I’m a non-specialist with a few basic clues about scientific method, and perhaps a few more clues about propaganda and msinformation when I see it. After the email hack, I’ve upped my reading around the place considerably, and, categorically, there is no doubt where the balance of science lies.

The denialist camp has very little of scientific credibility to show, but an array of repetitive, much-hyped, thoroughly-discredited memes that seem to be rolled out on a rotational basis. That’s been obvious over the last few eeeks and before that, from reading back on the main forums and blogs.

The orchestrated PR campaign to discredit science that started in the rearguard action of the tobacco industry and is now in active in the anti- climate science campaign has been insidious and destructive.

You’ve parroted a number of sources right out of that “heartland’. You have a scientific background? It’s not really obvious from your comments.

Cheers to the regulars here. haven’t been reading here for very long, but pleased to see some informed comments with a New Zealand flavour online.

Dead duck, “climategate” is a dead duck!.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P70SlEqX7oY&feature=related

the book which bears the title “Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.” after reading the title, i fully grasp the sense of your statement that the author is “always aware of uncertainties in his science and accords them proper status”. the same author (who again tells us the “truth” – as others have done before on the same subject…) also states that “coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or global climate disasters will be a dead certainty.” it does not really seem as nuanced to me as it does to you.

In other words, the result is cast off as shrill, and therefore impossible to be unbiased.

The thing is, they’ve done their homework. The argument was developed and cross-checked through over 150 years of scientific debate. The first “model run” in 1896 using pencil and paper has been refined but essentially validated. The atmospheric physics was worked out in the first half of the 20th century. The other driving forces of the climate have all been quantified, other possible culprits from undersea volcanoes to sunspots and orbital variations investigated and quantified – and there is warming left over.

one of the marked differences between you “the believer” and i “the sceptic” is that i will read hansen’s book with due curiosity (with its roland emmerich movie title), and that i will analyze his claims in light of the existing scientific evidence shored up for and against his claims and findings.

Excellent, well if you are actually reading science-based things you should figure this out eventually – as an ex-sceptic, I did. The on-line AIP book is very useful in showing how historical some of the skeptics’ claims are.

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=41
http://www.desmogblog.com/rm-bob-carter
http://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-michaels

Get a life, stop trying to screw up my childrens’ lives, and, please, spare us the crocodile tears of your fake victimhood…

I wish it were a matter of no great moment, but meanwhile the globe keeps warming, ice keeps melting, sea level keeps rising and I’m alarmed and want to see us take urgent remedial action. Which means that when they campaign against such action, in my eyes they become an enemy of human welfare. I hope that your immersion in that world won’t mean that you want to stop such mitigation measures as we may eventually undertake.

Incidentally Hansen always makes it clear that his understanding of climate change is based first on paleoclimate studies, then observation, with models coming third.

…I see you’ve added a link to a Bob Carter interview. He speaks with an air of authority but he does not speak for those who work closely on the issue, and his assertion that he is in the “middle” position is fictional.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgaeyMa3jyU&feature=player_embedded

thanks for your circumspect and cool reply. i find it a lot more appealing than laurence’s and rob’s foul language in response to a few fundamental thoughts i took the time to share, and which i think are important to throw into this debate.

i have moved from “believing” to “fact checking” during this summer of 2009 only because a friend of mine – another environmentalist – pointed me to a number of resources which provide a much more differentiated and unsettled picture about man-made global warming and the climate change debate. like you, and as i already pointed out earlier, i was convinced that the “sceptics” had a second agenda. after some 6 months of research, i still cannot see that being the case. they are just as sincere as the “alarmist” might be – or might have been before they got onboard what some might be inclined to call the the global warming gravy train.

it is important to bear in mind that the IPCC was created back in 1986 to “assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation”. in other words, it was the IPCC’s mission to find – or demonstrate – the existence of man-made global warming. and the IPCC did just that and found it. it is CO2. and where did it find it! in its models – inside computers…

a decade earlier, mainstream scientific thinking still was that we were about to slip back into another ice age. the confusion about the direction in which climate was going as little as 30 years ago really tells us that hard core climate science is still very young, and that many fundamental chemical and physical mechanisms of earth’s climate system are still completely unknown, or otherwise very poorly understood. try to model that!

i am a trained scientist, but i am not a climatologist. i do understand scientific method and process, and i am capable of reading papers, and also the same books you do. and i do read them. more importantly though, is to be able to read up on the assertions of scientists who differ over some of the fundamentals on climate change, and make up our own minds. it is not because we do not find these views aired in mainstream media that they are less sound or important – quite to the opposite. the eerie almost total silence of world wide media surrounding the east anglia affair (dubbed “CLIMATEGATE”) should be a reason enough for anyone to catch a whiff of a dead rat!

ok. let’s get to the “handful of scientific papers” that might stipulate differentiated kinds of GW mechanisms and outcomes. having read some of your posts, it is clear that you realize that climate change “happens” through some jolly complex lot of chemo-physical processes and mechanism scientists are trying to figure out, and that climate change is expected to create major impacts on different levels – such as enhanced storm events, sea level rise, species extinctions, etc. this covers many fields of scientific inquiry, and bodies like the IPCC are commissioned to bring the science together and make sense of it. they put the puzzle together – not necessarily the guy who digs up ice cores on greenland… there are hundreds and thousands of papers in the peer reviewed press which are at odds with the “consensus” position of the IPCC. not just a handful. strikingly though, as for the stuff mentioned further above, mainstream media report virtually nothing which is “climate contrarian” – as james hanson would put it. why, when there is so much of it (as you will find out!)?

probably the most comprehensive resource on this can be downloaded from the following link: http://www.heartland.org/publications/NIPCC%20report/PDFs/NIPCC%20Final.pdf . this report was published in july of this year, and has gone unnoticed by the press – worldwide. when you look at the breadth, scope and seriousness of the work involved, you might start to wonder how it is possible that report of this nature goes unnoticed. i for one, cannot figure that out… the report is quite scientific in tone and content, and also very bulky, but i believe it is accessible to the aficionado of climate science. just as i would urge you to read “alarmist” publications with due brains at hand, i would certainly also encourage you to challenge all assertions and findings derived in this report. having bought james hanon’s book already, you will be able to directly compare differing views on the same topics. and for rob – before i waste more bandwidth – the same report provides you with hundreds of very solid references suggesting more or less otherwise…

a more penetrable and even more recent text is the following book which i am just about to finish: Michaels, P.J. 2009. Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know. Cato Institute. Washington, DC. (laurence, the foreword to this book names american scientists who have recently lost their positions as state climatologists for holding scientifically motivated views on climate change which differed – and continue to differ – with IPCC’s findings; see, i did not pull that one out of my rectum, thank you very much).

to me the conjecture here is quite simple. we have been getting anthropogenic global warming and climate change stuffed down our throats left, right and center for the last two decades. governments, an intergovernmental expert panel steered by the UN, the media and a former US vice-president – all send us the same message over and over again. doubt, scepsis, and dissent have been effectively silenced and thwarted to such a degree that folks out there – such as ourselves on this blog – hardly manage to even have a decent conversation about things anymore. “fact-checkers” are likened to holocaust deniers – just because they want to know for themselves. scientists whose findings differ and publish them lose their jobs. others just stay quiet.

you have to read! there are more “inconvenient” truths out there than those fed to us on the broadband. you have to shoot beyond al gore’s DVD and book… and then come back to it and wonder… it’s an enlightening journey, and it is worth every second and penny you will “waste” on it. and since it is carbon neutral, you won’t warm up our planet by doing so!

now i order james hanson’s book!

You obviously consider that a handful of scientific papers which have not gained traction in the wider scientific community contain evidence that CO2 forcing is likely to be less than most believe, that warming is similarly likely to be lower, and that sea level rise will be small. We depend on the intellectual integrity of the scientific community as a whole in such matters. I have no doubt that any such papers have received due consideration and not gained acceptance – a common part of scientific debate as I understand it. You can hardly claim that they represent one side of a great divide in scientific opinion. Certainly they do not diminish the urgency of mitigation measures on which the survival of human cvilisation may depend.

“very palpable, justified and evidence-backed reasons to “believe” (and publish) that global warming is less than projected in the 4th IPCC report (that is a fact the IPCC is now dealing with), that sea level rise forecasts in the several meter range (by scientists such as james hansen) are off by several meters, and that the forcing of CO2 is likely to be substantially less than originally expected”