|
Post by Progenitor A on Mar 7, 2020 8:36:23 GMT 1
AGW Legerdemain Part 2 (more likely in this case banana-fingered fumbling) This author the Geologist James Powelll goes the whole hog and claims 100% consensus on AGW! This paper does not have the rigour of Professor Cook's paper on 97% consensus on AGW (based upon only 34% of scientists working on GW) In fact this paper is not a scientific paper at all - his methods are haphazard and directly seek to affirm his pre-conceived opinion that there is a massive majority among scientist for AGW. His method is the antithesis of Popper view of science - that is the quest to falsify hypotheses, but, be that as it may. He tells us that he 'examined' some 11000 papers and found none that were AGW 'rejectionists' His 'examination', he tells us consist of reading the TITLES of the 11000 papers. If the title 'suggested' that the author may be an AGW rejectionist then he read the abstract 'and sometimes the article'. He found that those titles that he suspected might be AGW rejectionist were not in fact rejectionist and concludes that there is therefore 100% consensus on AGW! Unlike the rigorous Professor Cook this author doe not tell us how many papers of which he actually read the abstracts - that is how many titles he actually selected to read As he did not even read the abstracts of the majority of papers he simply cannot know whether those papers supported AGW or were neutral on AGW (or even AGW rejectionist) In other words, on an issue of such striking importance as AGW his method and conclusion are a disgrace and would be laughed out of the scientific court were AGW not held in the same awe and reverence as are some religions journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0270467619886266…
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Mar 8, 2020 17:31:50 GMT 1
The conclusion of any such statistical study of published papers is in any case predetermined. If memory serves me, it was at the end of the last century that Nature under the scientifically egregious John Maddox took the editorial decision, widely broadcast throughout the scientific community, to stop accepting any paper that might throw any doubt whatsoever on the AGW hypothesis. The cAGW hypothesis, in fact. Science followed almost immediately - as did the BBC - and I would confidently surmise that any other journal with any pretensions to be scientifically respectable - or at least academically mainstream - quickly fell in line. This strangulation of alternative findings goes all the way down - and comes all the way up - to the very beginning of scientific research and community fertilisation - grant proposals, academic appointments, publishers' book acceptance, conference organisation and funding, thesis supervision, even no doubt to undergraduate course curricula and essay marking.
On the other hand, there are plenty of scientific journals that do publish papers that have a direct bearing on the global warming question, and throws the whole AGW hypothesis into irrefutable doubt. It's very unlikely that such papers would be included in the studies you cite, of course - primarily because they're about astrophysics rather than explicitly the Earth's climate.
The other obvious thing that ought to be pointed out whenever such questions are asked of "climate scientists" is that no one has ever seriously questioned the greenhouse gas theory. Of course more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere result in a warmer climate. all other things being equal: this isn't the debate at all, and hasn't been for at least a century, if it ever was. So, yes, some part of global warming has been caused by man's activities - it's never been in dispute. The question is how much, at what rate, how problematic this might be, and what might or ought to be done about it.
To be crystal clear: If a survey of climate scientists asked, "Would the climate have warmed in recent deacdes and would it be warming now if man's activities had produced no additional greenhouse gases than existed, say, before the Industrial Revolution?" then the overwhelming majority if not 100% of them would have to answer, "I honestly, speaking as a scientist, have no idea."
Ask those scientists working in those specialised fields of astrophysics aforementioned, on the other hand, and they'd all say: "Yes, absolutely, it's proven beyond question, as much as it has been that the Earth is round. We couldn't say with great precision how much cooler it would be under that scenario, but it would definitely be warmer, and it would now be warming, had mankind or any other greenhouse gas emitting species not existed at all. The range of uncertainty is somewhere between 60 and 90 percent - that is, somwhere around three quarters of the rise in global temperature since 1750 would have occurred anyway."
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Mar 15, 2020 6:26:20 GMT 1
Of course, it might be argued - and undoubtedly has been, and is - that this doesn't matter, this propagandising of a half-truth, as long as the greater good is served, the public is persuaded to force politicians to act, even if they have been fooled into being scared witless, and so forth. There are more important matters than the integrity of Science or scientists or the scientific method, and the survival of the planet is one of them. I'm sure this is what explains the E/Anglia email scandal, Hanson's porkies, the knowing exaggerations of the IPCC, and so forth - not so much blatant corruption, as a crusading sense of messianic virtue. Mosty, I'm sure, really do honestly believe that they know the truth, and have to get it across even if it means lying, to themselves first and foremost, about how they do so.
Well, there are very real dangers entailed by such an attitude. One could get high-faluting about the the principles of the matter - about the nobility of Science not as an institution but as a cultural revolution, about the moral spirit of truth-telling, and its priceless fragility, about the indispensable values of trust and humble transparency in a democracy, just as fragile and easily corruptible, about the essential role and hence sacred duty of a Free Press in such polities, about the meaning of real Education and learning and the value of logical thought - etc.etc.etc. But give that some deep thought later - it's all of utmost importance, mind you, but maybe at the end of the day. Of immediate and more down-to-earth relevance is that this monkeying around with the knowledge process, this deception and self-deception and mass propagandising, however well-intentioned the motive might be, may well end up in the Armageddon it's designed to forestall.
If the excuse is that it's incumbent on people like the IPCC, Hanson, Maddox, and all the rest to exaggerate what they know because one thing they know for sure is that the world is getting hotter, and another is that greenhouse gases contribute to it, and therefore emissions need to stop before it's too late, so people better be scared, wholly justified by the state of our knowledge or not, then consider this: Something like 75% of global warming is not caused by emissions at all, but by a more significant driver or set of drivers produced by our solar, inter-planetary, and galactic environments. Any "climate scientist" could know this, if they bothered to read outside their field, or consult their sceptical critics - the IPCC know this, its chief mathematical modeller has admitted as much, after being directed to such indisputable findings. As it happens, these drivers are compelling global temp to rise. It could have been, and often has been, and we'd better hope it will be again, in the opposite direction. Global temperatures could well be falling, as they were as recently as the 60s, when a significant portion of the scientific community was raising alarms about a coming Ice Age. This might have been the case despite the increasing emissions of CO2 - we'd be saying, burn as much as you can, before billions freeze to death!
But, as it happens, the two different sets of drivers are coinciding, and things do indeed look grim. But where is the serious discussion about what to do about it, should this coincidence not reverse itself? How can we cool the global temperature? Way way out on the fringes - it's not even allowed to be considered by the IPCC. I have seen or heard only one semi-serious broadcast about possible technical remedies on the BBC in over thirty years of looking out for it - a half-hour programme on the World Service. Quite competent - it covered most of the proposals, from atmosphere seeding to carbon recapture to the simplest, cheapest, and undoubtedly effective, cloud generation. But you know what the message of the programme was, in the end? Drummed home very forcefully, by "leading" scientists, politicians, and campaigners in the field, and, editorially, by the BBC itself? Don't let's even talk about these proposed solutions - it will only confuse the public and muddy the waters. And the waters are: the cause of Global Warming is man's carbon burning, and that's what we need to stop. Any other discussion will merely distract from this fundamental Truth.
But - suppose we can stop the carbon burning, and miraculously, at enormous expense, do. Yet the extraterrestial drivers, which are not in the least affected by whatever might be happening in our atmosphere, continue their current course - the solar and therefore geo-magnetic fields continue to weaken, for example. Global warming will continue. And it very probably is as dangerous as predicted, if so - sea levels, desertification, drought, famine...
We will have done nothing effective about it. Because our scientists and politicians have told us all that they know what's caused it, and what we must do to stop it, and the bottom line is that they misled us. It doesn't help in the least that they misled themselves too.
|
|