Fight back, scientists urged

“The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where scientist like to dwell, but as the facts that they are, facts as immutable as the law of gravity. The climatic disruption is not a theory open to a belief system any more than the solar system is a theory, or gravity, or the oceanic tides, or evolution.”

Strong words from a scientist, but I felt an involuntary cheer as I read them on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress. They are from Dr. George Woodwell in an email to Romm. Woodwell is the founder, Director Emeritus, and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre.

 

Romm had invited comment from him in response to a Washington Times report of an email exchange between several scientists from the National Academy of Sciences discussing the need to fight back against the attempts by sceptics to portray the UEA emails and the IPCC error as ground for doubting the science of climate change.

“This is not the time to wring our hands over the challenges to hyper-scientific objectivity, the purity of scholars, and to tie ourselves in knots with apologies for alleged errors of trifling import.”

Here is the reality, which Woodwell expresses with a freshness of perception:

“The fact is that we, humans, have changed the composition of the atmosphere with respect to heat-trapping gases enough to start the progression of global climate, not into a new steady state, but into an open-ended warming that is pulling the environment out from under this civilization. If one wonders where that process leads, one need not look far around the world to find dysfunctional landscapes. Have a quick look at New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, or Haiti before the earthquake.  All have fallen far below any point where internal resources can be used to restore a nation with a functional political system, a vital economy, and a functional environment.”

Scientists need to come out fighting:

“The scientific community has done brilliantly with the IPCC, by nature a conservative apparatus. It is time now, thirty years after the problem was recognized as threatening this civilization, for the scientific community to come forth with clear instructions, relentlessly repeated and amplified, as to how to restore a functional habitat for humanity. It can be done, but the scientific community has a big responsibility not now widely recognized or accepted.”

Woodwell has had plenty of time to consider these matters.  Over twenty years ago, in 1988, he testified to a Senate committee under the title Rapid Global Warming: Worse With Neglect. The matters he raised then have continued to be prominent in the science in the intervening years, and the early warning he sounded has stood the test of time.  (The full text of his testimony is included on the Climate Progress post.)

James Hansen also gave his famous Congressional testimony that year, and continues today to bring his scientific concern about climate change to the attention of political leaders.  He is a splendid exemplar of Woodwell’s urging that the scientific community “come forth with clear instructions, relentlessly repeated and amplified”.

There is much advice circulating these days about how to get the message across successfully to the public.  Some of it suggests that the scientists should retreat to their domain of research and leave it to others to work on public opinion. That won’t work.  If the scientists are not constantly and publicly reiterating the seriousness of their findings it’s likely that the issue will continue to be treated with far less urgency than it requires.  It’s not always easy for scientists to take public roles, but they need to do it  more than ever as the campaigns of disinformation reach the peaks of activity we have seen in recent months. Bravo Woodwell and others like him.

24 thoughts on “Fight back, scientists urged”

    1. I wonder if you have any appreciation of what democracy actually is.
      One thing is for sure – it has nothing to do with hiding the truth from the general population. It’s about giving everyone a voice.
      And your comment stinks of the odour of the common troll. Off topic and irrelevant.
      And it wasn’t Gareth who posted this, it was Bryan.

      [Fixed that for you, M. GR]

    2. I presume you’d have made the same offensive accusation to me if you’d realised I’d written the post. Your response to “the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis” is to raise the cry of Nazism and the death of democracy. You evidently have no science to advance, so fall back on name-calling – and very inappropriate name-calling, by the way, if you had any idea of my philosophical orientation.

  2. Bryan I have been waiting for the scientific community to pick itself up after the slanderous accusations of the relatively minor errors of judgment by a few. Nothing of which disproves the basic and fundamental science of AGW.
    Further to the above, I see that the UN is to carry out a review of the IPCC by academics, and in announcing the Review United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon reasserted the findings of the latest report.
    “The threat posed by climate change is real, and nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change,”
    I hope that this will provide the forum for the scientific community to reassert as forcibly as it can the facts which confront us now and which continue to grow day by day.

  3. So, Checkzor, trainee denialist troll, you’re back from self-imposed exile?
    How is life as a junior propagandist?
    Are you eating well, and writing home regularly?

    Now, have you read any climate science lately, or are you still struggling with the big words and unfamiliar concepts?

    Don’t worry, we’re here to help…

  4. Hi Rob,
    Great to hear from you!

    Yes, I am writing home regularly. I am half way through reading “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by A W Montford”

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illusion-Climategate-Corruption-Science-Independent/dp/1906768358/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268343476&sr=8-1

    Note that it gets 21 five star reviews. It’s a great read and I suggest you all read it. Unless, of course, you want to remain in denial that the Hockey Stick has any scientific merit.

    If you want to stay in denial (like, also, for example, denying the existence of the MWP), then I am very happy to help.

    I am running two day workshops on denialism – “how to bury your head in the sand and talk sh*t in the 21st century” which I will use some of the techniques shown on this blog.

    Thanks again, am just popping off to the edge of the world, where I am going to meet God and the guy who organised the 9/11 bombings for G W Bush. Elvis and Lady Di might turn up too,

    See ya

    A Denialist Troll

  5. (1) Desmogblog:
    http://www.desmogblog.com/

    There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.

    (2)
    http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41965

    According to physicist Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and a blogger for realclimate.org, Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming

    Maybe if (2) didn’t happen, we wouldn’t need (1)
    Desmogblog – #1 campaigner to remove us “trolls” the right to question dubious statements like (2)

    But I accept I am a denialist troll.
    Maybe you can “help me” by explaining (2) and why we need (1) to remove free speech

    Your sincerely
    A Troll that is not worth talking to

    1. “The divergence problem is a physical phenomenon – tree growth has slowed or declined in the last few decades, mostly in high northern latitudes. The divergence problem is unprecedented, unique to the last few decades, indicating its cause may be anthropogenic. The cause is likely to be a combination of local and global factors such as warming-induced drought and global dimming. Tree-ring proxy reconstructions are reliable before 1960, tracking closely with the instrumental record and other independent proxies.”

      The obvious hole in this logic is; if todays warming has caused the proxy to behave in a way representative of cooling, how do we know similar warming has not happened in the past?

      The divergence problem is not that that tree rings indicate cooling today, it is that the response of the proxy to warming is not predictable and therefore tree rings are not a good proxy.

      “Has this phenomenon happened before? In other words, can we rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature? Briffa 1998 shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends. This has been a general trend with the divergence problem – trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. The important result from Cook 2004 was that before the 1960s, the groups tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. Thus, the study suggests that the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and is restricted to recent decades.“

      How can one look at data back to 1880 and then conclude the problem is unique in the last 1000 years? If you place faith in the instrumental record the 50 years since 1960 are the warmest 50 years since 1880, so if the divergence problem only occurs at high temperatures then the good correlation before 1960 only proves good correlation since 1000AD if you assume cooler than 1960 temperatures during that period. And since the point of the reconstruction is to evaluate past temperatures it makes terrible sense to have an assumption that pre-empts the conclusion! If temperatures were warmer a tree ring proxy would not show it.

      This is hardly sceptical science as the blog portrays to be. It isn’t sceptical and it isn’t science. How sad.

  7. “The divergence problem is a physical phenomenon – tree growth has slowed or declined in the last few decades, mostly in high northern latitudes. The divergence problem is unprecedented, unique to the last few decades, indicating its cause may be anthropogenic. The cause is likely to be a combination of local and global factors such as warming-induced drought and global dimming. Tree-ring proxy reconstructions are reliable before 1960, tracking closely with the instrumental record and other independent proxies.”

    MY INTERPRETATION:

    We are trying to find anthro signals in tree ring data. But the tree ring data doesn’t match the temperature graphs. So it must be due to anthro warming.

    Therefore, if we assume anthro warming, we can adjust the tree ring data to prove anthro warming.

    An alternative view is:
    “Tree ring data is not a reliable temperature proxy”

    No, because the wonderfully liberal DeSmogBlog has decided that my (perfectly valid imho) opinion is “dangerous” and “confusing”, I should be not allowed to voice these opinions.

  8. “I am running two day workshops on denialism – “how to bury your head in the sand and talk sh*t in the 21st century” which I will use some of the techniques shown on this blog.” Dr C.

    Finally, some honesty. No prizes for guessing whose comments those techniques are modeled on – yourself, Gosman and C3.

  9. Checkzor – still worrying about Paleoclimate? I was rather hoping you might have some response to my post on why I think warming is caused by us in the previous thread. You might notice a dearth of denialist books about the things that really matter.

    If you are reading that book, then I sure you hope you are also reading Mann et al 2009,
    http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf

    That way you dont waste your reading effort chasing after straw men or more importantly, continuing to think that AGW is based on paleoclimate.

  12. Since this thread started with the article about the “email vandals”, why did the BBC sit on the emails for a month before they were ftp’d up to the russian server?

    Why didn’t they release them to Gavin so he could get the “official” take on the emails before the denier trolls Mosher and Fuller got their book to print?

    And when is the “official” version of the emails book coming out?

    Because, as we know, everything the denier trolls says has an equal and opposite argument from the establishment.

    Anyway, who said I was a denier? I am reading IPCC WG3 right now

  13. Checkzor – did I say it was not relevant? Paleoclimate has quite a degree of importance in validation and constraint but you are continually putting up views that are both long debunked nonsense and irrelevant to the question of basis for AGW. The riddles in paleoclimate are about what both the past temperature was (which is constantly revised as new data comes to hand – should science stand still on this?) and what the forcing in the past were. If model-response to forcings within model uncertainty dont match estimated past global temperature within uncertainty, then model is wrong – but this is certainly not the case.

    Now tell me how a steady measured 4W/m2 of extra warming is not going to warm the planet.

  14. I am not particularly interested in whether CO2 is warming the planet to be perfectly honest.

    I am just tired of this recycled garbage that is called science.

    Tell me that The Hockey Stick Illusion, which goes into a lot of detail about R2 and RE statistics and multiple proxy sets, and why they are invalid, is a waste of time.
    Tell me why it gets 21 5 star reviews

    Tell me why the “scientists” keep defending Mann.

    We get sick of this closed shop mentality. I don’t doubt there is a lot of valid research, but if scientists keep defending shoddy work then us “trolls” keep biting back..

    *snap*

    1. “Tell me that The Hockey Stick Illusion” – DrC

      http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm

      “Tell me why it gets 21 5 star reviews” – DrC

      Errrrr……….because it ain’t Paleoclimatologists reviewing it?.

      “Tell me why the “scientists” keep defending Mann.” – Dr C

      Because the study has been validated by scientific evaluation. See link above.

      “I don’t doubt there is a lot of valid research, but if scientists keep defending shoddy work” – Dr C

      But how would you know?. You don’t have any confidence (let alone understanding) in peer reviewed science remember?.

  15. There is a problem here I dont know how to answer. Montford publishes a racy read which those disinclined to AGW lap up. Checkzor, like many others concludes science is dodgy. Science can only point to the published research – but then if you believe Montford or Fuller, then you think they are crap anyway. If you published a demolition of it, would anyone read it? Meanwhile, emissions continue and earth keeps warming… Is there some point at which excuses run out and how much damage will be done before we get there.

    I’m outta here – too much time for nothing.

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