Global warming

[tehuatzi]

"The debate [on global warming] in the scientific community is over." - Al Gore in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC

"There Is No 'Consensus' on Global Warming" - Title of opinion piece on page A14 of the Mon 6-26 WSJ, by Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT

You can read the article here through

Comments

[kelglitter]

Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth? It opens at Boardman's Art Theater on Friday.

[tehuatzi]

Haven't yet. I want to. The subtitle of the opinion piece is, "An inconvenient truth for Al Gore."

[kelglitter]

Hey btw, here is why Al Gore says the debate is over in the scientific community:

"There is no controversy about these facts," Gore says in the film. "Out of 925 recent articles in peer-review scientific journals about global warming, there was no disagreement. Zero."

I think I see his point. If nobody is researching and presenting findings to the contrary in peer-review journals, even if people want to mince his words about the controversy being over, it kind of is.

[tehuatzi]

Wish that link to the article was functional - he does a good job of addressing the misreading, misinterpretation, and selective attention that leads to such conclusions. For example, regarding the "zero disagreement" out of the 900-odd journal articles, Lindzen clarifies,

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.

This kind of carelessness and mishandling of data earns my disrespect. For crying out loud, with tools these days like the Web of Knowledge, which make lit surveys so stinking easy (back in my day, we had to

[kelglitter]

Thanks! You got the link to work and I was able to read the full article.

I started to make a lengthy response with some of my thoughts on the article, one of which was that if one read it carefully one found that the author wasn't really backing up anything he said (for instance - the first thing that I noticed was his claim that Arctic temperatures were as warm or warmer in 1940 - and my question was: which one - as warm, or warmer, and why do you think that), but then I got to looking for information about Richard S. Lindzen in general and I found that although he has lots of papers in which he argues with other people's research, I couldn't find any in which he presented any research of his own to the contrary. He *does* regularly publish on meteorology (and has for over 30 years - his MIT publications page is here and they also have a "Other Publications" page here, but he doesn't cite his research in his rebuttals and all of it that I browsed through seemed to be fundamentally different in nature. To be sure, that does not