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Claude Allegre, noted skeptic:
http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777
is now implicated in scientific malfeasance:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090107/full/457140a.html
Why anyone believes anything these skeptic clowns says is beyond me.
Why anyone believes anything these skeptic clowns says is beyond me.
Ah c'mon you know why. They believe it because they want to believe it. They just ignore the details like Spencer being an Intelliget Design proponent and having screwed up the satellite temperature data analysis, or the number of skeptics who also don't think secondhand smoke causes lung cancer, etc. etc.
People are good at finding ways to believe what they want to believe.
I got a better one for you--a link that James E loves to point out, it is a presentation that was actually put together by a real professor at the university of oslo. How an actual professor of anything besides romantic Spanish literature could make such obvious chemistry errors is beyond me:
You don't need an expert peer review to recognize the garbage in this. Feel free to point out as many errors you see, I already noted several (my favorite being the claim that increasing CO2 will actually lead to an increase in CaCO3 precipitation in the ocean, thus sequestering it safely...He also argues that CO2 cannot exist in the atmosphere for very long and must instantly go into the ocean, since "we do not wait 50 years for our beer to come from the brewery.")
If you don't believe me see for yourself...in particular I am deeply suspicious of his Henry's law numbers (1:50 ratio of air to water), though I couldn't seem to find the real number for seawater. Freshwater at 25 C is 29:1 but I know the high ionic strength effects of seawater should greatly affect this.
I plan on tearing this presentation down in a yahoo question soon. Even most of the skeptics should be able to recognize the junk science within it.
I got a better one for you--a link that James E loves to point out, it is a presentation that was actually put together by a real professor at the university of oslo. How an actual professor of anything besides romantic Spanish literature could make such obvious chemistry errors is beyond me:
You don't need an expert peer review to recognize the garbage in this. Feel free to point out as many errors you see, I already noted several (my favorite being the claim that increasing CO2 will actually lead to an increase in CaCO3 precipitation in the ocean, thus sequestering it safely...He also argues that CO2 cannot exist in the atmosphere for very long and must instantly go into the ocean, since "we do not wait 50 years for our beer to come from the brewery.")
If you don't believe me see for yourself...in particular I am deeply suspicious of his Henry's law numbers (1:50 ratio of air to water), though I couldn't seem to find the real number for seawater. Freshwater at 25 C is 29:1 but I know the high ionic strength effects of seawater should greatly affect this.
I plan on tearing this presentation down in a yahoo question soon. Even most of the skeptics should be able to recognize the junk science within it.
Google "andrew dickson CO2 analysis handbook" and you should find a link to a Scripps Institution of Oceanography website (sio.ucsd.edu). One of the chapters in that handbook has the latest in greatest numbers for all of the CO2 chemistry constants.
Don't tell him I told you.
Oh, zippity doo-dah, here's the link:
(I'll find the real link in a bit)
Ok, it's chapter 5 of the manual that has the constants:
Chapter 5, the Goyet and Dickson CO2 analysis handbook
Well the guy is just a geologist, although apparently he's taught geochemistry. Is it just me, or do a lot of geologists
?
Ok, this is snarky, and unfair, and harsh, but it is also in a sense true. Science and engineering is all about heirarchies. Physicists look down on chemists, chemists sneer at biologists, biologists laugh at doctors, (doctors don't care because they are filthy stinking rich). Anyway, at most schools the smarter students go into the fields where there are great jobs with high pay, that doesn't tend to be geology. So you get a lot of marginal scientists who couldn't hack the physics curriculum, or perhaps decided after a couple years of chemistry there is no way they are suffering through any more p-chem, but need to finish their degree and not give up the core concentration of courses they already have in math and science, so they become geologists. They then know a smattering of science, and have a lasting grudge against the disciplines higher up the intellectual totem pole (and if you think this totem pole doesn't exist, then you have not spent much time in academia), which makes them predisposed and perfectly positioned intellectually to be contrarians because they know enough to think they understand something and are cranky enough to want to prove the establishment wrong.
I know, there are a lot of really smart geologists and geologists who knew from the instant they first understood there was such a thing as geology that they wanted to be geologists, but those are not the geologists that are climate skeptics. I am talking about the dumb geologists: the ones that can't understand how paleo climate and the geologic record is a laboratory filled with experiments available for testing theories related to climate physics and is not really an example of why mankind cannot possibly be affecting climate.
If you are a geologist reading this, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the other guy.
the dumb geologists: the ones that can't understand how paleo climate and the geologic record is a laboratory filled with experiments available for testing theories related to climate physics and is not really an example of why mankind cannot possibly be affecting climate.
If you are a geologist reading this, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the other guy.
Sounds like Jim Z to me! Seriously, that guy bugs the crap out of me. Mr. I don't need to cite any references because I'm a geologist and thus expert in all climate science. Mr. global warming is obviously a natural cycle even though I can't tell you which cycle or what the physical cause is. Mr. anyone who disagrees with me is obviously a "leftist". I can't stand that mofo.
I work with a bunch of geologists (and engineers, etc.) and most of them think it's funny to have a guy with an astrophysics degree around (which in an environmental consulting firm, is rather true). Anyway, one of my other co-workers is a nuclear engineer, and we got to talking with a couple geologists at one point about who was smarter (just joking around). The geologists got to talking about how they covered all these subjects in school (geology, physics, chemistry, etc.), plus they're more useful because a registered Professional Geologist can sign off on our reports (a comment Jim Z made to me, coincidentally - somehow he's more of a climate science expert because geologists can sign off on these documents and environmental scientists can't).
Anyway, we were just joking around but I could tell they had something of a chip on their shoulder toward other scientific disciplines as you mention. And I have to add that the geologists in my office are quite smart people, and probably all went into geology because the subject sincerely interested them. And coincidentally, none of them are AGW deniers. Nor do they claim to be climate science experts because they're geologists.
In short, Jim is one of the dumber geologists.
To be fair, I understand a lot of people go into geology (or other "applied" sciences like environmental science, atmospheric science, oceanography etc.) precisely because physics curriculae are so sterile and boring (I mean, get a physics Ph.D. and do what precisely? Sit around and wait for a huge apparatus to come online? Go to a small school and teach the stuff you learned as an undergrad to new undergrads?). So I'm not saying all geologists (or environmental scientists or what have you) walk around with chips on their shoulders. It's just that some of them do, and those that do probably aren't the ones with enough wisdom to figure out they are where they are because of who they are, not because some vague system beat them down or that they are the victim of intellectual oppression. The corollary to that is if you haven't accumulated some wisdom through life, you are vulnerable to false intellectual arguments, sophistry, and appeal to emotion. Sort of sounds like a skeptic to me.
Anyway, if you want to do pop psychology on most skeptics, you can deconstruct them into categories that involve academic shunning and a need for revenge. For example, William Gray was never really a theoretical meteorologist, he was an observational guy. But he never could explain those observations in terms of the Navier-Stokes equations (not that anybody really can). So he felt like a second-class scientist his whole career. For example, if you go through the archives on RealClimate.org, there is a post from the son of a very famous meteorologist/oceanographer, Claes Rooth I recall, who says his dad dismisses Gray as a "pattern recognition guy." That is a nasty insult among scientists, suggesting you aren't smart enough to do the math. So Gray's skepticism is rooted in a need to show that guys like Rooth don't know everything there is to know.
I'll shut up now, but if you want to deconstruct the world into sins of pride and sins of lust, I wouldn't disagree.
Edited by gcnp58 - Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:09:15 GMT
Most of the skeptics seem to be a very arrogant bunch of people who base their beliefs on the knowledge that they choose to believe. Most of what they say is true but they do not look at the whole big picture instead they choose small irrelevant pieces of data to support their argument and ignore anything else.
Dana:
Is it just me, or do a lot of geologists
Re the geologist discussion: I only know 1 geologist personally. She retired from Unocal and has worked at a nature center for 15 years sharing her love of geology, bats, music and nature with staff and the public. She is one of a few people I can carry on an intelligent discussion on global climate change with. Despite being a Doctor, she is generous and steps up sometimes to do the most onerous tasks without complaint. Let's not tar all geologists with claims based on generalizations or personal experience. The only other geologist I rubbed shoulders with personally was a college professor, who made such an impression on me I remembered his words years later when buying a house. I chose not to buy in the floodplain and trust the integrity of the Prado Dam upstream when I could buy up on a plateau and not worry about flooding or liquefaction following a major earthquake.
Jim Z., self-styled geologist cum climate expert, provides support for my hypothsis above, that the skeptic geologists are motivated more by emotional bias than an objective analyis of the science.
Question posed on Y!A here, Jim Z's answer is the first.
Jim Z. doesn't know Jeff Severinghaus. However, although the connection is very peripherally, I do. Severinghaus wouldn't kowtow to anyone, and as a tenured faculty at Scripps, is in no danger of losing his funding (he is probably one of the top geological chemists in the country so if he isn't getting his proposals funded, it means all available money for science in this country is gone, not that there is a conspiracy against him).
I'm not going to parse words - Jim Z is an idiot. And coincidentally he's a geologist (and extremely egotistical). A prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. And there are other geologists who fit this mould (Bob Carter comes to mind). And it's probably fair to say that other scientific fields like physics and chemistry are generally tougher than geology.
But of course it's not fair to generalize that geologists aren't too bright. And I think we all were very careful about not making such generalizations, and gcnp has given a couple examples of very smart geologists.
It's just a case of something which seems to be true fairly frequently (geologists who fancy themselves climate science but really don't understand the subject) - geoweeg is another example on YA, by the way - but obviously there are many instances of geologists who don't fit this generalization. As I mentioned, I work with several of them. I didn't mean to start a geologist-bashing discussion, but the trend for geologists to fit this mould bugs me sometimes. Especially jim and geoweeg and Bob Carter, who really just don't get it and yet lecture others about the subject.
