not believe that this work can be affected in any way by the recent email revelations. Thus, the first of the three pillars supporting the hypothesis of manmade global warming seems to be solid.
However, the two other pillars are much more controversial. To blame the current warming on humans, there was a perceived need to “prove” that the current global average temperature is higher than it was at any other time in recent history (the last few thousand years). This task is one of the main topics of the released CRU emails. Some people were so eager to prove this point that it became more important than scientific integrity.
The next step was to show that this “unprecedented high current temperature” has to be a result of the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The fact that the Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models are not able to explain the post-1970 temperature increase by natural forcing was interpreted as proof that it was caused by humans. It is more logical to admit that the models are not yet good enough to capture natural climate variability (how much or how little do we understand aerosol and clouds, and ocean circulation?), even though we can all agree that part of the observed post-1970 warming is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Thus, two of the three pillars of the global warming and carbon dioxide paradigm are open to reinvestigation.
The damage has been done. The public trust in climate science has been eroded. At least a part of the IPCC 2007 report has been put in question. We cannot blame it on a few irresponsible individuals. The entire esteemed climate research community has to take responsibility. Yes, there always will be a few deniers and obstructionists.
So what comes next? Let us stop making unjustified claims and exaggerated projections about the future even if the editors of some eminent journals are just waiting to publish them. Let us admit that our understanding of the climate is less perfect than we have tried to make the public believe. Let us drastically modify or temporarily discontinue the IPCC. Let us get back to work.
Let us encourage students to think their own thoughts instead of forcing them to parrot the IPCC conclusions. Let us open the doors of universities, of NCAR, NASA and other research institutions (and funding agencies) to faculty members and researchers who might disagree with the current paradigm of carbon dioxide. Only open discussion and intense searching of all possibilities will let us regain the public’s trust and move forward.

Mark Francis's picture Mark Francis replied on

I see he has affiliations with The Fraser Institute and The “cigarettes don’t cause cancer” Heartland Institute. Not good choices.

He clearly has not read the emails, yet he makes a pubic statement like that.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, which this is sourced from, is a vehicle built by Nigel Lawson, of all people. Denialist UK politician.

Late in his career, this is one professor not making good choices.

He’s pushing the false meme that climate scientist have closed minds, well, he should know better. He’d do better by avoiding that lie and simply sticking to a rather impressive CV. Instead of simply keeping to science, Chylek has decided to go political.

For a real view of the unsettled science of Global Warming, go read

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/unsettled-science/

Also posted here:

Unsettled Science
Filed under:

* Climate Science

— gavin @ 3 December 2009

Unusually, I’m in complete agreement with a recent headline on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:

“The Climate Science Isn’t Settled”

The article below is the same mix of innuendo and misrepresentation that its author normally writes, but the headline is correct. The WSJ seems to think that the headline is some terribly important pronouncement that in some way undercuts the scientific consensus on climate change but they are simply using an old rhetorical ‘trick’.

The phrase “the science is settled” is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what ’some scientists’ are supposed to have said. The reality is that it depends very much on what you are talking about and I have never heard any scientist say this in any general context – at a recent meeting I was at, someone claimed that this had been said by the participants and he was roundly shouted down by the assembled experts.

The reason why no scientist has said this is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary – science isn’t either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence – for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don’t know everything, we know nothing.

In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like “Is anthropogenic warming real?”, the answer is yes with high confidence.

But no scientists would be scientists if they thought there was nothing left to find out. Think of the science as a large building, with foundations reaching back to the 19th Century and a whole edifice of knowledge built upon them. The community spends most of its time trying to add a brick here or a brick there and slowly adding to the construction. The idea that the ’science is settled’ is equivalent to stating that the building is complete and that nothing further can be added. Obviously that is false – new bricks (and windows and decoration and interior designs) are being added and argued about all the time. However, while the science may not be settled, we can still tell what kind of building we have and what the overall picture looks like. Arguments over whether a single brick should be blue or yellow don’t change the building from a skyscraper to a mud hut.

The IPCC reports should be required reading for anyone who thinks that scientists think that the ’science is settled’ – the vast array of uncertainties that are discussed and dissected puts that notion to bed immediately. But what we do have are reasons for concern. As Mike Hulme recently wrote:

[S]cience has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don’t know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales.
…
The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been “done” or “is settled”; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it.

Dealing with the future always involves dealing with uncertainty – and this is as true with climate as it is with the economy. Science has led to a great deal of well-supported concern that increasing emissions of CO2 (in particular) are posing a substantial risk to human society. Playing rhetorical games in the face of this, while momentarily satisfying for blog commenters, is no answer at all to the real issues we face.

Dennis W. replied on

Phlogiston–

Dr. Chylek writes:

“we can all agree that part of the observed post-1970 warming is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration.”

DO YOU AGREE?

RickJames replied on

“part”

see that can mean anything. So “he accepts agw” is an example of a meaningless phrase.

For example by paving highways everywhere, mankind has created a warmer earth by some tiny amount. Technically, that’s agw.

CamMacKay replied on

“Oil Soaked Pat Micheals”?????

How could you? Pat Micheals is the father of modern climatology. This guy practically invented climate. Pat Micheals is widely regarded as one of the brightest if not the brightest climatologist to ever walk the face of the earth. Is there no limtis to the smear campaign? Morano and Ebell chose their role but really we should just lay off Micheals, he too far above the frey.

MichaelMaser's picture MichaelMaser replied on

Another great knee slapper: “really we should just lay off Micheals, he too far above the frey.”

You need to do your homework, Michaels has been shilling for petro-and-industrial funds for donkeys yearsssss.

Freiherr von Monckhausen's picture Freiherr von Mo... replied on

Richard,
I rather wonder who invented Pat Michaels.

You also have to give my English cousin Monckton some credit: he also invented a lot…

climate criminal replied on

Richard,

It would be wonderful if you could assign a running score to each poster. Just as Freiherr has mentioned. It would be an eye opener!

Freiherr von Monckhausen's picture Freiherr von Mo... replied on

Cam,
Did you ever count up your total negative score in this blog? Thats probably even beating Burt Reynolds and Sean Connery combined - on Saturday Night Live celebrity jeopardy. You are the closest thing to an Arctic thermometer…

Freiherr von Monckhausen's picture Freiherr von Mo... replied on

This is a testable statement and you have to give proof that he is really that great. Claiming it is not enough.

climate criminal replied on

From Rabett Run
Web of Science ISI Thomson Citation Index
‘Pat Micheals is the father of modern climatology’ – Huh!?

Here’s a few examples for context:
Dr. Jones’ [of the CRU] h=65
Paul Crutzen: h=80
Susan Solomon: h=70
Richard Lindzen: h=46
Mario Molina: h=43
Fred Singer: h=21
Pat Michaels: h=12

[Higher is better] http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/11/something-interesting-comes-this-way-ed.html

CamMacKay replied on

Is this like an ERA average for scientists? If that the case you can look at Dr. Jones as the Pete Rose of Science. He cheated, was caught now he’s got no respect. In science it’s doubly worse than baseball as at least Pete rose was still a good player. All of Jones papers now have to be shredded as we know the data has been fabricated and none of his papers ever received adequate peer review. Kind of like hitting a bunch of home runs in practise, until you face the opposing team it counts for squat.

Pat Micheals on the other hand is like a good closer, doesn’t get in the game much but when he does he’s throwing nothing but strikes. His logic is straight and true, and he is continually striking out the climate gang. No wonder the leaked e-mails revealed that the Anglianos wanted to beat him up to take him out of the game, Micheals is Killing them!

climate criminal replied on

A citation index is a measure of the author’s credibility. To get cited, a scientist has to publish papers and the papers are only cited by other scientists if they merit it.
That’s why Michaels gets such a low score. Even Singer is higher, but not for anything he’s done recently. e.g. Douglass et al. Which was described in the CRU emails as ‘fraud’.

To nominate Michaels as the father of climatology is idiotic in the extreme.

JR Wakefield replied on

By Atmospheric Scientist and Hurricane forecasting specialist Dr. William Gray. Gray is the renowned hurricane forecaster and Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU).

December 8, 2009

Had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events I would have likely been concerned over the possibility of humans causing serious global climate degradation.

There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide (CO_2 ) induced global warming disaster. These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards. These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.

Rising levels of CO_2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be a honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO_2 ‘s influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO_2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.

The last century’s global warming of about 1 degree F is not a consequence of human activities. This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation. These ocean current changes have lead to a small and gradual increase in the globe’s temperature. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age and into a generally warmer climate state. This is akin to the warmer global climate of the Medieval Period. We can do nothing but adapt to such long period natural temperature changes.

The recent ‘ClimateGate’ revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public.

The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO_2 emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO_2 output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate.

The Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, the likely climate agreements coming out of the Copenhagen Conference, and the EPA’s just announced decision to treat CO_2 as a pollutant represents a grave threat to the industrial world’s continued economic development. We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth. Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country’s sovereignty.

Mark Francis's picture Mark Francis replied on

Another denialist, politicized scientist. Pushing conspiracy theories as well I see.

This isn’t science. It’s politics.

Why is that? Why do I see denilalist claims that the science has been politicized, and yet they are the ones so often making political arguments?

Nothing he’s said is supported by the ongoing monitoring. Nor does his “theory” account for the rapid rise in warming. Though the oceans do take in and release heat, this is being observed.

He’s so certain about his cyclical ocean theory. That’s bizarre. Direct sensor monitoring doesnt tell us that. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/cooling-oceans.htm

The debunk of his overall ‘theory’: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/gray-on-agw/

“The heart of the problem with Gray’s new version of the THC story is that he labors under the misconception that the THC primarily upwells in the tropics, so that any reduction in the THC cools the North Atlantic but warms the tropics. This conception is at least 50 years out of date.”

“Note that Gray does not merely claim that THC changes are responsible for the observed hurricane cycles. He in fact claims that the entire 20th century warming signal is due to a slowdown of the THC, and that CO2 has nothing to do with it.”

Sure, and it’s just a coincidence that the greenhouse effect is long proven, and that

Finally, talk about the politicization of science. Check out a meeting paper he preparedfor a conference: http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/107533.pdf

It starts with this:

““Global warming caused by human activity might be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” Senator James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma) 2003”

Now there’s a politicized scientist. Now, he’s had a great career with hurricane prediction, but his climate change theory is poor. Observations don’t match his theories.

“Georgia Tech’s Webster says he’s been part of the anonymous peer review on several of Gray’s NSF proposals. Each time, he says, he recommended funding for Gray’s hurricane research but turned down the global-warming research component because he believed it wasn’t up to standards. “I have helped Bill get funding over the years,” he says. “This year, I was asked to review his proposal, and I had to recuse myself because of the ad hominem attacks he’s been making.”“

JR Wakefield replied on

You are correct. AGW isn’t about science, it’s about a radical left wing agenda to destroy capitalism. That is your quest right? Isn’t that the goal of the UN to funnel money from “rich” countries into “poor countries” like China? Isn’t it the goal of the UN to make us pay for past sins? Is it a coincidence that the IPCC was started by Maurice Strong who is on record saying democracies must be replaced? Most definitely it’s about politics.

CamMacKay replied on

Not really a conspiracy just biased scientists pushing an adgenda and politicians and the media buying into the scam for their own personal benefit. Climate research requires a lot of guesswork and estimate just to compile the ground temperature of the earth. Thousands of measuring stations required adjustments and tweaking to account for biased data. The hacked e-mails at the very least have shown us that the scientists involved in compiling this data are anything but unbiased, they are active political campaigners pushing a political adgenda. Micheal mann and jones are about as qualified to compile temperature readings as OJ simpson is to sit as a jury member in his own trial.

The reality is that the peer review system is corrupt, the data has been fudged and the evidence is non existent or biased. We are left with a theory that has not been adequately challenged by the scientific process and has proven it has zero predicitive abilities. In any other field of science free from bias, the theory would have been modified or scrapped to fit reality, rather than changing reality to fit the theory.

Dennis W. replied on

“This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation.”

And the peer-reviewed article published in a reputable journal for this assertion is?

JR Wakefield replied on

Because we live in a democracy of free speech, or do you want to get rid of that too?

Oh, and you people are “stained with oil money” as many oil companies, like Shell, are spending money on alternative fuels, and donate to your organizations too. Even the CRU was looking for oil money.

So stop with the red herrings. Not everyone who is skeptical is paid by the oil companies. Who pays for you Richard?

Mark Francis's picture Mark Francis replied on

The PR campaign fueling the denialist camp is paid by oil and gas companies, not to mention a large number of libertarian and conservative philanthropists’ funds.

It’s not that most people have some sort of arguable conflict of interest, it’s that the organized anti-GW campaign is filled with deliberate disinformation. Deliberately fake science. Which is why little of it makes it into peer review journals.

It was bad enough when they did this with asbestos (“not harmful”) and smoking (“doesn’t cause cancer”). But climate change is a huge issue.

MichaelMaser's picture MichaelMaser replied on

Just out for the holiday season! ‘Climate Cover-Up, the crusade to deny global warming’. … page after page exposes, refutes, illuminates, connects, indicts and reveals, proving up again and again the trinity on which the Denier Society is founded: Vested industry interests (i.e. petro-coal cabal), fake science manufactured by petro-coal interests in league with neo-con orgs, and a few dozen guileless shills jivin’ and shuckin’ for a handsome retainer and a shot at a notoriety they would never have otherwise garnered.

Forensic investigation meets Faust and Dr. Strangelove. Do add it to your Christmas list.

Ed_B replied on

I especially liked his comment that England has 80% of its legislation written by unelected Commissars in the EU.

It seems the bastion of democracy is the USA. It is absolutely clear that cap and trade or a carbon tax is not possible for at least a year, or after the mid term elections.

The CNN presentation tonight had it pretty well done, with even the warmist agreeing that “science will get a lot better now”(that the CRU has been exposed).

Yup.. all the years of enduring slanders for being a skeptic are nearing an end.

Phlogiston replied on

From 142 Scientists.
By the way most of the “2500” IPCC scientist did not make direct contributions, or even agree with AR4. That was down to about 36 close-knit fraudsters, from the Jones and Mann gang.

Open Letter to Secretary-General of United Nations
http://www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/

His Excellency Ban Ki Moon
Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, NY
United States of America
8 December 2009

Dear Secretary-General,

Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ - the more we
learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we
realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.
Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive
public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing
convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate
change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate
action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that
recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the
past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles,
ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural
phenomena.
We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific
disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations
Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for
their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in
climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer
models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained
through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous
human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly
outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are
having a dangerous impact on global climate;
Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the
natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with
increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal
communities;
The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate
change as they have done in the past;
Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual
and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to
anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those
changes;
Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are
increasing in severity and frequency;
Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface
temperature trends.
It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that
dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those
who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to
solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly
demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and,
if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have
utterly failed to do so

Dennis W. replied on

Phlogiston,

The scientists from the UK alone beat your international list by a factor of more than 10 (over 1,700 signatories):

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/news/latest/uk-science-statement.html

So, if you’re judging climate science by numbers, you lose ten-to-one.

Of course, science is settled not by scientists. It settled by published peer-reviewed science, where you have produced zero items.

JR Wakefield replied on

Gee, didn’t someone here claim that petitions don’t mean anything?

Most non climatologists. But that’s OK if they support your side, but not if they suuport the skeptical side. Your hypocracy knows no limits.

But get the real story here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/10/the-met-office-making-a-list-tries-to-prop-up-the-image-of-the-cru/

CamMacKay replied on

So I see that the Anglianos are at it again enforcing their protection racket. Pressuring scientists to sign a petition or risk losing work. Typical of the global warming alarmists. Hopefull they don’t send Mike “the mann” luciano around to collect, that might get scary. After the past statements revealed in the emails, perhaps Pat Micheals should get some body guards?

Dennis W. replied on

And, what I said was that science is settled by the science – not the number of scientists who sign on to something. So I am simultaneously dismissing the use of petitions to make scientific claims (which is Phlogiston’s approach here) and pointing out that those who claim they do mean something (Phlogiston?) still lose that argument on their own terms (Score UKMet–1,700, Phlogiston–140). The debate forum where the science is settled is in the peer reviewed scientific literature. It is two years now and I am still awaiting a peer-reviewed response to the IPCC 4AR, which is a compilation of the findings of hundereds of published, peer-reviewed climate change papers.