The Global Warming Debate

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Thank you for your comments.

Quote:Regarding biases, research funded by government grants is in a totally different category that research being funded by private industryLet's not pretend that the pressures to have a certain outcome in those 2 scenarios would be the same.

I might agree with that point to an extent, but that’s not the argument that I’m making. There is very little climate change research that is industry funded.

Quote:Government sponsored research has representatives from every side watching what happens, so no one group has control of funding, and pressuring for a particular outcome.

I think that this is debatable in the field of climate research. Many believe that the field is overwhelmingly dominated by advocacy for one side. Richard Lindzen, a tenured professor of atmospheric physics at MIT has stated many times that there are intense political pressures on climate scientists to conform to what he has called climate alarmism. Roy Spencer, a former NASA climate science (currently at the University of Alabama) who pioneered the use to satellites for measuring global temperatures, has stated similar sentiments.

If you included money for advocacy groups who write summaries and reports, then it would still be a very lopsided situation. I’ve read complaints that the petroleum industry has flooded the topic with money. However, some of the numbers that I’ve seen suggest that pro-global warming advocacy has a much larger pool of money than the skeptics. One organization that comes to mind which is know is have skeptical views on the subject is the Heartland Institute, which sponsors a rebuttal the IPCC reports, has a budget that is dwarfed by competing advocacy groups:

WWF..................$700 M
Greenpeace.........$300 M
Pew...................$360 M
Sierra Club............$56 M
Heartland Institute ...... $7 M

Quote:Regarding, "Climategate"...is this the one and only study on which the "alarmist" have made their argument? Like you said with your Hitler analogy, just because 1 bad actor says 1 + 1 = 2, doesn't mean it's not true. What about all the other research?

I’m not sure if I completely understand your comment about climategate.

The Climategate incident wasn’t a study. It confirmed what many believe to be unethical practices among a key group of climate scientists in the field of paleoclimatology. Among the charges against this group are manipulation of data and coordination to suppress publications by critics.

Quote:Finally, while data and analysis may be understandable by laypeople (non climate scientist), it would be more convincing to have climate scientists who have done the research say that the dangers of global warming (due to man) is over-blown and nothing to worry about. The climate scientist I have heard from are unequivocal that this is real.

There a problem in that anyone can pick and choose which climate scientist to ask in order confirm the opinion that they want. If you ask researchers like Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, or John Christy, then you’ll get a very different answer than if you ask researchers like Michael Mann, James Hanson, or Phil Jones.

Additionally, there are some independent researchers out there who do not get any funding for their research and publications. I mentioned Steve McIntyre in a previous posting. He does his analysis in his spare time, and doesn’t receive any government or industry funding. He did start accepting some paypal contributions on his blog. Since he began investigating statistical methods used in climate reconstructions, he has made multiple peer reviewed publications and served in the IPPC for the 2007 report. They tended to ignore his input, but he was invited to serve.

I’d like to reiterate two of my earlier points by stating that

• I think that many of us can better assess this by examining the science, rather than trying to evaluate the sources.
• I don’t think that we need to rely 100% on an argument from authority on this issue.
  

I think there have been several issues raised in which an informed personal can make a reasonable judgment call. For instance, with the key Hockey Stick Paper (Mann, Bradley, & Hughes), if the hockey stick trend goes away if a single series of trees (all from the western US) is removed, I think that most people would agree that the trend is not robust. This issue of robustness exists in every example of hockey stick shaped climate reconstruction over the past 1000 years that I am aware of. In another reconstruction (without the bristlecone pines), the hockey stick goes away if a single small series of a few trees from the Polar Urals is removed. By the way, the dendrochronologist who collected the Polar Ural tree core data has added several new trees to his collection, and the hockey stick trend went away. The climate researcher who was using this series, then began substituting another series (Yamal) in order to obtain the hockey stick shape. Steve McIntyre is the guy who uncovered these practices, and the climate scientists who published the original studies have done everything possible to prevent McIntyre from obtaining the raw data. These are the kinds of practices that make me more skeptical of their conclusions.