For the record, I have no position on this either way. It is not my field and I am too busy to properly study the opposing arguments.
Cap'n Jack Sarfatti Is Man-Made Global Warming Science Fraud For Money? http://bit.ly/aNdjZq
'bout 6 turn o' yer hourglass ago from the port o' AutoTweet Connector · Weigh in · Arr!
Randy Tinkerman Jack, why do you keep getting sucked into this crap. Do you actually think you should rely on the New Yawk Post for a discussion of real science? Can't you stick to your field? You detract from your real value.
'bout 6 turn o' yer hourglass ago · Arr! ·
Jack Sarfatti Not at all, but it needs to be discussed rationally not shouted down. I have no position on this issue. You are reacting like an ideologue fanatic. The issue is complex and rather than personal attacks you should give an intelligent refutation of the article. The first sign of totalitarian fascism is the shouting down of dissenting opinions and making it a crime to ask unpopular questions.
'bout 5 turn o' yer hourglass ago · Arr! · 2 mateys ·
Jack Sarfatti A good example of the creeping totalitarianism is the British Ban on Michael Savage - and one does not have to agree with his opinions to see that.
'bout 5 turn o' yer hourglass ago · Arr! ·
Randy Tinkerman There was no personal attack. And i will not refute this article's pablum, nor stoop to a discussion of it. The refutation, including placing in context, is in the peer-reviewed literature. There is not a whit of ideologue in my comment, and you know that.
'bout 5 turn o' yer hourglass ago · Arr! ·
Jack Sarfatti Randy these are emotional remarks. It may be that the article is wrong. I don't know. I do not have time to investigate it, but am interested in people's informed opinions on the details. Is the reporter lying about the Indian scientist for example? Could be, I haven't a clue and I have no position on this. Man-made pollution is bad for health of course and no one in his/her right mind wants to increase it in any case.
'bout 5 turn o' yer hourglass ago · Arr! ·
Randy Tinkerman There is nothing emotional about leaving the discussion to peer reviewers, nor not refuting a particular claim. Trumping an outlier among tens of thousands of data points is new to the politics of science, i suppose.
'bout 5 turn o' yer hourglass ago · Arr! ·
Greg Chilik It's entirely appropriate to offer criticism of the IPCC for making unverifiable predictions of future climatic effects (and for not performing basic, standard checking of their conclusions and the mathematics which supported their premise). They allowed the claim of the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers to be the centerpiece of their report, a claim which would raise red flags to anyone with a basic knowledge of oceanography or atmospheric science.
The IPCC falls into the trap that their detractors can easily take advantage of: publicizing dramatic examples of their predicted forecasts of the effects of extrapolating the current warming trend X number of years into the future. Specific predictions will nearly always be wrong, and gives opponents ample ammunition to discredit the prognosticator.
That being said, the writer of the Post article cannot be considered to be an objective commentator either -- the byline is not a Post writer but a spokesperson for a group which does have a specific political agenda. The writer also accuses the IPCC of making predictions without being able to back them up with evidence or mathematically correct formulation, yet engages in the same behaviour when throwing out politically charged phrases like "...economically ruinous 'cap and trade' anti-warming bill" without providing any substantive analysis in support.
More troubling is the writer continuing the political smear against all scientists: that their work is motivated by and results influenced by grant money which funds most academically-based research. Jack, I know you're particularly sensitive to the sense that scientific disciplines can get caught in their own feedback loop and end up in close-minded groupthink....but that's quite different from saying that entire scientific disciplines would deliberately falsify data en masse for the gross pursuit of money.
You can find countless scientists who work either individually or in independent groups studying climate data who can draw the conclusion that human civilization has fundamentally altered our atmospheric chemistry, but stop short of inferring that they know what the future results of this change will be. They don't fall into the intellectual or publicity-motivated traps that the IPCC finds itself in, but they do share a deep concern for what the [very unpredictable] results will be of increasing the carbon dioxide level of Earth's atmosphere far past the ceiling of normal historical fluctuations.
'bout one turn o' yer hourglass ago · Arr! ·
Jeff Kooistra The article is fairly accurate but I don't think except that the AGW "cause" isn't deliberate fraud. The 2035 claim was included in the IPCC report even though experts pointed out it was a mistake. The recently completed review of the IPCC was highly critical (find it here: http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/report/Climate Change Assessments, Review of the Processes & Procedures of the IPCC.pdf) Speaking of peer review, it turns out large portions of the IPCC reports relied on anything but peer reviewed literature (not that peer review impresses me one damn bit) despite claims to the contrary.