A new voice against the Global Warming hysteria
From the Hamilton, Ontario
Spectator:
Global warming hysteria challenged
Book reveals how controversial the science is on climate change
An anti-nuclear, Toronto-based, urban-loving, 1970s peace activist who opposes subsidies to the oil industry might be the last person expected to detail cracks in the science of global warming.
But Lawrence Solomon has done just that in a short book with a long subtitle: The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, And Fraud (And Those Who Are Too Fearful To Do So).
The spark for the book came after an American TV reporter compared those who question the Kyoto Protocol to Holocaust deniers. But Solomon wondered about that, so he sought out the experts in specific fields to garner their views.
Consider Dr. Edward Wegman, asked by the U.S. Congress to assess the famous "hockey stick" graph from Michael Mann, published by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which purported to show temperatures as mostly constant over the past 1,000 years -- except for a spike in the last century.
The IPCC claimed the hockey stick "proved" unique 20th-century global warming. But it didn't. Wegman, who drew on the initial skepticism of two Canadians who questioned Mann's statistical handling, found that his "hockey stick" was the result of a statistical error -- the statistical model had mined data to produce the hockey stick and excluded contrary data.
That mistake occurred not because Mann was deceptive or a poor scientist; he's an expert in the paleoclimate community as were those who reviewed his paper. But that was the problem: The paleoclimate scientists were trapped in their own disciplinary ghetto and not up to speed on the latest, most appropriate statistical methods.
Is Wegman the scientific equivalent of a medical quack? No. His CV includes eight books, more than 160 published papers, editorships of prestigious journals, and past presidency of the International Association of Statistical Computing, among other distinctions.
And a bit more:
The most intriguing part of The Deniers is the attempt by dozens of credible scientists to point out what should be common-sense obvious: The sun might affect Earth's climate.
"We understand the greenhouse effect pretty well," Solomon writes, "we know little about how the sun -- our main source of energy driving the climate -- affects climate change."
But the IPCC refuses to even consider the sun's influence on Earth's climate -- it conceives of its mission only to investigate possible man-made effects upon climate. But that's akin to a hit-and-run investigation where police rule out all cars except one model before they even question witnesses.
No one who reads The Deniers will be able to claim a scientific consensus exists on global warming. (Some scientists even argue the planet's climate is about to cool.)
Looks like an interesting book -- I'll have to see if our library can get a copy.
The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so.
Posted by DaveH at May 20, 2008 9:14 PM