For an apparently intelligent guy (one would expect an IQ at least at Mensan level, or the upper 2%) George Will can come up with some pretty stupid questions. Clearly, this pundit who so often echoes the GOOP-er line, doesn't process the level of insight many expect, or the critical thinking ability. In his latest effort, he takes the only remotely intelligent GOP candidate - Jon Huntsman - to task, for agreeing with the climate science consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse warming is real and contributing to the effects we observe.
He manages his criticism of Huntsman via assorted select questions, most of which I've dealt with in prior blogs, but let's look at them again (See, e.g. my blog "Ten Answers for Marty Femko" from last year).
Here they are:
1) In the 1970s, would you have trusted scientists predicting calamity from global cooling?
In fact, only a tiny group of climate scientists (maybe 1%) ever put any credence into the cooling theory, which we now understand was a very temporary manifestation of what is now recognized as global dimming. This phenomenon emerged in the late 1960s mainly from air pollution. Burning coal, oil and wood,whether in cars, power stations or cooking fires, produced not only invisible carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas responsible for global warming) but also tiny airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and other pollutants.
The concentration of the particulate pollutants in the atmosphere gave rise to a temporary cooling effect, but by the latter part of the decade it was all but gone - as evidenced in the 1981 image from a Science Encyclopedia (shown) with a map of Florida (top) showing the effects of sea level rise from anthropogenic global warming by the mid 21st century. Also, highlighting the warmer areas of the Earth.
We now know that global dimming actually masked up to one third of the most pernicious effects from global warming, so that as pollutants receded (e.g. after implementation of the Clean Air Act ca. 1972) global dimming abated and warming became much more pronounced.
2) Are scientists a cohort without a sociology - uniquely homogeneous and unanimous, without factions of interests and impervious to peer pressures or the agendas of funding agencies?
In fact, this displays Will's abominable ignorance more than any other question posed. First, he confuses "sociology" (a separate science) with "ideology". This is a Richter magnitude howler given such a stalwart, supposed man of letters!
Even given that most scientists do possess ideologies (as Will does) that doesn't mean those are allowed to prevail in published research! One must still meet the critical bar or threshold that one's work is acceptable in a rigorous peer review process for professional journals. I.e. such as for the (American Geophysical Union) journal EOS Transactions shown, with the depiction of ambient sea temperatures during the last El Nino compared to the most recent La Nina. The issue inherent in the analysis of such imagery, as the authors note, is the role of anthropogenic forcing on natural variability. In the case of the El Nino-La Nina cycles we are finding the first to be gradually getting more entrenched and powerful - leading to more disastrous droughts- heat wave events, and the latter to be weakening. Of course, much more work needs to be done, but right now a general consensus has emerged of the reality of the anthropogenic warming effects based on more than 15,000 peer-reviewed, published papers over the past 20 years.
As for Will's preferential funding claim for global-warmers, that's also preposterous. In the end, The National Academy of Sciences approves most grants for research, and their budget has been whittled down the past 10 years as the military occupations and wars have leached support from domestic needs, programs. But to Will's point: anyone who seriously believes he will either make money, or benefit from money from "unknown players" for pushing global warming research of questionable value, had best think that one over. In fact I'd call say such a person is 52 cards short of a ful deck.
3) Are the hundreds of scientists who are skeptical that human activities are increasing global temperatures not really scientists?
Well, the point here is that 99 out of 100 of them aren't really CLIMATE scientists! For example, Marty Femko in his "Ten questions for Climate Change Alarmists" appearing in The Mensa Bulletin of March, p.28, claimed that "100 scientists argue against the “consensus” at the International Climate Science Coalition conference on March 2-4, 2008". But as I pointed out to him, only one of them was a bona fide climate scientist (S. Fred Singer) and he's looked on as more or less a crank by the majority of the climate science community.
Further, the “International Climate Science Coalition” doesn’t represent the views or conclusions of mainstream climate science but rather a tiny subset of contrarians, many of whom are supported by the oil, coal and gas lobbies. Indeed, the “Coalition” itself is a think tank proxy for the fossil fuel lobbies. Thus, it is nether mysterious or astounding that global warming deniers will continue to be heard in whatever forum they can garner even if their own!
Femko's piece also references "the Copenhagen Consensus", which he alludes to as "a group of 36 experts including four Nobel Prize winners, who conclude that - among 17 challenges facing the world - efforts to stop global warming should receive the lowest priority"
Again, on inspection, one finds that this illustrious consensus has not one bona fide climate scientist . Rather it's composed entirely of economists- would’ve naturally rated global warming lowest in its priorities for challenges facing the world. (Subject as they are to the false premises inherent on the Pareto Distribution. Readers can consult my prior blogs on that).
Will would be better served by consulting Eos Transactions of the AGU, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22 , and the analysis of the extent of scientific consensus on global warming published by P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman . They found that (p. 24)
“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”
In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.
So we see from Will's specious questions that he's not really invested in serious answers for Huntsman or from him, but rather spewing more ideological drivel in conformance to what we call agnotology. Agnotology is derived from the Greek 'agnosis' and is the study of culturally constructed ignorance. In this case (as per Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor) it refers to the trend of skeptic science sown for political or economic ends - e.g. in imparting ignorance and faux skepticism- to undermine genuine science.
Untutored (in physics, especially) people then read 'A' and in the next breath see 'B' ostensibly refuting it. Without a hard science background (at least two years of university physics or chemistry plus calculus), they are "lost at sea" and hostage to any nonsense churned out by the spin factories. Marty Femko, Mensan though he is, is a perfect example.
What can serious people do to inoculate against this virus? Read widely and use serious articles on the web to google and learn more about true climate science as opposed to gibberish from popcorn pundits as I call them!
He manages his criticism of Huntsman via assorted select questions, most of which I've dealt with in prior blogs, but let's look at them again (See, e.g. my blog "Ten Answers for Marty Femko" from last year).
Here they are:
1) In the 1970s, would you have trusted scientists predicting calamity from global cooling?
In fact, only a tiny group of climate scientists (maybe 1%) ever put any credence into the cooling theory, which we now understand was a very temporary manifestation of what is now recognized as global dimming. This phenomenon emerged in the late 1960s mainly from air pollution. Burning coal, oil and wood,whether in cars, power stations or cooking fires, produced not only invisible carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas responsible for global warming) but also tiny airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and other pollutants.
The concentration of the particulate pollutants in the atmosphere gave rise to a temporary cooling effect, but by the latter part of the decade it was all but gone - as evidenced in the 1981 image from a Science Encyclopedia (shown) with a map of Florida (top) showing the effects of sea level rise from anthropogenic global warming by the mid 21st century. Also, highlighting the warmer areas of the Earth.
We now know that global dimming actually masked up to one third of the most pernicious effects from global warming, so that as pollutants receded (e.g. after implementation of the Clean Air Act ca. 1972) global dimming abated and warming became much more pronounced.
2) Are scientists a cohort without a sociology - uniquely homogeneous and unanimous, without factions of interests and impervious to peer pressures or the agendas of funding agencies?
In fact, this displays Will's abominable ignorance more than any other question posed. First, he confuses "sociology" (a separate science) with "ideology". This is a Richter magnitude howler given such a stalwart, supposed man of letters!
Even given that most scientists do possess ideologies (as Will does) that doesn't mean those are allowed to prevail in published research! One must still meet the critical bar or threshold that one's work is acceptable in a rigorous peer review process for professional journals. I.e. such as for the (American Geophysical Union) journal EOS Transactions shown, with the depiction of ambient sea temperatures during the last El Nino compared to the most recent La Nina. The issue inherent in the analysis of such imagery, as the authors note, is the role of anthropogenic forcing on natural variability. In the case of the El Nino-La Nina cycles we are finding the first to be gradually getting more entrenched and powerful - leading to more disastrous droughts- heat wave events, and the latter to be weakening. Of course, much more work needs to be done, but right now a general consensus has emerged of the reality of the anthropogenic warming effects based on more than 15,000 peer-reviewed, published papers over the past 20 years.
As for Will's preferential funding claim for global-warmers, that's also preposterous. In the end, The National Academy of Sciences approves most grants for research, and their budget has been whittled down the past 10 years as the military occupations and wars have leached support from domestic needs, programs. But to Will's point: anyone who seriously believes he will either make money, or benefit from money from "unknown players" for pushing global warming research of questionable value, had best think that one over. In fact I'd call say such a person is 52 cards short of a ful deck.
3) Are the hundreds of scientists who are skeptical that human activities are increasing global temperatures not really scientists?
Well, the point here is that 99 out of 100 of them aren't really CLIMATE scientists! For example, Marty Femko in his "Ten questions for Climate Change Alarmists" appearing in The Mensa Bulletin of March, p.28, claimed that "100 scientists argue against the “consensus” at the International Climate Science Coalition conference on March 2-4, 2008". But as I pointed out to him, only one of them was a bona fide climate scientist (S. Fred Singer) and he's looked on as more or less a crank by the majority of the climate science community.
Further, the “International Climate Science Coalition” doesn’t represent the views or conclusions of mainstream climate science but rather a tiny subset of contrarians, many of whom are supported by the oil, coal and gas lobbies. Indeed, the “Coalition” itself is a think tank proxy for the fossil fuel lobbies. Thus, it is nether mysterious or astounding that global warming deniers will continue to be heard in whatever forum they can garner even if their own!
Femko's piece also references "the Copenhagen Consensus", which he alludes to as "a group of 36 experts including four Nobel Prize winners, who conclude that - among 17 challenges facing the world - efforts to stop global warming should receive the lowest priority"
Again, on inspection, one finds that this illustrious consensus has not one bona fide climate scientist . Rather it's composed entirely of economists- would’ve naturally rated global warming lowest in its priorities for challenges facing the world. (Subject as they are to the false premises inherent on the Pareto Distribution. Readers can consult my prior blogs on that).
Will would be better served by consulting Eos Transactions of the AGU, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22 , and the analysis of the extent of scientific consensus on global warming published by P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman . They found that (p. 24)
“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”
In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.
So we see from Will's specious questions that he's not really invested in serious answers for Huntsman or from him, but rather spewing more ideological drivel in conformance to what we call agnotology. Agnotology is derived from the Greek 'agnosis' and is the study of culturally constructed ignorance. In this case (as per Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor) it refers to the trend of skeptic science sown for political or economic ends - e.g. in imparting ignorance and faux skepticism- to undermine genuine science.
Untutored (in physics, especially) people then read 'A' and in the next breath see 'B' ostensibly refuting it. Without a hard science background (at least two years of university physics or chemistry plus calculus), they are "lost at sea" and hostage to any nonsense churned out by the spin factories. Marty Femko, Mensan though he is, is a perfect example.
What can serious people do to inoculate against this virus? Read widely and use serious articles on the web to google and learn more about true climate science as opposed to gibberish from popcorn pundits as I call them!
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