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

[David Appell <appell@nasw.org>]

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