Industry Group Disregarded Own Scientists on Climate

jock59801 | Apr 24, 2009 12:33:46….Do you believe in anthropogenic global warming? If yes, how did you come to that conclusion?

This is what the right wing nutters do – deny, obfuscate, confuse. They are the only ones still unable to come to terms with the truth. We are moving beyond their sick ideologies much like a mother bear leaves a sick cub to die by itself in order to ensure survival of the fittest. It’s natural selection baby!

cicclinton | Apr 24, 2009 5:37:23 PM…..As I am a scientist and like to verify data for myself, can you point me to your reference doe the “Dozens of the scientists”.

deanbob, as a “scientist” you seem to have trouble with basic definitions (e.g. that of a scientific fact) and with citations (as far as I can tell, the phrase “Dozens of the scientists” is your invention, not a quote). So I have to ask, what kind of scientist are you???

James | Apr 24, 2009 6:39:50 PM….. I am a computer scientist. My typing never has been good. I’m not sure what you’re asking; but the quote
“Dozens of the scientists asked the Heartland Institute to remove their names from the list;” is from (cicclinton | Apr 24, 2009 5:37:23 PM) post.

“Why will none of the leading anthropogenic believing scientists debate those who believe otherwise?”
They do so all the time. Science is constantly being debated in the peer-reviewed literature and many other scientific forums. If you mean a big “show” debate, that may not be the best way to understand complex scientific problems.
Al Gore is not a scientist, so I don’t really care who he debates, or what they say.

I apologize for being ‘pushy’. I just realized I may seem infatuated like a reformed smoker (which I am) or a former anthropogenic believer( which I am). I am still reading and learning.

deanbob –your sugguestion was to “follow the money” –If you look at Heartland and who sponsers it, you may see the folly in this conservative think tank.

vissionquest | Apr 24, 2009 10:08:38 PM
….Very true – and it goes both ways. Look at the cap and trade money volume in the European countries. Who and what is benefitting? A recent article in the UK Tribune lamented that cap and trade was not achieving its goal.

The real giveaway is how Hansen and his alarmists answer any skeptical challenge: Denial. Never a scientific argument, just discredit the skeptical author and make him/her look like they are backed by big oil (most are not) or sling some other lie in their direction, always sidestepping the issue, never offering proof and most importantly not willing to put a means to disprove their hypothesis to writing. ie. they can’t be wrong. This is like an argument with a YEC and not worth the effort.

Jock
We have some good discussions going on at Live Science on this and Evolution.

“Science is about facts, not opinions, as some here have pointed out. But as some governments have tried to modify scientific reports in order to support their political views, we must always try to read all the info available and decide for ourselves.”
- comment from Andre Barreto of Brazil (an oceanographer)
Ref.
“Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away” By Greg Roberts, The Australian, April 18, 2009

Quietman,
What is “catastrophic?”
Can something be bad enough that we would want to avoid it, without it being “catastrophic?” Should we not then avoid it anyway?
You now seem to concede that “AGW is real but not catastrophic.” I assume you also agree that there is disagreement among scientists and we do not know everything about it? Then how, pray tell, are you so certain we have nothing to worry about? That the damage will be “acceptable?” How much harm to others DO you consider “acceptable?”
And what will you do if you are wrong, and there is a great deal of harm, if not actual catastrophe? Say “Oops.”

AGW is miniscule. The amount that we can contribute is nothing and is NOT the cause of climate change. There is no true global warming. Read ALL the peer reviewed papers, not just the ones that fit your ideology.

libertyrulz
Instead of hiding behind left and right wings, call it what it is. Socialists and Capitalists. You don’t have to hide it.

Just to clarify my last post, Hansen’s violation of the Hatch act was the illegal act.

deanbob
Yes, archaeology indicates that the lowlands were ice free and capable of raising crops and grazing cattle.
But Theoretical physicists (ie. Hansen) are not geologists, meteorists, archaeologists or paleontologists so they would not understand the implications.

Quietman
I am the very same Jock that you have spoken with before. And although I have respected your viewpoint in the past, I have no wish to discuss it further, now that I see that you are more motivated by McCarthyite red-baiting then by the objective pursuit of knowledge. This is not about commies or patriots, but about intellectual integrity and human compassion.
It is those very troglodytes you speak of that I care about, not the selfish mountain dwellers. I am safe from any harm as well, but that was never the point. It is harm to others I worry about, and the disrespect of science brought forth by blind contempt from partisan fools.
You talk of reading ALL of the peer-reviewed literature, although there are many thousands of papers on climate change, more than even a specialist could ever read, which is why the IPCC was created in the first place. But no, you would rather believe that the vast majority of scientists are lying commies, than to consider the possibility that human greed and selfishness might ever have bad consequences, or that you might not have it all figured out after all.

correction
“looking for the cause of CO2.”
I meant to type
“looking for the cause of Climate Change.”

You also missed the entire point of my little triad about my personal concerns. I AM concerned for those trogdolytes as they will be the ones that will be hurt most. I AM speaking for their benefit, not mine. I am fine. We don’t have riots on mountaintops but you will see them in the cities.

That’s all for the next couple of months for me. If you wan’t to discuss the science and not politics I’ll be at Live Science.

When I was growing up on the shores of Lake Erie under the smog laced rotten egg smell of the steel factories of Buffalo, industries did not care to talk about pollution and the need to clean up their act. The pristine waters of the Great Lakes was destroyed by the the lack of safe guards that were developed in the fifties and sixties. when I was in college in the seventies I took a class in Pollution Control and Legislation, and it was a known fact that the means of controlling air, water and land contamination was available back in the 1950′s. The need to control smoke stack emissions, wast discharge and particulate pollution could have been drastically curtailed through negative ion scrubbers and other waste management systems; but industrial giants such as Chevron, Bethlehem, 3M, Allied Chemical and other manufactures claimed that implementing such technologies would eat into their profit margins. As the auto industry claimed that they could not raise the mile per gallon ratio, and the smoke stack industries stated that they could not clean up the air; not they claim that they are being good neighbors and researching newer fuels that do not pollute. If they would have done the right thing in the fifties or the sixties we would have the mess we have now. So when are they going to use the technology to clean up their mess, the technology that is already here and available? Regardless of it eating into their profits margin.

Oh, and regarding Greenland annecdotes, please check a map. It’s MUCH, much smaller than the Earth.

deanbob, Akasofu is a respected author of many peer-reviewed articles (on Aurora and the magnetosphere) so I found the reference interesting.
To my someone untrained eye, the paper you cite seemed interesting, but contained anomalies and omissions that made me wonder, so I looked up some reviews of Akasofu’s work.
Red flag #1: None of his work on climate is peer-reviewed.
semi-Red flag #2: Almost all of his prior works had multiple co-authors, but his papers here do not.
Red flag #3: Akasofu is 76 years old, an age at which many notable scientists have spun off into nonsense.
Red flag #4: The post-publication reviews that I could find are not good, e.g. “This paper is not remotely credible, and it’s sad to see a respected scientist fall into this.” [The word "embarrassing" appears a lot in the reviews.]
Absent true peer-review, it’s hard to make a clear judgment, but after reading the informal reviews, even I can now see some of the glaring mistakes Akasofu made (e.g. wrt SO2 during 1940-1970), so my tentative informal assessment is thumbs-down.
Akasofu’s presentation did make some fairly clear predictions, but they are extrapolations from apples-and-oranges data so it’s not clear what to make of them. If they are right, they won’t really support his theory, and if they’re wrong, they won’t really discredit it.
So I invested a fair effort and came away intrigued but disappointed. ExxonMobil did get its money’s worth–this was a high-class and perhaps even well-intentioned obfuscation, but an obfuscation nonetheless.
On the other hand, just because because Akasofu botched this presentation doesn’t mean his ideas are discredited, and I think it would behoove someone else to revisit his theme and do the science correctly, but that’s not going to me (not my field and certainly not enough time for something like that).
Bottom line: paper not credible, but perhaps salvageable. It would be interesting to see what is left of the main argument once the mistakes are corrected.
[Apologies in advance if this appears garbled--I HATE the micro-window format for entering posts here, and lack of preview feature.]

In my list of red flags above, I should have noted Red Flag #0 — the conference in which the paper appeared was sponsored by the Heartland Institute (you can see that in the link itself), a non-profit which hides its donor list, but seems to be funded directly or indirectly primarily by oil companies.
There’s an interactive map somewhere showing a fairly intense inter-connection and overlap of Heartland with other front groups and oil companies.
Heartland’s other claim to fame? They put out pseudo-science and bogus legal and economic arguments to defend tobacco companies. Class act.

James….I scanned the article you referenced and plan to read. However, I did catch “However, abrupt temperature increases at the start of the Bølling-Allerød period, approximately 14.5 ka (Severinghaus and Brook 1999), and at the end of the Younger Dryas, approximately 11.5 ka, may have occurred at rates as high as 10°C in less than half a century over extensive areas of the Northern Hemisphere. In addition, although this was a period of warming in general, abrupt temperature decreases were also observed. A short-term cold event, the Younger Dryas, occurred approximately 12.8 to 11.5 ka, temporarily plunging the Arctic back into conditions of advancing ice sheets.” This is not AGW.
I think (and I believe you agreed) that the science is most important. Just because of the radical actions of Greenpeace in the past, should I discredit anything they fund? Be wary? Yes.
Did you see (short) “The missing sunspots: Is this the big chill?” by Dr David Whitehouse

“There are no, none, zero scientists that are part of the IPCC looking for the cause of CO2.” Posted by: Quietman | Apr 26, 2009 2:35:36 AM
That’s because CO2 comes from EVERYTHING. If the human race so desperately wanted to lower the amount of CO2 produced, everyone could all just stop breathing.