What if man made climate change

[pjclarke]

Easterbrook is Professor Emeritus, effectively retired from the University.

Publishing in the academic literature is the first step in scientific discourse: Easterbrook has not published his 'global cooling' schtick in any academic journal, I guess this is the subtext behind his department's statement:

The Geology Faculty at WWU believes that all science must be subjected to rigorous peer review and publication before it becomes worthy of serious discussion. We do not support publication of non-peer-reviewed scientific results in the general media

Therefore it is entirely appropriate that if Easterbrook has a prediliction for doctoring graphs, this should also be pointed out in a non-reviewed venue , where comments can be added by informed bystanders ...

The funniest error is that in all his graphs of the Greenland temperatures he has mislabelled the LIA and MWP (they are at least 1000 years off).

Therefore pclarke is completely wrong when he dimisses a paper simply because it isn't in a journal he approves of.

So BB, which journal did publish this study? Do tell. I don't believe it has been submitted much less accepted for publication. Nor is it likely to be, it contains so many glaring howlers (e.g. asserting that a cosmic ray proxy in Greenland can be correlated with Central England) and takes in cosmic rays, ocean currents, clouds and convection in its sweeping and incoherent 16 pages. Pure Blog Science.

[cojak]

BBC Four, 10pm: Storyville: Meet The Climate Sceptics

If anyone is interested...

[pjclarke]

When the atlantic cools as it does every few decades what impact will that have on the ice?

A professional statistician writes...

I regularly get comments claiming that ocean cycles are the cause of global warming. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Click!

[BlasterBates]

Publishing in the academic literature is the first step in scientific discourse: Easterbrook has not published his 'global cooling' schtick in any academic journal, I guess this is the subtext behind his department's statement:

Easterbrook has entered the fray with by publishing his paper on his website.

When a professor with a reputation such as Easterbrook, publishes a paper on his website this a bonafide paper in the academic debate.

He has also presented this in conferences. This in particular gives credence to the paper.

If Easterbrook had falsified the data, the University would take disciplinary action, at the very least they'd force him to take his off his website, you can bet. No University is going to tolerate anyone falsifying research. It is still there

Emiritus or not the reputation of the University is at stake. His department may not agree with him but this has no bearing on whether he falsified the data. Disagreement is actually fairly normal in academia. If scientists all agreed you wouldn't need a debate. In fact it is fairly normal to have very heated debates.

To refute this paper it would be sufficient for a scientist of stature to publish a rebuttal on his website, doesn't need to be a professor, just a member of a research department. I don't see one though, just no name bloggers, Why not?

If Easterbrook hasn't falsified the data then he's presented a very strong argument indeed that the warming, which he doesn't dispute, is part of a natural cycle.

The only rebuttal I've read is from bloggers that claim he falsified the data.

[EternalOptimist]

It's incredible that the warmistas are still saying such and such a person must be wrong simply because we disagree with him.
Even after agreeing there is no concensus and that science is not a popularity contest, they persist in trotting out this line.

as if it means diddly squat.

You have to come to the conclusion that they closed minded, blinkered and unwilling to learn

[Churchill]

It's incredible that the warmistas are still saying such and such a person must be wrong simply because we disagree with him.
Even after agreeing there is no concensus and that science is not a popularity contest, they persist in trotting out this line.

as if it means diddly squat.

You have to come to the conclusion that they closed minded, blinkered and unwilling to learn

Come on EO, give them a chance. Do you know when "Scientists" finally agreed that there was such a thing as continental drift and when the science of "Tectonics" was established?

[EternalOptimist]

Come on EO, give them a chance. Do you know when "Scientists" finally agreed that there was such a thing as continental drift and when the science of "Tectonics" was established?

I dont know the answer to that one. maybe they had a pea brain working on the stats

maybe they saw the little shrivelled up pea swinging about on the end of his brain stem through the vacant eyes. or it might have been the noise as it rattled against the inside of his 'ead.

Go on, when DID SasPlato finally accept the theory of tectonic plates ?

[dang65]

Is there any other example in history where something as important as this for the future of the human race has descended into a massive bitch-fight between people who actually know what they're talking about and people who don't like what they're hearing and will grasp at any old nonsense in order to make it go away?

How about this for example:

One of the major contributions to fighting cholera was made by the physician and pioneer medical scientist John Snow (1813–1858), who in 1854 found a link between cholera and contaminated drinking water. In two pioneering epidemiological field studies, he was able to demonstrate human sewage contamination was the most probable disease vector in two major epidemics in London in 1854. His model was not immediately accepted, but it was seen to be the more plausible, as medical microbiology developed over the next thirty years or so.

Cities in developed nations made massive investment in clean water supply and well-separated sewage treatment infrastructures between the mid-1850s and the 1900s. This eliminated the threat of cholera epidemics from the major developed cities in the world.

What if people had objected to the cost of installing a clean water supply, let alone all the bloody road works? I mean, what could possibly be the connection between water and disease? It's obviously some kind of conspiracy, funded by the water companies, no doubt. The likes of John Snow (no, not that one, the other one) will say anything to get their funding, let's face it. And there is a village in Devon which has dirty water and not one single person has died of cholera there (in the last six and a half months), so that's absolute proof that this theory is nonsense.

Even if there had been no connection whatsoever between cholera and contaminated drinking water, all that money was spent on something wonderful for society - clean drinking water in an infrastructure which is still in use today, more than a century later. We should do the same.

[sasguru]

It's incredible that the warmistas are still saying such and such a person must be wrong simply because we disagree with him.
Even after agreeing there is no concensus and that science is not a popularity contest, they persist in trotting out this line.

as if it means diddly squat.

You have to come to the conclusion that they closed minded, blinkered and unwilling to learn

I think you must be incredibly stupid. Not an ad hominem attack, just an objective observation from the blithering nonsense you have posted above.

The reason the scientific community doesn't agree with Easterbrook is simply because he's talking complete bollux and dishonest bollux at that. That's why no reputable journal will publish his stuff - not because there's a conspiracy, but because they would be a laughing stock.
The fact that BB has to resort to a clown like Easterbrook shows how pathetic your case is.

What is science if not consensus? Basically you have some data, some theories to explain that data, which can be falsifiable by other data, which lead to other theories.
The consensus comes from scientists looking at the data and analysing what its telling them.
Basically the data is telling us right now that AGW is real.
That could change in the future if new data came along, so far it hasn't.

There is no "proof" in science, only in maths. You can have data which disproves a theory but you cannot really proove anything as other data may come along and falsify it. Predictive power is only indicative and not really proof.
For example, you can tell that existing explanations of the physical world are not quite right because we can't unify what happens at the micro and macro levels, yet we can predict quite well what will happen at each level.
So we know these "models" are not quite right.

Similarly the theory of AGW may turn out to be wrong, but its way beyond the capability of the village idiots on this board to disprove it. All they seem to do is trot out the usual cranks ad nauseum. If its done once you can put that down to ignorance, if it is repeated it shows the paucity of evidence in support of the position.

[pjclarke]

I could, in a few moments, find websites proving that eating blueberries cures cancer, that the Twin Towers were brought down by a controlled explosion, that evolution is a hoax. They will have graphs, references and some are written by PhDs.... Life is short and time is limited, I need a filter - in other words.

Publishing in the academic literature fulfils many purposes, the primary ones being that the study is reviewed by experts in the field prior to publication to ensure it meets a basic standard of validity and is a substantial contribution to the science. Secondly it brings the material to the attention of other subject experts who are unlikely to spend much time in the blogosphere. Its not perfect, however peer review does weed out most of the nonsense.

You have not engaged with the substance of the criticisms of Easterbrook’s stuff, just denigrated the people who wrote it. The criticisms include treating 1855 as ‘the present’ thus ignoring the modern warming period and mislabelling many of his graphs. It is not the case that those making these points are just ‘no name bloggers’, Scott Mandia is a practising Professor of Physical Science and has complained to Easterbrook’s university.

Easterbrook’s ex-colleagues are powerless to stop him posting whatever he likes on the web, however they did put out a statement confirming their agreement with the IPCC position and deploring the publication of non-peer-reviewed research. Who could they possibly be referring to?

If Easterbrook was correct, there would be a Nobel in it for him at the least, not to mention the undying gratitude of the fossil fuel industry. Journals editors would be falling over themselves to publish the conclusive evidence on arguably the greatest scientific issue of our time. As it is, his theories are contradicted by the literature , he has an entry on the wiki page at a website run by climate scientists and he is reduced to hawking his stuff around such venues as the Heartland denierfest.