Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, has reissued a controversial demand for documents that he says may show that a prominent climate scientist, Michael E. Mann, violated a Virginia fraud statute in applying for a research grant while he was a faculty member at the University of Virginia. The new request, first reported by The Washington Post, comes a month after a state judge threw out Mr. Cuccinelli’s original demand that the university turn over a decade’s worth of documents, saying that it had failed to explain the allegations under investigation and that four of the five grants Mr. Cuccinelli said he was investigating were federal grants not covered by the state law, while the fifth grant was made before the law took effect, in 2003.
In his new demand, Mr. Cuccinelli omits the four federal grants, but says that “claims for payment and at least some payment” under the fifth grant occurred after the law took effect. He also details the allegations against Mr. Mann, now a faculty member at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, saying that the application for the fifth grant included references to two papers “which Dr. Mann knew or should have known contained false information, unsubstantiated claims, and/or were otherwise misleading.” The complaint adds that “some of the conclusions of the papers demonstrate a complete lack of rigor regarding the statistical analysis of the alleged data, meaning that the result reported lacked statistical significance without a specific statement to that effect.” The university has until October 29 to produce the documents, which include all correspondence from 1999 through 2006 between Mr. Mann and 39 other researchers, as well as all correspondence between Mr. Mann and research assistants, secretaries, and administrative-staff members.
Wow, if citing papers with weak statistical analyses is a crime, we’re all in trouble!
This is another example of climate deniers who have no legitimate basis for their objections to research, but want to prevent it anyway. It is harassment for political and ideological reasons with no justification in fact or law. See Michael Shermer’s distinction in “Skeptic” : “A climate skeptic …examines specific claims one by one, carefully considers the evidence for each, and is willing to follow the facts wherever they lead. A climate denier has a position staked out in advance and sorts through the data employing ‘confirmation bias’ — the tendency to look for and find confirmatory evidence for pre-existing beliefs and ignore or dismiss the rest.” [Excerpted in The Environmental Forum, July-August, 2010, pp22-23] The University shoudl refuse to turn over the documents and defend itself vigorously in court. As politics brings into office people who deny climate change (who also in some cases were the same folks who denied tobacco was addictive, or are the same folks who want Intelligent Design taught as an alternative to evolution) we need to find out if the decline in financial support for public universities brings with a decline in defense of both academic freedom and, frankly, intelligent discussion of reality.
Maybe I am naive when thinking about the world of grants, but it seems to me that if the grant was awarded before the law in question was pass the date of payment is irrelevant. The funding commitment was made prior to 2003. Cuccinelli needs to just suck it up and follow the laws that has swarn to protect as Virginia’s attorney general.
@corwinamber – You really paint with a broad brush. So, now anyone who challenges climate data is labeled a “climate denier.” There are plenty of people who are concerned that the confirmatory bias you suggest has been happening the other direction for some time. I don’t think any evolutionists would support withholding data from people who wanted to see how they came to the conclusions that they did. So why are climatologists so fearful of releasing their data? I am not some right wing extremist, but I do have concerns that the science that is now the basis of expensive and intrusive public policy is not as rigorous as to justify wholesale changes that impact millions of americans. One of the basic tenets of science is that it is open to challenge. You act like climate change is the truth (with a capital T) and anyone who challenges it is a heretic. And just to be clear, most people who challenge climate change aren’t challenging that the climate has changed, it is the claim that this change is primarily due to the influence of human activities.
#22199179, you make a mistake in trying to make a rational argument. Logic & rationality are anethema to Cuccinelli & his kind. They are proud of their ignorance and refute any who try to use rationality. They are the proud intellectual (?) heirs of Millard Filmore’s Know Nothing movement.
Seems to me also that Mr. Cuccinelli’s reported actions are more than a bit of a reach. However, seems that my colleagues above are also reaching. A few remarks follow.First, Mr. Cuccinelli’s over-the-top aggessiveness emulates other Attorneys General — such as Spitzer, Cuomo, and Blumenthal — as well as prosecutors such as Fitzgerald. If these gentlemen are rewarded for conduct of their offices (as they have been), shouldn’t we expect Cuccinellis to arise also?Second, while academic researchers expect their work to be taken seriously by those who make policy, it’s not clear that the academy has always taken seriously its responsibilities to make sure that published research is of high quality (or at least honest). The Harvard Affair and recent articles in the Chronicle cause some doubt about the commitment to that responsibility. (The handling of the Harvard case is troubling because of a decided lack of transparency.) Perhaps this AG feels duty bound to fill a perceived vacuum in protecting the public interest.Third, the tendency to label all those who disagree as “deniers” (See Comment 2 above) adds force to my second point. If skeptics were indeed different from deniers in the lexicon of the global warming, then I would expect that Bjorn Lomborg would not be attacked so frequently, so indignantly, and so personally.So, while I share some of the concerns of my colleagues above, I definitely do not share their indignation.
@jgpeters:A couple of things . . . .First of all, corwinamber did NOT say anyone who challenges climate data is a climate denier. What he said was climiate deniers base their arguments off previously arrived at opinions. Those who challenge the data on a case by case basis are not climiate deniers; they are climate skeptics.Secondly, Climatologists are not fearful of releasting their DATA. The Virginia AG is not asking for DATA. He is asking for personal correspondences . . . private conversations. He is hoping to waft up enough smoke to obscure the data. It’s a classic bait and switch operation. Lawyers don’t base arguments on scienfic data in of itself. They argue based on the words and opinions of human beings. Cuccinelli is hoping to find some indiscrete remark they can use to embarass climatologists and turn public opinion and influence public policy.The consensus of climatologists is that human activities have caused the climate change. The current focus is on how to fix it, and whether it can be fixed, and how much time we have to fix it.
@panacea, you are absolutely right, what the AG is trying to show is that the state gave over $200K in funding when the applicants for the grant lied about what their previous research showed. However, the AG is not trying to debunk climate change, he is trying to show that the researchers lied about their findings. The fact that the lie is about climate change is immaterial. The actual data would not be that helpful to an AG because he would not be able to make any sense of it, but, emails with words like “he used the ‘trick’ to ‘hide’ the effect” reveals an intent to defraud. That is what the AG is accusing them of; defrauding the state to keep money rolling in. That is the essence of the argument, that if climate change researchers don’t find climate change, they are out of a job.
Sorry, don’t buy it. The AG is trying to silence climate scientists:”We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground.” This is what Cuccinelli had to say when he started this war on science. He doesn’t care about the science. He cares about the effects the science will have on public policy.If climate scientists lied about their findings, it is a self correcting issue. No one single scientist has the final word on any subject in science. If Professor Mann had lied about his findings, other scientists would have proven it long ago.Instead, his findings have been confirmed by independant scientists working elsewhere.The issue of data validity, be it climate change or any other science, is best left to the people who understand it best: other scientists. Politicians with axes to grind should not be using the legal system to obfusticate the issues. Your accusation that “if climate change researchers don’t find climate change, they are out of a job,” is absurd. Research is research: if climate change did not exist, these scientists would still be researching climate for the very reason that its influences are so important to major industries such as agriculture.Professor Mann’s words are unfortunately, particularly because they are taken out of context. The hackers who stole those emails deliberately cherry picked phrases to make climatologists look bad. The whole purpose of the hack was to make the scientists look bad and distract the public at large. Professor Mann’s “trick” refers to a “trick of the trade”, a means to perform a routine task more easily and effectively, not a “trick” to fool people about what the results really are. Mann’s “trick” is a method to account for the “decline”, not of temperatures but of the reliability of tree rings to measure temperature data after 1960.This is nothing unusual: lots of things that are measured are affected by other factors. For example, pregnancy affects the reliability of hemoglobin and hematocrit due to an increase in total circulatory volume, resulting in the physiological anemia of pregnancy. As a result, an H&H that would cause alarm in others does not in the pregnant woman.There is no fraud, except on the part of the hackers who started this whole bruhaha.Why isn’t anyone talking about the costs the hackers incurred with their criminal acts? Review after review has been done on this, at considerable cost. Why isn’t Mr. Cuccinelli concerned about that fraud?Because that lie benefits his goal of discrediting science that will cost his benefactors billions, that’s why.
Unfortunately, things such as the “trick” issue with the e-mails get into the echo chamber and just won’t go away. The entire scientific community can explain again and again that the word “trick” is generally used to mean a clever shortcut, not deception, but those who do not understand how scientists use language just may not be convinced, and we may need to give up trying to convince them.However, those who call scientists such as Mann liars do owe it to themselves, not just to those whom they attack, to take a closer look at the *science* underlying all of this, before relying on arguments that certainly appear to be ad hominem at their heart. Getting deeply into the science involves some work, but there are some shortcuts based on understanding just a few of the essentials that should give pause to folks who think this anthropogenic climate change stuff is all a bunch of hooey. Here are a few things that are fairly easily understood with only a first college course in physics:- Stratospheric cooling. The issue here has been known since V. Ramanathan’s article in Science in 1988, and it has been a knife in the heart of the main competitor to anthropogenic sources for the current global warming, namely, postulating a solar origin instead. For really simple scientific reasons, if it’s the sun that’s heating things up, then the stratosphere should be heating up, while if it’s something down here on the surface of the earth, then the stratosphere should be cooling. And the stratosphere is cooling. Nobody has made any convincing counterargument to Ramanathan.(A straw man that is sometimes set up here: But solar effects due to orbital mechanics triggered the ice ages, so they must rule! Yep, orbital mechanics were the trigger. Not only do climate scientists not deny that, they insist on it, and they helped to finally figure out the relative importance of the orbital component. But easy power computations show that we are now putting enough CO2 into the atmosphere to overwhelm solar effects many times over, so solar effects no longer stand a chance of being an important driver of climate change.)- So if it’s something down here on terra firma, what? Well, we know the extra amount of carbon dioxide that has shown up in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial era, verified repeatedly by multiple means. The effect of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas has been known since Tyndall’s day in the 19th century, and is easily confirmed by experiment. And the amount of global warming we’re getting correlates well with the extra carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases, though carbon dioxide plays the main role among them). Those who want to postulate that something else is causing the warming then have the huge task of trying to figure out how the carbon dioxide would *not* be doing exactly what it is known through both theory and experiment to do, which is to be a greenhouse gas. This, and many other pieces of solid science, have really established beyond any doubt that carbon dioxide is the culprit.- But perhaps that extra CO2 that started showing up at the beginning of the industrial era and really began piling up at the end of the 20th century is coming from somewhere else besides us? Well, if it’s coming from somewhere else besides us, then we have to figure out where the CO2 we’re producing from burning fossil fuel is going, and the likely suspects (the oceans, land sinks, etc.) do contain some, but the portion that can’t be accounted for that way (and lots of folks have looked really hard) is enough to account for what’s showing up in the atmosphere.- And one other point: Despite all that, could it be possible that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere is not anthropogenic? Well, the deficiency of carbon 13 relative to carbon 12 in the excess of CO2 in the atmosphere tells us it originally came from biological processes, and the shortage of carbon 14 in it tells us that the appropriate amount of CO2 came from carbon put into biological matter eons ago. It’s carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels; that’s settled.That’s only a sample. There are many other fingerprints that show us what is going on with global warming, and we’re causing it. The part described above doesn’t take much work to understand, and, again, folks who genuinely doubt that the case has been proven for anthropogenic global warming need to take the time to understand it before bashing the folks who already do.Spencer Weart is a very good and well-known scientist who spent his early days as a solar physicist with exceptional credentials, after which he became a highly respected chronicler of science who is known for being careful about claims he makes and checking to see that he gets them right. He put it best: “The physics of the greenhouse effect is so basic that instead of asking whether it would happen, it makes more sense to ask what on earth could make it not happen.”
jgpeters.To carelessly make such accusations about scientific misconduct is itself unethical in the extreme. The Va AG says Mann is lying, so then your positoin is that he (Mann) must be? You support that, do you find that morally or intellectually defensible? You’re rehashing that garbage about the emails and the semantics like “trick”, which tells me you ain’t even trying. If you really cared about this issue, you might spend 10 minutes here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOgIf you really cared about supposed suppression of data, you might then go here for the innumberable links to publicly available data, codes, and anlyseshttp://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/wheres-the-data/Of course doing that would require some work, and why bother with that when we trade so entertainingly in baseless accusation.
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Really, is this issue the most dangerous threat to the lives of Virginia citizens in this era that falls under the responsibilities of the AG? Voters, even assuming that he finds a smoking gun, would justice in this case make your tax dollars well spent in the most efficient and personally impactful way?
I live in VA, and I am frequently embarrassed by Cuccinelli’s actions, especially regarding higher ed.
Mann is an employee of a public agency: the people have a right to know if he obtained money through falsehood. They also own the data which he obtained: they should be able to see it. The above is true, whether or not one is a “denier” or a “warmist” or something else entirely.
@colorlessblueideas:I agree . . . but I repeat, what Mr. Cuccinelli is demanding is not data, but personal correspondences. Mr. Cuccinelli can’t prove fraud through the data for two reasons: 1) He is not a climiate scientists, he is a lawyer, and 2) there is no fraud to prove and he knows it.Mr. Cuccinelli wants the personal documents because he wants to harass Mr. Mann and discredit him on a personal level since he can’t discredit him as a scientist through good science.
Personally, I think to nitpick about before or after the law went into effect, etc. is a distraction. The attorney general is unexplainably obsessed with a fine point about grantsmanship, when there must be huge other issues to address in Virginia on behalf of its citizens. If he can’t find other issues of importance, then perhaps he should take a vacation and rest and he will come back with an ability to prioritize on which issues really warrant attention at his level of government.
The Virginia AG is doing what the majority of states’ AG’s would do if they had the cojones–challenge their state universities’ use of taxpayer funds to “study” climate change, with little to no evidence of any man-made climate change taking place past the researchers’ liberal driven (not all, but too many) hypothesis that man must be doing it and not a natural event of the earth. Let this AG run it to ground, I say.
to bnmore and others: among serious people, anthropogenic climate change is not even debated any more. It’s happening. Deal with it however you like – get some popcorn and watch from the sidelines, continue on your anti-science journey back to the 13th century, go write some blogs at the behest of the koch brothers. whatever. The people doing the work of science have no use for you.Cojones. If you had real cojones bnmore you would have the integrity to at least inform yourself in the most basic way. But why bother when instead you can be a type of anti-intellectual vandal and lob accussations and insults from a position of ignorance?
to colorlessblueideas:That sounds like a perfectly fantastic idea: because Mann works for a public agency, or even in association with one, we can demand all of his correspondence with the flimsiest pretense? Do you actually support that view? Public employee or not, everyone enjoys some right to private communication in the work place. It’s self-evident.I mean for godsake, have you never read, or heard of, Orwell?!
I wonder if Kdineley has ever heard of Freeman Dyson.As a matter of fact, there are indeed serious people (some of whom actually know a little science, including evolution) to whom the “anthropogenic” part of AGW is by no means obvious. The ability of those who have made AGW their secular religion (Dyson’s imo very apt term) to ignore the sun is mind-boggling. This isn’t the place to debate the matter, but unless one’s mind is welded closed, it should be possible to consider a few questions:1. How big is the sun compared to the earth?2. What fraction of the matter in the solar system is in the sun itself?3. What’s the sun doing, all the time?4. How much energy does the earth receive from the sun? 5. How does this compare with the effects of human activity? Now the real AGW-religionist will respond that these are irrelevant questions that only an anti-intellectual know-nothing who probably doesn’t wear shoes would ask. The real AGW-religionist will not answer those questions or any others like them, probably on the ground that–this is an actual paraphrase–the sun is too far away from the earth to have any effect on us.For starters, if it weren’t for the sun, there would be no GW at all and there wouldn’t be any anthropomorphic anything, because there wouldn’t be any anthropos. And Kdineley’s ad hominem slurs against anyone who might have another opinion are all too typical of those who can’t imagine how anyone could possibly disagree with them. Yes, as a matter of fact, I’ve read Orwell. Have you ever read Hoffer? Start with The True Believer.And one more question:6. Why is it so crucial that heretics be silenced?
You have all missed the significance of this story. This AG doesn’t care about science or about grants. He cares only about headlines.He has nothing to show but ideology. His actions against the University and Mann are nothing more than a fishing expedition, where he is hoping to catch some headlines. If he had any actual evidence, he would bring charges and ask questions later. He has nothing but your attention.He’s grandstanding, pandering to the anti-government, anti-intellectual strains in our society, trying to make a name for himself in the media because he’s unable to do so in the courtroom. He doesn’t care what you all say about him, as long as you spell his name correctly.Move on.
Typical State Government.They provide 10% of the money for Higher Education but they want 95% control.
@dank48: go back and read megginson’s (#10) excellent post to answer your questions about why the Sun is not the culprit in climate change.There are no heretics and no one is attempting to silence anyone, except the climate deniers (because they can’t win the scientific argument, so they went for muckraking instead).@11126724: you make a valid point, unfortunately, Cuccinelli’s actions keep a non-issue alive. It can’t be ignored because to ignore action in the courts leads to default judgements, or worse ill-informed court decisions that chill the ability of scientists to conduct their research and to communicate with one another freely.Cuccinelli may only be going for headlines as you say, but there are real unintended consequences for science that can result.
Panacea, I’ve read Megginson’s post, and I got it the first time. Have you read my first five questions? Have you answered them? I ask because I really don’t understand how anyone could claim that anything we might do could “overwhelm” solar effects. The earth is a speck. We are not that big a deal. Only hubris could convince anyone that, with the sun comprising 99.86% of the matter in the solar system, our efforts amount to jack. If the sun hiccups, eight minutes and twenty seconds later, we’re history.
It does seem to me that, since the science does not give Cuccinelli what he wants, he has to resort to a personal attacks on the scientists. He is a poster child for the denialist mentality.
dank48, my post was plenty long as it was, and I admit that I didn’t include every detail in fear of making it even longer, but the details are straightforward and all readily available for those who are interested and genuinely curious. Poking around on the Internet or talking to a scientist at a nearby college can ferret them out. (But I hasten to add that my information comes from published, peer-reviewed material, not Internet sources.)Let me answer your five questions, since that can be done all at once. In summary, you are asking how it can be that human activity can possibly overwhelm the effects of the sun, since the sun’s energy output is so enormous while the relative output of humans, in CO2 or almost anything else, is so puny in comparison. The problem is that this is the wrong question, since the issue is not the total amount of energy we get from the sun, but the *variation* in the energy we receive from the sun, which is what in the past caused ice ages and brought us out of them. The major long-term solar effect on climate relates to periodic variations in parts of our orbit, which effectively increase and decrease our average distance from the sun (and have some other related effects; it’s a little more complicated than just distance from the sun, but that’s the main idea). This can cause the average amount of solar energy reaching our planet to vary something like plus or minus 0.5 watts per square meter over very long periods of time (and I don’t have right at hand a more precise number, but that’s pretty close). When the energy coming in is reduced by half a watt or so per square meter due to the orbital variations being just so, then the decreased solar energy, again operating over very long time frames, is enough to trigger ice ages. When the periodic orbital variations again crank up that thermostat, then, again acting over long periods of time, that additional sunlight gets us back out of ice ages. That change in solar power is a small part of the total energy received from the sun, but the change up and down is what counts in bringing on and ending ice ages, not the larger base energy we receive that underlies the energy.But greenhouse gases, primarily CO2, are now causing a retention of energy at the Earth’s surface amounting to something like 2.5 watts per square meter. That energy used to escape back into space, but now we’re keeping it. And the *variation* in energy received from the sun, again amounting to something on the order of half a watt, doesn’t stand a chance against that +2.5. It doesn’t matter that the sun is huge and we’re small – the numbers settle it, and they don’t lie.Again, all of this is straightforward, basic physics, and laws of physics, unlike those of humankind, aren’t ones we’re allowed to break.
Speaking of the laws of physics, I doubt very much that anyone daring to claim that human action trumps solar activity realizes that, by nuclear fusion, the sun converts four hundred million tons of hydrogen into three hundred ninety-six million tons of helium, every second. That missing four million tons of matter is converted to energy and, after making its way to the surface, a process that takes about a million years, it’s radiated into space. The earth receives about one two-billionth of that energy, which works out to about four pounds per second, which can be converted into the more usual units by E = mc^2. That’s per second. Do the math. Then tell me what a big deal human beings are. Nonsense. The real issue is money in the form of grants. Nobody funds anyone who claims the sky is, in fact, not falling. It’s all well and good to talk about how mere mortals can’t understand all that fancy science talk, but it’s pretty obvious from the emails that these folks were cooking their data. It’s also all well and good to talk about how the hacker(s?) cherry-picked passages to publicize, but if the dubious discussion hadn’t been there, there’d have been nothing to pick. You don’t have to be Mr. Wizard to grasp that “using tricks” can sometimes help to communicate, e.g. presenting quantitative information in a graphically clear manner. On the other hand, when the tricks are used to hide trends that conflict with the researcher’s theory, then a line has been crossed.
Post #19 please read Post #28, and get some knowledge…Too much taxpayer funds too many times is spent on research of strange and the weird…just for the additional revenue stream to the university and to the individual professors doing the research. I know the pressure upon researchers working at the “research universities” to produce and publish, regardless of the topic. I have long been in the business of this world and know what I say has much truth in it. I have several degrees from some pretty prestigious schools, along with 35 years in the business, and don’t feel I need to do the “mine is bigger” nonsense that so many others feel is the way to dialogue with those you disagree with. Knowing the VA AG as I do–and personally too–I can say that he is not on a witch hunt for name recognition or the like. He genuinely feels the need to get to the bottom of taxpayer funds that were used for this climate research–no more than that. That humankind has some impact upon the climate, I don’t doubt at all, but the UVA study went way, way beyond that point…to pin the changing earth climate upon man. That’s it.
@kdineley Sir, before you launch into your ad hominem attacks you might want to brush up on your reading comprehension. I did not say that these scientists lied, I was merely pointing out what the claim of the AG was. I don’t know if they lied or they just used post-modern jargon (unfortunately for you the straw man of someone who has not looked into the issue at all was false). You act as though the anthropogenic issue has no credible critics. The reason again that the AG is going after them is that other scientists have pointed out apparent issues that led the AG to have a reasonable suspicion that fraud has taken place. Maybe you are offended by terms like lying, but that is what they are accused of, committing fraud. I actually don’t know if and to what extent man is to blame for the changes in our climate (though I’m a scientist, I’m not educated in physics or biology), but just because a group of scientists with a financial stake are all refereeing each other’s papers doesn’t make me comfortable in saying “it will all work out in the end.” When we are making massive policy decisions we had better make damn sure that the science is irrefutable (to the extent that is possible). I am not willing to let people change policy because we “think” something is happening and if we don’t act now it will be too late if we’re right.
@dank48: You said, “It’s all well and good to talk about how mere mortals can’t understand all that fancy science talk, but it’s pretty obvious from the emails that these folks were cooking their data. It’s also all well and good to talk about how the hacker(s?) cherry-picked passages to publicize, but if the dubious discussion hadn’t been there, there’d have been nothing to pick.”Are you kidding? So hackers break into the private emails of scientists they want to discredit, take statements deliberately out of context, and it’s the scientists fault for “giving” them ammunition? Give me a break!Plenty of people understand the “fancy science talk”. The ones who don’t like what the conversation is about tend to slap those kinds of labels on it, so as to insinuate there is some sort of conspiracy among scientists to talk down to the public and mislead them. None exists.Your insinuation that scientists cook up provacative subjects for the sole purpose of obtain grants is ludicrous beyond belief. It is just one more example of “I don’t like your conclusions, so I’ll attack your character since I can’t disprove your research.”You said megginson should do the math. Actually, I rather think YOU should do the math. Right here. Megginson provided actual numbers that describe, very basically, the amount of energy that comes and goes (or doesn’t go) from the face of the earth. All you provided was “the sun puts out lots of energy,” and “E=MC2.” Run the numbers . . . prove your point, sir.@bnmoore: one man’s strange and weird is another man’s crucial breakthrough. Alexander Graham Bell was trying to help the deaf when he invented the telephone. Thomas Edison promoted the electric chair to discredit AC power. Plate techtonics was thought to be nonesense. The great thing about science is we never know where it will take us.@jgpeters: your own statement, “The reason again that the AG is going after them is that other scientists have pointed out apparent issues that led the AG to have a reasonable suspicion that fraud has taken place,” highlights the lack of wisdom in pursuing this legal action.The issue of whether or not climatologists such as Mann are right about climate change is an issue for the scientists to work out through the process of consensus. That some scientists disagree with Mann’s conclusions is not evidence of fraud. It is simply professional disagreement. When we make public policy decisions we have to make them on the best evidence we have available at the time. This is not the same things as saying “the sky is falling.” It simply means, “the evidence points to continuing damage to the environment is caused by man will have these specific adverse effects, and that we can avoid those consequences by changing our behavior in these ways.”To ignore the ever more compelling evidence because the issue is not proven to to absolute consclusivity is taking a head in the sand approach to our problems. We can ignore the effects of climate change, but that doesn’t make them go away.The real policy discussion should be, “how can we modify these consequences with the least disruption to our economy.”
jgpetersSave the feaux gentlemanship, sir. I’m talking to you direclty, ad hominem or not, perceive it anyway you like, because you are trading quite deliveberatley in the manucfactured controversy. Hence the comments about witheld data, when in reality troves of it can be easily accessed by any sincerely interested individual. You further suggest that climate scientists are making it up in order to keep a job, which basically panders to the worst kind of anti-science anti-intellectualism.But when challenged, you hide behind the excuse that you were simply explaining the rationale of the Va AG, as if the rest of us were incapable of figuring it out ourselves.
bnmoreGet some knowledge about what? Climate change? Maybe you’d care to tutor me. What have you got to offer – let’s here about tree rings, proxies, instrument record, forcings, feedbacks… I’m all ears.I do not find it reassuring in the least that you claim to know the AG “personally”. BTW, a lot folks who know personally know Mann, and Trenberth and others, say that they are committed scientists and men of integrity.You want to serve as foot solidiers in a trumped up witch hunt, the object of which is a researcher who doesn’t even work in VA any more, fine. Just don’t rationalize it as sincere disagreement based on the science. At least until you start talking science.
dank48 it turns out that I have heard of Freeman Dyson. I wonder if you have heard that he accepts anthropogenic global warming as a reality? Did you find it inconvenient to mention that? Further, would you be surprised that I find that suggestive of intellectual dishonesty?Dyson is undoubtedly a genius. His skepticism of climate modeling is valuable. What Dyson does not do, and this is important, is claim that the scientists he disagrees with, i.e. those who model climate, are making it up or lying or saying anything that will bag a grant. That is what you are saying. To make such blanket and uninformed accusations of misconduct is itself unethical.
Before we get on jgpeters’s case too much, we should realize that he does have one point. It’s just that it doesn’t lead where he is claiming it does.jgpeters is absolutely right that the sun is pouring a vast amount of energy onto the surface of the Earth each second, much more than we human beings utilize in our own energy budget, which is indeed quite puny by comparison.And through our “construction” of a CO2 “dam” in the atmosphere, we’re now keeping more of that vast amount of energy right here on Earth than we did a few hundred years ago. And that is precisely the problem.Nobody doubts that the vast output of the sun is the ultimate source of the energy that is leading to global warming; of course it is. But that is a different matter from the sun’s being the *cause* of global warming. We’re the latter, through our inadvertent, but very effective, efforts to keep more of the sun’s energy right here on Earth than is healthy for ourselves or our planet.I have certainly done the math (literally), and the math says quite emphatically that if we manage to hang onto even a small extra fraction of that huge amount of energy which jgpeters correctly points out is bombarding us from the sun, then we are in serious trouble. As the theory predicts, and observation and experiment completely confirm, we are indeed keeping too much of it, and we are indeed in serious trouble.
dank48 -Spare us the martyr’s complex – no one is silencing you. Talk all you like. If you have legitimate differences in the conclusions you reach after you interpret the data, fine, bring it to the table. But what you really want is to misrepresent, which is why you couldn’t even faithfully recount Dyson’s views in this thread after you yourself invoked him. Be prepared to be called on it, is all.
A fast correction, with an apology to jgpeters: Of course, my previous referred to the posts of dank48 rather than jgpeters – I glanced up at the preceding message and jgpeters stuck in my head when typing it.
megginson I applaud your patience and willingness to assume the best intentions. But do you really believe that jgpeters (and others) would need the basic explanations you are providing, had he any sincere interest in the science itself? But let us say you are right, that far, i.e. his interests are sincere… still, what kind of person goes on about the high crime of witholding data before he bothers to check for himself whether or not the data is available. When in reality tons and tons of it is.
Thanks, kdineley. I don’t usually jump into discussions like these, remembering Glenn Beck’s famous statement to the New York Times about his role being to serve as a rodeo clown for liberals, and there are some quarrels you can get drawn into that are just exhausting, time consuming, and pointless. However, it looked like there was an opportunity to get some facts injected that could make some folks following this conversation understand why the basic science on global warming is long settled. A poll taken by the Alliance for Climate Protection in August 2007 for its own internal use showed that 18% of Americans are convinced that global warming is a hoax, and nothing is going to change their mind; another 9% are at the other end of the spectrum; about 35% of Americans are more moderate than the 9% on the matter but understand the basics of climate change and the need to act sooner rather than later; and the other 38% are undecided or confused and would like more information. I’m not sure what fraction of the readers of this blog strand are in that 38%, but they do deserve some facts, and I was hoping to help them take some away.I have a collection of three quotes I like to keep in mind when I’m talking to others about these matters, and I wish others would think about them also:”You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan”If I had only eight words to leave you, it would be these, ‘Not who is right, but what is true.’” – Livingston C. Lord, President of Eastern Illinois University, in an address to the campus nine days before his death in 1933We just can’t ignore what is proven to be true and wreck our planet because we don’t want Al Gore to be right. I certainly don’t want Al Gore to be right, and in fact Al Gore would far rather that Al Gore were not right. It is terribly destructive that this issue has become politically loaded, and that goes just as well for folks who want Al Gore to be right so “those other folks” are wrong. In fact, though Al Gore has contributed much to public understanding on the matter, he is not entirely blameless in the politicization of it. When Reagan was President, Gore knew that bringing up climate change or other environmental subjects was a predictable way to prod Reagan into saying something outrageous about it, and he didn’t pass up the chances. (So have I now managed to say something to offend everyone?)My favorite quote, though, is from the original Star Trek series, in the classic episode “Day of the Dove”, and it’s by Klingon Commander Kang, played by Michael Ansara, when he saw the need for a truce with Captain Kirk so they could face an alien threat together. I’ll sign off with it:”Only a fool fights in a burning house.”
Hey, don’t knock this guy. He’s making Texas look reeeeeeaaaaaly good!