Articles Tagged "Roger W. Cohen "

Legislation and regulation aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions are predicated on the belief that science definitively shows that man's greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth's temperature to rise, with serious deleterious effects.

What if the cause-and-effect relationships between GHGs and temperature are greatly overstated? What if the data used to measure temperature change and its effects are of poor quality? What if we don't adequately understand important climatic systems (such as clouds or oceans) to simulate them accurately in the computer models used to predict climatic change? What if the stated positions of key scientific societies are under assault by the member rank and file? What if the state of empirical knowledge points to only a small human effect on climate? What if the best scientific information we have does not justify the economic costs associated with proposed legislation and regulation?

The answers to these questions directly impact the legislative and regulatory debates underway in the Congress and the Obama Administration.

On May 14, Dr. William Happer and Dr. Roger Cohen will review key features of climate science.

Click PDF file to see Invitation

To APS Open Letter Signatories,

This message outlines the key problems we see with the APS process to date and lays out the next stage of this initiative. It also provides opportunities for you to re emphasize your position to the APS.

As laid out at the APS website aps.org and in president Cherry Murray’s note to members (attached), two key claims are made with respect to the APS process that considered the proposal contained in our Open Letter.

1. The APS claims that the “[Kleppner Ad Hoc] committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research.”

2. The APS claims that “APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter.”

My colleagues and I thought you would be interested in this letter-to-the-editor, ”Petitioning for a revised statement on climate change,” published in the July 23 issue of the scientific journal Nature. It briefly describes the objectives and status of our initiative relating to the American Physical Society statement on climate change. The Nature letter is signed by Professors S. Fred Singer (University of Virginia), Hal Lewis (University of California at Santa Barbara), Will Happer and Robert H. Austin (Princeton University), Laurence I. Gould (University of Hartford), and myself. We are joined by more than sixty other members and former members of the Society who have signed the attached Open Letter. The Open Letter includes a proposed Alternative Statement which the signatories find a more accurate representation of the current state of the science than the unsupported assertion of the APS: “The evidence is incontrovertible.” The signatories are a diverse group who share only a background in physics and a concern for the integrity of the science process. They come from academia, industry, and government. Many are distinguished prize winners (including a Nobel laureate), members of national academies, authors of books, chairs of studies of historical significance, and leaders of important activities in industry and government.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like more information.

Sincerely,
Roger W. Cohen, Fellow, American Physical Society, July 23, 2009

You have recently received an Open Letter from the Woods Hole Research Center, exhorting you to act quickly to avoid global disaster. The letter purports to be from independent scientists, but that Center is the former den of the President’s science advisor, John Holdren, and is far from independent. This is the same science advisor who has given us predictions of “almost certain” thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time.

The facts are:

The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for ten years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists’ computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact

THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN’T EXIST.