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Re: [Phys-l] Climate Change - Is it Controversial?




First, let's start the discussion by defining what fossil fuels are. Someone?



--- On Tue, 3/10/09, David Appell <appell@nasw.org> wrote:

From: David Appell <appell@nasw.org>
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] Climate Change - Is it Controversial?
To: phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 3:38 PM
Bernard Cleyet wrote:
The below the ------- is from the Wiki. article on
Richard Lindzen.
He is one of the keynote speakers of the present
controversial
conference.

I am extremely disturbed by the apparent punishment of
critics of
anthropogenic climate change. As long as this
happens, I cannot
accept that the question is answered. When the
government, et al.
funds critics w/ "good" credentials, e.g. R.
L., then the question
may be resolved, until then I lump the IPCC, et al.
along w/ the Bush
administration as enemies of science. Reminds me of
the Soviet
attack on Vavilov.

Bernard, your writing/quoting style is confusing and you
are not very
clear about who said what, when, and where.

Nevertheless, the mainstream body of climate science has
been saying
since the 1995 IPCC report that man's activities are at
least partly
responsible for climate change ("The balance of
evidence suggests a
discernible human influence on global climate"). Since
then their
conclusion has only gotten stronger. For example, the IPCC
4AR (2007)
says: "The understanding of anthropogenic warming and
cooling influences
on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high
confidence
that the global average net effect of human activities
since
1750 has been one of warming."

The overwhelming majority of practicing climate scientists
agree with
this result. They will never be "certain,"
because the data has inherent
uncertainties and so do their models and scientists are
conservative by
nature. Lindzen is smart, but even smart people at MIT can
be wrong.
Lindzen's remarks, as at the Heartland Conference this
past Sunday
evening, are well-chosen and wise (and not as favorable as
skeptics
probably thought they would be), but yet even he does not,
frankly, give
the impression of being on the only path of truth compared
to all
others. He has no golden alternative theory. Nor do his
publications.

I have yet to see even one "skeptic," including
Lindzen, convincingly
explain late 20th-century warming based on natural factors
alone (or
even predominantly.) I don't mean hand-waving arguments
about the sun or
cosmic waves or sunspots or 1500-yr cycles, but hard,
detailed
calculations about radiative forcings and solar
irradiances, backed up
by (yes) models, models that are validated by their ability
to
back-predict, and, since the mid-1980s, forward-predict.

Frankly, almost all skeptic arguments I have ever seen --
and I try my
best to approach them unbiased and look purely at their
science --
contain fundamental errors in logic or science or both, and
come off as
not even worthy of a 2nd-year graduate student, their
errors being that
blatant.

How much should the government spend (1%? 10%? 30%?) to go
over the
issue again and again and again? At what point is a piece
of science
considered complete? Should the government still fund
alternative
viewpoints to the quark-gluon model? To alternative
theories about the
accelerating universe?

His position with regard to the IPCC can be summed up
with this
quotation: "Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial.


Yes. But the fact that CO2 _is_ a greenhouse gas is such an

overwhelmingly well-established scientific fact, with such
a significant
radiative forcing (2+ W/m2) that it trumps all and any
"holes" found so
far -- not that many have been found -- and, I suspect,
likely to be
found in the future. Climate scientists, the postdocs and
young
researchers and their mentors, the ones who have been
pouring over the
incoming climate data for decades now, 16-hours a day, are
not idiots,
and they are not "communists" trying to impose a
new world order or take
away our freedoms. They are workers with families and
mortgages and
credit card debt who are trying to do their job as honestly
as you or I
try to do ours.

I am sorry to spew, but this is all getting out of hand.

David
--
David Appell, freelance science journalist
e: appell@nasw.org
w: http://www.nasw.org/users/appell
m: St. Helens, OR
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