Articles Tagged "Reply To Article"

Reply to article: Why Conservative White Males Are More Likely to Be Climate Skeptics by Julia Pyper - scientificamerican.com

EXPERTS continue to hunt for the psycho-social underpinnings of that alleged mental disorder, climate-change denialism. Unwilling to accept that climate-change scepticism is simply an idea, informed by analysis and ideology, green know-it-alls are always sniffing around for a pseudo-scientific explanation for this apparently unhinged outlook.

So this week Scientific American informs us of a new academic study titled Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States. Having pored over polling data on climate-change denial collected in the US between 2001 and 2010, the study's authors deduce that 29.6 per cent of conservative white men believe global warming will never have much of an effect, compared with only 7.4 per cent of the general adult population.

When it comes to what the researchers call "confident conservative white males" - those who claim to have a high understanding of global warming - the findings are even more striking: 48.4 per cent of these cocky cons think global warming is a lot of hot air.

Reply to article: Vail Valley Voices: Global warming denier's claims are falsehoods by Michael E. Mann

When Scott Glasser's comment of 9/26/11 referred to me indirectly as an “inaccurate” and “irresponsible” “fool” for challenging the theory that human carbon dioxide emission was causing “global warming / climate change”, I felt compelled to respond. My 9/30/11 comment cited the facts and the data that supported my challenge to the theory. In that article, Glasser defended what has been come to be known as the Mann “hockey stick” curve. I responded in my article with the well documented criticism of it from a large number of scientists who carefully reviewed his claims. Also, the so-called “climategate” e-mails revealed an appalling lack of scientific integrity and manipulations by a cabal of advocates of that theory. Mann responded on 10/1/11 accusing me of “false and defamatory statements” packed with “lies and distortions”; of “lying to the public about science”; of a “string of lies tied together”. He stated my “lies are pernicious” and that I am a “charleton”.

In his response, Mann uses an ad-hominem overkill accusing me of lies and lying some six times! Methinks he doth protest too much.

When I am engaged in a scientific dispute with an adversary, and that opponent instead of citing the facts or the data that might support his argument, instead directs an intense barrage of ad-hominem slurs toward me, I am fully confident that I am winning the argument.

Reply to article: Vail Valley Voices: Fools deny global warming by Scott Glasser

“Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the handmaiden of truth” — Robert Weston.

Since I am a long-time denier of human-caused global warming and have been described as an “inaccurate” and “irresponsible” “fool” by Scott Glasser's commentary in Monday's Vail Daily, I feel compelled to respond.

I am a research scientist who also served as a meteorologist for the U.S. Navy. I am also a lifelong progressive Democrat.

For the 25 years that I have been studying the theory that human emission of carbon dioxide is causing global warming and climate change, it has never ceased to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people, including our president, have been taken in by that scam.

There is a simple way to tell the difference between scientists and propagandists. If scientists have a theory, they search diligently for data that might actually contradict their theory so that they test it rigorously or refine it. If propagandists have a theory, they carefully select only the data that might agree with their theory and dutifully ignore any data that might contradict it.

Reply to article: A Map of Organized Climate Change Denial by Andrew Revkin

Response by Kenneth Haapala Executive VP, SEPP, Oct 3, 2011

Revkin reveals his bias by his sources. The reference to the statement: “That there are such well-financed and coordinated efforts is not contentious.” is an article dated April 26, 1998. The article describes a draft plan, which, if implemented, had a media relations budget of $600,000 to fight adoption of the Kyoto Treaty. This is hardly compelling evidence of heavy funding. Revkin presents no evidence that the plan was funded or implemented. [See Article below]

By comparison, the GAO reported the US has spent $31 Billion Climate Science. This has gone to the promoters of global warming. Yet, the US has failed to produce a scientific study assessing global warming that meets the standards of the Data Quality Act of 2000.

The book upon which the Revkin article is based repeatedly cites Oreskes and Conway, 2010 – a piece of muckraking journalism that pretends to substantiate its claims with a massive number of footnotes. The claims are not substantiated. If Oreskes and Conway had the evidence claimed, it would have been upfront in the main text. [See Book below]

The mainstream media is all exercised that some Republican candidates, notably Rick Perry, do not agree that humans are the principal cause of global warming. Typical of the stories is one from the Los Angeles Times, reprinted in the Arizona Daily Star, that quotes Jon Huntsman as saying, “Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.” The Star headlined the article: “GOP’s Huntsman a voice of reason on global warming.”

Let’s take a closer look at “science” and see where the 98% number came from. It probably came from a paper from the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science titled “Expert credibility in climate change.”

In that paper, researchers scanned the literature and constructed a “database of 1,372 climate researchers based on authorship of scientific assessment reports and membership on multisignatory statements about ACC [anthropogenic climate change]” as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The researchers then arbitrarily assigned “expert” status to those who had published at least 20 papers. That cut the number of “experts” to 908. In the supporting material at the end of the paper we find that of the original 1,372 researchers, 619 were contributors to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report, and 212 were signatories to the UN’s Bali declaration. After culling duplicate names, the paper’s authors wound up with 472 “experts” out of tens of thousands of practicing researchers.

Re: Climate website questioned, by Zach DiLoreto, Aug. 18.

Undergraduate student Zach DiLoreto does not appear to have looked closely at the International Climate Science Coalition website, or perhaps he hopes no one reading his letter to the editor will.

Anyone visiting our site can immediately see that we have a great deal of basic, well-referenced science presented. Here are samples currently on our home page.

The Nongovernmental International Panel on climate change is highlighted as a permanent link - this report has thousands of peer-reviewed science references that present the climate realist case.

The second item on our site is a link to a well-referenced overview of the science, economics and politics of the climate debate.

Let’s cut through the rhetoric and answer the global warming question of the week: Was there a link between global warming and Hurricane Irene? The answer is definitely yes.

Hurricane Irene had not even made landfall before the debate began on whether or not global warming was to blame for the storm. Bill McKibbon, founder of the prominent global warming advocacy group 350.org, wrote in the Daily Beast last Thursday while Irene was still hanging out in the Bahamas, “Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.”

The Newark Star-Ledger, in language similar to that of other media outlets, followed up a day later while Irene was paralleling the coast of Florida. “We can now add Hurricane Irene among the symptoms that scientists warned we’d experience as global warming occurs,” wrote the Star-Ledger editorial board.

McKibbon, the Star-Ledger, and others claiming a link between Hurricane Irene and global warming were absolutely correct – although not necessarily in the nature of the link.

When Hurricane Irene made landfall in North Carolina, it marked the first time in over 1,000 days – just shy of three years – that a hurricane struck the contiguous United States. This matched the periods from 1980 through 1983 and 1999 through 2002 as the longest periods in recorded history that a hurricane did not strike the United States. So, we have over 100 years of human-caused global warming, yet the three longest stretches of hurricane-free conditions have occurred within the past three decades. This seems a little odd if global warming causes more hurricanes, doesn’t it?

On August 26 the Examiner featured a Viewpoint by Michael Stafford regarding Jon Huntsman coming "out of the closet". He quoted him as saying that "I...trust scientists on global warming." It is interesting to note that Mr. Huntsman didn't say which scientists he trusts, for there are many scientists with very strong credentials who don't agree with Mr. Stafford's view that there is a serious and deadly problem with climate change and that man-made, CO2-belching technology and industry is the cause of it.

Mr. Stafford assumes that Mr. Huntsman agrees with his version of the issue, and he says the "radical right" are in opposition to this view "shared by most educated American adults."

A proper education that many adults share tells us that the warming of the earth is not caused by CO2, but by a combination of the sun's activity and the oceans' atmosphere exchange process. Piers Corbyn, a Meteorologist and Astrophysicist from England, used the sun to accurately predict the weather. It is the Sun that governs weather. He proved it. He was called "The Super Weatherman".

On Friday (August 12), The Australian reported (Methane rise blocked by less irrigation, more natural gas) two new papers in the journal Nature explaining the marked slowing of the annual increases of methane in the atmosphere. The behaviour is shown in the figure, from The Australian, published above.

The scientific papers’ conclusions seemed to be heading in opposite directions, with one suggesting reduced methane emissions from fossil fuel production and the other from reduced natural influences, in particular rice paddy fields

There is a serious question about the role of methane as a greenhouse gas. If atmospheric methane is not increasing or simply varying due to natural causes then there is little we can do about it. Yet the carbon tax legislation will include fugitive emissions (of methane) from coal mines and transmission gas pipelines. This will impact on the extraction of coal seam gas as well.

My response below, to the article (August 20) referenced above, has too many characters, by a factor of two, to qualify for insertion online, and is of a nature and size that there's no chance it will be published as a regular letter to the Post so I'm submitting it this way hoping that your editors will perhaps consider at least permitting longer online responses in the future..

While it’s clear that the politics related to “climate change” are “hot”, so is the science. Eilperin and Achenbach, in their front-page article (August 20) have shed no new light on the science.

The term climate, unlike weather, is meant to cover much longer time spans. In just the past 1.3 million years our planet has experienced 13 ice ages, each followed by a brief warming period. We have the good fortune to be living during a brief warming period. Climate change has been ongoing since the origin of our planet some 4+ billion years ago. It's not always pleasant. When there are no longer any reports of shrinking glaciers or disappearing ice fields the next ice age will surely be underway.