Media Missed Opportunity to Enlighten Public on Current Climate Change Science
If you blinked you might've missed it. It could've slipped under readers' radar last week due to news coverage of the tragedy occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, the new immigration law in Arizona, the season finale of "Survivor" or the series conclusion of "Lost." But the Fourth Annual International Conference on Climate Change, held in Chicago May 16-18 and sponsored by The Heartland Institute, provided three days of news-intensive stories that should've taken precedence over nearly every other story of last week's news cycle.
In the interest of full disclosure, I recently accepted a freelance contract position as managing editor of a Heartland technology and public policy-based newspaper and have contributed several articles to Heartland's Environment & Climate News. But to assume that conference attendance precluded independent thinking in favor of a consensus is erroneous. In fact, the only consensus found in Chicago last week was that there is no consensus. Now to this writer, that's real science.
Among the nearly three dozen scientists speaking at the event were Dr. Craig Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, on the real impacts of ocean acidification; Dr. Gary Sharp, marine biologist, on ecological responses to climate change; Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, Stockholm University, on his theory that there is no imminent threat of alarming rising of sea levels; and Dr. Howard Maccabee, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, on health data refuting the urgency for Environmental Protection Agency regulation of carbon dioxide.
Other presenters included Dr. Helen Roe, Queens University, Northern Ireland, who studies proxies of temperature in the peat bogs of Ireland. She explained the value of biomass assessment for core proxy data for periods in time prior to the invention of thermometers. She was followed by Dr. Tim Patterson, Carleton University, Canada, who presented a paper on isotope analysis of Canadian peat bog sphagnum moss for Holocene age climate history studies; Willis Eschenbach, an independent climate researcher, spoke on his theory that thunderstorm complexes create up and down circulation not previously appreciated as the possible source of a tremendous stabilizing influence on the climate.
Dr. Ian Plimer, University of Adelaide, Australia, reminded his audience that most of the carbon on Earth is solid - in other words, rocks. He also spoke on the importance of deep sea volcanoes and other earth mantle sources of carbon dioxide and other carbon compounds, and proposed that we should be careful before we claim to know the cycling of carbon on a complex system like planet earth. Dr. Indur Goklany, American Enterprise Institute, discussed the positive aspects of potential climate warming by comparing mortality rates of populations indigenous to colder and warmer environments.
Many voices were heard as many were invited to attend and participate. Those scientists who do believe that humankind's carbon dioxide emissions drive climate change were underrepresented, as many of them declined event organizer James Taylor's invitation to present. Those who did attend - notably Dr. A. Scott Denning, Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere - received warm and respectful consideration. Even Stephen McIntyre, Climate Audit, the man responsible (with Dr. Ross McKitrick, University of Guelph, Canada, who also attended) for discrediting the infamous hockey stick graph, admitted he wouldn't support any criminal charges brought against the East Anglia scientists who participated in Climategate.
Don't take my word for it. The video of all of the conference presentations is available. It was an event that was woefully underreported, but that shouldn't prevent anyone interested in solidly researched scientific debate from viewing the conference in its entirety to shed more light on what is perhaps the most fiercely contested issues of our time. You may not come away with definitive answers, but you may find the presentations more satisfying than the confusing last episode of "Lost."
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Heartland, real science????? Ha
The Heartland conference wasn't very well attended because the public is finally catching onto the denialists' long campaign to distort the reality of climate science. I didn't recognize the names of most of the people mentioned in your article, but the ones I did recognize can hardly be thought of as objective scientists. McIntyre and McKitrick did not discredit the hockey, they merely made a foolish attempt at it.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/
"False claims of the existence of errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction can also be traced to spurious allegations made by two individuals, McIntyre and McKitrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist). The false claims were first made in an article (McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003) published in a non-scientific (social science) journal “Energy and Environment” and later, in a separate “Communications Arising” comment that was rejected by Nature based on negative appraisals by reviewers and editor [as a side note, we find it peculiar that the authors have argued elsewhere that their submission was rejected due to 'lack of space'. Nature makes their policy on such submissions quite clear: "The Brief Communications editor will decide how to proceed on the basis of whether the central conclusion of the earlier paper is brought into question; of the length of time since the original publication; and of whether a comment or exchange of views is likely to seem of interest to nonspecialist readers. Because Nature receives so many comments, those that do not meet these criteria are referred to the specialist literature." Since Nature chose to send the comment out for review in the first place, the "time since the original publication" was clearly not deemed a problematic factor. One is logically left to conclude that the grounds for rejection were the deficiencies in the authors' arguments explicitly noted by the reviewers]. The rejected criticism has nonetheless been posted on the internet by the authors, and promoted in certain other non-peer-reviewed venues (see this nice discussion by science journalist David Appell of a scurrilous parroting of their claims by Richard Muller in an on-line opinion piece).
The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, which hold that the “Hockey-Stick” shape of the MBH98 reconstruction is an artifact of the use of series with infilled data and the convention by which certain networks of proxy data were represented in a Principal Components Analysis (“PCA”), are readily seen to be false , as detailed in a response by Mann and colleagues to their rejected Nature criticism demonstrating that (1) the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction is robust with respect to the elimination of any data that were infilled in the original analysis, (2) the main features of the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely insensitive to whether or not proxy data networks are represented by PCA, (3) the putative ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick, which argues for anomalous 15th century warmth (in contradiction to all other known reconstructions), is an artifact of the censoring by the authors of key proxy data in the original Mann et al (1998) dataset, and finally, (4) Unlike the original Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, the so-called ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick fails statistical verification exercises, rendering it statistically meaningless and unworthy of discussion in the legitimate scientific literature.
The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick have now been further discredited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, in a paper to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, “Journal of Climate” by Rutherford and colleagues (2004) [and by yet another paper by an independent set of authors that is currently "under review" and thus cannot yet be cited--more on this soon!]. Rutherford et al (2004) demonstrate nearly identical results to those of MBH98, using the same proxy dataset as Mann et al (1998) but addressing the issues of infilled/missing data raised by Mcintyre and McKitrick, and using an alternative climate field reconstruction (CFR) methodology that does not represent any proxy data networks by PCA at all."
And, obtw, McIntyre, to his credit, doesn't think criminal charges should be brought against the East Anglia scientist because there is no evidence of any criminal wrong-doing. There is not even any evidence of non-criminal wrong-doing except for some ill considered comments by real scientists who are disgusted by the the long denialist campaign of lies and distortions. There is, quite specifically, no evidence of any data being manipulated.
Ian Plimer's contributions to the denialist literature have been solidly and repeatedly refuted by real climate scientists:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/plimers-homework-assignment/
Here are a couple for you to chew on.
If you wish to sully your own reputation by joining up with Heartland, it's your choice, but don't claim that you weren't warned. Take some time to read up on the real science before you make the leap.
douglas
douglas-
Rather than discussing science, you are resorting to name calling and my-father-can-beat-up-your-father. ...typical of AGW advocates.
-- Robert Moen, http://www.energyplanUSA.com
Robert,
I included plenty of scientific references as well as links. Just because you apparently choose not to read them or purposely ignore the reality does not diminish the real scientific evidence. Also, where did author of the article cite scientific findings or sources?
If you wish to engage in ad hom attacks, I will note that the Heartland Institute has engaged in exactly two campaigns, climate change denial and denial of the harmful effects of tobacco. The latter is, of course, laughable, as is the former.
If you wish to discuss science, then I suggest you provide something to discuss with references and citations.
douglas
Science not politics
The science of understanding the climate is new and extremely complex. The more smart, independent thinking focused upon it, the better.
-- Robert Moen, http://www.energyplanUSA.com