Posted on 07/06/2012 11:17:56 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
It was for a moment the clash of the Nobel Prize winners on climate change… just barely, but nothing like this has happened before in the debate-that-isn’t. Normally this is not a show the heavyweights turn up too. But there were three Nobel winners in the room at the same time.
, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland won the 1995 Nobel for work on Ozone. Both of the first two are fans of the man-made global warming theory and they both spoke just prior to notable skeptic Ivar Giaever (who won a Nobel for tunneling in superconductors in 1972).
[UPDATE: Watch Giaever speak - the whole speech - it's excellent. h/t Roberto Soria]
As usual, the core arguments of believers comes down to argument from authority. Can they attack the credentials of the dissenters? The skeptics, the real scientists, talk about evidence.
From Scientific American by Mariette DiChristina
Crutzen:
“The scientific evidence is really overwhelming. Most experts agree; maybe two or three in 100 disagree.” He added, “I know who they are and why they are wrong.”
Molina:
“Anticipating the next speaker, Ivar Gieavaer(sic), who shared the 1973 prize for work on tunneling in superconductors but was to offer a skeptical take on climate change, Molina said that critics aren’t usually the experts. Listening to them, he added, is like going to your dentist when you have a heart problem.”
Giaever stood his ground, dished it out for the Nobel committee, and pointed out the instruments are inaccurate, the results too small to mean anything, and called climate change “pseudoscience”. Merciless.
As he took the stage for his turn, Gieavar’s (sic) immediate remark was, “I am happy I’m allowed to speak for myself.” He derided the Nobel committees for awarding Al Gore and R.K. Pachauri a peace prize, and called agreement with the evidence of climate change a “religion.” In contrast to Crutzen and Molina, Gieavar (sic) found the measurement of the global average temperature rise of 0.8 degrees over 150 years remarkably unlikely to be accurate, because of the difficulties with precision for such measurements—and small enough not to matter in any case: “What does it mean that the temperature has gone up 0.8 degrees? Probably nothing.” He disagreed that carbon dioxide was involved and showed several charts that asserted, among other things, that climate had even cooled. “I pick and choose when I give this talk just the way the previous speaker picked and chose when he gave his talk,” he added. He finished with a pronouncement: “Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.”
(my emphasis).
H/t Climate Depot and Marc Morano
A long while ago, I wrote about the thought experiment — the delicious idea of someone like Julia Gillard coming face to face with someone like Ivar Giaever — and calling him a “science denier”… How arrogant art thy name-callers?
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UPDATE #2
I very much enjoyed watching the whole speech. This is breaking new ground. Not that he is telling die-hard skeptics anything new science-wise, but he’s convincing, authoritative, and entertaining and he’s reaching a layer of society with quiet but penetrating influence. No I don’t expect news headlines. It’s more that the seed has been planted, the message will spread and today we are just a bit closer to the point where it becomes very uncool to be caught looking like the gullible fool who didn’t question the propaganda. The alarmists must fear something exactly like this.
Giaever tells it well mostly. He has new ways to explain old themes and several times he’s crafted a funny line and delivered it with aplomb – nice timing.
No doubt he’ll be attacked. They will say he’s old, past it, not a climate scientist, because that’s the kind of people they are. They will go on and on about 1998, and why he was “cherry picking” even though that doesn’t make any difference to his main points or his final conclusion. I wouldn’t have included the part about “cooling since 1998″, mostly because it will distract from the excellent points everywhere else, and we don’t need to talk about the big El Nino in 1998 - we need to talk about how sea levels started rising long before coal fired power stations; we need to talk about the difference between science and religion; we need to talk about how impossible it is to measure global average temperatures to just 0.8C.
Nowhere in the scientific method are computer models mentioned as an acceptable substitute for empirical observation.
Computer models are fine, if they are validated. Computer models can explain observations and allow useful predictions.
The problem with AGW models is that not only are they - at best - poorly validated, but they contain far too many parameters, they are ad hoc and few of them are robust enough to account for off nominal conditions. Less charitably viewed, they are designed to predict global warming, - either intentionally or not - but not much good for anything else, especially for understanding the real world.
A Nobel prize for quantum physics level work (semiconductors) is quantum levels above the pseudo science of any kind of climate research.
And, giving the ozone-O-crats any kind of prize associated with science further cheapens the Nobel name....a name which is right down there with Yugo right now.
Good on Ivar for calling a clown (or two clowns) a clown. We should indeed be studying climate science...but it would be nice if we had real scientists doing the studying.
I am normally loathe to cite Wikipedia as a source, but:
“The last glacial period is sometimes colloquially referred to as the “last ice age”, though this use is incorrect because an ice age is a longer period of cold temperature in which ice sheets cover large parts of the Earth, such as Antarctica. Glacials, on the other hand, refer to colder phases within an ice age that separate interglacials. Thus, the end of the last glacial period is not the end of the last ice age. The end of the last glacial period was about 12,500 years ago, while the end of the last ice age may not yet have come: little evidence points to a stop of the glacial-interglacial cycle of the last million years.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period
It looks like the global warming fanatics hadn’t gotten to that particular Wikipedia page. However, it appears the global warming cult has infiltrated the content on the Wikipedia entry for “Medieval Warm Period.” There you will still find the discredited “hockey stick” graph, as well as Michael Mann’s BS of “it wasn’t warmer everywhere, it was actually cooler.” After that statement it cites what the particular studies show for each region, and (surprise) the data for each and every region showed it was significantly warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than it is today.
“Global Warming” will not take into account that we are actually still in an ice age, and that permanent ice as found in Greenland and Antartica has actually existed only for about 5% of Earth’s geologic history. In addition, the Global Warming Pharisees are painfully sensitive about the “Medieval Warm Period.”
I didn’t even notice that the Global Warming Pharisees had brought in some of the “Ozone Depletion” Sadducees. Anyone with basic knowledge of chemistry and astronomy knows ozone depletion is B/S. What is ozone? It is O3, an inherently unstable ionization of Oxygen. What causes it to exist? The absorption of energy by Oxygen atoms, causing them to form the ionized Ozone particle. Left alone, the ozone will naturally break down into the “normal” O2 molecule. How is Ozone created in the upper atmosphere? Through bombardment of Oxygen from solar radiation. Where and when do the ozone “holes” appear? At the earth’s poles, during each polar winter. What is happening then? Well, due to the earth’s axis, that is when those polar regions are pointed away from the sun, and not receiving solar radiation which causes the creation and replenishment of ozone.
A perfectly natural phenomenon. And one that has been happening for a billion years, or a least since Earth had a significant amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
A computer model is fine for predictive purposes, but it is not an acceptable substitute for empirical confirmation of a scientific hypothesis.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems alone makes that pretty obvious.
PS: Where were the “Radon Gas” guys?
Auditioning for a role with Ted Danson as Global Iceage Guys.
I am not versed in the finer points of Science, so let me just say, Thank you for posting! I found the speech fascinating. :)
After you clear the kids out of the house or turn the speakers down really LOW>>>>
... Obama isn't seizing on temporary hot DC weather to push the global warming hoax
Maybe they will get a bit of the message.
ROLF!
That is where all this idiocy started. Back in those days, there was no world wide web. No fancy graphical internet displays. Just basic windows, text and the internet newsgroups. Along with thousands of private BBS's. Was there, on the internet newsgroups, arguing with these credentialed clowns. There standard response was to send you to their FAQ, which contained nothing but references to Science and Nature articles. They acted as if referring to Science and Nature made them geniuses. As if..
Whether you call it a computer model or a mathematical model, mathematical models can and do confirm scientific hypotheses. The classic example is the 1919 eclipse measured by Eddington to verify General Relativity. Eddington could show that the observations confirmed General Relativity at (something like) the 95% confidence level, by comparing the observations to the predictions of the model.
Hear! Hear!
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