“Former scientist admits in his blog: ‘The Green Party runs the world’.”

http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/cycles-projections-and-other-lingo/#comment-963

— excerpt follows —-

The scientific norm is the professional literature, not blog commentary. If you look in to Lindzen and the response in the scientific literature, you’ll find that he’s been met properly (by the standards of science, that is). Namely, he suggested his ‘adaptive iris’ idea. This was based on there being a certain relationship (it had to have a particular sign, and large magnitude) between surface temperatures in the tropics and cloudiness (and, for that matter, particular types of cloud). One paper in the scientific literature doesn’t buy you much. It is the start of the conversation to publish in the literature, not blessing as holy writ. He published, and then got the best possible response — other people used other (better) data sets and observing methods to see if they could get the same answer as he had gotten in his first cut. Unfortunately for his hypothesis, the better data sets erased his effect. Indeed, not only was the magnitude much smaller than he thought, the sign was the opposite of what he thought.

As far as scientific norms go, he got extremely good treatment. a) he did publish his idea (no ‘conspiracy to suppress’) and b) other people took a serious look at it. It is significant work to take a look at somebody else’s new idea. As a scientist, if you can get others to look at your idea, you have done extremely well. As happens in science, perfectly normally, the initial proposition got rejected by more detailed analysis. Since what was at hand was deriving a relationship between observational quantities, and Lindzen is a theoretician, it’s no great surprise or shame that he didn’t get all the niceties on his data sets right. As usual, devils lay in the details, and the responses were from groups familiar with all the devils laying in those details.

Where things went problematic was that contrary to proper scientific practice, Lindzen didn’t drop his disproven idea. A bit of ‘is so’ publishing (sorry, it was painful to read his response article and this is all I can say of it) in response to the objections was it. And then much complaining outside the scientific literature about conspiracy, scam, censorship, … To be honest, even his original Iris publication was an example of lenient reviewing. There were problems in his data management in the original paper that even I saw (correctly) would be a problem for his idea — and I’m not a tropical person (polar regions mostly), nor, then, sea surface temperature, nor then or now satellite sensing of clouds. The later publications — in the scientific literature — about his errors confirmed my suspicions, and, unsurprisingly, added a number of problems to what I suspected. But that’s not what you see out on the blog universe.

You can make some headway over at scholar.google.com. A fair amount of the non-scientific world shows up there, but a fair amount of the scientific world is present.

Sorry to hear about the border crossing incident – sounds like Peter met the lowest 5% of the population. Thanks for Blindsight it is a very good read I especially like the way you make the (unlikely…) almost credible- possibly more so than AGW!

I voted Green Party in the last federal election because the Liberals were totally corrupt at the time, and may still be. The Conservatives are eminently predictable and downright dangerous to their neighbours, and the NDP can’t win due to decades of negative propaganda by mainstream media.

“I simply didn’t know what else to do,” is all I can say.

–Louis

The general drift is towards excusing inaction by any means necessary (although there are also some who try to wrap it all up into another NWO conspiracy) — even when the changes to our societal consumption patterns, industrial processes, and gains in energy efficiency, as well as support for adaptation strategies are a win-win. The real issues as revealed in Copenhagen is the gaming of the system that comes from market-based solutions as well as the struggle between the Industrialized North and the Global South.

A few examples:
- claim: climate scientists keep their data and methods secret. reality: no, they don’t, never did. Some of them might, however, refuse to answer the same harassing FOI requests from the same people over and over
- claim: . reality: 10 Minutes of research show, that half of these scientists are dead, half never heard of this list or were tricked into signing, and half have a degree in iguana collection
- and then there are the claims that nobody would expect to be lies, but that cannot be verified. examples from above:
- “I actually work for the Met Office in the UK … not all the people who work there think it’s us that is causing it, or even that the globe is warming!”. Andy Wood, in my opinion a real professional. Andy, how many hours a day do you spend on your concerned letters? Do they pay you per word, post or flat? And do you have to invent that stuff yourself or do you get a catalogue “effective lies for Q4/2009″ to choose from?

Try it. Take ten deniers counterarguments and look up the responses (realclimate.org is really good). If you then still don’t believe me take the next 10 or 50 claims, until you see a pattern, and you see the same people or personal repeating the same lies in every fucking discussion about agw. Their posts are easy to find, it’s the first 200.

About the term deniers and the ethical implications: There are the gullible stooges that fall for conspiracy theories, and there are people getting paid to influence public opinion for money so other people can get a good perfomance review for adding a few billion dollars to the net earnings for every year they can prevent drastic reductions in burning fossile fuels. Yes, it’s that much money. And yes, one can follow the money and find out the details, but i’m too fucking tired to repeat this shit again and again and again (look up Singer and his experience working for tobacco companies). Yes Andy, please bite here.
To be drastic (but in my opinion absolutely justified): these people are knowingly responsible for the future death of maybe millions (sic!) of people during the next few decades, and I sincerely hope that in 10 or 20 years people will remember this when they look at the dead and displaced, and put these people to justice.