Why reasoning with Warmists usually fails

This is interesting as it has application outside of just the man made global warming debate.

Other areas of political debate clearly have similar issues.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/23/why-its-so-hard-to-convince-warmists/

Damaging allegations about Warmism and Science

The following letter has been posted in full by James Delingpole on his blog in the Telegraph.

It speaks for itself and raises issue that really should ring alarm bells in our government with its plans to commit billions to the faith of Warmism at times on national financial austerity and when it will damage the chances of the growth we need to pay of the disastrous levels of debt Labour have saddled us all with.

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety
Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

Man made #climategate scandal warming up !

Apparently the Climate Research Unit has recently been hacked and data from emails etc is now swarming over the internet in a way that police states find very annoyingly hard to control.

The user friendly summary starts here from James Delingpole, who sees this on a par with the recent UK scandal on MPs expenses.

A summary blog post is available from The Reference Frame blog here, who has a list of MSM outlets carrying the story, blogs and other sites addressing it and even links to the original data. Looks like a good starting point for some research if your interested.

What's up with That are of course on it also.

( How long before it turns up on Wikileaks  ).

The damage limitation squad is out in force.

Lest convincing attempt at this is the refusal to confirm content by the Climate Research Unit (CRU ).
As you become more political the denials get more absolutist with govt advisers and officers starting the all science agree's man made climate change a fact ManBearPig rant.

The best counter strike I've seen is from Green Peace who have a real go at the "Nothing happening here" "move along now " ploy by suggesting its all internet obsessive stuff and even David Icke drives web traffic ( a nice touch Greeno's you get spin of the day award).

A more sane, by which I mean appealing to reason, pro-Warmist commentary is available at Real Climate here.

No doubt there will be some serious analysis and cross referencing of the data going on right now so it will be interesting to see where this story leads.

Expect a lot of smoke and spin from the Warmist religious cult, but they could really have been caught out this time. Or alternatively a closer inspection of the arguments by making everything more open could convince sceptics.

Personally I'm very sceptical. The geological records seem to argue against man made global warming, and as for computer modelling - its what I do for a living and I have near zero confidence in scientists capabilities of getting this anywhere near right. (Interesting and a few fun papers and conferences somewhere warm and nice - yes - reliable no. )

Update: There are allegations about illegal purging of data to avoid freedom of information requests being made, reported on Rush Limbaugh's site. If proven this would be very, very serious indeed.

Further update: This story kicked of at The Air Vent blog here - who was contacted by the hacker(s) with a link to the original Russian ftp site where a selection of the hacked data was uploaded. ( Its perhaps interesting to speculate why the other data has been kept back - to verify the information perhaps, or to use as a counter to spin operations to try to cover this up perhaps ?)

Give up you industry, lives and freedom or the puppy gets it

Ok I said I wouldn't be doing much more of this for a while, but I can't resist.

The government doesn't have the money to train our troops (TA) but does for unsubstantiated Warmist political propaganda to scare kids is gearing up to prepare for Brown to sell out our country one more time in Copenhagen.



See Not Evil Just Wrong.

Sir Frank Whittle on climate change

Some decades ago I was a young engineering student and my father send me a copy of a letter that Sir Frank Whittle was to send to the Washington Post. A few weeks ago I came across it in a box, along with the letter my late Father sent me. That letter was dated 1988, so the letter on the greenhouse effect must be earlier or the same date. What stuck me was how a man in the later part of his life could see so clearly to the weak points of the argument, then know as "the greenhouse effect" ( now its Climate Change after being rebadged from the Global Warming title, due to the need to explain why its getting colder - but of course its still our fault ). Anyway, whilst perhaps some elements of the letter can be challenged, I was particularly impressed by how he went straight for the obvious uncertainties and weak points in the warmists argument.


THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT NONSENSE

Almost every day we read about the "Greenhouse Doomsday Scenario (headline in "The Washington Post" of 31 July), i.e. the alleged trap ping of heat by 'greenhouse gases', chiefly carbon dioxide. We are told, that within a mere 50-60 years or so, all sorts of unpleasant-things will happen as a result of a world-wide rise in temperature: Holland, Bangladesh, and large areas of other lowlying land will be submerged by the rise in sea level, due in turn to the melting of the polar icecaps: droughts of increasing severity will occur, and so on. This sort of thing is being taken so seriously that two bills have been introduced in Congress relating to the subject.

All this is the kind of science fiction we can do without.

The whole business seems to be based on some very sloppy thinking. A N.A.S.A. scientist recently stated on TV that the world's average temperature has risen by six tenths of a degree centigrade in the last one hundred years. It would be interesting to know who measured the temperatures to this degree of accuracy over, say, the whole the Pacific Ocean, at all heights above it,at all hours of the day and night,and at all times of the year. Ditto for the rest of the earth's 197 million square miles. To measure the average temperature to this degree of accuracy over a single state of the U.S.A. would be quite a feat.

The use of the word 'greenhouse' is very misleading. The glass of a greenhouse does not block outgoing radiation as the so-called greenhouse gases are supposed to do: it prevents the loss of heat by convection by enclosure, and, being a very bad conductor, it prevents heat loss by conduction. If glass blocked the longer waves of radiation the sunset would appear a different color when viewed through it.

The doomsayers seem to be blind to some major fallacies in their arguments: for one thing they seem to overlook completely the fact that the oceans contain many times more carbon dioxide than the' atmosphere and therefore tend to act as a 'buffer' to •regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide. They never mention (in anything I have seen) that the carbon dioxide produced in the combustion of petroleum, coal, etc. is merely returning to the atmosphere some of the carbon dioxide taken from it many millions of years ago. They assume that all the carbon dioxide so produced, stays in the atmosphere,which it does not. They do not stress sufficiently that carbon dioxide is the main 'food' of all vegetation and that, without it there would be no plant life. Indeed, since all food chains begin with vegetation, all life (except, perhaps, anaerobic bacterial depends on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and ocean. Much of the carbon dioxide consumed by vegetation is, of course, returned to the atmosphere by the respiration of plants and animals, and by decay, but not all of it, because some is dissolved in ground water and ends up in the ocean.

One writer stated that there is now nearly twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there was during the last ice age. This just cannot be true: the very opposite is much more likely because carbon dioxide is continuously going out of circulation for ever by ending up in carbonate rocks (limestone, dolomite, chalk, etc.) coral etc. (it is. said that, on the Great Barrier Reef alone, coral is forming at the rate of twelve tons per acre per year; which means that more than five tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year is permanently removed from the atmosphere and ocean). The weathering of rocks is another mechanism by which carbon dioxide is permanently removed because it is caused mainly by the acidic effect of carbon dioxide dissolved in rain. The carbonates formed in the process being eventually carried off th-the<-»eceafc Us tVic Carboniferous period,atmospheric carbon dioxide must have been hundreds of times more than it is today, because vast quantities now 'locked up' in carbonate rocks were then in the atmosphere and ocean, and yet, then, there were great ice sheets over India, Africa, etc. I wonder how the doomsayers would explain that. Some greenhouse effect!!

Our use of fossil fuels (petroleum, etc.) may have temporarily suspended or even reversed, the long term depletion of the carbon dioxide, but when these run out ( and this will take a lot longer than other doomsayers predict) the net depletion will resume, It may well happen that in, say, rather less than a million years, mankind, if still around, may be driven to growing all his food in greenhouses artificially supplied with carbon dioxide produced by heating limestone- for which he would have to use nuclear or solar heat.

While one group is stressing the greenhouse effect, another is predicting another ice age. How confusing for the man in the street!! (to anyone who has experienced the last three summers in England, this latter prediction seems more believable).

Some people seem to think that recent record high temperatures in the U.S.A. confirm the greenhouse effect, overlooking the fact that there have been some record lows at night, which is opposite from what one would expect because the night-time loss of heat by radiation ought to be blocked by the greenhouse effect.

There are other questions the doomsayers might find it difficult to answer: has the color of the sky or sunset changed during the last few decades? Has there been a world-wide rise in sea level in the recent past?

Since there is no evidence that the dire events now predicted ever happened in the distant past when there was quite certainly far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today, it seems certain that they will not happen in the future.