From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Feb 05 2002 - 03:34:30 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: <hal@finney.org>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 2:28 PM
Subject: Re: CLIMATE: Cooling, not warming...
> It should always be a red flag when your ideological preferences are in
> alignment with your beliefs about an objective but controversial issue
> like global warming. An ideology is a useful tool but a terrible master.
> In the interests of constructing an accurate view of the world, you must
> be suspicious of easy and comfortable beliefs which conform with your
> preferences.
Quite so, and the underlying assumptions should be questioned and re-examined always.
> For a quick overview of the scientific consensus,
Science is not at all democratic. The notion of 'scientific consensus' (which I often see associated with global warming claims)
cannot clothe the emperor. One Max Planck outvotes an infinitude of "Lord Kelvins".
> I recommend last
> year's report on Climate Change Science by the National Research Council.
> It is available online at http://search.nap.edu/books/0309075742/html/.
> The report is only 29 pages and begins with a 5 page summary. Appendix B
> includes biographies of the contributors which should put to rest any
> contention that these are brainwashed government flunkies.
Each of the individuals listed in this picture-perfect display of influence-
http://books.nap.edu/books/0309075742/html/29.html#pagetop
is a State This or a National That, therefore the recipent of government largesse. One does not bite the hand that feeds them, thus
is the quest for truth -science- sullied by gunbarrel funding.
> They are in
> fact respected scientists with strong credentials,
Credentials are 'authorized' testimonies of some past performance, whether in intellectual achievements, brown-nosing, plagarizing,
backstabbing, ladder-climbing, or any of the other common behaviors found in state-run universities. They do not provide any
guarrantee of current and future performance.
> many of them members
> of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.
The National Academy of Sciences does not exist- it is quite strictly a figment of the imagination. Therefore, its prestige is
precisely zero.
> Here is an excerpt from the summary, reviewing the earlier report by
> the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
The January 2002 issue of *Scientific American* has a most illuminating article [pp 62-65] by claimed IPCC (which also does not
exist) "senior fellow" Stephen Schneider. Mr. Schneider also makes the claim within his article "Even the most credible
international assessment body, the [IPCC]...": an excellent illustration of the necessarily self-referential nature of such notions.
The author then asks "Will temperatures in 2100 increase by 1.4 degrees Celsius or by 5.8? *without any consideration* of global
cooling, stability, technological advances, etc., etc. The conclusion is placed before the assumption. Later, a claim that Bayesian
probability is objective is entertained, as if risk assessment could be done external to the risk assessor- a thought absent the
body of a thinker. It gets worse.
> "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50
> years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas
> concentration accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific
> community on this issue. The stated degree of confidence in the IPCC
> assesesment is higher today than it was 10, or even 5 years ago, but
> uncertainty remains because of (1) the level of natural variability
> inherent in the climate system on time scales of decades to centuries,
> (2) the questionable ability of models to accurately simulate natural
> variability on those long time scales, and (3) the degree of confidence
> that can be placed on reconstructions of global mean temperature over the
> past millennium based on proxy evidence."
>
> In my opinion, denying that human-caused global warming is the
> consensus of the scientific community is putting our heads in the sand.
Didn't something like 20,000 "members of the scientific community" sign a petition arguing that global warming is a hoax? It could
just as easily turn out, ****one hundred years from now****, that the tiny additions humans made to the atmosphere had staved off an
ice age.
Forrest
-- Forrest Bishop Chairman, Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering www.iase.cc
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