jnaujok's Journal: Foes of mine

Neat, I just checked the journal of some of my foes to find a rant about how, if I'm on their foe list, that I've made horrible scientifically untrue statements, or "supported ideology above science."

Now, I know that this comes from my ongoing defense of the non-anthropogenic global warming view. Whenever I comment on this, I'm relentlessly attacked, usually ad hominem, by the "other side". What surprises me is that this would somehow qualify as "ideology before science."

The more and more I'm reading about how climate science is performed in this country, the more I continue to doubt that Anthropogenic Global Warming is anything other than political ideology. In other words, ideology before science.

What kind of things bother me?

• Many of the studies refuse to publish their raw data, algorithms, or even detailed methodology. That's not science. The point of publishing is to put the idea out there so that the experiment can be duplicated. It is this duplication that is the point of science. Reproducible results. The idea of hiding data and methodology would mean automatic disqualification in any other peer reviewed journal. Nature in fact, requires public data archiving for all other branches of science, but not climate science. Why the exception?
• The maintenance and siting of the climate network appears to be atrocious. Not just really bad, not even poorly maintained, but possibly intentionally bad. Look at http://surfacestations.org/ and if you're not horrified, then you're not paying attention.
• The conflict of interests is overwhelming. Al Gore is out there "raising awareness" of AGW. But Al Gore also owns the largest Carbon Credit Trading organization in the world. Who is making money on every person who buys into purchasing Carbon Credits? That's right, Al Gore. When tobacco companies sponsor cigarette studies, no one believes the results. Why do we believe Al?
• The science is being bought. Turns out James Hansen, the poor oppressed scientist at NASA, got $750,000 from known left-winger George Soros. I don't know about you, but if someone gives me three quarters of a million dollars, I'm thinking they want something in return.
• In the same vein, Hansen is the sole source of climate data. He wrote and runs the code that generates the "adjusted climate values" from the raw temperature data. Problem is, for the last ten years, he absolutely refused to turn over the code. Then he got caught by analysis as having a "bug" in his code that just so happened to make the years from 2000 - 2006 the hottest years on record. Turns out most of those years weren't even in the top 20 warmest years. Suddenly the hottest year in the U.S. was no longer the El Nino driven year of 1998, but the year 1934. In fact five of the ten values were in the 1930's. Hmm. Where'd all the warming go.
  Then, after an act of Congress (okay, a Congressman threatening to pull all of Hansen's funding if he didn't) Hansen turned over the source code. It took only a few days to find that any measurement with more than one series (i.e. a temperature gauge that got moved so it was in a new location) introduced a bias in the temperature. The more series, the bigger the bias. And thats just in step 1. They haven't even gotten through all the steps yet.
• No global climate model has been accurate. Not one. You can't take the output of any GCM from five years ago and compare it to the last five years and get anywhere close to a match. If the model isn't accurate, then it can't be used to predict. I don't even want to go into how horrible the models are to begin with. I could write a journal entry on that all by itself.
• We don't understand precipitation. We don't know if it's a positive or a negative feedback. Most research is pointing at a hugely negative feedback. A recent paper said it may account for as much as an additional 30% cooling in the tropics. However, every computer model says it's a positive feedback. Every single one. And most of them consider it a huge positive feedback. Look up the "Iris Effect" and you'll see that it has to be negative.
• More and more scientists are starting to doubt the findings of global warming. Gray put out an absolute lambasting of AGW after Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Heck, Al's movie has been found by an English court of law to be inaccurate.
• So much data doesn't line up with AGW theory. Yes, we see warming -- in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere has been having record cold years. That would seem to average out. We see melting of the Artic Ice cap, but the Antarctic is having record amounts of mass added. We see glaciers in Europe melting, but many southern glaciers are advancing.
• So much of our data is inaccurate. Fifty years ago no one thought that taking the temperature every day would suddenly become a life or death struggle. Of the six stations in Brazil, five are listed as "Rural" when, in fact, they sit at the center of cities of over 500,000 residents. The Urban Heat Island skews all of these measurement upwards, while the actual rural station shows that temperatures have dropped.
• Many of the glaciers touted as "shrinking because of global warming" have actually been shrinking since the 1700's or even since the end of the last ice age.

I could go on and on. All of these facts have to be ignored to believe in AGW, but I'm the one being called an idealist. Sigh.

I guess I should be happy that my foes don't read this, but I can't be. Ignorance of the scientific method is what's driving AGW. "Scientific Consensus" is a meaningless term. If I get 500 scientists together and they all say that box number one contains a rabbit, it doesn't make it true. It should only take one scientist to walk in and say, "Uh, no, that's a fox," for the whole thing to fall apart. In real science, that lone scientist carries as much credence, more even, than the 500 "consensus scientists." An unconfirmable story runs that Einstein was once approached by a reporter, "Mr. Einstein," he said, "there's a new book coming out called 100 Scientists Prove Einstein Wrong. What do you think about that?" To which Einstein replied, "One, it takes one."

What ever happened to science?