Interesting voice on climate change, at Greenfyre. For teachers, there are interesting sources that should work well in presentations.
If Anthony Watts slams the site, we’ll know it’s good.
A rationalist on climate change
December 7, 2008
1 Comment | 
Climate change, Environmental protection, Global warming, History, Natural history, Science, Weblogs | Tagged: air pollution, Climate change, Environmental protection, Global warming, Politics, Science | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Michael Crichton’s errors worshipped by warming deniers
September 28, 2008The Millard Fillmore soap-on-a-rope* started spinning in the shower this morning. I knew some mischief was afoot.
Sure enough, as soon as we turned the gas on to the computer and the screen warmed up, what should pop up but a group claiming to be opposed to junk science and arrogant ignorance, but arrogantly spreading the ignorance of junk science: Climate Change Fraud, “The Crichtonian Green.”
I caught the site with a news reader that looks for idiocy about DDT. This is the line the automoton caught:
“DDT is not a carcinogen…the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people…”
We’ve washed out the dirt from Crichton’s claims before in the Bathtub, in “Michael Crichton hysterical for DDT.” Go read his errors there (there’s a YouTube video of his assaulting innocent school children with his hysteric errors, too, in case you think I’m joking).
Among the anti-science crowds, this stuff is holy writ. Dogma insists that scientists are craven political creatures driven to silly programs that waste money and hurt poor people. Never mind the facts. They believe it religiously — and they treat efforts to educate them as assaults on their faith.
DDT is a well-established carcinogen in animals, including mammals, and every cancer-fighting agency on Earth lists DDT as a probable human carcinogen. The various “bans” on DDT all allow DDT to be used to protect poor people against disease, but DDT’s overuse by its advocates led to rapid evolution of resistance and immunity in insects targeted by DDT — DDT use was stopped when it stopped being effective. Inaction on the part of DDT advocates, and their unwillingness to use other methods to fight malaria, have been culprits in the too-slow program to reduce malaria among poor people. Spraying DDT advocates with DDT will do absolutely nothing to get them off their butts to act.
(Go to the search feature on this blog, search for “DDT.” The truth is out there.)
Oy. This is how the week starts?
__________
* No, I never did get a Millard Fillmore soap-on-a-rope; but it makes a good gambit to open a post, don’t you think?
8 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Climate change, DDT, Global warming, History, Hoaxes, Junk science, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Climate change, DDT, History, Hoaxes, Junk science, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Science, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Oops! Gustav hammered Baton Rouge, no one noticed
September 8, 2008While everyone is patting themselves on the back for getting people out of New Orleans in fine fashion, and nervously tracking Hurricane Ike, another tragedy unfolds out of public view: Baton Rouge got hammered by Gustav. A week after the storm hit, half the city is still without power.
Anna West, at right with her son Anton Guevarra, and Zahli and Mira Bhayroo at the Baton Rouge, La., home of Lori Waselchuk, a freelance photographer (New York Times)
Baton Rouge provided refuge for New Orleanians fleeing the devastation of Katrina. While the city braced for a new wave of global warming refugees, it wasn’t prepared to get hammered itself.
Have you heard or seen much on the news about the levels of destruction in Baton Rouge?
What if we had a hurricane wipe out a city other than New Orleans, and no one noticed?
How many other places are in rather desperate straits, with no notice from national media? The New York Times appears to have missed the damage, though a reader named Allison tried to tell them in comments to one post at the Lede:
Oy.
Old American Airlines pal Gil Brassard called to say he’s got a new generator, and can charge his cell phone to call out, but still doesn’t have any other electricity. He complimented Jindal on the job he’s doing. Is the rest of electricity-short Baton Rouge doing as well as Gil? Who knows?
Do you think the McCain campaign’s presence in the early part of the storm distracted FEMA, the president and the governor?
Signs a news story is being missed:
- Allstate’s National Catastrophe Team is finally up an running
- Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal distrusts FEMA’s pledge of help on time
- Even Rod Dreher admits the damage is bad, and aid is slow (in a post oddly titled “Bobby Jindal in command). Dreher points to video of the catastrophe here; Dreher links to Revolution 21’s post
- Opinionated Catholic, otherwise suckered in by conservative drivel, wonders why it’s taking so long for help to arrive, and wonders whether this won’t put a squeeze on oil supplies
- The New York Times catches up with a story on September 8 — notes power has been out in much of Baton Rouge for 7 days
2 Comments | Capturing history, Climate change, Disasters, Government, History, Politics | Tagged: Baton Rouge, Climate change, disaster, Government, Hurricane Gustav, Media, New Orleans, Newspapers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Scouts predict weather
September 8, 2008Bill Britt is Scoutmaster of Troop 509 in Hurlburt Field, Florida. In a missive recently he comments on the ability of his Scouts to predict stormy weather:
Subject: This is gettin’ old!!
Argggh!
We had an annual multi-troop campout scheduled for the weekend of August 22. Hurricane/TS Fay decides to go right over the camp, so we cancel early.
We schedule a flag retirement ceremony with the VFW for Labor Day and wake up to Tornado Warnings from Hurricane Gustav’s feeder bands.
Now Hurricane Ike is trying to visit us for next weekend’s Spectre Island campout.
We now figure we can offer our services to NOAA as a long term Hurricane predictor for the Gulf Coast. All we gotta do is check out the calendar for future Troop events through November when the season ends.
Bill Britt, SM
Troop 509
Hurlburt Field, FL
Providing accurate cyclonic prediction since 2008
Leave a Comment » | Boy Scouts of America, Climate change, Humor, Science | Tagged: Boy Scouts, Climate change, Humor, Weather | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Why science matters in the campaign
September 7, 2008Dr. Art Hunt at The RNA Underworld explains why Obama’s plan to double NIH research funding is a good idea.
Big bang for the buck: Hunt’s analysis suggests doubling the research budgets might drive as much as a trillion dollar increase in our economy. Sure it’s optimistic — but read what he says. And then consider: Which platform offers the greatest hope of cures or treatments for cancers? Which platform offers the best hope for a cure or treatments for Alzheimer’s disease?
The two industries I mention here – pharma and biotech – are intimately interwoven with the basic biomedical research enterprise, and a significant amount of the innovation that drives these industries originates (or originated) in the NIH-funded biomedical research laboratory. In this respect, the NIH budget is an investment, and a wildly-successful one. Even if we don’t take the face-value numbers I have pulled from Wiki here (that show an annual return of some 1000%, and more than 750,000 high-paying jobs the tax receipts from which would probably pay much of the NIH tab by themselves), and instead factor in that some of these receipts and jobs are not American, it is still easy to see that basic biomedical research returns considerably more than the investment made by the government. (And this doesn’t begin to weigh the intangibles, the ways that the research enterprise gives back to society as a whole.)
Science bloggers have been not so noisy as this issue might need: The closest John McCain came to supporting science, the driver of our economy, was when he offered to assault education, and that’s the opposite of supporting science. Obama’s mentions are encouraging, but not frequent enough nor strident enough.
Think of just three of the issues that are affected by basic science research, that will be yelled about during the campaign:
- Health care: New cures could save a great deal of money, but would likely drive up costs in the short term. Right to life? What right to life survives the inability to pay for basic life-saving pharmaceuticals?
- Climate change: Areas of ignorance cover more territory than the Arctic ice. To all sides it should be obvious that more information is needed, which will require a lot more basic research in almost all fields. If we fail to increase our investments in understanding climate change, how can we expect to avoid errors in public policy?
- Defense: Think of where the Allies would have been in World War II without RADAR. Think of how the invasion of Japan would have gone without nuclear weapons. Think of the successes of Gulf War I with the use of stealth and communications jamming technology — and the later problems. Think of where we would be today had we known there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq in 2002 and 2003.
The silence on science should make us very, very concerned.
Have you read Obama’s response to the 14 big questions on science policy? McCain has not answered.
Other reading:
- Pharyngula, “Simple science teaching recommendations“
- The Intersection, “How I accidentally framed Carbon,” by Eric Roston (guest post – he’s the author of The Carbon Age)
- Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science
1 Comment | Climate change, Health care, Politics, Science, Science Debate 2008, Technology, War, War on Science | Tagged: Campaign 2008, Climate change, Health care, McCain, Obama, Politics, Science, Science Debate 2008 | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Climate change skeptics, your Freudian slip is showing
August 21, 2008Is the climate change debate about science, or politics?
Anthony Watts’s blog settled the question yesterday. Watts has been conducting surveys of U.S. weather reporting stations in a months-long campaign to make a case that data have been skewed by inappropriate sitings of the measuring equipment. Other posts on the blog celebrate every release of information that might be construed as contrary to warming or contrary to human effects on climate, or denigrating any release that supports a claim of change or that human activities cause the change.
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program released a draft report for public comment several weeks ago. Watts criticized the report for a tone he interpreted as advocacy instead of science. Since comments on the report are wide open, as required under the Administrative Procedures Act, comments like Watts’ can be submitted to the agency, and they must be answered. Watts’ invitation to people who disagree with any part of the report is a good encouragement for people to take a part in this important debate about public policy.
But then, yesterday, Watts posted the smoking gun showing political pushing of the science from the White House, unintentionally, I’m sure. In fact, Watts hailed the thing, with a headline claiming that the report was being “pulled.”
Reading through Watts’s post it is difficult to figure out what happened that prompted the headline — it’s hidden away in his quote of the attack-dog propaganda site at National Review On-line, Watts said:
Chris Horner writes on NRO Planet Gore:
…the U.S. Chamber pointed out that a preponderance of the 21 reports that had purportedly been “synthesized” had not actually been produced yet. Sure, that sequence sounds odd in the real world, but is reminiscent of the IPCC, to which the USP appealed as the authority for certain otherwise unsupported claims (though the IPCC openly admits that it, too, performs no scientific research). This is a point we also made in our comments. I’m informed that NOAA has now agreed to publish the underlying documents first and then put out their desired USP. The Chamber should have a release out soon.
Did you catch that? It’s in the line, “NOAA has now agreed.” So what is the document at NOAA referred to?
Oh, it’s not a document from NOAA. It is a memorandum from the anti-climate change science group set up by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, from William Kovacs, an employee of the U.S. Chamber.
A few days ago I received a call from the administration informing me that, while they will not withdraw the notice for comments, it will in the next several weeks file another Federal Register notice providing for comment when all of the synthesis reports are public.
It seems to me that the APA rules and procedures are quite clear. Comments must be accepted, and generally they must be commented upon. Comments to the effect that not all the material backing the report was available are fair game, must be answered by the agency, and if true, might make a case for more careful scrutiny of any regulation coming from the report.
What did NOAA do? Nothing that we can see. Instead, what’s got Watts happy is a note from a hardball political group that they’ve heard from the White House, suggesting there will be political philandering with the science report.
Good scientists have significant science findings that would mitigate or contradict findings expressed in the draft report. Pointing those studies out to NOAA and the Climate Change Science Program would be the way to make a solid case.
The skeptics’ asking the White House to politically kill the report, and then celebrating a missive from a lobbying group that claims the report has been killed contrary to the law under the Administrative Procedures Act, doesn’t suggest that science is the concern of the skeptics — at least, that’s not the message I get.
In the wake of the news of one probably illegally suppressed report, it’s probably not wise to celebrate the suppression of another, legal or not.
______________________________
Update: As of Thursday afternoon (August 21), Watt’s Up With That? has changed the headline from “pulled” to “hold.”
The same criticisms apply from above, still.
1 Comment | Climate change, Global warming, History, Politics, Science | Tagged: Climate change, Global warming, Meteorology, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
World Mosquito Day
August 21, 2008Oops! Missed this one.
Anopheles gambiae mosquito biting. A. gambiae is one of the several species of mosquito that is a vector for malaria. EPA/Stephen Morrison photo
August 20 is World Mosquito Day:
Pause for a moment on World Mosquito Day to reflect on the little bloodsucker that probably causes more human suffering than any other organism. Observed annually today, August 20, World Mosquito Day originated in 1897 by Dr. Ronald Ross of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, according to the American Mosquito Control Association, a nonprofit based in New Jersey.
Ross is credited with the discovery of the transmission of malaria by the mosquito, and was honored with a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902.
Each year 350-500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide, and over one million people die, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But malaria is not the only disease spread by mosquitoes. There’s also West Nile virus, various strains of encephalitis, Dengue Fever, Rift Valley Fever, Yellow Fever.
Resources:
4 Comments | Climate change, DDT, Global warming, Health care, History, Malaria, Science | Tagged: Climate change, Disease, Global warming, health, History, Malaria, Mosquito, Science, World Mosquito Day | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Crankin the geology stupid past 11 . . .
August 17, 2008It’s gotta be a virus, and pray to God it isn’t contagious.
Jennifer Marohasy made jaws drop with a stunningly under-informed claim about energy equilibrium and light bulbs, confusing watts as a measure of heat, getting thermodynamics wrong, and generally acting as if her wits temporarily headed to the beach.
And then she came right back with this one [moved to here]:
I have become curious about something. The core of the Earth is alleged to be molten. It’s also a fact that the deeper you dig into the Earth, the warmer it gets. Where is that heat coming from… surely not from the Sun. What’s the possibility that the Earth generates some of it’s own heat from geothermal processes?
The possibility is 100%. Ernest Rutherford had the goods on the issue just after the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 for his work on radioactivity, which included calculations on how the planet Earth is heated from within. Some sources say Rutherford identified planetary heating as early as 1896.
Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Foundation photo
Marohasy lives in Australia — is Google disabled for that continent or something?
These are the people who lead the charge for climate change skeptics? Anthony Watts, where are you?
This is a preview of the sort of ignorance that will elbow its way into Texas science if the State Board of Education succeeds in dumbing down Texas science classes, pulling down the intelligence quotient with creationism.
“Alleged to be molten.”
And water is alleged to be wet.
7 Comments | Climate change, geology, Global warming, Rampant stupidity, Science, Voodoo science | Tagged: Climate change, geology, Physics, Science, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Creationist success: Thermodynamicophobia strikes climate change denialists
August 17, 2008Every once in a while we get a glimpse of what the future would be like if the creationists ruled education and could teach some of the fantastic things they believe to be true as fact.
For example, creationists have for years complained that the basic chemistry of life somehow violates what chemists and physicists know as the “laws” of thermodynamics. Patient explanations of what we know about how photosynthesis works, and how animals use energy, and what the laws of thermodynamics actually are, all fall on deafened ears.
Comes Jennifer Marohasy, an Australian blogger at The Politics and Environment Blog, with this fantastic explanation about how the well-established notion of radiative equilibrium, simply doesn’t work.
“For the Earth to neither warm or cool, the incoming radiation must balance the outgoing.”
Not really.
No, really. Go read the post. And see these critiques, at Tugboat Potemkin, where problems with the rules of the principle of Conservation of Energy are noted, and Deltoid, where LOLCats makes a debut in explaining physics to the warming denialists.
Then go back and read the comments at Marohasy’s blog.
It’s not just the confusion of terms, like treating watts as units of heat. There’s an astonishing lack of regard for cause and effect in history, too:
Conservation of energy: it’s not just a phrase. The theory of radiative equilibrium arose early in the 19th century, before the laws of thermodynamics were understood.
Probably didn’t mention it here before, but Marohasy is also one of those bloggers who suffers from DDT poisoning. Among other things, she and Aynsley Kellow (whose book she recommends) use an astounding confabulation of history to claim DDT wasn’t harming birds at all, completely ignoring more than 1,000 research studies to the contrary (and not one in support of their claim).
Suggestion for research: Is the denialism virus that affects creationists, DDT advocates, and climate denialists, the same one, or are there slight variations? A virus seems the most charitable explanation, unless one wishes to blame prions.
Creationist physics, denialism in meteorology, physics, chemistry, and history. It makes a trifecta winner look like he’s not trying.
See also:
- Atmoz, “Conservation of Power”
- And this, in comments at Deltoid:
How many lightbulbs does it take to change the laws of thermodynamics?
One apparently.
- Just for good measure, sense from Cocktail Physics
1 Comment | Accuracy, Climate change, Creationism, denialism, Education, Global warming, History, Physics, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: chemistry, Climate change, Creationism, DDT, denialism, History, Physics, Thermodynamics, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Thought of the moment: Environmental movement most diverse
August 6, 2008Environmentalism is the most politically diverse movement in history. Here in the Kingsnorth climate camp, I have met anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives and, mostly, pragmatists. I remember sitting in a campaign meeting during the Newbury bypass protests and marvelling at the weirdness of our coalition. In the front row sat the local squirearchy: brigadiers in tweeds and enormous moustaches, titled women in twin sets and headscarves. In the middle were local burghers of all shapes and sizes. At the back sat the scuzziest collection of grunge-skunks I have ever laid eyes on. The audience disagreed about every other subject under the sun – if someone had asked us to decide what day of the week it was, the meeting would had descended into fisticuffs – but everyone there recognised that our quality of life depends on the quality of our surroundings.
The environment is inseparable from social justice. Climate change, for example, is primarily about food and water. It threatens the fresh water supplies required to support human life. As continental interiors dry out and the glaciers feeding many of the rivers used for irrigation disappear, climate change presents the greatest of all threats to the future prospects of the poor. The rich will survive for a few decades at least, as they can use their money to insulate themselves from the effects. The poor are being hammered already.
- George Monbiot, “I’d Rather Be a Hypocrite Than a Cynic Like Julie Burchill – Give me a posh, preachy eco-activist over a narcissist without a moral compass any day,” The Guardian, via Common Dreams News, August 6, 2008
British ecologist, journalist and activist, George Monbiot (Wikimedia image)
Leave a Comment » | Climate change, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, Global warming, History, Politics, Quotes, Science | Tagged: Climate change, Environmental protection, George Monbiot, History, Moral Authority, Politics, quote, Science, Social Movements | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Smoke without fire, in California
August 6, 2008Geology, geography, meteorology, climatology, chemistry — whatever you call it, reality always trumps fiction.
From the headline, “Ventura County hot spot puzzles experts,” I wondered whether a caldera was sending a telegram. Probably not.*
The ground smokes, but there is no fire. Experts’ best guess: Drought causes the ground to dry out, and crack. Petroleum stuff (in gas form) bubbles up from underground, into the cracked earth. Oxygen from the surface mixes deep. Somewhere underground the hydrocarbons meet the oxygen and the resulting combustion heats the ground to 800° Fahrenheit.
It’s a dry land analog of the methane hydrates warming and bubbling up in the ocean. The waste products contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, but so would the emissions if they didn’t burn first.
Cause or effect of climate change? Significant?
- Update, 9:23 p.m. Central: The usual suspects from Watts Up are huddled around the story, hoping for some fire to break out, to clear the smoke if nothing else. All they’re sure of is this: The experts are all wrong. It’s fun to recall when we were young and knew everything. The Ventura County Star notes geologists think these things are fun puzzles, rather than bafflements.
* The Long Valley Caldera is about 300 miles north of Ventura County. Ventura County itself is not particularly volcanically active, from what I understand.
6 Comments | Climate change, Geography - Physical, geology, Science | Tagged: Climate change, geology, Science, Weird Nature Stories | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
What if we’re wrong about global warming? Bob Park sez . . .
July 25, 20084. UNCOOL: LOT OF HEAT FROM GLOBAL-WARMING DENIERS.
Suppose, I asked myself, that the deniers are right and the CO2 thing is a mistake? What will happen if the world takes the CO2 thing seriously, adopting common sense measures to counter anthropogenic warming and there never was any warming in the first place? 1) there will more non-renewable resources to leave to our progeny; 2) we will breath cleaner air and see the stars again, the way we saw them half a century ago; 3) we could stop paving over the planet, and 4) cut down on the number of billionaires. If we’re wrong we could have a party. We could have a party either way.
Robert L. Park, What’s New, July 25, 2008
At Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, see also: “Starbucks controversy: The Way I See It #289 (global warming)”
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Climate change, Environmental justice, Global warming, Junk science, Politics, Science | Tagged: Accuracy, air pollution, Climate change, denialism, Environmental protection, Global warming, Junk science, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Russians leverage climate change for economic advantage: The Arctic Bridge
July 22, 2008In the U.S. we still have people throwing themselves in front of Zambonis to protest doing anything about global warming. In Russia, warming is taken as a fact.
And so Russians get a leg up on U.S. companies, in this case working to open an Arctic “bridge” for shipping goods from Russia to Canada and back.
Bookmark this site, Arctic Economics, you economics and geography teachers.
3 Comments | Business, Climate change, Economics, Free market economics, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Global warming, Globalization, Natural resources, oceans, Science, Transportation, Travel | Tagged: Business, Climate change, Economics, geography, Global warming, Globalization, Russia, Trade Routes, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Powerline jumps on the chance to screw up
July 19, 2008As long as there’s a dogpile of screw-ups, Powerline thought they’d jump on, regarding the hoaxes about a change in position on global warming at the American Physical Society.
If a lot of people screw up, where’s the shame? Right?
Powerline said, contrary to the facts:
Most people do not realize that the U.N.’s IPCC report was a political document, not a scientific one. As such, it explicitly refused to consider any of the recent scientific work on carbon dioxide and the earth’s climate. That work seems to show rather definitively that human activity has little to do with climate change, which has occurred constantly for millions of years.
Anyone who still had illusions that Powerline thinks about anything before they post it, or that they have any controls on accuracy or care for the facts, has had that illusion shattered. Of course, Powerline is a political organ, with not a whiff of science about it.
Give a fool enough rope . . .
Other resources:
- Live Science: “Rumor debunked”
- Carpetbagger Report: “Right’s misquided frenzy . . .”
- Australia’s Herald-Sun creates a run on sand to bury heads in
- Bellwether WorldNet Daily climbs on the bandwagon (if WorldNet Daily says it, it’s most likely dead wrong)
- Grist’s comments
- Blogs of the Denver Post have the testosterone Watts Up and Powerline lack, noting a correction
- Rebates for high efficiency air conditioners (Well, this “APS” is Arizona Public Service, the power company for much of Arizona. But I thought climate change critics may not notice the difference, and high-efficiency air conditioners reduce carbon emissions.)
- Even more, even sillier (NASA’s failure to mention greenhouse gases on Uranus is significant, why?)
22 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, Global warming, History, Hoaxes, Journalism, Politics, Science, Voodoo science | Tagged: American Physical Society, Climate change, denialism, Global warming, Hoaxes, Media, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Desperate climate change skeptics misread the news
July 18, 2008Internet-fueled antagonists of global warming reports probably grow weary of the constant drizzle of reports and stories confirming the bare, consensus conclusion that rising temperatures, globally, are contributed to significantly by human-provided air pollution.
So, can you blame them when they trumpet that a major organization like the American Physical Society reverses its stand on global warming, and publishes a paper by a fellow usually considered a hoax and tinfoil hat favorite, Lord Monckton?
Well, yes, you can blame them. That’s not at all what happened. It turns out that a division of APS simply opened a discussion on global warming, and in doing that, they published Monckton’s piece for discussion.
With this issue of Physics & Society, we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, together with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion. This editor (JJM) invited several people to contribute articles that were either pro or con. Christopher Monckton responded with this issue’s article that argues against the correctness of the IPCC conclusion, and a pair from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, David Hafemeister and Peter Schwartz, responded with this issue’s article in favor of the IPCC conclusion. We, the editors of P&S, invite reasoned rebuttals from the authors as well as further contributions from the physics community. Please contact me (jjmarque@sbcglobal.net) if you wish to jump into this fray with comments or articles that are scientific in nature. However, we will not publish articles that are political or polemical in nature. Stick to the science! (JJM)
Newsbusters, a right-wing, tinfoil hat driver site announced this morning that APS has abandoned its long-time position on climate change. Anthony Watts couldn’t wait to talk about it as a major hole in the case for doing something to clean up air pollution. “Myth of Consensus Explodes” Daily Tech breathlessly exclaimed.
By this afternoon, APS had warning labels up at their site to advise the unwary who might have been misled by the deniers:
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.
Bob Parks, former APS spokescurmudgeon, wrote about it in his weekly news comment, What’s New:
1. GOOD LORD! GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS VANDALIZE APS.
Science is open. If better information becomes available scientists rewrite the textbooks with scarcely a backward glance. The Forum on Physics and Society of the APS exists to help us examine all the information on issues such as global climate change. There are physicists who think we don’t have warming right, I know one myself. It is therefore entirely appropriate for the Forum to conduct a debate on the pages of its newsletter. A couple of highly-respected physicists ably argued the warming side. Good start. However, on the denier’s side was Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who inherited his father’s peerage in 2006. Lord Monckton is not a scientist, his degree is in journalism and he’s a reporter for the Evening Standard, an English tabloid. Whatever it is that Viscounts do, he may do very well, but he doesn’t know squat about physics and his journalism suffers from it. Worse, somebody fed the media the line that Monckton’s rubbish meant the APS had changed its position on warming; of course it has not. Few media outlets took the story seriously.
How desperate are the anti-Gore-ites? They are desperate enough they’ll turn off their bovine excrement detectors, and claim Monckton’s goofy stuff is a new position for APS, without bothering to check the facts.
How long will this hoax survive on the internet?
Other resources:
- APS Climate Change Statement
APS Position Remains UnchangedThe American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:
“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”
An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS. The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.” This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.
- Why Monckton is considered good for the tinfoil hat business
- Tim Lambert on Monckton fantasies and deceptions before the U.S. Congress (for a very thorough vetting of Monckton, go to Lambert’s blog and do a search for “Monckton”)
- A serious case against the conclusions of human causation for global warming, by Pat Frank, published in Skeptic’s online site, “A Climate of Belief.” Dr. Frank is a careful and generally rigorous thinker, a physicist with no axes to grind against anyone involved, who has made a good case that we cannot conclude human causation; in discussions I’ve had with Dr. Frank, he’s limited his criticisms to the science. I’m more of an effects guy myself — but this is the one article that keeps me hoping for more, better evidence (while we make plans to reduce emissions, of course — whether warming is human caused or not, we need cleaner air).
23 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, Global warming, History, Hoaxes, Journalism, Junk science, Science, Technology, Voodoo science | Tagged: American Physical Society, Climate change, denialism, Global warming, Hoaxes, Media, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Some say Baton Rouge would not be swamp kill from Gustav, had Bobby Jindal been elected governor of Louisiana.