Modern witch hunts

let me clarify a little about the causes of the global warming witch hunt.

On this mega site you can see exactly how the global warming idea was formed. In a word, the ice cores, the correlation between isotopes and CO2 formed the singlemost important factor. However, it's common knowledge that the physics is wrong, something with saturation. Therefore there are sceptics who say it can't be. So there were some constructions with "positive feedback" to bridge the gap but those are equally physically nonsense.

Nevertheless, if the ice cores were rightly interpreted, dramatic climate changes had occured in the past, hence we needed to change CO2 output and fast. However, the honest concern / alarm continued to meet physical critique. Then there are only two options: Either give up and accept that there is no dramatic climate change associated with greenhouse gasses, or persist and try to reach your targets with other means (bad -pre conceptual- science, hyperbole, demagoguery and witch hunts)

Meanwhile, it was proven that the CO2 in the ice cores lagged the isotopes considerably and could never have caused those changes. But that's unimportant now, the machinery does not need a cause anymore.

Anyway, if you try to find out what really happened and observe that things are rather different, you face tar and feathers.

Just an abstract here about what may have happened

and the used literature, after all, who is entitled to his own facts?

I In 30 years time if temperature has started leveling off, or even falling, surely that will falsify the AGW theory (or at least as it stands today).

The value of 0.03 volume percent which is noted in the literature has been proven to be too low compared with the results in Gießen. In the next tables we give the average values of all the samples in thousands of percents during the period 1.5 years. The overall average of more than 25,000 samples is 43.85 (438.5 ppmv)

I have serious reason to doubt that particular claim. If it were true what is the motive for not releasing both the email and the name of the person who sent it?

There are three possibilities

a) there is no mysterious email-writer and the claim has been invented knowing that it cannot be investigated

b) there was an email-writer but the email has been misquoted, or quote mined, in which case the motive for not naming the mysterious email writer would be so that said email is not made public which would debunk the claim

c) The claim is true. In which case there seems no benefit in hiding the person who sent the email. In fact it would be totally irresponsible to help cover up such potential fraud in the scientific community rather than naming the individual and making the email they sent public.

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, and distinguished guests, thank you for inviting me to testify today. I am a geologist and geophysicist. I have a bachelor's degree in geology from Indiana University, and a Ph.D in geophysics from the University of Utah. My field of specialization in geophysics is temperature and heat flow. In recent years, I have turned my studies to the history and philosophy of science. In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.
I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.

The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."

In 1769, Joseph Priestley warned that scientists overly attached to a favorite hypothesis would not hesitate to "warp the whole course of nature." In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the "hockey stick," because of the shape of the temperature graph.

Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.

There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed on this and other environmental issues.

Earth's climate system is complex and poorly understood. But we do know that throughout human history, warmer temperatures have been associated with more stable climates and increased human health and prosperity. Colder temperatures have been correlated with climatic instability, famine, and increased human mortality.

The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause--human or natural--is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria.

Just reporting that David Deeming has repeated his allegation to a Senate Comitee:

http://www.epw.senate.gov/hearing_st....cfm?id=266543

It is still hearsay, doesn't matter who he says it to.

I wonder if he was under oath?

Would be nice if he would provide some evidence. Perhaps he could produce the email, or give the name of the alleged NPR reporter. My guess is he will just keep making unsubstantiated allegations against non-existent persons.

Why would your guess be that?

Part of me felt a little nostalgic yesterday watching the last Senate hearing on climate change that will be chaired by Sen. James Inhofe. It all felt very familiar and comforting in some strange way. There was the well-spoken 'expert' flown in from Australia (no-one available a little closer to home?), the media 'expert' from the think tank (plenty of those about) and a rather out-of-place geologist. There were the same talking points (CO2 leads the warming during the ice ages! the Medieval Warm Period was warm! it's all a hoax!*) that are always brought up. These easy certainties and predictable responses are so well worn that they feel like a pair of old slippers.

Climate science is one of those fields where anyone, regardless of their lack of expertise or understanding, feels qualified to comment on new papers and ongoing controversies. This can be frustrating for scientists like ourselves who see agenda-driven 'commentary' on the Internet and in the opinion columns of newspapers crowding out careful analysis.

Many scientists participate in efforts to educate the public and to rebut or debunk rather fanciful claims or outright mis-representations by writing in popular magazines such as EOS and New Scientist or in the Comments section of journals. However, this takes time to put together, and by the time it's out, mainstream attention has often moved elsewhere. Since these rebuttals appear in the peer-reviewed literature, these efforts (in the long run) are useful. However, a faster response would sometimes be helpful in ensuring that the context of breaking stories is more widely distributed at the time.

Journalists with deadlines and scant knowledge of the field quite often do not know where to go for this context on papers that are being pushed by some of the partisan think-tanks or other interested parties. This can lead to some quite mainstream outlets inadvertently publishing some very dubious and misleading ideas.

In order to limit the scope to those issues where we can claim some competence, the discussion here is restricted to scientific topics. Thus we will not get involved in political or economic issues that arise when discussing climate change. The validity of scientific information is completely independent of what society decides to do (or not) about that information. Constructive comments and questions are welcome, as are guest articles from other scientists who may choose to contribute on an occasional basis.

Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.

Andre -
My definition of a witch hunt: active persecution of people falsely found
guilty of a crime.

For a view on the scientific community failing to recognize a correct point of view espoused by one or two dissidents, and then slowly coming around, see:

Marshall BJ, Warren JR (1984). "Unidentified curved bacilli in the stomach patients with gastritis and peptic ulceration". Lancet 1 (8390): 1311–1315.
SF -

With regard to the "myth" thing -

What you have is a laundry list of black and white statements, which is fine.
It would be even nicer if you could substantiate those statements with a real citation or two.

Barbara Boxer will chair the next hearing. I don't think Deming will be invited to testify for the foreseeable future.

Let's have a look at your favorite climate site welcome:

It occurs to me that we have the roots of the witch hunt here with some blatant poisoning-the-well fallacies, most basically meaning that everybody who expresses doubt about "global warming" is a villain by default.

So I read the article of Khyliuk/Chilingar again. Andre was asking for some "mud throwing" in his opening post, I prefer tarts. The first one for Andre. Posting such rubbish (and not even having read it) is the final proof that he is ready to accept literally everything to do his anti-Kyoto or mainly anti-Science propaganda. The paper is pure nonsense with incredible errors. It's breathtaking. Their computation of solar variation, their implicit suggestion of processes on a billion years time scale are relevant for today's climate. UNBELIEVABLE. Their citations!!!! Obscure websites, russian journals from the 60s etc etc. This tart is with cream.

Next tart in the face of Pat Michaels for posting the paper on his worldclimatereport website. May please the native speakers read again what he wrote. Am I wrong, for me it reads in each phrase like "ok that's nonsense I know, but it has been published". Further details : It turns our that Khilyuk cant be identified as a faculty member of UCS. Chilingar is infact at UCS, but now, given that so many here are fond of polls, here is a question. The paper is about solar insolation variation, carbon dioxide outgassing and microbial activity. So lets guess what the expertise of Chilingar is:

1) Astronomer

2) Geochemist

3) Biologist

4) Oceanographer

5) Petroleum Engineer

Just one vote is allowed and the answer is here.

http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=266711

The color glossy 64 page booklet -- previously was only available in hardcopy to the media and policy makers -- includes speeches, graphs, press releases and scientific articles refuting catastrophe climate fears presented by the media, the United Nations, Hollywood and former Vice President turned-foreign-lobbyist Al Gore.

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/9/25/12463/2968

[ ed: US Senator James Inhofe Presents A Short History Of Global Warming. Note - to start with - the wildly incorrect names and dates. ]

Anyway, in 1970 the United Nations came up with something called the IPCC, the International Plant Panel for Climate Control [ ed: the correct name is "The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change". The IPCC was established in 1988 ] , and they came up with one guy who said he was a scientist and they had this thing called the hockey stick that said this is what the temperature had been and how it's visibly related to the hockey stick, Global Warming's coming in, and how we're all going to die. Well, that was in 1970 and all the liberals joined in, the Hollywood crowd all joined in, and this was the liberal agenda that they enjoyed so much.

So whilst you amuse yourself by playing the persons instead of the ball, why not have another look at the ice age graph:

Remember this one? The big proof that CO2 caused the interglacials:

In a nutshell, the cause of those 100,000 years spikes (interglacials) is believed to be caused by the wobbles in the earth. However the forcing of those is very weak.

So CO2 GHG effect was invented

From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a "feedback", much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.

I thought this thread was about witch hunts (witch=person) not futbol.

Where has any credible climate scientist ever offered what would be considered; "The big proof that CO₂ caused the interglacials:"

Here is the position that your "opponents" take. If you are going to argue against their position, at least present it fairly.

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

Read up on your classics. Thats 1970-1980 consensus, when the hype was born and also the exact reason why the hype was born, converting from the new ice age hype. This may help. But with a self sustaining hype nowadays, who needs a reason? So we can just deny it now.

By the late 1970s, most scientists were convinced that orbital variations acted as a "pacemaker" to set the timing of ice ages.(43) Science magazine reported in 1978 that the evidence for the Milankovitch theory was now "convincing," and the theory "has recently gained widespread acceptance as a factor" in climate change.(44)

In climate science, where everything is subtle and complex, it is rare for an issue to be settled. By the late 1980s, it did seem to be an established fact that ice ages were timed by orbital variations. The chief question that remained in the minds of most scientists was what kind of feedbacks amplified the effect.

The scientists who published these calculations always added a caveat. In the Antarctic record, atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 750,000 years had cycled between about 180 and 280 parts per million. The level in the late 20th century had now climbed above 370 and kept climbing. (The other main greenhouse gas, methane, was soaring even farther above any level seen in the long ice record.) Greenhouse warming and other human influences seemed strong enough to overwhelm any natural trend. We might not only cancel the next ice age, but launch our planet into an altogether new climate regime. The ice cores themselves gave convincing evidence of the threat, according to analyses published in the early 1990s. The "climate sensitivity" — the response of temperature to changes in carbon dioxide — could be measured for the last glacial maximum. The answer was in the same range that computer models were predicting for our future, raising confidence that the models were not far wrong.(53a)