Could you point me to a reference for this? There are so many unfounded accusations in the media today, put out by climate change deniers and those with vested interests, all of which have been proved false by the international scientific community.
This deniers campaign by non-scientists has unfortunately created a hugh obstacle for the average person to obtain the facts and realize the seriousness of this global problem. You know, that for all the scientific data supporting climate change, collected over the last 30 years to be false, thousands of scientists from all over the world would have to be involved in some gigantic conspiracy. It would be like trying to fool the world that the Apollo Project to the moon never happened. All of the thousands of engineers (Including myself) spread among hundreds of companies across the country who worked in a vast development network would have to had been a part of a massive scheme to fool the entire international press. Impossible. And what would be their motivation anyway? Having worked with scientists all my career, I can tell you they make up one of the most honest of professions. The scientific method by nature keeps it this way where everyone is constantly checking each others work trying to uncover errors.
TBrooke
On Feb 21, 2010, at 10:59 AM, JAMES FRYE wrote:
Brooke, I'm always willing to discuss differences. My problem is a mistrust of what I am reading. Why? Recently it has been proven(?)* that climate data presented as evidence for global warming was not accurate, not complete, and not scientifically selected. Yet everyone seemed to jump on that data as conclusive proof that the world is going to hell in a hand basket! Is the world warming? It could very well be. Is the ice cap melting? Probably. Is this a danger to mankind? Could be What should I do? If it makes sense, do it, if it doesn't forget it. One thing that I have learned over the years, you can make data tell anything you want it to. Jim Frye
* my edit TBG
2 comments:
Brooke, I'm not sure of the name, but it's the school or institute in Great Britain that much of the press refers to as the source of the climate data leading to the warning about global warming. The Director recently resigned due to the criticism of the data and how it was reported.
Look, I'm not saying global warming is not occurring. What I am saying is we cannot be the only country paying the price. I'm all for doing the things we can, but not at the risk of losing our economic position in the world. I still say if the scientists and engineers were to be left alone they could solve so many of the problems. I also believe that some of the remedies suggested are foolishness. Global warming should not be used to solve the haves and have not questions. What is China doing? You've seen my comments on experiences in other parts of the world. The USA is not the sole source of the problems, it should not be the sole source of the penalties.
Jim: the school in question is the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. There are two key elements of the controversy you refer to. One is a reference in an email to "a trick to hide the decline." Unfortunately, the controversy is based on a layman's fundamental misunderstanding of mathematician's language (not being a mathematician, I'll leave it to someone else to explain properly). That fundamental misunderstanding then got picked up by well-funded climate-change denialist groups and it became loudly echoed in right-wing media as evidence that the climate scientists were engaged in nefarious manipulation of data. In order to believe this, you have to believe that people who have a clearly stated political agenda that is opposed to taking any human action to mitigate climate change are acting in good faith and that thousands of scientists, from across the globe are simple dupes or acting in bad faith. Occam's razor should raise concerns about that interpretation.
The other element to the controversy was evidence from hacked emails that scientists at CRU tried to suppress publication of research papers reaching different conclusions about climate data (claiming that they are bad science) and that they tried to withhold release of evidence that they felt was unhelpful to their position. These are much more serious charges, but these are charges about process, not about the data (lots of research papers are rejected for publication because they are, in fact, bad research).
But it seems to me that what is going on here is something we see quite a lot of: at the margins of any field one can find mistakes and objectionable actions and when one takes those mistakes and expands them out of proportion so that they look like the dominant core rather than the outlier. Consider what is shaping your perspective her and ask yourself, are these emails refuting decades of data gathered by thousands of scientists from across the globe or are they evidence of, at worst, bad actions at one local. In other words, are these emails capable of overturning a massive amount of data or are they only capable of sowing seeds of doubt? I think that one needs to give credit and credence to the scientists who have been working on this for a long time and not to denialists whose work relies only on doubt and anecdote, not actual evidence.
I don't have the time or inclination to respond to your argument about "paying the price." I'll only say for the moment that the U.S. is, by far, the largest contributor of greenhouse gases in the world. China, India and whatnot may be catching up, but they are still very far behind. Like it or not, if climate change is real, the U.S. has to be the major actor in mitigation and as long as the U.S. refuses to take any action (waiting, instead, for the Chinese to do something first) nothing will ever happen because everyone knows that their actions are ineffective if the U.S. doesn't change.
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