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The article points out the situation with Global Warming science: "...Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will

The article points out the situation with Global Warming science: "...Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression. One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are not longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms." I would be very interested to see a comprehensive paper on Climate Research funding and decision making for that funding, but I do remember seeing articles in the past on Scientists being threatened or fired for questioning man-made Global Warming. One of many examples: http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=21207 http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=21207 . However, I haven't heard about any scientists being threatened/fired for advocating Global Warming.

Tichy 18y ago
Granted, the one about the retired professors was the one single argument it gives. Other than that, just because a theory is not popular, doesn't prove that it is right. I am pretty sure that if you want funding for research into the Spaghetti Monster, you might as well also be fired. That is why I did not like the article - it suggests public outrage is a proof that there is something to the theory, but it is not a proof (nor does it prove the opposite). Not saying that I like the academic system - I think there is always a lot of politics involved. I am amazed by the kinds of things that get funding. For example there are whole conferences on "consciousness", something that I personally believe to be a complete chimera (or take religion - in Europe you can take up religion as a subject at university, not sure about the US). So people meet on those conferences and talk about what? They can not even give a definition of the subject...
Retric 18y ago
Many old scientists don't accept new theories. Thirty years ago there was a lot less evidence of global worming and computer models where a lot worse. My concern with the "Non Global worming" crowd is they have no single consistent theory. Some say it’s getting hotter but people are not involved others say it’s not and some even say it’s getting colder. If there was a consistent set of facts that disproved global worming there would be consist response that x, y or z is why global worming is wrong but for a significant length of time it's just pick a new pet theory and plaster it around and drop it as soon as it's disprove by evidence. Find me some 10 year model with 10 year old evidence that is validated and consistently disproves global worming and I would look into it until then your just ranting.
- william-newman 18y ago
  It is true that objections to global warming are all over the map, including some embarrassingly silly objections. E.g., it's not just anonymous trolls on internet who claim not to believe the Earth was in a warming trend over the 20th century. Sadly, there were high profile nonanonymous people who held onto that position for much longer than I think was reasonable. It's also true that the anthropogenic global warming crisis camp succeeded in reaching more consensus, converging pretty strongly on its two flagships, Gore and IPCC. But are you really impressed with the consensus? How much do you know about it? A lot of the CO2 climate technical controversy turn on two subcontroversies, historical climate (how exceptional the 20th century trend was, roughly) and theoretical climate modelling/simulation. I judge the 10-year hindsight score on modelling to be a somewhat vague Gore 0, ranters without consistent disproof of global warming 0. On historical climate , though, it's a much sharper Gore -1, ranters 1. It seems to me that by your standards of 10-year stability, the modelling controversy is a clear stalemate today. In decades to come, as CO2 levels continue to rise and the model predictions diverge from back-of-the-envelope calculations, the predictions of 1998-era models should be dramatically confirmed or falsified. Today, though, they aren't precise enough to distinguish strongly. Incidentally, convincing people of controversial stuff by modelling is not easy in any field. If you become sufficiently concerned with CO2 that you decide it's important to support nuclear power, you might find it educational to argue reactor safety models or radwaste disposal geological models with nuclear skeptics. And my Ph. D. work was related to modelling electron transfer reactions, and I'm very glad that cytochromes are not politically controversial. On the historical climate argument, I think the crisis camp did achieve a medium-term political victory by the way that they achieved and rhapsodized about consensus on the famous Mann "hockey stick" graph, showing stable centuries of natural climate followed by a zoom upward somewhat correlated with global rise in CO2. But because their 2000-era consensus turned out to be technically bogus, I judge their political victory to be a long-term embarrassment for them, in part because it makes it harder to maintain a straight face while solemnly refuting analyses like Crichton's. "Technically bogus?" I hear some of you say. Chiefly I mean that Mann's statistical methods were screwed up. For the mathematically-minded among you, one noteworthy point is that they were shown to reconstruct the temperature as a hockey stick even when the experimental temperature proxy data were replaced with purely random red noise. For those whose tastes run more to sociology more than math, in the spirit of the Crichton essay, two noteworthy points are first that this analysis reaching a politically convenient but technically surprising conclusion was widely accepted by insiders despite such technical flaws, and second that when it was eventually shot down, it was by a pretty extreme example of "outsider". (And "technically surprising?" Well, I appreciate the mathematical tractability of nice long uninterrupted time series. And I realize that famous historical extreme data points like the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm period aren't so easy to accommodate in the same formal statistical analysis with uninterrupted time series. But when your formal analysis based on long continuous time series of proxies for temperature gives results that sit uneasily with the grab bag of well-known datapoints on historical extremes of temperature itself, it should be surprising and call for some checks (of the statistical analysis, of the actual temperature dependence of the proxies, on the grotty realities of how the data were collected, on whether the proxies have tracked temperature since then, etc.). It seems that this first occurred to an outsider named McIntyre.:-) (There are still arguments about whether Mann's general conclusion of stable stable ever-so stable global climate might turn out to be correct after all: there are lots of ways to choose from the available temperature proxy data and lots of ways to analyze them, and with some modern choices people have arrived at conclusions similar to those of the approximately-10-year-old papers. But even if the politically correct conclusion somehow turns out to follow from a more modern technically correct analysis, it'll be a sort of happy accident: not a vindication of the 1999ish published work, but at most a vindication of Mann's unpublished intuition or simple luck.) "until then your just ranting" Hey, I love you too, but only conditionally. I will love you if you have any 10 year model with 10 year evidence that is validated and consistently proves the crisis variant of anthropogenic global warming. Not just that we've warmed over the past century or more, which is now completely uncontroversial (and about time). Not just that the expected CO2 sensitivity is likely to be about what we'd expect from a back of the envelope calculation, which is not terribly controversial. Instead, the Gore/IPCC version: that we can be pretty confident that the CO2 sensititivity is several times greater than the back of the envelope value, enough to be the main explanation of the warming trend in the 20th century and enough to have more dramatic effects in this century.)

Tichy 18y ago

Granted, the one about the retired professors was the one single argument it gives. Other than that, just because a theory is not popular, doesn't prove that it is right. I am pretty sure that if you want funding for research into the Spaghetti Monster, you might as well also be fired. That is why I did not like the article - it suggests public outrage is a proof that there is something to the theory, but it is not a proof (nor does it prove the opposite). Not saying that I like the academic system - I think there is always a lot of politics involved. I am amazed by the kinds of things that get funding. For example there are whole conferences on "consciousness", something that I personally believe to be a complete chimera (or take religion - in Europe you can take up religion as a subject at university, not sure about the US). So people meet on those conferences and talk about what? They can not even give a definition of the subject...

Retric 18y ago

Many old scientists don't accept new theories. Thirty years ago there was a lot less evidence of global worming and computer models where a lot worse. My concern with the "Non Global worming" crowd is they have no single consistent theory. Some say it’s getting hotter but people are not involved others say it’s not and some even say it’s getting colder. If there was a consistent set of facts that disproved global worming there would be consist response that x, y or z is why global worming is wrong but for a significant length of time it's just pick a new pet theory and plaster it around and drop it as soon as it's disprove by evidence. Find me some 10 year model with 10 year old evidence that is validated and consistently disproves global worming and I would look into it until then your just ranting.

william-newman 18y ago
It is true that objections to global warming are all over the map, including some embarrassingly silly objections. E.g., it's not just anonymous trolls on internet who claim not to believe the Earth was in a warming trend over the 20th century. Sadly, there were high profile nonanonymous people who held onto that position for much longer than I think was reasonable. It's also true that the anthropogenic global warming crisis camp succeeded in reaching more consensus, converging pretty strongly on its two flagships, Gore and IPCC. But are you really impressed with the consensus? How much do you know about it? A lot of the CO2 climate technical controversy turn on two subcontroversies, historical climate (how exceptional the 20th century trend was, roughly) and theoretical climate modelling/simulation. I judge the 10-year hindsight score on modelling to be a somewhat vague Gore 0, ranters without consistent disproof of global warming 0. On historical climate , though, it's a much sharper Gore -1, ranters 1. It seems to me that by your standards of 10-year stability, the modelling controversy is a clear stalemate today. In decades to come, as CO2 levels continue to rise and the model predictions diverge from back-of-the-envelope calculations, the predictions of 1998-era models should be dramatically confirmed or falsified. Today, though, they aren't precise enough to distinguish strongly. Incidentally, convincing people of controversial stuff by modelling is not easy in any field. If you become sufficiently concerned with CO2 that you decide it's important to support nuclear power, you might find it educational to argue reactor safety models or radwaste disposal geological models with nuclear skeptics. And my Ph. D. work was related to modelling electron transfer reactions, and I'm very glad that cytochromes are not politically controversial. On the historical climate argument, I think the crisis camp did achieve a medium-term political victory by the way that they achieved and rhapsodized about consensus on the famous Mann "hockey stick" graph, showing stable centuries of natural climate followed by a zoom upward somewhat correlated with global rise in CO2. But because their 2000-era consensus turned out to be technically bogus, I judge their political victory to be a long-term embarrassment for them, in part because it makes it harder to maintain a straight face while solemnly refuting analyses like Crichton's. "Technically bogus?" I hear some of you say. Chiefly I mean that Mann's statistical methods were screwed up. For the mathematically-minded among you, one noteworthy point is that they were shown to reconstruct the temperature as a hockey stick even when the experimental temperature proxy data were replaced with purely random red noise. For those whose tastes run more to sociology more than math, in the spirit of the Crichton essay, two noteworthy points are first that this analysis reaching a politically convenient but technically surprising conclusion was widely accepted by insiders despite such technical flaws, and second that when it was eventually shot down, it was by a pretty extreme example of "outsider". (And "technically surprising?" Well, I appreciate the mathematical tractability of nice long uninterrupted time series. And I realize that famous historical extreme data points like the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm period aren't so easy to accommodate in the same formal statistical analysis with uninterrupted time series. But when your formal analysis based on long continuous time series of proxies for temperature gives results that sit uneasily with the grab bag of well-known datapoints on historical extremes of temperature itself, it should be surprising and call for some checks (of the statistical analysis, of the actual temperature dependence of the proxies, on the grotty realities of how the data were collected, on whether the proxies have tracked temperature since then, etc.). It seems that this first occurred to an outsider named McIntyre.:-) (There are still arguments about whether Mann's general conclusion of stable stable ever-so stable global climate might turn out to be correct after all: there are lots of ways to choose from the available temperature proxy data and lots of ways to analyze them, and with some modern choices people have arrived at conclusions similar to those of the approximately-10-year-old papers. But even if the politically correct conclusion somehow turns out to follow from a more modern technically correct analysis, it'll be a sort of happy accident: not a vindication of the 1999ish published work, but at most a vindication of Mann's unpublished intuition or simple luck.) "until then your just ranting" Hey, I love you too, but only conditionally. I will love you if you have any 10 year model with 10 year evidence that is validated and consistently proves the crisis variant of anthropogenic global warming. Not just that we've warmed over the past century or more, which is now completely uncontroversial (and about time). Not just that the expected CO2 sensitivity is likely to be about what we'd expect from a back of the envelope calculation, which is not terribly controversial. Instead, the Gore/IPCC version: that we can be pretty confident that the CO2 sensititivity is several times greater than the back of the envelope value, enough to be the main explanation of the warming trend in the 20th century and enough to have more dramatic effects in this century.)