Quote van de dag

Hajo Smit laat weer maar eens blijken hoe gemeend zijn SMOM-subsidie-aanvraag tot het opzetten van een blog waar beide partijen in het debat kunnen dialogeren nu eigenlijk juist was:

De enige reden dat ik vind dat Al Gore, Ramstdorf, Schellnhuber, Pier Vellinga, Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Rotmans, Maurits Groen, Maarten Hajer en ander intellectueel tuig de rest an hun leven mogen worden opgesloten (in een fysieke cel dan wel in het isolement van hun verspilde leven) is dat zij mede verantwoordelijk zijn voor het niet-oplossen van zeer gemakkelijk te tackelen zaken zoals dijken in Bangladesh, electriciteit en drinkwater in heel Afrika etc 

Climate of Doubt

Watch Climate of Doubt on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Read More on Scott Mandia’s blog

Chemtrail burgemeester Peter Vereecke versus de rede

Een jaar geleden alweer blogde ik over de Peter Vereecke, voorzitter van de Belfort Groep een man die niet enkel klimaatwetenschap verwerpt, maar een resem complottheorieën omarmt, zoals chemtrails, gedwongen vaccinaties of de codex alimentarius conspiracy.

Daarenboven bestookte de man blijkbaar een hele hoop personen met ongewenste mails, zoals topambtenaren van het Vlaams Agentschap Zorg en Gezondheid, maar ook weermannen Frank Deboosere en Sabine Hagedoren.

Omdat hij enkele ambtenaren persoonlijk viseerde, werd klacht ingediend tegen Peter Vereecke bij het Parket van Gent, dat een psychiater en klinisch psycholoog heeft verzocht Vereecke aan een geestesonderzoek te onderwerpen, wat hij geweigerd heeft.

Zoals  te voorspellen viel, ziet Vereecke zelf ziet er uiteraard een poging tot intimidatie in en vraagt hij minister Jo Vandeurzen om een onderhoud.

h/t Barracuda

John O'Sullivan: Look Ma, no brain!

This is a guest post by Captain Pithart

John O'Sullivan is the driving force behind the physics-denying group "Slaying the Sky Dragon" (aka Principia Scientific International, chairman: Tim Ball), a group so deeply rooted in denialist Fantasia that even Christopher Monckton denounced their first book as unscientific nonsense.

O'Sullivan may not be the brightest bulb in the climate denialist sideshow, but he sure is well-connected and industrious. According to his LinkedIn entry, in 2010 he "established himself as the world's most popular Internet writer on the greenhouse gas theory of climate change (Google)", with highlights such as "Shock News: Disgraced Climategate Scientist Made Top UN Weatherman" (didn't notice the source was five years old), "Carbon Dioxide Not a Well Mixed Gas and Can’t Cause Global Warming" ("School Children Prove Carbon Dioxide is Heavier than Air"), or "Solar Ovens Prove Greenhouse Gas Theory is cooked" (don't even ask).

O'Sullivan Makes a List

O'Sullivan recently posted a list of "Fifty IPCC Experts Expos[ing] Washington Post Global Warming Lies". In it he proves that he is capable of cutting and pasting up to 50 names and quotes without having to resort to his, or anybody other's brain. Well done, John :)

He lists people that he somehow associates with the IPCC (he does not mention how), combined with quotes that in his mind demonstrate their criticism of the IPCC. Some of them worked on IPCC reports, and are quoted out of context; others are so-called "Expert Reviewers for the IPCC", which means they requested to look at the IPCC report before publication, which anybody interested in it can do. As you need no qualifications for being one, the title is only used by people trying to buy authority they don't have.

IPCC Expert Reviewers

Here are the "Expert Reviewers" on the list (those that use the "title" themselves are daggered):

• Richard Courtney
• Peter Dietze ‡
• Lee C. Gerhard ‡
• Vincent Gray ‡
• Kiminori Itoh
• Steven M. Japar
• Madhav Khandekar
• Hans Labohm ‡
• Patrick J. Michaels
• Paul Reiter ‡
• Murry Salby
• Tom Victor Segalstad
• David Wojick ‡
• Miklós Zágoni

O'Sullivan missed only one climate contrarian "Expert Reviewer" that I was able to find: Ross McKitrick, Steven McIntyre's economist sidekick. Good work, John :)

So that's fourteen. Most of the other people O'Sullivan lists are promoted as experts on the IPCC mostly because they contributed critical quotes that bolster his world view. I suspect he got many of them from mining Marc Morano's report More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims. But what about the handful of real IPCC contributors on the list?

The O'Sullitaj Chimera

Lučka Bogataj is an established Slovenian scientist working on climate issues, and contributed to IPCC AR4 Working Group II, "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability". O'Sullivan quotes her:

Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don't cause global temperatures to rise.... temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.

The second part of this quote was compress-pasted from an earlier O'Sullivan post, where Bogataj said:

A detailed comparison of temperature data and the quantity of carbon dioxide captured in the ice shows, that sometimes it warmed up first and then the concentration of carbon dioxide increased, and sometimes vice versa, but on average the temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.

Wow, that's true! And forest fires, too, are sometimes from natural causes and sometimes due to arsonists. So it turns out that Dr. Bogataj is right in agreeing with established science.

But what about the first part of the new quote? It's actually a compress-pasted version of O'Sullivan's own words from the old post he started with

Dr. Lucka Kajfež Bogataj left cold clear water between herself and her former UN shipmates by declaring that rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide probably don’t cause global temperatures to rise.

Which is most likely the result of O'Sullivan misunderstanding the real Bogataj quote in the first place. Greenfyre's had some fun with the story back in November 2010.

Watch a video of Lučka Bogataj stating how urgent the climate problem is.

More AGW-convinced IPCC contributors

About the others on the list that were involved in the IPCC reports:

Here's a quote by Andrew A. Lacis of NASA GISS:

The bottom line is that CO2 is absolutely, positively, and without question, the single most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It acts very much like a control knob that determines the overall strength of the Earth’s greenhouse effect. Failure to control atmospheric CO2 is a bad way to run a business, and a surefire ticket to climatic disaster.

The quote run by O'Sullivan is a commentary on an early draft of the report, which was much improved in later revisions.

Mike Hulme issued clarifications after it became clear that his words were misinterpreted and lauded in the denialosphere.

Oliver Frauenfeld is quoted out of context too, as detailed by Deltoid back when Morano used the same quote.

Martin R. Manning was vice-chair of Working Group II. I could not find the source of the quote O'Sullivan attributes to him, and without the context it could just as likely refer to governments watering down scientific findings. Here's Manning talking about the pressing issues that have to be tackled on a warming planet. He also contributed to the 2008 Scientific American article "The Physical Science behind Climate Change", subtitled "Why are climatologists so highly confident that human activities are dangerously warming Earth?".

IPCC contributors really unconvinced of AGW

The list contains two metallurgists that participated in AR4: Philip Lloyd and Tom Tripp. What does a metallurgist know about climate variability? Not necessarily much, it turns out, even when he contributed to IPCC AR4 Working Group III, helping to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions from magnesium production operations.

John Christy is one of the more than 600 scientists that contributed to IPCC AR4 Working Group 1 (the one concerned with the actual physical climate science). In fact, together with his frequent collaborator Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen (who also once was an IPCC contributor), he forms the trinity of established climate scientists that peddle climate science denial. He also sat on satellite temperature data for a decade (together with Spencer), claiming that the warming from the other scientists' datasets was faulty, until it was found that the error was in their measurements.

Rosa Compagnucci is a member of the IPCC Working Group II for the Chapter on Latin America, and specialist on the "El Niño" phenomenon. It seems that she thinks the global temperature change is due to changes in solar activity. It turns out it's not.

IPCC lead author John T. Everett (Fisheries, Polar Regions, Oceans and Coastal Zones) thinks the Earth might be cooling. It's not.

Richard Tol was an economic lead author for Working Group II. He is of the Bjørn Lomborg school of thought, that mitigation should only be approached when it's cheap enough.

Christopher Landsea, a contributing author and hurricane expert, says that global warming might not lead to more hurricanes. The science in this area is indeed not very conclusive yet, but it seems that they might not become more frequent, but stronger.

Aynsley Kellow, a contributing author on environmental policy, wants to tackle other greenhouse gasses first.

Harry F. Lins was IPCC co-chair during the first report (1990), and contributed to the second and third. The quote attributed to him by O'Sullivan is not his own words, but at least from the text of a 2009 petition to Barack Obama, organized by the fossil-fueled Cato Institute, which he signed together with a colorful mix of about one hundred others. But that's another story.

No Consensus?

What do we learn from this? Although, like mostly anything, the IPCC has its faults, it managed to produce a pretty solid report on the state of climate science, even when a huge and diverse group of people contributed to it, some of which don't understand all aspects of it, and some of which disagree for different reasons. How many? Considering more than 450 lead authors and more than 800 contributing authors were involved in the 2007 report (with more than 2500 Expert Reviewers), the fraction is somewhere clearly below the 3% of established climate scientists that disagree that global warming is mostly man-made and is going to be a problem. This won't stop people like O'Sullivan from gleefully pasting together lists of make-believe authorities; but it should stop people from listening to the newspaper clipping artists.

John O'Sullivan: Comic relief from the denialosphere

I must admit that I am, in a twisted way, a fan of John O'Sullivan's works; he holds a special place in my denier panorama, never ceasing to entertain with his antics, which he trumpets into the world with a childlike pride the size of a planet.

I just hope that the people that made him the world's most popular Internet writer on the greenhouse gas theory of climate change (Google) did so for the same reasons.

Oh, one more: You might wonder what the "Galileo Movement" is that O'Sullivan tips his hat to in his recent article. Here's their newest contribution to climate science.

Voorspelbaarheid

ik voorspelde hier dat Rypke Zeilmaker nooit zou ingaan op het feit dat Fred Singer niet meer of niet minder dan gelogen heeft over zijn financiële banden met de fossiele brandstoffen-industrie en die voorspelling is uitgekomen .
Dat wetenschappelijk onderzoek gefinancierd wordt is een evidentie en dat, Exxon uitgezonderd, de petroleumindustrie beseft dat onderzoek een wezenlijk onderdeel is van vooruitgang vind ik wel net zo fijn. Dat een onderzoeker gefinancierd wordt betekent uiteraard nog niet automatisch dat die onderzoeker corrupt is. 
Gekeken moet worden –moet ik dit nou echt nog neerpennen- naar wat er met die middelen wordt gedaan. En dan blijkt dat Singer’s werk er vooral uit bestaat wetenschap aan te vallen, in plaats van te zoeken naar vooruitgang.
Het feit dat Singer liegt over zijn financiering is daarbij veelbetekekend. Dat het Zeilmaker geen ene moer kan schelen dat Singer liegt al evenzeer.
Het PCCC publiceerde ondertussen al een antwoord op de belangrijkste fouten in Singer’s presentatie tijdens zijn bezoek aan het KNMI. Een video met de lezing in Brussel kan je hier vinden; Singer heeft zoals verwacht  niets gezegd dat niet allang weerlegd is.
Ondertussen is Wolfgang Wagner, hoofdredacteur van Remote Sensing, opgestapt na de publicatie van Roy Spencer’s ondermaatse laatste worp en worden de resultaten van het interessante CLOUD-experiment op allerhande blogs gestrecht tot iets wat onmogelijk uit het onderzoek valt te concluderen. Business as usual dus.

The one where S. Fred Singer lies about his funding and is NOT coming to Belgium ?

Claes Johnson just announced S. Fred Singer will not be coming to Belgium during his European tour, after Belgian IPCC vice-chairman Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele contacted the organising Société Européenne des Ingénieurs et Industriels with this letter :

.La SEII et l'honnêteté scientifique Monsieur le Secrétaire général,

La SEII soutient-elle implicitement le déni climatique, à la veille du congrès mondial des ingénieurs à Genève consacré aux défis énergétiques (où j'aurai l'honneur de donner une "keynote lecture") ?
L'utilisation du papier à lettres de la SEII par votre administrateur M. Masson pour l'invitation ci-jointe le suggère malheureusement, malgré une phrase hypocrite pour indiquer que la SEII ne "sponsorise" pas l'événement.
Vous devez savoir que MM Fred Singer est une personne dont l'honnêteté scientifique laisse fortement à désirer. Ses activités de désinformation sont financées par les lobbies des combustibles fossiles (voir XXXXXXXXXXXXXX) , et il est scandaleux qu'une telle personne puisse être associée, de près ou de loin, à la SEII et à la Fondation universitaire.
Des collègues éminents m'ont écrit que M. Johnson ne valait pas mieux. Un de ses "textbooks" récents, où il parlait à tort et à travers des changements climatiques, publié par le Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Suède), a dû être rétracté par ce dernier tellement il contenait d'erreurs.
Merci de me dire très rapidement quelles mesures la SEII compte prendre pour se distancier de cet "événement"? Je serais heureux également de savoir quel est le mandat de ce "think tank" de la SEII sur les changements climatiques que Mr Masson préside (alors que son CV n'est pas disponible sur le site de l'Université d'Antwerpen, et que je n'ai jamais entendu parler de ses compétences en matière de climat).
Cordialement, Prof. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele

In short, Van Yp states Singer’s scientific honesty is lower than one would desire, and Singer gets funded by the fossil-fuel industry.
Singer responds :

• Why am I not surprised by this disreputable action of this IPCC officer.After all, we know from Climategate emails that these people will go to any length to suppress scientific dissent. Even to libel and to use bald-faced lies.
• Of course, I am not supported by fossil-fuel industry. That is complete nonsense and invention
• My Europe visit is paid by the Ettore Majorana Foundation -- to give an invited talk at a climate conference in Erice. I am using the occasion to accept additional invitations to speak (without lecture fees) at the Univ of Hamburg, Imperial College, Univ of Paris - Jussieu, and of course at the KNMI in De Bilt. By happenstance I was also invited to address 100+ engineers in Zurich.
• Our IPCC colleague van Yp also questions my honesty. Well now -- the IPCC has been using me as a scientific reviewer, I publish regularly in peer-reviewed journals and am an elected Fellow of several scientific societies. So there must be some who disagree with van Yp.

Singer is stating in his reply he’s not being supported by the fossil-fuel industry. Which simply is a lie.
Of course Dutch denialists like climategate.nl’s Rypke Zeilmaker are not pleased with the cancellation. But what they are not mentioning, and probably never will, is Singer’s lie.
Singer’s Astroturf group Science and Environment Policy Project received US$ 10.000 from Exxon in 1998 and 2000.
The +/- 20p NiPCC-report was worth US$ 143.000, through an intermediate source, as the industry isn’t stupid enough any more to fund directly (as they have to publish their funding). And of course this NiPCC report was complete nonsense.
Earlier in his career, when he was still a tobacco lobbyist, Singer received US$ 20.000 for a report trying to manufacture doubt on the relation between passive smoking and cancer. Many more fascinating documents on Singer”s lobby career can be found in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. Of course don’t expect the Dutch denialists to ever mention this library. Remember I got banned on De Dagelijkse Standaard when mentioning Labohm lied when telling he didn’t know about Singer’s funding. Getting too close to the source I guess.
Meanwhile, it seems the Singer & Johnson meeting will become a private meeting.

A consensus is not science ? Contrary !

Even though it’s such an easy topic, few things have been so poorly understood by laymen as the role of a consensus in science, leading to phrases like ‘a consensus is not science’.

This statement could not be any further from the truth.

But it takes some understanding of the philosophy of science to understand what is wrong with the statement. Many people seem convinced ‘consensus’ implies scientific proof is lacking. Before dealing with consensus, it’s important to understand what “scientific proof’ actually means. I’ve dealt with this issue in my post Loose thoughts on some frequent fallacies. It’s very important to understand the philosophical travesty the post tries to make clear : a ‘proof’ in the sense of an ’absolute truth until the end of time’ does not exist.

As odd as it may sound, the word proof only reflects the current state of knowledge, we are not able to prove anything. Even for theories we ‘absolutely know for sure’ they are real we don’t have any proof at all. Just assumptions (usually strengthened by conducting experiments). Take for instance the gravitation-theory. It’s merely an unproven theory !
Let’s ask a tricky question : how do you ‘prove’ gravity is not just a theory ? I’ll give you a hint : you can’t. Really, it’s impossible !

Sure, you can write down Newton’s law :


Does this law ‘prove’ gravitation ? No !

Sure every experiment you conduct will obey he law, but this doesn’t prove the equation. Not at all. It just doesn’t falsify the theory, that’s all. Conducting the experiment a zillion times does not provide any evidence or ‘proof’ next time the apple will fall from the tree too. After all, one day, who knows, the apple will not fall. The point is : science works with assumptions and predictions, but from a philosophical point of view none of these provide an absolute evidence or ‘proof’.

Nevertheless, no one in their rightful would discard gravitation. Why ? Scientific theories never ever are accepted because they are proven to be right (as we cannot proof them) but because scientists accept them. In other words, because there is a consensus.

Many people fail to understand this. While science accepts the evolution theory, there are people like Erich von Däniken saying extra-terrestrials came to earth and initiated earth’s civilisation. Why isn’t his theory accepted ? After all, we cannot prove aliens did not come to earth ? One reason is there’s a whole lot of positive assumptions supporting the evolution-theory, while there are none for the ET-theory. But as none of them really ‘prove’ anything, the simple reason evolution is accepted is a vast majority of scientists accepts the theory.

Science is –always– based on nothing more than consensus ! People who say a consensus isn’t science don’t understand science.